The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  He had no choice. He told her Ralph’s name. And that he lived in Maryland now. But when she asked him for the actual number, he couldn’t give it to her. His cell phone knew the digits, not him. She said she’d go online and find Ralph’s number and give him this one and explain as much as she could. She wished him sincere good luck.

  And that was it.

  Pepper left the phone alcove, despondent. In part because he knew, even if Mari actually did track down his brother, Ralph wouldn’t call. He probably wouldn’t even tell their mother Pepper was in the hospital. Pepper had entered the alcove thinking he had at least one ally. He left knowing he had none.

  He left the alcove and looked toward Northwest 2 and the room waiting there. Another day and a half. How many more chances would that give last night’s visitor to drop in?

  He looked to his right and saw that unclassifiable trio—woman in her fifties, man in his thirties, teenage girl—walking from the television lounge and down Northwest 5. He watched as they entered the room at the hub of Northwest and circled around the nurses’ station. They barely spoke to one another but didn’t look angry, really. Maybe just a little worn out. The time spent getting ready for the visit, traveling to the hospital, sitting around with your loved one inside a sealed (if sunny) room. That’s going to get you tired. Now they spoke to one of the staff. A nurse led the family to Northwest 1, toward the secure ward door. She moved ahead of the family, already picking through her ring of keys for the right one. The one that would let them leave. Pepper watched all this carefully.

  He felt so low just then, at a complete loss. Dogged out. Abandoned. Without the willpower to be prudent, to check himself. A feeling known, generally, as fuck it.

  Pepper trailed behind the family who trailed the nurse. No alarms went off as Pepper moved closer. No one even noticed him.

  The nurse had her back to the hallway and the proper key in hand. She pulled it forward, moving it toward the lock, and the red plastic cord squeaked faintly with the stretch.

  It was then that Pepper realized he was really going to try to escape. He worried about the dude in his thirties, but not that much. The guy was doughy, not very tall; the kind of man who made a living but rarely worked. And, for all Pepper knew, heavily medicated. Pepper could get past him. His slow walk turned into a trot.

  The nurse slipped the key into the secure ward door and this is the moment when she got a bit lazy. She should have looked over her shoulder to be sure there were no other patients crowding close. In fact, the orderly should actually have accompanied her and the family to the door. All this was basic training. But there was only the one young orderly on shift, and he’d gone to the television lounge to let people know visiting hours were about over.

  The nurse stood at the door alone. She’d offered to go open the door for this family just to avoid the damn charting for a few minutes. The most pleasant part of her job for the next few hours would be these moments when she got to usher visitors out. She took some pride in smiling at them as they left, like a good hostess. She was new, on the job for only two months. She unlocked the secure ward door and pulled it open.

  A moment later Pepper rear-ended her.

  The big man was fast when he had the proper motivation. Like getting out of the nut hut. Like stepping outside and breathing fresh air.

  Pepper moved toward the door. He reached that family and mushed them out of the way. First the man: it was like brushing past a sack of dirty laundry, that’s how soft the man’s body felt. The guy slipped and went down. Then Pepper made his harshest decision. He chose to vault over the woman in her fifties. He thought this was better than barreling through her. But the man was no kind of athlete. Pepper had no ups. If he went three inches off the ground it would be an all-time best. He bum-rushed that poor woman and she went stumbling forward, plowing into the nurse’s back. The two smashed into the wall just to their left.

  No time for apologies. The door was completely open. Look at that lavender wall paint in the hallway right outside! Pepper could’ve maneuvered a Zamboni machine through the doorway. He was free. He was free. Even if it was the worst idea he’d had, in a week of lousy ideas, the man could still escape. He made it past everyone.

  Except the teenage girl.

  She didn’t have Pepper’s size or weight, obviously, but what she did have in her favor was rage. She had the Crazy Strength. (Retarded folks are rumored to have powerful—nearly mythic—strength but don’t shortchange the mentally ill. In the proper state they can bring the ruckus.)

