Praying for Sleep

20

Lis was taping the top row of windows in the greenhouse when the storm finally hit.

Her face was inches from the glass as she was reaching out to lay a strip on a hard-to-reach pane. Suddenly a slash of rain cracked against the window. She twisted away, dropping the tape, thinking for an instant that someone had flung a handful of gravel at the panes. She nearly tumbled backwards off the ladder.

She climbed down and retrieved the masking tape, surveying the sky. Worried that a window might shatter into her face if she continued to tape, Lis again considered leaving-now. But the north windows, those facing the storm, were still to be done.

Ten minutes, she decided. She’d allow herself that.

Climbing up once again she thought about Kohler’s advising her to leave. Yet she felt no extreme urgency. He hadn’t seemed particularly concerned on her behalf. Besides, she reasoned, the Ridgeton sheriff would certainly have called if he’d learned that Hrubek was headed for town.

As she laid the X’s on the squares of glass, her eyes fell on the lake and the forest. Beyond them, barely visible in the rain, was a huge expanse of countryside-a muddy horizon of fields and woods and rocks disappearing into the black windy sky. The sweep of terrain seemed so limitless, so perfectly able to contain the infection of Michael Hrubek, that it was foolish to think that he might even get close to Ridgeton. The vastness of the landscape would protect her husband too; how could either man possibly find the other?

And where was Owen at this moment?

In her heart she believed he’d be back soon. Perhaps even before she and Portia left for the Inn. Returning empty-handed, angry and frustrated-because he’d missed his chance to play soldier.

And because he had lost an opportunity to do penance.

Oh, Lis had understood that from the start. She knew that his errand tonight had a tacit purpose. It was part of a complicated debt he seemed to feel he owed his wife.

And perhaps he did, she reflected. For Owen had spent much of last year in the company of another woman.

He’d met her at a legal continuing-education conference. She was a trust-and-estates lawyer, thirty-seven years old, divorced with two children. He offered these facts as proof of the virtue of his infidelity; no young, gum-snapping bimbo for him.

Yale-educated.

Cum laude.

“Do you think I give a fuck about her credentials?” Lis had shouted.

When she’d first seen a MasterCard receipt for a hotel in Atlantic City, dated the weekend he was supposed to be in Ohio on business, she was devastated. Never before a victim of adultery, Lis hadn’t realized that illicit sex is only a part of the infidelity game. There’s illicit affection too, and she wasn’t sure which hurt the worst.

Why, bedding the bitch in Trump’s Palace, her highly educated thighs squeezing Owen’s, flicking tongues, shared spit, exposed nipples and cock and cleft… Those were bad enough. But Lis was almost more stung by the thought of their joined palms, romantic walks on the turbulent Jersey beach, the two of them sitting on a bench and Owen sharing his most private thoughts.

Stern Owen! Her quiet Owen.

Owen from whose mouth she had to pry words.

Much of this was speculation of course (he’d learned his lesson and volunteered nothing more after blurting out the woman’s CV). But the thought alone of an intimacy deeper than sex was horrifying to Lis and her fury at their furtive conversations and entwined fingers grew beyond all reasonable proportion. For weeks after his confession she was racked by a sensation that she might at any moment erupt in madness-anytime, anywhere.

By the time she confronted him, the affair was over, he said. He’d taken his wife’s head in his long hands, stroking her hair, jiggling the earrings he’d given her (during the height of his infidelity, Lis had noted with ire, and that night pitched the jewelry out). The woman had asked him to leave Lis, Owen said, and marry her. He refused, they fought and the affair ended bitterly.

After the initial, cataclysmic weeks following this confession, after the long nights of silence, after those funereal Sunday mornings, after an intolerable Thanksgiving, they began to discuss the matter as couples do-tactically, then obliquely, then reasonably. Lis now had only vague memories of the conversations. You’re too demanding. You’re too strict. You’re too quiet. You’re too reclusive. You’re not interested in what I do. You have to loosen up sexually. You come on like a rapist. You never complained… Yes but you scare me sometimes I can’t tell what you’re thinking yes but you’re so stubborn yes but…

The second-person pronoun occurs never so often as in the aftermath of infidelity.

Finally they decided to consider divorce and went their separate ways for a time. During this period Lis finally admitted to herself that the affair was no surprise. Not really. Owen’s having an attorney for a lover, well, that was a shock, yes. He didn’t fare well with strong women. To hear him tell it, his best relationship prior to Lis had been with a young Vietnamese woman in Saigon during the war. He was tactfully reluctant to go into many details but he described her glowingly as sensitive and demure. It took Lis some translating, and prying, to figure out that this meant she was subservient and complacent and she spoke very little English.

