The Devil in Silver (29 page)

Where Coffee’s messy, empty bed looked like an open grave.

Though Pepper lay in restraints, he curled his head back as best he could because he kept wishing, praying, he’d catch sight of Coffee once again. When the pipes in the bathroom rattled, Pepper forgot
and called out for Coffee, asked if he’d share a can of soda. But of course Coffee never answered.

The day after that, each member of the revolution had long meetings with Dr. Anand. Debriefings. Pepper was the last.

They sat him down in conference room 2. Dr. Anand was already at the table. Miss Chris sat in attendance. And a man whose gray flannel suit was more memorable than he was. He had an iPad propped up on the table. This guy didn’t look at Pepper. He just tapped at the screen with one finger. (He was there to make notes for any potential legal actions that could be brought against the hospital at some future date.)

Dr. Anand placed both hands on the table and didn’t bother with any introductory talk. “Pepper, we’re looking for some kind of explanation for what happened.” He put up one hand before Pepper could respond. “We’ve already met with Dorry and Loochie, so we’re looking for a simple and clear explanation. Simple and clear,
please
.”

Pepper nodded, but what could he tell the man? Did he believe what Dorry had said?
He’s my son
. Coffee thought he’d been searching the Internet telepathically. And look how that part turned out. He’d thought those digits would save his life, but they were just a wrong number in Oakland. Good work, Kofi! How’s that for clear? Pepper saw no way of summarizing all this, so he said nothing.

Dr. Anand looked disappointed. He sat back in his chair. He said, “Miss Chris will need to take some blood and check your blood pressure.”

Miss Chris rose. The blood-pressure strap in one hand. “Doctor says I to do it and you gone let me do it, hear?” She spoke as if Pepper was a dog, but there was something desperate in her voice. “You
hear
?” she repeated.

Miss Chris was scared of him. They probably all were. He didn’t feel pressed to reassure them. He felt like seeing them squirm.

“ ‘In the mist dark figures move and twist,’ ” Pepper said to her. “ ‘Was all this for real or some kind of hell?’ ”

Dr. Anand took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, exhausted. Even the uninvolved legal rep peeked up from his tablet screen.

Miss Chris put one hand on her hip. “That from the Bible?”

“That’s Iron Maiden,” Pepper said.

Miss Chris frowned, now more confused than fearful. Pepper decided to stop talking and let the woman do her job.

Dr. Anand leaned across the table, slid a few strips of newsprint toward Pepper. “This is how the incident has been reported so far.”

As Miss Chris pulled up Pepper’s pajama sleeve and slapped the blood-pressure strap around him, he focused on the terrible picture of Kofi.

“That’s no glamour shot,” Pepper said.

“That’s how Coffee looked when he first came to us,” Dr. Anand said. “We’d made a lot of progress.”

Pepper wriggled his arm as it went slightly cold below the strap. Miss Chris stopped pumping and air hissed as it leaked out.

“You got him to cut his hair and take a bath.”

Dr. Anand shook his head. “We got him off the street. We got him to
maintain
his hygiene. We taught him how to contact government agencies so he could get the benefits he was entitled to upon his release.”

Miss Chris removed the strap and searched for a suitable vein in the crook of Pepper’s elbow.

“And when was that going to be?” Pepper asked.

Dr. Anand spoke plainly. “Release depends on so many variables.”

The doctor sighed. He looked as tired as Pepper had ever seen him.

“We do everything we can to find solutions,” Dr. Anand said. “But we only discover greater mysteries.”

Miss Chris slipped a needle into Pepper’s vein. He hardly felt it go in. She pulled back the stopper on the needle and all of them—Pepper, Miss Chris, Dr. Anand, even the legal rep—watched Pepper’s blood fill the vial.

After Miss Chris finished taking blood, Dr. Anand had a few more questions. None of them seemed concerned with understanding why the four of them had revolted, only to record the order of events should a timeline ever be needed for a legal proceeding. After all that, Dr. Anand said, “There’s still time for you to get lunch.”

Pepper felt surprised. “I thought you were going to put me back in restraints.”

Dr. Anand’s face turned red (reddish brown) and looked at the nearly catatonic representative. He said, “No one wants to use restraints on you at all.” Then he looked at Miss Chris and said, “Do we?”

