The Devil in Silver (24 page)

“You think
rudeness
is how you strike back at Miss Chris? Heh? When all I do for you around here?”

He still didn’t respond.

Miss Chris read Pepper’s medications aloud, practically shouting. She slammed the little white cup on the counter as best she could with an item that weighed all of an ounce.

“Put it in my hand,” Pepper said.

What happened to keeping up the pretense of the compliant patient, Pep? He couldn’t manage it just then. And not with Miss Chris. They entered a contest of wills. She wouldn’t lift the cup and he wouldn’t move his hand, and the whole scene was beneath the dignity of six-year-olds.

Josephine was the one who asserted adulthood. She left her place in front of the computer, even as she suspected—on some paranoid level available to us all in the face of willful technology—that the machine would flash the secret of its inner wisdom at the moment when she left her chair. Nevertheless, she stood up and she took the white cup and turned it over so the pills fell into Pepper’s palm.

Miss Chris and Pepper looked at Josephine with scorn
and
relief, though neither of them would ever admit to the latter.

Miss Chris patted Josephine. “You too soft for this line of work, child.”

Josephine nodded and thought,
You’re welcome
.

Pepper brought his palm up to his mouth, slowly, showing the back of his hand to the two staff members. As he’d learned to do by now he slipped the two pills into the space between his lower lip and gums.

Miss Chris nodded at him, satisfied, then set down the clipboard with a clatter and left the nurses’ station to go and double-check the rooms in the men’s hall. Looking for lollygaggers. She knew there were none—all medications had been administered—but some part of her always suspected trickery and that life required vigilance.

Leaving Pepper and Josephine at the nurses’ station. Josephine, hoping to avoid a return to the computer, to that program whose name she even dreaded thinking. (Equator!) And Pepper, who wanted to avoid thinking about what was to come that night. Pepper coughed once, bringing his hand to his mouth, and spat the Haldol and lithium into his palm.

With that done, Pepper said, “You didn’t talk much during our last Book Group.”

“I didn’t want to hear the doctor give me another wrong name.”

Josephine looked back at the desktop computer, as she’d feared the
menu on the screen had changed; it had actually gone back a step, to the log-in page. Where a staff member was to input his or her employee ID number in order to process the mounds of intake forms for electronic collection. They had all figured out how to log in, but little more than that. Equator discouraged all attempts equally, whether by Josephine or Miss Chris or Scotch Tape or Terry. (Thus far, none of the doctors could be persuaded to try. And the social worker had been let go three weeks back.)

There was actually a very good reason for all the headaches this computer caused the staff: The hospital had acquired the wrong program for their system. Equator was a program used by banks, to help home owners who were trying to avoid foreclosure of their homes. People would call to speak to a representative but would only reach the voice-command operator instead. That operator would then walk the home owner through the Equator program, which helped to explain which forms were required, when and where to submit them, and how soon the home owner might expect to see their foreclosure issue processed. And Equator was a ripping success for the banks. It was less of a success for the troubled home owners. The number of successful foreclosures almost quadrupled once the banks started using the program. It regularly misfiled forms, misstated the dates when those forms were due, and most often it simply lost all records of the home owner ever having tried to negotiate adjustments to their mortgages. By the time a human representative from the bank (let’s say, Bank of America, for instance) finally got in touch with the home owner, who’d been calling frantically for months, the case would’ve already been ruled in the bank’s favor. So, really, that human representative was only calling to let the home owner know they were now home
less
. At least three major American banks would consistently claim these errors were aberrations, glitches in the software, but if you were caught in the loop of this program’s machinations you’d start to believe it had actually been designed to
erase
people’s traces of home ownership. You’d believe because it so often did just that.

So why on earth had New Hyde Hospital arranged to purchase and use this fantastically inappropriate software? Because most systems
(particularly a public hospital’s IT department) barely work. Which means that most systems regularly fail.

