Josephine pushed her chair back so she could stand as well. Feeling edgy because of what Loochie had said to Scotch Tape. Her move left the staff phone unguarded on the desk. Boldly, Coffee grabbed the receiver.
“Coffee!” Josephine shouted.
Pepper shouted now, too. Repeating himself. “How did you go online, Coffee?”
Coffee looked back at Pepper. “The mind was the first computer!”
A line that silenced everyone for a moment.
Finally Pepper said, “Well, what the fuck does that mean?”
“The mind is technology beyond anything human beings have invented so far,” Coffee said. “Without all those meds in my bloodstream, I could access the Internet with my will. From anywhere. I only had to shut my eyes and concentrate. I have full use of my mind’s power now. You see?”
And this is the moment when Pepper thought of Dorry’s sweater, inside out; of Coffee discarding his binder; even Loochie’s fingers slipping under her red scarf. Each person slightly different from the healthier picture presented only two days ago. Maybe these folks were on psychiatric medications because they actually needed them. Why hadn’t Pepper seriously considered that before now?
Two words slipped out of his mouth. Pepper said, “Oh, shit.…”
But it was too late for turning back.
Scotch Tape grabbed Coffee’s wrist. He looked like he’d tear Coffee’s hand off just to get the receiver back.
Dorry shouted, “Wait! Wait! We can talk this out!”
“Talking is done,” Scotch Tape growled.
Loochie said, “You got that right.”
Then she punched Scotch Tape square in the throat.
Scotch Tape went down easier than Josephine. The guy straight-up collapsed after Loochie yapped him.
That isn’t meant to clown Scotch Tape, or make him seem weak. Really. One punch from Loochie Gardner could topple small governments. The man simply found himself overmatched. As Pepper had been when he made the mistake of giving Loochie’s mother (and brother) the bum rush.
By comparison, Josephine was much luckier than Scotch Tape; she only faced Pepper and Coffee and Dorry.
In light of what happened to Scotch Tape, Josephine didn’t hesitate. She scrambled. Over the nurses’ station. Climbing on the low desk and vaulting right over the higher counter. She fled. But when she landed on the other side she slipped and nearly fell. Pepper and Coffee caught her. To them, this looked like gallantry, but from Josephine’s perspective, two wild men had just grabbed her arms.
And then Josephine just freaked.
She hollered, yes, but that was actually the least of it. Her arms went stiff and her hands balled into fists and her legs dropped out from under her so fast that Coffee and Pepper nearly went to the floor themselves. It was like her lower half fainted.
Meanwhile her mouth continued to wail.
Boy, did it.
Pepper became annoyed instantly. Maybe she thought they were going to rob her? Rape her? She acted like they were going to cut open her belly and feast on her organs. All this after he’d just borrowed a copy of Van Gogh’s letters! Funny to say it, but Pepper’s feelings were really hurt just then.
But here’s the thing: Pepper had it wrong. Josephine wasn’t thinking about them when she snapped. Not really. She didn’t scream just out of fear for herself in that moment. It was also a deeper terror. When Loochie punched the orderly, Josephine felt a raw, cold shock, of course. But when the two men grabbed her, she felt the fear.
Because she thought of her mother. Lorraine Washburn.
Who lived with Josephine, the only child, in a two-family house out in Rego Park. Her mother hadn’t been able to take good care of herself anymore and moved in with Josephine in 2009. And Josephine had welcomed her mother. Because, even though she was young, Josephine had spent the last few years cultivating little more than her own loneliness. Then here came her mother, Lorraine, a woman who’d been quite independent herself once, but couldn’t manage it any longer. And Josephine received the woman as the wick welcomes the match. Josephine appreciated her mother’s company, now that she was becoming a woman and no longer a girl. So when Pepper and Coffee grabbed Josephine, she screamed, and struggled, from a place beyond self-preservation. Josephine saw Lorraine waking up tomorrow morning to find her daughter hadn’t returned home. Josephine saw Lorraine mystified by this sudden change in their soothing routine; saw her mother retreating to the living-room couch out of fear; sitting there, unable to imagine who else she might rely on. Unable to recall even a cousin’s phone number. Paralyzed and puzzled. So scared she might not even eat, as was her way. Starving from fright. Dying on the second floor of the two-family house after days of confusion and despair. (The first floor reserved for the home owners, Mr. and Mrs. Martinez-Black.) Josephine was going to leave her mother to that? A woman who’d raised her so decently? No. No. No.
