Praying for Sleep

2

Above them the sky had gone from resonant gunmetal to black.

“What’s that? There?” The woman pointed to a cluster of stars above the distant line of alder and oak and occasional white birch that marked the end of their property.

The man sitting beside her stirred, setting his glass on the table. “I’m not sure.”

“Cassiopeia, I’ll bet.” Her eyes lowered from the constellation to gaze into the large state park that was separated from their yard by the inky void of a dim New England lake.

“Could be.”

They’d sat on this flagstone patio for an hour, warmed by a bottle of wine and by unusually congenial November air. A single candle in a blue fishnet holder lit their faces, and the scent of leaf decay, ripe and too sweet, floated about them. No neighbors lived within a half mile but they spoke in near whispers.

“Don’t you sometimes,” she asked slowly, “feel something of Mother around here still?”

He laughed. “You know what I always thought about ghosts? They’d have to be naked, wouldn’t they? Clothes don’t have souls.”

She glanced toward him. His gray hair and tan slacks were the only aspects of him visible in the deepening night (and made him, she reflected, if anything, ghostlike). “I know there’re no ghosts. That’s not what I mean.” She lifted the bottle of California ’s finest Chardonnay and poured herself more. She misjudged and the neck of the bottle rang loudly on her glass, startling them both.

Her husband’s eyes remained on the stars as he asked, “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing at all.”

With long, ruddy and wrinkled hands Lisbonne Atcheson absently combed her short blond hair, shaping the strands but leaving them as unruly as before. She stretched her limber, forty-year-old body luxuriously and looked momentarily at the three-story colonial house rising behind them. After a moment she continued, “What I mean about Mother… It’s tough to explain.” But as a teacher of the Queen’s language Lis was bound by the rule that difficulty of expression is no excuse for not expressing, and so she tried once more. “A ‘presence.’ That’s what I mean.”

On cue, the candle flickered in its cerulean holder.

“I rest my case.” She nodded at the flame and they laughed. “What time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

Lis slouched down into the lawn chair and pulled her knees up, tucking her long denim skirt around her legs. The tips of brown cowboy boots, tooled with gold vines, protruded from the hem. She gazed again at the stars and reflected that her mother would in fact have been a good candidate for ghosthood. She’d died just eight months ago, sitting in an antique rocking chair as she looked out over the patio where Lis and Owen now sat. The elderly woman had leaned forward suddenly as if recognizing a landmark and said, “Oh, of course,” then died in a very peaceful second.

This house too would have been a good site for a haunting. The dark boxy structure contained more square footage than even a fertile eighteenth-century family might comfortably fill. It was sided with weather-stained cedar shakes, brown, scalish, rough. The trim was dark green. Once a Revolutionary War tavern, the house was divided into many small rooms connected by narrow hallways. Beams dotted with powder-post-beetle holes crisscrossed the ceilings, and Lis’s father had claimed that several finger-size perforations in the walls and posts were from musket balls fired by rebel militia as they fought the British from room to room.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been sunk into the interior design of the house over the past fifty years but for some reason her parents had never properly wired the place; lamps with low-wattage bulbs were all that the circuits could bear. From the patio tonight these lights shone through the small squares of rippled panes like jaundiced eyes.

Lis, still thinking of her mother, said, “It was like the time near the end when she said, ‘I just talked to your father and he said he was coming home soon.’ ” That conversation would have been a tricky one; the old man had been dead for two years at that point. “She imagined it, of course. But the feeling was real to her.”

And their father? Lis wondered momentarily. No, L’Auberget père was probably not present in spirit. He’d dropped dead in a men’s room in Heathrow Airport as he tugged angrily at a reluctant paper-towel dispenser.

“Superstition,” Owen said.

“Well, in a way he did come home to her. She died a couple days later.”

“Still.”

“I guess I’m talking about what you feel when people are together again, people who knew someone who’s gone.”

