The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  Pepper couldn’t help it. He had to look in. Unlike the last room, this one was almost empty. Only one piece of equipment, but it was a beast. A reclining chair, like you find in a dentist’s office. This one had a small crane attached at the top. The crane hung over the seat and had five metal attachments hanging down. The crane was like a wrist, the attachments enormous fingers. Pepper imagined a patient strapped into this device. Someone on his back, looking up at that rusted hand. The digits reaching down to do what? He pictured the giant, inorganic hand slowly, methodically plucking out the patient’s eyes. One at a time. Say you’re having trouble with your eyes? Bet you won’t have that trouble now.

  Pepper moved around the chair, circling it, as Loochie watched from the doorway. Whatever this machine used to do, it had once been the height of modern medicine. Ophthalmologists probably heard about it and drooled. The chance to use a PX-1000! And now it was entombed in a dark room. He doubted anyone even knew it was there anymore. I will decay, Pepper thought touching the abandoned machine. I will be buried. I will be forgotten. What was my life worth?

  Pepper moved around to the spot in the ceiling that had leaked into his room. Here the floor trembled from his weight. He knelt and felt the residue of rainwater. He traced it back to one of the boarded-up windows. A piece of the board had rotted through. He thrust two fingers through the hole and felt a night breeze on his skin. It felt cool and comfortable outside. “Let’s go,” Pepper said.

  Loochie was still in the hallway. “I’m waiting on you,” she whispered.

  They followed the hallway all the way to the oval room. This corresponded with the first floor, too. Right below their feet sat the nurses’ station. The staff members logging files onto the computer. Talking with one another. Checking email on their phones. Living normally. Up here, in place of a nurses’ station, they found only a chair on the second floor. One office chair, very old, three wheels instead of four. It tipped forward slightly, forlorn in the dim light.

  When Pepper and Loochie trod across this room, they hardly lifted their feet. They moved like cross-country skiers to quiet their footfalls as they passed over the staff’s heads.

  They reached the hallway above Northwest 1. They walked even slower, more quietly just because they were so close.

  And finally they found the air duct.

  It was exactly where Dorry had drawn it on her map. It corresponded to the place right above the secure ward door.

  The grill over the air duct had been lost long ago. The hole, that crawl space, sat open. The faint light from the hallway illuminated the mouth of the duct. It wasn’t even that high up. Pepper would give Loochie a boost, but with a little effort she could’ve pulled herself up.

  “Okay,” Loochie said, looking at the air duct. “This is it, right? We’re really here?”

  Pepper took out the map as if he didn’t know. He triple-checked. He shook the sheet of paper. “No question.”

  Loochie pulled her wig down so it was tighter on her scalp. She knelt and retied the laces of her baby-blue Nikes. When she rose again, Pepper said, “Why didn’t Dorry leave?”

  He wasn’t really speaking to Loochie, just out loud. But she answered him anyway. “She probably couldn’t climb up by herself.”

  “Did you see her scale that fence?” Pepper asked.

  “I don’t know why she didn’t,” Loochie told him. “But I know we can.”

  Loochie patted her face, opened and closed her fists. Getting her courage up. The air duct looked relatively big to her. It might be a little tight around Pepper, but she’d have a little more room to breathe.

  Why didn’t Dorry leave? Pepper couldn’t let the question rest.

  “Gimme a boost,” Loochie said.

  Why didn’t she?

  He knew why.

  “I’ve got something I want you to do for me,” Pepper said quietly.

  Loochie was already at the air duct. Reaching up, she grazed the opening with her fingertips. She turned around. “What are you waiting for?”

  Pepper reached into his pants. He pulled out a single glossy magazine page. It was crumpled up. He handed it to her.

  “Open it,” he said.

  He didn’t know what she would find any more than she did.

  She scanned the headline. “The penguins of Antarctica,” she read.

  Pepper shook his head. “That’s a little ambitious.”

  He reached into his pocket again. Pulled out another page.

  “Borneo’s best beaches,” she said after scanning.