Josephine fought hard to make her mouth work, to talk these patients out of doing anything with lasting repercussions. But she couldn’t master speech at the moment. Yelling seemed the best she could do. Josephine Washburn would not let herself die today. No, she would’ve begged if she could. Please. But the only sound that came out of her was this primal howl.
So Coffee and Pepper continued to restrain her.
Then Loochie raised her arm. Loochie made a fist. But Loochie didn’t throw the punch.
Instead, Dorry spoke.
Calmly.
Dorry said, “All right now. All right. Everybody stop and think. Loochie, you don’t want to hit her. And she doesn’t want you to hit her.”
Loochie lowered her arm. It was true. She didn’t want to hit Josephine. She didn’t like the nurse, but she didn’t dislike her, either. She couldn’t say that about Scotch Tape, which is why it had felt so satisfying when he crumbled. And even Scotch Tape wasn’t someone she hated. There was only one person around here that she hated.
One thing.
Josephine looked everywhere but at the old woman. This wasn’t on purpose, but an instinctive response. The reptile part of Josephine’s brain, trying to figure how to save its tail.
Dorry said, “Look at me now. Look at me.”
Josephine’s shoulders went looser at the soothing measure of Dorry’s voice. She unclenched her fists. Pepper and Coffee didn’t let go of her wrists.
“I’m a mother,” Dorry said. “And a grandmother. So believe me, I know you’re somebody’s little girl, too. No one wants to hurt you. That’s not what we’re here to do.”
Dorry touched the pearls around her neck. As if drawing Josephine’s eyes to the pearls would prove these four patients weren’t murderous, violent psychopath cannibals. Would such people wear jewelry? In fact, the pearls only made Dorry seem more peculiar in these circumstances. But what could Josephine do but trust the old ambassador? At least while she found herself trapped between the salt-and-pepper sentries.
“What do you want?” Josephine asked quietly.
“Keys,” Pepper answered, and the nurse looked at him nervously.
“I can’t let you all out of here. I’m sorry but I can’t. You’ll hurt … yourselves.”
Dorry frowned at Pepper to shut him up. She tugged at Pepper’s fingers until he let go of Josephine’s wrist. Then she did the same with Coffee.
Dorry said, “We don’t want to escape.”
“What, then?”
Coffee blew out a deep breath. “The silver door.”
Josephine looked up at Pepper and at Coffee. “I’m not going to let you hurt another patient.”
“You got a lot of rules for a bitch that’s outnumbered,” Loochie said.
Josephine crossed her arms and both Pepper and Coffee winced, afraid of another eruption. They placed their hands over their crotches, just in case; they looked like two soccer players awaiting a direct free kick.
Dorry said, “Nobody’s going to get hurt.”
Josephine sucked her teeth. “Sure.”
Dorry said, “
Look at me. We want to speak with him. You give us the keys. We put you and Clarence into one of the rooms. As soon as we’re done, we let you out. And we’ll take any punishment that comes after that. Okay?”
This all could’ve been over much quicker. Just let Loochie start swinging. But it seemed important to Dorry that the nurse hand over the keys on her own. That the nurse trust Dorry. This didn’t matter so much to the other three at first, but as they listened to Dorry, they, too, felt a change. They didn’t want to batter and steal like criminals. They didn’t want to rampage like frenzied animals. They were human. Dorry put out her hand to accept the nurse’s keys and the others waited patiently.
Josephine looked at each of them, moving from one face to the next. Josephine made twelve dollars an hour at this job. That should put all cries for courageousness into context. Taking this job for that pay had already been an act of bravery.
Finally, Josephine opened her hand and the looped red plastic key chain dangled from her thumb. It swayed side to side. All five of them listened to the keys as they jangled like a wind chime.
Finally Josephine set the keys in Dorry’s palm.