  This teenage girl was the patient. The woman in her fifties, the mother. The soft-bodied man in his thirties, her brother. Pepper had guessed wrong, and he would pay for it.

  The kid mounted him from behind. She grabbed his shirt right by the waist and planted her feet on the backs of his shins. Even though she didn’t weigh that much, Pepper couldn’t stay upright with that pressure on his calves. With that surprisingly simple move she toppled the big man.

  As he fell, time slowed, giving Pepper a moment to once again take in the painted trees in the framed pictures on one wall. The images seemed to move away from him now. Before his face hit the floor, he had one clear thought.

  I’m a fucking idiot.

  When Pepper’s face connected with the linoleum tiles, his mouth opened and his front teeth connected with them and he heard one of his teeth crack, and small bits of enamel skitter through the doorway, to the other side.

  The young woman ran up his back, clawing forward, until she grabbed the back of his head and pulled at his hair. Brown strands in her hands. And this whole time those two blue pom-poms on the top of her blue knit cap were bouncing and bobbing playfully.

  “Put your hands on my mother again!” the teenager howled. “Put your hands on my fucking mother!”

  The girl brought her right elbow down on the back of Pepper’s neck; her elbow stabbing right into the ball at the top of his spine. Pepper couldn’t even yell, he coughed violently and foamy spit covered his lip and chin. He dropped the side of his face against the floor and he huffed and heaved and snorted.

  The woman in her fifties had found her footing by now. She grabbed her daughter and pulled her away. “That’s enough, Loochie! Come on now! Get off him! Loochie!”

  The nurse and the girl’s brother got up, too. The orderly on duty and two other nurses stampeded down the hall and surrounded Pepper’s prone body.

  “He hit my mother!” the girl shouted. “It’s not my fault!”

  The orderly grabbed Pepper’s shins. Pepper kicked but there wasn’t much power in him. The orderly then dragged Pepper backward, away from the open door and farther into the unit, like a roped steer. It took a great strain to move Pepper’s body just three feet. Then the nurse who’d opened the door shut it again. She locked it.

  Pepper looked up at the wild child, to see her staring down at him, one arm hooked around her mother’s shoulder protectively. The girl’s brother shivered as he leaned against a wall.

  A nurse arrived with Pepper’s punishment. When a patient fucked up this fully he wasn’t just given another pill. This time they brought the high-dose solution. It came in liquid form, inside of a needle.

  7

  THEY HAVE TO keep patients medicated on a psychiatric unit. Staff are trying to get the patient’s illness back in control. If a person is in the hospital, it’s probably because his or her levels are off. Some meds are tried, a few work and others don’t but staff are always trying to find the exact right combination for each patient.

  But the other reason they have to keep patients medicated, even sedated, is because life on the unit will scramble anyone’s brains.

  What is there to do in a mental hospital? Watch television, sit in your room, wander the hallways, step out for a smoke break, attend group meetings. Every day, that’s all you get. It’s why visiting hours mean so much. Even patients who didn’t get along with their families on the outside are pleased to welcome them here.

  Bein
g stuck inside and doped up to the gills can make the place feel like a time machine, as Loochie knew, even by age nineteen. The distinction between the days, the weeks, the months, the years fade. It all seems like one long day. You just lose track. It’s shocking how quickly that can happen.

  So if Pepper lost the next day or two because of the injection (plus the Haldol and lithium) well, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. It took him hours to swim back to the shores of consciousness. And who was waiting for him right there on the beach? A nurse carrying a small white cup. Casting him out to sea again.

  It takes time for a body to adjust to the meds. Really not all that different from building up one’s tolerance to alcohol. Once, one beer had your head wobbling loose on your neck, but in time, it might take five or six. You learn to hold your liquor. In the ward, you learn to hold your pills.

  But it takes time.

  Pepper’s seventy-two-hour observation period came and went, and he hardly realized its passing. Not that he forgot, he was just so busy swimming. Who petitions for his legal rights while trying desperately not to drown?

