The Devil in Silver (16 page)

“What does that mean?” Pepper asked.

Dr. Anand touched Pepper’s arm lightly, consoling. “It means you stay with us until
we
feel you’re ready to go. In your case, we might not feel comfortable releasing you until your arraignment date.”

Pepper stared out the windows. “The only way I get out of the hospital is if I’m going to jail.”

Dr. Anand stood up. “Let me be completely honest with you, Pepper. You came to us under a bit of a technicality, that’s true. But while
you’ve been here, you’ve been impulsive, quick to anger, in a potentially manic state at
least
three times according to the records my staff have made. Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness before?”

Pepper tried to sit up, but he could only raise his head. “I know I get heated up, okay? But there’s got to be a line, right? I mean
everything
can’t be a sign of mental illness.”

“No. Of course not. And despite what you might think, I don’t want to diagnose you with an illness. But you’re here, however it happened, and I wouldn’t be any kind of doctor if I didn’t take a little time to try and see if you need help. And if you do, then I want to help you. That’s the truth.”

Pepper marveled at Dr. Anand’s sincere tone. He knew Dr. Anand meant what he’d said, and yet it didn’t comfort him.

Dr. Anand got up. Pepper watched him leave the room.

“I’ll send one of the nurses to bandage you up. I’ll prescribe a painkiller, too. Did you get your morning meds?”

Pepper rolled, with some difficulty, onto his right side, so he faced Dr. Anand. “I already took them,” Pepper said. “Josephine gave them to me.”

Dr. Anand watched Pepper a moment. Pepper wondered if the doctor would see the white cup, the two pills, under the bed. But finally Dr. Anand nodded. He said, “You’ll meet your demons everywhere, Pepper. Let us help you face them here.”

Josephine did return with a painkiller (Vicodin) and she dressed the cuts on his chest. She wrapped him with bandages. The whole time he kept on with that tight, shallow breathing, seeming impossibly weak. Josephine maintained a professional air but she felt bad for him. Hard to believe this was the same man who’d knocked down three people, herself included, with such ease. When she attached the clips to hold the bandage, Josephine patted him tenderly and, silently, said a prayer.

“I left your meds,” she said, looking down at the floor. “I just realized.”

Pepper reacted quickly. “Dr. Anand saw them. He gave them to me.”

She nodded. Still new enough at the job that she accepted a patient’s word.

“I brought you some clothes,” Josephine said. She had the blue hospital-issue top and bottom, the blue no-skid socks, and set them on his mattress. She left because, sympathetic or not, she wasn’t going to undress him.

Pepper got himself up and peeled off his shirt, but hesitated before slipping on the pajama top. Even if he was trapped, did that mean he had to wear the prisoner’s uniform? But wearing a torn and bloody shirt would only look madder. What choice? No choice. He put the pajama top on. Then he slid off his wrinkled pants, and his whiffy Smartwool socks. Pepper folded the slacks and balled up his socks and left them in the top drawer of his dresser. It had taken a month, but now he even looked like he belonged.

He wanted to throw some cold water on his face, but that would mean standing in front of the makeshift bathroom mirror. Seeing some version of himself looking this way. He wanted to avoid that for a while longer.

Northwest 2 sounded livelier today. A room’s door opened and shut and out walked that mumbly kid who’d been up in the lounge late at night, mouthing the close-captioned words at the bottom of the flat screen. The kid had the kind of pockmarked face that made him look fifty. He walked with his eyes focused on the tops of his feet. He wore faded jeans and a T-shirt with a cartoon figure on it. One word in big beige letters:
HEATMISER
.

Heatmiser passed Pepper in the hallway. He weaved around the big man without even looking. He hummed to himself and his voice wasn’t half bad. Faint and mournful. Pepper watched Heatmiser until Heatmiser stopped walking and looked back.

Heatmiser said, “Heard you last night.”

He watched Pepper quietly, wore no expression Pepper could read. Pepper touched his bruised ribs instinctively, but before he might say anything, Heatmiser spoke again.

“Better hurry if you want breakfast.”

Then the guy walked on. He didn’t slow down and Pepper couldn’t catch up, with his wounded gait. He shuffled down Northwest 2.

