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 surplus there was at local markets. At first he was suspicious of his supervisors. Yet he never once had a panic attack. He showed up for work on time and was usually the last to leave. Eventually he settled into the job—shoveling manure, lugging sledgehammers, fence stretchers and staples from fence post to fence post, carting milk pails. The only times you’d suspect he wasn’t your average farm boy was when he’d use white fence paint on Herefords to even up markings he found unpleasant or scary.
Still, as soon as he was told not to paint the cows, he shamefacedly complied.
Michael Hrubek, who’d never in his life earned a penny of his own money, was suddenly making $3.80 an hour. He was having dinner in the hospital cafeteria with friends and washing dishes afterwards, he was writing a long poem about the Battle of Bull Run, and he was an integral part of Kohler’s delusion-therapy program, not to mention the cover boy of his proposal to the State Department of Mental Health.
And now, Kohler reflected sorrowfully, he was a dangerous escapee.
Oh, where are you, Michael, with your broken eyes?
One thing he was convinced of: Michael was en route to Ridgeton. The visit with Lis Atcheson had been doubly helpful. Partly for what it revealed about Michael’s delusion. But also for what it revealed about her. She’d lied to him, that was clear. He’d tried to deduce exactly where her story about Indian Leap deviated from the truth. But she seemed to be a woman used to living with secrets, with feelings unexpressed, passions hidden, and so he hadn’t been able to spot the lie. Yet Kohler felt that whatever she wasn’t telling him was significant—very likely significant enough to prod Michael out of the haze of his deluded but secure life and urge him to make this terrifying journey through the night.
Oh, yes, he was on his way to Ridgeton.
And here waiting for him, huddled in the driving rain, was Richard Kohler, a man willing to bribe bounty hunters with thousands of dollars he could scarcely afford, to troop through hostile wilderness, to track down and meet his edgy and dangerous patient all by himself and spirit him back to the hospital—for Michael’s sake and the sake of the thousands of other patients Kohler hoped to treat during his lifetime.
The doctor now gazed over the spacious parking lot and drew his black overcoat about him in a futile effort to ward off the heavy rain and gusts of wind. He opened his backpack and lifted out the sturdy metal syringe then filled the reservoir with a large dosage of anesthetic. He flicked the bubbles to the top and fired a small spurt into the air to expel them. Then he leaned back, his face pelted with rain, and he looked up once more at the perpetual motion of the sign above his head.
25
“Look at this!”
A mile down the road Michael rounded a curve and barked a sudden laugh. He calmly recalled which pedal was the brake and he pressed it gently, slowing to ten miles an hour.
“Look!” He leaned forward, his head almost to the windshield, and gazed into the sky, filled with rain that reflected red, white and blue lights in a million spatters.
“Oh, God, what could this mean?” His skin hummed with emotion and upon his face a vast grin was spreading. Michael pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the Subaru. He stepped out into the rain and, as if in a trance, began walking through the parking lot, his John Worker boots scraping on the asphalt. He paused at the base of the shrine and stood with his hands clasped before him, reverently, staring up into the sky. He dug into his backpack and observed that he had two skulls left. He selected the one in worse condition—it was cracked in several places—and set it at the base of the sign.
The voice came from nearby. “Hello, Michael.”
The young man wasn’t startled in the least. “Hello, Dr. Richard.”
The thin man sat on the hood of a white car, one of fifty, all in a row. Doesn’t he look small, doesn’t he look wet? Michael thought, reminded once again of the raccoon he’d killed earlier in the evening. Such little things, both of them.
Dr. Richard scooted off the Taurus. Michael glanced at him but his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the radiant sign revolving above their heads.
Michael ignored the middle portion of the sign, noting only that the word MERCURY was bloody red. What he stared at were the two words in blue, Union-soldier
blue: On the top, FORD. On the bottom, LINCOLN.
“That’s where you killed him, isn’t it, Michael? The theater?”
This is surely a miracle. Oh, God in your infinite brilliance . . .
“Ford . . . Lincoln . . . Ford’s Theater . . . Yessir, I sure did. Make no mistake. I snuck into the presidential box at ten-thirty on April 14, the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. It was Good Friday. I came up behind him and put a bullet into his head. The President didn’t die right away but lingered until the next day. He linnnnngered.”
