The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  Ah, yes, the one concern that might trump an unfortunate detour into flagrant ethnic stereotyping. Vanity! Or, more specifically, crippling insecurity. Sue kept her hand over her mouth and twisted away from Pepper.

  “Come on,” Pepper said. “They look nice.”

  Which was a lie. (Her teeth were jacked.)

  “I like it when you smile,” he said.

  Which was true. And she could hear that in his voice.

  She turned back to him. Her hand still hadn’t moved. He reached out, pulled it down. He leaned toward her so he could whisper. “If you need me to say racist things to make you smile, I’ll do it,” Pepper said. “But only if you ask nice.”

  Sue pulled her hand from his, raised it one more time, and plunked him on his forehead. He overplayed the pain. Rearing back and stretching his mouth open, he pantomimed a howl without breaking the room’s hush.

  Sue grabbed Pepper’s hand and put it back on her thigh now. She watched him until he returned her intense gaze. She pulled his hand higher, to the top of her thigh. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly. Not the cheek, but the lips this time. When he pulled away, her shuttered eyes seemed to have grown brighter, as if she’d drawn the blinds.

  She said, “I’ve been held in one kind of detention or another for almost a year now.”

  Pepper wasn’t sure what to do with this. Here they were, getting warm, and she drops a bit of information sure to cool any room. When he frowned at her and remained still, Sue said, “I’m telling you I’m horny.”

  He kissed her much harder the second time.

  Then he slipped his hand between her thighs. He felt the mound of her pussy, warm through her nightdress. She put her hand over his and pressed him closer to her. Pepper rubbed through the fabric and she ground against his fingers. She breathed more quickly, tight and shallow little sounds. The television showed pictures of night skies from a weather forecast, showering the room in blue light.

  Sue arched her back; Pepper kept rubbing.

  They both wanted to kiss, but Sue had her head arched too far backward. The muscles of his right arm were already sore but he kept at it. Sue huffed, hissed really, through her clenched teeth.

  Pepper closed his eyes. He didn’t want to watch her, but to feel her. And he didn’t want to get all aware of the three other people in the room; folks who couldn’t help but understand what was going on ten feet from them. If Pepper started thinking of them, he couldn’t keep rubbing Sue. It was just so ridiculous. Like all good public sex.

  Sue had been louder in the buildup than in the finale. Maybe this is because she had opened her eyes. She’d seen her two friends (Rachel and Marjolein) so focused on their newspapers that they could only be listening to her and Pepper. What would they think if she really let it out, like she wanted to, at the end? This was already embarrassing enough! So when Sue came, she cut the sound off, as best she could, in her throat.

  Sue had sweated across her neck and chin. The top of her nightdress showed the wetness. Pepper slipped his sore hand back into his own lap and kneaded the palm with his other hand. The top of his shoulder ached and burned, but he refused to show the pain.

  Sue leaned in to him and smiled. Without self-consciousness. She was hardly there, at the table, in Northwest. She was just, momentarily, relaxed. It had been a looooong time since she’d been with a man. Most women appreciate busting a good nut, too (so to speak!).

  Sue returned to her body. Returned to the television lounge. And this chair. Where this man sat beside her. She kissed Pepper absently. She huffed through her nose, one long breath. If she wasn’t smiling, she sure felt like smiling. She tugged at Pepper’s zipper.

  There is a lot of sex going on in the nation’s psychiatric units. (Not to mention the adult homes and residential units that also cater to, and care for, the mentally ill in the United States.) Adults cooped up for weeks and months and years (and sometimes decades). What do you think will result from being so tightly packed? Friction.

  (We’re not counting the sexual abuse that goes largely unreported, because that’s abuse not sex. The horrible stuff happens, too: patient on patient, staff on patient, even patient on staff.)

  We’re focused, here, on the consensual business—a.k.a. affection; dating; courting. Hell, even just hooking up. The niceness. Because, ladies and gentlemen, despite the perceived differences between them and you, the mentally ill like jooking, too!