Miss Chris smiled at the legal rep. “
No
, doctor.”

Which wasn’t the same as saying they hadn’t used them. Or wouldn’t.

Now both staff members looked at Pepper cautiously. Maybe this was his moment to testify to the man with the iPad.

But the rep defused the situation. “I’m sure a staff as qualified as ours only uses restraints within the limits of existing laws. I have
no
doubts.”

With that, the man returned to the screen. Tapped a few more times, then shut the black case that held the spiffy device. “We’re all done,” he said.

Pepper and Miss Chris walked down Northwest 1 until they reached the nurses’ station. There were four staff members on duty besides Miss Chris and Dr. Anand. Two more nurses and two orderlies. Extra muscle. The uprising had been good for one thing: overtime pay for the underpaid staff.

Miss Chris brought Pepper to the counter, and the other nurse brought out his small white cup of pills. They hadn’t changed the medications, not even the doses, but when he put the pills in his mouth all five staff members watched him closely.

“No cheating,” Miss Chris taunted.

After he swallowed she said, “Pop your mouth.”

Pepper opened his mouth. He
had
swallowed the pills. Nevertheless, Miss Chris pulled on a latex glove, rose to her toes, stuck one finger between his lips and gums and checked.

“Tongue,” she said.

He lifted it and her finger felt around faintly, almost tenderly. It was the gentlest moment the two of them had ever shared. She slipped
her finger out and pulled the glove off with a snap. She said, “Lunch then.”

Miss Chris walked behind Pepper down Northwest 5 and he felt like she was leading him to his execution. A shot in the back of the head. Maybe he’d even find the bodies of Dorry and Loochie and Coffee already there. Four corpses left in an empty room. New Hyde’s headache relieved that easily.

But slow down, Pepper. You ain’t Lorca! You’re not even Tommy from
GoodFellas
. The only punishment awaiting him was a lunch tray.

The other patients had been eating for a while. When Pepper entered the lounge, they watched him. He couldn’t be sure if they seemed sympathetic or accusatory. As the pills began to numb him, he found he didn’t much care. He sat alone at a table and looked down at his food. He felt both hungry and repulsed by the idea of eating.

Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly were at one table. Neither man looked at Pepper. At another table he saw another familiar couple. Sam and Sammy! But then he focused and realized they were two different women, new patients, similar but decades older than Sam and Sammy had been. Japanese Freddie Mercury sat at a table alone and it took Pepper a moment to wonder where his pal, Yuckmouth, might be. But really, who cared?

Who cared? Who cared? Who cared?

Pepper ate but tasted nothing. He blinked and breathed.

When Pepper finished lunch, Miss Chris and two orderlies appeared. They surrounded him. They walked Pepper back to his room. They looped the restraints around Pepper’s ankles and wrists. They left him there.

NOW THAT THE
legal rep had gone, Pepper’s every meal was served in his room. His meds were brought to him. Loochie and Dorry were treated the same way.

There was a time when Dr. Anand knew of, but perhaps willfully ignored, his staff’s overuse of restraints on patients. But after the
incident
with Coffee, he’d check in on Pepper or Loochie and Dorry and find them in wrist and ankle restraints but, to his own quiet surprise, he didn’t care. When one of them complained about the aches (their backs, from lying prone for so long, especially) the doctor nodded his head and became engrossed in the charts in his hand. Soon enough, he got so used to seeing them tied down that he really didn’t even see the restraints anymore.

For the first
two weeks
after Coffee’s death, the trio didn’t spend much time on their feet or out of bonds. During the third week, they were freed in shifts. Each got eight unstrapped hours a day. The other sixteen, they were flat on their backs or, for variety’s sake, the restraints were rearranged so they could spend the sixteen hours on one side. Each time Pepper was lashed down, he asked the nurse or orderly if they’d leave one arm free so he could at least read during the hours he lay awake. And do you know who was the only staff member to indulge him? Miss Chris. Go figure that one. The times
when Miss Chris left one arm unbound, Pepper read from the only book in his possession, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. With his bed in its new position, he faced a wall instead of the windows and the sunlight streamed in over his back and illuminated the pages throughout the day.

