The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  There was a time when Dr. Anand knew of, but perhaps willfully ignored, his staff’s overuse of restraints on patients. But after the incident with Coffee, he’d check in on Pepper or Loochie and Dorry and find them in wrist and ankle restraints but, to his own quiet surprise, he didn’t care. When one of them complained about the aches (their backs, from lying prone for so long, especially) the doctor nodded his head and became engrossed in the charts in his hand. Soon enough, he got so used to seeing them tied down that he really didn’t even see the restraints anymore.

  For the first two weeks after Coffee’s death, the trio didn’t spend much time on their feet or out of bonds. During the third week, they were freed in shifts. Each got eight unstrapped hours a day. The other sixteen, they were flat on their backs or, for variety’s sake, the restraints were rearranged so they could spend the sixteen hours on one side. Each time Pepper was lashed down, he asked the nurse or orderly if they’d leave one arm free so he could at least read during the hours he lay awake. And do you know who was the only staff member to indulge him? Miss Chris. Go figure that one. The times when Miss Chris left one arm unbound, Pepper read from the only book in his possession, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. With his bed in its new position, he faced a wall instead of the windows and the sunlight streamed in over his back and illuminated the pages throughout the day.

  Pepper was free from eight p.m. until four in the morning. Then back to bed.

  The Devil didn’t return. As if Coffee’s murder had appeased it.

  But for how long?

  Six weeks later, on April 11, Miss Chris and a new orderly found Pepper asleep in his bed. They didn’t wake him until they’d removed the restraints. The orderly kicked the side of his bed. Pepper opened his eyes.

  When he sat up, Miss Chris stretched out her hand, a small plastic cup in her palm. He accepted the pills without a fuss.

  Then the orderly handed Pepper a small plastic bag from T.J. Maxx. Inside, he found a pair of slacks, a shirt, underwear, new socks. One new outfit, the same size as the clothes he’d worn in.

  “Dr. Anand bought those for you,” Miss Chris said. “Since your other clothes got ruin.”

  “You can move around the unit freely now,” the orderly said.

  “But we’re watching,” Miss Chris added.

  As Pepper washed his face in the bathroom sink, he found himself smiling in the mirror.

  Look at that, he thought. His fuzzy reflection couldn’t stop smiling, which meant he must’ve been smiling. Pepper brought his cheap towel to his face and dried off, but he couldn’t feel that rough fabric against his cheeks. He dropped the towel, then traced the smile in the mirror with his fingertip. He tapped the metal with one long fingernail, and it sounded as if he was clicking the reflection’s teeth.

  He’d lost weight while in restraints. Sure, he hadn’t been able to move much for six weeks, but he hadn’t eaten hardly at all. When the nurses came to feed him, he sometimes refused. Not really a hunger strike, more like a hunger tantrum. But the staff didn’t try to persuade him when he did this. You don’t want to eat? I’ll see you in the morning. Just like that. You’re not Bobby Sands if no one’s paying attention. You’re just starving.

  Pepper dressed in his new clothes. Good to get out of those pajamas. Then he went to breakfast.

  He moved through the unit with his head down, ignoring the staff, and ignoring the phone alcove as well. He heard a patient in there, a woman, talking on the phone with pleasure, laughing to a loved one. And Coffee wasn’t in there, on hold on the other phone, because Coffee was dead. So Pepper ignored the alcove and stumbled into the breakfast line. He picked up his tray of cereal and milk, a small green apple and two dry pieces of toast.

  No one else in the television lounge paid attention to him. They had their own troubles and a television show to watch. Mr. Mack had control of the machine again and he’d picked his favorite.

  On the screen, the same anchor, as well maintained as a pre-owned luxury car, scrabbled through a handful of papers on his desk and looked up at the camera as the show returned from a commercial break.

  “Welcome back to News Roll, I’m your host Steve Sands. As you know, we focus on the big news, national and international, but we’re even more committed to covering the big news that’s local. That’s right. Casting an eye on the stories that matter most to New Yorkers like you and me.”