  “Well, fuck,” Pepper muttered.

  He pulled a handful of magazine sheets out of one pocket. He held them up to his face so he could read each one. He snapped through them until finally he found one that seemed right.

  Loochie held the paper close. “Van Gogh’s Amsterdam.”

  “That’s the one,” Pepper said.

  She dropped her hand. “What is this?”

  “I got interested in this guy,” Pepper said. “He’s a painter. But they only had black-and-white versions of his stuff in the book I read. This article says they have a whole museum devoted to his stuff. I want you to go there. See his paintings. For me.”

  And what he didn’t say, but could’ve added: and for Sue.

  Loochie crumpled the article in her fist.

  “See it for yourself, Pepper.”

  He nodded, but didn’t respond to what she’d said. “You’ll have to apply for a passport first,” Pepper instructed. “You can do that at the post office. Then you buy a plane ticket. Then you go.”

  Loochie almost laughed. “Okay, fine, let’s play this game. You know a passport costs money, right? And the plane ticket? You think they’ll let me fly free if I ask nicely?”

  Now Pepper went into his back pocket. He took out his wallet and removed a blue card. “This is my ATM card,” he said. “Go to any branch. You can’t take out more than a thousand a day. But take it out. It’s yours.” He told her the code.

  She looked down at the ATM card. Why was her face feeling so warm?

  “Should be four thousand dollars left,” Pepper said. “But take it all out before the end of the month or else Time Warner and a few other assholes are going to take their cut. I’d be happier if you had it.”

  Loochie shook her head and thrust the card back at him. “I’m not …” she began, but couldn’t finish. She raised her free hand, balled into a fist, and hit him in the chest, but there wasn’t any power in it. She hit him again.

  “Come on now,” Pepper said.

  She looked up at him. “I’m scared to go alone.”

  Pepper went down on one knee. He looped his fingers so she could put one foot in them. “You put that card and that article in your pocket,” he said clearly and loudly. She was so stunned that, probably for the first time since grade school, she just did what an adult told her to do.

  “Now give me your foot.”

  Loochie did that, too. And next thing, she was climbing into the air duct. Scrambling really. She had enough space that, if she curled herself tight, she could turn herself around. She did that, and looked down at Pepper.

  Being inside the air duct, hearing the tinny echo of her movements, caused a panic to rise in Loochie. It felt like bile climbing up her throat. She shook. She almost felt angry. “Why are you doing this!” she shouted. She didn’t concern herself with whether or not the staff on the first floor might hear her. “Just come on. We can both make it. Why won’t you leave?!”

  Far behind them there was a second howl. Even louder and, somehow, wetter. Like someone was screaming underwater. Pepper looked over his shoulder, then back to Loochie.

  “I gotta go help,” he said.

  Loochie looked past Pepper, down the long hallway.

  “You let me know that you got there,” Pepper said. He waved one hand in front of her face to get her attention back. “That’s how you repay me.”

  Loochie couldn’t speak. She only nodded.

  Pepper
saw that, with the wig on, Loochie really looked like a new version of herself. If she walked right past him in another context, he doubted he’d even recognize her. In a way, Loochie’s mother had supplied her daughter with a great disguise.

  “Turn around now,” he said.

  Loochie focused on his face. Her eyes became less cloudy, her lips firm. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered.

  Pepper grinned. “That’s the Loochie I know.”

  She slowly turned herself around in the air duct again. She crept forward on her belly.

  Pepper watched her go. It took less than a minute before he couldn’t see her in there. He listened to the squeak of her sneakers as she inched ahead. Finally Pepper turned away.

  He retraced his steps.

  He went back in.

  40

  PEPPER AND LOOCHIE had been right earlier, that the second floor of the unit was surprisingly critter-free. No water bugs. No gnats. No rats. (Plural.)

  There was one rat in the entire two-story. Pepper had seen it come tumbling from the ceiling in Glenn’s room. A single common rat roamed. His name was LeClair.

  LeClair the Rat.

