“How are you, Michael?” Kohler asked.

“They’re lis-ten-ing. Sometimes you have to keep your mind a complete blank. Have you ever done that? Do you know how hard it is? That’s the basis of Transcendental Meditation. You may know that as TM. Make your mind a complete blank, Doctor. Try it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“If I hit you with that chair your mind’d be a complete blank. But the downside is that you’d be a dead fucker.” Michael had then closed his mouth and said nothing more for several days.

Marsden was a state hospital, like Cooperstown, and offered only a few dismal activity rooms. But Kohler had finagled a special suite for patients in his program. It was not luxurious. The rooms were drafty and cold and the walls were painted an unsettling milky green. But at least those in the Milieu Suite-so named because Kohler’s goal was to ease the patients here gradually back into normal society-were separated from the hospital’s sicker patients and this special status alone gave them a sense of dignity. They also had learning toys and books and art supplies-even the dangerous and officially forbidden pencils. Art and expression were encouraged and the walls were graced by the graffiti of paintings, drawings and poems created by the patients.

In August Richard Kohler commenced a campaign to get Michael into the Milieu Suite. He chose the young man because he was smart, because he seemed to wish to improve, and because he had killed. To resocialize (one did not cure) a patient like Michael Hrubek would be the ultimate validation of Kohler’s delusion-therapy techniques. But more than precious DMH funding, more than professional prestige, Kohler saw a chance to help a man who suffered and who suffered terribly. Michael wasn’t like the many schizophrenic patients who were oblivious to their conditions. No, Michael was the most tragic of victims; he was just well enough to imagine what a normal life might be like and was tormented daily by the gap between who he was and who he so desperately wanted to be. Exactly the sort of patient Kohler wished most to work with.

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.