Old scarred marble floors in a cold white corridor. A room where the mad sat at their work. To Suttree they seemed like figures from a dream, something from the past, old drooling derelicts bent above their basketry, their fingerpaints or knitting. He’d never been among the certified and he was surprised to find them invested with a strange authority, like folk who’d had to do with death some way and had come back, something about them of survivors in a realm that all must reckon with soon or late. In the center of the room sat a nurse at a desk. She read the morning paper where the news was
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The only place to go.