Dorry led Josephine toward Northwest 1. Conference room 2 awaited. Pepper and Coffee followed behind them like members of a broke-ass Praetorian Guard. And last was Loochie, dragging the unconscious orderly backward by the arms. She’d demanded that Pepper and Coffee let her do this alone. Like hauling what you’ve hunted. It was an effort, but she managed.
They brought Josephine and Scotch Tape to the room. Loochie laid the orderly flat on the floor with more tenderness than any of the others might’ve expected.
Dorry sat Josephine in one of the chairs. Pepper and Coffee and Loochie left the room. As Dorry pulled the door shut she said, “We won’t be long. And thank you.”
Josephine didn’t respond. She watched her hands, gathered limply in her lap. After the door was closed and locked, she listened as the footsteps receded.
When Josephine couldn’t hear them anymore, she reached into her pants pocket. They hadn’t thought to pat her down before they locked her in. Josephine pulled out her cell phone.
20
WHEN ALL FOUR patients returned to the oval room, they found themselves stopped up. Like froze up. Shocked. They found a nurses’ station without a staff member behind it. And they didn’t quite know how to react. They weren’t actually free, still stuck inside New Hyde, but even an unattended desk felt like liberation.
And not only for them.
Heatmiser, Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth, Wally Gambino and the Haint, those three women Pepper had seen poring through magazines one night—the redhead and the mousy-looking woman and the Asian (this had to be Loochie’s “Chinese Lady,” right? The one who’d seen Sam’s corpse?)—all these patients surrounded the vacant nurses’ station now, and Pepper’s crew joined them. Wally Gambino leaned over the top of the station and peeked under the desk space as if another nurse or orderly might be hiding there. This was a trick. Had to be.
The patients walked around the station in a circle. All of them, like a game. Inspecting the empty station closely. If only the Trojans had been this methodical! But even after everyone made the circuit, all fourteen patients, they still couldn’t believe it. They kept a prudent distance from the nurses’ station, as if it were a bull that had only been stunned.
Then Coffee broke the spell.
He stepped inside the nurses’ station. A bit of a jolt, just to see that. Then he grabbed one of the wheeled chairs sitting under the desk, pulled it out, and rolled it to the lip of Northwest 5. The others watched him quietly. Then Coffee pushed the chair as hard as he could and it went spinning. It didn’t stop rolling until it reached the television lounge.
“Look at that,” Dorry said quietly.
The patients all turned to Coffee again. As if he should do another act of magic. There was a second chair under the table, but that little trick wouldn’t work twice.
You might expect them to smash the computer next. It was still on, its fan rumbling louder than a dryer in a Laundromat. But these mental patients only gawked at the shoddy equipment, almost like they pitied the staff for having to do their jobs with it. Yes, even this population was well aware of laptops and Smartphones.
Dorry lifted her right hand.
All thirteen other patients looked up at her. What next?
Even Pepper and Loochie and Coffee wondered.
Dorry opened her hand and let the nurse’s keys dangle. They clinked and all the patients looked over their shoulders, around the various bends, so used to having staff members appear seconds after that sound. Heatmiser’s mouth even dripped slightly with saliva. But no one else appeared.
“Does anyone know which of these keys opens the desk drawers?” Dorry asked.
Pepper felt a hot flash of concern. What did that have to do with anything? He’d been choking back his anxieties, but they threatened to spill out now. Coffee with his Internet brain; Loochie whose strength and ferocity only seemed to have increased between the time she’d tangled with him and with Scotch Tape; and now Dorry wanted to do some drawer hopping. It wasn’t just fear that he felt, but guilt. He’d urged Coffee to join him in turning down the meds. And then helped enlist Dorry and Loochie. He’d thought he was doing them a solid, freeing them from the shackles of their sedative servitude, but already it seemed likely he’d been wrong.
Dorry looked at Pepper and whispered, “Have a little faith in me.”
None of the patients knew which key opened which drawers, so they waited as Dorry tried one, then the next. Finally, she found the right key for the right drawer and Dorry peeked inside. She smiled at all the patients who hadn’t joined their Velvet Revolution. (Velvetish, counting Loochie’s punch.) Then Dorry made a big show of stepping back, sweeping her hands over the open drawer. The patients crowded closer. They peeked around and over one another. One voice cried out.
“Cigarettes!”
“This is the staff’s stash.” Dorry smiled. “Take as many as you like.”
