The Devil in Silver

1

THEY BROUGHT THE big man in on a winter night when the moon looked as hazy as the heart of an ice cube. It took three cops to wrestle and handcuff him. They threw him in their undercover cruiser and drove him to the New Hyde mental hospital. This was a mistake. They shouldn’t have brought him there. But that wasn’t going to save him.

When they reached the hospital, everyone got out. The big man refused to walk. The three cops mobbed around him, trying to intimidate, but to the big man they just looked like Donald Duck’s nephews: Huey, Dewey, and Louie. A bunch of cartoons. It didn’t help that they were dressed in street clothes instead of blue uniforms.

Dewey and Louie walked behind the big man and Huey stayed up front. The big man’s hands were cuffed behind his back. Dewey and Louie pushed him like tugboats guiding a barge, one good shove and he floated toward the double doors of the building. The lobby was so empty, so quiet, that their footsteps echoed.

New Hyde looked like a low-rent motel. Bland floral-print cushions on the couches and chairs, the walls a lackluster lavender. There were no patients waiting around, no staff members on hand, not even an information desk. But Huey, the lead cop, knew where he was going. The big man frowned at the décor and the empty seats. He’d thought they were taking him to a lockup. What the hell kind of place was this? He got so confused, his feet stopped moving, so Dewey and Louie gave him another shove.

They reached the far end of the lobby and found a hallway. The cops turned right but the big man went left. It might’ve looked like an escape attempt except that the big man stopped himself after two paces. So confused he actually turned back to look for them. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were watching him now, to see what he would do. They were relaxed because they knew he could do nothing.

Huey raised his right hand. He wore a chunky silver diver’s watch that looked expensive even under the hospital’s terrible fluorescent lights. He beckoned and the big man stepped closer to them. It was quiet enough that the cops could hear him lick his dry lips.

Now this guy was big but let’s put it in perspective. He wasn’t Greek mythology — sized; wasn’t tossing boulders at passing ships. He wasn’t even Green Mile—sized; one of those human-giant types. He stood six foot three and weighed two hundred seventy-one pounds, and if that doesn’t sound big to you, then you must be a professional wrestler. The dude was big but still recognizably human. Beatable. Three smaller men, like these cops, could take him down together. Just to get that straight.

The big man returned to his captors, without a word, and once again they all moved in the same direction.

The hallway was clear and empty, just lavender walls boxing in a thin runway of industrial carpet. But the big man could see that the runway ended at a big old door, heavy like you’d find on a bank vault. Unmovable. This was no Motel Six. His footsteps faltered. But this time the cops weren’t going to let him wander off. Dewey yanked that big boy backward, by the handcuffs. His shoulders popped in their sockets and his face went hot with pain.

“Now he’s scared,” the lead cop said.

They reached the door. A small white button sat in the wall. Huey pressed it and kept his finger on the button. The buzzer played on the other side of the door and sounded like a duck’s quack, as if Huey was throwing his cartoon voice.

The secure door featured a window the size of a cereal box. With his finger still steady on the buzzer, Huey peeked through it.

“Just break the glass,” Dewey said.

He seemed to be joking, but he hadn’t smiled.

Huey clonked the sturdy silver face of his diver’s watch against the window. “You couldn’t shatter this shit with a bullet.”

The big man opened his mouth. He had plans to speak but found no words. He couldn’t stop staring at that door. Not wood, not faux wood, fucking iron. Maybe. The damn thing had rivets in it, like it had been torn off a battleship. Bombproof; fireproof; probably airtight, too.

He finally found the words. “This place is locked up tighter than your Uncle Scrooge’s vault.”

Huey turned away from the door. His eyes brightened with joyful cruelty. “You think these jokes are going to save you, but they’re only making things worse.”

Louie said, “He’s just trying to get one of us to hit him. So he’ll have a lawsuit.”

Dewey said, “We didn’t hit him before, why would we start now?”

Huey said, “You’re applying logic to a man who’s not thinking logically.”

“What the hell does that mean?” the big man asked.

“We think you might be a danger to yourself because of your mental condition,” Louie added sarcastically.

The big man’s body went rigid. “What mental condition?”

Dewey said, “You attacked three officers of the law.”

“How was I supposed to know you were cops?!”

To be fair, the big man had a point. The three men wore plain clothes. Their shields, hanging around their necks on silver chains, were tucked under their different colored sweatshirts. But who cared? Here was one rule you could count on: You were never allowed to punch a cop. So forget about punching two of them, repeatedly, and trying hard to connect with the third. It didn’t matter if they were in uniform, wearing plain clothes, or rocking a pair of pajamas.

But before he could get into a debate about the finer points of an entrapment defense, an eye appeared on the other side of the unbreakable window.

Well, a head at least, with a mess of grayish white hair, but the only part they could make out clearly was that eye. The outer ring of the pupil was blue but closer to the iris the color turned a light gray. Cataracts. The other eye was shut because the person squinted. Man or woman? Hard to say, the face was smooshed so tight against the pane. The clouded pupil swam left then right, as alien as a single-cell organism caught under the objective lens of a microscope. It surveyed the big man, and the three cops. It blinked.

The big man frowned at the person in the window. Dewey and Louie unconsciously stepped backward. Only Huey, still pressing the white button, didn’t seem startled by the watchful eye. He smiled at the big man, more broadly than he had all night. Relishing what he would say next: “Welcome to New Hyde.” He pointed to a plaque embedded in the wall right above the door: NEW HYDE HOSPITAL. FOUNDED IN 1953.

Dewey said, “When can we leave?”

Just then the eye seemed to slip away from the window and another face replaced it. This new person stood farther from the glass so they could make out more of him. A man. Brown-skinned. With puffy cheeks, a soft chin, and a nose as round as an old lightbulb. He wore glasses. A bushy mustache. And a scowl.

They could see his chest, the tie and jacket he wore. An ID card, sheathed in plastic, hung around his neck on a plastic cord.

The big man said, “He wears his ID on the outside, see? That’s how people know what his job is.”

The three cops sighed with exhaustion. Nine-twenty at night and all three were tired. They just had to hand the big man off and file their reports, then each could finally go home. (To their mother, Della Duck?)

The brown man looked out at Huey, and his gaze followed the cop’s arm down as far as it could go, toward that finger, still mashing the white buzzer. The brown man then stared up at Huey again and brought one finger to his lips in a shushing motion. Huey pulled his hand away so quickly, you would’ve thought the buzzer had just burnt him.

The bolt lock in the door turned, clacking like the opening of a manual cash register’s drawer. Then the door opened with surprising ease for its apparent weight. The doorway exhaled a stale, musty smell.

They could now see the brown man fully. His big round face fused right onto his round body. Imagine a wine cask, upright, wearing glasses. Not tall and not fat, just one solid oval.

And yet he must be someone with authority, if he had the keys to open this mighty door. Which was good enough for the big man, who said, “I’m innocent.”

The brown man looked up at the big man. “I’m not a judge,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”

The doctor narrowed his eyes at Huey, who suddenly seemed bashful.

The doctor said, “I didn’t expect to be seeing you again.”

Huey nodded, looking away from the doctor. But then he seemed to feel the gaze of his partners, and he snapped out of his shame.

“This is legit. He jumped two of my guys.”

The big man appealed to the doctor. “I thought they were meatheads, not cops.”

The doctor looked at the two cops on either side of the big man. He smiled, which made his bushy mustache rise slightly like a caterpillar on the move. He stepped aside and invited them in. “My team is waiting down the hall,” he said, locking the door behind them. “Second room.”

The cops led the big man forward. Dewey and Louie holding his arms tighter than before. They didn’t like the meathead line. Huey, with the watch, rested one hand on the big man’s shoulder and together the quartet followed the doctor.

The room looked like nearly any medium-sized conference room you’ll ever find. The walls were an eggshell white, a dry-erase board hung on one of them with the faintest red squiggles half erased in an upper corner. A pull-down screen hung on another wall. In the middle of the room sat a faux-wood table, large enough to seat fifteen, but ringed by only fourteen faux-wood chairs with plastic padded backs. Another ring of cheaper, foldout chairs was placed against the walls. The working class of meeting spaces. All the people already in the room looked as tired as the décor.

Tonight the full intake team was in attendance: a social worker, an activity therapist, a registered nurse, three trainees, an orderly, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist (that was the brown man). These poor folks had been ready to leave at the end of their shift, but then the cops called ahead and said they were bringing in a new admission, so the doctor demanded that everyone stay. The team had been waiting on the big man for two hours. This was not a cheerful group. Ten people, plus three cops, plus the big man. It would be a crowded, grumpy room.

Before the guest of honor arrived, the men and women on staff had sat at the table with notepads and files spread out in front of them, doing busywork for other patients while they waited. Some used cell phones to make notes, or to text, or answer email. The orderly, at the far end of the table, watched a YouTube video on his phone and sagged in his chair.

When the cops brought the big man into the conference room, the staff members leaned backward, as if a strong wind had just burst in. The doctor pointed to a faux-wood chair that had been pulled back from the table about three feet.

“He can sit there.”

Huey brought the big man to the chair and unlocked his handcuffs. He then took the big man’s right wrist and handcuffed it to the arm of his chair. The staff watched quietly and without surprise. Only the orderly looked away from the scene, replaying the video on his phone.

Once the big man settled, the doctor walked to the open door of the conference room. Somewhere outside the room, farther down the hall, deeper into the unit, buzzing voices could be heard. A television playing too loudly. The doctor pushed the door shut, and the room became so quiet that everyone in it could hear, very faintly, the bump-bump-bump coming from the orderly’s cell phone. The tinny thump of music playing over small speakers.

The doctor walked the length of the room and chucked the orderly on the shoulder as he passed to collect a folding chair for himself.

He set his plastic chair in front of the big man and sat down. He smiled and the bushy mustache rose.

“I’m Dr. Anand,” he said. “And I want to welcome you to New Hyde Hospital. This building, this unit, is called Northwest.”

The big man looked at the other staff members. A few of them managed a New York smile, which is to say a tight-lipped half-frown. The others watched him dispassionately.

Dr. Anand — like the big man, like most of the people in this room — had been raised in Queens, New York. The most ethnically diverse region not just in the United States, but on the entire planet; a distinction it’s held for more than four decades. In Queens, you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That’s Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all-you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet.

Dr. Anand was no stranger to the buffet table, a man of Indian descent who sounded a little like a working-class guy from an Irish neighborhood. He dropped those r’s when he wasn’t being careful. He sounded like he was talking through his nose, not nasal but surprisingly high-pitched.

The big man wasn’t concerned with ethnography just then. He hadn’t said anything since crossing the threshold of the big doorway. That’s because he wasn’t actually there. Only his body filled his chair. The rest of him lagged a little behind. It was still back in the lobby.

The big man knew he should be listening to this doctor. If anyone could explain how soon he’d be released, it must be the barrel-chested Indian dude squatting on the dinky chair right in front of him. But he just couldn’t do it. His ears felt stuffed up and his mind fuzzy. He wanted to turn and look over his shoulder, try to find that lagging part of him that would make sense of this moment. He didn’t actually move, for fear the cops might pummel him.

“So why do you think you’re here?” Dr. Anand asked.

The whole room waited for his answer.

Except for the orderly, who pulled out his cell phone again, muted the device, and tilted his head down toward the screen. He wore the glazed-eyed grin of a man watching something that showed skin.

In some strange way it was deeply reassuring for the big man to see this familiar incompetence. He asked, “If this is a hospital, how come you’re not checking my blood pressure or something?”

Three of the staff members at the table recorded this question in their notes. The patient’s responses during the intake meeting were vitally important. Not only what he said, but how he said it. Did he seem agitated? Morose? Distant? Combative?

(Combative.)

Dr. Anand nodded slowly. “This is a psychiatric unit. We’ll take your vitals and all the rest, but first we want to get to know you.”

Psychiatric unit.

Two words the big man could honestly say he’d never imagined hearing in a sentence pertaining to him. Open container in public, public urination, twice he’d been in fights where the police had been called. He’d never had trouble that caused him more than an overnight stay in a lockup. Most of the time they were just ticketable troubles. One time he hopped a turnstile — in a rush to get to Madison Square Garden for Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls tour; the one where Tommy Lee did his drum solo in a rotating metal cage suspended over the crowd — the cops scolded him, gave him a ticket, but he still made the show. (And it was great.) That’s the kind of trouble the big man had been in. But this?

Dr. Anand leaned forward. “Is this your first time?”

Huey answered for him. “As far as our records indicate.”

Staff members noted this in their paperwork as well. All those pens writing on the tabletop at the same time sounded like a skateboard’s wheels on pavement.

“I want my lawyer,” the big man said. Wasn’t that what he should tell them?

Huey squeezed the big man’s shoulder. The silver diver’s watch appeared in his eye line. The big man blinked rapidly, as if the cop was about to conk him. Instead the cop explained, “It don’t work that way. You haven’t been charged with a crime yet so an attorney isn’t your right.”

The big man pulled at the handcuff attached to his right wrist. The metal thunked against the armrest. Even the orderly looked up now. Inside New Hyde this orderly counted as the muscle, the one to hold a thrashing patient down, separate two patients fighting over a kid-sized carton of milk. (Nurses did the same, but that was not what they’d been hired to do.) Now the orderly sized up the big man, tried to figure if he could handle the new admit once the cops, and their handcuffs, were gone. The big guy wore cheap khaki slacks and a button-down light blue long-sleeved shirt. Both in sizes you only find in Big & Tall stores. The new guy had size to him, no doubt, but it was the kind of bulk you find on bouncers at shitty bars; the kind of guys who wear overcoats to hide the fact that their bellies are bigger than their chests. A big man but not a hard man. He’d probably do more damage falling on you than punching you. The orderly came in a smaller package, but was made of denser material. He’d been a wrestler in high school and stayed in good shape. He felt sure he could maintain control later on. Threat assessed, he looked back down to his screen.

The big man pleaded, “If I’m not charged with anything, then you can let me go.”

Dr. Anand shook his head faintly. “Unfortunately, no. You’re categorized as a ‘temporary admit.’ Which means the police leave you in our custody for seventy-two hours.”

“Three days? I’m not staying here three more minutes!” He bucked in his chair. Dewey and Louie had their hands firm on his shoulders in an instant, keeping him seated.

