The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  But instead, Steve Sands only said, “That was definitely a moment of 2008.”

  A blander pronouncement has rarely been made, and yet Steve Sands sighed deeply, nodded profoundly, as if he’d just signed the Declaration of Independence.

  But back in the lounge, Dorry didn’t have to worry about holding on to a job, or advertisers. She pointed at the screen as Steve Sands moved on to another “moment of 2008.”

  Dorry said, “You know what that woman sounds like?”

  Mr. Mack turned in his chair and sneered. “I know exactly what she sounds like.”

  To this, Dorry merely nodded and grinned without commitment. Satisfied that he’d made his point, Mr. Mack looked back at the screen.

  Then Dorry turned to Pepper and Coffee. She spoke in a quieter voice.

  “That woman just sounds scared.”

  Mr. Mack’s half hour passed and the silent pair—Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth—came in to wordlessly request the remote. They switched to QVC and watched, rapt, as a vaguely familiar celebrity from the eighties talked up a line of skin products. Dorry, Pepper, Coffee, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly exited the lounge posthaste.

  Coffee moved fastest because Pepper had handed over his credit card. An act of faith, he called it. (Mr. Mack, when he’d seen Pepper do it, called it “being an ass.”)

  Halfway down Northwest 5, Scotch Tape appeared, grinning like a villain. He pointed at Pepper. “You’ve got a curfew now, my man. In your room after dinner. Doctor’s orders.”

  Pepper said, “But that other orderly wouldn’t even give me dinner. You know that. You told him not to.”

  Scotch Tape said, “Don’t make accusations like that unless you have proof.”

  Dorry trailed behind Pepper and Scotch Tape, all the way to the nurses’ station. As she broke for the women’s hall, Dorry called out to Pepper, “Solidarity!”

  “Bitch, please,” Scotch Tape muttered.

  When Pepper returned to his room, he found that his mattress had been stripped of its sheets and his pillow was missing. A bare mattress lay on the bed frame. And the towel he’d set down on the floor, to catch the leak from the ceiling, had been taken away. In its place someone had stacked his slacks and socks. They were soaked orange.

  Pepper had to admit these guys were good. He’d asserted his rights and they’d attacked his quality of living. How many more small cuts like this before he’d just give up? This was a method of control in many arenas. The indignities of an insurance claim come to mind.

  Pepper wasn’t sure what he should do about the clothes. The drip from the ceiling seemed to have stopped. Now there was just a dried orange blob on the ceiling tile, like a dollop of apricot jam. But the slacks and socks were still wet. He’d be wearing these pajamas for a lot longer.

  Scotch Tape said, “I told you how to get out of this place, but you just couldn’t be cool.” He seemed disappointed in Pepper.

  Pepper didn’t feel the need to respond. Anything he said would probably only count against him sometime later. Right now he only wanted to show Scotch Tape that these little degradations hadn’t bothered him. He couldn’t think of a better way to assert his own strength. So he went to his bed where it now rested, against the wall with the painted-over door. He got in bed (on the bed, since there were no sheets). He reached over and pulled his book from the dresser. He held it up as a barrier between him and Scotch Tape.

  Jaws.

  Scotch Tape said, “Hope it don’t get too cold in here tonight!” Then walked back down the hall.

  Pepper stayed focused on the novel. He read in a whisper, a habit since he was little and trying to drown out the sounds of road traffic coming from Kissena Boulevard.

  “A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibration and signaled the brain. The fish turned toward shore.”

  Pepper lost time. As he continued reading, he lost even more. The late evening passed and, except for getting up to use the bathroom twice, he forgot himself. He wasn’t transported from New Hyde to the beaches of Amity, he didn’t feel the New England sun on his skin or the salty breeze on his tongue, but he was reminded of the life beyond this bare bed, and distracted from all the hard questions he’d face once he put the book down. The reading became a muscle relaxant, a sedative, a salve, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  Which is why Pepper wasn’t stressed when Coffee got press-ganged into the room. Terry practically tossed Coffee through the open doorway. Coffee stumbled into the room, and Pepper, at ease from the enjoyable reading, looked up casually. Coffee’s blue binder flapped into the room next. Then Terry slammed the door shut. A second after that, the door was locked.

