My next stop was at the clownery

...where I wandered invisible down long hallways, watching the inhabitants at their work or play or whatever it was they were doing. One inmate was packing cockroaches, one hundred to the bag. I do not think the insects were dead, though they were very quiet. Another inmate was constructing a large bust of the Viceroy, so the label said, out of what appeared and smelled to be dung. A third inmate, with the aid of a tall ladder, was writing her autobiography on the walls of the place. She had covered four stories of one stairwell and had extended her tale out into the reception area, where two walls were already covered with obscenities. I followed her story back in time until I reached a door to the roof, where a group of attendants were having morning coffee. Even read in reverse, it had been a novel of violence, abuse, incest, and horror [146].

Tepper, Sheri S. Beauty. Doubleday / Foundation, 1991. ISBN: 0385419392.