She shook her head. “We'd talked about it—helping her get her paperwork in on time. She promised to try, but to tell the truth, I didn't harbor much hope. And I didn't care. Because she was productive where it counted—getting on the phone all day with agencies and arguing for every last penny for her cases. She stayed late, did whatever it took to help them. Who knows? Maybe she was going that extra mile for Hewitt.”

She picked up the phone. “Mary? Coffee, please. . . . No, just one.”

Putting it down, she said, “The real horror is that it could happen again. We have a steel corral now, to direct them out onto the street after they get their meds. The county finally sent us a guard and the detector, but you tell me how to predict which of them is going to blow.”

“We're not very good prophets under the best of circumstances.”

“No, we're not. Hundreds of people file in here each week, for meds and vouchers. We've got to let them in. We're the court of last resort. Any of them could be another Hewitt. Even if we wanted to lock them up, we couldn't. The state hospitals that haven't been shut down are filled to capacity—I don't know what your theory is about psychosis, but mine is that most psychotics are born with it—it's biological, like any other illness. But instead of treating them, we demonize them or idealize them, and they get caught in the squeeze between the do-gooders who think they should be allowed to run free and the skinflints who think all they need is to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

“I know,” I said. “When I was in grad school the whole community psych thing was in full bloom—schizophrenia as an alternative lifestyle, liberating patients from the back wards and empowering them to take over their own treatment.”

“Empowering.” She laughed without opening her mouth.

“I had a professor who was a fanatic on the subject,” I said. “Studied the mental health system in Belgium or somewhere and wrote a book on it. He had us do a paper on deinstitutionalization. The more I researched it, the less feasible it seemed. I started to wonder what would happen to psychotics who needed medication and couldn't be counted upon to take it. He handed the paper back with one comment, “Medication is mind control,' and gave me a C-minus.”