Nearly the whole room scribbled notes after that. And instantly the big man saw that his usual headfirst routine wasn’t going far. Can’t bulldoze through this. He knew what he had to do then. Stay calm enough to convince them of the truth.

Dr. Anand leaned forward in his chair. “You’ll be with us for three days. That’s the law. It’s Thursday night. You’ll be with us until Monday morning. And in that time we’ll evaluate your mental state.”

“I can tell you my mental state.”

Dr. Anand nodded. “Let’s hear it.”

“I’m pissed.” Being mellow had never been one of his talents.

From the back of the room the orderly rose as high as he could in the chair. “Language, my man.”

The big man took him in. “You watching music videos or porn on your phone?” he asked.

Dr. Anand looked at the orderly.

“It’s off!” he said, as he fumbled with the device.

The big man grinned and said, “I’m going to call you Scotch Tape. ’Cause I see right through you.”

The orderly said, “Look here.…”

But Dr. Anand caught the orderly’s eye. If this was a contest of power, you can guess who won. The other staff members studied their laps, and silence choked the room. The orderly pulled his chair forward and set the cell phone on the tabletop, facedown.

A moment after that, the big man heard a snorting noise from the back of the room. It sounded like the radiators in his apartment. They would snort and hiss, too, at odd hours. Sometimes they produced heat, other times they just made a racket. The snorting stopped. The room didn’t get any warmer.

Dr. Anand returned his attention to the big man. He didn’t look angry, more like exhausted. “Why don’t we just start with a name. What should we call you?”

Huey had the big man’s wallet. He handed it to the doctor.

“You’ve got my name,” the big man said. His brown pleather wallet, old and overstuffed, carrying more ATM receipts than currency, sat in the doctor’s hand.

Dr. Anand shook the wallet. “I’m not asking what it says on your license. I’m asking what you like to be called.”

Why was this doctor talking to him like that? Like he was a dun-sky? He spoke so slow it seemed like another language. Being treated like a newborn only riled the reptile in the big man’s brain.

He said, “You can call me ‘Ed the Head.’ ”

Two staff members actually wrote this down, the others just looked confused.

Scotch Tape couldn’t control himself. From the back of the room he shouted, “I am not calling you no ‘Ed the Head!’ ”

The big man nodded. “Then call me … ‘Blackie Lawless.’ ”

Scotch Tape leaned forward and snatched up his phone as if it was the big man’s neck. “Watch it, white boy!”

Blackie Lawless was the lead singer of an eighties band called W.A.S.P., but the big man didn’t have time to give Scotch Tape a history lesson in heavy metal.

The cops shifted in their stances. They wanted to be done. Dr. Anand seemed the least exasperated by all this. He opened the wallet, pulled out the driver’s license, and read the name to himself.

“Your name’s not Edward. And it sure isn’t Blackie!”

The big man felt foolish. What was he really doing here? Giving a little shit to an orderly? Confusing a doctor? But to what end? He couldn’t think past the anger caught in his throat. In other places, his taste for pointless conflict made him seem a bit wild, lippy, a guy who wouldn’t back down. He liked that. But that’s not how they’d see it in a psychiatric unit. These people at New Hyde were evaluating him. He had to remember that.

Just breathe. Be calm. Speak to the doctor for real.

“Pepper,” the big man said in a subdued voice. “Everyone calls me Pepper.”

“Why do they call you Pepper?” Dr. Anand asked.

“Because I’m spicy.” He couldn’t help it, the words just came out. Now he looked at the doctor to see if this would earn a demerit, too. But Dr. Anand didn’t seem bothered.

The snorting began again. This time it seemed closer, no longer playing in the back of the room. It came from under the conference table. And it no longer sounded like a radiator. More like a living thing, but not human. A bull. The snorting grew louder. Pepper watched the table. He felt confused but refused to show it. What could he say that wouldn’t make him look like a grade-A lunatic? Then, once again, the sound abruptly cut out.

Dr. Anand put the license back into the wallet and balanced it on Pepper’s thigh. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I get to keep that?”

“This isn’t prison,” Dr. Anand said. “You have rights.”

“Except the right to walk out of here tonight,” Pepper said.

Dr. Anand nodded. “Except that one.”

The doctor turned in his chair again and spoke to the staff, but stared directly at the orderly. “Let’s all remember Pepper’s name.”

Scotch Tape wanted to howl but he also wanted to avoid getting written up again. Dr. Anand would probably already make a little note about the business with the phone. And it was 2011. If there was ever a year to be cavalier about employment, well, this sure wasn’t it. So Scotch Tape nodded and said, “Pepper.”

The snort came for a third time. It was even closer now. Immediately to his right. As if the animal had crept right up to his ear. Even worse, there was a smell. Musky and warm, like old blood. It made his throat close, and he wanted to wretch. The hospital’s staff members sat around the conference table taking notes, or watching him. Not one of them seemed to notice anything. How could they not smell that stink?

Pepper cut his gaze to the right, but was almost afraid to do it. What would be worse? Seeing a snorting, stinking beast there or nothing at all? All he found was one of the cops. Dewey. There was something strange about the cop’s face, though. His face was flushed. His nostrils flared. His stance was tense. Surreptitiously he, too, was peeking to his right. The snort came again. Dewey heard it! Had to be. Pepper almost cheered with relief. Then Dewey caught Pepper looking at him. Instantly he lost his fearful expression. He looked straight ahead, doing his best impression of tranquility. The snorting faded, along with the smell.

Dr. Anand said, “I think we’re ready to transfer him, officially.”

The cops undid Pepper’s handcuff, and Dr. Anand filled out some forms right there in front of everyone. Pepper tried to catch Dewey’s eye.

“You …” Pepper began.

“I didn’t hear nothing,” Dewey said, cutting him off.

But when Dr. Anand opened the door, Dewey practically stampeded to get out first. The other two cops and some of the staff watched him with quizzical expressions. Then the doctor escorted Huey and Louie out the door. When they’d all left the room, the staff didn’t even look at Pepper. They pulled out their cell phones and clicked or tapped or viewed or listened to messages.

Then Dr. Anand returned and the phones were set facedown on the table, while the nurse walked over to take Pepper’s belt and the laces from his work boots. Pepper let her have all three items because he couldn’t quite believe the police had actually left him here.

Dr. Anand took the same plastic seat in front of Pepper. “Now what we want you to do is tell us a little about your family. Treat this like a celebrity interview. We’re the paparazzi and we want to know all about you.”

Scotch Tape chided him. “Act like you’re on TMZ!”

Pepper wondered if that paparazzi pitch worked on other people. Maybe younger ones. It sure didn’t mean much to him. But he talked about himself anyway. He talked so he wouldn’t hear the snorting. His shoulders remained so tense they would be a little sore in the morning.

He told them about his parents, Maureen and Raymond, who ran a video store in Elmhurst. Raymond died not long after VHS tapes did, and Maureen sold the business and lived alone for eight years. She stayed in Maryland with Pepper’s brother, Ralph, now. Ralph had a wife and son, and Maureen took care of the kid so the parents could work. Pepper couldn’t remember his nephew’s name just then and felt bad about that. Pepper graduated from John Bowne High School in Flushing and spent one semester at Queens College. His brother, Ralph, had the business sense of their father and owned a Wendy’s in Gaithersburg. Pepper had inherited his mother’s work ethic, a facility for the regular grind; she was the one who’d actually kept the family’s video store running day to day. Pepper figured that if he told them as much as he could they might realize the truth: He didn’t belong in here. He only didn’t tell them where he worked, figuring they might actually call. He couldn’t afford to be fired again.

“And what about relationships?” Dr. Anand asked. “Not with your family. Personal ones.”

“There’s a woman in my building,” Pepper admitted.

“And what’s her name?” the doctor asked.

“Mari.”

“And where is Mari now?”

“She’s probably in her apartment, with her daughter. Isabelle.”

“Is Mari your girlfriend?”

The word sounded so silly in Dr. Anand’s mouth. And even sillier applied to Pepper, a man of forty-two. “It’s early still,” he said.

What he didn’t add was that Mari was actually the reason he was in here. It sounds a little old-fashioned, but he’d been trying to protect her honor when it all went so badly so fast. She didn’t even know where the cops had taken him. He wanted to let her know where he was and even more, he wanted to hear that she was okay. And how was he supposed to be of any good to her trapped in here? Pepper didn’t say all this out loud. They’d ask him what he did, and why it all went badly, and the story would only make him seem even rowdier.

Never mind, though. Dr. Anand had plenty of other questions.

But the more Pepper told them the less he seemed to matter. He might’ve been relating the inventory of the truck from yesterday’s job. Dr. Anand and his staff weren’t listening, only gathering the necessary information to refine his classification. After forty-five minutes he was a case history; a new admit awaiting diagnosis; a subject.

After an hour Pepper was, officially at least, a mental patient.

2

WITH PEPPER’S INTAKE meeting finished, Dr. Anand walked him out of the conference room and back into the hall. Pepper expected some ceremonious next step, but the doctor just pressed him back against the hallway wall, as if he was about to use a pencil to mark Pepper’s height.

“Stay here,” Dr. Anand said, already turning away. “A nurse will be by quickly. She’ll take you to your room.”

And just like that, the doctor returned to the conference room and shut the door. Pepper felt like a fridge left out on the sidewalk.

The walls in this hallway were eggshell white like those in the conference room. The floors were cheap beige linoleum tiles. On the wall, right beside him, at shoulder level, hung a framed landscape painting. There was another across the hall. An empty beach by his shoulder; a path through empty woods across the way. Soothing images, by reputation. In truth, Pepper felt more comfortable around apartment buildings and even on subway platforms — maybe not beautiful, but his natural habitat. Not just his, but likely that of nearly every damn person associated with this hospital, from the staff to the patients to the cops who’d brought him in. So why decorate the walls with someone else’s dream of peace? Maybe they were just feeding that most natural human appetite, the hunger for somewhere else. A yearning Pepper could relate to just then.

No nurse appeared, and for fifteen minutes Pepper just repeated the same words to himself: seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours. You can stand anything for seventy-two hours.

The loud voices playing from a TV somewhere down the hall, deeper inside the unit, had changed to loud explosions. Maybe someone had switched the channel, or the show had come to a moment when the world starts blowing up. Pepper knew it was just a television show, but the sounds seemed to grow as they traveled from wherever the TV sat to where Pepper still stood in the long, empty hall of closed doors. The howl of human beings, the victims of those crashing sounds, played louder and louder. Like the people themselves were about to come flooding into view. Maybe not even people, but people’s parts. A wave of blood. Dismembered limbs breaking the surface of that wave like sharks’ fins.

Pepper knew this couldn’t happen, but his chest felt tight.

He looked to his right and focused on that secure ward door. What if Dr. Anand hadn’t locked it behind the cops? What if all Pepper had to do was give a little push?

Seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours.

He couldn’t stand this for that long. He couldn’t even make it twenty minutes before he tried to escape. Pepper lurched toward the big door.

He grabbed the handle and pushed lightly. But of course the door didn’t open. He pushed harder. He tried to turn the knob. It didn’t shimmy. He let go of the handle now and pressed both his meaty hands against the door and leaned into it. He set his broad, laceless boots down flatly, repositioned his large hands, and now he powered against that door, straining like a bull. But the damn door stayed secure.

Finally he pressed his face to the shatterproof window. There were little lines embedded in the plastic, like chicken wire. He’d been on the other side less than two hours ago. Two hours before that, he’d been on the other side of Queens! He’d been trying to help Mari by having words with her ex-husband, a man who wouldn’t leave Mari be. And yet here Pepper was, locked away. He pressed his face to the window, fucking confused. There was nobody on the other side. He closed his eyes.

“Better not let them see you doing that.”

Pepper opened his eyes, expecting — not hoping, but expecting — to find himself on the E train, having fallen asleep and only now waking to learn he’d dreamed up New Hyde Hospital. Instead he found himself still staring through the plastic window.

“If you understand English, then step away from the door,” the voice continued.

But Pepper didn’t move fast enough. Before he could stand up, stand back, and turn around, he felt fingers grip his wrist.

After having three cops wrestle him to the ground in a high-school parking lot, then being handcuffed to a chair, Pepper really wasn’t in the mood to get hemmed up one more time. No more hands on him tonight. He turned and yoked the person grabbing him. He actually pulled off a pretty sophisticated move, mostly through momentum and a great weight advantage. He yanked his wrist free from the person’s grip, turned and enveloped the body behind him, and lifted it into the air.

When it was over, Pepper had a seventy-six-year-old woman in a bear hug.

And before he could apologize, or loosen his grip, or set her back down on her feet, what did the old woman do?

She kissed him right on the mouth.

He dropped her and she landed harder on one foot than the other, yipping like a dog whose tail has been caught.

Now Pepper bent to cradle her on instinct, in case she’d been badly injured. But the old woman threw her arms out to stop him.

“You like it a little too rough for me,” she said.

The door of the conference room finally opened and Dr. Anand’s round head peeked out. He watched them both for a moment. Pepper and the old woman turned their attention to him.

“I see you’ve met Dorry,” the doctor said. “She’s our unofficial ambassador.”

“Hello, Captain.” She saluted him, any hint of leg pain hidden.

Dr. Anand tipped his head toward her slightly, then looked back down the hall, deeper into the unit, toward the TV sounds.

“Miss Chris is late again,” Dr. Anand said.

Dorry patted her chest. “She deputized me.”

She looked up at Pepper. “I can take him to his room.”

She jabbed Pepper in the belly. The new admit looked comically large next to Dorry, like a sheepdog beside a shih tzu.

Dr. Anand looked down the hallway once more, but Miss Chris made no appearance. He said, “Take him to his room, Dorry, but don’t go in his room.”

Dorry poked Pepper’s belly again.

“Dr. Anand thinks I’m a raging slut,” she said.

Dr. Anand stepped all the way into the hallway and waved his arms as if clearing smoke. “I never said that, Dorry! Now come on.”

Pepper couldn’t help it, he laughed. The old woman made him feel at ease. The blush burning across Dr. Anand’s brown face also helped. Pepper decided to join in the banter. He set one hand on Dorry’s shoulder and said, “Maybe me and her will just run away together.”

Dorry quickly slipped away from Pepper’s hand as Dr. Anand stepped toward them with surprising quickness. “There is no intimacy allowed between patients on the unit. Do you understand?”