Owen was tired of speaking about the spirits of the dead. He sipped his wine and told his wife he’d scheduled a business trip for Wednesday. He wondered if he could get a suit cleaned in time for his departure. “I’ll be staying through Sunday, so if-”

“Wait. Did you hear something?” Lis turned quickly and looked at the dense mesh of lilacs that cut off their view of the back door of the house.

“No, I don’t think I…” His voice faded and he held up a finger. He nodded. She couldn’t see his expression but his posture seemed suddenly tense.

“There,” she said. “There it was again.”

It seemed like the snap of footsteps approaching the house from the driveway.

“That dog again?” Lis looked at Owen.

“The Busches’? No, he’s penned in. I saw him when I went for my run. Deer probably.”

Lis sighed. The local herd had feasted on over two hundred dollars in flower bulbs over the course of the summer, and just last week had stripped bare and killed a beautiful Japanese-maple sapling. She rose. “I’ll give it a good scare.”

“You want me to?”

“No. I want to call again anyway. Maybe I’ll make some tea. Anything for you?”

“No.”

She picked up the empty wine bottle and walked to the house, a fifty-foot trip along a path that wound through topiary, pungent boxwood and the bare, black lilac bushes. She passed a small reflecting pond in which floated several lily pads. Glancing down, she saw herself reflected, her face illuminated by the yellow lights from the first floor of the house. Lis had occasionally heard herself described as “plain” but had never taken this in a bad way. The word suggested a simplicity and resilience that were, to her, aspects of beauty. Looking into the water tonight she once again prodded her hair into place. Then a sharp gust of wind distorted her image in the water and she continued toward the house.

She heard nothing more of the mysterious noise and she relaxed. Ridgeton was among the safest towns in the state, a beautiful hamlet surrounded by wooded hills and fields that were filled with kelly-green grass, huge boulders, horses bred for running, picturesque sheep and cows. The town had been incorporated even before the thirteen states considered unionizing, and Ridgeton’s evolution in the past three hundred years had been more in the ways of earthly convenience than economics or attitude. You could buy pizza by the slice and frozen yogurt, and you could rent Rototillers and videos but when all was said and done this was a walled village where the men were tied to the earth-they built on it, sold it and loaned against it-and the women marshaled children and food.

Ridgeton was a town that tragedy rarely touched and premeditated violence, never.

So tonight when Lis found that the kitchen door, latticed with squares of turquoise bottle glass, was wide open, she was more irritated than uneasy. She paused, the wine bottle in her hand slowly swinging to a stop. A faint trapezoid of amber light spread onto the lawn at Lis’s feet.

She stepped around the thicket of lilacs and glanced into the driveway. No cars.

The wind, she concluded.

Stepping inside, she set the bottle on the butcher-block island and made a perfunctory search of the downstairs. No evidence of fat raccoons or curious skunks. She stood still for a moment listening for sounds within the house. Hearing nothing, Lis put the kettle on the stove then crouched to forage through the cabinet that contained the tea and coffee. Just as she placed her hand on the box of rose-hip tea, a shadow fell over her. She stood, gasping, and found herself looking into a pair of cautious hazel eyes.

The woman was about thirty-five. She had a black jacket over her arm and wore a loose-fitting white satin blouse, a short, shimmery skirt, and lace-up boots with short heels. Over her shoulder was a backpack.

Lis swallowed and found her hand quivering. The two women faced each other for a moment, silent. It was Lis who leaned forward quickly and embraced the younger woman. “Portia.”

The woman unslung the backpack and dropped it on the island, next to the wine bottle.

“Hello, Lis.”

There was a moment of thick silence. Lis said, “I didn’t… I mean, I thought you were going to call when you got to the station. We’d pretty much decided you weren’t coming. I called you and got your machine. Well, it’s good to see you.” She heard the nervous out-pouring of her words and fell silent.

“I got a ride. Figured, why bother them?”

“It wouldn’t have been a bother.”

“Where were you guys? I looked upstairs.”

Lis didn’t speak for a moment but merely stared at the young woman’s face, her blond hair-exactly Lis’s shade-held back by a black headband. Portia frowned and repeated her question.