  Pepper chose a table that looked out on the decrepit basketball court. In a couple hours, about noon, the staff would open the door here for a smoker’s break. Would they let him go out there? Pepper wondered how many of the patients still had their staff schwag. At least he’d distributed free cigarettes to the masses! That’s the best thing he could say about the incident: He’d helped a bunch of people flirt with cancer.

  He took an empty table, his back to the rest of the lounge, and looked out on the court. He ignored Steve Sands. Halfway through the meal, he actually felt the sunlight on his face. Despite the meds, he sensed the warmth. Such a small thing, but so pleasant. He ate his toast quietly in his chair. He tasted the sweetness of the butter and almost laughed.

  “You eating that?”

  He knew the voice even before he saw the hand reach over his shoulder and take his apple.

  Loochie.

  “I am eating that,” he said, and swiped at the fruit with his left hand.

  Or, he meant to swipe at that fruit. By the time the signal left his brain, hacked through the underbrush of antipsychotics, and actually raised his hand, that girl had already taken it.

  His reaction time still needed work.

  She took the seat directly across from him. She wore the blue knit cap again, but the pom-poms were missing. Two sad blue strings lay limp. Pepper wondered if she’d even plucked the pom-poms off while suffering some involuntary spasm in the middle of the night.

  Loochie finished the apple, down to the core. She wiped her fingers on her polo shirt. Loochie said, “Share your cereal with me?”

  Pepper set the Frosted Flakes down and opened the back of the box. While he opened the plastic and poured the milk, Loochie went to the nurses’ station and demanded a plastic spoon. When she returned, Pepper pushed the box toward her, it sat halfway between them. They took turns dipping their spoons in. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Loochie finished her last spoonful and said, “Thanks.”

  Pepper touched the plastic spoon to his forehead in a salute.

  “So, we going to kill that old bitch or what?” Loochie asked.

  Pepper actually ate one more spoonful of cereal. It wasn’t until he’d finished chewing that he understood what Loochie had said.

  “You with me?” she asked, smiling like she’d just asked him to go hang out at the mall.

  No.

  That was his answer. The only answer. Loochie looked at him, confused. “Pepper?”

  On the television, Steve Sands looked into the camera and seemed to speak directly to Pepper. “My friends, the world gets more frightening every day. The news I report to you stays with me when I go home to my wife and children every night. As our politicians fail us, and our once-mighty institutions suffer from rigor mortis, it’s become clear that we’re kind of on our own out here. Am I right? That’s just how it seems to me. It may sound harsh, but the new American reality is this: every man for himself. Make sure your butt is covered.”

  Mr. Mack actually applauded from his chair. “That man is speaking the truth right there! You can’t save nobody but yourself.”

  At the same table Frank Waverly picked at his scrambled eggs. When Mr. Mack slapped his friend’s shoulder, looking for a little corroboration, Frank Waverly leaned away from the touch.

  Pepper returned to his room and read. At lunch, he came out to the nurses’ station, took his pills, then ate. Though they were making sure he took his pills, his body was starting to react with slightly less tilt. The body adapts. At eleven p.m. he found himself awake instead of zonked into a narco-coma
. His body had adapted in another way, too. Weeks spent walking the ward from eight in the evening to four a.m. meant that his clock had readjusted. He came to life during the haunted hours.

  Pepper still hadn’t been given a new roommate, though the staff had at least cleared Coffee’s bedsheets. The only thing they’d left behind was his blue binder. It had been on the windowsill, and when one of the nurses went to grab it, Pepper said it was his. They’d cleaned out the bottom drawer full of pills without comment. Scotch Tape even moved Coffee’s dresser away from the wall and swept up all the rat droppings. The room had been cleaned, cleared, but that didn’t make it feel empty.

  Eleven thirty, and Pepper put down Van Gogh’s letters and left his room.

  He passed the rooms of the other men in Northwest 2. Nearly all the doors were shut. He passed the nurses’ station and didn’t pay attention to the staff. Since he’d taken his evening meds, they had no reason to linger over him. They were making more stacks of paperwork for the electronic filing to come. They’d been promised a solution to the computer problem. The proper program would soon appear. So they prepared.

