“Eight out!” she shouted, for no one’s benefit. It’s not like one of the orderlies, or another nurse, or any of the higher-paid staff, was standing around with a clipboard, taking count. No. Miss Chris called out the number only to alert the other staff members back at the nurses’ station that she had monitored this break and she better not be bothered to cover another soon.
Four of the eight patients spent their time smoking. Japanese Freddy Mercury and Yuckmouth, Wally Gambino and, of all people, the Haint. They stood around the tilted basketball rim and lit up. The other four gathered under the maple tree. The ground showed dozens of maple seeds, gone brown because they’d fallen and found only concrete. Nowhere to grow so they died. Dorry reached down and picked one up and twirled the stem between her thumb and forefinger.
“My son used to like playing helicopters with these.”
“He never visits you?” Coffee asked. He didn’t realize the line might sound harsh.
Dorry let the husk go and it fell without whirling. “I like to think he’s always near me. But my daughter visits.” She seemed glum but smiled after a moment. “And she brings my grandsons.”
Out here, away from the watchful eye of a moderately vigilant staff, Pepper dropped the droopy lip and straightened his left leg.
Loochie said, “Why are you acting like that?”
“I’m trying to make them think I’m still on my medication. We were all supposed to do that. Remember?”
Loochie said, “I was!”
Dorry and Coffee nodded, too. As if their chicanery had been clear. And Pepper understood that this, right now, was how they thought they appeared all the time, even when the medication had been wrecking them. Even Dorry, who’d been at New Hyde for decades, had never seen herself as she’d been seen by others.
And what about Pepper? Before he got all incredulous about the distance between the reality and the perception of Dorry, Coffee, and Loochie, maybe he’d better consider the difference between the man he believed he was and the man so many others encountered. His brother and sister-in-law. His mom and dad. The super of his building, once or twice when his apartment had no heat in the depths of winter. And, of course, Mari. He’d hoped she thought of him as a valiant knight, but from that phone call, she seemed to think of him as, at best, a bother. He wondered if she’d ever found his brother’s number. So far Ralph sure hadn’t called or come by. Maybe nobody ever saw themselves completely objectively. Every self-image needs a flattering mirror or two.
Pepper said, “Well, let’s talk about now. Let’s talk about what’s next.”
Loochie, without thinking, crouched and found a half dozen pebbles there on the ground and as she gathered them up she said, “We let it out. Then we light it up.”
She stood again and shook the handful of small stones in her palm.
Pepper said, “That’s one vote for fighting.”
Coffee said, “I just want to get the right people in here so they can make this place work the way it’s supposed to.”
Pepper said, “That’s one vote for insane faith.”
Coffee cut his eyes at Pepper and Pepper corrected himself.
“That’s one vote for optimism. How about that?”
Coffee said, “Accurate.”
“I want to talk with him,” Dorry said. “He needs to hear us. We need to make him understand that he’s hurting us. Maybe he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. Have you considered that? Once you know someone, it’s a lot harder to remain enemies.”
Loochie shook her closed fist at Dorry. “So you want to make friends with the Devil? That’s your plan?”
“He’s a man!” Dorry shouted. The patients by the rim looked over quickly but soon returned their attention to their cigarettes.
“And I would think that if anyone should be able to feel a little sympathy for a person with troubles,” Dorry added, “it’s people like us.”
Loochie said, “People like you, maybe. People like me? We don’t shake hands with monsters.”
Dorry laughed. “What does that mean? ‘People like me.’ Teenagers? I’ve got bras that are older than you.”
Loochie scrunched her nose. “That’s nasty.”
Coffee poked Pepper in the arm. “What about you, then? What do you want to do?”
“I want to get out of here,” Pepper admitted. “I don’t want to open that door or fight or have peace talks with that thing. I want us to leave. It’s like you people forgot what it’s like to live anywhere but here!”
Loochie and Coffee and Dorry flinched at that.
Dorry squinted at Pepper. “And where will we go once you open the big door? Will I stay with my daughter in Greenpoint? Where she’ll treat me like a burden every single day? Until eventually she calls an ambulance for me, because I just don’t fit into her life there, and I’m escorted back to New Hyde Hospital by the EMTs. That’s your plan?”
Pepper tried to speak, but Dorry reached across and touched Loochie lightly on the side of her head.
“And Loochie will go back with her mother and her brother, yes? At least until they call the police to come get her after one too many fights. And then she’ll be right back at New Hyde, you can bet.”
Dorry pointed at Coffee next. “And he’ll be free for as long as he doesn’t attract anyone’s notice. But as soon as he does, they’ll come talk to him about his status in this country. And when they find out that he’s overstayed his original visa? They’ll send him right back to Tora Bora.”
“Uganda,” Coffee said.
Dorry nodded. “You’re welcome.”
She stepped right up to Pepper, one shoulder bumping him in the gut.
“So when you say you want us to leave, who are you really thinking of? We can’t run from what’s coming. But if you want to go, you can go. Why don’t you climb that fence right now?”
Pepper looked at the chain link, the kind he’d been climbing since he was a kid, all around Queens. Even with the lingering ache in his rib cage, even with the barbed wire bundled along the top edge, he thought he could do it. Strip off his pajama top and toss it over the barbs to protect his skin. He’d get cut, but he could manage. With the meds out of his system for three days, he felt in so much more command of his body. He felt sure even his wounds had healed faster. He watched the fence line and the other three watched him. Until Miss Chris opened the door to the lounge again and called the patients back in.