Pepper wanted to point out how ridiculous the warning was. What they were just doing counted as intimacy, too. But he knew, from past experience, no one likes a nitpicker. Especially not one who looked like him. Such a small act as begging to differ, from such a large man, tended to make people particularly angry. In general, people thought he took up too much room on the subway and often sighed or grunted to let him know. The only benefit to his great mass was that he could lift heavy things. He’d been a professional mover for eleven years.

As Dr. Anand continued to glare, Pepper stepped back an arm’s length from the old woman. Then he stuck his arm out and wiggled his fingers to show the distance. The playful moment over, Pepper again felt the gravity of this night—I’m locked in a mental hospital—as dead weight in his legs.

Dr. Anand nodded at Dorry. “He’s in five.” The doctor reentered the conference room and shut the door behind him with a click.

The old woman was right beside Pepper, pinching the back of his left hand. “I thought you were going to tell him about how you kissed me next.”

“Me?”

“Don’t insult a lady.”

Dorry’s hunched back only made her look smaller than she already was. She had wiry white hair that clearly hadn’t been combed in days. It shot from her scalp in fifteen unflattering directions, like a feral child’s. Her faded blue nightdress came down to her shins. On her dry, bony feet were faded blue slipper-socks. She wore gigantic glasses, big plastic Medicare frames. Their lenses so thick they looked slathered with Vaseline. Even if you didn’t know this woman was crazy, you’d think she was crazy.

Pepper said, “I’m sorry for grabbing you. I didn’t know you were a woman.”

Dorry frowned. “What the hell kind of apology is that?”

Pepper gripped his hands together. “I didn’t mean it like that! I’m sorry, that’s all. All right?”

“Let’s put the past behind us,” she said. “I always greet the new admits. You should see a friendly face first.”

Then Pepper pointed one finger at her eye, though not too close.

“That was you!” he said. He realized she really had been the first person he’d seen.

Dorry took off her glasses and the resemblance became exact. She winked at him.

“I’m always getting recognized by my fans.”

Pepper pantomimed applause. He didn’t actually clap because he didn’t want to give Dr. Anand another reason to step into the hall.

Dorry reached out and wrapped her left arm around Pepper’s right elbow. She looked up at him over the tops of her glasses. From here he could see the off-color band around her iris. She clearly wasn’t blind, but maybe blindness wasn’t too far off.

He was surprised to feel grateful for the tenderness in the touch.

“Let me give you the tour,” she said.

“They call this building Northwest,” Dorry began. “That’s just because it’s located in the northwest corner of New Hyde Hospital’s grounds. So much for creativity, right? Anyway, there’s three buildings at the center of the hospital campus and that’s the heart of the operation. Emergency room, surgery, children’s unit, geriatrics, ICU, almost everything is in those three buildings. Everything but us, really. You’ve got those three buildings, then the main parking lot. A couple hundred parking spaces. Then, you’ve got us crazybirds, tucked into the northwest corner. Some people say we’ve been exiled out here, but I prefer to think our building is exclusive. You’ve got to have a special invite to enter Northwest. They’re called commitment papers! I’m just kidding.

“So Northwest is the psychiatric unit. No other kinds of patients. It used to be an ophthalmology ward but that was over fifty years ago. Before I even got here, and that’s saying something. Fifty years ago they made Northwest a psychiatric unit and moved all the old ophthalmology equipment up to the second floor. It’s just a big attic. The layout of the second floor is exactly the same as the first, but none of us has any business up there.

“Think of the unit as a wagon wheel. That’s the easiest way to picture it in your mind. There’s one roundish room in the middle of Northwest and that’s where you’ll find the staff. There’s a big old desk unit in there called the nurses’ station. All roads lead there. It’s the hub of this wagon wheel.

“Then you’ve got five hallways. They’re like the spokes, going to and from the nurses’ station. Like this hallway here, it’s the first one any new patient enters, so it’s called Northwest One. Northwest One has all the conference rooms.” She slapped one of the closed doors. “This is where you’ll have group sessions, mornings and afternoons. But don’t think of these as classrooms because then you’ll start thinking of Northwest like it’s a school, with schedules and activities and lots of structured time. But it doesn’t work like that! You can wander, watch television, or lie down in your room. That’s how people spend most of their day, every day, on the unit.”

Pepper grabbed the handle of a closed door and tested it.

“Come on. Stop jiggling that. The only way to open these conference-room doors is with a set of keys. And only staff members carry those. Keep moving.”

She yanked on Pepper’s arm and he followed her.

“Now here we are. The hub. And that’s the nurses’ station. Right in the center. Ugly isn’t it? And it’s not even real wood. Or at least it’s not good wood. It looks kind of like a Chinese food — restaurant counter, doesn’t it? I’ve seen enough of those!

“I guess the biggest difference between those Chinese-food places and the nurses’ station is that this one doesn’t have those bulletproof windows separating the workers and customers. And there’s no Chinese people working back there, either. Mostly it’s blacks. Usually the blacks are on the customer side, am I right? Chicken wings and French fries! They love that chicken-wings-and-French-fries combo. And extra hot sauce, please! I’m just kidding. They never say ‘please.’

“So you can see the five hallways from here. That’s Northwest. And while you’re in here, that’s pretty much the whole world. You’ll see. Northwest One, Two, Three, Five.”

“What about Four?”

Dorry stopped moving. Almost seemed to stop breathing. “Forget about Northwest Four, you understand me? You don’t go near Northwest Four.”

“You going to tell me what’s over there, or can I guess?” He couldn’t take her seriously.

“That’s where the buffalo roam,” she said absently. Dorry’s eyes lost focus, a thousand-yard stare.

Pepper stifled a grin. “Oooooh-kay.”

“Do I look like I’m joking with you?” she asked.

You look bonkers, is what Pepper wanted to tell her. Instead he said, “No, ma’am.”

Just as suddenly, Dorry’s glare disappeared. She smiled as if they hadn’t just had this little confrontation. She continued the tour.

“Each hall has its own purpose. Northwest Two is for the men. All male patients sleep in rooms on Northwest Two. All female patients are in Northwest Three. They’re serious about that. No slipping past them. I’m the only exception. I’ve been here long enough so they trust me. And I’m so old they can’t imagine I’m going to screw anybody. Boy, are they wrong. Kidding!

“Now here you are. Northwest Two, room five. I can open the door for you but I can’t step in. Look! They’ve put fresh sheets and a pillowcase at the foot of your bed. And one of their finest pillows. Hah! The damn things are thinner than a throat lozenge, but don’t bother asking for a second one. They’ll write that you’re a ‘narcissist’ in your file. I remember the patient who was in that bed before you. He was discharged two weeks ago. Or is he dead? I forget.

“Anyway, that’s the tour. Gratuities aren’t mandatory, but they are appreciated!”

3

HE DID NOT give her a tip.

Dorry didn’t actually wait around to see if he would. She wrapped up her talk and left Pepper standing in the threshold of his new room. He watched her waddle off, hunched and surprisingly quick, and even when he turned away he could hear her padding down the hallway. From a distance — Northwest 4? Northwest 5?—Pepper still heard the television. Someone must’ve switched to another station, no more explosions or human howls, just the electronic snap of some teenage R&B number. Pepper didn’t recognize the song, but he knew the style because at least one or two of the guys on his moving crews were kids. At some point during a six- or seven-hour job, you could count on one of them to start playing loud music out of his phone. Pepper wished he had his phone now, but they’d confiscated it with his belt and laces.

He stepped backward into the room and shut the door. The sounds of the television, Dorry’s footsteps, the general buzz of the hospital unit, were muted and now he was alone. He flipped on the light.

This room had the same eggshell-white walls as in the hallways. It was about the size of the living room in his Jackson Heights apartment. There were two beds in here. The bed frames, industrial metal, twin-sized, were both unmade. But where Pepper’s had the sheets folded neatly at the foot of his mattress, the other’s sheets were tossed like a wind-ravaged sea.

Pepper had a roommate.

Besides the beds, there wasn’t much furniture. A pair of cheap, narrow dressers backed up against two opposing walls. They came up as high as Pepper’s shoulders. One looked unused, the dresser top bare, while the other, next to the messy bed, had eight soda cans sitting on it, stacks of newspapers, and a dozen old pens in a plastic cup, each pen cap chewed until it was warped.

Pepper reached down to the handle of the closed door, looking for a lock he could turn. But the only way this room would lock was with a key.

Pepper walked to the bare dresser, crossing the linoleum tiles. He opened each dresser drawer but found nothing inside. He sat on his bed. The mattress was long enough to accommodate him if he didn’t stretch out. If he did, his ankles and feet would hang over the end. A metal bed in a mental hospital. Now that’s some reality few folks are prepared to face. Pepper let go of the frame.

Do something. Do something.

He picked up the sheets at the foot of the bed and, to his own surprise, made the bed. It was something to do. The only thing he could think of. The sheets were whiter than the walls, crisp but far from plush. He snapped the fitted sheet on, pulling each corner tight. He slipped his thin pillow into its case. As he worked he heard Dorry’s patter in his head, but kept trying to forget it. He didn’t want to remember the layout of Northwest. Didn’t want to remember where Northwest was situated on New Hyde Hospital’s grounds. He didn’t want to wonder if the last patient in this room — in this bed! — was discharged or … not.

Eventually he finished making his bed. What could he do to distract himself next? His bed sat flush against one of the long walls in the rectangular room. Above his bed were two tall windows. A pair of thin, yellowed curtains, were drawn back.

Windows.

Pepper immediately flashed back to the only thing he knew about mental institutions: the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. After Jack Nicholson got lobotomized then smothered by the Indian, hadn’t Big Chief used a piece of machinery to bash open one of the windows and go running off into the gray dawn? Couldn’t Pepper do the same?

He climbed onto the bed he’d just made, and left some big old boot prints right on that white top sheet, but so what? He was inspired. When he stepped on the bed the springs yelped. He took a second step and the frame itself groaned. He leaned against the windows and wondered if he could use this bed frame as a battering ram.

But then he saw the same white chicken wire woven into the window, and he recognized it as the same unbreakable plastic outfitting that small window in the ward door. He rapped on the surface, as if it was a door that might creak open. But that didn’t happen, of course. He would’ve bashed at the windows with his fists, his elbows, but what would be the point? That cop had been right; you couldn’t get through this shit with a bullet. Jack Nicholson and the Big Chief had lived in more breakable times.

When Pepper pulled his face back from the window the chicken wire fell out of focus and the outside world became clearer. Nighttime in New Hyde. A lawn ran just below Pepper’s window, cut so low it was almost bald. It ran about fifty yards until it reached a chain-link fence that surrounded the whole New Hyde campus. The fence was topped with two rows of barbed wire. Pepper could see it from here, like unpolished silver in the moonlight. How bad would that stuff cut him, if he got out and tried to climb?

With the door shut, the television silenced, Pepper could hear the sounds of traffic running along Union Turnpike, the largest roadway nearby. From this distance, the engines rumbled as one, sounding like a rushing river. Only some bleating car horns reminded him he was listening to a street. That people were in their cars, going elsewhere.

Pepper stepped back from the window, still on the bed. The reflection he now saw wasn’t his face, just a blurred circle. It looked like an enormous thumb had been pressed to the window from the other side. His blurry head the thumb pad.

He stepped down off the bed and one of his boots slipped off his foot. Without laces they weren’t too secure. He kicked off the other one. It tumbled across the floor and stopped by the door. One tan steel-toed Belleville boot, size 14.5.

Pepper noticed another door. He opened it and found the tight, windowless bathroom. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, standing in the dark without bothering to turn on the light. Eventually his eyes adjusted. He took in the stand-up shower stall to his right and sink to his left. A soap dispenser hung next to the sink, attached to the wall, like the kind you’d find in any fast-food restaurant’s bathroom. He fumbled for the cold-water knob at the sink and then listened to the water flow. The hiss of the water leaving the tap sounded like steam leaking out of those radiators in his apartment on Northern Boulevard. His home.

He looked at what he thought was the mirror above the sink, but couldn’t find his reflection there. Just another blurry shape.

He slapped at the walls, searching for the light switch now. He needed to see himself. To prove he was still there. But when he found the light, he saw the problem. No mirror above the sink, just a buffed metal pane. He stood before the semi-reflective surface with dismay. That was him? An elongated pink smudge? Vaguely humanoid. Hardly him. But when he tilted his head, that thing tilted its head, too.

He smiled and the thing sprouted fangs.

He finally turned off the tap but still thought he heard rushing water in his ears.

Pepper moved to the toilet seat and closed the lid. He sat down and slumped to his right, resting his face against the cool wall. That felt nice. Even comforting. Maybe he’d stay here for a while, until he could figure out a plan.

But soon enough he’d slid off the toilet and went down on his knees to pray. He’d been a churchgoing boy once, long ago, though he couldn’t even remember more than a few words of the Lord’s Prayer. He did remember shutting his eyes at prayer time and that always made the world slow down. He closed them now. Eyes closed, head slightly bowed, he breathed. His mind slowed.

He’d fucked up tonight. The cops had brought him here without warning. He hadn’t expected that, nor being reduced to this. Two hours in New Hyde Hospital, 120 minutes inside Northwest, and he’d become a guy who prays on the floor, in the dark. As close to panicking as he’d come as a grown man. Two hours was all it took to capsize him.

But that was okay. Happened to nearly everyone sometimes. The fear just gets you. And in a place like this? A mental hospital? Anyone would feel thrown upside down. Even someone who belonged here. No need to feel crushed. He’d been scared, confused, but the feeling was passing. He just needed to control himself. He’d made the bed, and it was late enough, probably right around eleven o’clock.

He got off his knees, returned to the bedroom, and turned off the lights. Only moonlight lit the room, coming in through the shatterproof plastic windows. He pulled the thin curtains shut. He was out of ideas, but only for tonight. He could get a little self-control going tomorrow. Stay so calm and gentle they’d release him by Saturday. A little rest was what he needed. He lay flat on his back and let his feet dangle off the edge.

Did they give you one free phone call in mental hospitals, like in jail? That was all he needed to start correcting things.

Tomorrow he’d call Mari.

Around a quarter to four in the morning, Pepper opened his eyes.

He might’ve been a workingman but he wasn’t this early a riser. Not naturally. But there he found himself, back to the room, facing the two large windows above his head, seeing the deep night fade into a faint purple dawn through the thin curtains.

