The Devil in Silver (15 page)

The Devil.

The Devil stomped down on his chest again and snorted.

You don’t want to be awake, aware, when your rib cage breaks. When your rib cage breaks you want to be passed out.

But somehow, Pepper hadn’t.

It didn’t hurt. He’d already gone into shock, which is the human body’s last line of defense. Your body loves you too much to let you really feel trauma like that. So it wasn’t pain that made the breaking rib cage such a terror for Pepper. It was a sound.

He’d heard the creaking of his sternum, so he almost felt prepared for the final crack, the tune of grinding bones, but he absolutely was not prepared to hear the ocean. That thing smashed his rib cage and suddenly Pepper heard the sea.

His gasping breaths, the snorts and wheezing of the Devil above him, even the thumps as the back of his head rose and fell, rose and fell while he thrashed on the floor. All of that was drowned out.

His ears filled with the splash of an ocean rolling toward the shore and breaking. If he shut his eyes, he would’ve sworn he was at Jones Beach. Or the dirty curl of Coney Island. Maybe it was just the sound
of liquid filling his brain cavity, Pepper didn’t know and he didn’t care anymore.

Let the sea roll over me
, he thought.

See the sea?

So when the room’s lights snapped on, Pepper wasn’t prepared.

Not just because of the brightness, or because the pressure on his chest suddenly stopped, but because he’d forgotten about psych units and shatterproof windows and meds three times a day; all the tortures of New Hyde. He’d inhabited a different world. He’d been on that shoreline.

So by the time he returned, drawn back into the hospital and his room and his own body on the floor, by then Pepper’s life had already been saved.

Not by a nurse or orderly.

Not by his roommate, Coffee.

It was Dorry.

Dorry!

She stood over Pepper’s body.

Wielding her bath towel as a weapon.

She had it rolled tight and snapped it like a whip. She aimed it at the corner where the ceiling tile had fallen in, but Pepper couldn’t see around her. Couldn’t focus well enough to see much of anything except that beautiful, badass old woman standing between him and his end.

“Hyah!” Dorry shouted.

She snapped her towel at the corner as if facing a lion in a cage.

“Bad boy!”

Somehow the staff on duty hadn’t heard Pepper kicking his bed frame, but they sure couldn’t ignore that old lady.

“Hyah!”

The towel’s snap echoed in the room again.

“Dorry!”

The night nurse stood in Pepper’s doorway. She looked at the big man, flat on the floor, and her mouth fell open in horror.

“What in the
hell
did you do to him, Dorry?”

Pepper shook his head, or at least he thought he did. He wanted to clear Dorry’s name, but to everyone else it looked like he was having a seizure.

Dorry said, “
I
didn’t do that and
you
know it!”

Scotch Tape, on night duty, stood behind the nurse, as stunned as his coworker.

“Don’t back talk,” he said.

Dorry snapped the towel at the corner again. This time, instead of snorting and wheezing, the thing only whimpered softly, like a whipped dog. A sound that everyone in the room seemed to hear, not just Pepper.

The nurse put one foot into the room. “This is a male hall, Dorry. How you even get here? You been sneaking?”

Dorry dropped the big towel and it landed across Pepper’s legs. He felt its weight on his thighs. Scotch Tape and the nurse surrounded Dorry. Pepper curled up as best he could, afraid one of them would kick him in the head by mistake. This movement made his rib cage stab sharply and he gasped.

But before the nurse gave Dorry any tranquilizers, before Scotch Tape checked on Pepper there on the ground, before all other concerns, came the thing in the corner. It was practically mewling over there.

Scotch Tape stooped over Pepper and pulled the big body towel off him. Scotch Tape unfurled the towel and walked over to the corner where Dorry had been aiming her attack. A moment later Pepper watched Scotch Tape escort that thing out of the room.

Pepper couldn’t see the head, or much of the body, because Scotch Tape had draped the towel over it. Only the pajama bottoms and those calloused heels. The soles slapped the floor tiles loudly as Scotch Tape led it out of the room. The Devil leaned against Scotch Tape for balance. Scotch Tape whispered soft assurances to it.