  When he came to New Hyde, it was the third week of February.

  When he finally shook off his medical haze, it was the middle of March.

  8

  PEPPER DIDN’T UNDERSTAND how much time he’d lost until he wandered out of his room and down Northwest 2 and shuffled up to the nurses’ station. He put both elbows on the top tier like a man sidling up for a drink. He even smiled as he looked down at Scotch Tape, Miss Chris, and another nurse charting. He meant to ask how he could sign himself out of his padded cell. Seventy-two hours had surely come and gone.

  Then he saw a copy of the New York Post up there on the nurses’ station. It lay flat, facedown, the back cover showing the lead story of the sports section. Unofficial policy saw staff often leaving their old newspapers out for patients to read. A minor kindness. And at the top of the page, Pepper saw, almost in passing, a mention of March Madness, the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship. March.

  How could the Post already be talking about fans bracket picks? In February?

  Pepper might’ve been impulsive, a little quick to throw hands, but he wasn’t stupid. And as he came to understand the real news the paper was delivering to him—it’s March 17!—Pepper had to clutch at the nurses’ station desktop just to keep from keeling over.

  He grabbed at the desktop and leaned forward. He looked like a man halfway in a lake, trying to climb back into the boat. He flailed out with one hand and sent the newspaper flying from the station like a gray bird.

  Scotch Tape rose up and Miss Chris rolled her seat backward, out of the nurses’ station, and around the side to get closer to Pepper, without lifting her butt from the chair. The other nurse already had her keys in hand and was fiddling with the drawer where they kept the tranquilizers.

  Pepper looked at Scotch Tape directly and said quietly. “It’s March. Why am I still here?”

  Scotch Tape looked into Pepper’s eyes. He realized the big man wasn’t trying to come over the desk, wasn’t attacking the staff, so he spoke as calmly as he could. “That was the doctor’s decision, not mine.”

  “I want to see him,” Pepper said.

  Miss Chris clapped a hand against her thigh. “You and me both!”

  She put one hand on the nurses’ station and pulled herself up from the chair.

  “That man makes the rules, but we the ones who enforce them. And we get all your scorn in the bargain.”

  Pepper let go of the desktop and stood tall again. “But he can’t just decide to keep me here like that. Without telling me.”

  The other nurse, whom Pepper now recognized as the one he had knocked down during his escape attempt weeks before, stopped jimmying the desk drawer and grabbed a three-ring binder. She opened the cover and flipped pages and finally found the one she wanted. She stood up and stepped closer to Scotch Tape, then set the open binder on the desktop so Pepper could see.

  A form with four paragraphs of single-spaced legalese. It looked like a warranty.

  “So what’s this?” Pepper asked. He barely glanced at it. He didn’t want to read, he wanted to be heard.

  Scotch Tape said, “Consent form, big man. Agreeing to be admitted as a patient. Everyone has to sign one if the seventy-two-hour period ends but the doctor thinks you still need to be with us.”

  The nurse reached down and tapped the bottom of the page with one finger. Her wrist was still sprained from the fall she’d taken thanks to Pepper.

  “You signed it. You agreed,” she said with some satisfaction.

  Now Pepper actually looked at the page. That scrawl at the bottom was his signature? It looked more like someone had drooled blue ink on the page.

  “I’ve been in half a coma for the last four weeks.”

  Miss Chris moved closer, right next to his left arm. She looked at the consent form. “Looks like your hand was working.”

  Pepper understood that this was a joke, but not for him. Not even really on him. It was the gallows humor of people who’ve seen this kind of mess happen before. And will again. What can you do? That was the unspoken phrase at the end of every sentence. What can you do? Just go along.

  Pepper felt his rage just then like a series of small explosions. In his gut. His chest. His throat. His hands. The rational part of him was howling, Don’t do anything! Don’t do anything! Calm down! But it was like holding a conversation right below a rumbling jet engine. Whatever Pepper did next was going to fuck him, long term. But he felt incapable of stopping himself.