Awake. Why?

Because somebody was jabbing him in the small of his back.

As groggy as Pepper was, he remembered the incident from seven hours earlier, when he’d yoked that old woman. He couldn’t afford to risk something like that again. He wouldn’t be completely surprised if Dorry had a way of sneaking in here. Maybe she was after that tip. Maybe she had more tour-guide information to give. He turned his head slowly, expecting to see the old woman.

Instead he found a man’s face. So close to his own that Pepper could smell the man’s turkey dinner. A broad, round face. Smooth skin, and practically bald. Brown complexion, darker than Dr. Anand’s. Not an Indian guy, but a black guy. There was no other way to put this: the guy’s head looked like a malt ball.

Poking Pepper again, the guy said, “Let me get a quarter.”

He had a wide, flat face and a wide, flat nose and tiny little eyes set deep into his head. He was a grown-up but you could imagine what he’d looked like as a child. Almost exactly like now.

Pepper could feel this guy’s nail digging into him. He was more than aggravated by this. He was mildly disgusted.

“Come on, Joe,” the guy said. He spoke with an accent, the English slightly clipped, which didn’t really tell Pepper much. He might be from another country, but in this borough there were probably five hundred countries to choose from.

“You’re my fucking roommate.” Pepper didn’t state this as a question. More like someone who’s just realized he’d stepped in dog shit. He shut his eyes, turned his head back toward the windows, and pretended to fall back asleep. Maybe his roommate would give up. But this malt ball — headed bastard just moved his finger higher. Poking Pepper in the shoulder. Harder. Pepper turned to look at him.

“Let me get a quarter,” the man repeated.

This guy’s round face looked wet with desperation. His cheeks, his chin were shiny and moist, as if he’d been sweating. Or crying. Or both. He began stabbing at the back of Pepper’s exposed neck with a nail as thick as the edge of a flathead screwdriver.

It was all too much, finally.

Pepper rolled onto his back, to protect his neck, and so he could move on this man. But when he tried to pull an arm free from beneath the covers he found he couldn’t quite do it. Pepper had wrapped himself up in his own sheets, his head sticking out one end of the wrap, his feet dangling from the other.

The guy hunched over him with a puzzled look. He scanned the length of the bed, saw the trap Pepper had sprung on himself, and dropped his poking finger. He crab-walked backward two steps just to take this ridiculous sight in.

“You look like an enchilada,” he said quietly. “How you going to give me a quarter now?”

Pepper said, “I wasn’t going to give you any damn money. I was going to smack you in the head.”

The man nodded, the top of his round head catching the dawn light.

“Well, you won’t be doing that, either.”

Pepper shimmied in the tight sheet.

“Just give me a minute,” Pepper said.

And the man did. He crouched and watched Pepper move. When the minute was up, very little had changed. “Now what?” asked Pepper’s roommate.

Pepper lay there, still tangled, but refused to ask this guy for help. Then he’d have to give the man a quarter. He’d rather lie here and starve himself loose.

The roommate leaned forward. “There’s an important person I’m trying to reach.” He looked over his shoulder, at the door to their room. “A man in the government.”

Pepper let out a long, slow sigh. Of course. Weren’t crazy people always trying to contact someone important? A man in the government. The Queen of Mars. The Knights Templar.

Pepper laughed to himself and relaxed and the sheets seemed to slip right off him.

“Patients are allowed to make phone calls?” Pepper asked.

“But it’s not free, Joe. You have to pay for the call.”

“That’s why you want a quarter.”

“Yes.”

“In the middle of the night.”

The man shook his head. “I want a quarter all the time.”

Okay then. Bonkers or not, the man had helped Pepper a little bit. Patients could make phone calls. Pepper had money — bills in his wallet and coins in his pocket. He wouldn’t call Mari this early, but it was good knowing that he could. He reached down into his pocket and felt the handful of coins waiting there, jingling a little.

“That’s it,” the man whispered. “Yes, yes, I hear the good news.”

Pepper found the coin he wanted to give, held out his hand, his fingers closed around the quarter. The man grinned.

As soon as Pepper released his fingers, his roommate snatched the quarter out of the air and ran from the room without shutting the door.

Pepper yelled, “And stop calling me Joe!”

But the guy was already gone. The lights in the hall filled the room like the headlights of a double-decker bus.

Pepper had to get up. He shivered in the slight chill of the air-conditioned room, cursed as he walked to the door and shut it, and bumped his shin on the metal frame of his bed when he reached it again. He flopped into his bed and, looking across the room at his roommate’s, wondered if the guy ever even slept there. Maybe he collected his alms around Northwest all night. Dorry had warned him that life in Northwest would be unstructured, but he would’ve thought the staff at least discouraged panhandling.

As the sun began rising on Friday morning, Pepper tried to fall back to sleep.

No luck. The door to his room blew open. Louder than an explosive charge. His roommate turned on the overhead lights, soaking their room with queasy yellow light.

“It’s a Canadian quarter!” he shouted.

Pepper lay still, faking the steady breathing of deep sleep. But underneath the covers he nearly laughed as he listened to his roommate pacing. Would the man escalate things? Would Pepper have to fight? That sure wouldn’t help to get him out of this place any sooner. Just that quickly, Pepper worried about what his roommate might do.

But the poking never resumed. The roommate finally turned out the light and went to bed.

From beneath his blanket, the guy whispered, “That’s cold, Joe. Real cold.”

Pepper slept until seven a.m.

4

PEPPER WOKE UP with the sun. He hadn’t forgotten where he was, but even in here, with an ache in his neck from the thin pillow, having slept in his street clothes, and even through sheets of shatterproof plastic, the sunlight sure felt pleasant. He practically purred in his bed, a great cat rousing.

But who the hell had drawn the curtains? Pepper thought of his roommate. He pictured himself sleeping deep and that guy standing over him long enough to tug the curtains. It just made him feel so vulnerable.

“Wake up! Wake up!” a woman’s voice sang. It wasn’t his roommate looming at his bedside, and not Dorry, either. A different older woman moved to the head of his bed and snatched his top sheet off. Didn’t even pause to check if Pepper had his pants on or off. (Thankfully, for all involved, they were still on.)

“I don’t plan to run a bath for you,” she explained tersely. She had a Caribbean accent. “It’s seven in the morning. Wake up! And get out of your bed.”

The woman’s actions screamed “Staff Member” but her wardrobe cooed “Casual Grandma.” A beige blanket sweater and shapeless jeans, comfortable black sneakers, and hair cut short. She had a batch of keys hanging from a plastic cord around her wrist. They jangled as she tugged the top sheet one more time, all the way off him.

“You’ll make your bed when I leave, hear?”

Those keys, that tone, the direct but disinterested stare, that’s how Pepper knew she was an employee and not a patient.

And Pepper nodded at her as he sat up. He almost said, Yes, ma’am.

“Now you take this,” the woman said. She opened a clenched hand. Two pills sat in her palm: a light green pill and a little white gelcap.

He looked at them with horror. As if she’d offered him poisoned Flavor Aid.

Remember who you are! he thought.

Pepper unfurled himself and stood, knowing he was a big old banner of a man. People tended to crane their necks and read the sign: STEP BACK.

But not this time.

The woman didn’t move. The pills in her palm didn’t even tremble as his body took up so much space. She simply tilted her head back and cut her eyes at him. She was old but her face still remarkably smooth. She had that power. You could see it in the way her lips drew down now, her lower jaw jutting out like the Don Corleone of the West Indies. Her eyes went from mildly cloudy to suddenly, strikingly clear.

“You going to give Miss Chris the business, heh? Trust me, you a big man but a small potato! And if I have to leave here and get a doctor, I promise you I coming back to make mash potato.”

What was it about that accent and that set of the chin? That aura of threat and premonition? Miss Chris had struck fear into badder men than Pepper, he felt sure of that.

What was Pepper going to do anyway? He’d had a grandmother of his own. Different color, different country of origin, different personality, but just as fearsome. Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman’s displeasure.

Miss Chris held her hand above her head, so the pills hovered just below Pepper’s chin. “I won’t make another request.”

Pepper plucked both pills and Miss Chris dropped her arm.

“At least tell me what these are,” he said.

“I’m your psychiatrist or your nurse? Because if I’m you’re psychiatrist I’m due a better paycheck.”

The light green pill was Haldol. The white gelcap was lithium. Miss Chris actually knew this, but was too vexed by the big man’s attitude to explain.

Pepper said, “I need to make a phone call.”

Miss Chris raised her eyebrows. “That’s a phone in your hand or two pills? Deal with what’s in front of you first. Then if you want to make a phone call, you go make your phone call. I’m here to dial the numbers for you? No! No!”

Miss Chris continued talking but she wasn’t actually addressing Pepper, so he stopped listening. He brought his lips down to his hand and slurped up both pills. They sat on his tongue. His mouth hung open as if the pills were scalding hot.

“I’m a Verizon employee?” Miss Chris continued. “Put your eyes to my ID and it will tell you different.”

He wasn’t getting past Miss Chris, out of this room, toward that phone call, if he didn’t swallow the pills.

Pepper finally closed his mouth and gulped. He felt the dry taste of the pills at the back of his tongue as Miss Chris wound down her rant.

Once Miss Chris had seen him swallow the meds, her job was done. She turned and left the room without even a wave.

Pepper didn’t want to run out right after her. He didn’t want to follow behind her down the hall. So he went into the bathroom where he found two sets of towels and washcloths on a rack by the shower. One set looked used, the other set clean. Pepper undressed and took a warm shower. There was a soap dispenser on the wall here, just like the one by the sink. Pepper squeezed out a few dollops of Pepto-Bismol-pink soap. He tried to wash off the moment with Miss Chris. He stood under the showerhead with his eyes closed and wondered what effect those two little pills would have. They’d been so small.

He dried off, dressed again, and left his room.

The hallway gave the feeling of a community college. Institutional. Low-budget. But now he noticed the wooden railing running alongside either wall. It ran about waist height. Unbalanced patients could cling to these wooden rails and pull themselves down any hall.

Parallel to the railing hung a strip of wallpaper, like trim just beneath the ceiling. A series of five repeating images. Lighthouses. A lighthouse at night, under a full sun, at dawn, in the evening, overlooking the sea during a storm. The painted lighthouses ran all the way down Northwest 2.

Pepper followed their lights.

He reached the nurses’ station, the room at the hub of the unit. Four staff members worked at the station, all seated. Pepper noticed Miss Chris moving down Northwest 1. She stomped toward the secure door in her practical shoes, still speaking out loud. But to whom?

The nurses’ station was a rectangular desk area, with two tiers. The outer tier stood as tall as a bar top. Behind that top tier was a second one, lower, where staff members could sit and work at desk height. Pepper saw the tops of four heads. He didn’t recognize any of these people from the intake team last night. Two nurses, an orderly, and a social worker were all in there, hunched over, heads down, filling out forms in the natural posture of the public-hospital worker.

Pepper wanted to walk over and ask about that phone call. But first he had to make his mind understand what his eyes were seeing. The image wasn’t blurry — four staff members worked inside the nurses’ station — but the meaning of that image made less sense. He could’ve been looking at a giant terra-cotta pot, the tops of the four heads like four plants just breaking the surface of the soil. He was swaying and didn’t even realize Dorry had grabbed his hand until she yanked on his pinky.

She looked up at him, unsmiling. “You better hurry if you want breakfast. They’re about to shut down. Are you hungry?”

Pepper was hungry. In fact, ravenous. Huey, Dewey, and Louie sure hadn’t taken him out to dinner before they dropped him at New Hyde last night. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.

“I have to make a call first,” he said.

But whose voice was that who said it? His, but not his. Distant. Slow.

“It’s eight twenty-five,” Dorry told him, and to Pepper her voice sounded faster, a bit daffier, than it had the night before. “They shut breakfast down at eight thirty and don’t serve food again until lunch. You want to wait that long?”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. His naturally big appetite had been enhanced.

“Wait,” Pepper said. “How can it be past half past eight?”

Dorry pointed at a wall where no clock hung. She kept her finger pointed there as if he just couldn’t see it. Miss Chris had given Pepper those pills at seven a.m. He’d lost almost an hour and a half since then? Those two little pills had walloped his ass.

Now Dorry pulled at his pinky again. “You can eat or you can talk, but you can’t do both in five minutes. The phones will be there when you’re done. I promise.”

Pepper nodded at her, or at least he hoped he did. He had a hard time feeling his body. For instance, he was already walking now and he’d hardly noticed. Dorry led Pepper around the nurses’ station and held on to him. Not one staff member looked up at them. All he heard when passing them was the skritching of their pens.

Dorry pulled Pepper down another hallway. One she hadn’t showed him the night before. “This is Northwest Five,” she said. “You remember the wagon wheel?”

Pepper did but he couldn’t say yes and nod his head and walk simultaneously. So he just looked down at his feet in their gray thermal socks. He hadn’t even put on his boots. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.

Much like Northwest 1 and 2 the hall here was lined with closed doors. They barely registered in Pepper’s periphery. Left then right. So when they reached the end of Northwest 5, Pepper didn’t expect the room to be so big and bright. It was filled with chairs and tables and surprisingly natural light. It was twice the size of the room at the hub of the ward.

“This,” Dorry said, sweeping her free hand and speaking in a theatrical whisper, “is the television lounge.”

There were six round wooden tables. Each could fit four or five people. They were spread out in a crescent shape, running along two adjacent walls that were entirely made up of ceiling-to-floor windows. These windows even looked like glass without chicken-wire veins.

Dorry seemed to read his thoughts. “Pretty, aren’t they? But don’t get too excited. They’re glass coated with shatterproof plastic. They’re actually even tougher than the windows in our rooms, they just don’t look as industrial. It’s expensive stuff! Which is why New Hyde only paid for it here, in the lounge.”

This lounge was the closest the psych unit had to a showroom. A place where photos were taken on the rare occasions when the psych unit made it into the hospital’s brochures. (Four times in forty years.) More important, the lounge was where families sat with patients during visiting hours. It had to offer a better view than the bedrooms.

And what could Pepper see through those floor-to-ceiling shatterproof glass windows? A decrepit old basketball court. Half-court, actually. With one tired-ass basket. The rim oxidized from orange to a sickly brown. The once-white backboard had gone gray. Even the pole tilted forward about ten degrees. It wouldn’t be hard to dunk on a hoop like that, but then patients weren’t ever taken out there to play basketball.