Half a dozen hands went into the drawer right away. The staff didn’t stockpile packs, but cartons. (This job was stressful.) There was enough in the drawer for each patient to walk away with a pack of his or her own. Even the ones who weren’t smokers figured, Why not?—and took some for themselves. It was the surprise of the moment, the fact that the stuff belonged to the staff. The idea made all of them a bit giddy. Even if it made them sick, they were going to puff.
Dorry opened her hand again and the keys jangled as they swung. She reached into the drawer and plucked out one cigarette for herself. She didn’t smoke. It was a trophy. A memento. She tucked it into her bra.
She smiled at Pepper, and Pepper did feel relieved by the seeming sanity of this step. Distract the others. Dorry spoke to the patients still milling about. She said, “Now, how about a long smoke break outside?”
All this negotiation took only ten minutes.
Back in conference room 2, Josephine Washburn couldn’t get her phone call through. She hadn’t dialed the police directly because that wasn’t hospital protocol. Instead, she was to first call the head of security on the grounds of New Hyde Hospital. That’s the system that had been put in place, and no one making twelve dollars per hour was encouraged to improvise. The head of security’s phone rang and rang and rang until finally the guy’s voice mail picked up. But even then, Josephine recognized there was a problem. Namely, the voice on the hospital’s security-greeting message was someone she didn’t recognize. It was actually a guy who’d been fired almost a year before. The former head of hospital security. Eugene Klutch. A man who’d been caught stealing food from the hospital kitchens. Not a turkey sandwich, but one hundred frozen turkeys. He’d been behind a series of pantry thefts that had been going on for three years at New Hyde Hospital. At their most brazen, the Klutch crew had stolen two ovens (industrial ovens) from one of the kitchens over in the main building on the campu
s. Klutch hadn’t gone to jail, just been forced to retire. And now, nearly a year later, that man’s voice still hadn’t been changed on the security center’s answering machine. Josephine knew another man had been hired because he was the one who’d given the new employees the lecture about the hospital-security protocols. He’d growled at the new hires, but hadn’t been savvy enough to record a new message? How much faith could Josephine have in hospital security? But she left a message because she was smart enough to know there needed to be evidence that she’d followed protocol.
Next, she called the head of hospital administration. Also as per guidelines. The one rule at New Hyde, above all others, was to avoid embarrassment. (Embarrass, meaning “leave vulnerable to lawsuits.”)
While it was nearly ten p.m., the head of hospital administration could be reached. Or, if not him, then his answering service. (Yes, they do still exist.) So Josephine called those offices (all numbers she’d programmed into her phone at Orientation) and left a message with the woman who answered the line. Josephine explained what had happened, that she was a nurse over in Northwest, that the patients had overpowered her and the orderly (who still hadn’t woken up), and now those patients were roaming the ward freely. “Doing what?” the woman on the line asked, though she sounded magnificently disinterested. Setting fires? Taking drugs? Who knew? The fact that Josephine was locked in a room made it impossible to say. At the end of all this, the woman only sighed, and said, “Please hold the line while I connect you directly.”
Josephine said, “What was the point of asking me those questions if you’re just—”
Then instead of connecting the call the lady hung up on her.
Quite a system.
At that moment, Josephine should’ve called the cops. She’d done all she could to protect New Hyde Hospital. She’d tried to follow protocol, but the protocol was ass.
But for a few seconds she could only stare at the cell phone. Going through all this nonsense to reach someone in charge, this was the first time she’d ever been treated like, well, a patient. With rules that defied all common logic; people employed to help you who are unable, really, to even hear you; the sense that the system’s goal is only to keep trouble contained. It’s not like Josephine had been so all-fired powerful when she was a nurse, but supervising the patients had at least allowed the illusion of some difference between her and them. But now it felt damn hard to pretend. In many ways, at this moment of crisis, she was just as powerless as they were. Josephine didn’t make this connection consciously, but it tickled at her in a way that made her mind freeze. She looked at the phone and knew what she should do, but she couldn’t make her hand act the way her mind wanted. (And even this was quite like the average patient’s day.) Josephine wondered how anyone was supposed to live under such conditions and remain sane.
The Devil in Silver: A Novel Page 20