  And he was old.

  That point is less about his age than his inflexibility. LeClair had been at Northwest his entire life, four years. Now that might not sound so amazing, but the average rat life span is two to three years. So roughly speaking, LeClair had lived the equivalent of 120 human years.

  He hadn’t seen another rat, though, in over a year. (That’s thirty human years.) Long ago, they’d bred on the second floor like, yes, rats. The females, called does, matured like rats everywhere do, reaching puberty at only six to eight weeks old. They went into heat every four to five days, for about twenty-four hours at a time. The average litter size was twelve. So you want to talk about a population explosion? If you’re talking about rats, it’s not even an explosion, it’s an expectation.

  And yet the back spaces of Northwest were barren. Why? There were three reasons: 1) New Hyde Hospital didn’t make a habit of spending its money, as staff salaries and the profoundly wack-ass computer at the nurses’ station should attest; but there was one expenditure that did enjoy New Hyde’s enthusiastic financial support. Besides administrative salaries, which were astronomical at the very top, New Hyde paid for pest control. Nothing shuts down a hospital faster than vermin, so New Hyde paid for exterminators without hesitation. Practically had the trucks on standby. Northwest’s second floor got bombarded with nerve toxin–type poisons at least twice a year. (Don’t mention that to the patients on the first floor.) That’s reason number one for why the second floor was so lifeless.

  2) Human beings weren’t the only living things the Devil stalked. It fed on warm bodies and fostered fear; rats would do just as well as humans. The Devil had been wandering these halls for years—longer than LeClair had been alive. Dropping down into a patient’s room was the main course, but a passing rat might serve as an aperitif. The rats even had their own name for the beast. Not the Devil. What do rats know of such things? They called him “With Teeth.” Named for the way he killed their kind. He became a kind of legend among the rats, a tale told to make children cower in the dark. But eventually, the rats grew tired of such haunted grounds. They decided to leave Northwest. To flee from With Teeth. A mass exodus.

  (Spiders and roaches and all other small life following not far behind.)

  So that explains why the rats fled, but not why LeClair the Rat remained behind. That’s because he—LeClair the Rat—was the third reason the other rats all left, en masse. To put it bluntly, nobody liked the guy.

  LeClair the Rat was profoundly intelligent. Unfortunately, he felt it was terribly important that every other rat in the world know this about him. He was a real bore and a pedant, but worst of all he was just a weenie. But so what, right? Why not just ignore a rat like that? Why abandon him? The problem was that LeClair was also a good scavenger. He foraged food, rummaged nesting materials—but when he returned with the goods, he wouldn’t share them freely. Instead, he’d force the other rats to sit around and listen to him—all his brilliant thoughts—before handing over the precious materials. You say you just want to know if those kernels of corn LeClair discovered were edible? Plebeian. You’d just hoped to use these bits of shredded newspaper to line a nest? Troglodyte. Didn’t you want to hear what LeClair thought about newspapers? And the dangers of how humans artificially increased the size of their corn? And, while he was at it, let him weave in the history of …

  The point here wasn’t that LeClair the Rat was hated because all the other rats were dull-witted, anti-intellectuals. (Though, of course, some were.) The point was that LeClair the Rat had ideas, and he divided the entire rat population into two groups: those whose ideas agreed with his and those who had none. He couldn’t fathom that other rats might simply value different ideas and methods from his own. (That possibility was void, as Mr. Mack would say.)

  As time passed, the other rats grew tired of their lives in Northwest: dodging the exterminators and their arsenal of poisons, cowering as With Teeth plagued the second floor, avoiding the increasingly sanctimonious LeClair. Some of the elder rats told stories of another world, someplace beyond Northwest. Outside. Where they might procreate and forage and procreate and die. What more could a rat ask for?

