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    Jen and I arrived on the sixth floor and walked toward its rotting main space. Streamers hung limply from the ceiling tiles over bagels and tubs of whipped butter and plastic cutlery. An air-conditioning unit—suspended in one of the room’s wall of Gothic-looking windows with their grids of rusting panes—cooled the large room. A sign on the wall, left over from the previous week, bade the outgoing intern class farewell. I envied that group, so far ahead of me in their training. I didn’t know any of them personally, though Jen had received and shared what felt like a carefully worded e-mail from one a couple months prior, a response to some questions Jen had sent her about the internship. The e-mail warned about the lack of amenities like toilet paper in the sixth-floor bathrooms, department politics, and the new director of training, who had started midway through the previous interns’ time there: “I think Dr. Brent will come into his own during your year, so you’ll get to watch him develop, but don’t be afraid to standup for what you want and demand changes, especially when things get out of control.”
    The place was filled with Behavioral Health staff who’d been summoned to greet us. For morning, the mood was festive. Staff introduced themselves sleepily to us as they ate. The interns gathered in a circle, ten of us, seven adult track and three child. We were demographically representative of our discipline: eight women and two men. All in our early to mid-thirties. Five of the women were Jewish, and two of those Israeli. One of the women was black and one a native Spanish speaker. Intern classes all over the city looked just like us, though most sites did not have quite as many trainees.
    Of the six other adult interns, I had known two for years, Jen and Leora, who had been my classmate in graduate school. Friendly if never quite friends, we were the only two of our class of sixteen to be on internship together, the others spread throughout the city and up the East Coast. We hugged in greeting, not having seen each other since classes ended in May. The others introduced themselves in turn: Zeke in an odd corduroy suit with elbow patches, Tamar with a terrible cold, Alisa bubbly and pretty, Bruce curly-haired and wry. The child-track interns said hello, too, though with slightly less interest, as we weren’t sure how much to invest in each other, how much our time there might intersect.
    As we all exchanged information, our director of training appeared in our circle, though I hadn’t seen him approach. Scott, as he would instruct us to call him, would never seem to walk into a room, but rather simply to manifest, a desultory rabbit from a long-battered hat. “Welcome,” he said, spreading his arms in front of him. He was average height and slender, boyish, though certainly well past forty, with thinning blond hair and a sallow complexion. There was warmth in his voice,but it was tinged with an irony that negated it, the armor of a man eager to convey that he didn’t want us to imagine that he took himself—this role—too seriously. “I’ve met all of you except … well, you must be Darcy, and you must be Zeke. Glad to finally lay my own eyes on you two.”
    Though it was customary for intern applicants to interview for internships with the director of training, Scott Brent had not yet taken over the job when I’d first set foot on the grounds of the hospital the previous December, early in the interview process. Kings County had actually been my first interview, and after waking up at 3:00 a.m. in a panic and not falling back to sleep (internship is a necessary precursor to finishing the degree, and that year, nationally, there were only spots available for 75 percent of applicants), I became one of the first interviewees of the season to arrive there. My timing meant that I interviewed with Sylvia Goldberg, the longtime, beloved director of training, known by that time to be retiring. She