  Unfortunately, actual intercourse is about the hardest thing to achieve on the unit. The staff might huff and shout about kissing and fondling, but they’d often let the couple be. They will dole out discipline for more, though. A patient will be likely to get his butt in restraints, at the very least. There’s even a chance they’ll transfer him to another hospital, and how good would that be for the budding romance?

  So second-tier sex becomes king. A little bit of sucking in the phone alcove, or maybe a handjob in the blind spot of the television lounge. Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman might sneak into a man’s room. That’s rare, though, because even if the staff doesn’t catch you, there’s your roommate to contend with. He isn’t necessarily overjoyed that you’re getting a little play and he’s left cuddling his antidepressants. Some grouchy patient will snitch in record time. It’s a real feat—let’s go ahead and say it’s a miracle—if two people sneak some actual lovemaking inside the psych unit’s walls.

  Which is why we might marvel, offer our fair share of respect to the powers of Providence. (Or Plotting?) The confluences of life. Because the very next night, Pepper snuck Sue into his room. She stayed with him until dawn. An actual sleepover. The kind of delight most folks take so for granted that they denigrate it with the term “one-night stand.” But it’s hard to dismiss a whole night when your trysts don’t usually last an hour.

  Pepper didn’t manage this alone however. He had help.

  From Loochie and Dorry.

  Pepper hoped to have Sue over to his place. All their groping in front of others struck him as embarrassingly juvenile. Two people over forty should not be wrasslin’ in ways that invite maximum humiliation unless they’re in a Nancy Meyers film.

  Pepper knew he had to get Sue back to his room. Not just so they could make love, but so they could be alone. As soon as she said she’d be gone in less than a week—as soon as Pepper realized she was serious—he began thinking about how he might yank her from the jaws of doom and deportation. The news had tickled that heroic nerve of his.

  At six in the morning, everyone in the lounge—Pepper, Sue, Rachel, Marjolein, and Elliott—rose from their tables, collected magazines and newspapers and accordion files. The others didn’t look at Pepper and Sue, still mortified by the way they’d been groping like teenagers. They all walked to the nurses’ station and accepted their morning meds. Each went to his or her room to sleep.

  Pepper and Sue took their meds and parted ways at the base of Northwest 3. He’d walked her as close to her door as hospital rules allowed. He watched her sashay down the hall. He felt the hot loss of her like a blush. That was the moment, right there, when he became determined to get her alone.

  He’d taken his pills, seen Sue enter her room. As he wandered back to Northwest 2, the first stages of medicinal drowsiness bumped against the back of his legs like a dog, nearly tripping him. But when he reached his room, he resisted the urge to rest. Instead, he tried to drag the second bed, Coffee’s old bed, to the middle of the room. As soon as he pulled it, the scrape of the metal feet echoed. Even though he had the door shut he felt sure the staff would hear. So he went to the bathroom and unspooled reams of toilet paper. He bunched it into balls and tucked the paper under the two legs at the head of Coffee’s bed. Enough padding that the bed slid quietly once he lifted the other end. He did the same with his bed. Together they formed a cozy looking queen-sized.

  He stretched the top sheets so they covered both mattresses. Tucked the sheets around them so it looked like one mattress. He fluffed the thin pillows. Got d
own on his hands and knees and swept the entire floor with his bare hands. (There were no new rat droppings, thank goodness.) If he could get Sue in the room tomorrow, how unsexy would it be to ask her to wait while he made all these changes? Imagine her clipping news articles on the floor while he worked up a sweat in the wrong way. Better to do this now, risk having the staff see it and make him take it apart, than to wait until his woman was with him. He knew that seduction was 96 percent preparation. (The other 4 percent was brushing your teeth.)

  When Pepper finished, he actually felt reenergized, so he went out to get breakfast. He didn’t eat much of it. Instead he pocketed the cereal box and palmed the milk carton. (He checked the expiration date; it was still good.) If Sue got hungry, he’d offer her a late-night dessert of Cocoa Puffs. He walked the midnight meal back to his room. He drew the room’s curtains. What else to do at this point?

  Get some sleep, Pepper. Tonight is going to be a motherfucker.