“You yelled, ‘Sic semper tyrannis.’ ”
“They’ve been after me ever since.” Michael looked at his doctor. No, he was no impostor. It was truly Dr. Richard. You look tired, Doctor, Michael thought. I’m awake and you’re asleep. What do you make of that? He gazed up at the sign again.
“I want to help you.”
Michael chuckled.
“I’d like you to come back with me to the hospital.”
“That’s nuts, Dr. Richard. I just left there. Why would I want to go back?”
“Because you’ll be safe. There are people looking for you, people who want to hurt you.”
Michael snapped, “I’ve been telling you that for months.”
“That’s true, you have.” The doctor laughed.
Michael took the pistol from his pocket. Dr. Richard’s eyes flicked down momentarily but returned immediately to his patient’s. “Michael, I’ve done a lot for you. I got you the job on the farm. You like that job, don’t you? You like to work with the cows, I know you do.”
The pistol was warm. It was comfortable in his hand. It was, he thought, quite fashionable. “I’ve been wondering if—wouldn’t this be strange—if this was the same gun I’d used.”
“To shoot Lincoln?”
“The very same gun. That would have a special meaning. That would make a lot of sense. Do you like the scent of blood, Dr. Richard? When do you think a soul makes the a-scent to heaven? Do you think souls linnnnger on earth awhile?”
Why is he stepping closer to me? Michael wondered. When he’s this close, it’s easier to read my mind.
“I wouldn’t know.”
Michael held the pistol close to his face, smelling the metal. “But how do you explain that it was just there for me? This gun. It was just there in the store. The store with the heads.”
A shudder ran through Michael Hrubek.
“What heads?”
“All the little heads. White and smooth. Beautiful little white heads.”
“Those skulls?” Dr. Richard nodded toward the sign pole.
Michael blinked but said nothing.
“So you shot Lincoln, did you, Michael?”
“Sure did. I was willing and abe-le.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about it? In any of our sessions?”
Michael’s stomach twisted with unbridled anxiety. “It was . . .”
“Why?”
Fear prickled at his neck. Between rapid breaths, Michael answered, “It was too terrible. I did a terrible thing. Terrible! He was such a great man. And look what I did. It was . . . It hurts! Don’t fucking ask me any more.”
“What,” Dr. Richard asked gently, “was so terrible about it? What was too terrible to tell me?”
“Many things. Too numerous to go into.”
“Tell me about one.”
“No.”
“Just pick one thing and tell me, Michael.”
“No.”
“Please. Now. Quick.”
“No!” What’s this fucker up to?
“Yes, Michael. Tell me.” For an instant the thin doctor’s eyes grew fierce and commanding. He ordered, “Now! Tell me!”
“The moon,” Michael blurted. “It . . .”
“What about the moon?”
“It rose bloody red. The moon is a sheet of blood. Eve is wrapped in the sheet.”
“Who’s Eve, Michael?”
“Nice try, fucker. Don’t expect me to say anything more.” Michael swallowed and looked around nervously.
“Where did the blood come from?”
“The moon. Ha, just kidding.”
“Where, Michael? Where did the blood come from? Where?!”
In a whisper: “From . . . their head.”
“Whose head, Michael?” Dr. Richard said, then shouted, “Tell me! Whose head?”
Michael began to speak then he smiled grimly and snarled, “Don’t try to trick me, fucker. His head. His, his, his head. Abraham Lincoln’s head. The sixteenth president of the United States’ head. The rail-splitter from Illinois’s head. That’s who I meant. I put a fucker of a bullet in his head.”
“Is that what you mean when you’d say ‘ahead,’ Michael? You were talking about somebody who got hurt in the head? Who? Who else got hurt, besides Lincoln?”
Michael blinked, and sizzled in panic. “Seward, you’re thinking of! Secretary of State. But he got stabbed! If you’re going to trick me, get your facts straight. He didn’t enjoy the evening much either, by the way.”
“But someone else got shot, didn’t they?”
“No!”
“Think, Michael. Think back. You can tell me.”
“No!” He pressed his hands over his ears. “No, no, no!”
“Where did all that blood come from? Blood everywhere!” Dr. Richard whispered. He leaned forward. “So much blood. Enough blood to cover the moon. Sheets and sheets of it.”
Enough blood to cover the sheet . . .
Michael cried, “There was so much of it.”
