The Devil in Silver: A Novel

by Victor Lavalle

  Poking Pepper again, the guy said, “Let me get a quarter.”

  He had a wide, flat face and a wide, flat nose and tiny little eyes set deep into his head. He was a grown-up but you could imagine what he’d looked like as a child. Almost exactly like now.

  Pepper could feel this guy’s nail digging into him. He was more than aggravated by this. He was mildly disgusted.

  “Come on, Joe,” the guy said. He spoke with an accent, the English slightly clipped, which didn’t really tell Pepper much. He might be from another country, but in this borough there were probably five hundred countries to choose from.

  “You’re my fucking roommate.” Pepper didn’t state this as a question. More like someone who’s just realized he’d stepped in dog shit. He shut his eyes, turned his head back toward the windows, and pretended to fall back asleep. Maybe his roommate would give up. But this malt ball–headed bastard just moved his finger higher. Poking Pepper in the shoulder. Harder. Pepper turned to look at him.

  “Let me get a quarter,” the man repeated.

  This guy’s round face looked wet with desperation. His cheeks, his chin were shiny and moist, as if he’d been sweating. Or crying. Or both. He began stabbing at the back of Pepper’s exposed neck with a nail as thick as the edge of a flathead screwdriver.

  It was all too much, finally.

  Pepper rolled onto his back, to protect his neck, and so he could move on this man. But when he tried to pull an arm free from beneath the covers he found he couldn’t quite do it. Pepper had wrapped himself up in his own sheets, his head sticking out one end of the wrap, his feet dangling from the other.

  The guy hunched over him with a puzzled look. He scanned the length of the bed, saw the trap Pepper had sprung on himself, and dropped his poking finger. He crab-walked backward two steps just to take this ridiculous sight in.

  “You look like an enchilada,” he said quietly. “How you going to give me a quarter now?”

  Pepper said, “I wasn’t going to give you any damn money. I was going to smack you in the head.”

  The man nodded, the top of his round head catching the dawn light.

  “Well, you won’t be doing that, either.”

  Pepper shimmied in the tight sheet.

  “Just give me a minute,” Pepper said.

  And the man did. He crouched and watched Pepper move. When the minute was up, very little had changed. “Now what?” asked Pepper’s roommate.

  Pepper lay there, still tangled, but refused to ask this guy for help. Then he’d have to give the man a quarter. He’d rather lie here and starve himself loose.

  The roommate leaned forward. “There’s an important person I’m trying to reach.” He looked over his shoulder, at the door to their room. “A man in the government.”

  Pepper let out a long, slow sigh. Of course. Weren’t crazy people always trying to contact someone important? A man in the government. The Queen of Mars. The Knights Templar.

  Pepper laughed to himself and relaxed and the sheets seemed to slip right off him.

  “Patients are allowed to make phone calls?” Pepper asked.

  “But it’s not free, Joe. You have to pay for the call.”

  “That’s why you want a quarter.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the middle of the night.”

  The man shook his head. “I want a quarter all the time.”

  Okay then. Bonkers or not, the man had helped Pepper a little bit. Patients could make phone calls. Pepper had money—bills in his wallet and coins in his pocket. He wouldn’t call Mari this early, but it was good knowing that he could. He reached down into his pocket and felt the handful of coins waiting there, jingling a little.

  “That’s it,” the man whispered. “Yes, yes, I hear the good news.”

  Pepper found the coin he wanted to give, held out his hand, his fingers closed around the quarter. The man grinned.

  As soon as Pepper released his fingers, his roommate snatched the quarter out of the air and ran from the room without shutting the door.

  Pepper yelled, “And stop calling me Joe!”

  But the guy was already gone. The lights in the hall filled the room like the headlights of a double-decker bus.

  Pepper had to get up. He shivered in the slight chill of the air-conditioned room, cursed as he walked to the door and shut it, and bumped his shin on the metal frame of his bed when he reached it again. He flopped into his bed and, looking across the room at his roommate’s, wondered if the guy ever even slept there. Maybe he collected his alms around Northwest all night. Dorry had warned him that life in Northwest would be unstructured, but he would’ve thought the staff at least discouraged panhandling.

