The Devil in Silver (20 page)

Maybe she would share.

“Hello, Dorry,” Pepper said. Even to himself, he sounded artificial. He wondered how broad a smile he might be showing.

But then he appreciated, enjoyed, that he could feel his lips move. That he could coordinate the thought of sitting at Dorry’s table with the action. That the meds had been beaten back enough that he could feel himself smiling, even if it was just to try to trick an old woman out of a desiccated-looking orange on her dinner tray. (It was either that or, you guessed it, a beet cookie.)

But even as Pepper pulled the chair out, Dorry slapped one hand on that orange and closed her mottled fingers around it. And with that she got to peeling.

Three hunks—bing, bang, boom—right into her mouth. Hardly enough time to chew. It was as if she ate the orange just to spite Pepper. As if this woman, both a mother and grandmother, had learned how to recognize when someone was just being nice in order to get something from her.

When Dorry had finished, a line of juice running down her chin, she said, “You look hungry.”

Pepper pouted. “I am.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you won’t do what they tell you.”

“News travels that fast?”

Dorry nodded toward the next table where Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly sat over their dinner trays. Mr. Mack lifted his head from his carton of juice as if he’d been monitoring Pepper and Dorry’s conversation. He set down his juice, looked directly at Pepper and said, “I am a
grown
man. I do not gossip.”

Then he returned to his previously scheduled apple juice. Once he did, Dorry raised her right hand and curled it into the shape of a duckbill. She nodded toward Mr. Mack again.

Quack, quack, quack!

The moment Mr. Mack looked up from his meal, Dorry dropped the pantomime.

And, of course, none of this had any bearing on Pepper’s hunger. And, for that matter, on his recent stance. Hadn’t he just gone all Spartacus? Where were his legions of gladiators rallying behind him?

Dorry just wiped her chin.

Mr. Mack looked at his wrist. “It’s just about six thirty. I’ve got the slot.”

The other patients hardly seemed to hear him. They either remained focused on their meals or on the game show playing on the screen.

“No whammies, no whammies, no whammies …!” shouted the man on the television, who hadn’t been well dressed even when this show first aired twenty-six years ago.

“Come on,” Mr. Mack said. “Who’s got the remote? It’s six thirty and I want the news.”

Loochie sat at the table closest to the screen. She raised one hand, holding the remote. “
Almost
six thirty,” she said.

Mr. Mack glared at her. “That’s fine,” he said. “But as soon as it’s my time I want my show.”

And finally here came Coffee.

Pepper watched as Terry, the orderly, received no follow-up phone call. Coffee just shuffled down Northwest 5, looking slightly
dulled
, and he reached the orderly. He was given a dinner tray.

Pepper watched as Coffee scanned the lounge. Looking over, through, past Pepper. Pepper didn’t bother waving him over. Instead Pepper became improbably interested in the woman on the screen now and the question of whether or not some little red animated demon would destroy her dreams.

“Come on, no whammies,” she chanted. “Come on, no whammies.”

It was as if Coffee had been a reel of film that hadn’t quite caught on the grooves of a projector wheel. Finally he
saw
Pepper (meaning his medicated vision and his consciousness synced). Coffee registered Pepper there at the table with Dorry and shambled over.

Coffee sat, and removed the orange, the cookie, and the juice carton from the tray. He slid the cookie to Dorry. He slid the tray, which held franks and beans for the main course, toward Pepper. Baked
beans from a can, hot dog from a package, a bun that felt (and tasted) like a soft foam microphone cover. Pepper ate it all gratefully.

While Pepper chomped, Coffee said, “Give me your credit card first. Then I’ll join you.”

Pepper sneaked a look at Dorry.

“That’s certainly one way to destroy your credit,” Dorry said. She slipped the cookie into her lap.

“Stop!”

On television the woman risking five thousand dollars and a vacation to Fiji winced as an animated demon chortled and clawed back all her winnings. The game-show host offered his practiced sympathies, then said good night to the viewers with a vacant grin.