Like when New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric unit, generally known as Northwest, had been deemed in dire need of
modernization
, and in its zeal to get the work done, the hospital had saddled the unit with a computer program whose only real-world application was to mishandle struggling home owners. A program to take advantage of people who were being ground down. That’s what the hospital bought. So while it was the wrong program for Northwest’s specific needs, it did fit Northwest’s overall theme.

And why would Josephine want to return to dealing with all of that?

Which is why she wanted to extend the conversation with Pepper. Better to linger with him than grapple with Equator again.

“I’ll tell you something I did find out,” Josephine said. “Peter Benchley felt guilty about
Jaws
for many years after it came out. He turned into an activist for sharks!”

She slapped the top of the nurses’ station desktop.

“He said that, in one year, in the whole world, only
twelve
human beings are attacked by sharks, on average. But every year human beings kill
one hundred million
sharks. Isn’t that crazy? He made us scared of them, but they’re the ones who should be scared of us.”

“Where’d you read that?” Pepper asked. He, too, appreciated the diversion this conversation provided.

“I watched a video of him on YouTube. But I didn’t bring it up during Book Group because, I don’t know. I was just listening mostly.”

Pepper felt a pang similar to the one he’d had when he remembered the Coinstar. YouTube! How quickly that silly phrase sounded like a high point in human culture. To go online and witness someone’s ugly kid doing something cute. To watch snippets of great movies that had been overdubbed with grating music by some moron who thought they were improving the film. To stumble across human beings with insipid thoughts, video cameras, and the utter lack of humility that made them use one to immortalize the other! Of course, Pepper should’ve registered Josephine’s remark about the sharks. The horror of those numbers. The outsized power of fear and the way it
reshapes reality. But instead, Pepper felt a throbbing nostalgia for YouTube, and it was, sad to say, the detail that made him decide what he was going to do tonight. Dorry was right, he could fit back into the outside world. And that’s where he wanted to be. Tonight, when the other three ran toward the silver door, Pepper would be walking
out
.

Pepper said, “I’d like to take you up on that offer. The books you bought for us.”

Josephine exhaled happily. Another chance to avoid that computer.

“Come with me,” she said.

She led him to Northwest 1, but when they reached the door where the cart was kept, she waved Pepper backward until he stood against the opposite wall. “You wait there.”

Josephine came out a moment later, pushing the three-tiered book cart. Pepper touched the side of the cart as they returned to the nurses’ station, as if they were guiding the vessel together. Josephine popped inside the station to find her handbag, from which she pulled out a small spiral notebook with a plain green face.

On the front she’d written two words: “Washburn Library.”

“What’s that mean?” Pepper asked.

Josephine shrugged. “I paid for the books, so I figured the library should be named after me. Josephine Washburn.”

Pepper looked at the books. “What did you pick?”

Josephine brushed her hands along the top tier of titles. Like many books bought at library sales, these were a bit battered. Mostly hard-covers, a few paperbacks.

“Believe it or not, I really did
listen
at the last Book Group. What Dorry said. I tried to pick books that were more about people like you.”

Like me?

But rather than protest, Pepper let her comment pass. He looked at the books instead.

Ariel, Darkness Visible, The Noonday Demon, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Golden Notebook, Wide Sargasso Sea, Hard Cash, He Knew He Was Right, Angelhead, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
. And more.

“I don’t know any of these,” Pepper said, feeling embarrassed.

Finally, he found one book that at least carried a name he recognized. A paperback. He straightened and Josephine went onto her toes slightly, to see the cover.

“Is this a book of his paintings?” Pepper leafed through the pages but found only a handful of images, toward the center of the book. All in black and white.

“Letters,” Josephine said. “He wrote lots of letters in his life.”

Pepper weighed the book in his open hand. The cover showed a painting of the artist’s face; at least this was in color. The man looked both dour and vibrant, somehow. Pepper thought, strangely, that he recognized the expression on the guy’s grill. “I want this one,” he said.