Pepper was free from eight p.m. until four in the morning. Then back to bed.

The Devil didn’t return. As if Coffee’s murder had appeased it.

But for how long?

Six weeks later, on April 11, Miss Chris and a new orderly found Pepper asleep in his bed. They didn’t wake him until they’d removed the restraints. The orderly kicked the side of his bed. Pepper opened his eyes.

When he sat up, Miss Chris stretched out her hand, a small plastic cup in her palm. He accepted the pills without a fuss.

Then the orderly handed Pepper a small plastic bag from T.J. Maxx. Inside, he found a pair of slacks, a shirt, underwear, new socks. One new outfit, the same size as the clothes he’d worn in.

“Dr. Anand bought those for you,” Miss Chris said. “Since your other clothes got ruin.”

“You can move around the unit freely now,” the orderly said.

“But we’re watching,” Miss Chris added.

As Pepper washed his face in the bathroom sink, he found himself smiling in the mirror.

Look at that
, he thought. His fuzzy reflection couldn’t stop smiling, which meant
he
must’ve been smiling. Pepper brought his cheap towel to his face and dried off, but he couldn’t feel that rough fabric against his cheeks. He dropped the towel, then traced the smile in the mirror with his fingertip. He tapped the metal with one long fingernail, and it sounded as if he was clicking the reflection’s teeth.

He’d lost weight while in restraints. Sure, he hadn’t been able to move much for six weeks, but he hadn’t eaten hardly at all. When the nurses came to feed him, he sometimes refused. Not really a hunger
strike, more like a hunger tantrum. But the staff didn’t try to persuade him when he did this. You don’t want to eat? I’ll see you in the morning. Just like that. You’re not Bobby Sands if no one’s paying attention. You’re just starving.

Pepper dressed in his new clothes. Good to get out of those pajamas. Then he went to breakfast.

He moved through the unit with his head down, ignoring the staff, and ignoring the phone alcove as well. He heard a patient in there, a woman, talking on the phone with pleasure, laughing to a loved one. And Coffee wasn’t in there, on hold on the other phone, because Coffee was dead. So Pepper ignored the alcove and stumbled into the breakfast line. He picked up his tray of cereal and milk, a small green apple and two dry pieces of toast.

No one else in the television lounge paid attention to him. They had their own troubles and a television show to watch. Mr. Mack had control of the machine again and he’d picked his favorite.

On the screen, the same anchor, as well maintained as a pre-owned luxury car, scrabbled through a handful of papers on his desk and looked up at the camera as the show returned from a commercial break.

“Welcome back to
News Roll
, I’m your host Steve Sands. As you know, we focus on the big news, national
and
international, but we’re even more committed to covering the big news that’s
local
. That’s right. Casting an eye on the stories that matter most to New Yorkers like you and me.”

Pepper chose a table that looked out on the decrepit basketball court. In a couple hours, about noon, the staff would open the door here for a smoker’s break. Would they let him go out there? Pepper wondered how many of the patients still had their staff schwag. At least he’d distributed free cigarettes to the masses! That’s the best thing he could say about the incident: He’d helped a bunch of people flirt with cancer.

He took an empty table, his back to the rest of the lounge, and looked out on the court. He ignored Steve Sands. Halfway through the meal, he actually felt the sunlight on his face. Despite the meds,
he sensed the warmth. Such a small thing, but so pleasant. He ate his toast quietly in his chair. He tasted the sweetness of the butter and almost laughed.

“You eating that?”

He knew the voice even before he saw the hand reach over his shoulder and take his apple.

Loochie.

“I
am
eating that,” he said, and swiped at the fruit with his left hand.

Or, he meant to swipe at that fruit. By the time the signal left his brain, hacked through the underbrush of antipsychotics, and actually raised his hand, that girl had already taken it.

His reaction time still needed work.

She took the seat directly across from him. She wore the blue knit cap again, but the pom-poms were missing. Two sad blue strings lay limp. Pepper wondered if she’d even plucked the pom-poms off while suffering some involuntary spasm in the middle of the night.

Loochie finished the apple, down to the core. She wiped her fingers on her polo shirt. Loochie said, “Share your cereal with me?”