The Devil was there.

Even once the lights came on.

Even with the staff in the room.

No delusion. No dream. It was
real
. Pepper almost howled at the terrible truth of it, but he couldn’t muster the sound.

“Okay now,” Scotch Tape whispered to it. “We’ll get you back. Come on.”

Dorry looked down at Pepper.

“Maybe you feel like they’ve pushed you off the cliff already,” she said.

The nurse peeked at Pepper, too. She saw him watching Scotch Tape and the thing under the towel. And the nurse shifted her body to block Pepper’s view! In the same movement, she put an open hand to Dorry’s mouth. Pepper knew what the nurse had in her palm. And Dorry didn’t argue, she took the pills and swallowed them.

Dorry looked at Pepper once more, lips pursed in a sympathetic frown.

“You have to climb back up,” she said.

The nurse sucked her teeth and squeezed Dorry’s upper arm.

“Enough foolishness, Dorry. Why you come to this boy’s room anyway? You forgot you’re an old woman? He too young for you!”

The nurse laughed loudly, as if she could make everyone (herself included) forget what had just happened in this room. She pulled Dorry out.

The pair stepped into the hallway, and the nurse looked back at Pepper, who was still on the floor, on his back. His breathing stayed weak but at least it came steady.

“I’ll be back to help you, soon come,” the nurse promised.

Who would ever doubt her return? It just wasn’t possible that Pepper would be left after such an attack.

But forty minutes later, no one had returned to check on him so he finally had to pull himself off the floor.

NO WAY AROUND
it, a doctor had to be called in.

Maybe Pepper’s sternum hadn’t actually splintered (since he had pulled himself, painfully, back into bed), but even if his chest plate hadn’t cracked, the man’s pain sure wasn’t a delusion. The morning after his attack, Josephine came with morning meds. When she stood over Pepper, she saw the blood that had seeped through the front of his shirt. A hundred little red dots in the fabric, all bunched around his chest. Pepper opened his eyes and looked at her, but just opening his eyes was an exertion. He spat out a dozen shallow breaths but couldn’t say a word.

Josephine sat on the side of his mattress. There wasn’t much space, but she wasn’t very big. One of the reasons people treated her like a kid, even though she was twenty-four, was because of how her body hid the years.

She set the small white cup with Pepper’s meds down on the floor, and leaned over Pepper. His eyes shut, then opened again. She wasn’t sure he could see her. His eyes wouldn’t focus on her face. She wondered at the pain he was in, and if she wanted to keep doing this job, but then told herself to stop. Even if she quit tomorrow, she was here now.

“I’m going to open your shirt,” she said.

She undid the buttons gingerly. The fabric had stuck to his skin, blood like an adhesive. Finally she got the top two buttons loose and peeked inside and smelled the stale punch of Pepper’s dried blood.

Now she noticed one of the torn restraints, dangling from the side of the bed. She pulled at it and let it swing loose again. She looked at Pepper.

“What did you do to yourself?”

He shook his head so faintly that it looked like a tremor.

“I guess you’ll need to see a doctor,” she said.

When Josephine padded out of the room, Pepper figured that might be the end of it. She might say he needed to see a doctor, but that didn’t mean she’d actually call one. It was just a way to get out of the room. Like last night’s nurse. When he breathed too deeply, his ribs hurt; he was surviving on shallow breaths.

The morning meds remained in their cup, on the floor. Josephine had left without making him take them. He felt grateful for this. His throat felt so tight he couldn’t even imagine ingesting something as small as a pill.

Ten minutes later, Dr. Anand walked in.

The man appeared at the doorway, just as slightly comical as he had been on that first night. Jacket and tie and ID on a plastic cord around his neck. Bushy mustache; cheeks as healthy and round as a brown Santa Claus. But he seemed a bit more rushed this time, maybe the intake meeting was the only time a patient earned the doctor’s complete attention. Now he offered a new performance: the overtaxed physician.

