These two, together.

She can’t say exactly why she wants this reconciliation. But nonetheless Lis feels, inexplicably, that this is something she must try. As a student told her last week, after she caught him cheating, “Hey, you play the odds.”

They sling more gravel, as the rain falls heavily in thick dashes through the car’s white headlight beams. Then the stuffy announcer fades in to tell his listeners that coming up next will be Handel’s Water Music. He’s apparently oblivious to the joke, and moves on to other news, while the sisters look at each other for an instant, and laugh, then return to their task.

The Cadillac raced down the highway amid the sticky rush of thick tires on wet asphalt and the hum of the grand engine’s eight calm cylinders.

Michael Hrubek was still anxious from the run-in with the conspirators twenty minutes before. The fuckers! He’d escaped, yes, but his hands quivered violently and his heart pounded. His mind kept slipping off track, and he’d forget where he was and what he was doing. The echo of the gun’s loud crack, the memory of the feel as it jumped in his hand, were prominent in his thoughts.

“Cadillac,” he sang frantically, “hard tack, sic semper tyran-ak… Dr. Anne, won’t you come back?”

After the death of Dr. Anne Muller, Michael began to wander. He occasionally spent time in state hospitals but lived mostly on the street, surviving on cheese sandwiches from social workers and scrounging through Dumpsters outside restaurants. He was ravaged by anxiety and paranoia though the latter condition had a positive consequence: fearing drugs, all of which he believed to be poisonous, he remained uninfected by AIDS, hepatitis and other serious illnesses.

After several months in the Northeast he meandered south to Washington, D.C., intending to apologize for his past crimes to Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant or the current President, whomever he met first. He managed to get to the White House gate and knocked on the door of the guard’s station.

“It’s vital that I talk to you about this assassination business, John Guard. It’s vital!”

Picked up, bang, by the Secret Service.

“That was stupid,” he told himself glumly as he waited in an interrogation room somewhere in the Treasury Department. “Shouldn’t’ve done that.”

But he wasn’t tortured as he’d expected. He was simply asked a series of what he called mind-messing questions and released after two hours. He knew that during the session the agents had somehow planted a tracking device in his body and he threw himself in the reflecting pool of the Washington Monument to short out the battery. He felt better after this dip and moved into Arlington National Cemetery, where he lived for a month.

Finally he grew bored with the capital and wandered back north, looking for his father. After a month of sporadic searching Michael believed he found his family’s house in an old neighborhood of Philadelphia. He walked through the unlocked front door to see if anyone was home. Someone was, though it turned out to be not his father but the wife of a police detective.

Picked up, bang, for that one too.

Released the next day he hiked all the way to Gettysburg and lay in the middle of the battlefield, howling in shame for his role in ending the life of the greatest President the United States had ever known.

Picked up, bang.

Phillie, Newark, Princeton, New York, White Plains, Bridgeport, Hartford.

That was Michael’s life: hospitals and the street. He slept in boxes, he bathed in rivers when he bathed, and he wandered purposefully. Every day was an intense experience. He saw truths with a piercing clarity. There were truths everywhere! Raw and painful truths. In red cars zipping down the street, in the motion of a tugboat easing into a slip, in the part of a teenage boy’s hair, in a symmetrical display of watches in a jewelry-store window. He considered each of these revelations, always wondering if it might ease the burden of his anxiety and fear.

Did it say something to him? Did it offer solace?

Michael met people in his wanderings and they sometimes took to him. If he was clean and was wearing clothing recently given to him by a priest or social worker, someone might sit beside him on a park bench as he read a book. With a Penguin Classic in your hand, you were easily forgiven rumpled clothes and a short stubble of beard. Like any businessman out on a fine Sunday afternoon, Michael would cross his legs, revealing sockless ankles in brown loafers. He’d smile and nod and, avoiding the subjects of murder, rape and the Secret Service, talk only about what he saw in front of him: sparrows bathing in spring dust, trees, children playing flag football. He had conversations with men who might have been chief executives of huge corporations.

This nomadic life finally came to an unpleasant end in January of this year when he was arrested and charged with breaking into a store in a small, affluent town fifty miles south of Ridgeton. He’d shattered the window and torn apart a female mannequin. He was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist, who believed there were sexual overtones to the vandalism and declared him violently psychotic. Giving his name as Michael W. Booth he was involuntarily committed and sent to Cooperstown State Mental Hospital.

There, even before an intake diagnostic interview, Michael was shuttled into the Hard Ward.

Still in a restraint camisole he was deposited in a cold, dark room, where he remained for three hours before the door opened and a man entered. A man bigger even than Michael himself.

“Who’re you?” Michael challenged. “Are you John Wilkes Orderly? Do you work for the government? I’ve been to Washington, D.C., the capital of this great country. Who the hell do you-”

“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.