  Even this didn’t cause Pepper much alarm. He grinned at Coffee conspiratorially and said, “We’re the bad boys of this unit!”

  Coffee remained serious. He pointed at the door and said, “Listen.”

  Terry’s sneakers squeaked as he padded down Northwest 2. Pepper heard the clank of another door being locked. And another. Again, and again. Every room in the men’s hall. The whole unit going on lockdown.

  Pepper sat up. “Did everybody but you refuse their meds?”

  Pepper’s shoulders tightened as he imagined the glory of such a thing. It had taken a few hours, but they had followed his example!

  Coffee rolled his eyes. “You’re not Jesus Christ. You do know that, right?”

  Pepper frowned and set the book down, got up from the bed and crept to the door. Since there was no window to look through, he pressed his ear to the metal. “So what is it, then?”

  Coffee came to Pepper’s side. “The EMTs are here.”

  “Someone’s hurt?” Pepper asked.

  “Someone’s dead,” Coffee said.

  16

  PEPPER AND COFFEE checked the door when they woke at dawn. Still locked. They had to lie down again, try to force themselves to sleep. Coffee managed, but Pepper couldn’t. He showered and returned to bed where he read a little more of Jaws. Now the book was about a marriage, and adultery. Of course, the shark still lived out in the waters off Amity, but the police chief, Martin Brody, had another predator to watch out for. This one walked onshore. The oceanographer Brody brought in to investigate the great white must’ve had his own thin canals of mucus and nerve endings, because he could sense that Mrs. Brody, the chief’s wife, was drifting alone in the sea of her marriage. And that dude smelled blood!

  The lock sounded and Pepper and Coffee got up. Pepper peeked outside. Josephine continued down Northwest 2, unlocking all the other doors. Pepper and Coffee walked out of their room, moved down the hall, and found a line at the nurses’ station, like any other morning.

  The women had been let out first. There were still five waiting to get their meds. Pepper and Coffee joined the queue without thinking. They were like conscientious objectors who’d mistakenly wandered onto the front line. Sneaking off again, unnoticed, hardly seemed possible in a room that size. Pepper stepped one foot out of the line, and a staff member at the nurses’ station cut her eyes at him. He stepped back in. He didn’t see how he’d have the nerve to refuse his meds this morning if he couldn’t even muster the courage to walk away.

  Loochie stood two places ahead. She’d looked back at him as he’d put one foot out and pulled it back again. Her eyes were red, the pouches under them so dark they looked black. The pom-poms on her blue knit cap drooped down to her ears. The kid looked wrecked. Not beat up, worn out. She let the woman between them go ahead so she and Pepper could talk.

  Pepper said, “I heard someone got hurt.”

  Loochie said, “Sam.”

  Pepper looked down Northwest 1, toward the conference room where they’d had Book Group the afternoon before. Almost as if he were watching Sam now, walking out of that room the day before, distraug
ht because of Sammy’s disappearance.

  Loochie pointed toward the nurses’ station, the staff members. “They said she killed herself.”

  “They told you that?” Coffee asked.

  Loochie shook her head. “I heard them say it. My room was right next to hers.”

  “But did anybody see her do it?” Pepper asked.

  Loochie shrugged. “With Sammy gone, Sam had the room alone.”

  Coffee and Pepper and Loochie took a step forward on the line together.

  Loochie said, “The Chinese lady saw Sam’s body before they took her out. Right before they put us on lockdown.”

  “What Chinese lady?”

  Loochie sniffed at Pepper, ignoring his question. She looked at her hands and pooched out her lips. Forget about crying, the kid looked like she was going to melt.

  Loochie said, “Sam took Sammy’s bedsheet and drowned herself with it.”

  “Hung herself,” Pepper corrected. “That what you mean?”

  Loochie clenched her hands. “If I meant ‘hang’ I would have said ‘hang.’ The Chinese lady said Sam got the sheet down her throat. She swallowed it.”