  28

  THAT NIGHT, PEPPER didn’t drag Sue to the far table. She moved to that spot and Pepper tugged her back. She didn’t like that.

  “Tired of me already,” she said, trying to make it sound playful, which only made her sound more wounded instead.

  Pepper pulled her to one of the tables closest to the television set. Heatmiser had to hump his chair two spaces to the left so they could get around him and sit. This made the kid grumble, but neither of them noticed. Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters took notice, and Sue felt a twitch of embarrassment. This time because she’d let this man influence her in a way the other two would never allow.

  That small shame is what made Sue ignore Pepper once they sat down. A different table, but she still had her materials. She perused her newspapers with an intensity she hadn’t shown in days. Pepper remained fantastically unaware until he tried to take Sue’s hand. She pulled away. He tried a second time, thinking she was being playful, and got more of the same. He felt a tension growing between them.

  Ask her something, Pepper. About herself. Her work.

  He peered under her chair. “How come that file says ‘No Name’?” He pointed to the one under her desk.

  Sue hadn’t heard him because she was busy scolding herself. It was stupid to get close with a man when she was about to be deported! It was childish to wish the two of them might run off somewhere. And to abandon her two friends now, just because this guy started sniffing around. She ought to gather her things and leave the table, hole up in her room until the folks from Immigration came. At least there’d be diginity in that.

  Three times Pepper asked Sue about her “No Name” file until, finally, Redhead Kingpin yelled at him from the next table. “I’ll explain it if it’ll make you shut up.”

  Embarrassed, Pepper stomped over to Redhead Kingpin, and stood over her with his arms crossed.

  “Okay. Explain.”

  To her credit, Redhead Kingpin didn’t return the wrath. Besides, she wanted to explain. Why work so hard on something and keep it to herself?

  She had a manila accordion folder, just like Sue’s. Written in red marker the same two words: “No Name.” She stood and undid the cord that held the manila folder closed. She turned it upside down. Articles and magazine clippings fell across the tabletop. A downpour. Hundreds of clippings. They covered the table. They spilled off the side and fluttered to the floor. The sound was like the crackle of footsteps in fallen leaves.

  As soon as she was done, Still Waters, at the next table, stood up. She had her own manila accordion folder. On the side, two words written with red crayon. “No Name.”

  Still Waters came to the redhead’s table. She turned her folder over and let the clippings fall. Across the tabletop and onto the floor.

  Last came Sue. Who didn’t care if Pepper understood but at that moment, she was standing with her friends. No matter how wild or theatrical this seemed, she was with them. Sue turned her manila folder upside down. The clippings fell on the table, cascaded to the floor. Hundreds of them, just like the others. When it was finished, Pepper couldn’t even see his feet.

  All four of them were up to their ankles.

  But in what?

  “What you see here is the work that we’ve been doing here at Northwest for a total of eleven years.”

  To Pepper’s great surprise, Still Waters was talking. She didn’t look at him, didn’t look up at all, but her voice resounded loudly. With confidence.

  Pepper looked at the clippings. Some were yellow and brittle with age. Others showed fresh ink. Some pieces were long, accompanied by photos, but only a few. They were all, basically, death notices.

  “These are just the fatalities we know about,” Still Waters said. She nudged her foot through the pile. “Clipped out of newspapers we could get our hands on.”

  “Is Coffee’s article in there?” Pepper asked. “Dr. Anand showed it to me. Did you see it?”

  “It’s there,” Redhead Kingpin said.

  Pepper stepped backward gingerly, out of the pile of papers, as if he’d been standing on a corpse.

  “Coffee’s got written,” Still Waters said. “But people like this, people like us, usually don’t even rate a paragraph. No money, sometimes no family, maybe not even a marked grave. No names.”

  “You keep these to remember them,” Pepper said.

  “You’ve got it,” the redhead said. She touched the top of Still Waters’ head. “Marjolein here, she’s got the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known. She’s the one who started clipping. It hurt her to think of people just reading the paper, folding up these names, and throwing them away.”

  “So these folders are like a kind of war memorial,” Pepper said.

