Victor Lavalle - The Devil in Silver

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.

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.

Being 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.

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.