Praying for Sleep

Frank knows about that? I didn’t think he did. Wait, maybe I mentioned it to him.”
    The doctor nodded at the screen. “Art Carney’s my favorite.”
    “He’s a funny one, sure is. I like Alice. She knows what she’s about.”
    “Frank wasn’t sure how long Michael’d been cheeking them. He said two days.”
    “Two?” Lowe shook his head. “Where’d he hear that? Try five.”
    “I think they want to keep it quiet.”
    Lowe began to relax. “That’s what Adler told me. It’s not my business. I mean, with . . .” The comfort vanished instantly and Kohler noticed Lowe’s hand seeking the satin strip on the blanket beside him. “And I just spilled the beans, didn’t I? Oh, fuck,” he spat out, bitterly discouraged at how easily his mind had been picked.
    “I had to know, Stu. I’m his doctor. It’s my job to know.”
    “And it’s my job, period. And I’m gonna lose it. Shit. Why’d you trick me?”
    Kohler wasn’t giving any thought to Lowe’s employment. He felt his skin crackling with shock at this confirmation of his hunch. In his last session before the escape, yesterday, Michael Hrubek had looked Kohler in the eye and had lied about the Thorazine. He’d said he was taking all his meds and the dosage was working well. Three thousand milligrams! And the patient had given it up purposefully and lied about doing so after he’d been off the pills for five days. And he’d lied very well. Unlike psychopaths, schizophrenic patients are rarely duplicitous in such calculating ways.
    “You’ve got to come clean, Stu. Hrubek’s a time bomb. I don’t think Adler understands that. Or if he does he doesn’t much care.” Kohler added soothingly, “You know Michael better than most of the doctors at Marsden. You’ve got to help me.”
    “I got to keep my job is what I’ve got to do. I’m making twenty-one thousand a year and spending twenty-two. Adler’ll have my nuts for what I told you already.”
    “Ron Adler isn’t God.”
    “I’m not saying anything else.”
    “Okay, Stuart, you gonna help me, or do I have to make some phone calls?”
    “Fuck.” A can of beer flew from the big hand into the gray wall and with a spray of foam fell gushing onto the dingy shag carpet. It was suddenly vitally important for Stuart Lowe to tend the embers of his fire. He leapt up and pitched three fresh logs onto the heap of the dying flames. A gorgeous cascade of orange sparks bounced to the hearth. Lowe returned to the couch and said nothing for a moment. Kohler believed this meant that he accepted the terms of the agreement, which was of course no agreement at all. The signal of surrender was the soft pop as the TV was shut off.
    “Did he stockpile all the Thorazine or flush it? You have any idea?”
    “We found it. He stockpiled it.”
    “How much?”
    Lowe said resignedly, “Five full days. Thirty-two hundred a day. This’ll be the sixth.”
    “When you saw him tonight, was there any indication of what he had in mind?”
    “He was just standing there in the buff, looking at us like he was surprised. But he wasn’t surprised at all.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Nothing,” Lowe spat out. “I don’t mean a fucking thing.”
    “Tell me what he said. Exactly.”
    “Didn’t Frank tell you? You already talked to him.” He looked at Kohler bitterly to see if he had been as big a fool as he thought. The doctor had no choice but to oblige. “Frank’s still recovering from surgery. He won’t be conscious till morning.”
    “Jesus Christ.”
    “ What did Michael say? Come on, Stu.”
    “Something about a death. He had a death to go to. I don’t know. Maybe he meant a funeral or graveyard. I was pretty shook, you know. I was trying to fight him off Frank.”
    Kohler didn’t respond and the orderly continued, “With those rubber things they give us.”
    “The truncheons?”
    “I tried. I was trying to get him upside the head but he don’t feel no pain. You know that.”
    “That’s one thing about Michael,” Kohler agreed, observing what a sorrowful liar Lowe was and feeling pity for this man, who’d obviously abandoned his partner to die a terrible death.
    “That’s all I heard. Then Michael grabbed away the club and come after me. . . .”
    “Now tell me what Adler really said to you.”
    Lowe exhaled air through puffed-out cheeks. He finally said, “I wasn’t supposed to say nothing about the meds. To nobody. And he wanted to know if Michael’d said anything about