  Then Pepper felt the small, bony fingers wrap around his wrist. A touch he knew, even in this state. The only person who’d put her hands on him with any tenderness in this wasteland.

  Dorry was there, at his right side, pulling at his wrist, looking up at him serenely.

  “You’ve been down there, Pepper. You already know that road. You know exactly where it ends.”

  Pepper started to pull back, despite himself.

  She said, “More punishment. More drugs. That’s what they’ll give you.”

  The nurse next to Scotch Tape said, “That’s not fair, Dorry.”

  Dorry sighed. “But it’s still true.”

  Pepper’s hands relaxed and his shoulders did, too. That rage in his gut, his chest, his throat—it left him like a bad spirit being cast out. Dorry still held his wrist.

  He exhaled. He felt like a lost child who has wandered into the wrong house.

  “What should I do instead?” he asked her weakly.

  “For now?” Dorry grinned. “Let’s go to Group.”

  Then Dorry quietly led Pepper to one of the conference rooms on Northwest 1.

  There were already a few people inside the meeting room, on their feet, and when Pepper entered the room, an older man called out to him.

  “Grab the end of that table, please.”

  But Pepper couldn’t follow the order. Had he even heard it? No. He was repeating the date in his head.

  March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17.

  The older man clapped his hands loudly and Pepper finally snapped back. The guy looked to be in his fifties, red-faced, bald. The way he grit his teeth, he looked like Bob Hope; the chin like a shovel, the broad forehead and high cheekbones.

  He looked at Pepper and said, “The others already know me. I’m Dr. Barger.”

  Dr. Barger was broad and short. He seemed unlike any doctor Pepper had ever seen. He wore a sport coat, but the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, the reddish flesh of his chest visible. Thick gray chest hairs ran all the way up to his Adam’s apple. And he wore a thin gold chain that lay in the hair like an extension cord in a shag carpet. Dr. Barger looked like a swinger.

  “Let’s go,” he said sternly, pointing at one end of the conference table again.

  What did Pepper know better than this? Moving furniture. It was almost comforting to do the work. He grabbed one end. He’d lifted it a foot
off the ground before he even asked where he was supposed to take it.

  Dr. Barger couldn’t heft the other end. He gave it two tugs and a vein on his forehead throbbed perilously. He stopped trying and looked around the room, at the other patients. “A little help,” the doctor said.

  And who came to the rescue? The teenage girl who’d chopped Pepper down. Loochie. The kid didn’t get her end as high as Pepper’s—how could she, she stood a foot shorter—but the weight of the table didn’t seem to bother her any more than it did Pepper. She still wore that light blue knit cap. The pom-poms sat on either side of her head like mouse’s ears.

  Pepper and Loochie frowned at each other.

  This little thing took me out? Pepper thought. He felt a dose of grudging respect.

  Dr. Barger, oblivious to any tension, waved toward the far end of the room. “Put the table over there. Line it up against the back wall.”

  As Pepper and Loochie moved the table to the back of the room, the four other patients rearranged chairs. There were only seven people in the room, including the doctor, so they’d only need one table for their group session.

  Pepper recognized a few of the patients. Dorry, of course. And Loochie. Coffee, too. A pair of white women who looked like each other—identical short haircuts, similar light blue mom jeans and Old Navy T-shirts showing the American flag. Even their bodies looked alike, bottom-heavy like butternut squash. Not twins, not siblings, but alike.

  As everyone sat at the conference table, Dr. Barger smiled. “And now I’d like to welcome you all to our weekly Book Group.”

  One of the two short-haired women said, “How can you call it a weekly Book Group when we never have any books?”

  The other said, “Don’t be too hard on the doc. Have you looked at this bunch? I’m not too sure all of us can read!”

  The first woman pointed across the table at Pepper, and said, “Hey, Frankenstein. You hate books as much as you hate fire?”