The Devil in Silver (31 page)

Pepper said, “So what’s your name?”

She crossed her arms. “What does everyone around here call me?”

Pepper shrugged cartoonishly, raised his eyebrows. “How would
I
know?”

She twisted her lips and sighed. “My name is Xiu,” she said. “But you won’t be able to pronounce it.”

“Xiu,” Pepper repeated, but it came out sounding like “zoo.” He knew that wasn’t quite right because he’d just heard her say it. He tried to hold his mouth closed the way she had. It seemed like she clenched her jaw, pursed her lips, and (somehow) simultaneously parted her teeth to make the sound come out.

“Xiu,” he tried. “Xiu.” But it only sounded worse. It made his neck hurt.

Finally she tapped the tabletop with an open hand. “Just call me Sue.”

Pepper said, “I’m going to keep practicing.”

She nodded. “But until then …”

“Sue.”

She looked to be about his age. In her early forties. She had a wide round face, and her smile never grew bigger than that grin. In all the lines she’d spoken just now he had yet to actually see her
teeth
. It didn’t seem like they were missing, but like she consciously kept them covered with her lips. Such a self-conscious way of speaking. She had a broad, flat nose that seemed to float off her broad face. Thinning black eyebrows. Deeply black hair that fell limply on either side of her face and hid her ears. Her eyes were also black and, somehow,
remote
. They were like closed shutters. But he could see, even through those slats, her lights were on.

“I’m Pepper,” he said.

“I know who you are.”

“You’ve been asking about me?” He sat higher in his seat.

“You tried to escape,” she said.

He slumped. “I don’t know what we tried to do. But it didn’t work.”

She grabbed a copy of
Outside
magazine from her pile. “No. It really didn’t.”

Sue stopped on a page with a photo of a waterfall spraying down a mountain. She pressed a finger to the water as if her skin would come away wet. “So what will you do now?” she asked.

“I think I’ll go into real estate.”

“Commercial or residential?”

“I’m going to make a bid on the ball court over there.”

“How much will you offer?”

“A dollar forty-nine.”

She bugged her eyes wide. “Don’t you know the bubble burst? A dollar forty-nine sounds like 2006 prices!”

They leaned toward each other, just slightly. They hardly noticed it. She reached into her stack of magazines and slid a different one to him:
National Geographic Traveler
. Pepper looked at her. Sue creased a picture of a desert oasis. She tore it out carefully.

“For the files,” Pepper said.

She held the picture up. A series of date-palm trees surrounding a small pool of water. “This one isn’t a
file
. It’s a
dream
.”

Sue reached below her chair where she had an old plastic Associated
Supermarket bag. Inside there were two somewhat worn accordion folders. One manila, one blue. She opened the blue one, and Pepper saw dozens and dozens of clippings from glossy magazines. Each one a fantasy spot worth visiting. Sue slipped the image of the oasis in there. Then she pressed it shut with the Velcro tab. She touched the blue folder. “The dreams.” She touched the manila folder. “The files.”

Pepper watched her quietly. Was this crazy or was it cute? And did Pepper care? At least right now? He was with a woman whose company he already liked. And she seemed to like him. In a coffee shop, at a party, or in a psychiatric unit, some interactions always feel good.

“So will you come see me again tomorrow?” Sue asked.

On the third night, Pepper arrived
early
.

The three women (and Heatmiser) tended to hit the television lounge at about ten p.m. This allowed the dinner rush to pass and the food (and meds) to hit the other patients. By nine o’clock, most couldn’t stay awake even if you set a limb on fire. By ten there was hardly anyone left. That’s when the quartet hit the stage. They fought through the haze rather than fall asleep. Other patients did exactly the same during the day, after breakfast meds, or lunch. They chose to keep alert then because they liked being up with the sun. These four were just on a different schedule.

And now there were five.

Sue came in carrying her plastic bag with two accordion folders and the night’s reading material clutched to her chest. She wore a thin white sweater over her faint blue nightdress and white Keds that had been through a hundred or more cycles in a washing machine, clean but eroding. To Pepper, she looked like a librarian. And in a way, that’s what she was.