  As the sun began rising on Friday morning, Pepper tried to fall back to sleep.

  No luck. The door to his room blew open. Louder than an explosive charge. His roommate turned on the overhead lights, soaking their room with queasy yellow light.

  “It’s a Canadian quarter!” he shouted.

  Pepper lay still, faking the steady breathing of deep sleep. But underneath the covers he nearly laughed as he listened to his roommate pacing. Would the man escalate things? Would Pepper have to fight? That sure wouldn’t help to get him out of this place any sooner. Just that quickly, Pepper worried about what his roommate might do.

  But the poking never resumed. The roommate finally turned out the light and went to bed.

  From beneath his blanket, the guy whispered, “That’s cold, Joe. Real cold.”

  Pepper slept until seven a.m.

  4

  PEPPER WOKE UP with the sun. He hadn’t forgotten where he was, but even in here, with an ache in his neck from the thin pillow, having slept in his street clothes, and even through sheets of shatterproof plastic, the sunlight sure felt pleasant. He practically purred in his bed, a great cat rousing.

  But who the hell had drawn the curtains? Pepper thought of his roommate. He pictured himself sleeping deep and that guy standing over him long enough to tug the curtains. It just made him feel so vulnerable.

  “Wake up! Wake up!” a woman’s voice sang. It wasn’t his roommate looming at his bedside, and not Dorry, either. A different older woman moved to the head of his bed and snatched his top sheet off. Didn’t even pause to check if Pepper had his pants on or off. (Thankfully, for all involved, they were still on.)

  “I don’t plan to run a bath for you,” she explained tersely. She had a Caribbean accent. “It’s seven in the morning. Wake up! And get out of your bed.”

  The woman’s actions screamed “Staff Member” but her wardrobe cooed “Casual Grandma.” A beige blanket sweater and shapeless jeans, comfortable black sneakers, and hair cut short. She had a batch of keys hanging from a plastic cord around her wrist. They jangled as she tugged the top sheet one more time, all the way off him.

  “You’ll make your bed when I leave, hear?”

  Those keys, that tone, the direct but disinterested stare, that’s how Pepper knew she was an employee and not a patient.

  And Pepper nodded at her as he sat up. He almost said, Yes, ma’am.

  “Now you take this,” the woman said. She opened a clenched hand. Two pills sat in her palm: a light green pill and a little white gelcap.

  He looked at them with horror. As if she’d offered him poisoned Flavor Aid.

  Remember who you are! he thought.

  Pepper unfurled himself and stood, knowing he was a big old banner of a man. People tended to crane their necks and read the sign: STEP BACK.

  But not this time.

  The woman didn’t move. The pills in her palm didn’t even tremble as his body took up so much space. She simply tilted her head back and cut her eyes at him. She was old but her face still remarkably smooth. She had that power. You could see it in the way her lips drew down now, her lower jaw jutting out like the Don Corleone of the West Indies. Her eyes went from mildly cloudy to suddenly, strikingly clear.

  “You going to give Miss Chris the business, he
h? Trust me, you a big man but a small potato! And if I have to leave here and get a doctor, I promise you I coming back to make mash potato.”

  What was it about that accent and that set of the chin? That aura of threat and premonition? Miss Chris had struck fear into badder men than Pepper, he felt sure of that.

  What was Pepper going to do anyway? He’d had a grandmother of his own. Different color, different country of origin, different personality, but just as fearsome. Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman’s displeasure.

  Miss Chris held her hand above her head, so the pills hovered just below Pepper’s chin. “I won’t make another request.”

  Pepper plucked both pills and Miss Chris dropped her arm.

  “At least tell me what these are,” he said.

  “I’m your psychiatrist or your nurse? Because if I’m you’re psychiatrist I’m due a better paycheck.”

  The light green pill was Haldol. The white gelcap was lithium. Miss Chris actually knew this, but was too vexed by the big man’s attitude to explain.

  Pepper said, “I need to make a phone call.”

