Praying for Sleep

Hey . . .” He laughed good-naturedly. “What are you doing without any clothes on?”
    “What are you doing hiding in yours, fucker?” Hrubek retorted with a sneer.
    Suddenly the reality of their mission struck Lowe with a jolt. My God, they weren’t in the hospital. They weren’t surrounded by fellow staffers. There was no telephone here, no psychiatric nurses nearby with two hundred milligrams of phenobarb. He grew weak with fear and when Hrubek gave a shout and fled up the valley, Jessup not far behind, Lowe remained where he was.
    “Frank, hold up!” Lowe called.
    But Jessup didn’t wait, and reluctantly Lowe too started after the huge blue-white monster, who was leaping along the trail. Hrubek’s voice echoed in the damp valley, begging not to be shot or tortured. Lowe caught up with Jessup and they ran side by side.
    The orderlies crashed through the undergrowth, swinging their truncheons like machetes. Jessup panted, “Jesus, on these rocks! How can he run on these rocks?” A memory suddenly came to Lowe—the image of Hrubek standing behind the hospital’s main building, his shoes around his neck, walking barefoot on gravel, over and over, muttering as if speaking to his feet and encouraging them to toughen up. That had been just last week.
    “Frank,” Lowe wheezed, “there’s something funny about this. We oughta—”
    And then they were flying.
    Sailing through the black air. Trees and rocks tumbling upside down, over and over. With identical screams they plunged into the ravine that Hrubek had easily leapt over. The orderlies smacked against the rocks and branches on their way down and their spinning bodies slammed into the ground with vicious jolts. An icy cold began to radiate through Lowe’s thigh and arm. They lay motionless in the gray ooze of the mud.
    Jessup tasted blood. Lowe examined his bent fingers, attention to which flagged when he wiped the mud from his forearm and found that it wasn’t mud at all but a wide, foot-long scrape where skin used to be. “Cock-sucker,” he wailed. “I’m gonna hurt that asshole bad, it’s the last thing I do. Oh, shit. I’m bleeding to death. Oh, shit . . .” Lowe rolled into a sitting position and pressed the scrape, feeling in horror his own hot, torn flesh. Jessup was content to lie unmoving in the methane-scented mud and breathe a few cubic centimeters of air, the most his stunned lungs would accept. He gasped wetly. After a moment he was able to whisper, “I think—”
    Lowe never found out what was on Jessup’s mind because at that moment Hrubek strode into the middle of the ravine. He casually bent down, pushing Stuart Lowe aside, and plucked the men’s tear-gas canisters from their belts, flinging them deep into the woods. He turned abruptly back to Lowe, who looked up into Hrubek’s leering face and began to scream.
    “Stop that!” Hrubek screamed in return. “Stop that noise! ”
    Lowe did, and using the advantage of Hrubek’s own panic scrabbled away. Jessup’s eyes closed and he began muttering incoherently.
    Lowe lifted the truncheon.
    “You’re from Pinkerton,” Hrubek barked. “ Pink er-ton. I’m in the pink, Mr. Fuckin’-A Orderly. Your arm looks pretty pink and tend -er. Nice try, but you shouldn’t’ve come after me—I’ve got a death to at- tend to.”
    The rubber stick in Lowe’s hand remained poised for a moment, then with a gushing sound landed in the mud at his feet. He took off, running blindly through the woods, his courage suddenly as flimsy as the grass and saplings that bent beneath his pounding feet.
    “Oh, don’t leave me, Stu,” Jessup cried into the mud at his lips. “I don’t want to die alone.”
    Hrubek watched the disappearing form of Stuart Lowe then knelt on top of Jessup, pushing his head further into the ground. The orderly tasted dirt and grass, the flavor of which reminded him of his childhood. He began to cry.
    “You dumb fucker,” Hrubek said. Then he raged, “And I can’t wear your clothes either.” He poked sharply at the stitched label, Marsden State Mental Health Facility, on Jessup’s jumpsuit. “What good are you?” He began to sing, “ ‘ Good night, ladies, good night, ladies, I’m going to see you cry. . . .’ ”
    “Will you let me go, please, Michael?”
    “You found me out, and what I’m doing has to be a surprise. ‘Good night, laaaaaaadies, I’m going to see you die !’ ”
    “I won’t tell nobody, Michael. Please let me go. Oh,