Dorry said, “There’s five smoke breaks a day. They let patients stand out there to puff.”

Dorry brought Pepper to a tall wheeled cart, like the kind used in school cafeterias. Gray as a gunship, with large black wheels at the base. An orderly stood there, but didn’t seem like he wanted to linger. It wasn’t Scotch Tape, but a different black guy, tall and skinny and disinterested. The orderly removed the last full tray and almost handed it to Pepper, but Pepper couldn’t get his hands raised. His arms just stayed there at his sides even though the fingers did wiggle. Dorry took the tray for him. And with that, the orderly checked his watch—8:32—and pushed the cafeteria cart out of the television lounge and down Northwest 5.

Dorry moved toward an empty table, farthest from the other patients. The tables and chairs were the kind of dining sets you might buy from a defense contractor. They lacked any beauty and weren’t even comfortable. But neither the people who sold it — in bulk — nor the people who purchased it — in bulk — were ever going to sit at these tables, so what the hell did they care?

Dorry settled down at the far end of the crescent. Pepper took fifteen minutes to catch up. No joke. A walk of no more than ten feet took him a quarter of an hour. He regretted waiting to make the phone call more and more. Having breakfast in this place only seemed like he meant to stay.

Sitting down gave Pepper trouble, too. He had to coordinate pulling the chair out without being in its way. He had to aim his butt at the chair cushion and not smack into the armrest instead. And he had to scoot forward in his chair, which meant working up some traction between his thermal socks and the tiled floor. The man had sweat on his forehead when he finally picked up his fork.

Dorry smiled widely. “Those meds are murder, aren’t they?”

There were other patients gathered at the tables on the other end, by the TV mounted to the wall. Some sat with their breakfast trays in their laps and their heads cocked back so they could see the thirty-two-inch flat screen.

Eight patients stared at it, men and women, pawing blindly at their breakfast trays. Their mouths hung open and their eyes looked heavy in post-dosage stupor. What else could they do to ride the dosage out but watch television? Pepper couldn’t even manage that.

The news played, though what was on hardly seemed to matter. The patients watched commercials and weather reports as intently as “breaking news” when they were in this state. Pepper heard the anchor’s voice. “Thousands packed Cairo’s Tahrir Square for a ‘Day of Victory’ to celebrate the one-week anniversary of the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.”

Pepper tried to focus on his breakfast tray. A small box of cereal, a green apple, an eight-ounce carton of milk, a four-ounce juice cup, two pieces of white toast, and a set of plastic utensils. Very little of this stuff actually qualified as food. Foodlike, maybe. Pepper looked away from his tray, slowly raising his eyes, if not his entire head, to peek at the half-court out there. But what he saw, just beyond the court, was that same chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. The door to the half-court had three locks.

How am I here? Pepper wanted to ask.

But he couldn’t form the words. Not only was his body still working at sludge speeds, but now his mouth was so dry he could feel the bumps of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He needed a sip of that juice. The most appetizing item on the tray. He meant to move his arms, to grab the tiny cup, but couldn’t. His fingers didn’t work, either.

Dorry watched him struggle without offering help. It wasn’t that she was being cruel. It was that she was on meds, too. Pepper recognized it on her face. She smiled widely again. Had he said something funny or was she reacting on delay to something she’d heard minutes ago?

He stared into her mouth. Dorry had tombstone teeth, bent at all angles and going gray. Her giant glasses showed streaks, like a window that’s been wet but not wiped clean. She wore the same blue nightdress from the night before. She was the kind of person Pepper might’ve given change to on a subway and never thought about again. Not a good thing to admit, but it was true. And now here he was, looking to her for help with his meager breakfast. His thirst overwhelmed him.

“Dorry,” he whispered.

Speaking, just that one word, and barely a whisper, made his parched throat burn. He puckered his lips, he opened and closed them. He stared down at the breakfast tray, at the juice carton, and hoped she understood.

Dorry said, “Do you know much about the American buffalo?”

It took Pepper a moment to register how mind-bogglingly random Dorry’s question was. If he’d been in control of himself, he might’ve chucked his table at her out of frustration. But he couldn’t do much of anything. He watched the little juice cup with an almost romantic longing.

Dorry rose from her chair.

She shuffled around the table.

“Two hundred years ago, or something like that, the American buffalo dominated the West. There were millions of the great beasts, running in herds so big it sounded like thunder rolling toward you. A population of five million. Ten million. Maybe more.”

Pepper couldn’t quite focus on her words. By now his mind seemed to be floating. Or sinking. Either way, his brain was an untethered balloon. If he hadn’t been able to see the tabletop right in front of him, see his arms balanced on the chair’s armrests, he would’ve thought he’d been let loose to float into the sky.

His throat felt so dry.

“When the settlers started crossing the country in droves, the American buffalo met its match. People wanted the skins for warmth, they ate the meat, they used the horns and the bones and all the rest. Those Native Americans used even more of the animal, but they hunted it all out of proportion, too. Used it for themselves and sold it to the settlers. The American buffalo became big business. Nothing stands in the way of that. In no time, maybe three years, those beautiful beasts were almost extinct.”

Dorry stood by his side now. She reached across his tray for the four-ounce juice cup. But she couldn’t pull the foil top off the thing. Even though she’d been on the unit for much, much, much longer than Pepper, she, too, had been walloped by her morning dose. What she took would’ve put Pepper into a coma.

“People used to go out and hunt them with rifles. Hell, they even leaned out of moving trains and picked the buffalo off with potshots. They also call the American buffalo a bison. Same animal, two names. Don’t know why that happened.”

Dorry finally opened the juice. Like Pepper used to do when he was a kid enjoying a quarter water after school. She popped two holes with her teeth then jabbed one finger inside to make a kind of spout. She tilted back Pepper’s head and opened his mouth.

“But the worst way to kill them, in mass numbers, was to drive a herd toward the edge of a cliff and just make all those big dumb things jump right off. It was messy. Some people think the men did it just for fun. Or maybe it was more efficient. Didn’t use any bullets and you had all of them right there at the bottom of the cliff. The sight, from above, must have been something truly hellish. Just thousands of bison, broken into pieces. Heads and hooves and tails and guts. Blood everywhere. Some of them didn’t die right away. They might be down there snorting and wheezing and slowly drifting off toward death. But it hardly counted as a loss for anyone but the buffalo. Even though it sounds wasteful, the profits were so big it didn’t matter.”

Dorry finished by slowly pouring the apple juice into Pepper’s mouth.

Pepper’s arms shivered and his tongue expanded in his mouth like a sponge. His eyes focused on the old woman standing over him. He smiled at her: a mama bird feeding its chick.

After drinking two ounces, he regained some control of his body. He raised one hand and took the juice from Dorry, sat up straighter, and slurped the rest himself.

And Dorry returned to her chair, snatched both pieces of toast off his tray, and winked. The price of partnership.

Pepper grabbed the green apple and bit it once. A chomp so huge it exposed the core. Smaller bites, Pepper. After he finished chewing he asked, “Dorry, why did you tell me that story about the buffalo? It’s horrible.”

They laughed and the mood seemed to lighten.

Then Dorry said, “I want you to understand where you’ve found yourself, big boy. In here we’re the buffalo. And New Hyde is the cliff.”

Pepper wasn’t any goddamn buffalo, or bison, or whatever. He was a man and he’d be leaving soon after he made his phone call. Of course, Pepper couldn’t say those things to Dorry. Instead he spent forty-five minutes finishing his apple while she calmly watched him, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.

“We’ll have to go back to the nurses’ station if you want to make that phone call,” she said. “You remember where it is?”

How could Pepper be expected to forget? What kind of dimwits was Dorry used to dealing with? But then Pepper remembered he’d been unable to walk half an hour ago, so maybe he shouldn’t be too smug.

“Down that hall.” Pepper gestured with his head.

Dorry grabbed the cereal box off his tray and held it up. She raised her eyebrows and Pepper consented to let her take it. Dorry marched over to the gaggle of patients by the television. She skirted around one table, closer to the windows, and stopped beside an old black woman wearing a purple pantsuit and matching little church hat. Dorry leaned close and spoke into the woman’s ear, then set the cereal box in her lap.

Pepper and Dorry turned their walk back to the nurses’ station into a funny kind of race. Dorry held on to the wooden railing running along the right wall, and Pepper held on to the one on the left. They used the railings for balance, and to drag themselves forward. Eating breakfast had spiked Pepper’s blood sugar enough to put a dent in his paralysis, but he still needed a little help. And Dorry did, too. Clinging to their respective rails, they lumbered in harmony.

When they reached the nurses’ station again, the same tops of the same four heads were still bent over the same paperwork. The staff members hadn’t shifted. Just as Dorry and Pepper reached the oval room, a phone rang behind the nurses’ station and one of the staff, a woman, picked up.

“Northwest,” she answered, as if this was her name. She listened for a moment. “The doctor is not on the unit just now. Let me put you through to his voice mail. All right?” She asked without waiting for a reply. A faint click could be heard as the nurse pressed the transfer button. Then a clunk as the plastic phone went back into its cradle. The woman went back to paperwork. At New Hyde the term for this was charting.

Pepper found he could best move through the room if he focused on its discrete little details. If he spent too much time planning his phone call to Mari, everything he needed to explain and to ask of her, then he got tripped up. Stick to the basic motor functions, Pepper! Footsteps, and hands held tight to the railing, and keeping pace with Dorry as she led him forward.

But then he lost himself by counting hallways. They’d just left Northwest 5 and as they veered to the left, making a circuit around the nurses’ station, holding to the curved railing, they reached Northwest 1. As they crossed the mouth of that hallway, Pepper turned and recognized the secure door. Miss Chris stood in the open doorway. A delivery man held a white bag, food from a place nearby called Sal’s. Miss Chris counted out her money. Pepper couldn’t even consider escaping just then, he could barely stay upright. Then they passed Northwest 1 and Pepper clung to the railing again. Up ahead was Northwest 2, the men’s hallway, where his room lay. He looked over and saw Northwest 3, the women’s. There he saw a pair of middle-aged women walking together, dressed nearly identically, and laughing over some impossibly funny joke. Really happy, at least in that moment. Were they patients? How could they be smiling if they were in here? He couldn’t stop watching the women as he moved.

And that’s how he bumped right into Dorry, nearly knocking her over. But he caught himself and her. The wooden railing groaned as the two of them held to it.

“Sorry,” Pepper said.

Dorry said, “My son was the same way. Never looked where he was going.”

Two of the staff members at the nurses’ station rose from their seats, just high enough to peek over the desktop at Dorry and Pepper. One of them was Scotch Tape, who recognized Pepper from last night and didn’t feel like being bothered this early. No one being hurt, no one attempting to escape, no one refusing treatment. As far as the staff’s checklist went, there were no problems then. He returned to his charting.

Dorry and Pepper had stopped midway on the wheel, between Northwest 2 and Northwest 3. Between the two halls there was a little alcove.

“Pay phones,” Dorry said.

“I can make as many calls as I want?” Pepper asked. Surprised that prisoners were limited to just one, but mental patients had unlimited access.

“As long as you’ve got the money,” she said.

He had the change right in the pocket of the slacks he’d slept in. Pepper reached into the pocket and pulled out the coins. Only then did he realize the act of balance he’d just achieved. A minor feat for anyone over two years old, agreed, but you’d be surprised how that medication makes you feel like a wobbly infant. It had been two hours since he’d swallowed the meds and he still didn’t feel clearheaded, but maybe they had lost their worst effects.

The change in his palm looked like shiny communion wafers.

The alcove wasn’t terribly big. There were two pay phones. Both were in use. By the same guy.

Pepper’s roommate.

Mr. Malt Ball held one receiver to his right ear. The other was balanced on his left shoulder. He looked like an old-time receptionist, putting through calls. He didn’t notice Pepper, even in that cramped space. This guy had admirable powers of concentration. Either that or he was just ignoring the big man.

The roommate spoke into the phone by his right ear. “Yes, I will hold.”

Then he set that phone onto his right shoulder and lifted the other one to his left ear and said, “Hello? Hello? Come on!” But he’d already been put on hold on that phone, too.

Dorry peeked in. She said, “That’s Coffee.”

At least Pepper had a name for his enemy.

“I should warn you,” she said. “I wouldn’t go around flashing my change like that.” She pointed at Pepper’s open hand and he closed his fingers. “Coffee’s going to ask for money if he sees that.”

“He already did. He’s my roommate.”

Dorry winced like someone who’s just touched an open flame. “For the first time since we’ve met, I actually feel sorry for you.”

Dorry meant this as a joke, but why did it make Pepper flinch?

He walked right up to the still oblivious Coffee, who had returned to the phone at his right ear. His eyes were tilted upward as he listened to the hold message play for the fifth time in a row. That’s why he didn’t understand what was happening when Pepper snatched the other receiver out of his left hand to hang up the line.

“I’m using this phone now,” Pepper said.

Pepper stood half a foot taller than Coffee but, more important, Pepper outweighed Coffee by at least eighty pounds. And Pepper’s face, with its high, flared nostrils and bared teeth, looked about as pleasant as an etching of a Chinese demon. The sensible reaction for Coffee would have been to make peace. Or even to get his ass out of the alcove. But let’s say this for Coffee: the man was out of his mind.

Coffee squared right up to Pepper, chest to belly.

Then he spat in Pepper’s face.

The saliva struck the big man’s chin, slid down, and hung there like a chrysalis for a full three seconds before Pepper hit the man.

Actually he crushed him. The alcove didn’t have enough room for real blows to get thrown, so instead Pepper threw himself. The smaller man got caught between a wall and two hundred seventy-one pounds of medicated murderousness. Coffee might as well have been ground into a fine powder. Ready for the French press. (Sorry!)

Coffee howled and went down to the floor. The other receiver slipped out of his right hand, striking against one wall like a gavel. A recorded announcement played from the receiver, repeating what it had already been saying for many minutes:

“Thank you for calling 311 in New York City. We’re here to help.…”

Coffee was curled on the ground, hands over his face. Pepper stooped over him. Pepper wanted to thump this guy for spitting on him. Really one of the most cowardly and disgusting moves a person can pull in a fight. But before he could do more, Pepper felt that saliva dripping down onto his neck and he panicked. What if this dude’s spit had passed through his lips, even just a little bit, and gone down his throat? AIDS? Hepatitis C? Who knew what could happen? The moment the thought came up, it was impossible to put down. He stuck his tongue out and pressed it to the sleeve of his shirt. Licking his arm to clean his tongue. Coughing loudly.