“Who else, Michael? Who else got shot? Please tell me.”
“I tell you, you telegraph the CIA and the Secret Service!”
“It’ll be our secret, Michael. I won’t tell another living soul.”
“Will you tell a dead soul?” he roared, throwing his head back and raving into the pouring rain. “They’re the ones we have to worry about! All the dead souls! That’s where the danger is!”
“Who, Michael? Tell me.”
“I . . .”
Oh, what’s that on your head? What’s that you’re wearing?>
Daddy’ll be home soon. Daddy’ll make her take it off.
Her beautiful head, all ruined. No, no!
“Michael, talk to me! Why are you crying?” Dr. Richard gripped his arm. “What are you thinking?”
He’s thinking: I came into the house. I’d been in the backyard doing many important things. I came into the house and there she was, and there were no masks on her eyes and her fingernails weren’t burning. There she was in the bedroom, wearing the same nightgown she’d worn for days and days and days. Very fashionable. The very thing to wear to go by the store to buy the store. The very thing to wear when you’re holding a gun, this very gun. John Wilkes Booth had given it to her.
“Michael! What’s the matter? Look at me! What are you thinking?”
He’s thinking: Booth must have been her lover and he gave her this gun—to protect her from dead Union soldiers. But she sold me out. She betrayed me!
“Did you say betrayal? I can’t hear you. You’re muttering. What are you saying, Michael?”
She held the gun in her hand. She was lying in bed in her nightgown. She sat up when I came into the doorway and she said . . . She said . . . She said, “Oh, you.”
Michael heard her words tonight, as he’d heard them a million times before—spoken not in surprise or contempt or supplication but out of infinite disappointment.
He’s thinking: And then she kissed her gold hair with the lips of the gun, and blood flew high as the moon and covered her head like a red glistening hat. It covered the sheets.
Oh, you . . . Oh, you . . .
Michael had stood in the doorway of her bedroom as he watched the blond hair grow dark under the crimson hat. Then he leaned down and touched her quivering hand awkwardly, the first physical contact between mother and son in years. Her unfocused eyes grew dark as eclipses, her forked fingers shuddered once and r
elaxed and then slowly lost whatever warmth they’d once held, though Michael let go long, long before her flesh grew cold.
“The beautiful head . . .”
“Whose, Michael?”
Then the memories vanished, as if a switch had been shut off. The tears stopped and Michael found himself gazing down at Dr. Richard, who was now only a foot or so from him.
“Who?” said the doctor desperately.
“Nice try,” Michael said, cheerfully sarcastic. “But I don’t think so.”
Dr. Richard closed his eyes for a moment. His lips tightened then he sighed. “Okay, Michael. Okay.” He fell silent for a moment then said, “How ’bout we drive back to the hospital together? I’ve got the BMW. We talked about going for a ride sometime. You said you’d like that. You said a BMW was one fucker of a car.”
“Fucker of a Nazi car,” Michael corrected.
“Let’s go, come on.”
“Oh, but I can’t, Dr. Richard. I’m going to pay a little visit to Lis-bone. Oh, that was bad, what happened there. I’ve got some evening up to do.”
“Why, Michael? Why?”
“She’s the Eve of betrayal,” he answered as if it were self-evident.
Dr. Richard’s face slowly relaxed. He looked away for a long moment. Then his face brightened—every bit of his face except his eyes, Michael noticed. “Hey, you’ve got a car too. I’m impressed, Michael.”
“It’s not like a Cadillac,” he sneered.
“Look over there,” the doctor said casually. “At that row of cars. All those Lincolns. Row after row of Lincolns. ”
“That’s interesting, Dr. Richard,” Michael said agreeably, studying not the cars but his doctor’s face. “But what’s more interesting is why you’ve been hiding your hand behind you all night, you fucker!”
“God, no!” The doctor’s left cross thudded harmlessly into the huge chest, as Michael ripped the syringe from the narrow fingers.
“What’ve we got here? This is shiny, oh, this is pretty. You’ve got a present for me? Oh, I know all about you! You came out all by yourself to stick me in the back and turn me over to the conspirators. So nobody’d know about me, nobody’d know about Dr. Richard’s little secret who ran away. Don’t tell the world until you’re ready. Right? Stick me in the back then stick me in a crash bag, you fucker?”
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