The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  Next there was a shuffling back and forth on the tile floor, and Pepper remembered Coffee’s routine from the night before. He imagined Coffee was getting up the courage to ask Pepper for the coins in his pocket. Maybe he’d only been bringing the food so he could ask for even more money. No kindness without a cost.

  Finally a shadow moved across Pepper’s top sheet.

  He smelled an unclean body. Something sour. Like the ammonia-haunted corner of a subway platform that has never been truly cleaned.

  Pepper kept his back to the room. Hadn’t he and Coffee made a sort of truce? Talking, eating together, sharing soda and oranges—didn’t that earn Pepper a night without panhandling? The more Pepper thought this way the angrier he felt. The more Pepper anticipated that tap he was about to feel against his shoulder, the more he wanted to finish the fight they’d begun in the phone alcove.

  But then someone just leaned close to Pepper’s ear and breathed into it. Fuck! Pepper’s ear felt so hot that he instinctively pulled the covers up to hide his face. But the breathing stayed steady on the other side. Still right by Pepper’s ear. So hot it soaked the fabric, and the covers turned damp at the spot. The breath felt so hot that it actually began to burn.

  Pepper pulled the covers back down now, trying to inch away, toward the windows, but able to move only so quickly in his addled state. And when the covers came down from his head, he felt the touch of rough hair against his neck. Rough like gnarled wool, matted. And the burning breath kept coming as though pumped from a bellows, until Pepper’s skin felt like it was puckering.

  Pepper opened his mouth to call out to a nurse or an orderly—even Scotch Tape—anyone who might come in here and separate the two of them. But when Pepper opened his mouth he couldn’t speak. The only sound coming out of Pepper was a wet cough, a choking sound.

  Because someone had three fingers in Pepper’s mouth.

  And it wasn’t Coffee.

  The fingers reached all the way to the back of Pepper’s tongue, one nail jabbing his uvula.

  Pepper was so shocked, so disgusted, working so hard to keep from vomiting that he couldn’t bring his teeth down on those fingers hard enough. He was too dazed.

  The thing pulled Pepper’s head back, away from the windows, with enough force to move the rest of Pepper’s body. Until the two finally made eye contact.

  The eyes Pepper met were white and empty. They had no pupils. Just the white meat of the eye, faint red veins running just below the surface like the chicken wire running through the shatterproof windows.

  Was this person having a seizure?

  Once Pepper was on his back, the fingers drew out of his mouth, the nails raking his tongue. His jaw ached from being yanked. In the dark, Pepper couldn’t see much more than those white eyes. Matted hair dangled down across his attacker’s face. The hair scratched at Pepper’s nose and lips. It felt like fur.

  Pepper was looking up into a face he couldn’t understand.

  The hair against his skin was fur, after all. And resting in that thick pelt he now saw a wide, wet nose, black and quivering.

  Was this a hallucination? Something brought on by the pills? Like Ebenezer Scrooge’s old bit of undigested beef? An apparition? This had to be an error. This was only his roommate, Coffee, standing over him. Coffee, who had woken him up. Coffee, who wanted a quarter. Pepper was just too tired, too drugged out, too confused to see clearly. He had to slow down, breathe in, he was just caught somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. That place where monsters really exist.

  Pepper looked at his roommate’s bed.

  There was Coffee, wide-eyed and shivering.

  Watching.

  The figure above Pepper’s bed leaned closer now. Its hot breath burned the tip of Pepper’s nose like direct sunlight. And its own wet, black nose wriggled as it sniffed him.

  Stop this, he thought. Just leave me be.

  But Pepper wasn’t addressing the thing standing over his bed. Because he knew it couldn’t really be there. He was pleading with his own pill-addled mind.

  Then the door to their room rattled and shook. Pepper’s eyes blinked and fluttered. The thing by his bed moved away so quickly, it seemed to fly.

  “Who locked this?” a nurse’s voice called out.

  She unlocked the door and snapped on the overhead light. It was the night nurse, who’d given him his nighttime dose earlier, along with an orderly.

  “You two stop all that screaming!” the orderly shouted, stomping into the room.

  Had they been screaming? Both of them?

  The nurse shook two white plastic cups, one in each hand. The tranquilizers inside rattled like backgammon dice.

  Coffee and Pepper sat straight up in bed.

  Pepper scanned the room, he even peeked under his bed frame. The animal was gone. The only thing different about the room was a ceiling panel on the floor by Pepper’s dresser.

  “Now this is just sad,” the orderly said. He picked the panel up. “This place is just coming apart.”

  The orderly had to leave the room and return with a folding chair so he could slide the panel back into place.

  Now the nurse shook the little white cups again. “Y’all know what’s coming.”

  Please knock us out! That’s what they were both thinking. Right then Pepper only wanted to disconnect. He didn’t want to see what he’d just seen. If he’d seen it. Felt it. Bad dream. Bad dream. (Shared dream?) Bad dream. Better to be knocked out than to lie awake till dawn.

  6

  PEPPER WOKE UP thinking of butts.

  And nothing else.

  Ladies’ butts.

  Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman’s back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts—the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman’s thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts.

  In other words, Pepper woke up horny.