Try to imagine what Scotch Tape and the other staff members saw when they entered the alcove, drawn in by Coffee’s screams and Pepper’s wretching. The staff found a very large man standing over a smaller one, menacing the smaller man who was, even now, scrambling to get hold of the dangling pay-phone receiver to try his call again. And the big man was — what the hell else could you say? — licking himself.

Crazy-balls. The scene was absolutely crazy-balls.

Scotch Tape sucked his teeth. He stared up at Pepper with distaste. “Damn, my man.”

Pepper stopped applying his tongue to the fabric of his shirt and turned toward Scotch Tape. Below them both, Coffee spoke urgently into the phone.

“Hello?” he whimpered. “Please. I’ve seen it. I know where it lives.”

“Thank you for calling 311.…”

Two nurses poked their heads into the alcove, but with Coffee, Pepper, and Scotch Tape already inside, there was no more room. From farther outside the alcove Miss Chris shouted, “What’s this foolishness?!”

Scotch Tape called out, “New admit attacked Coffee.”

Hearing it like that, from a staff member, made Pepper understand what he’d just done. Hadn’t he resolved to control himself? To make the best impression possible? But getting spat on had to count as a mitigating circumstance. Pepper wanted to explain.

“I needed to make a phone call,” he began.

Scotch Tape waved the words away. “I’m taking you back to your room now, and you’re going to stay in there for the rest of the day. You hear?”

Coffee rose to his feet now, pushing himself up with his back against the wall. He shook the receiver of the phone Pepper had hung up. “Now you owe me a quarter, Joe! An American quarter!”

Pepper said, “This guy was using both phones and I just …”

Scotch Tape stepped closer to Pepper. They were squared up just like Pepper and Coffee had been, but Scotch Tape wouldn’t have to spit on anyone to make his point. That was clear.

“Save that shit,” Scotch Tape said. “You can explain all this to Dr. Anand.”

The way Scotch Tape said it, the name sounded like “AndAnd.”

From outside the alcove Miss Chris added, “Oh-ho, it’s Charlie Big Potato causing the fuss? I already told him to be easy.”

In defiance, desperation, and drugged-out confusion, Pepper grabbed the phone on the left, lifting the receiver out of its cradle. He’d make his phone call.

But Scotch Tape wouldn’t let that happen. He pressed two fingers down on the cradle, and the dial tone choked before Pepper even got the phone to his ear.

Then, another quick flash of temper, Pepper half-raised the receiver like he’d bring it down on Scotch Tape’s head. But he stopped himself from making a bad day terrible and put the phone back in the cradle.

Scotch Tape grinned.

“That’s smart, big boy. First smart move you’ve made since you got here.”

Oh, how Pepper would’ve loved to pick up Coffee and use him to bludgeon Scotch Tape to death. Would that count as black-on-black crime?

Scotch Tape misread Pepper’s contemplative look. He spoke with a mix of compassion and condescension. “You calm now? All right, then. Let’s go. You and me. Back to your room.”

As Pepper followed Scotch Tape out of the alcove, Coffee still clung to the pay phone like a man adrift, trying to stay afloat. The receiver was tucked against his ear.

The automated voice on the other end thanked him, once again, for calling.

“It’s here,” Coffee said quietly.

5

SCOTCH TAPE MOVED alongside Pepper, shaking his head as if he’d just seen a kid do something that would earn a powerfully strict punishment.

“I believe you,” Scotch Tape said as they walked.

A pair of old men, one small and one medium-sized, walked past Pepper and Scotch Tape, going in the opposite direction. They wore sport coats and walked in synchronicity. Scotch Tape nodded at them but they ignored him. The smaller one peeped Pepper.

“You believe me about what?” Pepper asked.

“What you said last night,” Scotch Tape continued. “That you don’t belong here. I believe you.”

Pepper stopped to reach for the handrail, put off balance by the residual effects of the medication or what Scotch Tape just said.

“Why do you believe me?” Pepper asked.

“You seen Dorry? Or Coffee? Most of the patients in here? Shit, I’ve seen crazy. And you’re not that. You can be an asshole, though.”

“Why don’t you unlock that big door for me then, so I can just go home.”

Scotch Tape shook his right arm and the red plastic cord slipped down below his wrist. It looked like a miniature Slinky. His keys dropped and he caught them with practiced cool.

“Today’s February 18. You got a seventy-two-hour watch and you’re not getting out any sooner than February 21. But if you keep acting stupid, you’re going to be staying a whole lot longer.”

Pepper didn’t say anything smart because even he’d known that rolling on Coffee had been really dumb.

Scotch Tape said, “Let’s keep going.”

Scotch Tape entered room 5 with Pepper and shut the door behind him. He moved to Pepper’s dresser and rested an elbow on it.

“You know how you got here?”

Pepper couldn’t get a handle on what this moment really was: surprising camaraderie, or just a staff member messing with a patient. So he said nothing.

“That cop who brought you in, the one who did the talking, his name is Detective Saurez. He brought you here because him and his boys aren’t getting no more overtime from the NYPD right now. Processing you at the precinct would have taken hours. Without that overtime they’d basically be working for free. But they know if they drop you off with us you’re our problem and their workday is done. Half of them got second jobs to get to. Like we don’t.”

Pepper shook his head. “That’s why I’m here? Because Huey, Dewey, and Louie got lazy?”

Scotch Tape looked confused for a moment, but he let it pass. He tapped the top of Pepper’s dresser with two fingers, for emphasis.

“That Saurez dude has pulled this same shit with Dr. Anand before. Plenty times. I’m telling you. And we have to process you. But I’ll bet you Dr. A is making some phone calls today.”

Pepper noticed one of his laceless boots standing by the door. The other was most likely under his bed. Yes. He fished beneath the frame and there it was. Pepper collected his shoes and set them both down, together, neatly by the foot of his bed. A little bit of order.

Pepper said, “They can’t just do something like that.”

Scotch Tape shook his head as if Pepper were a silly child.

“And yet here you are,” Scotch Tape said as he left the room and locked the door from the other side.

Pepper sat on his bed.

He wasn’t actually surprised to be locked in his room as punishment. Even if this was a hospital, they’d fallen back on some old-school discipline. His mom and dad might’ve done the same, thirty years ago, when Pepper got into a fight with his kid brother, Ralph.

Locked door, still no phone call made, Scotch Tape’s revelation about why he’d been brought in here, and even Dorry’s little story about the American buffalo. The whole mess swirled in Pepper’s head until he imagined a cliff with a mound of bodies at the bottom. But his vision was far worse than what Dorry had described. He saw buffalo heads and human arms, bison’s legs and human torsos, a mess of discarded flesh and fur. And the three cops were at the top of the cliff. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, not even wearing their plain clothes but the brightly colored sweatshirts those duck kids wore in the cartoons. One red, one blue, one green. They were pushing something big to the edge of the cliff, and he knew who it was.

What to do with all that?

Pepper put on his boots to get rid of the dark thoughts.

The boots were three years old now. Bought from a military shoemaker. The soles were flexible, the toes durable, and lots of ankle support. Perfect for furniture movers, as well as soldiers. Even without the laces it felt good to have his work shoes back on. He worked exclusively for Farooz Brothers Movers. He was very good at his job.

Pepper was thinking maybe he should call the Farooz brothers himself, risk asking them for help, when he heard a patter against his shatterproof windows.

It was rain. A sun shower. The best kind of storm. They always made Pepper feel drowsy. Rain against the windows. The faint tapping got stronger, but only slightly. A sun shower on a Friday morning. Pepper slid his butt backward and lay flat on his bed, the boots still on his feet.

Pepper liked to watch that painter on television, Bob Ross. His voice was as pleasant as this morning rain. His voice as soft as his white-guy afro. If Pepper was ever switching through channels and happened across an episode of Bob Ross’s painting program, he would lie down (if he could), lower his eyelids, and just lull.

And that’s what happened to him there, in his bed at New Hyde. A sun shower and memories of Bob Ross blissed him right out. Until someone unlocked that room’s door, there was nothing else he could do anyway. He listened as the rain seemed to creep up the side of his windows instead of down, until the patter seemed to dance against the roof of the building. Pepper had forgotten what Dorry told him, about Northwest having a second floor, so he thought the noise above his head was just rain hitting the roof. That’s why Pepper listened to it calmly. It lulled him. Up there the noise changed slightly. It sounded more like creaking. Like wood stretching. A faint, fast rhythm to it as the sun shower became a little more forceful.

The rain grew even stronger and the sun got crowded out, but by then Pepper had nearly fallen asleep. As more clouds burst outside, the creaking in the ceiling only got faster and the tapping against the windows turned into slaps. There was so much to worry about, so many mistakes to sort out when he got out of bed again. He almost worked himself back into a frenzy when he thought about Mari and what her ex-husband might be doing to her right now. But he couldn’t do much about any of it right then, so he just listened to the sounds of the wild world. Slapping and creaking and carrying on. Drowning out everything, even Pepper’s rising fear that he might not get out of Northwest. Not in seventy-two hours. Not for far longer than that.

Forget all that right now.

As Pepper’s eyes fluttered closed, he could almost hear the alizarin-crimson voice of Bob Ross, whispering, “And until next time, I’d like to wish you happy painting, God bless, and I’ll see you again.”

When Pepper’s eyes opened again, who did he find stooping over him? Not kindly, sweet, semi-burnt-out Bob Ross. No, it was Coffee.

Fucking Coffee.

And Pepper had a feeling about where this would head next. He’d fallen asleep flat on his back, above the covers. Instinctively, he shoved his hands into his pockets just in case Coffee had been planning to rob his ass in his sleep. Coffee noticed Pepper doing this and sneered as he backed away.

“I don’t need your money that badly, Joe.”

Pepper lifted his head off his pillow. “Stop calling me Joe.”

Coffee pointed at the tray on top of Pepper’s dresser. “I brought you lunch.”

Pepper sat up now, starving. The change in his right pocket shook as it settled. He got up and walked toward the tray. As he moved, his clothes felt stiff and his feet, still in the boots, felt wet and sweaty. His wool socks had been in need of a wash when he put them on Thursday. So by now they might be getting a bit ripe. Then he felt self-conscious. Even though he’d showered that morning, he already wanted to wash himself again. But not in that tight, windowless bathroom. Not in that stand-up shower stall. At home. In his tub. He probably hadn’t taken a bath in eight or nine years, but he’d earned such an indulgence. He’d even throw in some Epsom salt for the sciatica that had the left side of his lower back hurting. Wait. How had a luxurious indulgence turned into an old man’s nerve therapy? And so quickly?

Pepper looked down at the lunch tray: a small orange, a plastic carton of apple juice, a tuna-fish sandwich on white bread (the bread looked like dry wall and the tuna, grout), a small cookie prepackaged in plastic. The cookie was just dough with a mysterious small red ruby in the center. It looked like a wedge of beet, to be honest. A beet cookie for dessert? Who would do that to people? Even crazy people deserved better.

Pepper knew he should thank Coffee for bringing him the food, especially considering what had happened in that alcove. Yet this meal had all the hallmarks of a punishment. Pepper said nothing.

Coffee sat in bed, where he’d brought his own lunch tray and a can of soda. He tapped the top of the can with the same bony nail he’d used to poke Pepper the night before.

Pepper looked at the wealth of bad options on his tray. Which should he start with? It was like deciding between torture and torture. While Pepper pitied himself, Coffee kept rapping on that soda-can lid. Must’ve been at it a whole minute. The kind of rap-tap-tapping that made Poe flip his lid. Exactly as Pepper almost did. But then he looked at the man making the noise. Late twenties maybe, slumped forward on his messy bed, the can between his thighs, banging away. Pepper thought of one of those little toy monkeys clanging a pair of cymbals. (Pepper did not mean that in a racist way.) Coffee had been at it so long that it seemed maniacal, but here was a lunch tray right in Pepper’s lap. A kindness that deserved a little respect. So instead of going off on Coffee, Pepper tried to think of why someone might tap the top of the can like that. And keep going. Like a person clearing his throat, again and again, until you finally realize he has something to say. Something to share. Maybe he just wanted to be asked the right question.

“Where are you from?” Pepper asked. Usually an easy way to start a conversation in Queens. But Coffee didn’t respond. Just kept drilling that soda can.

“How long have you been in New Hyde?”

That caused Coffee to miss the top of the can and poke at the air, but just as quickly he went back to his routine.

Pepper had to think about what other subjects there might be, the ones that really mattered to Coffee. It didn’t take much longer to guess. He sighed.

“Who were you trying to reach? On the phones.”

Coffee smiled into his lap. He stopped tapping. “You really want to know?”

Based on that grin, the width and brightness of it, now Pepper wasn’t so sure. If this guy ended up saying he’d been trying to ring up the Illuminati or Reverend Al Sharpton (Okay, Pepper, now that one was a little racist), Pepper wouldn’t want to hear it. It would just be too sad.

Coffee said, “I was trying to reach the mayor’s office.”

Was that sane? Pepper couldn’t quite say. Ambitious, but not necessarily nuts. Lots of people called the mayor with problems. Pepper picked up the small orange, the size of a handball. He closed his fingers around it and it disappeared.

“The mayor of … where?” he asked.

Coffee finally snapped the tab of his Sprite can. When the top opened, it sounded like a sizzling pan.

“The mayor of New York City. Who else?”

(Mayor McCheese?)

Pepper opened his hand and bit into the top of the orange skin. He spat the chunk onto his tray and peeled the rest. “And why were you trying to reach him?”

Coffee drank half his can of soda in slow gulps. When he finished, he looked at Pepper directly. Each man sat on his own bed, with his lunch tray on his lap. They looked like kids bunking at sleepaway camp.

Coffee said, “I had to let him know this place is dangerous. I’ve seen its true face.”

Pepper dropped the rest of the orange skin on the tray and tore the fruit in half.

Pepper held up the orange and said, “I’ll trade you for a can of soda.”