“She lost the trip to Fiji!” Loochie shouted. The kid looked despondent.

Mr. Mack shouted. “That’s six thirty even!” He pointed at his naked wrist. And, sure enough, he was right. “Now stop daydreaming about places you are never going to visit and turn on channel 148.”

But Loochie wasn’t about to do his bidding. She dropped the remote on his table where its plastic casing thunked.

Pepper finished the last of his meal as Mr. Mack pushed his chair back and stood. He aimed the remote at the television. It took a few dozen presses on the controller before the machine did as it was told.

Dorry pointed at Pepper. “You like symbolic victories, I guess. You want to get Coffee here to refuse his medication just like you did and then
both
of you get written up,
both
of you get punished, and
neither
does anything to face the real problem on this unit. That’s a brilliant plan.”

The television roared now. A guy in his fifties who was modular-furniture attractive, sat in front of a nondescript news desk, wearing an expensive but unstylish jacket and tie.

“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Steve Sands. Welcome to
News Roll
.”

Behind Steve Sands, a large flat screen showed images of Coffee’s idealized leader, the Black President. And after him, a series of men and women in their fifties and sixties, all of them white except one black guy with glasses and a big smile.

“With presidential elections only a year away …”

Not even the local news, it was a “news program.”

Cue the exodus!

Two-thirds of the patients scrambled. The Air Force’s finest fighter squadrons don’t move as fast. Patients skedaddled to avoid the yapping trap of Steve Sands.

Even the orderly, Terry, gathered the empty meal trays fast. Dorry, Coffee, Pepper, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly. They were the only ones who stayed.

Dorry reached out and grabbed Pepper’s forearm. She said, “The real problem here is
fear
.”

Pepper wanted to say,
Fear? Really? I thought the problem was the Devil coming into my room and stomping me out
. Fear hadn’t nearly crushed him to death. And she should’ve known, since she’d been there.

On-screen, Steve Sands said, “As we gear up for the blood sport of politics in 2012, I thought we should look back to 2008, just to remember where we were then. And to help us think about where we might be going.”

Mr. Mack tapped Frank Waverly and pointed at the screen, as giddy as a child watching “Elmo’s World.”

Steve Sands said, “Now my producers and writers, even my wife, had a lot of suggestions for the clip that should start us off this evening. But I knew exactly which one has stayed with me the longest. And it’s not a major event. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might never have been noted in the pre-YouTube age. Remember this one?”

Now the screen showed an auditorium during a town-hall meeting. An older man in a black suit stood at a lectern. A microphone on a stand before him. He said, “Okay. Let’s go.… This lady in red has had her hand up for some time.”

The fingers of a right hand could be seen at the bottom of the screen, waving with great energy. When the woman was called on, the hand dropped and the camera pulled back to reveal seven other people up on the stage with the man in the black suit, all seated behind tables. Below those folks on the stage, people’s heads and shoulders
could be seen in the rows. The auditorium looked pretty full. The woman in red, her hair pulled up and held with a clip, said, “Thank you, Congressman, um, Castle.…”

The lady, in a red T-shirt, carried a plastic bag with a yellow sheet of paper inside and a tiny American flag. Her other hand gripped the microphone.

She said, “I wanna know … I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I am an American citizen. With a seal on it. Signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time, the date … I wanna go back to January 20, and I wanna know why are you people ignoring his birth certificate. He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am an American. My father fought in World War Two, with the Greatest Generation, in the Pacific theater, for this country, and I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!”

The audience went wild with cheers and that’s when the video stopped. Steve Sands returned to the screen. He shuffled some papers on his desk and raised one eyebrow and leaned forward. It seemed as if he was about to really
say
something. Risk an opinion about what the woman had just said, or about the audience’s reaction, or even about the President himself.

But instead, Steve Sands only said, “That was
definitely
a moment of 2008.”

A blander pronouncement has rarely been made, and yet Steve Sands sighed deeply, nodded profoundly, as if he’d just signed the Declaration of Independence.