Pepper stopped at the nurses’ station because he needed to rest. His ribs seemed like they wanted to tear through his skin. He burned on the inside, and the heat ran up into his jawline. He might not have wanted the meds, but the painkiller would be nice just then. Pepper dropped one meaty forearm on the nurses’ station and looked down to the desktop. There he could see what had captured the attention of three nurses and two orderlies: a computer.

A desktop device that looked forty years old. It had a big gray monitor with a screen that emitted faint green light. That thing had been out of date in 1982. The rest of the desk space back there showed stacks of paperwork, each a foot high.

The staff had been tasked with digitizing all the information in all those charts. The computer had been installed that morning. The files on the desk space surrounding the machine, files that would total eleven feet three inches if placed in a single stack, was just the paperwork that had been filled out in the last
three months
. The nurses and orderlies looked at the computer as if it had betrayed them. They looked at one another to see which of them might volunteer for the task of inputting the information. Frankly, you’d have a better chance of getting a Korean to marry a black person.

In an act of bravery or stupidity (both), Josephine parted her colleagues so she could sit at the chair in front of the computer. She opened the software the hospital had purchased to sync up record keeping throughout their system. As soon as she did this, the other nurses patted her gently with approval. The orderlies looked up at Pepper.

One said, “Go eat.”

A pleasant morning to you, too!

Dorry said, “So you understand now?”

She sat across from Pepper. He’d come to join her and thanked her for helping him the night before.

Heatmiser sat with two other men at another table. All three
looked up at the screen and didn’t speak with one another. Pepper hadn’t seen the other two men before, maybe he just hadn’t been looking. One Japanese, one East Indian. But the two men seemed, somehow, like family. It took a moment for Pepper to realize it was because they both had some of the most awful teeth he’d seen on this side of the nineteenth century. Wow. Crowded, off-color, some bent in and others bent out. No wonder they’d found each other, brothers of the busted grills. He nicknamed them quick, in his own mind, Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth. (It might seem to make more sense to nickname the Indian guy Freddie Mercury, since Freddie Mercury was an Indian—birth name Farrokh Bulsara—but that’s kind of racist. Sorry. The Japanese guy actually looked like Freddie Mercury. The Indian guy just had a yuckmouth.)

Dorry sat with her back to the raggedy basketball court outside. It was the kind of day where you can see the sun behind a thin fog of clouds, like a lightbulb glowing inside a pillowcase. Dorry leaned forward in her chair so Pepper would stop gazing at the skies and pay attention.

“Do you
understand
now?” she asked.

It was PB&J for breakfast today. He separated the two halves of the sandwich and set them back down. The vein of dry brown peanut butter, the artery of gummy blueish jam. The sandwich looked as appetizing as an autopsy.

“I understand this meal is criminal,” he said.

He was a bit surprised he’d been able to come up with the line, weak joke that it was. He felt surprised by the way his hands moved, too. They lifted and lowered quickly. When he thought of opening his hands and wiggling his fingers that’s exactly what they did. Why?

He hadn’t taken his medicine.

Dorry said, “You’ve heard of drug trials, right? They test out some new pharmaceutical on a set of people. Some get the real thing, others get a placebo. If the trial is a success, they sell the drug to the intended market. You understand?”

Pepper poked at the top of his sandwich. “What happened to me last night?”

Dorry said, “I’m trying to tell you.” She picked up the pint of milk on her tray. Pepper had one, too. She lifted it and shook it and the milk inside sloshed. Somehow even the PB&J on his tray appeared more appetizing when he imagined washing it down with a nice swallow of milk.

Dorry said, “I can see you smacking your lips already.”

Dorry brought the carton to her face, like right up against the left lens of her big glasses. She tore open the carton at one end. She pulled until she made a little spout. She sniffed it. Then she leaned even farther across the table so Pepper could do the same. He inhaled. He frowned.

“I think that milk is off,” he said.

Dorry nodded, then lifted the carton to her lips and drank. Forget drank, she
chugged
that pint of questionable milk. The sight made Pepper’s own throat close up. Little beads of milk trickled out the sides of the spout and ran along her cheeks. The stuff looked more yellow than white. When she finished, she set the carton back down and looked at Pepper with high seriousness.

“The milk
was
bad,” she said. “But you can get used to it.”