Coffee set his tray on his pillow, rose from the bed, grabbed another Sprite from his dresser and exchanged it for half the orange. He wobbled slightly as he moved across the room. Coffee leaned down so he could be close to Pepper’s face. So close that Pepper leaned backward. There had been the faint accent, and now this complete ease with closeness. Pepper felt sure this guy hadn’t been born in the United States. While the rest of the world seems happy with only a membrane of personal space, Americans need a bubble.

Coffee said, “The mayor ought to know it’s killing us.”

“And you think Bloomberg can do anything about that?”

Coffee tore off a slice of the orange and slipped it into his mouth. He hardly chewed before he spoke. “The man got three terms in a city where two terms are the law! He changed the law to help himself, so why can’t he do it to help others?”

“But why would he want to?” Pepper asked. “What would he get?”

Coffee laughed quietly as he went back to his bed. He pulled the lunch tray onto his lap and lifted the tuna sandwich. He sniffed at it, then set it down again without tasting.

Pepper ate his sandwich in two bites, damn the funny smell. And if Coffee didn’t eat his soon, Pepper would offer to eat it for him. As bad as it tasted, all this would help get his strength up. The morning pills weren’t making his mind drag anymore. They had worn off. His body no longer drifted. A little fuel, any fuel, would fill his tank.

The rain had stopped and the clouds parted. The sun reappeared. Bright out. The windows were still slick with drops but they dried fast in the daylight.

“You ask why the mayor should care.” Coffee pointed at Pepper. “You’re an American. That’s right?”

“That’s right.”

“I am not. That is why I know what you cannot believe. This country might look like it’s about to break down for good.”

“That’s the truth,” Pepper said, as he choked down the tuna. Just then, even a bad job was a good job in this woefully unemployed country.

Coffee raised his Sprite as if he was giving a toast.

“But listen to me because I’m serious. America is not broken yet.”

Pepper wanted to argue. To educate this outsider. He knew the way systems ran in this country. For instance, he wondered how long it would take for Coffee to reach the mayor. A week? No chance. How about a thousand years? And then to be heard? To have something done about New Hyde? Count that shit in eons.

He wanted to say all that, but maybe he should’ve been more concerned about the sound of Miss Chris’s shoes coming down the hallway. In one hand she carried a small white plastic cup. In that cup were two small pills for Pepper. His midday meds.

Miss Chris plus Haldol plus lithium. A recipe for bed rest. He’d lost the morning and now it seemed he was going to lose the afternoon. She entered the room, ignored Coffee (because he’d already gotten his dose), and practically tossed the two meds down Pepper’s throat. As he drifted away, it occurred to him that he might end up spending the entire seventy-two-hour observation period with his eyes shut. Practically comatose. Then it occurred to him that this might be intentional.

So he slept through the afternoon, and in the evening Coffee did Pepper the kindness of bringing the dinner tray. A scoop of macaroni and cheese, a spoonful of green beans, two slices of plain white bread, a plastic container of apple juice. (Again with the apple juice?) And another sugar cookie with a beet-looking blob stuck in the middle. This dessert, like the afternoon’s, would remain in its plastic.

Pepper ate the food, and a nurse, one he hadn’t seen before, came in to bring his nighttime meds. New nurse, same pills. He was knocked out even before the nurse had returned to the nurses’ station.

And that, friends, was almost all of Pepper’s first full day on the psychiatric unit.

The last thing to happen was this:

He opened his eyes at 2:45 a.m. He was on his side, facing the door. He saw Coffee under the covers of his own bed. The room’s lights were out, the door shut; behind Pepper the moon was up. Pepper got up to use the bathroom and this took a little while. He had to roll himself off his mattress, and then he spent a few minutes on his hands and knees on the floor. The tiles felt cold against his palms and even through his slacks. He planned to stand up and walk to the toilet, but he just couldn’t coordinate his muscles. So he crawled to the bathroom on his hands and knees while Coffee watched in silence.

In the bathroom Pepper clutched on to the sink to pull himself up. Who was that in the bathroom, grunting and groaning? It was him, but the sound seemed so far away.

He splashed water on his hands and face. He peed. He washed his hands again. He returned to bed. This time he lay down facing the windows.

The view wasn’t so bad at this hour. Pepper could see the tops of the trees outside and the starless dark sky and the moon, nearly full. He couldn’t see the chain-link fence or the barbed wire at the top or make out the headlights of cars in the distance. It felt good.

Which is why the intrusion bothered him so much.

Pepper heard a muted thump. It could’ve been something dropping from above, but Pepper couldn’t figure out what that might be. Then he thought of a set of bedcovers being tossed to the floor, and Pepper assumed that Coffee had climbed out of bed.

Next there was a shuffling back and forth on the tile floor, and Pepper remembered Coffee’s routine from the night before. He imagined Coffee was getting up the courage to ask Pepper for the coins in his pocket. Maybe he’d only been bringing the food so he could ask for even more money. No kindness without a cost.

Finally a shadow moved across Pepper’s top sheet.

He smelled an unclean body. Something sour. Like the ammonia-haunted corner of a subway platform that has never been truly cleaned.

Pepper kept his back to the room. Hadn’t he and Coffee made a sort of truce? Talking, eating together, sharing soda and oranges — didn’t that earn Pepper a night without panhandling? The more Pepper thought this way the angrier he felt. The more Pepper anticipated that tap he was about to feel against his shoulder, the more he wanted to finish the fight they’d begun in the phone alcove.

But then someone just leaned close to Pepper’s ear and breathed into it. Fuck! Pepper’s ear felt so hot that he instinctively pulled the covers up to hide his face. But the breathing stayed steady on the other side. Still right by Pepper’s ear. So hot it soaked the fabric, and the covers turned damp at the spot. The breath felt so hot that it actually began to burn.

Pepper pulled the covers back down now, trying to inch away, toward the windows, but able to move only so quickly in his addled state. And when the covers came down from his head, he felt the touch of rough hair against his neck. Rough like gnarled wool, matted. And the burning breath kept coming as though pumped from a bellows, until Pepper’s skin felt like it was puckering.

Pepper opened his mouth to call out to a nurse or an orderly — even Scotch Tape — anyone who might come in here and separate the two of them. But when Pepper opened his mouth he couldn’t speak. The only sound coming out of Pepper was a wet cough, a choking sound.

Because someone had three fingers in Pepper’s mouth.

And it wasn’t Coffee.

The fingers reached all the way to the back of Pepper’s tongue, one nail jabbing his uvula.

Pepper was so shocked, so disgusted, working so hard to keep from vomiting that he couldn’t bring his teeth down on those fingers hard enough. He was too dazed.

The thing pulled Pepper’s head back, away from the windows, with enough force to move the rest of Pepper’s body. Until the two finally made eye contact.

The eyes Pepper met were white and empty. They had no pupils. Just the white meat of the eye, faint red veins running just below the surface like the chicken wire running through the shatterproof windows.

Was this person having a seizure?

Once Pepper was on his back, the fingers drew out of his mouth, the nails raking his tongue. His jaw ached from being yanked. In the dark, Pepper couldn’t see much more than those white eyes. Matted hair dangled down across his attacker’s face. The hair scratched at Pepper’s nose and lips. It felt like fur.

Pepper was looking up into a face he couldn’t understand.

The hair against his skin was fur, after all. And resting in that thick pelt he now saw a wide, wet nose, black and quivering.

Was this a hallucination? Something brought on by the pills? Like Ebenezer Scrooge’s old bit of undigested beef? An apparition? This had to be an error. This was only his roommate, Coffee, standing over him. Coffee, who had woken him up. Coffee, who wanted a quarter. Pepper was just too tired, too drugged out, too confused to see clearly. He had to slow down, breathe in, he was just caught somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. That place where monsters really exist.

Pepper looked at his roommate’s bed.

There was Coffee, wide-eyed and shivering.

Watching.

The figure above Pepper’s bed leaned closer now. Its hot breath burned the tip of Pepper’s nose like direct sunlight. And its own wet, black nose wriggled as it sniffed him.

Stop this, he thought. Just leave me be.

But Pepper wasn’t addressing the thing standing over his bed. Because he knew it couldn’t really be there. He was pleading with his own pill-addled mind.

Then the door to their room rattled and shook. Pepper’s eyes blinked and fluttered. The thing by his bed moved away so quickly, it seemed to fly.

“Who locked this?” a nurse’s voice called out.

She unlocked the door and snapped on the overhead light. It was the night nurse, who’d given him his nighttime dose earlier, along with an orderly.

“You two stop all that screaming!” the orderly shouted, stomping into the room.

Had they been screaming? Both of them?

The nurse shook two white plastic cups, one in each hand. The tranquilizers inside rattled like backgammon dice.

Coffee and Pepper sat straight up in bed.

Pepper scanned the room, he even peeked under his bed frame. The animal was gone. The only thing different about the room was a ceiling panel on the floor by Pepper’s dresser.

“Now this is just sad,” the orderly said. He picked the panel up. “This place is just coming apart.”

The orderly had to leave the room and return with a folding chair so he could slide the panel back into place.

Now the nurse shook the little white cups again. “Y’all know what’s coming.”

Please knock us out! That’s what they were both thinking. Right then Pepper only wanted to disconnect. He didn’t want to see what he’d just seen. If he’d seen it. Felt it. Bad dream. Bad dream. (Shared dream?) Bad dream. Better to be knocked out than to lie awake till dawn.

6

PEPPER WOKE UP thinking of butts.

And nothing else.

Ladies’ butts.

Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman’s back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts — the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman’s thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts.

In other words, Pepper woke up horny.

Let’s take a moment to be impressed. Three doses of Haldol and lithium topped off with a Vicodin nightcap and the urge still arose, like a flower growing through concrete. And he sure hadn’t been staring at any butts while in here. He just hadn’t had the itch. All those butts, and more, were stored in Pepper’s memory chip. It was as if his mind had known the surest way to rouse him from the pit of sedation. Asses would work.

Pepper’s mind woke him up. He found himself in his bed yet again. No butts in sight.

Now Pepper, get your big ass out of bed.

Outside his windows Pepper heard the muted rumbles of traffic moving down Union Turnpike. Ambulances whining as they sped toward the hospital. Car horns composing a fugue of frustration. From where the sun sat he guessed it was midday. He’d probably slept through breakfast.

In fact, it was four thirty on Saturday afternoon.

Coffee’s bed sat empty. The sheets tussled but the body gone. The door to the room was open. Pepper walked to the corner where the ceiling panel had fallen down. He stood under it but couldn’t make himself raise his hand and touch. It felt like standing under a cold shower, being right there. Pepper’s big body tensed so hard he shivered. He half-expected someone, something, to come crashing down on him. But that didn’t happen. So finally he backed out of the room, keeping an eye on that ceiling tile until he’d left.

He stepped into the hallway gingerly. Would one of the staff members appear, tackle him, and hold his mouth open? Why hadn’t Miss Chris or Scotch Tape or whoever was on duty done that to him this morning like they did the day before? Maybe they preferred to let a sleeping patient lie.

Northwest 2 was empty. Quiet. Yes, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling made noise, the low drone of an electric insect. But other than that? Not much. Pepper didn’t even hear his own footfall. He had only his Smartwool socks on his feet. He went back for his boots.

He still wore the clothes he’d had on when the cops brought him in. Now the fabric looked a bit ragged, more wrinkled than an old man’s balls.

He reached the nurses’ station and found just one orderly back there, charting.

The orderly looked up from his seat, over the tall shelf of the nurses’ station, and nodded at Pepper. A thick folder of paperwork sat in front of him. The orderly had stopped writing to flex his aching fingers. Like the other staff members, he wore his keys on a short, red plastic cord around his wrist. When the orderly looked up at Pepper again and stretched his aching hand this time, his keys tinkled.

“Last night …” Pepper said, but he couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t want to say it out loud.

The baby-faced orderly kept watching Pepper, but his hand dropped back on the papers and the fingers searched blindly for the pen, working nearly autonomously.

“You need something?” the orderly asked.

How old was this guy? Twenty? And in this place he had almost total authority over Pepper, a forty-two-year-old man.

“Where is everyone?” Pepper asked.

The orderly jerked his head once, behind him, toward Northwest 5, the television lounge.

“It’s visiting hours.”

Finally the kid looked down and found his pen. He snatched it, then looked up and frowned, clearly unhappy to find Pepper still standing there.

Now the orderly leaned over and lifted a clipboard.

“You had your lunchtime meds?” He scanned the list but wasn’t sure of this patient’s name.

Pepper saw an opportunity. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I had those. Definitely.”

“What’s your name again?” the orderly asked, torn between the clipboard and the charting.

“Thanks!” Pepper shouted as he walked to Northwest 5, and the orderly just set the clipboard back down with a shrug. He clicked his pen and returned to work.

Even from halfway down Northwest 5 the lounge looked like it was jumping. Every table was occupied, handfuls of folks were forced to stand. The natural afternoon light flushed against every face. And most of the people in there weren’t even looking up at the television, though the television stayed on.

Pepper didn’t make it all the way to the lounge. Part of the problem was that he saw Dorry in there, at a table with a slightly tired-looking woman in her forties, and two enthusiastic kids under ten. The kids were in their chairs, on their knees, holding playing cards close to their faces. Dorry, too, though she kept dropping her hand theatrically and one or the other child would shout for Grandma to be careful! The woman in her forties had a hand of cards, too, but hers were facedown on the table. She looked out the window and seemed to wish she was anywhere else.

And Coffee sat at another table with a pudgy man in a tight white button-down shirt and wide tie. His suit jacket hung on the back of his chair. He and Coffee were hunched over documents spread out on the table. Filling the entire table. Reams of data of some kind. And the man in the shirt and tie looked exasperated. He’d take one form and hold it up and read it, then place it facedown on a growing pile. Then lift another, read through, shake his head, and place it facedown with the others. Meanwhile, Coffee merely slid yet another sheet of paper toward the man. Pepper wasn’t sure which of them he should feel sorry for.

There were meetings of various kinds at every table. Some folks had even brought in food. Chinese, or pizza from Sal’s, bottles of soda or juice, chips or cookies. Like they were having picnics on the psychiatric unit.

How could this place be so active, so lively, when last night he saw …?