That’s a relationship? she wondered, unnerved to find that this was the sort of woman her husband had sought out. Still, there seemed to be something more to the liaison. Something dark. Owen wouldn’t go into the details and Lis was left to speculate. Maybe he had accidentally wounded her and stayed with her out of loyalty, slipping her stolen rations and medicines and nursing her to health. Maybe her father was a Viet Cong whom Owen had killed. Plagued with guilt, he’d offered some reparation and fallen in love.

This all seemed far too romantic, operatic even, for Owen Atcheson, and she ultimately attributed the affair to youthful lust, and his fond memories of it to the revisionist ego of a middle-aged man. But there was no denying that a servile young thing had a certain appeal to him. The greatest friction between them-and his worst flares of temper-arose when she opposed him. She could rattle off a hundred examples-buying the nursery, urging him to be more of a sexual partner, suggesting they see a therapist when the marriage hit rough spots, traveling less.

And yet, ironically, his domineering side did have a certain appeal to Lis. As troubling as this was, she couldn’t deny it. She still recalled seeing him for the first time. She was in her midthirties, an age at which most Ridgeton women were sensible mothers several times over. Lis had attended a town-council meeting, where Owen was representing a building developer seeking a P &Z variance. Stern and unyielding, Owen Atcheson stood at the podium and comfortably withstood the assault of wrathful citizens. Lis stayed long after her own minor ministerial proceeding and watched him play the king’s knight. She was captivated by his cold articulation and, watching him grip the podium with his large hands, actually found herself aroused.

She engineered a chance meeting in the parking lot afterwards, suggesting they exchange phone numbers. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll need a good lawyer someday.”

One week later he asked her to dinner and she accepted at once.

On the first date he showed up scrubbed and trimmed, wearing a blue blazer and khaki slacks, carrying a dozen roses. Owen ordered for her, picked up the check discreetly, held open every door she walked through and capped the evening with a chaste kiss after escorting her to the door.

He did everything by the book and she felt absolutely nothing for him.

He didn’t call her afterwards and-despite a brief sting to the ego-she decided she was relieved not to hear from him. She went out with several other men casually, thinking no more about the austere Owen Atcheson. Then one Saturday, six months later, they ran into each other in a store on Main Street. He claimed he’d been meaning to call but had been traveling extensively. Why, Lis had wondered, did men think this made you feel better, explaining how much they’d wanted to call but had not?

As she and Owen stood awkwardly at the counter of Ace Hardware, he glanced down at the white plastic tubing she was buying. It was for her garden, she explained. Did she need any help installing it? When she hesitated he looked into her eyes and said he didn’t have many talents but there were a few things he was very good at. Plumbing was one.

“All right,” she said.

They returned to the small bungalow she was renting. With Owen supervising, together they hooked up the irrigation system in half an hour. When the work was finished, he walked to the spigot, beckoning her to follow. He took her hand and placed it on the knob then enfolded her fingers with his. “Shall we?” he asked, and turned the faucet on full as he lifted her chin with his free hand and kissed her hard on the mouth.

They spent the rest of the afternoon in Lis’s brass bed, not even bothering to climb beneath the blue gingham covers, their dirty work clothes strewn about them on the stairs and floor.

They were married eight months later.

Throughout their six years together Lis had frequent doubts about their future yet she’d never thought that infidelity would end the marriage; more likely, she believed, one of them would just pack and leave-maybe after, in a fit of temper, he finally delivered one of the slaps he’d come close to inflicting on her in the past. Or after she’d insisted, no, no compromises, that he choose between her and another weekend at the office.

So his affair was a sobering event. She was, at first, fully ready to divorce him and start life on her own. Initially this had a great appeal to her. But Lis Atcheson was not at heart an angry woman and as the weeks went by she found she needed to remind herself to be indignant about the affair. This equilibrium made the idea of living alone again less attractive. Besides, he was excruciatingly contrite, which gave her a curious power over him-the only upper hand she’d ever attained in the marriage.

A practical matter too: Ruth L’Auberget, who’d been ill with cancer throughout this time, finally passed away, and the daughters were heirs to a complicated estate. Lis, with no interest in financial matters, found herself relying more and more on Owen. Business and money were, after all, aspects of his profession and as he became involved in managing the estate the couple grew close once again.

