“Shut the fuck up.” John Orderly slammed him into the wall and then shoved him to the floor. “Don’t scream, don’t shout, don’t talk back. Just shut the fuck up and relax.”
Michael had shut the fuck up but he hadn’t relaxed. Nobody relaxed at Cooperstown. This was a place where patients simply gave up, surrendering to their madness. Michael spent much time sitting by himself, looking out windows, jiggling his legs with nervous energy, repeatedly muttering a single song-“Old Folks at Home.” The staff psychologist who spent about seven minutes a week with Michael never pursued this compulsion but if he had he’d have found that the old Stephen Foster song contained the line “Oh, darkie, how my heart is yearning,” which to Michael referred not to a slave but to darkness, specifically night. Night brought the hope of sleep, and sleep was the only time when he was at peace in this terrible place.
Cooperstown-where nurses would put two women patients in a room together with a single, oiled Coke bottle and watch from the door.
Cooperstown-where John Orderly would bend Michael over the tin washbasin and press into him again and again, the pain crying up through his ass into his jaw and face, the cold metal of the orderly’s keys bouncing on the patient’s thigh and matching the rhythm of his thrusts.
Cooperstown -where Michael slipped far, far from reality and came to believe with certainty that he was living in the time of the Civil War. In his month on the Hard Ward Michael had access to only one book. It was about reincarnation and after reading it a dozen times, he understood how he could in fact be John Wilkes Booth. He carried Booth’s soul around with him! The spirit had flown from the old wounded body and circled for a hundred years. It alighted upon the head of Michael’s mother just as the baby struggled out of her, leaving the red marks on her stomach that she had told him were his fault but not to worry about.
Yes, within him was the soul of Mr. John Wilkes Booth, a fair actor but a damn good killer.
One day in March of this year, John Orderly took Michael by the arm and pushed him into Suzie’s room. He slammed the door shut and aimed the video camera through the window.
They were alone, Michael and this twenty-four-year-old patient, on whose pretty face was only one blemish-a tiny indentation of scar in the middle of her forehead. Suzie looked at Michael carefully with her sunken eyes. She was someone whose only earthly power was in knowing what was expected of her. She observed that Michael was a man and immediately hiked her skirt over bulging thighs. Down went her panties and she rolled onto her hands and knees.
And Michael, knowing that John Orderly was just outside the door, also knew what to do-exactly the same. Pants down, on his hands and knees. Here they remained, butts bare to the world, while John Orderly fled down the hallway when a doctor unexpectedly happened by. The psychiatrist glanced inside the room and opened the door. He inquired what the patients were doing.
Michael answered, “Waiting for John Orderly. I’m ready for him and so is she. Make no mistake. Like all men of medicine, John Orderly’s got a very big cock.”
“Oh, my God.”
The investigation resulted in the dismissal of five orderlies, two nurses and two doctors from Cooperstown. Michael, however, never learned John Orderly’s fate because as one of the most victimized patients he was immediately transferred out of the Hard Ward into the voluntary-commitment section of the hospital. “Due to stabilization of his condition,” the report said. “Prognosis for improvement: fair to good.” In fact Michael was far sicker than when he’d been admitted but the administrators wanted to isolate him from the questioning reporters and state mental-health examiners who descended on the hospital to investigate what one newspaper dubbed “Psycho Ward Atrocities.”
Reforms were instituted, the reporters went elsewhere for their stories, and Cooperstown fell from the public eye-just as Michael himself was largely forgotten within the halls of the hospital.
A month after the scandal he was still a resident of the Cooperstown Soft Ward. One weekend he found himself unusually agitated. On Saturday evening the anxiety increased to massive proportions and he began to feel the walls of his room closing in on him. Breathing grew difficult. He suspected the Secret Service was behind this; agents frequently bombarded him with beams that electrified his nerves.
Michael didn’t know that his anxiety was due not to the federal government but to something much simpler: his medication instructions had been misplaced and he’d received no Haldol for four days.
Finally in desperation he decided to find the one person in his recent memory who might help him. He had, he recalled, accused Dr. Anne of being a conspirator and had even announced on hundreds of occasions that he was happy she was dead. He decided that the only way to find relief was to retract his cruel pronouncements and apologize to her. He spent the night plotting his escape from Cooperstown, a plan that involved diversionary fires and costumes and disguises. The elaborate scheme proved unnecessary, however, because on Sunday morning he simply dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and walked out the front gate of the hospital, right past a guard unaware that he was a Hard Ward patient in the Soft Ward wing.
Michael had no idea exactly where Dr. Anne might be. But he knew Trevor Hill was in the southern part of the state and that was the direction in which he started to jog that spring morning. Soon he became lost in a tangle of country roads and the more lost he became, the greater was his anxiety. Panic crawled over his skin like hives. At times he took to sprinting, as if fear were an animal snapping at his heels. Other times he hid in bushes until he felt unseen pursuers pass him by. Once, he summoned up his courage and climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck, on which he rode for an hour, hiding under the canvas tarps, until the driver stopped at a roadside diner. Noticing that there were four trucks parked in the lot and fearing this very unlucky number, Michael leapt off and escaped down a nearby country lane.
Around noon he found himself in the middle of a large parking lot. He paused, caught his breath and walked through the lot toward a row of trees, nauseous with anxiety. He ran through the lot and disappeared into the bushes just beyond the large wooden sign. He glanced at the words that were carved into it as if by a huge wood-burning iron.
Welcome to Indian Leap State Park
Michael Hrubek thought of that day now, six months later, as he steered his black Cadillac over the crest of a hill on Route 236. He saw before him a long smooth straightaway sailing into a distance filled with flashes of lightning and the soft glow of lights that perhaps were those of Ridgeton. He cringed as rain clattered on the roof and windshield.
“Betrayal,” he muttered. Then he repeated the word, bellowing. He was scalded with anxiety. “Eve of betrayal! Fuckers!”
In an instant his pulse rate leapt to 175 and sweat sprung from his pores. His teeth clattered like galloping hooves on concrete. His mind snapped shut. He forgot GET TO, he forgot Lis-bone, he forgot Eve, the conspirators and Dr. Anne and Dr. Richard… He forgot everything but the icy clutch of fear.
His hands quavered on the steering wheel. He gazed at the Cadillac’s hood with shock-as if he’d suddenly awakened and found himself riding a rampaging bull.
I’ll fight this, he thought. God, please help me fight this! He lowered his head and chewed on his inner cheek. He tasted blood. I will fight it!
And for a very brief moment he did.
For a very brief moment he gripped the ivory wheel firmly and forced the car back into the right lane of the highway.
For this brief moment Michael Hrubek was not a maladroit lunatic, a host holding an ancient killer’s soul. He was not driven by unbearable guilt. Abraham Lincoln was merely a great, sad figure from history whose face graced copper pennies, and Michael himself was just a big, strong, young man filled with much promise, driving a gaudy old car down a country road, scared to death, yes, but more or less in charge of himself.