To this quandary a solution was inevitably created: a remote place was given over to healing and transcendence, and with equal inevitability that place became a scapegoat in its own right, so that to it were sent not only criminal minds but also anyone else who did not fit, who took actions which—while in no sense illegal or immoral—were too unsettling to contemplate, who pursued thoughts or philosophies considered dangerous by those who did not share them. And finally there went also the outcasts and the drifters, by dint of that strange human gravity which at certain times appoints one place the locus of all that is odd and ill-suited, and from a bubbling pool of psychological toxins periodically ejects genius. Thus it was not only a hospital for the violently insane, but also a skunkworks, a commune and a school of art. We called it the Last House.