Praying for Sleep

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.

21
    “Where’d you find this?”
    Under the bed, up a tree, in between Mona the Moaner’s legs . . .
    Peter Grimes didn’t respond and to his great relief the hospital director seemed to forget the question.
    “My God. He’s been talking to DMH for three months ? Three fucking months! And look at all of this. Look!” Adler seemed almost more astonished at the volume of paperwork that Richard Kohler had generated than by the contents of those papers.
    Grimes noticed that his boss was touching the sheets rather gingerly, as if afraid of getting his fingerprints on them. This was perhaps Grimes’s imagination but it made the young doctor extremely uncomfortable—largely because it seemed like an excellent idea, one he wished had occurred to him earlier, before he’d left the evidence of his identity imprinted all over the documents.
    Adler looked up, his thoughts hovering, and to keep him from asking again where the papers had come from, Grimes read from the sheet that happened to be faceup in front of the two men. “ ‘Dear Dr. Kohler: Further to your proposal dated September 30 of this year, we are pleased to inform you that the Finance Division of the State Department of Mental Health has provisionally agreed to fund a program for inpatient treatment of severely psychotic individuals according to the guidelines you have set forth in the aforementioned proposal. . . .’ ”
    “God damn him,” Adler interjected with such vehemence that Grimes was afraid to stop reading.
    “ ‘A preliminary budget of 1.7 million dollars covering the first year’s financial needs for your program has been provisionally approved. As agreed, funding will come from existing allocations to the state mental-health hospital system, in order to bypass the necessity of a public referendum.’ ”
    But stop he did when Adler muttered “bypass” as if it were an obscenity and snatched away the sheet to read the final paragraph himself. “ ‘This is to confirm that your proposal is conditioned upon approval by the Board of Physicians of the State Department of Mental Health, following your