Praying for Sleep

like Michael Hrubek would be the ultimate validation of Kohler’s delusion-therapy techniques. But more than precious DMH funding, more than professional prestige, Kohler saw a chance to help a man who suffered and who suffered terribly. Michael wasn’t like the many schizophrenic patients who were oblivious to their conditions. No, Michael was the most tragic of victims; he was just well enough to imagine what a normal life might be like and was tormented daily by the gap between who he was and who he so desperately wanted to be. Exactly the sort of patient Kohler wished most to work with.
    Not that Michael leapt at the chance to join the psychiatrist’s program.
    “No fucking way, you fucker!”
    Paranoid and suspicious, Michael refused to have anything to do with the Suite, or Kohler, or anyone else at Marsden for that matter. He sat in the corner of his room, muttering to himself and suspiciously eyeing doctors and patients alike. But Kohler persisted. He simply wouldn’t leave the young man alone. Their first month together—and they saw each other daily—they argued bitterly. Michael would rant and scream, convinced Kohler was a conspirator like the others. The doctor would parry with questions about Michael’s fantasies, trying to break him down.
    Finally, tuckered out by Kohler’s aggressiveness and by massive dosages of medicine, Michael reluctantly agreed to join his program. He was gradually introduced to other patients, first one on one, then in larger groups. To get the young patient to talk about his past and his delusions, Kohler would bribe him with history books, filching them from the library at Framington hospital because the collection at Marsden was almost nonexistent. In their individual sessions Kohler kept pushing the young man, turning up the emotional heat and forcing him to spend time with other patients, probing into his delusions and dreams.
    “Michael, who’s Eve?”
    “Oh, yeah, right. Like I’m going to tell you. Forget about it.”
    “What did you mean by ‘I want to stay ahead of the blue uniforms’?”
    “Time for bed. Lights out. Nighty-night, Doctor.” So it went.
    One cold, wet day six weeks ago, Michael was in Marsden’s secluded exercise area, walking laps under the surly eyes of the guards. He gazed through the chain-link fence at the bleak, muddy New England farm on the hospital grounds. Like most schizophrenics Michael suffered from blunted affect—hampered display of emotion. But that day he was suddenly swept up by the bleak and sorrowful scenery and started to cry. “I was feeling sorry for the poor damp cows,” Michael later told Kohler. “Their eyes were broken. God should do something for them. They’ll have a hard time.”
    “Their eyes were broken, Michael? What do you mean?”
    “The poor cows. They’ll never be the same. Good for them, bad for them. It’s so obvious. Their eyes are broken. Don’t you understand?”
    The flash came to Kohler like an ECS jolt. “You mean,” he whispered, struggling to control his excitement, “you’re saying the ice is broken.”
    With this backhanded message—like the one about getting close to Dr. Anne Muller—Michael was trying to express his inmost feelings. In this case, that something about his life had changed fundamentally. He shrugged and began to cry in front of his therapist—not in fear but out of sorrow. “I feel so bad for them.” Gradually he calmed. “It seems like a difficult life to be a farmer. But maybe it’s one that’d suit me.”
    “Would you be interested,” Kohler asked, his heart racing, “in working on that farm?”
    “The farm?”
    “The work program. Here at the hospital.”
    “Are you mad?” Michael shouted. “I’d get kicked in the head and killed. Don’t be a stupid fucker!”
    It took two weeks of constant pressure to talk Michael into the job—far longer, in fact, than it took Kohler to gin up the paperwork to arrange the transfer. Michael was technically an untouchable at Marsden because he was a Section 403 commitment. But there is no easier mark than state bureaucracy. Because Kohler’s voluminous documentation referred to “Patient 458-94,” rather than “Michael Hrubek,” and because the supervisors of vastly overcrowded E Ward were delighted to get rid of another patient, Hrubek was easily stamped, approved, vetted and blessed. He was assigned simple tasks on the farm, which produced dairy products for the hospital and sold what little