The Devil in Silver (19 page)

Coffee raised his hand, palm open. “Don’t say it. I
never
use his name. By now it has become like a superstition to me. I am trying to reach the
Black President
. I mean to tell him of our conditions, and ask him for help.”

Pepper touched his belly lightly. He shook his head and said, “Let me tell you something and you need to believe it. I don’t care who the Big Boss is. I don’t care if someday it’s a Big Lady! The whole game is fixed. Top to bottom. Left to Right. The Black President is just like the White President. ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ ”

Pepper heard what he just said in his own head. Was that racist? (Meh.)

Coffee closed his binder. “Dorry was right. You think all those things you say make you sound smarter, but I think you sound like a fool.”

There might’ve been room for more argument but Pepper stepped away from the dresser, and now he noticed something remarkable about the wall space behind his dresser. It wasn’t a wall.

It was a door.

It had been painted over. The door handle had been removed, but he could still make out the small indent in the paint where a handle would’ve fit. And the lock bulged through the paint as well, like a nipple under a tight shirt. Pepper wondered if the lock still worked. Forget schooling Coffee about his political naiveté, what the hell was this?

Coffee touched the bulge of the painted lock and anticipated Pepper’s question. “All the bedrooms on the unit used to be offices. All
the conference rooms used to be exam rooms. The television lounge was a ‘recovery room.’ They don’t tear down and rebuild anything at New Hyde. Too expensive. They just seal off one door and create another one. They call it ‘repurposing.’ ”

Pepper tapped at the sealed door. “So if we could get this open, we could just walk into the next room? We wouldn’t have to step out into the hall?”

Coffee pressed one hand against the door. “I guess not.”

“And if we kept opening the doors, where would the last one lead?”

“Where would you want it to lead?” Coffee asked.

Pepper didn’t want to say the word outside out loud. Speaking the word might jinx it. He’d made fun of Coffee about the “Black President,” but now look at him indulging his own superstition. So he said it to himself.

Outside.

PEPPER FELT CHARGED
. He went into the bathroom and found his bath towel, folded and placed it on the floor in his room, right under the dripping ceiling. At the nurses’ station the other patients were waiting in line for their nighttime meds.

Some might doubt the mentally ill could pull off an orderly queue. Aren’t they raving lunatics? Shouldn’t they be wandering off or howling at the moon? That’s more dramatic, admittedly, but inaccurate. If most of these people weren’t wearing blue pajamas, you’d have thought you were in a bank line, waiting to talk to the only available teller.

Pepper and Coffee were behind Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly. Mr. Mack had a well-maintained mustache. Frank Waverly had actually turned a paper napkin into a pocket square for his sport coat. Of all the patients Pepper had seen so far, these two seemed least likely. They were the kind of older folks you see less and less anymore. The ones who cultivate their dignity long after anyone’s checking for it. The ones who don’t think it takes an
occasion
to wear trousers. Even in here, even considering how long they’d been on the ward (six years for Mr. Mack; seven for Frank Waverly), the gentlemen still made an effort. A fantastic act of will. They were like a pair of leopards, held too long in a zoo. Remarkable, but a little ruined.

Pepper and Coffee got in line behind the pair. The smaller man, Mr. Mack, peeped them, top to bottom, then sighed with boredom and turned forward again. Frank Waverly didn’t bother.

“That was a
door
!” Pepper whispered.

But Coffee’s eyes were on the phone alcove. He couldn’t move through this room without looking at it. Pepper had to grab Coffee’s elbow to get his attention. When he did this, Coffee’s arm squeezed tight against the binder tucked into his armpit.

Coffee said, “Do you want the staff to hear you talking about that?”

Mr. Mack looked over his shoulder again. Interested.

The line moved forward.

Pepper’s two favorite people were administering the meds at the nurses’ station. Scotch Tape and Miss Chris. She held the clipboard and Scotch Tape handed out the white cups of pills.

The sight of that tray gave Pepper a punch in the gums. His mouth hurt already, thinking of swallowing them. The lunchtime meds had worn off and he felt clearheaded again, like this morning. He felt good. Did he really have to give that up?

“I’m going to refuse my pills,” Pepper said.