  And eventually the rats did leave. Some lived in the wilds of New Hyde’s poorly maintained grounds; others found their way to the main buildings of the hospital; and others reached human homes beyond the fence line and their descendants still live there now. (Sorry, but it’s true.) But none of the rats ever told LeClair that they were going. He’d heard them talk about that place, Outside, but dismissed it as a myth. (If it was real, he would’ve been the one to think of it.) And one day LeClair the Rat found himself living alone on Northwest’s second floor. Nearly alone. Him and With Teeth. LeClair at least knew enough to keep his distance from that one. (In fact, the day he’d come crashing through Glenn’s ceiling was because With Teeth had been chasing him, trying to take a bite.)

  He tried to stay brave in the face of his isolation. He didn’t admit to missing his fellow rats; instead, he cultivated a growing disdain for them. And that helped him make it through the year of solitude. But today, LeClair the Rat had to finally admit the truth.

  He was lonely.

  He’d tried, one last time, to find purpose in his work. He’d boldly leapt out, in plain view of the humans, and annexed a box of sugared corn. He almost got clocked, one of the humans chopping at him with a broom, but he escaped. And returned to the second floor. He’d felt pride in his daring, but could share the story, and the cereal, with no one. That’s when he came to realize that it can be honorable to stand alone, arguing for a righteous cause. But sometimes “taking a stance” becomes confused with “just being an asshole.” It had taken quite awhile, but on this late night LeClair the Rat finally accepted that, long ago, he’d turned into a prick.

  But today LeClair the Rat was going to change.

  Could he really, though? Hard to say. At least he might try.

  So that night he’d passed through every room on Northwest’s second floor. Surveying the discarded furniture where he’d made his nests, the wiring he’d chewed through, it was surprisingly difficult for him to give up the grounds he’d cultivated, no matter how barren and lifeless now. He might not have gone through with it, but then he heard the humans nearby. They’d found their way into his realm. Sure, there’d been the old woman, who sometimes sprinkled bits of food on the floor for him, but this night there were a dozen humans crashing around. Howling and battling and encroaching on his territory. This, finally, was what convinced LeClair to go. He thought he might make his way to that place—Outside—where the other rats had gone. Maybe he would find some of them. Or maybe he would die. But at least he wouldn’t be stuck in here, bereft, adrift, alone.

  This is how LeClair the Rat came to be in a section of the air duct when Loochie appeared. Sh
e found that big old rat directly ahead of her.

  Wow! She could scream. The only thing that shut her up was when the rat turned toward her. She thought LeClair the Rat might charge and bite off her nose. This threw her into a dazed silence.

  She tried to turn around, or scoot backward, but pushing back only seemed to wedge her in tight. She imagined getting stuck here, unable to wriggle free, dying in a fucking pipe. She didn’t know what to do. She could slide her hands up in front of her, one at a time. At the very least she could try to guard her face. Bat the big rat back if it came at her.

  But what did LeClair the Rat know about this human in front of him? Zip. As far as he was concerned, this body in the air duct might be kin to With Teeth. It hadn’t been able to catch LeClair, so it sent this smaller one. It wasn’t only Loochie who was smacked with a sudden case of fright.

  Loochie watched the rat.

  And LeClair watched her.

  Finally, the rat turned away from Loochie. It moved again.

  Loochie thought she’d wait long enough to let the rat disappear. That was what her revulsion suggested she do. But she had to admit that she felt lost. The air duct hadn’t just run a straight line out of the building. The air duct twisted here and there like bends in a road. She wasn’t entirely sure if, at the end of her journey, she’d be looking out on a night sky or just back into the second-floor hallway, where she’d started. Pepper hadn’t given her Dorry’s map after all. In here, she was on her own.

  In her mind, she’d already retraced her path to the bus stop in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. (Or whatever it had been called.) She was already looking for the tree that leaned so far over that its leaves touched the roof of one home. She was already planning on the face she’d pull when she pretended she left her MetroCard at home and could the bus driver please just let her ride to the depot. She imagined the letter she would write to her mother, explaining why this, as wild as it seemed, was the sanest choice she’d made for herself in many years. For all her hesitation, her fear of hurting her mother, Loochie was already determined to leave.