  Coffee and Pepper couldn’t respond. They only breathed quietly, focused on the feeling of air in their tracheas. Each one imagining the feeling of a bedsheet clogging the pathway.

  Loochie said, “The Chinese lady said one of the nurses pulled the sheet out of Sam’s throat and the end of it was bright yellow. It was yellow because it was down in Sam’s stomach.”

  “Who kills themselves like that?” Pepper said.

  Coffee huffed. “Nobody does.”

  Then the trio reached the nurses’ station. The nurse read off Loochie’s name—Lucretia Gardner—it was the first time Pepper had ever heard it. He felt compelled to share his real name with her, right then, to be fair. But the nurse handed over Loochie’s meds and moved on to Pepper quickly, and that feeling passed. The orderly placed Pepper’s little white cup on the desktop like a bartender setting down a shot. Before the nurse could read his name out, Pepper placed his hands behind his back and said, “I refuse.”

  The orderly laughed. “You refuse? You sound real dumb right now.”

  Then Pepper looked directly at the orderly and said, “I’m not taking that shit.” He gestured at the white cup with his chin. “Smart enough?”

  These two took the news with a lot less shock than the staff from the night before. The nurse just wrote something on the clipboard and began to say Coffee’s name.

  But before she could finish, Coffee said, “I refuse.”

  When they reached the lounge, most of the tables were full. Pepper hadn’t seen a turnout like this, outside of visitors’ hours, in all his weeks on Northwest. There were some patients who woke up only long enough to snack on their morning pills, then slept through the breakfast hours; others who snuck their food back to their rooms and ate alone, or with their roommates. (Sam and Sammy had been like that.) And others who were usually up all night and only went to bed when dawn light crept through the grand windows of the television lounge.

  But this morning, all the patients were up and out of their rooms. Maybe it was a reaction to having been locked in overnight. Maybe none of them wanted to feel isolated, all by themselves, alone in their rooms. Whatever the reason, the lounge stayed packed.

  “That was real stupid,” Loochie said as they moved toward the orderly handing out breakfast trays.

  Before they reached him, his cell phone rang.

  Pepper said, “They can’t make you take those pills. If you say no, they have to respect that.”

  Loochie snorted. “Think you have to tell me? I’ve been on psych units since I was thirteen. I know the laws.”

  Pepper stopped short and reached out for Loochie’s arm. “You’ve been at Northwest for six years?”

  Loochie laughed with genuine glee. “Not here. They have juvenile psychiatric units, and adult ones. I was in the juvenile ones, on and off, since I was—”

  Pepper cut her off. “Thirteen.”

  He looked at Coffee, who seemed just as stunned. Both men were struck by the idea of being in a place like this—whether juvenile or adult—since that age. How could anyone stand it? Right then, Loochie looked like some battle-hardened centurion to both men.

  But Loochie didn’t linger in their surprise. She knew what usually came soon after. Pity. And she sure wasn’t interested in something like that. Especially not from Pepper and Coffee; she would’ve called them Abbott and Costello, but she was decades too young for a reference like that.

  “You accept the pills so they don’t punish you,” Loochie said. “Simple.”

  They reached the orderly and he gave Loochie her breakfast. The other two he waved off and they knew why.

  Pepper said, “But then you end up taking the medicine and getting all …” Pepper rolled his eyes back in his head and let his mouth go slack.

  Loochie slipped her tongue into the pouch of her cheek and dug out all three of her meds, still intact. She had her back to the orderly so he wouldn’t see this. Then she slipped the pills back into the side of her mouth with an expert’s ease.

  She said, “You think I could’ve brought you down so hard if I took all the pills they give me? I skip at least one round a day.”

  Pepper muttered, “I didn’t go down that bad.”

  Loochie ignored him, still focused on the trick of tucking away her pills. “Didn’t you ever hide your vegetables as a kid?”

  Pepper shook his head, almost proudly. “My parents never made me eat them.”

  “The all-American diet,” Coffee said disdainfully.