Frank Waverly turned his head so hard, the move seemed positively chiropractic. Then he looked ahead again, just as quickly.

Pepper grabbed Coffee’s elbow again. “Do it with me. Say no.”

Coffee didn’t even answer him. The line moved forward.

Pepper said, “Strength in numbers.”

Coffee patted the binder with his free hand. “These are the numbers that give me strength.”

A fair point. Not about the numbers (that was kooky talk), but what Coffee really meant was that he had no history with Pepper. They weren’t partners in crime just because they’d moved a bed. And maybe Pepper hoped to refuse the pills along with someone else. So much harder to do difficult things alone. That’s why so few people try.

The line moved forward. Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly were up. Miss Chris read out each man’s name (even she called Mr. Mack “Mr. Mack”), then Scotch Tape slid their doses over to them.

Pepper leaned close to Coffee. “I’ve got a credit card in my wallet. You can use it like a calling card. Call whoever you want. Even O—”

Coffee cut Pepper off with a glare.

“Even the Black President,” Pepper said. “You can have the card if you do this with me.”

Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly walked around the nurses’ station and toward dinner in the television lounge. Pepper and Coffee were up.

Another nurse sat behind the station. She slapped at the “new” computer, inputting chart info. It wasn’t Josephine. The nurse didn’t seem to be doing well. She had a stack of old files, and she hadn’t logged in one page of the stuff in over an hour. That poor woman was just tapping the Tab key over and over. She planned to do this for six more hours, until her shift ended.

Miss Chris looked at Pepper’s chest very quickly. He saw her do it, though she tried not to be obvious. Dr. Anand, or maybe the nurse, Josephine, had spread the word of his injuries. But if Miss Chris felt any sympathy, she hid it well. She looked at his chest, then back at her chart and scanned for Pepper’s name.

But before she could read it aloud, before Scotch Tape could track down Pepper’s white plastic cup, Pepper said, “I don’t want my medication.”

Miss Chris stopped scanning her clipboard and Scotch Tape looked up from his tray. Coffee, too, nearly dropped his binder. He hadn’t believed Pepper was going to say it. The handful of patients behind Pepper even stopped breathing.

Miss Chris held a pen in one hand and she tapped it on the clipboard once. “You’re
refusing
medication, heh? Against the wishes of your doctor?”

Funny how she made that sound like a breakdown in military discipline. Like refusing the order of your commanding officer.

“Yes,” Pepper said slowly, his voice catching. “I’m refusing.”

The nurse at the computer had been listening on delay, so she didn’t react to Pepper’s words until just then. They surprised her, too. Instead of clicking the Tab key she hit Shift and suddenly her whole screen went blank, and she said, “Shit!” Which echoed the thoughts of her coworkers precisely.

Scotch Tape put both his hands on the nurses’ station desktop and
leaned toward Pepper. “You have the right to refuse,” he said. “But refusal is taken as a sign that your illness is in control of you.”

“What if I’m refusing because I’m
not
ill?”

Miss Chris almost barked. “If you was healthy, you wouldn’t refuse!”

“There’s no way I can win this argument,” Pepper said, more to himself than to them.

“It’s a guilty heart that refuses,” said Miss Chris. “If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t say no.”

Her last line was the one that jolted Pepper. He’d had arguments like this with black friends, about the police. A couple of the younger men on some crew at Farooz Brothers would be talking about all the stop-and-frisk beefs they’d been getting into with the NYPD. The numbers had been just obscene, according to them, starting in maybe 2009. Even worse by 2011. And Pepper used to ask them why they cared about getting searched if they had nothing to hide.
If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t say no
. That’s exactly what he’d said to them. More than once. And they’d shake their heads like he was just some middle-aged white dude who didn’t know anything worth knowing about such an experience. But in this moment, with Miss Chris and Scotch Tape, with their logic that not taking medication was a sign that a person was deeply ill, well, he wanted to laugh a little and explain—not to Scotch Tape or Miss Chris, but to a couple of young guys on his old crews—that maybe he had an inkling of what he’d sounded like. He suddenly understood this back-and-forth as a kind of conditioning. It wasn’t about whether or not he took his pills, and it wasn’t about whether or not some kids had a little weed in their pockets. This wasn’t about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. Pepper hadn’t considered this a problem before, he realized, because he hadn’t been one of those
types
. Until now.