  Miss Chris raised her eyebrows. “That’s a phone in your hand or two pills? Deal with what’s in front of you first. Then if you want to make a phone call, you go make your phone call. I’m here to dial the numbers for you? No! No!”

  Miss Chris continued talking but she wasn’t actually addressing Pepper, so he stopped listening. He brought his lips down to his hand and slurped up both pills. They sat on his tongue. His mouth hung open as if the pills were scalding hot.

  “I’m a Verizon employee?” Miss Chris continued. “Put your eyes to my ID and it will tell you different.”

  He wasn’t getting past Miss Chris, out of this room, toward that phone call, if he didn’t swallow the pills.

  Pepper finally closed his mouth and gulped. He felt the dry taste of the pills at the back of his tongue as Miss Chris wound down her rant.

  Once Miss Chris had seen him swallow the meds, her job was done. She turned and left the room without even a wave.

  Pepper didn’t want to run out right after her. He didn’t want to follow behind her down the hall. So he went into the bathroom where he found two sets of towels and washcloths on a rack by the shower. One set looked used, the other set clean. Pepper undressed and took a warm shower. There was a soap dispenser on the wall here, just like the one by the sink. Pepper squeezed out a few dollops of Pepto-Bismol-pink soap. He tried to wash off the moment with Miss Chris. He stood under the showerhead with his eyes closed and wondered what effect those two little pills would have. They’d been so small.

  He dried off, dressed again, and left his room.

  The hallway gave the feeling of a community college. Institutional. Low-budget. But now he noticed the wooden railing running alongside either wall. It ran about waist height. Unbalanced patients could cling to these wooden rails and pull themselves down any hall.

  Parallel to the railing hung a strip of wallpaper, like trim just beneath the ceiling. A series of five repeating images. Lighthouses. A lighthouse at night, under a full sun, at dawn, in the evening, overlooking the sea during a storm. The painted lighthouses ran all the way down Northwest 2.

  Pepper followed their lights.

  He reached the nurses’ station, the room at the hub of the unit. Four staff members worked at the station, all seated. Pepper noticed Miss Chris moving down Northwest 1. She stomped toward the secure door in her practical shoes, still speaking out loud. But to whom?

  The nurses’ station was a rectangular desk area, with two tiers. The outer tier stood as tall as a bar top. Behind that top tier was a second one, lower, where staff members could sit and work at desk height. Pepper saw the tops of four heads. He didn’t recognize any of these people from the intake team last night. Two nurses, an orderly, and a social worker were all in there, hunched over, heads down, filling out forms in the natural posture of the public-hospital worker.

  Pepper wanted to walk over and ask about that phone call. But first he had to make his mind understand what his eyes were seeing. The image wasn’t blurry—four staff members worked inside the nurses’ station—but the meaning of that image made less sense. He could’ve been looking at a giant terra-cotta pot, the tops of the four heads like four plants just breaking the surface of the soil. He was swaying and didn’t even realize Dorry had grabbed his hand until she yanked on his pinky.

  She looked up at him, unsmiling. “You better hurry if you want breakfast. They’re about to shut down. Are you hungry?”

  Pepper was hungry. In fact, ravenous. Huey, Dewey, and Louie sure hadn’t taken him out to dinner before they dropped him at New Hyde last night. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.

  “I have to make a call first,” he said.

  But whose voice was that who said it? His, but not his. Distant. Slow.

  “It’s eight twenty-five,” Dorry told him, and to Pepper her voice sounded faster, a bit daffier, than it had the night before. “They shut breakfast down at eight thirty and don’t serve food again until lunch. You want to wait that long?”

  He didn’t. He couldn’t. His naturally big appetite had been enhanced.

  “Wait,” Pepper said. “How can it be past half past eight?”

  Dorry pointed at a wall where no clock hung. She kept her finger pointed there as if he just couldn’t see it. Miss Chris had given Pepper those pills at seven a.m. He’d lost almost an hour and a half since then? Those two little pills had walloped his ass.