  Let’s take a moment to be impressed. Three doses of Haldol and lithium topped off with a Vicodin nightcap and the urge still arose, like a flower growing through concrete. And he sure hadn’t been staring at any butts while in here. He just hadn’t had the itch. All those butts, and more, were stored in Pepper’s memory chip. It was as if his mind had known the surest way to rouse him from the pit of sedation. Asses would work.

  Pepper’s mind woke him up. He found himself in his bed yet again. No butts in sight.

  Now Pepper, get your big ass out of bed.

  Outside his windows Pepper heard the muted rumbles of traffic moving down Union Turnpike. Ambulances whining as they sped toward the hospital. Car horns composing a fugue of frustration. From where the sun sat he guessed it was midday. He’d probably slept through breakfast.

  In fact, it was four thirty on Saturday afternoon.

  Coffee’s bed sat empty. The sheets tussled but the body gone. The door to the room was open. Pepper walked to the corner where the ceiling panel had fallen down. He stood under it but couldn’t make himself raise his hand and touch. It felt like standing under a cold shower, being right there. Pepper’s big body tensed so hard he shivered. He half-expected someone, something, to come crashing down on him. But that didn’t happen. So finally he backed out of the room, keeping an eye on that ceiling tile until he’d left.

  He stepped into the hallway gingerly. Would one of the staff members appear, tackle him, and hold his mouth open? Why hadn’t Miss Chris or Scotch Tape or whoever was on duty done that to him this morning like they
did the day before? Maybe they preferred to let a sleeping patient lie.

  Northwest 2 was empty. Quiet. Yes, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling made noise, the low drone of an electric insect. But other than that? Not much. Pepper didn’t even hear his own footfall. He had only his Smartwool socks on his feet. He went back for his boots.

  He still wore the clothes he’d had on when the cops brought him in. Now the fabric looked a bit ragged, more wrinkled than an old man’s balls.

  He reached the nurses’ station and found just one orderly back there, charting.

  The orderly looked up from his seat, over the tall shelf of the nurses’ station, and nodded at Pepper. A thick folder of paperwork sat in front of him. The orderly had stopped writing to flex his aching fingers. Like the other staff members, he wore his keys on a short, red plastic cord around his wrist. When the orderly looked up at Pepper again and stretched his aching hand this time, his keys tinkled.

  “Last night …” Pepper said, but he couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t want to say it out loud.

  The baby-faced orderly kept watching Pepper, but his hand dropped back on the papers and the fingers searched blindly for the pen, working nearly autonomously.

  “You need something?” the orderly asked.

  How old was this guy? Twenty? And in this place he had almost total authority over Pepper, a forty-two-year-old man.

  “Where is everyone?” Pepper asked.

  The orderly jerked his head once, behind him, toward Northwest 5, the television lounge.

  “It’s visiting hours.”

  Finally the kid looked down and found his pen. He snatched it, then looked up and frowned, clearly unhappy to find Pepper still standing there.

  Now the orderly leaned over and lifted a clipboard.

  “You had your lunchtime meds?” He scanned the list but wasn’t sure of this patient’s name.

  Pepper saw an opportunity. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I had those. Definitely.”

  “What’s your name again?” the orderly asked, torn between the clipboard and the charting.

  “Thanks!” Pepper shouted as he walked to Northwest 5, and the orderly just set the clipboard back down with a shrug. He clicked his pen and returned to work.

  Even from halfway down Northwest 5 the lounge looked like it was jumping. Every table was occupied, handfuls of folks were forced to stand. The natural afternoon light flushed against every face. And most of the people in there weren’t even looking up at the television, though the television stayed on.

  Pepper didn’t make it all the way to the lounge. Part of the problem was that he saw Dorry in there, at a table with a slightly tired-looking woman in her forties, and two enthusiastic kids under ten. The kids were in their chairs, on their knees, holding playing cards close to their faces. Dorry, too, though she kept dropping her hand theatrically and one or the other child would shout for Grandma to be careful! The woman in her forties had a hand of cards, too, but hers were facedown on the table. She looked out the window and seemed to wish she was anywhere else.

  And Coffee sat at another table with a pudgy man in a tight white button-down shirt and wide tie. His suit jacket hung on the back of his chair. He and Coffee were hunched over documents spread out on the table. Filling the entire table. Reams of data of some kind. And the man in the shirt and tie looked exasperated. He’d take one form and hold it up and read it, then place it facedown on a growing pile. Then lift another, read through, shake his head, and place it facedown with the others. Meanwhile, Coffee merely slid yet another sheet of paper toward the man. Pepper wasn’t sure which of them he should feel sorry for.

  There were meetings of various kinds at every table. Some folks had even brought in food. Chinese, or pizza from Sal’s, bottles of soda or juice, chips or cookies. Like they were having picnics on the psychiatric unit.

  How could this place be so active, so lively, when last night he saw …?