“Oh, we’re out by the lake. It’s a strange night, isn’t it? Indian summer. In November. Have you eaten?”

“No, nothing. I had brunch at three. Lee stayed over last night and we slept late.”

“Come on outside. Owen’s out there. You’ll have some wine.”

“No, really. Nothing.”

They headed back down the path, thick silence filling the short distance between them. Lis asked about the train ride.

“Late but it got here.”

“Who’d you get a ride with”

“Some guy. I think I went to high school with his son. He kept talking about Bobbie. Like I should know who Bobbie was if he didn’t give me his last name.”

“Bobbie Kelso. He’s your age. His father’s tall, bald?”

“I think,” Portia said absently, looking out over the black lake.

Lis watched her eyes. “It’s been so long since you’ve been here.”

Portia gave a sound that might have been a laugh or a sniffle. They walked the rest of the way to the patio in silence.

“Welcome,” Owen called, standing up. He kissed his sister-in-law’s cheek. “We’d about given up on you.”

“Yeah, well, one thing after another. Didn’t get a chance to call. Sorry.”

“No problem. We’re flexible out here in the country. Have some wine.”

“She got a ride with Irv Kelso,” Lis said. Then she pointed to a lawn chair. “Sit down. I’ll open another bottle. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

But Portia didn’t sit. “No thanks. It’s still early enough, isn’t it? Why don’t we get the dirty work over with?”

In the ensuing silence Lis looked from her sister to her husband then back again. “Well…”

Portia persisted, “Unless it’d be a hassle.”

Owen shook his head. “Not really.”

Lis hesitated. “You don’t want to sit for a few minutes? We’ve got all tomorrow.”

“Naw, let’s just do it.” She laughed. “Like the ad says.”

Owen turned toward the younger woman. His face was in shadow and Lis couldn’t see his expression. “If you want. Everything’s in the den.”

He led the way and Portia, with a glance at her older sister, followed.

Lis remained on the patio for a moment. She blew the candle out and picked it up. Then she too walked to the house, preceded by sparkling dew lifted off the grass and flung from the tips of her boots, while above her in the night sky Cassiopeia grew indistinct, then dark, then invisible behind a wedge of black cloud.

He walked along the gritty driveway, passing through pools of light beneath the antiquated, hoopy lamps sprouting from the uneven granite wall. From high above, a woman known to him only as Patient 223-81 keened breathlessly, mourning the loss of something only she understood.

He paused at a barred wooden door, beside the loading dock. Into a silver plastic box-incongruous in this nearly medieval setting-the middle-aged man inserted a plastic card and flung the door open. Inside, a half dozen men and women, wearing white jackets or blue jumpsuits, glanced at him. Then they looked away uncomfortably.

A white-jacketed young doctor with nervous black hair and large lips stepped quickly to his side, whispering, “It’s worse than we thought.”

“Worse, Peter?” Dr. Ronald Adler asked vacantly as he stared at the gurney. “I don’t know about that. I expect pretty bad.”

He brushed his uncombed sandy-gray hair out of his eyes and touched a long finger to a thin, fleshy jowl as he looked down at the body. The corpse was huge and bald and had a time-smeared tattoo on the right biceps. A reddish discoloration encircled the massive neck. His back was as dark with sunken blood as his face was pale.

Adler motioned to the young doctor. “Let’s go to my office. Why are all these people here? Shoo them out! My office. Now.”

Vanishing through a narrow doorway the two men walked down the dim corridors, the only sounds their footsteps and a faint wail, which might have been either Patient 223-81 or the wind that gushed through the gaps in the building, which had been constructed a century ago. The walls of Adler’s office were made from the same red granite used throughout the hospital but he was its director so the walls were paneled. Because this was a state hospital, however, the wormwood was fake and badly warped. The office seemed like that of a bail bondsman or an ambulance-chasing lawyer.

