Praying for Sleep

Don’t you agree? Get me those orderlies. Now.”
     
    “Ronnie, are you feeling better?”
    “I’m okay,” the young heavyset man snapped. “So what? I mean, what’re you going to do about it? Honestly. ”
    Dr. Richard Kohler felt the cheap bedsprings bouncing beneath Ronnie’s weight as the patient scooted away from him, moving all the way to the headboard, as if Kohler were a molester. Ronnie’s eyes flicked up and down suspiciously as he examined the man who’d been his father, brother, friend, tutor and physician for the past six months. He carefully studied the doctor’s curly fringe of thinning hair, his bony face, narrow shoulders and thirty-one-inch waist. He seemed to be memorizing these features so he might have a good description in mind when he reported Kohler to the police.
    “Are you uncomfortable, Ronnie?”
    “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, Doctor. I get too scared. ” He whined like a wrongly accused child. Then suddenly growing reasonable he said conversationally, “It’s the can opener mostly.”
    “Was it the kitchen? All the work in the kitchen?”
    “No no no,” he whined. “The can opener. It’s too much. I don’t see why you don’t understand it.”
    Kohler’s body was racked by a yawn. He felt a painful longing for sleep. He’d been awake since 3:00 a.m. and had been here, at the halfway house, since 9:00. Kohler had helped the patients make breakfast and do the dishes. At 10:00 he shuttled four of them to part-time jobs, conferring with employers about his patients and mediating little disputes on their behalf.
    The rest of the day he spent with the remaining five patients, who weren’t employed or who had today, Sunday, off. The young men and women each had a psychotherapy session with Kohler and then returned to the mundane chores of running a household. They divided up into project groups that did what to healthy people were absurdly simple tasks: peeling potatoes and washing lettuce for dinner, cleaning windows and bathrooms, separating trash for recycling, reading aloud to each other. Some lowered their heads and completed their assignments with furrowed-brow determination. Others chewed their lips or plucked out eyebrows or cried or came close to hyperventilating from the challenge. Eventually the work got done.
    Then, catastrophe.
    Just before dinner, Ronnie had his attack. A patient standing beside him opened a can of tuna with the electric opener, and Ronnie fled screaming from the kitchen, triggering a chain reaction of hysteria in several other patients. Kohler had finally restored order and they sat down to dinner, Kohler with them. The food was eaten, dishes washed, the house straightened, games played, television programs hashed out (a Cheers rerun was the majority selection of the evening and the M*A*S*H minority abided grudgingly by the decision). Then meds were taken with juice, or the orange-flavored liquid Thorazine was chugged, and it was bedtime.
    Kohler had found Ronnie hiding in the corner of his room.
    “What would you like to do about the noise?” Kohler now asked.
    “I don’t know !” The patient’s voice was dull as he chewed his tongue—an attempt to moisten a mouth painfully dry from his Proketazine.
    Adaptation causes stress—the hardest thing for schizophrenics to cope with—and, Kohler reflected, Ronnie had plenty to adapt to here in the halfway house. He had to make decisions. To consider the likes and dislikes of the other people living with him. He had to plan ahead. The safety of the hospital was gone. Here he was confronted daily with these matters, and a downhearted Kohler could see the young man was losing the battle.
    Outside, vaguely visible in the darkness, was a lawn that had been kept perfectly mowed by the patients all summer long and was now hand-stripped of every leaf that made the mistake of falling upon it. Kohler focused on the window and saw his haggard face in the black reflection, his eyes socketlike, his chin too narrow. He thought, for the thousandth time that year, about growing a beard to flesh out his features.
    “Tomorrow,” Kohler said to his unhappy patient, “we’ll do something about it.”
    “Tomorrow? That’s just great. I could be dead tomorrow, and so could you, mister. Don’t forget it,” snapped the patient—sneering at the man to whom he owed not only such peace of mind as he possessed but probably his life as well.
    Even before he’d decided to attend medical school,