The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  “You think she’s right?” Pepper asked. And he had to repeat himself because Coffee didn’t answer him. He realized he must’ve whispered.

  “You think she’s right? It took Sammy when it couldn’t get me?”

  They reached the nurses’ station and Coffee said, “I wish I could tell you yes or no. But I can only say I’m happy you’re all right.”

  Pepper touched his own chest lightly. “Not that good.”

  Coffee waved away any self-pity. “Better than Sammy, I bet.”

  It was almost dinnertime and all the staff, besides Josephine, were busy dropping pills into little white plastic cups. Preparing for the dinner rush. Coffee eyed the phone alcove.

  Then Pepper reached over and slipped the blue three-ring binder from under Coffee’s arm. The copy of Jaws fell to the floor with a smack, but Coffee didn’t pay it any attention.

  “What’s in here?” Pepper asked.

  But he didn’t even have time to playfully flip through the pages. Coffee reached up and thumped Pepper directly against his wounded sternum, and Pepper hopped on one foot and his hands flew out and he huffed out one big breath. And Coffee’s binder fell from Pepper’s hands and Coffee caught it. Then he stooped and picked up his copy of Jaws. By the time one of the orderlies looked up from the tray of pills, Coffee was walking toward Northwest 2 and Pepper seemed to be doing some kind of interpretative dance.

  The orderly said, “Go get ready for dinner.”

  Pepper steadied himself and breathed deeply as he walked. Trying to catch up to Coffee, who was already halfway down Northwest 2, almost at their room. First Loochie, then the staff, the Devil and now even Coffee. What was the point of being as big as he was if no one respected it? He didn’t realize how much it would rattle his confidence to lose the power of his size. Besides that, what did he have? Other things, surely. But what?

  He caught up to Coffee, standing in the doorway of their room.

  Pepper stopped right behind Coffee and said, “What’s the holdup?”

  Coffee pointed. Up.

  Pepper said, “Ah, shit.”

  The ceiling had sprung a leak.

  Right over Pepper’s mattress.

  A rust-colored stain, about the diameter of a coffee mug, could be seen in the ceiling tile above his bed.

  They watched as a drop fell from the ceiling and landed directly on Pepper’s pillow. It wasn’t the first. There was a reddish blot about as big as a half-dollar.

  Pepper put one hand on Coffee’s shoulder, for balance. His chest throbbed, his throat tightened. He whispered, “Should I report this?”

  Coffee looked up at the ceiling and down at the pillow. Sadly, he knew this place much better than Pepper. He’d been at New Hyde a year.

  Coffee said, “You should just move your bed.”

  The spot in the ceiling seemed to darken for a moment, then a bead of moisture gathered and dangled and descended. They watched it fall. As if they hadn’t already seen what would happen. They watched it hit Pepper’s pillow. The reddish blot grew.

  “That’s disgusting,” Coffee said.

  True. But how disgusting? What was it? Pepper took his hand off Coffee’s shoulder. He looked down at Coffee with a look of pleading. Would Coffee go in first? But Coffee just shook his head. Coffee sure wasn’t going in to investigate on Pepper’s behalf. He wasn’t about to be that black guy. (You know, the one who scouts ahead and gets his ass sliced in two. Somewhere near the first ten minutes of the horror movie. Although, to be fair, moviemakers have largely stopped that practice. Now there’s usually one amiable but forgettable white person who dies first, and then they kill off all the nonwhite cast members.)

  The ceiling dripped again. The drop fell. The pillow caught it. The reddish blot bloomed.

  Coffee stepped aside and Pepper cautiously moved toward his bed, his eyes on the stain. He reached the pillow and pulled it away from the bed. He looked back at Coffee, who hadn’t stepped any farther into the room. His roommate looked poised to book back down the hall.

  Pepper lifted the pillow to his face. Up close the stain looked almost the color of a sunset, reddish brown. He thought of Sammy. Was her body right there on the other side of the ceiling tiles? Had that thing dragged her body into the darkness and done to her what it had meant for him? And brought her husk back to Pepper, like a cat presenting a dead bird?

