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By Root 1342 0

to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college. Leonard studied at the Rockefeller Library every night until midnight, like a yeshiva student davening over the Torah. At the stroke of twelve he headed back to West Quad, where there was always a party going on, usually in his room. Miller, a Milton grad who’d already had four years away from home to refine his Dionysian methods, bolted two huge Burmester speakers to the ceiling. He kept an industrial-size canister of nitrous oxide like a silver torpedo in the corner by his bed. Any girl who sucked on the rubber hose inevitably fainted into your arms like a damsel in distress. Leonard found he didn’t need such stratagems. Without really trying, he had grown into the thing girls wanted. By December, he began hearing reports of a list in the girls’ bathroom in Airport Lounge, a list of the cutest guys on campus that included his name. One night Miller delivered a note from a punked-out English girl named Gwyneth, with dyed red hair and witchy black fingernails. The note said, “I want your bod.”

She got it. So did everybody else. A representative image of Leonard’s freshman year would be of a guy lifting his head from an act of cunnilingus long enough to take a bong hit and give a correct answer in class. Not sleeping made it easier to two-time somebody. You could leave one girl’s bed at five a.m., cross campus, and slide into bed with somebody else. Everything went fine, Leonard’s grades were good, he was absorbed intellectually and erotically—until he went without sleep for a week during Reading Period. After his last exam, he threw a party in his room, passed out in bed with a girl he couldn’t recognize the next morning, not because he didn’t know her (the girl was, in fact, Lola Lopez) but because the ensuing depression had blinded him to everything but his agony. It colonized every cell of his body, a concentrate of anguish seemingly secreted, drip by drip, into his veins like a toxic by-product of the previous days of mania.

True mania, this time. So many magnitudes beyond the exhilarated spirits of his high school days that it bore little resemblance. Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year’s fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken host who refused to let anyone leave, who grabbed people by the collar and said, “Come on. One more!” When those people inevitably did vanish, you went out and found others, anyone and anything to keep the party going. You couldn’t stop talking. Everything you said was brilliant. You just had the best idea. Let’s drive down to New York! Tonight! Let’s climb on top of List and watch the sunrise! Leonard got people to do these things. He led them on incredible escapades. But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who’d been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue …

Like a drunk on a bender, Leonard had a blackout afterward. He woke up next to Lola Lopez in a state of utter collapse. Lola managed to get him up, however. She led him by the arm to Health Services, telling him not to worry, to hold on to her and that he’d be all right.

It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital, when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be “managed,