Adler flicked the light on and tossed his overcoat onto a button-studded couch. The summons tonight had found him between the legs of his wife and he’d leapt off the bed and dressed hastily. He noticed now that he’d forgotten his belt, and his slacks hung below his moderate belly. This embarrassed him and he quickly sat at his desk chair. He gazed momentarily at the phone as if perplexed it wasn’t ringing.

To the young man, his assistant, Adler said, “Let’s have it, Doctor. Don’t hover. Sit down and tell me.”

“Details are pretty sketchy. He’s built like Callaghan.” Peter Grimes aimed his knobby hair toward the body in the loading dock. “We think he-”

Adler interrupted. “And he is…?”

“The one who escaped? Michael Hrubek. Number 458- 94.”

“Go on.” Adler fanned his fingers gingerly and Grimes placed a battered white file folder in front of the director.

“Hrubek, it seems-”

“He was the big fellow? Didn’t think he was a trouble-maker.”

“Never was. Until today.” Grimes kept retracting his lips like a fish chewing water and exposing little, even teeth. Adler found this repugnant and lowered his face to the file. The young doctor continued, “He shaved his head to look like Callaghan. Stole a razor to do it. Then he dyed his face blue. Broke a pen and mixed the ink with-” Adler’s eyes swung to Grimes with a look of either anger or bewilderment. The young man said quickly, “Then he climbed into the freezer for an hour. Anybody else would’ve died. Just before the coroner’s boys came by to pick up Callaghan, Hrubek hid the corpse and climbed into his body bag. The orderlies looked inside, saw a cold, blue body and-”

A barked laugh escaped from the director’s thin lips, on which to his shock he detected the scent of his wife. The smile faded. “Blue? Incredible. Blue?”

Callaghan had died, Grimes explained, by strangulation. “He was blue when they found him this afternoon.”

“Then he wasn’t blue for long, my friend. As soon as they cut the sheet off him, he was un-blue. Didn’t the fucking orderlies think of that?”

“Well,” Peter Grimes said, and could think of nothing to add.

“Did he hurt the meat-wagon boys?” Adler asked. At some point tonight he’d have to total up how many people might sue the state as a result of the escape.

“Nope. They said they chased him but he disappeared.”

“They chased him. I’m sure.” Adler sighed sardonically, and turned back to the file. He motioned for Grimes to be quiet and began to read about Michael Hrubek.

DSM-III diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenic… Monosymptomatic and delusional… Claims to have been committed in seventeen hospitals and escaped from seven of them. Unconfirmed.

Adler glanced up at his assistant. “Escaped from seven hospitals?” Before the young man could answer the question, to which there really was no answer, the director was reading once more.

… committed indefinitely pursuant to Section 403 of the State Mental Health Law… Hallucinatory (auditory, nonvisual)… subject to severe panic attacks, during which Pt. may become psychotically violent. Pt.’s intelligence is average/above average… Difficulty processing only the most abstract thought… Believes he is being persecuted and spied upon. Believes he is hated by others and gossiped about… Revenge and retribution, often in Biblical or historical contexts, seem to be integral parts of his delusion… Particular animosity toward women…

Adler then read the intake resident’s report about Hrubek’s height, weight, strength, general good health and belligerence. His face remained impassive though his heart revved up a few beats and he thought with dread and clinical admiration, The son of a bitch is a killing animal. Jesus, Lord.

“ ‘Presently controlled by chlorpromazine hydrochloride, 3200 mgs./daily. P.O. in divided doses.’ Is this for real, Peter?”

“Yes. I’m afraid so. Three grams of Thorazine.”

“Fuck,” Adler whispered.

“About which…” The assistant rocked against the desk with his thumbs pressed on a stack of books, the digits growing bright red under the pressure.

“Let’s have it. All of it.”

“He’s been cheeking his meds.”

Adler felt a bristle of heat course over his face. He whispered, “Tell me.”

“There was a movie.”

“A movie?”

Grimes clicked together two untrimmed nails. “An adventure film. And the hero pretended to take some drug or something-”

“You mean in the rec room?… What are you telling me?”