Josephine felt more gratified than she could say when Pepper tucked the book under his arm. It seemed to erase Dorry’s dismissal from the week before, and the frustrations of the computer program and the always-curt Miss Chris. Josephine took this job because she needed the paycheck, but she chose this line of work—nursing—because she thought she was good at helping others. She’d had very little chance to prove it since she’d started at New Hyde. The job often felt like triage, not care. Under such circumstances, lending Pepper this paperback seemed like a small victory. Take them wherever you can, Josephine.

She opened her spiral notebook to the first page and wrote out the title in full:
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his Brother and Others (1872–1890)
.

“Just put your initials here next to the title,” she said.

Pepper looked at the pen in her hand, the page of the spiral notebook, but hesitated.

“It’s a
library
, right? You don’t keep the books. You borrow them.”

She didn’t say this with an attitude. More like this was another part of the fun, the game. So Pepper wrote his real initials—“P.R.”—and Josephine watched him do this with a grin.

“You can keep it as long as you like.” She snapped her notebook shut. “No late fees!”

He appreciated Josephine’s enthusiasm. She saw this book as a loan, but Pepper knew it was more of a parting gift. He’d be taking it with him tonight and he wouldn’t be back to return it.

“Thanks,” he said. “And good-bye.”

She pushed the Bookmobile back toward Northwest 1. “I’ll see you again on Monday,” she said. “Don’t be such a drama queen.” She laughed.

Pepper nodded slightly and squeezed the book with two hands.

“Sure,” he said. “What could happen between now and then?”

FIRST THING THAT
happened after he said good-bye to Josephine was that Pepper ran into Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly. He was returning to his room, library book under his arm. The old men were out for their midmorning constitutional. As Pepper passed the pair, Mr. Mack pinched the sleeve of Pepper’s shirt and tugged at it.
Pulled his coat
, as old heads used to say.

Pepper turned back and Mr. Mack spoke as if they’d already been conversing for a while. “Now the way I see it,” Mr. Mack began. “And I do
see
it. The big problem you face is how to stay hid once you make it out the front door.”

Pepper pulled his sleeve away, took two extra steps, before he realized what Mr. Mack had just said. The larger, watchful Frank Waverly remained silent.

Mr. Mack grinned and nodded at Pepper.

“You escape out of here and they just go into your file and find out where you live, where you worked, who your people are. You told them all that at the intake meeting, am I right? That’s enough information for triangulation. They’ll snatch you back up before the sun rises.”

Pepper looked past these two men. He saw Josephine at the nurses’ station. And at the far end of Northwest 1, Miss Chris, opening the
front door, walking out and shutting it again. Neither one had heard Mr. Mack broadcasting Pepper’s escape plan.

Mr. Mack slipped his hands into the pockets of his sport coat, which gave him a professorial air. “Now you could go on the run, leave the city or even the state. But here’s something they don’t tell you about being a fugitive. That mess is expensive. And you don’t look independently wealthy to me. No offense.” Then Mr. Mack snickered to show he certainly did mean to offend.

Pepper hardly registered the slight.
Who blabbed?
That’s what he wanted to know. Not that Mr. Mack would’ve told him.

“The trick, for you, big boy, is going to be getting your records. That’s where they’ll have all the facts you related on your first night. You go to another hospital and the record here will eventually make its way there. I’ve had it happen to me. So the trick,
before
you run, is to leave no records behind. No file, and you could settle right down the block. They would never realize you were you. I promise you that.”

Mr. Mack squared up close to Pepper’s chest, like the two men were boxers meeting in the middle of a ring.

“But whatever you do, you need to remember you’re taking the coward’s way out, big boy. Sound harsh? It is harsh. But I’m trying to get through to you. There’s only one thing that needs to be done with the motherfucker in that room. It won’t stop until somebody stops it.”

“Why don’t you do it, then?” Pepper asked.

“I’m an idea man,” Mr. Mack said. He poked Pepper’s beefy arm. “And my idea is that you’ve got the strength. But not the resolve.”