Pepper looked at the carton of milk on his tray now and couldn’t imagine doing what she’d just done. Now the sandwich looked even worse than it had. He wondered if everything on this tray was past its sell-by date. Hard to keep from getting paranoid in a place like this. Bad food, constant doses of medication, human beings penned in and observed. He began to understand what Dorry might be telling him.

“You’re saying the staff is experimenting on us?” Pepper asked.

Dorry pointed at him, frowning with disappointment. “You think this is about patients versus the staff. I understand why, but you have to think bigger. This isn’t us.” She pointed at the other patients. “Versus them.” She pointed toward the nurses’ station.

“
They
aren’t even here,” she said. “
Everyone
in New Hyde is trapped, in some way. Patients and staff. You think
they
ever set foot in a place like this unit? No, no. Our lives are a clinical trial, Pepper. We’re all being tested.”

Pepper leaned across the table, as far as he could. “By who?”

“The biggest corporation of all,” she said. “Coffin Industries. They don’t stop exploiting you until you’re dead.”

But what did all this have to with what happened to him last night? What he’d seen wasn’t a man. He felt sure of that, at least. He wanted to grab Dorry’s shoulders and shake her until she understood it, too. Then maybe they could actually talk about the damn thing clearly and not this nonsense about Coffin Industries.

Dorry reached across the table and snatched his carton of quite possibly putrid milk. She lifted it and said, “May I?”

You won’t be too surprised that Pepper left the table before Dorry got to glugging. He hadn’t wanted to watch it once, so why would he want to see it a second time?

His chance to escape witnessing Dorry’s encore performance had come when one of the nurses entered the television lounge, flicking through the keys on her chain. She found one long four-sided key. As she moved through the lounge, half a dozen other patients appeared behind her, matter pulled in her wake. They followed her, and Heatmiser slid back from his place at the table to join them. The nurse stopped at the glass doorway in the lounge. She slid the key into the door’s bottom lock and called out, “Smoke break!”

Pepper found himself excited by those two words. Even if it was only to stand around on a busted old basketball court. This would be the first fresh air he’d known in almost thirty days. He left Dorry, took his PB&J, and got in line to go out.

The
breeze
. It touched his neck and made him shiver. He opened his mouth and smacked his lips like a child conditioned to feed at the feel of his mother’s nipple. He inhaled the oxygen and swore it even had a taste. His tongue quivered in the cage of his mouth. He had to clamp his teeth closed to be sure it wouldn’t slip free.

Heatmiser and Pepper and a Puerto Rican kid in his twenties marched outside. (When asked, at his intake meeting four months ago, what he wanted to be called, the Puerto Rican kid told Dr. Anand he wanted everyone to use his “professional name,”
Wally Gambino
, and Anand only blinked and said, “Wally it is!”)

The nurse didn’t walk outside with the patients. She didn’t have to.
At the far end of the court stood that chain-link fence with barbed-wire icing. A less addle-minded person might be able to scale it and use a blanket to cover the razor wire, slip himself over to freedom, but that was sort of the point of New Hyde, no? These folks, by and large, couldn’t even coordinate their outfits. Just about every patient wore a pajama top with jeans on the bottom, or pajama bottoms and a stained blouse on top. Some had showered recently, while others (Heatmiser) hadn’t. Not a jailbreak population.

None of the patients wore coats, it was March but still a little chilly. They were all just so happy to feel the real climate that they didn’t register the cold at all.

New Hyde didn’t supply the smokes. Those were brought by family on visiting days. A (semi)cheap gift, but much appreciated. Once outside, each patient pulled out a loosie and sparked it. All Pepper had was his inedible PB&J. But who cared? He stood outside. He walked the length of the half-court. On one end, that raggedy basketball rim hung at an angle, and at the opposite end stood a tall maple tree. The tree threw shade over half the court. That’s where nearly everyone went. Everyone but Pepper, eyes closed and face up toward the sun, and Loochie, who’d been one of the last ones out. She walked right up to the fence line and picked up a handful of rocks and pebbles. Pepper only opened his eyes when he heard Loochie stop in front of him. He heard this regular breathing and looked down to see her staring up at him, left hand heavy with stones. It was hard, for a moment, not to think of David and Goliath.