  Pepper brought the pillow to his nose.

  He sniffed the fabric.

  “Rainwater,” Pepper said. “I think it’s rainwater.”

  He wasn’t just saying this. That’s really how the pillow smelled. Musty, with a faint whiff of corroded metal. A backed-up rain gutter maybe. This was a worthless old building that hadn’t been well maintained even when it was an ophthalmology ward. Standing water and poor construction and a rusty metal rain guard equals orangish musty water backing up, leaking through the ceiling. Onto his pillow. Obviously he didn’t know that this was true, but it did make sense. Also, it was the preferable explanation. It wasn’t blood.

  Rainwater.

  Pepper dropped his pillow on the floor. At the very least, they’d have to give him a new one, right? Then he moved to the foot of his bed, clamped one paw around the bed frame and pulled. It hardly moved. He tried again and his rib cage filed a protest. It sent shock waves of pain up into his skull. He actually saw small flashes of light in his eyes. Pepper let go of the bed and breathed and patted his chest and let the pain subside. Then he looked to his roommate—his friend?—Coffee.

  “Will you help me?”

  Pepper grabbed the bottom end of the bed again and waited there. Coffee watched Pepper for a moment and finally tossed his copy of Jaws onto his mattress. Coffee walked to the head of Pepper’s bed and grabbed the frame with his one free hand.

  Pepper gestured at the three-ring binder and said, “I won’t swipe that from you again.”

  Coffee nodded. “Okay.” But he didn’t put the binder down.

  And Pepper, still aching, decided not to push it. He and Coffee lifted and together they got the bed off the ground. Pepper nodded toward the opposite wall and they moved together, kind of crab-walking.

  Picture it: Pepper’s end of the bed tilted up about six inches higher than Coffee’s, and he’s popping a sweat because, even with the help, his injuries have made him weaker. And at the other end, you’ve got Coffee, concentrating more on the book in his right hand than the bed in his left. As a result, the frame wobbles and the legs at his end occasionally bump against the floor. Pepper wanted to give the man a few moving tips. (Paramount being: Use two damn hands!) But no one ever listens to a know-it-all so he tried a different tack.

  “You ever reach that guy? The controller?”

  “Comptroller,” Coffee corrected. “I spoke to a guy who worked for the man. A ‘fund-raiser.’ ”

  “And what did this guy say?”

  “He thought I was calling for New Hyde Hospital. Like maybe I was someone high up. He said I could probably talk to the comptroller if …”

  “If?” Pepper couldn’t suppress a grin. Though with the trouble he was having holding up the bed it looked more like a grimace.

  “If I was interested in donating to the campaign fund. I laughed when he said that and explained that I was a patient.”

  The bed bonked the floor again, then screeched as the legs scratched the floor. Pepper wondered if the staff heard, but then he wondered if they would even care. Were patients allowed to rearrange?

  “What did this guy do when you said you were a patient?” Pepper asked.

  “He hung up.”

  They reached the opposite wall and Pepper lowered his end. Coffee just dropped his. The whole frame twanged. Pepper’s chest heaved a bit from the labor. A month without work was like a month without exercise. He felt a little ashamed to have lost so much strength so quickly. But his mind wasn’t quite as weak. He’d taken his midday dose with lunch when he came in from the smoker’s court, but missing the morning dose still had ma
de a difference. His mind felt more vigorous than it had in weeks.

  “Where are you from, anyway?” Pepper asked.

  Coffee seemed to stiffen, a conversation coming that he didn’t enjoy. “I’m from Uganda,” he said.

  The glaze on Pepper’s eyeballs could’ve been used to coat a turkey.

  “Uganda,” Pepper said. “Of course. I see.”

  Coffee sighed. “It’s in East Africa.”

  Pepper nodded as if he’d known all along. “Where else would it be?”