“I will be informing the doctor about this,” Miss Chris said. “You can be sure.”

Scotch Tape waved one arm, treating Pepper like a winged pest. “Well, go
on
, then!” he said.

Scotch Tape knew that most of an orderly’s job on a psych unit was
a simple matter of herding. Herd the patients toward their meals and meds, herd the patients toward their group sessions and family visits, herd the patients away from anything that might agitate them. Because an agitated patient was a troublesome patient. And these people could be enough trouble even when calm. So Scotch Tape had to send Pepper away before he and Miss Chris paid attention to the others in line. Let the match flame of that little rebellion burn out. Once it did, you wouldn’t smell the shit.

Pepper looked at Coffee. Maybe he wanted to see his little act bear fruit immediately. (Not maybe.)

But Miss Chris sucked her teeth. “Don’t look so frighten about Coffee. We know him a lot longer than
you
, heh? You can meet Coffee in the lounge when
I
done with him. You think we going to eat him?” Then she laughed with that special Caribbean venom. It comes from the back of the throat, like a chest-clearing spit.

And what could Pepper do? As he moved away from the station, Scotch Tape picked up the hospital phone on the desk and dialed a number. He glared at Pepper the whole time. Pepper skedaddled down Northwest 5, toward the television lounge. Looking back over his shoulder only once. Seeing Coffee at the nurses’ station. Miss Chris speaking to him with such gusto that her body shook. And Coffee shrinking under the force of her wind.

He wasn’t sure if Coffee would follow his lead, but as Pepper had moved away from the nurses’ station, he felt something else, too. Pride? Power? Peace?

All of the above. He said no and they backed down.

When Pepper reached the lounge, he found half the tables occupied. Dinner trays and television, a pretty typical American evening.

Dorry sat at one table, alone, and waved for Pepper to join her.

Pepper considered one of the empty tables instead. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, but he wanted to sit alone and see what was going to happen. He’d refused his medication and they’d been a bit pissed, but otherwise? He’d been expecting them to hang him upside down by his ankles. Or maybe just throw him a quick lobotomy. But nothing of the sort happened.

Pepper approached the orderly manning the dinner cart. He didn’t ask for a tray, he just extended his two hands wide enough for a tray to be balanced between them. This wasn’t considered especially rude for the unit. At New Hyde there was less goodwill between server and customer than at a ghetto Burger King.

But the orderly was on his cell phone. A device Pepper found himself eyeing with great envy. (Cell phones weren’t supposed to be used on the unit, not by patients or staff.) Pepper waited until the orderly finished his call. The guy looked directly at Pepper the whole time, nodding and grinning until he hung up. Then the orderly, a big bo-hunk type, grinned and said, “We’re all out of meals, man.”

Pepper counted the six trays still on the rack.

“I guess my mind’s playing tricks on me.”

The orderly didn’t even look back at the cart. He crossed his arms to make his beefy biceps look even fuller. “I hear you’re not really hungry anyway,” he said. “I hear you’re actually
turning down
the things staff members offer you.”

Aha.

Pepper nodded. “It’s going to be like that.”

The orderly shrugged. “Let’s see if your appetite comes back by breakfast.”

And why did this guy take such
pleasure
in this little act? It was cruel, but the cruelty wasn’t really the charge for him. It was the rules. The order. Outside the unit (and even inside, mostly) this orderly, Terry, was a pretty decent dude. He volunteered at an animal shelter in Forest Hills and found it easier to care for animals than people. With people, you start getting into choice. To put it another way: Terry worked on a psychiatric unit but he didn’t really believe in mental illness. A series of bad (or stupid) choices led folks to New Hyde’s nut hut, that’s what Terry believed. Like this guy, Pepper. The doctor says you need to take your meds, so why not take them? You can’t leave until the doctors believe you’re improving. They won’t believe that if you’re not dosed up. And maybe the damn things are even helping you act like less of a wackadoo. So why not do it? Why not? Why not? Why not? In this way,
not
evil, even understandable,
Terry justified denying Pepper his dinner. And Pepper could see Terry wasn’t going to become some fifth column among the staff, so he walked away and finally decided to sit with Dorry.