  Only one table had three seats free. It was the table closest to the garbage bin. Also, Dorry sat in the fourth chair. She caught Pepper’s eye, but this time she didn’t have to wave him over. Pepper came to her right away. Coffee and Loochie in tow.

  When they sat, Dorry handed out portions from her tray. The apple for Coffee, the dry toast for Pepper. She liked giving it out when she wasn’t being manipulated. Loochie looked down at her own tray and, not to be outdone, gave her dry toast to Pepper. Coffee got her small box of Froot Loops. The four of them broke bread.

  Dorry took off her glasses and pulled at the right sleeve of her nightdress. She buffed the lenses while they watched her. When she put them back on, the damn things looked even cloudier than before.

  “You may be wondering why I summoned you all here tonight,” Dorry said.

  Loochie said, “It’s morning.”

  “And you didn’t summon us. We showed up,” Pepper said.

  Dorry raised one hand, the pointer finger standing straight. “I’m going for a little atmosphere here.”

  Coffee, less prone to bursting bubbles, said, “We’re here to talk about Sam. And Sammy.”

  Dorry closed her eyes for a moment. “And about Marcus, and Bernadette, and Gustavo, and on and on.”

  They sat quietly, even as the rest of the lounge filled with conversation.

  “We’re here to talk about what’s to be done. And the best way to do it,” Dorry said.

  Loochie bit into her apple, and to the other three, the crunch sounded louder than the television nearby.

  Dorry said, “Making phone calls hasn’t brought in the cavalry.” She looked at Coffee and tilted her head slightly. “I’m sorry, Coffee, that’s no reflection on you.”

  Coffee shook his head. “I just haven’t reached him yet. But thanks to Pepper I’ve been able to make a lot more calls. And I finally got the number for the White House switchboard.”

  Pepper and Dorry and Loochie watched Coffee quietly. He leaned forward in his seat; he grinned at them with such enthusiasm that no one wanted to be snide.

  Pepper said, “What if we made a plan for what we might do just in case the Big Boss is … delayed in helping us? Just to have a backup.”

  Coffee nodded. “I guess that would be smart.”

  Dorry said, “So what’s the first big problem we face?”
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br />   “The Devil is trying to kill us,” Loochie said.

  “That’s our final problem,” Dorry said. “We can’t face that man until we’re ready.”

  Pepper opened his mouth and closed it. Opened and closed it. On the third try he actually produced sound, words. “We all have to get off these medications. That’s first. You can’t fight if you can’t think straight.”

  Loochie said, “If we did that I might stop …” She didn’t finish the sentence, but one hand rose and touched the side of her knit cap.

  “… I might stop doing harm to myself,” she finished.

  Dorry rapped the tabletop, right in front of Coffee. “And you might do better with the people you reach if you sounded a little more …”

  Coffee stiffened. “I’m always polite and direct.”

  Loochie said, “Really? ’Cause a lot of the times it sounds like you’re just yelling into those phones. Maybe you think you’re really saying something, but a lot of times it just sounds like noise.”

  Dorry lowered her eyes. “I’d have to agree.”

  Coffee brought one hand to his throat. “Really? That’s what I sound like?” He looked to Pepper but what could Pepper say? He hadn’t actually heard any of Coffee’s calls. But from Loochie’s description they sounded bonkers.

  Coffee dropped his head. “Maybe that’s why they never call me back.”

  He sounded so despondent that Pepper wanted to give the small bald dude a hug.

  “And I …” Dorry began. “I’d just like to get one night of true rest. I don’t think I’ve had a natural sleep in”—she pointed at Loochie—“since before this girl was even alive.”

  To sleep, to be less self-destructive, to communicate clearly with the world. Those all sounded like reasonable dreams to Pepper. But what came after that? Once they all cleared their minds of the pharmaceutical junk and found themselves, in a word, potent again. Then what?

  “I almost made it to the silver door,” Pepper told them.

  The others looked at him patiently. It seemed as though all the other people in the room, and even the sunlight warming the lounge, moved at a different speed than the four people at this table now. With the mere mention of the silver door, time left them behind.