Their life became easier. Lis bought the 4x4. As agreed among the sisters and Ruth L’Auberget, Lis and Owen moved into the Ridgeton house with its dream greenhouse and Portia received the co-op. Owen bought suits from Brooks Brothers and fancy shotguns. He went deep-sea fishing in Florida and hunting in Canada. And he continued to take business trips, often overnight. But Lis believed his pledge of fidelity. Besides, she reasoned, Owen clearly liked being wealthy, and the money, stock and house were all in Lis’s name.

So when, tonight-after they’d learned of Hrubek’s escape-Owen had stood before her, armed with his black guns, Lis had looked past his grim mouth and the consuming hunt lust in his eyes and had seen a husband trying the only way he could to fix a love altered by his own carelessness.

Well, bless you, Owen, for your errand tonight, Lis thought, taping the last of the windows. Your efforts are appreciated. But hurry home now, won’t you?

The wind was rising. It drove a whip of rain across the roof and north side of the greenhouse with such a clatter that Lis gasped.

It was time to leave.

“Portia! Let’s go.”

“I’ve got a couple more to do,” she called from upstairs.

“Leave ’em.”

The woman appeared a minute later. Lis studied her for a moment and was surprised to see that in these country clothes, so atypical of Portia, the sisters looked very much alike.

“What?” Portia asked, noting Lis’s gaze.

“Nothing. You ready?” Lis handed her a yellow rain slicker and pulled her own on.

Portia slung her backpack over one shoulder. Lifting her small Crouch & Fitzgerald suitcase Lis nodded toward the door. They walked outside into the rain that now was falling steadily. A sudden gust ripped the baseball cap from Portia’s head. She shouted in surprise and ran to retrieve the hat while her sister double-locked the back door, and they stepped along the soggy path to the edge of the parking area.

Lis turned to look back at the house. With the windows barred by X’s of tape, and the old, warping shingles, the colonial had a battle-weary air, as if it squatted in the middle of a no-man’s-land. Her eyes were on the greenhouse when she heard her sister ask, “What is that?”

Lis spun around. “My God.”

Spreading out before them was a field of mud and water, nearly a foot deep, covering much of the driveway and filling the garage.

They waded through the chill, slimy water and gazed at the lake. It wasn’t their levee that had given way; it was the sandbags by the dock-the ones that Owen had assured Lis he’d stacked high and solid. The rising lake had pushed them over and the water was backing into the creek behind the garage. Amid eddies and whirl-pools, the stream was filling the yard.

“What do we do?” Portia shouted. Her voice was harsh and unsettling; despite the quick-moving current, the flood was virtually silent.

There wasn’t much they could do, Lis decided. The water was flowing in through a twenty-foot gap-too large for the two of them to dam. Besides, the garage was in a low-lying area of the property. If the level of the lake didn’t rise much more, the house and most of the driveway would be safe.

She said, “We leave is what we do.”

“Fine with me.”

They waded into the garage and climbed into the Acura. Lis slipped the key into the ignition. She paused superstitiously-concerned that the flood had shorted out the battery or ruined the starter. She looked at Portia then turned the key. The engine kicked to life and purred smoothly. Backing out carefully, Lis eased the car through the flood up the incline of the driveway.

They were nearly out of the dark pool surrounding the garage when the car shuddered and the front wheels, the drive wheels, dug through the gravel and into the slick mud below, where they spun uselessly, as if they rested in ruts of ice.

This, Lis recalled, had been her second concern.

He eased his BMW around the curve on Route 236 and sped out of Ridgeton through the cutting rain.

Richard Kohler now descended through the hills and swept to the right, heading due east once again. There it was. Perfect. Just perfect! He laughed out loud, thinking that the scene was far more impressive than he’d remembered. He pulled into the back of the lot, parked and shut the engine off. He unzipped his backpack, extracting Michael Hrubek’s file-the one he’d started to read earlier that evening.

This battered folio had been penned by sixty-five-year-old Dr. Anne Weinfeldt Muller, a staff psychiatrist at Trevor Hill Psychiatric Hospital.

Trevor Hill was a renowned private facility in the southern part of the state. Michael had been Anne Muller’s patient for merely five months but her insights into his plight, and his improvement under her care, were inspiring. It was, Kohler reflected, a true tragedy that no one would ever know how effective Muller’s treatment of Michael Hrubek might have been.