  Pepper paced down Northwest 5, to the television lounge. He only realized he wasn’t wearing shoes or socks when the chill in the floor leached into his soles. Since it was late, he found the late-shift patients on duty. The night birds.

  There were still only four of them: Heatmiser, who still watched the silent television screen and read along with the closed captioning. He had a chair right under the television. Footage of a tornado-wracked territory showed on the screen. The closed-captioned text read: “Residents of Alabama are bracing for moors.”

  “More,” Heatmiser corrected.

  The other three patients were there, too. The redhead, the woman who never seemed to make eye contact with anyone, and the Chinese Lady. Each sat at a table by herself like a sovereign, newspapers spread out across her tabletop like scrolls.

  Pepper repeated one sentence to himself as he walked toward them: Do not call her the Chinese Lady. Do not call her the Chinese Lady. But the more times he thought this phrase, the more afraid he became that he’d say it. He approached the redhead because that seemed safer. She was also the only one who’d spoken to him that night, long ago now, so she seemed like the leader. Make introductions to the Redhead Kingpin, and the others would follow.

  “You reading all those papers?” he asked her, smiling lightly.

  Redhead Kingpin didn’t so much as sigh.

  Pepper, feeling slighted, moved around Heatmiser, reached up to the television set, and turned the volume up. Now the news was being yelled at them. A childish act, no doubt.

  He pulled a chair up beside Heatmiser. Heatmiser rose from his seat, mumbled something, and wandered from the television lounge, looking confused. On-screen, footage from the Kentucky Derby played. The hoofbeats on the track sounded louder than bombs at high volume.

  Finally, Redhead Kingpin turned in her chair. She watched Pepper quietly for maybe one more minute. “You’re just going to make noise until we invite you to play with us,” she said.

  Pepper’s only response was to cross his arms. Was the man actually pouting?

  The redhead cleared her throat. The other two women—the one who never made eye contact and not “the Chinese Lady”—stopped their reading and looked up for the first time. “Does anyone have a problem with …”

  “Pepper.”

  “Does anyone have a problem with Pepper joining us?”

  The one at the next table still didn’t lift her head, but her hand did rise, as if she was in a classroom. Then she waved the hand side to side.

  Redhead Kingpin said, “Say your piece.”

  The woman lowered her hand. She spoke into her clavicle. “He can stay, but he can’t read any of my periodicals.”

  Pepper sniffed at her. “I don’t even want to read any of your periodicals.”

  Just like that, the woman lifted her head. The woman had the coloring, and shape, of a sweet potato. Hardly the type to seem threatening. But what Pepper saw in her eyes actually made him tremble. She looked more rageful than Loochie just then. A scowl that would’ve made the Devil quake. He’d had thugged out guys (thugged out black guys) who hadn’t stiffened his spine so quickly. (Was that racist?) (Probably.)

  “It was just a joke,” Pepper muttered.

  The woman nodded once, like Pepper had apologized, and looked back down at her magazine.

  Redhead Kingpin splayed her hands flat and wide apart on her table. Three or four newspapers were spread out there. She adjusted each, just slightly, the way you might straighten an off-center painting.

  “Well, my table’s all full,” Redhead Kingpin said.

  Finally, the third woman (not the … you know) said, “He can sit with me.”

  Pepper walked to her table. But before he sat, Redhead Kingpin cleared her throat again. She pointed at the television. “How about you lower that before you get all comfy?”

  After he did, the redhead added, “And please don’t start the same trouble you did with your other friends.”

  “I didn’t—” he began to explain. He stopped when he realized these three women (and probably all the other patients) blamed him for what happened. Were they wrong?

  Pepper sat at the Chinese woman’s table. She had newspapers and a few magazines. She offered him a copy of Backpacker magazine, which he accepted. But he couldn’t concentrate.

