Victor Lavalle - Lucretia and the Kroons

The orderly said, “Frank Waverly is no fool. It’s you who’s being defiant.”

Mr. Mack grinned at this as if he’d just been complimented. He raised the remote again and lowered the volume. But just one bar.

Pepper, meanwhile, had settled himself at his table, ignoring the skirmish. Instead of the staff and patient, he watched the sunlight as it lit up the half-court outside the lounge.

He didn’t notice he had company until they sat.

Loochie, Coffee, and Dorry.

At the other end of the lounge, Mr. Mack’s hand rose again, the remote aimed at the screen, and the little green volume bars appeared again. The sound went up.

“Mr. Mack!” the orderly shouted.

Dorry reached over and put her hand on top of Pepper’s.

“So,” she said, when he looked at her.

She leaned toward him without smiling. She squinted, as if trying to see deeper inside. Loochie spoke next, though.

“It’s been around long before any of us. I mean any human beings. They found it living here and built Northwest just to hold it. You understand? Northwest is a cage.”

Coffee leaned forward to add, “But every living thing needs to eat, Pepper. You can keep something in a cage, but then you have to feed it. Now look at us here. The food makes us fat. The drugs make us slow. We’re cattle. Food. For it. And best of all, for New Hyde, no one notices when people like us end up dead.”

Behind the group, a new skirmish unfolded. Mr. Mack’s half hour of television privileges had passed. This was as much of a rule on the unit as the medication schedule. The only way to keep so many different patients occupied. It was Sammy’s turn to hold the remote. But Mr. Mack wouldn’t let it go. He and Sammy were now tugging at either end of it like it was the key to New Hyde’s front door.

The orderly intervened. “Your time is up , Mr. Mack.”

“I got one minute left! I got one minute!”

“You got milk breath!” Sammy yelled back at him. “And your teeth are yellow!”

Behind Sammy, Sam added, “And those are his good qualities!”

Frank Waverly, Mr. Mack’s friend, nodded at this. Even though Mr. Mack was his best friend, he couldn’t disagree with Sam’s point.

Now the orderly clomped over to the tables to break up their nonsense.

Dorry, Loochie, and Coffee paid this chaos no mind. They were on another plane. Dorry leaned in to speak, snatching that wretched cookie off Pepper’s tray and dropping it into her lap before opening her mouth. “I’m going to tell you the truth about what you saw last night.” She glared at the others. “Not stories.”

She stole the cookies off Coffee’s tray, then Loochie’s with surprising quickness and dropped them into her lap.

“I’ve been here longer than Coffee and Loochie combined. I have the distinction of being the second patient ever committed to Northwest. And that thing you saw the other night? He was the first. Let me tell you this, with no ambiguity. He’s a man. Deformed. Very troubled. Very angry. But just a man.”

Pepper could feel that breath burning his ear again. Could see those white eyes, missing their pupils. Felt the fur. “I’ve never seen a man like that,” he argued.

Loochie and Coffee nodded solemnly.

Dorry shook her head. “I’m telling you what I know .”

The orderly stood over Mr. Mack now and put his hand out in a gesture common to any parent. Exasperated authority. Mr. Mack looked at his wristwatch and counted out loud. “Nine … eight … seven … six …”

When he reached zero, he opened his hand and held the remote out to Sammy, but the orderly snatched it first to turn the volume down. When Sammy got her turn, she chose an episode of American Chopper .

She and Sam pulled their chairs right up under the screen. Even the patients who didn’t like the show remained in their seats and watched to pass some time. On the screen a burly guy with a graying mustache slapped the side of a silver motorcycle, grinned at the camera, and said, “This beast looks like it was forged in hell!”

Coffee rose from his chair. “Why don’t we just show him?”

Dorry shook her head. “Not yet.”

Pepper said, “Show me what?”

Loochie picked the green apple off her tray. She bit into it and chewed.

“Show you where it lives,” she said.

The four of them walked down Northwest 5 as a pack. Loochie and Coffee in the lead, Dorry and Pepper behind.

Dorry said, “What’s on Northwest One?”

Pepper said, “The exit.”

Loochie said, “That’s no exit.”

Coffee said, “It’s just an entrance, for us.”

Dorry asked, “What’s on Northwest Two?”

Pepper said, “Male patients.”

Dorry asked, “What’s on Northwest Three?”

Pepper said, “Female patients.”

As they entered the room at the hub of the unit, Dorry said, “And what’s on Northwest Five?”

Pepper said, “Television lounge.”

Loochie turned back to him and the pom-poms on her knit cap bounced. “We would’ve accepted smoker’s area, too.”

They ignored the staff members sitting inside the nurses’ station just as the staff members ignored them. They were in two overlapping realities.

Dorry touched Pepper’s shoulder to stop him. “So what’s left?”

“Northwest Four,” Pepper said. “You told me not to go anywhere near it.”

Loochie and Coffee and Dorry and Pepper gathered at the threshold of that hallway. Northwest 4 looked like all the others. Eggshell-white walls, beige tiled floors, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. There were doors running down either side, but here was the first difference: None of the doors had knobs. Even from the lip of Northwest 4, Pepper could see door after door with the handle removed and the lock sealed. A whole hallway of rooms that were never used.

At the far end of Northwest 4 sat a large stainless-steel door.

It looked like the little cousin of the secure door in Northwest 1. Stainless steel instead of cast iron, sleek where that other one was rough. But it, too, had a shatterproof window. The lights of the room behind that door were out. Totally dark.

“There,” Dorry said quietly.

Loochie lifted one foot. “Watch this.”

Her baby-blue Nike crossed the threshold of the hallway, and instantly Miss Chris called out from the nurses’ station.

“Off-limits.”

Loochie winked at Pepper and planted her foot over the line. She lifted her back foot and brought that one over, too. There she stood, just barely, in Northwest 4.

Scotch Tape stood up and leaned his elbows on the desktop of the nurses’ station.

“Loochie,” he growled. “You heard what Miss Chris said?”

Loochie stepped back.

“They protect it,” Coffee whispered.

Pepper couldn’t look away from the stainless-steel door one hundred feet down Northwest 4. It bent the light cast down from the ceiling so that something seemed to move behind the plastic window. A figure on the other side, or just a reflection of something on this side? Pepper stared at the small window. His legs stiffened. His face turned warm.

He felt watched.

Then he heard his own voice in his head. It was saying, No, no, no, no, no . Not disbelief but refusal.

“I don’t belong here,” he told the other three. “This isn’t my fight.”

His spoken voice sounded so small. He watched Dorry and Loochie and Coffee deflate with disappointment. A story came to him, an explanation.

“In 1969,” he told them, “the Doors performed at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. About twelve thousand fans showed up to hear them play. Jim Morrison was drunk.”

“You were there?” Loochie asked. “You been to Miami?” She sounded jealous.