  Still Waters didn’t look up but she nodded. “I like that.”

  Behind them Heatmiser said, “You guys are kind of making a mess, man.”

  Sue and Pepper and Still Waters and the Redhead Kingpin turned to look at Heatmiser. Would the women eviscerate him?

  Heatmiser scratched his head absently. “Staff’ll probably take all that from you if they see it like that.”

  A fine point. The man had saved himself a disemboweling. The women scooped articles back into their manila folders by the handful. They didn’t bother to figure out which was whose. Pepper even got on one knee and passed clippings to Sue in great bunches, handfuls of epitaphs.

  When they were almost done a terrific scream came down the hall. Terrific meaning intense. Terrific meaning awesome and astounding. Terrific meaning causing great fear.

  A howl, coming from Northwest 3. It sounded so bad that Rachel and Marjolein dropped their folders on the table and booked it toward the ruckus. Pepper and Sue followed. Heatmiser didn’t run after them. For one perfect moment he was alone in the lounge.

  He climbed onto his chair. After a moment’s hesitation he climbed onto the empty table. Then he sang, just loud enough for his fragile falsetto to fill the room. “You disappoint me, you people raking in on the world.” His voice was beautiful and tender. He took a breath, sang louder. “The devil’s script sells you the heart of a blackbird.” Standing on the table he threw his arms out and took a bow. With his eyes closed he really could hear thunderous applause. He smiled so brightly that he shined.

  The others tracked the screams, which continued, and grew louder. The staff leapt from their station. Nurse Washburn fumbled, trying to unlock one of the drawers. She cursed herself for her clumsiness, which only slowed her down more. The two orderlies on duty moved much faster. One bounded over the top of the desk.

  The doors on Northwest 2 and 3 opened with the same quickness. Patients streamed out, most groggy, some smiling, pleased by the disturbance; it was something new.

  It was Loochie Gardner.

  Getting her ass kicked.

  By an old woman.

  When Pepper and Sue finally reached Northwest 3, they had trouble seeing clearly. There were too many spectators in the way. Pepper had to go on his toes to see over everyone else. Sue was out of luck.
<
br />   “What is it?” Sue shouted. “Who is it?!”

  “It’s Dorry,” Pepper said. “She’s scalping Loochie.”

  The two women, young and old, were wrestling on the floor. The patients had formed a circle around them like this was a school yard fight. Dorry was on top. Loochie struggled. Her blue knit cap had already been snatched off. Everyone could see the girl’s patchy scalp. Except it looked even worse now. More hair had been pulled out. The kid almost looked like a Hare Krishna, completely bald except for a little topknot. That last handful of hair was in Dorry’s clutches. And Dorry seemed determined to have it out, too.

  “Get off me!” Loochie cried. She sounded scared. Pepper couldn’t blame her. The howls they’d heard had come from the kid.

  “Get her off me!” Loochie begged. She grabbed at the last of her hair. There were small dots of blood on her scalp, where other strands had recently been yanked out.

  The two orderlies cut through the crowd, but were clearly confused. They would’ve assumed they were coming to save Dorry from Loochie, but obviously that wasn’t the case. Even though the orderlies both saw what everyone else just saw—Dorry laying the smack-down on Loochie—they still grabbed Loochie. It was like their minds had delivered a verdict long before their eyes could judge the evidence. They pulled the girl’s hands away from her head, a man holding each of her wrists.

  “What the fuck?!” Loochie yelled as the orderlies worked to restrain her. Even the other patients agreed.

  “That’s not right!” shouted the Redhead Kingpin.

  Wally Gambino raised one hand high and whipped his extended fingers to make a snapping sound. “That shit is cold, yo! Y’all are foul.”

  Mr. Mack’s face had a pillow crease from where he’d been sleeping just moments before. He had his sport coat on, but had only managed to get one arm through its sleeve. He pointed at Dorry and Loochie. “I am so tired of these two. Throw ’em both in lockup! It’s folks like them who make life hard in here for the rest of us. They’re enemies of the state! That’s how I see it.”