  The woman was generous enough to let him sit, to offer the reading material, but she didn’t make conversation. She wasn’t interested. She scanned a copy of The Washington Post. When she found some article that snagged her interest, she pulled out a pen and underlined the text. Finally, she folded the page with great precision, until there were deeply creased lines around the piece. Carefully she tore it free. Didn’t even need scissors. (She wasn’t going to be given any in here.)

  “What’s that for?” Pepper asked. He spoke quietly.

  “For the files,” she answered, as she turned the page, scanning new articles.

  Ah, yes, the files. Pepper kept making the mistake of confusing the appearance of sanity with the real thing. Did she mean The X-Files? The Rockford Files? The Wackadoo Files? Who knew? But Pepper wouldn’t push. It didn’t matter if she was saving these articles to use as toilet paper in her room. She’d let him sit for a while, right? Being quiet in her company was kind of nice, wasn’t it? Just be happy with that.

  Pepper looked out the windows of the lounge. He saw the disused basketball court. At the edge of the court stood the not-so-tall fence with barbed-wire curlicues at the top. He saw the empty parking lot of New Hyde Hospital. He decided, just now, to find peace in even this view. To sit quietly and let the sound of turning pages become like white noise. A lullaby. In a little while, he might want to move again.

  But not yet.

  24

  ESMIN GREEN DIED at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York; she was only forty-nine. A patient on the hospital’s psych unit, she’d been brought to the psychiatric emergency room for “agitation.” After waiting to be seen for twenty-four hours, she collapsed on the dirty waiting-room floor. She lay there like salmon on a skillet, the heat rising below the pan and making the flesh jump. Her head slipped under one of the waiting-room chairs. Her legs splayed out straight. She lay there and two security guards looked into the room on two separate occasions. A doctor did, too. All three men watched her lying there on the floor. They didn’t even step into the waiting room. At last, a nurse arrived to check on Esmin Green, who’d been on her back for an hour. To see if the woman was conscious, the nurse kicked Esmin Green’s leg.

  But the woman was already dead.

  And the only thing that made the case against that doctor (fired), the nurse (suspended), and the two security guards (both suspended) was the hospital’s surveillance tape. Someone on staff had doctored the medical records so they read that at 6:20 a.m. Ms. Green was “sitting quietly in waiting room.” If not for the video
footage, and its time stamp, Esmin would’ve been passed off as an unforeseeable accident, the kind of thing, as is said “that no one could’ve prevented.”

  Who would’ve challenged the official version? One cosigned by four staff members. Would anyone give credence to the other two patients, clearly seen in the video, also stuck in that waiting room—the ones who saw Ms. Green’s death happen? How would they be treated as witnesses? How easy would it be to make wackos seem nuts? Were the good people of the jury supposed to take their word over a nurse’s? Over a doctor’s? It was just too horrible to believe that such a thing could happen. People don’t get treated that way. A nurse wouldn’t do that. A doctor takes an oath. Security guards … well, okay, maybe no one would be too surprised that some security guards fucked up.

  The jury’s verdict (at best) might’ve been: We really feel terrible for these people. (And here’s the hard part, they really would.) We feel terrible, but we have doubts. We doubt the world works this way, because it has never worked this way against us.

  Luckily for Esmin Green’s family, cameras are considered legally sane. Their testimony above reproach. Kings County Hospital reached a settlement with the Green family. Turns out Esmin had blood clots in her leg; her complaints of pain were legitimate. The clots caused her heart to stop, and because she was left unaided, she expired.

  This happened in 2008.

  25

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Pepper returned to the television lounge just before midnight. He found Heatmiser under the television screen, Redhead Kingpin at her table, and Still Waters sitting at the next. Pepper grabbed the back of a free chair at the third table, but before he pulled it out he asked, “May I join you?”

  She shrugged. Good enough! Pepper sat across from her.

  The Chinese woman flipped through a copy of the New York Post, the pages slightly spotty because she’d had to fish it out of the trash.

  “Anything interesting?” he asked.

  “Not yet.” She looked up from the page. “You don’t have anything to read?”