Like Kohler, Anne Muller divided her time among various hospitals and happened to have come across Michael at a small state facility where she worked with severe schizophrenics. Impressed by his intelligence and struck by his unusual delusions, she campaigned to pry open the doors of expensive Trevor Hill and have Michael admitted as a pro bono patient. The hospital administrators-preferring patients that were more “mainstream” than Michael (that is, able to pay their bills)-had resisted her efforts at first but had finally acquiesced, largely because of her own prestige and talent and pigheaded manner.

His first day had been spent in a restraint camisole. Then he’d calmed and the feared garment had come off. Kohler glanced again at Muller’s notes, jotted in the first week of the young man’s commitment:

Pt. is hostile & suspicious. Afraid of being struck. (“You hit me on the head, you’re one dead fucker, make no mistake.”) No apparent visual hallucinations, some auditory… Motor activity is extreme, restraint at times necessary… Affect flat or inappropriate (Pt. began sobbing when noticed book of American history; later Pt. laughed when asked about maternal grandmother and said she was “one dead fucker”)… Cognitive functioning good but flights of ideas indicate purely random thinking at times…

Although the many state hospitals in which Michael had been committed undoubtedly blended together into a grim stew of memories, Trevor Hill might very well have stood out pleasantly in his mind. In state facilities, patients wore filthy clothing and sat in drab rooms with blunt crayons or Play-Doh for entertainment. Many of the men and women had the indentations of lobotomies on the crowns of their heads and were regularly third-railed by electroconvulsive-shock technicians or sent into insulin comas. But Trevor Hill was different. There were far more orderlies and doctors per patient than in the state hospitals, the library was full of books, wards were sunny and windows unbarred, the grounds landscaped with trim paths and gardens, and rec rooms stocked with learning toys and games. ECS was used occasionally but medication was the major tool of treatment.

Yet, as with all schizophrenic patients, getting the right drug and dosage for Michael was a major task. One young resident at Trevor Hill had naïvely asked him what medicines he’d taken in the past and the patient answered like a diligent medical student. “Oh, lithium. Generally, chlorpromazine and its derivatives are contraindicated for me. I’m a schizophrenic-make no mistake about that-but a big component of my disease is manic-depression. You may know that as bipolar depression. So, lithium has generally been my drug of choice.”

The impressed resident prescribed lithium and under the drug’s effect Michael went berserk. He threw the ward’s television through a window, leapt out after it and got halfway through the main gate before being tackled by three burly orderlies.

After this incident Dr. Muller took over treatment personally. She put Michael on a loading dose of Haldol-a dosage larger than he would ultimately need but intended to stabilize him fast. He improved immediately. Then began the fine tuning, balancing the drugs’ effectiveness against the side effects of weight gain, dry mouth, the uncontrollable moving of the lips that antipsychotic drugs cause, the nausea. His regimen included, at various times, Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Moban, Haldol, and Prolixin. Thirty milligrams of this, one hundred of that, up it to two hundred, no, better mix it. Eighteen hundred of Thorazine, no, go higher, switch to Haldol, ninety milligrams of it, well, that’s the same as forty-five hundred of Thorazine, too high, how’s his dyskinesia? Okay, back to Stelazine…

Muller finally settled on what Kohler himself found worked best with Michael: high levels of Thorazine. Michael’s treatment consisted of this workhorse drug and his therapy with Dr. Anne. She met with him every Tuesday and Friday. And what was distinctive about his sessions with this psychiatrist was that unlike so many of his doctors in the past she listened to what he had to say.

“You’ve said a couple of times now, Michael, that you’re worried about what’s ‘ahead.’ Do you mean your immediate future?”

“I never said that,” he snapped.

“Did you mean something ahead of you in the hallway? Was someone upsetting you?”

“I never said a word like that. Someone’s making up things about me. The government’s usually to blame, the fuckers. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Do you mean ‘a head,’ like someone’s head, a skull?”

He blinked and muttered, “I can’t go into it.”

“If it’s not the head maybe you mean someone’s face? Whose?”

“I can’t fucking go into it! You’re going to have to use truth serum on me if you want that information. I’ll bet you have already. You may know that as scopolamine.” He fell silent, a smirk upon his face.

The therapy was no more sophisticated than this. Like Kohler, Anne Muller never tried to dissuade Michael of his delusions. She dug into them, trying to learn what was inside her patient. He resisted with the resilience of a captured spy.

But after four months Michael’s paranoid and contrary nature suddenly vanished. Muller herself grew suspicious-she’d come to recognize that Michael had a calculating streak in him. He grew increasingly cheerful and giddy. Then she learned from the orderlies that he’d taken to stealing clothes from the laundry room. She assumed that his apparently improved temperament was a ruse to shift suspicion about the theft.

