Victor Lavalle - The Devil in Silver

Pepper let the postcard lie in his large palm with the image facing him. It was in color. Bright yellow and orange. Van Gogh’s Vase with Twelve Sunflowers . The image so vibrant that Pepper felt the warmth of the sun that fed those flowers. Pepper traced a finger over each one. He lifted the card now and turned it over.

The postmark read: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In the space for a message he found two words, in large print (and a punctuation mark):

“LOOCHIE LIVES!”

Pepper’s heart leapt so hard, he almost didn’t survive.

It’s fair to say Pepper haunted the oval room. He didn’t know where else to go. His room seemed sort of lonely, but the lounge — and that big, blaring television — just seemed to promise a different kind of isolation.

Instead he stayed in the oval room, right by the phone alcove, while Josephine returned to logging the paperwork that New Hyde Hospital hoped to flip into fraudulent profits. She continued, rather than walking off the job in protest because she needed the paychecks that would come for another week. Frankly, she was more concerned with how she’d pay for the elder-care home she’d found for her mother. (She couldn’t leave Mom in the house alone, after all, while the Army deployed her to the other side of the world.)

Pepper didn’t bother her again. He hovered near the phone alcove, and every few minutes he slipped Loochie’s postcard out of the breast pocket of his pajama top and looked at it. Van Gogh’s painting and Loochie’s note, which was more beautiful? (Okay, the painting, but not by much.) Loochie was out there in the world. He felt so happy it almost made him nauseous. He wondered where she was. Still in Amsterdam? Back in the United States? Maybe even somewhere else by now.

But really, it didn’t matter where Loochie had gone. Didn’t matter if she’d ever face hard times again. (Of course she would, like anyone.) For now Loochie was something she hadn’t been through six years of on-and-off institutionalization. Loochie was alive .

Beside the phone alcove, he watched some of the other patients emerge from their rooms. He watched Northwest 1, the new women’s hallway, and the female patients who turned in the wrong direction, too. Disoriented by the rearrangements. Facing the front door rather than the nurses’ station and getting totally rattled until they saw Pepper, eyes so bright he shined like a lighthouse. He waved and they set course toward him.

He greeted each one, then sent him or her to the lounge. As those men and women ate breakfast — those who’d survived the terrible night — the food on their trays tasted damn near gourmet.

And finally the new admit finished his intake meeting. Dr. Barger and his team had kept the first room, right next to the secure door, as a meeting space. But since the new patient was a man, Dr. Barger escorted him all the way down Northwest 1 to the nurses’ station. Dr. Barger told the new admit to wait there for Josephine, who had run to the bathroom. (Though the doctor remembered her name as Karen .) Then Dr. Barger returned to his team in the intake room.

The new admit hadn’t responded to Dr. Barger, or anyone else during the meeting. He waited at the nurses’ station now in the same pose as Pepper had seen before. Head down, arms crossed, he didn’t take in the surroundings at all.

Pepper knew what he was going to do even before he began. He slipped Loochie’s postcard into the breast pocket of his pajama top. There, it fortified him, like any good talisman.

Pepper approached the new guy slowly. What to say now? How to break the ice, one dude to another? Pepper didn’t want to look stupid. Suppose he spoke and this guy only glared at him, or tried to bite off his nose, or laughed at him. It seemed so ridiculous to be nervous about saying hello to a stranger after what he’d been through at New Hyde. But there it was, even here, just some mundane social anxiety. Pepper rested one hand on Loochie’s postcard. This made it look like he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He felt himself calm.

Now Pepper walked closer and extended his hand. “What’s your name?”

The new admit left Pepper’s hand hanging there. Kept his arms crossed.

“Anthony,” he finally said.

“People call me Pepper.” He lowered his hand.

Anthony grinned to himself. He kept his head down, but spoke loud enough to be heard.

“Is that because you give everybody the squirts?”

Pepper laughed. Anthony grinned, then returned his gaze to the floor.

At the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, there’s a bit of text printed on the wall of the second-floor landing. It explains Van Gogh’s ambition as a painter; that Van Gogh viewed his work as a kind of “love letter” to humanity. He hoped to be a great artist, but not simply to bring praise upon himself, his talent. (Though that would’ve been nice, dammit.) He hoped to reflect the world’s own glory, with love. An artistic impulse, but one not exclusive to artists. For instance, Coffee. For instance, Dorry. And now, Pepper. The aspiration is so rarely rewarded, or even understood, that most people don’t even try. But wherever it’s found, whenever it’s displayed, it’s an act of genius.

Soon enough Pepper would be released, but until then what would he do? Sit in his room and wait , or might there be more he could offer? Like now, with this new guy, so overwhelmed, so clearly scared, helpless. Pepper touched Anthony’s arm lightly.

“I like to greet the new admits,” he said. “You should see a friendly face first.”

Pepper raised his free hand and waved as if to take in the entire world. He smiled at Anthony.

“Let me give you the tour.”

MY WIFE GAVE birth to our first child, a son, in May 2011. We were overjoyed and exhausted. We’re both writers and each of us had books due to our publishers by the end of the summer. That gave us about three months to complete our manuscripts. We were scared shitless and figured it was impossible. But with a new kid we needed money more than ever. My wife and I made a deal. We’d give each other two hours out of the apartment every day, seven days a week until September arrived and we had to return to our teaching gigs. (We ain’t making a living on the writing alone!) We stuck to the schedule religiously and the pages piled up. Did we make the deadline?

Hell, no.

But we created decent routines. Leaving home for only two hours meant that I couldn’t travel far. I ended up working at the Twin Donut on Broadway and 180th Street. Nine tables, no elbow room. If it was packed I’d go down to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Broadway and 178th. Between my two offices sat the Port Authority, George Washington Bridge branch. When the coffee ran through me I used its wretched but reliable public bathroom. I wrote this novel in those donut shops out of necessity, not design. But this book wouldn’t be what it is if I’d written it anywhere else.

Each day I had the privilege to hear, see, (and sometimes smell), a cast of characters as broad and beguiling as anything out of Dickens or Days of Our Lives . I’m talking about the old women trying to hand out Spanish-language editions of The Watchtower inside the Port Authority, the fruit and vegetable sellers lining the sidewalks between 179th and 180th, the bus drivers on their coffee breaks, the mothers rationing donuts out to their already amped-up kids, the Chinese women selling bootleg DVDs out of their handbags, the addicts panhandling cars coming off the George Washington Bridge, the twitchy men lined up for far too long at the urinals inside the Port Authority bathroom, the old Dominican men who spoke in shouts so loud that my iPod could never drown them out, the cops and the high-school kids, the tourists and the meter maids, the dude in his fifties who just came through the Twin Donut carrying a handful of knit caps and chanting, “Good hats, good hats, five dollars.” All of them, and more, are in this book. A few even inspired some secondary characters at New Hyde Hospital. If I’d worked on The Devil in Silver someplace secluded and serene, I might’ve forgotten how bonkers and beautiful people can be. So thank you, Twin Donut, Dunkin’ Donuts, Port Authority, and all the folks I watched file through. You people nearly wore my reclusive ass out! Also, I love you.