Praying for Sleep

panties and she rolled onto her hands and knees.
    And Michael, knowing that John Orderly was just outside the door, also knew what to do—exactly the same. Pants down, on his hands and knees. Here they remained, butts bare to the world, while John Orderly fled down the hallway when a doctor unexpectedly happened by. The psychiatrist glanced inside the room and opened the door. He inquired what the patients were doing.
    Michael answered, “Waiting for John Orderly. I’m ready for him and so is she. Make no mistake. Like all men of medicine, John Orderly’s got a very big cock.”
    “Oh, my God.”
    The investigation resulted in the dismissal of five orderlies, two nurses and two doctors from Cooperstown. Michael, however, never learned John Orderly’s fate because as one of the most victimized patients he was immediately transferred out of the Hard Ward into the voluntary-commitment section of the hospital. “Due to stabilization of his condition,” the report said. “Prognosis for improvement: fair to good.” In fact Michael was far sicker than when he’d been admitted but the administrators wanted to isolate him from the questioning reporters and state mental-health examiners who descended on the hospital to investigate what one newspaper dubbed “Psycho Ward Atrocities.”
    Reforms were instituted, the reporters went elsewhere for their stories, and Cooperstown fell from the public eye—just as Michael himself was largely forgotten within the halls of the hospital.
    A month after the scandal he was still a resident of the Cooperstown Soft Ward. One weekend he found himself unusually agitated. On Saturday evening the anxiety increased to massive proportions and he began to feel the walls of his room closing in on him. Breathing grew difficult. He suspected the Secret Service was behind this; agents frequently bombarded him with beams that electrified his nerves.
    Michael didn’t know that his anxiety was due not to the federal government but to something much simpler: his medication instructions had been misplaced and he’d received no Haldol for four days.
    Finally in desperation he decided to find the one person in his recent memory who might help him. He had, he recalled, accused Dr. Anne of being a conspirator and had even announced on hundreds of occasions that he was happy she was dead. He decided that the only way to find relief was to retract his cruel pronouncements and apologize to her. He spent the night plotting his escape from Cooperstown, a plan that involved diversionary fires and costumes and disguises. The elaborate scheme proved unnecessary, however, because on Sunday morning he simply dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and walked out the front gate of the hospital, right past a guard unaware that he was a Hard Ward patient in the Soft Ward wing.
    Michael had no idea exactly where Dr. Anne might be. But he knew Trevor Hill was in the southern part of the state and that was the direction in which he started to jog that spring morning. Soon he became lost in a tangle of country roads and the more lost he became, the greater was his anxiety. Panic crawled over his skin like hives. At times he took to sprinting, as if fear were an animal snapping at his heels. Other times he hid in bushes until he felt unseen pursuers pass him by. Once, he summoned up his courage and climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck, on which he rode for an hour, hiding under the canvas tarps, until the driver stopped at a roadside diner. Noticing that there were four trucks parked in the lot and fearing this very unlucky number, Michael leapt off and escaped down a nearby country lane.
    Around noon he found himself in the middle of a large parking lot. He paused, caught his breath and walked through the lot toward a row of trees, nauseous with anxiety. He ran through the lot and disappeared into the bushes just beyond the large wooden sign. He glanced at the words that were carved into it as if by a huge wood-burning iron.
     
    Welcome to Indian Leap State Park
     
    Michael Hrubek thought of that day now, six months later, as he steered his black Cadillac over the crest of a hill on Route 236. He saw before him a long smooth straightaway sailing into a distance filled with flashes of lightning and the soft glow of lights that perhaps were those of Ridgeton. He cringed as rain clattered on the roof and windshield.
    “Betrayal,” he muttered. Then he repeated the word, bellowing. He was scalded with anxiety. “Eve