Praying for Sleep

his mind mercifully shut down and his vision went black. The next thing he remembered was the cruel grip of two security guards, brutally pulling him to his feet. The now-conscious girl, tugging down her skirt, was screaming. Michael’s pants were undone and his limp penis hung out, cut and bloodied by the zipper of his trousers.
    Michael recalled nothing of what had happened. The girl claimed she had just gone to bed, having caught the flu. She’d opened her eyes and found Michael spreading her legs and penetrating her violently, despite her desperate protests. Police were called, parents notified. Michael spent the night in jail, under the cautious eye of two very uncomfortable deputies, unprepared for a prisoner who glared at them and threatened to make them “dead fuckers” if they didn’t bring him a history book from his room.
    The evidence was in conflict. Although there were traces of three different condom lubricants found in and around the girl’s vagina, Michael wasn’t wearing a condom when the guards captured him nor were any located in the room. The defense lawyer’s tack was that the girl herself had lifted Michael’s penis from his jeans and alleged rape, rather than admit that she’d taken on a succession of students after drinking herself semiconscious—a theory that, while politically incorrect, might very well have appealed to the jury.
    On the other hand there were several purported witnesses to the crime, including the girl herself. Then too Michael had threatened or glared at half the campus at one time or another—particularly women.
    But the most damning evidence of all: Michael Hrubek himself—a big, scary boy, more than twice the girl’s size, who’d been caught, the prosecutor was only too pleased to point out, with his pants down. Nailing shut his own coffin, Michael grew incoherent after the incident and began to mutter violent epithets. Taking the stand in court would have been a disaster. The lawyer pled him down to one count of sexual assault and he was given probation on condition that he withdraw from school and voluntarily commit himself to a state hospital near his home, where he’d undergo a treatment program for violent sex offenders.
    After six months he was discharged from the hospital and returned to his parents’ home.
    Once he was back in Westbury, reason and madness rapidly began to merge. One day, the autumn after the rape, Michael announced to his mother that he wanted to return to college. He added, “I’m only going to take history. They better let me do that. Oh, and I want to become a priest. I’m not going to study anything else. No math, no English, no al-ge- bra ! Just fucking forget about it! I’m only going to study history. ”
    His bleary-eyed mother, lolling in her unmade bed, her blond hair stiff as straw, laughed in astonishment at his demands. “Go back to college? Are you serious? Look what you did! Do you know what you did to that girl?”
    No, Michael didn’t know what he’d done. He had no idea. All he remembered was some girl lying about him and because of that he’d been forced to abandon his precious history classes. “She’s a fucker! She lied! Why can’t I go back? Aren’t I fashionable enough to go to school? Well, aren’t I? Priests are very fashionable. Someday I’ll write a his -tory about them. They often fuck little boys, you know.”
    “Go to your room!” his mother tearfully shouted, and he—a man in his twenties, a man twice her size—scurried off like a whipped dog.
    Often he’d whine, “Please? I want to go back to school !” He promised to study hard and become one fucker of a priest to make her happy. He said he’d wear a crown of thorns on his bloody head and make people rise from their graves.
    “Jesus wore thorns because He rose from the dead,” he explained one day to her. “That’s why roses have thorns.”
    “I’m going out, Michael,” she would cry.
    “Are you go -ing to run away from me? Where are you go -ing? To al-ge- bra class? Are you going to wear a bra while a priest fucks you?”
    His mother left the house. She no longer called him her little soldier boy. She no longer had nails as red as burning cigarette embers, and the masks of her eyes often ran in streaks down the matte skin of her cheeks.
    Oh, Mama, what are you wearing? Take that hat off your head. Take off that crown. All those bloody thorns! I don’t like that, not one bit. Please! I’m sorry for what I said