But back in the lounge, Dorry didn’t have to worry about holding on to a job, or advertisers. She pointed at the screen as Steve Sands moved on to another “moment of 2008.”

Dorry said, “You know what that woman sounds like?”

Mr. Mack turned in his chair and sneered. “I know exactly what she sounds like.”

To this, Dorry merely nodded and grinned without commitment. Satisfied that he’d made his point, Mr. Mack looked back at the screen.

Then Dorry turned to Pepper and Coffee. She spoke in a quieter voice.

“That woman just sounds
scared
.”

Mr. Mack’s half hour passed and the silent pair—Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth—came in to wordlessly request the remote. They switched to QVC and watched, rapt, as a vaguely familiar celebrity from the eighties talked up a line of skin products. Dorry, Pepper, Coffee, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly exited the lounge posthaste.

Coffee moved fastest because Pepper had handed over his credit card. An act of faith, he called it. (Mr. Mack, when he’d seen Pepper do it, called it “being an ass.”)

Halfway down Northwest 5, Scotch Tape appeared, grinning like a villain. He pointed at Pepper. “You’ve got a curfew now, my man. In your room after dinner. Doctor’s orders.”

Pepper said, “But that other orderly wouldn’t even give me dinner. You know that. You told him not to.”

Scotch Tape said, “Don’t make accusations like that unless you have proof.”

Dorry trailed behind Pepper and Scotch Tape, all the way to the nurses’ station. As she broke for the women’s hall, Dorry called out to Pepper, “Solidarity!”

“Bitch, please,” Scotch Tape muttered.

When Pepper returned to his room, he found that his mattress had been stripped of its sheets and his pillow was missing. A bare mattress lay on the bed frame. And the towel he’d set down on the floor, to catch the leak from the ceiling, had been taken away. In its place someone had stacked his slacks and socks. They were soaked orange.

Pepper had to admit these guys were good. He’d asserted his rights and they’d attacked his quality of living. How many more small cuts like this before he’d just give up? This was a method of control in many arenas. The indignities of an insurance claim come to mind.

Pepper wasn’t sure what he should do about the clothes. The drip from the ceiling seemed to have stopped. Now there was just a dried
orange blob on the ceiling tile, like a dollop of apricot jam. But the slacks and socks were still wet. He’d be wearing these pajamas for a lot longer.

Scotch Tape said, “I told you how to get out of this place, but you just couldn’t be cool.” He seemed disappointed in Pepper.

Pepper didn’t feel the need to respond. Anything he said would probably only count against him sometime later. Right now he only wanted to show Scotch Tape that these little degradations hadn’t bothered him. He couldn’t think of a better way to assert his own strength. So he went to his bed where it now rested, against the wall with the painted-over door. He got in bed (
on
the bed, since there were no sheets). He reached over and pulled his book from the dresser. He held it up as a barrier between him and Scotch Tape.

Jaws
.

Scotch Tape said, “Hope it don’t get too cold in here tonight!” Then walked back down the hall.

Pepper stayed focused on the novel. He read in a whisper, a habit since he was little and trying to drown out the sounds of road traffic coming from Kissena Boulevard.

“A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibration and signaled the brain. The fish turned toward shore.”

Pepper lost time. As he continued reading, he lost even more. The late evening passed and, except for getting up to use the bathroom twice, he forgot himself. He wasn’t transported from New Hyde to the beaches of Amity, he didn’t feel the New England sun on his skin or the salty breeze on his tongue, but he was reminded of the life beyond this bare bed, and distracted from all the hard questions he’d face once he put the book down. The reading became a muscle relaxant, a sedative, a salve, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Which is why Pepper wasn’t stressed when Coffee got press-ganged into the room. Terry practically tossed Coffee through the open doorway. Coffee stumbled into the room, and Pepper, at ease from the enjoyable reading, looked up casually. Coffee’s blue binder
flapped into the room next. Then Terry slammed the door shut. A second after that, the door was locked.

Even this didn’t cause Pepper much alarm. He grinned at Coffee conspiratorially and said, “We’re the bad boys of this unit!”