  (Pepper had actually thought it was an island in the Caribbean.)

  But then Pepper snapped a finger and said, “Idi Amin!”

  At this Coffee seemed to deflate. “Still our most famous export.”

  Coffee looked at the front door, and Pepper could tell this guy was about to run away. Maybe Idi Amin, the murderous dictator, wasn’t the best way to talk about Coffee’s homeland. Or maybe that just wasn’t what Coffee cared about most now. Pepper needed to bring the talk back to their situation here. They could talk about the glorious history of Samoa (Uganda!) later on.

  “The mayor,” Pepper said. “The comptroller. Who are you going to try next? Department of Sanitation?”

  “At least I’m trying something!” Coffee yelled back.

  Pepper and Coffee pushed the bed up against the wall here. Coffee and Pepper’s beds were in the same position, lining the same wall, on either side of the room’s door.

  Only problem now was that Pepper’s bed sat right below the ceiling tile that had cracked and fallen in the night before. Thankfully, someone on staff had come through and removed the pieces of tile (though they hadn’t swept up the dust) but the hole remained. Instead of sleeping under the stain, he’d be sleeping here? Pepper climbed on his bed slowly and rose to his toes. Slipping his head into the crawl space felt like he was slipping it into a tiger’s mouth. The top of his head felt hot. He remembered those two feet dangling down from the darkness. He tried to see to the other end of the room, where his bed had just been. Trying to make out the silhouette of Sammy’s body. But he couldn’t tell. Soon enough the dust floating in the air up there coated his forehead, his eyelids, his lips. He couldn’t stay up there any longer and he hopped down off his bed. He winced and clutched his chest.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Pepper said. And he wasn’t just talking about where he’d rest his head. He meant maintaining. He meant facing whatever came next.

  Then Coffee walked over to Pepper’s dresser and said, “Help me move this.”

  The dresser looked like wood but wasn’t. Didn’t even seem to be some kind of plastic. It might almost have been made of cardboard, that’s how cheap it felt. If they’d painted fake drawers on the back of a refrigerator box, it wouldn’t have been much worse than this.

  Pepper pushed the dresser and it slid so easily the move almost seemed graceful. He slid it until it was at the far end of this wall. Now it sat adjacent to the two windows in the room.

  “You’ll make fun of me if I tell you who I’m really hoping to reach,” Coffee said.

  Pepper tapped the top of the dresser. “Yes,” he said. “I probably will.”

  When Coffee said the name it was unintelligible.

  “Try again, my friend.”

  Coffee set his three-ring binder down on Pepper’s dresser. He opened the cover and flipped through the pages. Columns had been drawn on every page, by Coffee’s own hand. It looked like a ledger. Page after page filled with surprisingly readable script. Coffee had the most elegant handwriting Pepper had ever seen.

  “These are my notes,” Coffee began. “Every person I’ve reached in the last year. Their names and numbers, the offices they represent. What they said they would do. What they said they wouldn’t do. What was actually done. You’ll see there’s nothing in that column. Council members. Lawyers. Reporters. Clerks. Secretaries. Everything goes in here. So I can prove my story.”

  “Prove that you’ve been ignored?”

  Coffee flipped through a series of blank pages until he reached the very last page in the book. This one had two words written at the top.

  “Prove that I tried everything. So when I finally reach him, he’ll know I’m a serious man.”

  The two words at the top of the page were “Big Boss.”

  Pepper touched the letters. “You mean God?”

  Coffee laughed, it was a soft sound, and his eyes narrowed when he smiled. “I don’t appeal to God for man’s mistakes. I just have to reach the man who will make things right down here. I don’t write his name because when people see his name, hear his name, they go crazy. They get so angry. They get scared. Or disappointed. But it doesn’t matter. His name means more to them than it does to me. His name could be anything, it’s his power that counts.”

  Pepper stepped back and looked at Coffee’s serious round brown face.

  “Don’t tell me.…”

  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.

  15

  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 Pep
per 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.”