Praying for Sleep

you . . . He killed someone.”
    “No!”
    “A woman in Cloverton.”
    “He’s coming here?”
    “No, it doesn’t look like it. He’s going to Boyleston. To get a train out of the state, I’d guess.”
    “What should we do?”
    He paused. “I’m not going after him, Lis. I’m coming home.”
    He heard her exhale a sigh. “Thank you, honey.”
    “Stay in the house. Lock the doors. I’m only fifteen minutes away. . . . Lis?”
    “Yes?”
    He paused. “I’ll be there soon.”
    Heck and Owen said goodbye to the woman and hurried out into the rain, buffeted by the terrible wind. They followed the driveway to the dim road that led back to the highway.
    Owen glanced at Heck, who was trudging along morosely.
    “You’re thinking about your reward?”
    “I have to say I am. They’ll probably get him in Boyleston for sure. But I had to call and tell them. I’m not going to risk anybody else getting hurt.”
    Owen thought for a moment. “You’re still due that money, I’d say.”
    “Well, the hospital’s gonna have a different opinion on that, I’ll guarantee you.”
    “Tell you what, Heck, you burn on down that highway to Boyleston, and if you get him first, fine. If not, we’ll sue the hospital for your money and I’ll handle the case myself.”
    “You a lawyer?”
    Owen nodded. “Won’t charge you a penny.”
    “You’d do that for me?”
    “Surely would.”
    Heck was embarrassed at Owen’s generosity and after a moment he shook the lawyer’s hand warmly. They continued in silence to the clearing where the ruined Cadillac sat.
    “Okay, Emil and I’ll head south here. It’s a beige Subaru we’re looking for, right? Let’s hope he doesn’t drive Japanese any better’n he drives Detroit. Okay, let’s do it.” On impulse he added, “Say, after this’s over with, let’s stay in touch, you and me. What do you say? Do some fishing?”
    “Hey, that’s a fine idea by me, Heck. Happy hunting to you.”
    Heck and Emil limped, and trotted, back to the battered Chevy pickup fifty yards down the road. They climbed in. Heck started up the rattling engine, then sped through the fierce rain toward Route 315, his left foot on the accelerator and an eye on his modest prize.
     
    The sign revolved slowly in the turbulent night sky.
    Dr. Richard Kohler looked toward the flashes of light in the west and laughed out loud at the metaphor that occurred to him.
    Wasn’t this how Mary Shelley’s doctor had animated his creature? Lightning?
    The psychiatrist now recalled very clearly the first meeting with the patient who would play the monster to Kohler’s Frankenstein. Four months ago, two weeks after the Indian Leap trial and Michael’s incarceration in Marsden, Kohler—overcome with morbid and professional fascination—had walked slowly into Marsden’s grim, high-security E Ward and looked down at the huge, hunched form of Michael Hrubek, glaring up from beneath his dark eyebrows.
    “How are you, Michael?” Kohler asked.
    “They’re lis-ten-ing. Sometimes you have to keep your mind a complete blank. Have you ever done that? Do you know how hard it is? That’s the basis of Transcendental Meditation. You may know that as TM. Make your mind a complete blank, Doctor. Try it.”
    “I don’t think I can.”
    “If I hit you with that chair your mind’d be a complete blank. But the downside is that you’d be a dead fucker.” Michael had then closed his mouth and said nothing more for several days.
    Marsden was a state hospital, like Cooperstown, and offered only a few dismal activity rooms. But Kohler had finagled a special suite for patients in his program. It was not luxurious. The rooms were drafty and cold and the walls were painted an unsettling milky green. But at least those in the Milieu Suite—so named because Kohler’s goal was to ease the patients here gradually back into normal society—were separated from the hospital’s sicker patients and this special status alone gave them a sense of dignity. They also had learning toys and books and art supplies—even the dangerous and officially forbidden pencils. Art and expression were encouraged and the walls were graced by the graffiti of paintings, drawings and poems created by the patients.
    In August Richard Kohler commenced a campaign to get Michael into the Milieu Suite. He chose the young man because he was smart, because he seemed to wish to improve, and because he had killed. To resocialize (one did not cure ) a patient