“An adventure film. But he didn’t really take them. The pills. He pretended to but he cheeked them and spit ’em out later. Harrison Ford, I think. A lot of patients did that for a few days afterwards. I guess nobody thought Hrubek was that cognitively functional so they didn’t watch him that closely. Or maybe it was Nick Nolte.”

Adler exhaled slowly. “How long was he off the candy?”

“Four days. Well, make that five.”

Flipping through his ordered mind Adler selected the Psychopharmacology file cabinet and peeked inside. Psychotic behavior in schizophrenics is controlled by anti-psychotic medication. There’s no physical addiction to Thorazine, as with narcotics, but going cold turkey off the drug would render Hrubek nauseous, dizzy, sweaty, and intensely nervous, all of which would increase the likelihood of panic attacks.

And panic was what made schizophrenics dangerous.

Off their Thorazine, patients like Hrubek sometimes fly into psychotic rages. Sometimes they murder.

Sometimes voices tell them what a good job they did with the knife or baseball bat and suggest that they go out and do it again.

Hrubek, Adler noted, would also experience severe insomnia. Which meant that the man would be wide awake for two or three days-ample opportunity to spread his mayhem about quite generously.

The moaning grew louder, filling the dim office. Adler’s palms rose to his cheeks. Again he smelled his wife. Again he wished he could turn back the clock one hour. Again he wished he’d never heard of Michael Hrubek.

“How’d we find out about the Thorazine?”

“One of the orderlies,” Grimes explained, chewing water again. “He found it under Hrubek’s mattress.”

“Who?”

“Stu Lowe.”

“Who else knows? About him cheeking the candy?”

“Him, me, you. The chief nurse. Lowe told her.”

“Oh, that’s just great. Now listen to me. Tell Lowe… tell him it’s his job if he ever repeats that. Not a single fucking word. Wait…” A troubling thought occurred to Adler and he asked, “The morgue’s in C Ward. How the hell did Hrubek have access to it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, find out.”

“This all happened very fast, extremely fast,” the flustered assistant blurted. “We don’t have half the information we need. I’m getting files, calling people.”

“Don’t call people.”

“I’m sorry?”

Adler snapped, “Don’t call anybody about this without my okay.”

“Well, the board…”

“Jesus, man, especially the board.”

“I haven’t yet,” said Grimes quickly, wondering what had become of his cockiness.

“Good God!” Adler exploded. “You haven’t called the police yet?”

“No, no. Of course not.” This was a call he’d been about to make just as Adler arrived at the hospital. Grimes noticed with alarm how violently his own fingers were quivering. He wondered if he’d have a vagus-nerve lapse and faint. Or pee on his boss’s floor.

“Let’s think about this, shall we?” Adler mused. “He’s sure to be wandering around out near… Where was it?”

“Stinson.”

Adler repeated the name softly then touched the file under eight firm fingertips as if preventing it from rising into the inky stratosphere of his Victorian asylum office. His mood lifted slightly. “Who were the orderlies who schlepped the body from the morgue to the hearse?”

“Lowe was one. I think Frank Jessup was the other.”

“Send ’em up to me.” Forgetting his ill-fitting slacks Adler stood and walked to the grimy window. It hadn’t been washed in six months. “You’re responsible,” Adler said sternly, “for keeping this absolutely quiet. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” Grimes said automatically.

“And, goddamn it, find out how he got off E Ward.”

“Yessir.”

“If anyone… Tell the staff. If anyone leaks anything to the press they’re fired. No police, no press. Send those boys up here. It’s a hard job we’ve got here, isn’t it? Don’t you agree? Get me those orderlies. Now.”

“Ronnie, are you feeling better?”

