Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

A verdict of not guilty by reason of diminished capacity was entered. Under Section 403 of the Mental Health Law, Hrubek would be classified as dangerously insane and would be incarcerated indefinitely in a state hospital, to be reevaluated annually.

“I left the courthouse. Then-”

“And what about the incident,” Kohler asked, palms meeting as if he were clapping in slow motion, “with the chair?”

“Chair?”

“He jumped up on a chair or table.”

Ah, yes. That.

The courtroom began to empty. Suddenly a huge voice rose over the murmuring of the spectators and press. Michael Hrubek was shouting. He threw a bailiff to the ground and climbed onto his chair. The manacles clanked and he lifted his arms over his head. He began screaming. His eyes met Lis’s for a moment and she froze. Guards subdued Hrubek, and a bailiff hustled her out of the courtroom.

“What did he say?”

“Say?”

“When he was on the chair. Did he shout anything?”

“I think he was just howling. Like an animal.”

“The article said he shouted, ‘You’re the Eve of betrayal. ’ ”

“Could be.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No. I don’t.”

Kohler was shaking his head. “Michael had therapy sessions with me. Three times a week. During one he said, ‘Betrayal, betrayal. Oh, she’s courting disaster. She sat in that court, and now she’s courting disaster. All that betrayal. Eve’s the one.’ When I asked him what he meant, he became agitated. As if he’d let an important secret slip. He wouldn’t talk about it. He’s mentioned betrayal several times since then. You have any thoughts on what it might mean?”

“No. I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“And afterwards?”

“After the trial?” Lis sipped the strong coffee. “Well, I took a trip to hell.”

After the publicity faded and Hrubek was committed in Marsden, Lis resumed the life she’d led before the tragedy. At first her routine seemed largely unchanged-teaching summer school, spending Sundays at the country club with Owen, visiting friends, tending the garden. She was perhaps the last person to notice that her life was unraveling.

Occasionally she’d skip a shower. She’d forget the names of guests attending her own cocktail parties. She might happen to glance down as she walked through the corridors of the school and find that she was wearing mismatched shoes. She’d teach Dryden instead of the scheduled Pope and berate students for failing to read material she’d never assigned. Sometimes in lectures and in conversations she found herself gazing at embarrassed, perplexed faces and could only wonder what on earth she’d just uttered.

“It was as if I was sleepwalking.”

She withdrew into her greenhouse and mourned.

Owen, patient initially, grew tired of Lis’s torpor and absentmindedness and they began to fight. He spent more time on business trips. She stayed home more and more frequently, venturing outside only for her classes. Her sleep problems grew worse: it was not unusual for her to remain awake for twenty-four hours straight.

Adding to Lis’s difficulty was Dorothy, who stepped as brusquely into widowhood as she slipped into the front seat of her Mercedes SL. She was gaunt and pale and didn’t smile for two months. Yet she functioned, and functioned quite well. Owen several times held her out as an example of someone who took tragedy in stride. “Well, I’m not like her, Owen. I never have been. I’m sorry.”

When Dorothy sold her house and moved to the Jersey shore in July, it was not she but Lis who cried during their farewell lunch.

Lis’s life became school and her greenhouse, where she would snip plants and wander like a lost child over the slate path, her face occasionally damp as the leaves of a plantain lily.

But gradually she improved. She took Prozac for a time, which made her jaw quiver and fingers tremble and infused her dreams with spectacular effects. It also aggravated the insomnia. She switched to Pamelor, which was gentler.

And then, one day, she simply stopped taking the pills and hung up her housecoat.

“I can’t tell you what happened. Or when exactly. But I suddenly just knew it was time to get on with my life. And I did.”

“I’d had some clues that Michael’s delusion involves American history,” Kohler told her. “Particularly the Civil War… ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ -that’s what Booth shouted after he shot Lincoln.”

“ ‘Thus ever to tyrants.’ ” Lis the schoolteacher added, “It’s also the state motto of Virginia.”

“And the April 14 reference. The assassination.”

“What does Lincoln have to do with anything?”

Kohler shook his head. “Michael’s been very reluctant to talk to me about his delusions. Only hints, cryptic phrases. He didn’t trust me.”

“Even you, his doctor?”

“ Especially me, his doctor. That’s the nature of his illness. He’s paranoid. He’s always accusing me of trying to get information out of him for the FBI or Secret Service. He has a core delusion but I can’t get to the bottom of it. I suppose it centers on the Civil War, Lincoln ’s death, conspirators. Or some event he associates with the assassination. I don’t know.”

“Why’s his delusion so important?”

“Because it’s central to his illness. It explains to him why every day is so unbearably hard. A schizophrenic’s life,” Kohler lectured, “is a search for meaning.”

And whose isn’t? Lis wondered.

“It’s a very controversial matter right now,” the doctor said, adding that he himself was considered a bit of a renegade. She thought he was a little too smug with this characterization of himself. “Schizophrenia is a physical illness. Just like cancer or appendicitis. You have to treat it with drugs. No one disputes that. But I differ from most of my colleagues in thinking that you can also treat schizophrenic patients very effectively with psychotherapy.”

“I can’t really imagine Hrubek lying on a couch talking about his childhood.”

“Neither could Freud. He said schizophrenic patients shouldn’t be treated with psychoanalysis. Most psychiatrists agree. The current treatment is to get them on brain candy-that’s how the cynics among us refer to their medication-and force them to accept reality, teach them to order in restaurants and do their own laundry, then turn them loose. And it’s true-extended analysis, with the patient on the couch, that’s wrong for people like Michael. But certain types of psycho therapy work very well. Seriously ill patients can learn to function at a very high level.

“Most psychiatrists think that schizophrenic patients ramble incoherently, that their delusions are meaningless. I think that almost everything they say is meaning- full . The more we try to translate their words into our way of thinking, yes, the more pointless those words are. But if we try to grasp their metaphoric meaning, then doors open up. Take a Napoleon, okay? That’s the popular image of a schizophrenic. I won’t try to convince a patient that he isn’t Napoleon. And I wouldn’t just pat him on the head and say, “Bonjour,” when I pass him in the hall. I’d try to find out why he thinks he’s the emperor of France. Nine times out of ten there’s a reason. And once I know that, I can start to unlock doors. I’ve had remarkable results with patients-and some of them are a lot sicker than Michael.” He added bitterly, “I was just getting inside him, I was almost there… When this happened.”

“You make him sound innocent.”

“He is innocent. That’s the perfect word for him.”

She thought angrily, Oh, isn’t the good doctor used to people buying his bill of goods? The malleable patients who nod their damaged heads and shuffle off to obey. The sorrowful families pecking through his pompous words for comfort like birds for seed. Young, terrified interns and nurses. “How on earth,” she asked, “can you romanticize him? He’s just a set of muscles free to do whatever he wants. He’s a machine run amok.”