Victor Lavalle - The Devil in Silver

Miss Chris continued talking but she wasn’t actually addressing Pepper, so he stopped listening. He brought his lips down to his hand and slurped up both pills. They sat on his tongue. His mouth hung open as if the pills were scalding hot.

“I’m a Verizon employee?” Miss Chris continued. “Put your eyes to my ID and it will tell you different.”

He wasn’t getting past Miss Chris, out of this room, toward that phone call, if he didn’t swallow the pills.

Pepper finally closed his mouth and gulped. He felt the dry taste of the pills at the back of his tongue as Miss Chris wound down her rant.

Once Miss Chris had seen him swallow the meds, her job was done. She turned and left the room without even a wave.

Pepper didn’t want to run out right after her. He didn’t want to follow behind her down the hall. So he went into the bathroom where he found two sets of towels and washcloths on a rack by the shower. One set looked used, the other set clean. Pepper undressed and took a warm shower. There was a soap dispenser on the wall here, just like the one by the sink. Pepper squeezed out a few dollops of Pepto-Bismol-pink soap. He tried to wash off the moment with Miss Chris. He stood under the showerhead with his eyes closed and wondered what effect those two little pills would have. They’d been so small.

He dried off, dressed again, and left his room.

The hallway gave the feeling of a community college. Institutional. Low-budget. But now he noticed the wooden railing running alongside either wall. It ran about waist height. Unbalanced patients could cling to these wooden rails and pull themselves down any hall.

Parallel to the railing hung a strip of wallpaper, like trim just beneath the ceiling. A series of five repeating images. Lighthouses. A lighthouse at night, under a full sun, at dawn, in the evening, overlooking the sea during a storm. The painted lighthouses ran all the way down Northwest 2.

Pepper followed their lights.

He reached the nurses’ station, the room at the hub of the unit. Four staff members worked at the station, all seated. Pepper noticed Miss Chris moving down Northwest 1. She stomped toward the secure door in her practical shoes, still speaking out loud. But to whom?

The nurses’ station was a rectangular desk area, with two tiers. The outer tier stood as tall as a bar top. Behind that top tier was a second one, lower, where staff members could sit and work at desk height. Pepper saw the tops of four heads. He didn’t recognize any of these people from the intake team last night. Two nurses, an orderly, and a social worker were all in there, hunched over, heads down, filling out forms in the natural posture of the public-hospital worker.

Pepper wanted to walk over and ask about that phone call. But first he had to make his mind understand what his eyes were seeing. The image wasn’t blurry — four staff members worked inside the nurses’ station — but the meaning of that image made less sense. He could’ve been looking at a giant terra-cotta pot, the tops of the four heads like four plants just breaking the surface of the soil. He was swaying and didn’t even realize Dorry had grabbed his hand until she yanked on his pinky.

She looked up at him, unsmiling. “You better hurry if you want breakfast. They’re about to shut down. Are you hungry?”

Pepper was hungry. In fact, ravenous. Huey, Dewey, and Louie sure hadn’t taken him out to dinner before they dropped him at New Hyde last night. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.

“I have to make a call first,” he said.

But whose voice was that who said it? His, but not his. Distant. Slow.

“It’s eight twenty-five,” Dorry told him, and to Pepper her voice sounded faster, a bit daffier, than it had the night before. “They shut breakfast down at eight thirty and don’t serve food again until lunch. You want to wait that long?”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. His naturally big appetite had been enhanced.

“Wait,” Pepper said. “How can it be past half past eight ?”

Dorry pointed at a wall where no clock hung. She kept her finger pointed there as if he just couldn’t see it. Miss Chris had given Pepper those pills at seven a.m. He’d lost almost an hour and a half since then? Those two little pills had walloped his ass.

Now Dorry pulled at his pinky again. “You can eat or you can talk, but you can’t do both in five minutes. The phones will be there when you’re done. I promise.”

Pepper nodded at her, or at least he hoped he did. He had a hard time feeling his body. For instance, he was already walking now and he’d hardly noticed. Dorry led Pepper around the nurses’ station and held on to him. Not one staff member looked up at them. All he heard when passing them was the skritching of their pens.

Dorry pulled Pepper down another hallway. One she hadn’t showed him the night before. “This is Northwest Five,” she said. “You remember the wagon wheel?”

Pepper did but he couldn’t say yes and nod his head and walk simultaneously. So he just looked down at his feet in their gray thermal socks. He hadn’t even put on his boots. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right .

Much like Northwest 1 and 2 the hall here was lined with closed doors. They barely registered in Pepper’s periphery. Left then right . So when they reached the end of Northwest 5, Pepper didn’t expect the room to be so big and bright. It was filled with chairs and tables and surprisingly natural light. It was twice the size of the room at the hub of the ward.

“This,” Dorry said, sweeping her free hand and speaking in a theatrical whisper, “is the television lounge.”

There were six round wooden tables. Each could fit four or five people. They were spread out in a crescent shape, running along two adjacent walls that were entirely made up of ceiling-to-floor windows. These windows even looked like glass without chicken-wire veins.

Dorry seemed to read his thoughts. “Pretty, aren’t they? But don’t get too excited. They’re glass coated with shatterproof plastic. They’re actually even tougher than the windows in our rooms, they just don’t look as industrial. It’s expensive stuff! Which is why New Hyde only paid for it here, in the lounge.”

This lounge was the closest the psych unit had to a showroom. A place where photos were taken on the rare occasions when the psych unit made it into the hospital’s brochures. (Four times in forty years.) More important, the lounge was where families sat with patients during visiting hours. It had to offer a better view than the bedrooms.

And what could Pepper see through those floor-to-ceiling shatterproof glass windows? A decrepit old basketball court. Half-court, actually. With one tired-ass basket. The rim oxidized from orange to a sickly brown. The once-white backboard had gone gray. Even the pole tilted forward about ten degrees. It wouldn’t be hard to dunk on a hoop like that, but then patients weren’t ever taken out there to play basketball.

Dorry said, “There’s five smoke breaks a day. They let patients stand out there to puff.”

Dorry brought Pepper to a tall wheeled cart, like the kind used in school cafeterias. Gray as a gunship, with large black wheels at the base. An orderly stood there, but didn’t seem like he wanted to linger. It wasn’t Scotch Tape, but a different black guy, tall and skinny and disinterested. The orderly removed the last full tray and almost handed it to Pepper, but Pepper couldn’t get his hands raised. His arms just stayed there at his sides even though the fingers did wiggle. Dorry took the tray for him. And with that, the orderly checked his watch—8:32—and pushed the cafeteria cart out of the television lounge and down Northwest 5.