Miss Chris shouted, “Eight in!”
“If you’re going to stay with us,” Dorry said, calmer now, “I think we should wait until Saturday night.”
“Overnight weekend shift,” Coffee added.
Loochie said, “Only two staff on duty then. That’s smart.”
Saturday night.
Two days from then. Forty-eight more hours of dumping their meds down bathroom sinks; 2,880 minutes of gaining strength; 172,800 seconds before Pepper had to decide if he would fight alongside them, or flee.
18
SATURDAY MORNING, PEPPER woke up to find himself alone in the room and its door halfway open. Since his bed sat right beside the hidden door in the wall, he’d taken to touching it at the bulge where the handle used to be. In the last two days, he’d probably rubbed the spot two dozen times. The motion had become reassuring, soothing, as he tried to decide what he’d do tonight. Pepper touched it now but, in a flash, saw this behavior as if watching himself from across the room. He thought of Coffee at the phones, dialing and dialing. Or Loochie, pulling out her own hair on so many nights. Obsessive ticks. Maybe he was developing one, too. Pepper pulled his hand away. He jumped out of bed. He needed to do something else, to focus on anything else.
Pepper closed the door. He went across the room to Coffee’s dresser, and slid it away from the wall. He wanted to see if there was a door outlined under the paint here, too. But when Pepper moved the dresser, he found all these small black droppings on the floor. Rat turds. Wonderful.
Pepper rested one arm on Coffee’s dresse
r, which made the flimsy thing slide toward Coffee’s bed. When it connected, he heard a rattling sound. Pepper stooped and pulled open the bottom drawer and found pills. Handfuls of them. He’d seen Coffee dump some of his meds down the bathroom sink for the past few days, but who knew how many were assigned to the man each day? Pepper had been kept on a steady diet of two pills, three times a day, so he’d assumed that was about normal. In fact, there were patients on the unit who took six, seven, nine pills per meal. Imagine that. Twenty-seven doses a day. Coffee was one of those. This drawer full of pills represented just five days of abstaining.
The sight made Pepper downright nostalgic for the days of Coffee pestering him for coins. It was a wonder Coffee had been able to do that much with this many pharmaceuticals in his blood. Nickels, dimes, and quarters. For a moment Pepper was reminded of the simple—stupid!—pleasure he used to take in gathering up his coins and going to a Coinstar machine at the Key Food near his apartment. Feeding the change into that swiss-cheese grill and listening to it all rattle as the machine counted up the currency. Sometimes he’d even forget to take the slip to the register and redeem it for cash right away. The joy had been in finding out how much he’d collected. That’s the kind of thing that being inside the unit made a person miss.
As Pepper slid the drawer shut again, he wondered if, and when, the police would ever return for him. When they’d bring him before a judge. When he’d receive sentencing. Or was this the sentence? Not what they’d intended when they picked him up but just as good. He wondered where he might be in the NYPD’s system. How long after the paperwork was filed before Huey, Dewey, and Louie would return for him? In books, movies, television, the justice system worked with a ruthless efficiency. Arrest, arraignment, trial, and verdict, all in forty-six minutes and forty-eight seconds.
Not here.
Since the conversation under the maple tree, Pepper had been evading the other members of his revolutionary cell. When Coffee went out to “take” his meds and get breakfast, Pepper pretended to still be sleeping. Yesterday, he didn’t eat one meal with Coffee or Dorry or Loochie. If they’d noticed, they didn’t stress him about it. All that mattered, for their purposes, was what he’d do tonight. But he still didn’t know.
Before leaving the room, Pepper went to his dresser and took out his street clothes. The slacks and socks had dried. They were a little stale, but they didn’t stink. They now showed large orange splotches where the dirty water had soaked through and stained. On the right butt cheek of his slacks, and in spots down both legs. The heels of both socks, too. And yet Pepper put them on. His shirt had been ruined so he still had to wear the pajama top.
With those spotted clothes on he almost looked like a man wearing desert camouflage pants. He even put on his boots again.
Pepper walked to the nurses’ station after all the other patients had been there and gone. Miss Chris and Josephine had been on duty together, but only Miss Chris stood waiting for him now. Josephine sat in front of the computer again. The screen glowed slightly green, and she stared at it with an expression beyond confusion, beyond frustration. Josephine almost looked serene as she watched the screen. Her arms were crossed, as if waiting for the computer to address her. As if it might offer an ingot of wisdom if she sat there long enough.
Miss Chris, on the other hand, waggled the clipboard at Pepper when he entered the oval room. “This the one I waiting on.” She took one look at his stained, spotty slacks but said nothing. At least he wasn’t walking around without them.
Pepper reached the nurses’ station and stretched out his right hand for his pills.
“Eh-heh, just like that? You come late-late and don’t even apologize?”
She gave Pepper the sharp eyes. But he’d been on the unit for a month and a half and felt less intimidated by her now. It wasn’t that he thought she was harmless, he just couldn’t hide that he also found her to be a pain in the ass. Pepper kept his hand out and did not apologize. He looked her directly, defiantly, in the eye.
“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 hu
man representative was only calling to let the home owner know they were now homeless. 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.”
The Devil in Silver: A Novel Page 18