“I’m okay,” the young heavyset man snapped. “So what? I mean, what’re you going to do about it? Honestly. ”

Dr. Richard Kohler felt the cheap bedsprings bouncing beneath Ronnie’s weight as the patient scooted away from him, moving all the way to the headboard, as if Kohler were a molester. Ronnie’s eyes flicked up and down suspiciously as he examined the man who’d been his father, brother, friend, tutor and physician for the past six months. He carefully studied the doctor’s curly fringe of thinning hair, his bony face, narrow shoulders and thirty-one-inch waist. He seemed to be memorizing these features so he might have a good description in mind when he reported Kohler to the police.

“Are you uncomfortable, Ronnie?”

“I can’t do it, I can’t do it, Doctor. I get too scared.” He whined like a wrongly accused child. Then suddenly growing reasonable he said conversationally, “It’s the can opener mostly.”

“Was it the kitchen? All the work in the kitchen?”

“No no no,” he whined. “The can opener. It’s too much. I don’t see why you don’t understand it.”

Kohler’s body was racked by a yawn. He felt a painful longing for sleep. He’d been awake since 3:00 a.m. and had been here, at the halfway house, since 9:00. Kohler had helped the patients make breakfast and do the dishes. At 10:00 he shuttled four of them to part-time jobs, conferring with employers about his patients and mediating little disputes on their behalf.

The rest of the day he spent with the remaining five patients, who weren’t employed or who had today, Sunday, off. The young men and women each had a psychotherapy session with Kohler and then returned to the mundane chores of running a household. They divided up into project groups that did what to healthy people were absurdly simple tasks: peeling potatoes and washing lettuce for dinner, cleaning windows and bathrooms, separating trash for recycling, reading aloud to each other. Some lowered their heads and completed their assignments with furrowed-brow determination. Others chewed their lips or plucked out eyebrows or cried or came close to hyperventilating from the challenge. Eventually the work got done.

Then, catastrophe.

Just before dinner, Ronnie had his attack. A patient standing beside him opened a can of tuna with the electric opener, and Ronnie fled screaming from the kitchen, triggering a chain reaction of hysteria in several other patients. Kohler had finally restored order and they sat down to dinner, Kohler with them. The food was eaten, dishes washed, the house straightened, games played, television programs hashed out (a Cheers rerun was the majority selection of the evening and the M*A*S*H minority abided grudgingly by the decision). Then meds were taken with juice, or the orange-flavored liquid Thorazine was chugged, and it was bedtime.

Kohler had found Ronnie hiding in the corner of his room.

“What would you like to do about the noise?” Kohler now asked.

“I don’t know!” The patient’s voice was dull as he chewed his tongue-an attempt to moisten a mouth painfully dry from his Proketazine.

Adaptation causes stress-the hardest thing for schizophrenics to cope with-and, Kohler reflected, Ronnie had plenty to adapt to here in the halfway house. He had to make decisions. To consider the likes and dislikes of the other people living with him. He had to plan ahead. The safety of the hospital was gone. Here he was confronted daily with these matters, and a downhearted Kohler could see the young man was losing the battle.

Outside, vaguely visible in the darkness, was a lawn that had been kept perfectly mowed by the patients all summer long and was now hand-stripped of every leaf that made the mistake of falling upon it. Kohler focused on the window and saw his haggard face in the black reflection, his eyes socketlike, his chin too narrow. He thought, for the thousandth time that year, about growing a beard to flesh out his features.

“Tomorrow,” Kohler said to his unhappy patient, “we’ll do something about it.”

“Tomorrow? That’s just great. I could be dead tomorrow, and so could you, mister. Don’t forget it,” snapped the patient-sneering at the man to whom he owed not only such peace of mind as he possessed but probably his life as well.

Even before he’d decided to attend medical school, Richard Kohler had learned not to take personal offense at anything schizophrenic patients said or did. If Ronnie’s words troubled him at all, it was only because they offered a measure of the patient’s relapse.

This was one of Kohler’s clinical errors. The patient, involuntarily committed at Marsden State hospital, had responded well to his treatment there. After many trials to find a suitable medication and dosage Kohler began treating him with psychotherapy. He made excellent progress. When one of the halfway-house patients had improved enough to move into an apartment of her own, Kohler placed Ronnie here. Immediately, though, the stresses accompanying communal living had brought out the worst of Ronnie’s illness and he’d regressed, growing sullen and defensive and paranoid.