Before she’d even settled herself in her chair, Pepper pulled his hands out from under the table. He waved his book at her. “I brought something tonight!”

At the television Heatmiser shushed Pepper. Pepper looked back as if he’d like to mess with the kid, but that boy’s face already looked
five kinds of tired, weary in a way that had little to do with sleep. So Pepper only nodded and said, “Sorry.”

Heatmiser turned back to the closed-captioned scroll on the TV. The words appeared on the bottom half of the screen. “Catherine Zeta-Jones is touted for bipolar II disorder,” it read.

Heatmiser laughed to himself. “I think you mean ‘treated,’ ” he whispered.

Sue laid her stuff out at their table. Not the magazines, but the newspapers this time. She had the manila accordion file on the table; the blue one, for dreams, stowed under her seat. Pepper saw two words written in black ink on the side of the manila folder.

“No Name.”

This gave Pepper a chill, as if he were seeing that phrase etched into someone’s tombstone. He didn’t want to look at it. Pepper raised his book and showed her Van Gogh’s self-portrait on the cover.

“That’s him?” she asked. “He looks intense.”

Sue leaned closer to the page. “Actually, I think he looks a little like Elliott.” She pointed at Heatmiser.

Pepper looked back at the television. “That’s his name?”

Sue said, “Let me see some more of his paintings.”

Pepper flipped through the book’s pages fast as a deck of cards. “These are his letters, mostly to his brother. There’s only a few pictures in here and they’re only in black and white. But I think his stuff was mostly in color.”

Sue touched the cover. “Have you ever seen them in real life?”

Pepper snorted. “I didn’t even really know who this guy was until I opened this book. I mean I heard about him, like his name, but I just knew it was, like, a saying. You know? A teacher said it to me in class once. ‘You think you’re a real
Van Gogh.
’ And that was only because I was drawing a woman’s tits on my desk.”

“That’s charming,” Sue said and flared her nostrils.

Sue reached into one of her sweater pockets and took out a tiny notepad and a pen. She set them on the tabletop. Nearby, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters had already begun working for the night. The day’s newspapers were open. Both women scanned the articles.

But Sue didn’t rush to join them as she might have on any other
night in the past. When she looked at Pepper, she didn’t want to stay quiet. She didn’t mind if they spoke for a little longer.

Pepper, sensing that he’d passed some hurdle, some gate, felt a flush in his chest and arms. He said, “The thing I’ve been thinking about, as I’m reading these letters, is that there’s actually
two
Vincent Van Goghs.”

“Like clones?” Sue asked.

Pepper laughed loudly.

Behind him, Heatmiser said, “Come on, man.”

Pepper leaned closer to Sue so they could speak quietly. He said, “I mean there’s Van Gogh, now, whose name is used to tease a kid at P.S. 120 just because he’s drawing …”

“Tits,” Sue said dryly.

Pepper kept going. “You know they have a whole museum dedicated to Van Gogh in Amsterdam? They have a plug for it in the back of the book. A whole
building
dedicated to what he painted in his life.”

“How long did he live?”

“He was dead at thirty-seven.”

“Damn.” Sue sat back in her seat. “I’m forty-one.”

She looked at Pepper quickly, to see if the admission would sour him somehow. But Pepper didn’t care. He was still on his “two Van Goghs” point. He put his hand on the armrest of her chair. He said, “But the second Van Gogh is just a guy named Vincent.
Vincent
lived for thirty-seven years.
Van Gogh
only came to life after Vincent died. Same man, two people.”

Sue watched Pepper’s hand there on her armrest. She tapped his arm with her notepad playfully. But he mistakenly thought she was trying to push him back. Like he was getting too close. So he pulled his arm away. Sue’s disappointment passed like a breeze on the back of her neck. It made her shiver. She placed her forearm on the armrest then so if he reached out again she’d be sure to feel his touch.

But to continue the conversation, Sue said, “That reminds me of an interview I heard with Sheryl Crow once.”

