Prologue

Rosa

"It's a miracle you found me," Rosa is telling us. "Don't let them stop you. Don't let those bastards stop you. Don't let them tell you I am too ill to talk to."

Insiders from the Taliesin Fellowship had steered us away from her. She was, they told us, incoherent, a lunatic, had spent time in a brothel hotel in Marseilles. Visiting Rosa would be a "waste of time." Nobody volunteered where to find her, and it was clear that it would have been imprudent to ask.

From the outside, Las Encinas, a dark Shingle Style structure surrounded by handsome trees and manicured gardens with fountains, looks like a luxury hotel from the 1920s. It is, in fact, a hospital, a residential treatment center for the depressed and the addicted in Pasadena, California. Cut into the wooden lintel above the entrance is the admonition Non est Vivere Sed Valere Vit: "Life is not being alive but being well."We pass under a low, timbered porte-cochere and through the front door. The receptionist calls ahead for clearance, and then directs us back along a pathway toward the building where this longtime Taliesin resident awaits us. The architecture deteriorates as we leave the elegant old building and move through the gardens toward a complex of buildings that would never appear in the hospital's glossy brochure. We pass a cordon of modest two story apartment buildings where patients who are well enough live independently.

A white, single-story stucco structure stands at the rear of the grounds, a metal grille over its front window; if not for the heavy security door, it might be a laundry facility. A muscular attendant opens the door a crack until we have confirm