Victor Lavalle - The Devil in Silver

There was still the question of how Mr. Visserplein had been able to climb up to the second-story door. An old man doing something like that, how had he managed this? It wasn’t magic. The stairs in the stairwell had been removed, yes, but not the handrails. ( You son-of-a-bitch you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones! That kind of thing.) (Anyway, why would they have taken the handrails out? Who, in all sanity, would imagine a patient having the determination — and the Crazy Strength — to pull himself up to the second floor that way? Nobody , that’s who.) In the aftermath they finally removed the railing from the former stairwell, too. They cleared out the thousands of cookie wrappers. They scrubbed out lines from a song the old man had scrawled on the wall beside his bed (Welcome to where time stands still, no one leaves and no one will). In other words, Dr. Anand did some heroic reshuffling at Northwest, and he hoped this would let him keep his job. (For all his despondency earlier, he needed the salary.)

When the patients finally awoke from their medicinal slumber, became truly aware again, they didn’t realize how much had happened while they were out.

Pepper lay in his new bed in his new room. He missed his old room. The view from this window offered little but the single tower of New Hyde Hospital’s off-white main building in the distance. It looked like a giant vanilla wafer. Pepper missed seeing the tops of the trees.

He got out of bed. He wore pajamas, top and bottom, and slipped on his light blue slipper-socks. He looked at the ceiling and listened for the creaking sound. Pepper heard nothing but the low buzz of the lights.

He went to his dresser. Had he brought all his things with him when he transferred rooms? He’d been so medicated, he could hardly remember. One set of outdoor clothes? Check. Coffee’s binder? Check. Sue’s blue accordion folder? The folder was there, but nothing sat inside. The two words were still there. “Nice Dream.” He’d have to fill it with something new.

His boots stood beside the dresser, upright and at attention. He left them there for now.

Pepper stepped out into the hallway, and instinctively, turned left instead of right, thinking he was still on Northwest 2, but he was on Northwest 4 now. The silver door was at the end of the hall, propped open.

Pepper flinched and held his breath as he braced for the Devil ( Mr. Visserplein ) to come bounding out of the room. But that didn’t happen. Pepper caught his breath again. He stared at the open door.

A light glowed inside. He walked toward the room cautiously but nobody came to stop him. He looked over his shoulder but no one paid attention. He reached the silver door. He touched the stainless steel.

He looked inside.

Imagine a concrete stairwell without stairs (and now without railings). Twenty feet up, in the ceiling, a single strong bulb cast light that filled the room. No shadows. No bed. No evidence at all that anyone had ever lived in here. Been kept here.

Pepper looked at the concrete floor, almost expecting to see Mr. Mack’s small crumpled body. Or at least a bloody stain. But the floor was clean. Power-washed. All the surfaces were so bright because they’d all been repainted.

He left the room and paced back down Northwest 4 slowly. His feet hurt. So did his knees and hips. How long had he been underwater? That’s how he felt. Like a man walking out of the ocean. All but drowned. His nose and eyes even stung. When he reached the nurses’ station, it looked a little different. Another change courtesy of Dr. Anand. The lower half of the nurses’ station was the same split-level rectangular desk but the upper half was no longer open. Shatterproof plastic panes had been installed. The nurses’ station now looked exactly like a ghetto Chinese-food counter.

Pepper walked up to the station. Nurse Washburn sat inside.

Pepper knocked on the plastic with a little force. He wanted to believe this new partition had been put up as a joke. He’d tap it and it would tumble down harmlessly. But that didn’t happen. He knocked and the plastic rattled but stayed firm. Nurse Washburn looked so small inside that clear cage.

“I’ll take the General Tso’s chicken,” Pepper said. “Gimme an extra-spicy mustard.”

Nurse Washburn, to his great surprise, grinned at him.

“You haven’t seen all this yet.”

“How long has it been since …”

He gestured toward Northwest 2, his old room, with his chin.

“Two months,” she said, and looked embarrassed to tell him.

He felt a little shocked, but only a little. He remembered the passing of days. Meals eaten. Television watched. Showers taken. Smoke breaks under the maple tree. He might even have had a few conversations. Two months. Was it June?

Nurse Washburn tilted her head to the right, a look of real sympathy.

“It’s no surprise,” she said. “The doctor just lowered everyone’s meds back to normal.”

“How is Dr. Sam?”

She shook her head. “Not him. He’s gone.”

None of the improvements had helped Dr. Samuel Anand. The board of New Hyde Hospital voted to terminate his contract. He was replaced. The Devil had vanquished the doctor, too.

Aside from the new plastic shielding, the inside of the nurses’ station looked largely the same. The desk phone had been returned. Nurse Washburn sat in front of the same outdated computer screen. On either side of it were more stacks of patient records.

Pepper leaned forward. He read the names on the tabs. Gerald Mack. Frank Waverly.

“What are you doing with those?” Pepper said. “Those men are dead and gone.”

Nurse Washburn, Josephine, looked down at the paperwork and back up at Pepper. “Dead, yes,” she said. “But not gone, not with Equator Zero.”

“Dr. Anand talked about that,” Pepper said. “But he didn’t explain what it meant.”

Josephine rolled backward in her chair. She gestured at the computer screen. “Equator Zero is a program for filing patient records.”

Pepper nodded. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Not just for keeping records. But for filing them.”

Pepper raised both hands, like a scale. “You like Clamato and I like Clamahto.”

“New Hyde is a public hospital,” Nurse Washburn said. “That means it gets city, state, and federal money to take care of its poorest patients. Which is just about all of you. No offense.”

Pepper doffed an invisible cap. “Thanks.”

“All these agencies pay different fees for different treatments,” she continued. “And one of the reasons we charted so much was because we were basically writing up receipts. In the past, we would send copies of those receipts in, and the different agencies would pay the hospital.”

Nurse Washburn opened one folder and waved the sheets of paper under her chin like a fan.

“But now everything is computerized. That means we don’t have to send copies of anything. We just send electronic files from our computer to their computer. Then their computer authorizes money to be deposited in New Hyde’s accounts. But Equator Zero is kind of like automatic billing. Once the patient is in our system, New Hyde Hospital will bill for that patient’s care until the end of time.”

“At least you all won’t have to keep doing it yourselves every month.”

Nurse Washburn put the papers back into their folder, closed it, and set it neatly at the top of a stack. “No, Pepper. You don’t understand. Equator Zero will continue to charge for the care of a patient even after that patient is gone.”

“Discharged?” Pepper asked.

She put her hands on the paperwork again. One on Frank Waverly’s pile. One on Mr. Mack’s. “Deceased,” she said.