Praying for Sleep

stopped seeing this psychiatrist after his father’s insurance company refused to reimburse the family for any more visits. He spent more and more time in his room, sometimes reading history, sometimes wearing his mother’s clothing, sometimes screaming out the windows at people who walked past. The Hrubeks’ pale-blue home became a renowned house of terror among the children of Westbury, Pennsylvania.
    This was his life for the years following his expulsion from college—living at home, going on his mad sorties, dunking toys, eating junk food, reading history, watching television.
    It was around his twenty-fifth birthday, in April, that Michael withdrew into his room and stopped talking to anyone. One month later he tried to burn down the house to stop the voices that came from his mother’s bedroom. The following Saturday Hrubek senior dressed his son in an ill-fitting suit and took him, along with three books, a change of underwear and a toothbrush, to a state mental hospital in New York. He lied about state residency, and had the boy admitted to the facility under an involuntary-commitment order intended to last for seventy-two hours.
    His father hugged Michael and told him the hospital would stabilize his condition and make him well enough to live at home. “I’ll have to think about that,” a frowning Michael responded, not knowing that those would be the last words ever spoken between father and son.
    Upon his return to Westbury, the depleted man sold the house at a loss and moved to the Midwest, where his family had come from years before.
    After six weeks the hospital’s Third-Party Payments Section gave up trying to track down his father, and Michael became a guest of the state.
    This hospital was bleak—an institutional desert, where the long hours were broken only by Pill Time and Meal Time and Shock Time. At this point in his illness, however, Michael was more evasive than aggressive and didn’t need electroconvulsive-shock treatment. His pills calmed him down and he spent the days sitting placidly in his room until his butt grew sore then he’d stand and stare out the windows barred by wire lattice that dangled with tiny streamers of greasy dust.
    Once a week he would talk to a doctor.
    “You have to take your meds. . . . Are you taking them? Good. You see, we’re aiming to get you to the point where you’re aware, I’m speaking of a conscious awareness, that your concerns are a function of your illness not of the reality around you. . . .”
    Michael would grunt disagreeably and remind himself to keep a suspicious eye on the fellow.
    After six weeks in the hospital Michael Hrubek was diagnosed as mildly schizophrenic, nonviolent, possibly paranoid, and was among eighty-seven similar patients released when the hospital closed one of its wings due to budget cutbacks.
    Because Third-Party Payments had never informed Discharge that the location of Michael’s father was unknown, the release notice was sent to a fictitious address in Valhalla, New York. On the day Michael was discharged an orderly parked him on a bench in the waiting room and told him to wait for a family member to pick him up. Four hours later Michael told the duty nurse that he was going to say goodbye to one of the groundskeepers. Instead, he wandered unchallenged through the front gate—thus beginning a lengthy and harrowing journey that would lead him to cities throughout the Eastern Seaboard, to hospitals of varying degrees of renown and infamy, to idyllic Trevor Hill Psychiatric and his beloved and betraying Dr. Anne, to the snakepit of Cooperstown, to the deaths at Indian Leap, to Marsden State Mental Health Facility, to Dr. Richard . . . and finally—after so many miles and so very many lifetimes—to the astonishing place in which Michael found himself tonight: the driver’s seat of a black, thirty-year-old Cadillac Coupe de Ville, speeding not toward Boyleston at all, but straight down Route 236 west to Ridgeton, which was now less than twenty miles away. As he drove, musical words flew from his lips:
    “Cadillac, hard tack . . . Hard tack, horseback . . . Soldier boys, gray and blue . . .”
    His hands left a residue of sweat on the white steering wheel and he kept repeating to himself which pedal was the accelerator and which was the brake. He’d sometimes find himself easing over the center line and in panic forget which lane he was supposed to be in. Then, remembering, he’d forget how to steer back into