Dr. Anand walked in quickly. Eyes down in concentration, not meekness. He wiggled a clipboard in his left hand. He reached into his pants pocket with the other and jiggled his set of keys. Dr. Anand pulled his hand out of his pocket and scratched his scalp. He patted his chin then the pocket of his coat, looking for a pen. Pantomiming harriedness.

He hadn’t looked at Pepper yet.

“Okay, Mr.…”

When the doctor finally looked up, he grinned genuinely.

“Pepper! Right?” He moved toward Pepper’s bed, reading the chart
on the clipboard. When he reached the bed, he kicked the little white cup carrying Pepper’s morning meds. They rolled under the bed but Dr. Anand didn’t notice.

“Sounds like you hurt yourself.”

“It wasn’t me,” Pepper said.

Dr. Anand giggled. “My daughter loved that song. I don’t think she understood what it meant.”

Pepper looked at the doctor directly. “The Devil did this.”

Dr. Anand didn’t respond to that. (Would you?) He finally sat next to Pepper on the bed and undid the rest of the buttons on Pepper’s shirt. He moved more quickly than Josephine. Dr. Anand opened the shirt and looked at Pepper’s bruises. The skin was reddish and purple all over. There were small cuts across Pepper’s chest where the foot (hoof?) had crushed down on him.

Dr. Anand leaned back, his eyebrows raised. “Jiminy …”

The doctor set the clipboard on the floor and used both hands to press against Pepper’s rib cage. He started light and then a little harder. It didn’t take much force to make Pepper wince.

“Can you roll on your side?” the doctor asked. “Your back to me?”

It took a moment, but Pepper pulled it off. Pepper felt the doctor’s hand pressing against his skin.

“Breathe as deeply as you can,” the doctor said. Pepper felt the chilly rim of a stethoscope just below one of his shoulder blades. He always liked that feeling, and he liked it now. When Pepper inhaled, it hurt, and when he exhaled, it hurt more. He concentrated on the comfort of the stethoscope just to keep from crying.

Dr. Anand rolled Pepper onto his back again and pressed the stethoscope to his chest now. Pepper breathed in and out. Dr. Anand looked at his watch. He pulled the stethoscope off and stuffed it back into a pocket of his jacket. He reached down, grunting slightly, and grabbed the clipboard off the floor, wrote on Pepper’s chart.

“Did your roommate do this to you?” Dr. Anand asked.

Pepper shook his head.

“One of the
other
patients, then?”

Pepper breathed in and spoke as he exhaled. “I already told you who.”

Dr. Anand frowned. “No jokes here, Pepper. I want you to tell me the truth. Did a member of the
staff
do this to you?”

Right away, Pepper wanted to say yes just because that would be a manageable, rational, realistic problem. The staff had abused him. It wasn’t untrue, was it? Maybe Dr. Anand would transfer him?

“Can you just get me off this unit?” Pepper asked quietly. He imagined being taken to the ICU, or for surgery—who cared what?—and being kept there. Away from whoever, whatever, had nearly killed him.

Dr. Anand held the bottom of the clipboard and tapped the top lightly against his own knees. “Transfer. Well, that’s a problem, Pepper.”

“Why?” Pepper’s voice cracked.

“Because you were admitted here by
the police
, and you’re being held here pending
criminal
charges. You understand? So, technically, this unit is your detention center. If you weren’t in here, you’d probably be at Rikers awaiting a hearing. And believe me, this is a lot better place to be.”

Pepper almost laughed, but that would’ve caused too much pain.

Dr. Anand looked down at Pepper’s chest and sighed.

“
Generally
, this is a lot better place to be.”

“You told me I’d be released in seventy-two hours,” Pepper said. “That was over a month ago.”

Dr. Anand nodded and winced, as if he was a salesman about to explain the unfair return policy of his store. “We did keep you for a seventy-two-hour observation. But what we observed is that you needed more time with us. So we readmitted you, as an involuntary admit.”