“I don’t trust you,” Ronnie barked. “It’s pretty fucking clear what’s going on here and I don’t like it one bit. And there’s going to be a storm tonight. Electric storm; electric can opener. Get it? I mean, you tell me I can do this, I can do that. Well, it’s bullshit!”

Into his perfect memory Kohler inserted a brief mental notation about Ronnie’s use of the verb “can” and the source of his panic attack tonight. It was too late in the evening to do anything with this observation now but he’d review the young man’s file tomorrow in his office at Marsden and write up a report then. He stretched and heard a deep bone pop. “Would you like to go back to the hospital, Ronnie?” he asked, though the doctor had already made this decision.

“That’s what I’m getting at. There isn’t that racket there.”

“No, it’s quieter.”

“I think I’d like to go back, Doctor. I have to go back,” Ronnie said as if he were losing the argument. “There are reasons too numerous to list.”

“We’ll do it then. Tuesday. You get some sleep now.”

Ronnie, still dressed, curled up on his side. Kohler insisted that he put on his pajamas and climb under the blankets properly, which he did without comment. He ordered Kohler to leave the light on, and did not say good night when the doctor left his room.

Kohler walked through the ground floor of the house, saying good night to the patients who were still awake and chatting with the night orderly who sat in the living room, watching television.

A breeze came through the open window and, enticed by it, Kohler stepped outside. The night was oddly warm for November. It reminded him of a particular fall evening during his last year of medical school at Duke. He recalled walking along the tarmac from the stairs of the United 737. That year the trip between La Guardia and Raleigh-Durham airports had been like a commute for him; he’d logged tens of thousands of miles between the two cities. The night he was thinking of was his return from New York after Thanksgiving vacation. He’d spent most of the holiday itself at Murray Hill Psychiatric Hospital in Manhattan and the Friday after it in his father’s office, listening to the old man argue persuasively, then insist belligerently, that his son take up internal medicine-going so far as to condition his continuing financial support of the young man’s education on his choice of specialty.

The next day, young Richard Kohler thanked his father for his hospitality, took an evening flight back to college and when school resumed on Monday was in the Bursar’s Office at 9:00 a.m., applying for a student loan to allow him to continue his study of psychiatry.

Kohler again yawned painfully, picturing his home-a condominium a half hour from here. This was a rural area, where he could have afforded a very big house and plenty of property. But Kohler’s goal had been to forsake land for convenience. No lawn mowing or landscaping or painting for him. He wanted a place to which he might escape, small and contained. Two bedrooms, two baths and a deck. Not that it didn’t have elements of opulence-the condo contained one of the few cedar hot tubs in this part of the state, several Kostabi and Hockney canvases and what was described as a “designer” kitchen (“But aren’t all kitchens,” he had slyly asked the real-estate broker, “designed by somebody?” and enjoyed her sycophantic laughter). The condo, which was on a hilltop and looked out over miles and miles of patchwork woods and farm-land during the day and the sparkling lights of Boyleston at night, was-quite literally-Kohler’s island of sanity in a most insane world.

Yet tonight he made his way back into the halfway house and climbed the creaking stairs to a room that measured ten by twelve feet and was outfitted only with a cot, a dresser and a metal mirror bolted to the wall.

He stripped off his suit jacket and loosened his tie then lay on the cot, kicking off his shoes. He looked out the window at a dull spray of stars then, lowering his eyes, saw a ridge of clouds in the west slicing the sky in half. The storm. He’d heard it was supposed to be a bad one. Although he himself liked the rain, he hoped there wouldn’t be any thunder, which would terrify many of his patients. But this concern passed immediately from his mind as he closed his eyes. Sleep was all he could think of now. He could taste it. He felt the fatigue ache in his legs. He yawned cold tears into his eyes. And in less than sixty seconds he was asleep.