“Tangent!” Pepper hissed and laughed.

“Just listen. She was talking about how she made a living when she
was younger. Before she became famous. She used to give music lessons in Los Angeles. And she said one day she had this guy come in for a lesson but I think he didn’t come back. Or she didn’t pursue it. She never saw him again.

“Then she’s watching a movie, maybe it was
Thelma and Louise
, and she sees the guy who had been in her living room for music lessons. He’s right there on the screen. Having sex with Geena Davis. And in the interview she said something like ‘If only I’d known it was Brad Pitt!’ ”

Pepper watched her quietly. “And?”

“If only she’d known it was Brad Pitt? She did know it was Brad Pitt. He just wasn’t
Brad Pitt
yet. Same man. Two people.”

Pepper reached out and touched her wrist, there on the armrest. Nearly involuntarily, her fingers opened and her notepad fell out of her hand.

Pepper smiled. “Now we’re talking.”

Pepper pulled his fingers away from her skin and immediately she missed them. He leaned over to grab her notepad from where it fell. When he did, his head moved past Sue’s nose, and she smelled the shampoo Pepper had used when he showered just before seeing her tonight. She had the same shampoo, of course. They all did. But when a woman likes a man, nothing about him remains common. It’s
his
. Especially his. Even some no-name, half-bleachy shampoo.
Eau de Pepper
. (Available at ninety-nine-cent stores everywhere.)

Pepper handed back her notepad. She felt afraid her face had flushed, so she focused on her newspapers. Pepper returned to Vincent’s letters.

They stayed at the table together until five a.m.

“
I’LL BE GONE
in less than a week.”

Sue told him this on the fourth night.

They didn’t take the same table as the previous nights, close to Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters. Tonight they wanted a little privacy, which meant moving a few tables over. This one was also hidden from the view of staff members inside the nurses’ station by a structural column. Considering the circumstances, this felt like running off to a private villa.

But wait! Hadn’t the entire ward gone on high alert about seven weeks ago? Hadn’t the aftermath of Pepper’s insurrection had consequences? Well, yes: Staff members were approved for overtime pay, but that only lasted a month; Pepper, Dorry, and Loochie were checked to be sure they took their medications; legal counsel had evaluated the hospital’s possible legal culpability; and the criminal matter of Kofi Acholi’s death was being investigated by the New York City Police Department.

(But if the pace of Pepper’s possible indictment for assaulting Huey, Dewey, and Louie weren’t evidence enough of systematic sluggishness, please consider that the full extent of police activity in the likely suicide of Samantha “Sam” Forrester was that a yellow sticker had been affixed to the door of her room, sealing it shut; the yellow
sticker read, in part:
THIS AREA IS THE SITE OF AN ONGOING POLICE INVESTIGATION. DO NOT ENTER
. The police wouldn’t be back to this room for eleven more weeks. And when they came, it would only be to cut the sticker, open the room, and conclude their investigation with a few sheets of paperwork; Miss Chris would be left to scrape the remains of the sticker off the door and door frame, and halfway through, she’d pawn the job off on the nearest orderly.)

Which is to say that Pepper and Sue would be left alone at their table.

Because they sat behind the columns, Pepper felt bold. He rested his hand on her right thigh, which was slim and soft. He squeezed her leg. How long had it been since he’d been able to do that to a woman? Too long.

“You’re getting discharged?” he whispered.

He knew he should only feel happy about this. Like hearing someone you care about has just had a long jail sentence commuted. But this also meant that in less than a week she’d be leaving him. When they’d only just begun. He understood that he was being selfish. He tried the same sentence again, trying to sound elated.

“You’re getting discharged!”

He would walk her to the secure door. He would
watch
her walk out. And he realized that, despite his own sadness, he would be so glad she was
free
.

“I’m getting deported,” Sue said.

He laughed at this. A big one. Up from the belly. Enough to make everyone else in the lounge shoosh him hatefully, as if he were a teenager texting in a movie theater. And
their
sound was so loud, so clearly hostile, that a member of the staff called out from the nurses’ station.