  Pepper chose to focus on one table with three people sitting around it. An older woman, in her fifties, a heavyset man in his thirties, and a teenage girl who looked to be about sixteen. He couldn’t figure out which of them was the patient. Why did that bother him just then? It was like he suddenly wanted to know. Like he should just be able to tell. He assumed it was the guy in his thirties but, if he was being honest, that was only because the man was kind of chunky. He assumed the woman in her fifties was the mother, but mostly because she kept handing out egg rolls and cartons of Chinese noodles to the other two. She pulled a board game from a shopping bag. Pepper realized that these “clues” also proved nothing. Only the teenager seemed the unlikely choice. She wore baby-blue Nikes and a matching light blue knit cap pulled over her head. The cap had two small light blue pom-poms that dangled from the top. Pepper imagined some celebrity, one he couldn’t name, had worn much the same outfit recently. The kid just looked so put together in that high-school high-fashion kind of way, where a fifteen-year-old tries to look like a twenty-year-old and ends up making herself seem like she’s twelve. He wished he could excuse her from this room, so she could just go out and enjoy the prickly fruits of childhood. At least until the next time she and her mother visited the chubby guy.

  But this sleuthing didn’t really matter. From his place at the lip of the television lounge, Pepper could be sure of only one thing: No one was there to see him. He pitied himself.

  But instead of indulging this emotion too long, Pepper went back to the pay phones. If most of the patients were here in the lounge, then maybe, finally, the pay phones would be free. He could make that call. The person he most hoped would visit didn’t even know where the cops had taken him. Time to call her.

  “Mari.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “You can’t guess?”

  “There’s a number but the caller ID just says ‘New York City.’ ”

  “It’s your favorite neighbor.”

  “Gloria?”

  “That’s funny. It’s Pepper.”

  She paused.

  “Hi, Pepper.”

  “You sound as tired as I feel.”

  She paused again.

  “Were you worried about me?”

  “I was worried about what you did to Griff.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s okay. I guess. I don’t talk to him if I don’t have to, but since the police haven’t come here and arrested me for conspiracy, I figure he’s not dead.”

  “You want to know where I am?”

  “Why did you have to do that, Pepper?”

  “What? You told me he was threatening you, so I figured you wanted some help.”

  “I was just talking about it with you, Pepper. You know? I thought you were being my friend. I wasn’t asking you to fix anything.”

  “You don’t tell a gentleman about a problem and expect him not to help.”

  “So I guess it’s my fault, right? You went to my job.”

  “His job.”

  “It’s the same place! God! You know how it looks now? Like I hired a man to come to my job and beat up my ex-husband. What does that say about me? I teach seventh-grade Spanish!”

  “I went to Van Wyck to tell him to keep his distance. That’s all.”

  “I can handle myself! I’ll call the cops if he really tries to hurt me. But that’s my business anyway. I was just talking! But now you make me look like … My students saw you hitting him in the parking lot. How do you think they’re going to look at me at school on Monday?”

  “Why would they know it has anything to do with you?”

  “Teenagers know. I’m telling you. I’m trying to act like a grown-up and you make me look like a fool. How am I supposed to teach them how to act if I can’t keep my own life in order? This is my job, Pepper. It’s like you’re trying to get me fired.”

  “I meant to do something good. For you.”

  “Look, Pepper. I don’t know how else to say this. I’m sorry to say this. But it’s not going to happen like th
at. Between you and me. I’m not trying to be mean, but you have to hear me.”

  “Do you know where I am now? Your ex-husband … who the hell is named Griff anyway? Your ex-husband was the one who tried to get tough with me when I asked him nicely to stop threatening the mother of his child! He threatened to sue me. For menacing. Is that a crime? Okay, I admit, I lost my temper at that point. I smacked him one. So then we both got into it. Then three guys drive up in a Dodge Charger and I’m supposed to know they’re cops? In a Dodge Charger? I assumed they were meatheads. But they were fucking cops. Patrolling a school zone. Now I’m in a hospital behind this shit. And last night I was attacked! I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, so I’m sorry but I called thinking that if anyone might give me a little understanding it would be the woman I was trying to look out for!”

  “I’m sorry about all that, Pepper. I really am. But I don’t know what you want me to do. You wanted to help me, but you never asked me what kind of help I needed. All I wanted was to talk about it. It was nice to do that with you down in the laundry room all those times. You were already helping. I don’t think that mess with Griff was about me at all. It was about you.”

  “Marisol.”

  “You have a brother, right? Your family is who you should be calling if you’re in a hospital.”

  “You mean Ralph? I haven’t spoken to him in six years. Maybe more.”

  “But he’s your brother.”

  “It’s not going to happen, Mari. I’m not calling him. And he’d probably hang up as soon as he heard it was me.”

  Mari sighed into the phone. Pepper was going to make even coming to his aid into a hassle. She said, “Hold on and I’ll find a pen.…”

  Well that was depressing.

  But also just confusing. How could she and Pepper see the same actions so differently? It made him wonder if the cops, or that dick-head Griff, had spoken to Mari and explained the fight in a way that made him seem as terrible as possible. Speaking to her about it forced him to see the same afternoon from a new angle. A big guy stomps into a parking lot and beats up a teacher. Then he beats up three cops. Good God. He’d begun seeing this version of himself—a thug, a marauder, a monster—when Mari mentioned calling his brother, when she asked him to hold on while she found a pen.