Yet before Muller could confront him, Michael began to deliver the loot to her. First, two mismatched socks. He handed them to her with the bashful smile of a boy with a crush. She returned the articles to their owners and told Michael not to steal anymore. He grew very grave and told her he was “unable at this time to make a commitment of that magnitude.”

Important principles were involved, he continued. “Very important.”

Apparently so, for the next week, she received five T-shirts and more socks. “I’m giving these clothes to you,” he announced in a whisper, then walked away abruptly as if late for a train. The gift-giving went on for several weeks. Muller was far less concerned about the thefts themselves than understanding what Michael’s behavior meant.

Then, when she was lying in bed at three in the morning, the epiphany occurred. She sat up, stunned.

In the course of a long, disjointed therapy session that day, Michael had lowered his voice and, eyes averted, whispered, “The reason is, I want to get my clothes to you. Don’t tell anyone. It’s very risky. You have no idea how risky.”

Clothes to you. Close to you. I want to get close to you. Muller bolted from her bed and drove immediately to her office, where she dictated a lengthy report that began with a subdued introduction tantamount to a psychiatrist’s shout of joy:

Major breakthrough yesterday. Pt. expressed desire for emotional connection with Dr., accompanied by animated affect.

As the treatment continued, Michael’s paranoia diminished further. The thefts stopped. He grew more sociable and cheerful and he required less medication than before. He enjoyed his group-therapy sessions and looked forward to outings that had previously terrified him. He started doing chores around the hospital, helping out the library and gardening staffs. Michael, Muller reported, had even driven her car several times.

Kohler now looked up from the report and gazed across the gritty parking lot. Lightning flashed in the west. Then he read the final entry in the file, written in a hand other than Anne Muller’s. He found he could picture the scene upon which these notes were based only too well:

Michael lies on his bed, looking through a history book, when a doctor comes into his room. He sits on the bed and smiles at the patient, inquiring about the book. Michael immediately stiffens. Little sparks of his paranoia begin to burn.

“Who’re you, what do you want?”

“I’m Dr. Klein… Michael, I’m afraid I have to tell you that Dr. Muller is sick.”

“Sick? Dr. Anne is sick?”

“I’m afraid she’s not going to be meeting with you.”

Michael doesn’t know what to say. “Tomorrow?” he manages to blurt, wondering what this man has done with his doctor and friend. “Will I see her tomorrow?”

“No, she’s not coming back to the hospital.”

“She left me?”

“Actually, Michael, she didn’t leave you. She left all of us. She passed away last night. Do you know what it means, ‘passed away’?”

“It means some fucker shot her in the head,” he answers in an ominous whisper. “Was it you?”

“She had a heart attack.”

Michael blinks a number of times, trying to comprehend this. Finally a bitter smile snaps onto the patient’s face. “She left me.” He begins nodding, as if relieved to hear long-anticipated bad news.

“Your new doctor is Stanley Williams,” the man continues soothingly. “He’s an excellent psychiatrist. He trained at Harvard and he worked at NIMH. That’s the National Institutes for Mental Health. How’s that for credentials, Michael? Very sharp fellow, you’ll be pleased to know. He’s going to-”

The doctor manages to dodge the chair, which splinters against the wall with the sound of a gunshot. He leaps into the corridor. The heavy oak door restrains Michael for about ten seconds then he finishes kicking his way into the hall and storms through the hospital to find his Dr. Anne. He breaks the arm of an orderly who tries to subdue him and they finally net him like an animal, a nineteenth-century technique that had been used at Trevor Hill only once since it opened.

One week later, his advocate and therapist dead, Michael Hrubek and his sole material possessions-toothbrush, clothes and several books of American history-were shipped to a state mental hospital.

His life was once again about to become an endless stream of Pill Time and Meal Time and Shock Time. And it would have too, except that after sitting in the hospital’s intake waiting room for two hours, temporarily forgotten about, he grew agitated and strolled out the front door. He waved goodbye to a number of patients and orderlies he’d never met and continued through the gate, never to return.

Dr. Richard Kohler noted that the date of that disappearance had been exactly fourteen months ago; the next official record about Michael Hrubek was an arrest report written by the unsteady hand of a trooper at Indian Leap State Park on the afternoon of May 1.

The psychiatrist set aside Anne Muller’s file and picked up the small notebook filled with the jottings he had made at Lis Atcheson’s house. But before he read he stared for a moment outside at the drops of thick rain that rattled on the windshield, and he wondered just how much longer he’d have to wait.