  Now Dorry pulled at his pinky again. “You can eat or you can talk, but you can’t do both in five minutes. The phones will be there when you’re done. I promise.”

  Pepper nodded at her, or at least he hoped he did. He had a hard time feeling his body. For instance, he was already walking now and he’d hardly noticed. Dorry led Pepper around the nurses’ station and held on to him. Not one staff member looked up at them. All he heard when passing them was the skritching of their pens.

  Dorry pulled Pepper down another hallway. One she hadn’t showed him the night before. “This is Northwest Five,” she said. “You remember the wagon wheel?”

  Pepper did but he couldn’t say yes and nod his head and walk simultaneously. So he just looked down at his feet in their gray thermal socks. He hadn’t even put on his boots. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.

  Much like Northwest 1 and 2 the hall here was lined with closed doors. They barely registered in Pepper’s periphery. Left then right. So when they reached the end of Northwest 5, Pepper didn’t expect the room to be so big and bright. It was filled with chairs and tables and surprisingly natural light. It was twice the size of the room at the hub of the ward.

  “This,” Dorry said, sweeping her free hand and speaking in a theatrical whisper, “is the television lounge.”

  There were six round wooden tables. Each could fit four or five people. They were spread out in a crescent shape, running along two adjacent walls that were entirely made up of ceiling-to-floor windows. These windows even looked like glass without chicken-wire veins.

  Dorry seemed to read his thoughts. “Pretty, aren’t they? But don’t get too excited. They’re glass coated with shatterproof plastic. They’re actually even tougher than the windows in our rooms, they just don’t look as industrial. It’s expensive stuff! Which is why New Hyde only paid for it here, in the lounge.”

  This lounge was the closest the psych unit had to a showroom. A place where photos were taken on the rare occasions when the psych unit made it into the hospital’s brochures. (Four times in forty years.) More important, the lounge was where families sat with patients during visiting hours. It had to offer a better view than the bedrooms.

  And what could Pepper see through those floor-to-ceiling shatterproof glass windows? A decrepit old basketball court. Half-court, actually. With one tired-ass basket. The rim oxidized from orange to a sickly brown. The once-white backboard had gone gray. Even the pole tilted forward about ten degrees. It
wouldn’t be hard to dunk on a hoop like that, but then patients weren’t ever taken out there to play basketball.

  Dorry said, “There’s five smoke breaks a day. They let patients stand out there to puff.”

  Dorry brought Pepper to a tall wheeled cart, like the kind used in school cafeterias. Gray as a gunship, with large black wheels at the base. An orderly stood there, but didn’t seem like he wanted to linger. It wasn’t Scotch Tape, but a different black guy, tall and skinny and disinterested. The orderly removed the last full tray and almost handed it to Pepper, but Pepper couldn’t get his hands raised. His arms just stayed there at his sides even though the fingers did wiggle. Dorry took the tray for him. And with that, the orderly checked his watch—8:32—and pushed the cafeteria cart out of the television lounge and down Northwest 5.

  Dorry moved toward an empty table, farthest from the other patients. The tables and chairs were the kind of dining sets you might buy from a defense contractor. They lacked any beauty and weren’t even comfortable. But neither the people who sold it—in bulk—nor the people who purchased it—in bulk—were ever going to sit at these tables, so what the hell did they care?

  Dorry settled down at the far end of the crescent. Pepper took fifteen minutes to catch up. No joke. A walk of no more than ten feet took him a quarter of an hour. He regretted waiting to make the phone call more and more. Having breakfast in this place only seemed like he meant to stay.

  Sitting down gave Pepper trouble, too. He had to coordinate pulling the chair out without being in its way. He had to aim his butt at the chair cushion and not smack into the armrest instead. And he had to scoot forward in his chair, which meant working up some traction between his thermal socks and the tiled floor. The man had sweat on his forehead when he finally picked up his fork.

  Dorry smiled widely. “Those meds are murder, aren’t they?”

  There were other patients gathered at the tables on the other end, by the TV mounted to the wall. Some sat with their breakfast trays in their laps and their heads cocked back so they could see the thirty-two-inch flat screen.