himself, something that his vaunted poet ward mate, Robert Lowell, has encouraged him to pursue. He will do these things, even with the Miltown. He will try, as he has tried and failed time and again, to avoid the pills. But even if he must capitulate to his prescriptions, he will do these things.
Frederick is in an asylum for the mentally ill, and he can agree that sometimes he gets confused and acts in ways that surprise even him. But he is lucid now, many call him brilliant, and he is only forty, practically a young man still. He is a youngish man of talent, of passions, enthusiasms, and intelligence. And he is attractive, if not exactly handsome: his hairline is rapidly recoiling from his face, his ears protrude at such angles that he likes to joke that, should he be pushed from a cliff, his ears would perform Bernoulli’s principle, and he could simply glide to safety. Frederick tells himself that he is only here temporarily, for the same reason that a number of similarly gifted men are here: too much intellect, too much passion appearing to ordinary men as madness. He will make the most of his time here. He will write, as he wishes he had time to write but never does amid the responsibilities of his life outside the hospital. It’s not that Frederick thinks he has wound up at Mayflower for these reasons. Frederick knows better than to believe, as his wife sometimes claims to, that all things happen for a reason. Things happen; it is up to us to invent for them purpose.
2
This is the morning of the day that will change everything, but the men and women of the Mayflower Home cannot yet know this. One, however, will later claim to have sensed a foreboding. At the top of the far side of the Depression, Professor ShlomiSchultz sits at his mahogany desk in Upshire Hall, the grand old mad mansion. Years before, Upshire was dubbed the Harvard Club, and though it has never exactly been official hospital policy, the four corner rooms on the first floor, each ornate with the trappings of Victorian-era prosperity, each with soothing pastoral views, have been occupied by mad men who have attended the illustrious university, after which the Georgian colonial grandeur of Mayflower is modeled. In keeping with tradition, Professor Schultz is former Harvard faculty, once the P. A. McIyre Professor of Linguistics, before his schizophrenic condition intensified to the point that his colleagues concluded Schultz’s work had tilted past visionary, into the realm of the insane.
Initially, when Professor Schultz cryptically claimed to have discovered an unknown language, his colleagues had responded with an amalgam of curiosity, skepticism, jealousy, and worry. When, however, it became clear that this language was derived from sounds that only Schultz heard, they referred him to Mayflower, where he has remained for decades. But Schultz, having lost his family many years ago, does not mind his current position, does not perceive its indignity. For here, far from the demands of students and curricula, deans and symposia, he can focus singularly on his work. And the work couldn’t be going better. These days, nearly everything makes a sound, and each sound is composed of a variety of subsounds, all the way down to the screaming clouds of electrons around their nuclei.
Usually, Schultz tries to ignore that static always coming out of the upper atmosphere; he has grown accustomed to its fluctuating whine and muffled babble, just as the men of Ingersoll have grown accustomed to ignoring the television always chattering in the common area. But today there is a new sound, distant but insistent, which he cannot ignore.
3
Is your stomach readied to receive that gruel?
From a distance behind him, Frederick hears that famous voice, with its inescapable gravity. Frederick turns to face Robert Lowell.
Before Lowell, Frederick’s few encounters with the famous had invariably left him disappointed. Jerry Lewis at a USO show in Boston, an airplane