Pepper chose to focus on one table with three people sitting around it. An older woman, in her fifties, a heavyset man in his thirties, and a teenage girl who looked to be about sixteen. He couldn’t figure out which of them was the patient. Why did that bother him just then? It was like he suddenly wanted to know. Like he should just be able to tell. He assumed it was the guy in his thirties but, if he was being honest, that was only because the man was kind of chunky. He assumed the woman in her fifties was the mother, but mostly because she kept handing out egg rolls and cartons of Chinese noodles to the other two. She pulled a board game from a shopping bag. Pepper realized that these “clues” also proved nothing. Only the teenager seemed the unlikely choice. She wore baby-blue Nikes and a matching light blue knit cap pulled over her head. The cap had two small light blue pom-poms that dangled from the top. Pepper imagined some celebrity, one he couldn’t name, had worn much the same outfit recently. The kid just looked so put together in that high-school high-fashion kind of way, where a fifteen-year-old tries to look like a twenty-year-old and ends up making herself seem like she’s twelve. He wished he could excuse her from this room, so she could just go out and enjoy the prickly fruits of childhood. At least until the next time she and her mother visited the chubby guy.

But this sleuthing didn’t really matter. From his place at the lip of the television lounge, Pepper could be sure of only one thing: No one was there to see him. He pitied himself.

But instead of indulging this emotion too long, Pepper went back to the pay phones. If most of the patients were here in the lounge, then maybe, finally, the pay phones would be free. He could make that call. The person he most hoped would visit didn’t even know where the cops had taken him. Time to call her.

“Mari.”

“Who’s this?”

“You can’t guess?”

“There’s a number but the caller ID just says ‘New York City.’ ”

“It’s your favorite neighbor.”

“Gloria?”

“That’s funny. It’s Pepper.”

She paused.

“Hi, Pepper.”

“You sound as tired as I feel.”

She paused again.

“Were you worried about me?”

“I was worried about what you did to Griff.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s okay. I guess. I don’t talk to him if I don’t have to, but since the police haven’t come here and arrested me for conspiracy, I figure he’s not dead.”

“You want to know where I am?”

“Why did you have to do that, Pepper?”

“What? You told me he was threatening you, so I figured you wanted some help.”

“I was just talking about it with you, Pepper. You know? I thought you were being my friend. I wasn’t asking you to fix anything.”

“You don’t tell a gentleman about a problem and expect him not to help.”

“So I guess it’s my fault, right? You went to my job.”

“His job.”

“It’s the same place! God! You know how it looks now? Like I hired a man to come to my job and beat up my ex-husband. What does that say about me? I teach seventh-grade Spanish!”

“I went to Van Wyck to tell him to keep his distance. That’s all.”

“I can handle myself! I’ll call the cops if he really tries to hurt me. But that’s my business anyway. I was just talking! But now you make me look like … My students saw you hitting him in the parking lot. How do you think they’re going to look at me at school on Monday?”

“Why would they know it has anything to do with you?”

“Teenagers know. I’m telling you. I’m trying to act like a grown-up and you make me look like a fool. How am I supposed to teach them how to act if I can’t keep my own life in order? This is my job, Pepper. It’s like you’re trying to get me fired.”

“I meant to do something good. For you.”

“Look, Pepper. I don’t know how else to say this. I’m sorry to say this. But it’s not going to happen like that. Between you and me. I’m not trying to be mean, but you have to hear me.”

“Do you know where I am now? Your ex-husband … who the hell is named Griff anyway? Your ex-husband was the one who tried to get tough with me when I asked him nicely to stop threatening the mother of his child! He threatened to sue me. For menacing. Is that a crime? Okay, I admit, I lost my temper at that point. I smacked him one. So then we both got into it. Then three guys drive up in a Dodge Charger and I’m supposed to know they’re cops? In a Dodge Charger? I assumed they were meatheads. But they were fucking cops. Patrolling a school zone. Now I’m in a hospital behind this shit. And last night I was attacked! I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, so I’m sorry but I called thinking that if anyone might give me a little understanding it would be the woman I was trying to look out for!”

“I’m sorry about all that, Pepper. I really am. But I don’t know what you want me to do. You wanted to help me, but you never asked me what kind of help I needed. All I wanted was to talk about it. It was nice to do that with you down in the laundry room all those times. You were already helping. I don’t think that mess with Griff was about me at all. It was about you.”

“Marisol.”

“You have a brother, right? Your family is who you should be calling if you’re in a hospital.”

“You mean Ralph? I haven’t spoken to him in six years. Maybe more.”

“But he’s your brother.”

“It’s not going to happen, Mari. I’m not calling him. And he’d probably hang up as soon as he heard it was me.”

Mari sighed into the phone. Pepper was going to make even coming to his aid into a hassle. She said, “Hold on and I’ll find a pen.…”

Well that was depressing.

But also just confusing. How could she and Pepper see the same actions so differently? It made him wonder if the cops, or that dick-head Griff, had spoken to Mari and explained the fight in a way that made him seem as terrible as possible. Speaking to her about it forced him to see the same afternoon from a new angle. A big guy stomps into a parking lot and beats up a teacher. Then he beats up three cops. Good God. He’d begun seeing this version of himself — a thug, a marauder, a monster — when Mari mentioned calling his brother, when she asked him to hold on while she found a pen.

He had no choice. He told her Ralph’s name. And that he lived in Maryland now. But when she asked him for the actual number, he couldn’t give it to her. His cell phone knew the digits, not him. She said she’d go online and find Ralph’s number and give him this one and explain as much as she could. She wished him sincere good luck.

And that was it.

Pepper left the phone alcove, despondent. In part because he knew, even if Mari actually did track down his brother, Ralph wouldn’t call. He probably wouldn’t even tell their mother Pepper was in the hospital. Pepper had entered the alcove thinking he had at least one ally. He left knowing he had none.

He left the alcove and looked toward Northwest 2 and the room waiting there. Another day and a half. How many more chances would that give last night’s visitor to drop in?

He looked to his right and saw that unclassifiable trio — woman in her fifties, man in his thirties, teenage girl — walking from the television lounge and down Northwest 5. He watched as they entered the room at the hub of Northwest and circled around the nurses’ station. They barely spoke to one another but didn’t look angry, really. Maybe just a little worn out. The time spent getting ready for the visit, traveling to the hospital, sitting around with your loved one inside a sealed (if sunny) room. That’s going to get you tired. Now they spoke to one of the staff. A nurse led the family to Northwest 1, toward the secure ward door. She moved ahead of the family, already picking through her ring of keys for the right one. The one that would let them leave. Pepper watched all this carefully.

He felt so low just then, at a complete loss. Dogged out. Abandoned. Without the willpower to be prudent, to check himself. A feeling known, generally, as fuck it.

Pepper trailed behind the family who trailed the nurse. No alarms went off as Pepper moved closer. No one even noticed him.

The nurse had her back to the hallway and the proper key in hand. She pulled it forward, moving it toward the lock, and the red plastic cord squeaked faintly with the stretch.

It was then that Pepper realized he was really going to try to escape. He worried about the dude in his thirties, but not that much. The guy was doughy, not very tall; the kind of man who made a living but rarely worked. And, for all Pepper knew, heavily medicated. Pepper could get past him. His slow walk turned into a trot.

The nurse slipped the key into the secure ward door and this is the moment when she got a bit lazy. She should have looked over her shoulder to be sure there were no other patients crowding close. In fact, the orderly should actually have accompanied her and the family to the door. All this was basic training. But there was only the one young orderly on shift, and he’d gone to the television lounge to let people know visiting hours were about over.

The nurse stood at the door alone. She’d offered to go open the door for this family just to avoid the damn charting for a few minutes. The most pleasant part of her job for the next few hours would be these moments when she got to usher visitors out. She took some pride in smiling at them as they left, like a good hostess. She was new, on the job for only two months. She unlocked the secure ward door and pulled it open.

A moment later Pepper rear-ended her.

The big man was fast when he had the proper motivation. Like getting out of the nut hut. Like stepping outside and breathing fresh air.

Pepper moved toward the door. He reached that family and mushed them out of the way. First the man: it was like brushing past a sack of dirty laundry, that’s how soft the man’s body felt. The guy slipped and went down. Then Pepper made his harshest decision. He chose to vault over the woman in her fifties. He thought this was better than barreling through her. But the man was no kind of athlete. Pepper had no ups. If he went three inches off the ground it would be an all-time best. He bum-rushed that poor woman and she went stumbling forward, plowing into the nurse’s back. The two smashed into the wall just to their left.

No time for apologies. The door was completely open. Look at that lavender wall paint in the hallway right outside! Pepper could’ve maneuvered a Zamboni machine through the doorway. He was free. He was free. Even if it was the worst idea he’d had, in a week of lousy ideas, the man could still escape. He made it past everyone.

Except the teenage girl.

She didn’t have Pepper’s size or weight, obviously, but what she did have in her favor was rage. She had the Crazy Strength. (Retarded folks are rumored to have powerful — nearly mythic — strength but don’t shortchange the mentally ill. In the proper state they can bring the ruckus.)

This teenage girl was the patient. The woman in her fifties, the mother. The soft-bodied man in his thirties, her brother. Pepper had guessed wrong, and he would pay for it.

The kid mounted him from behind. She grabbed his shirt right by the waist and planted her feet on the backs of his shins. Even though she didn’t weigh that much, Pepper couldn’t stay upright with that pressure on his calves. With that surprisingly simple move she toppled the big man.

As he fell, time slowed, giving Pepper a moment to once again take in the painted trees in the framed pictures on one wall. The images seemed to move away from him now. Before his face hit the floor, he had one clear thought.

I’m a fucking idiot.

When Pepper’s face connected with the linoleum tiles, his mouth opened and his front teeth connected with them and he heard one of his teeth crack, and small bits of enamel skitter through the doorway, to the other side.

The young woman ran up his back, clawing forward, until she grabbed the back of his head and pulled at his hair. Brown strands in her hands. And this whole time those two blue pom-poms on the top of her blue knit cap were bouncing and bobbing playfully.

“Put your hands on my mother again!” the teenager howled. “Put your hands on my fucking mother!”

The girl brought her right elbow down on the back of Pepper’s neck; her elbow stabbing right into the ball at the top of his spine. Pepper couldn’t even yell, he coughed violently and foamy spit covered his lip and chin. He dropped the side of his face against the floor and he huffed and heaved and snorted.

The woman in her fifties had found her footing by now. She grabbed her daughter and pulled her away. “That’s enough, Loochie! Come on now! Get off him! Loochie!”

The nurse and the girl’s brother got up, too. The orderly on duty and two other nurses stampeded down the hall and surrounded Pepper’s prone body.

“He hit my mother!” the girl shouted. “It’s not my fault!”

The orderly grabbed Pepper’s shins. Pepper kicked but there wasn’t much power in him. The orderly then dragged Pepper backward, away from the open door and farther into the unit, like a roped steer. It took a great strain to move Pepper’s body just three feet. Then the nurse who’d opened the door shut it again. She locked it.

Pepper looked up at the wild child, to see her staring down at him, one arm hooked around her mother’s shoulder protectively. The girl’s brother shivered as he leaned against a wall.

A nurse arrived with Pepper’s punishment. When a patient fucked up this fully he wasn’t just given another pill. This time they brought the high-dose solution. It came in liquid form, inside of a needle.

7

THEY HAVE TO keep patients medicated on a psychiatric unit. Staff are trying to get the patient’s illness back in control. If a person is in the hospital, it’s probably because his or her levels are off. Some meds are tried, a few work and others don’t but staff are always trying to find the exact right combination for each patient.

But the other reason they have to keep patients medicated, even sedated, is because life on the unit will scramble anyone’s brains.

What is there to do in a mental hospital? Watch television, sit in your room, wander the hallways, step out for a smoke break, attend group meetings. Every day, that’s all you get. It’s why visiting hours mean so much. Even patients who didn’t get along with their families on the outside are pleased to welcome them here.

Being stuck inside and doped up to the gills can make the place feel like a time machine, as Loochie knew, even by age nineteen. The distinction between the days, the weeks, the months, the years fade. It all seems like one long day. You just lose track. It’s shocking how quickly that can happen.

So if Pepper lost the next day or two because of the injection (plus the Haldol and lithium) well, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. It took him hours to swim back to the shores of consciousness. And who was waiting for him right there on the beach? A nurse carrying a small white cup. Casting him out to sea again.

It takes time for a body to adjust to the meds. Really not all that different from building up one’s tolerance to alcohol. Once, one beer had your head wobbling loose on your neck, but in time, it might take five or six. You learn to hold your liquor. In the ward, you learn to hold your pills.

But it takes time.

Pepper’s seventy-two-hour observation period came and went, and he hardly realized its passing. Not that he forgot, he was just so busy swimming. Who petitions for his legal rights while trying desperately not to drown?

When he came to New Hyde, it was the third week of February.

When he finally shook off his medical haze, it was the middle of March.

8

PEPPER DIDN’T UNDERSTAND how much time he’d lost until he wandered out of his room and down Northwest 2 and shuffled up to the nurses’ station. He put both elbows on the top tier like a man sidling up for a drink. He even smiled as he looked down at Scotch Tape, Miss Chris, and another nurse charting. He meant to ask how he could sign himself out of his padded cell. Seventy-two hours had surely come and gone.

Then he saw a copy of the New York Post up there on the nurses’ station. It lay flat, facedown, the back cover showing the lead story of the sports section. Unofficial policy saw staff often leaving their old newspapers out for patients to read. A minor kindness. And at the top of the page, Pepper saw, almost in passing, a mention of March Madness, the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship. March.

How could the Post already be talking about fans bracket picks? In February?

Pepper might’ve been impulsive, a little quick to throw hands, but he wasn’t stupid. And as he came to understand the real news the paper was delivering to him — it’s March 17!—Pepper had to clutch at the nurses’ station desktop just to keep from keeling over.

He grabbed at the desktop and leaned forward. He looked like a man halfway in a lake, trying to climb back into the boat. He flailed out with one hand and sent the newspaper flying from the station like a gray bird.

Scotch Tape rose up and Miss Chris rolled her seat backward, out of the nurses’ station, and around the side to get closer to Pepper, without lifting her butt from the chair. The other nurse already had her keys in hand and was fiddling with the drawer where they kept the tranquilizers.

Pepper looked at Scotch Tape directly and said quietly. “It’s March. Why am I still here?”

Scotch Tape looked into Pepper’s eyes. He realized the big man wasn’t trying to come over the desk, wasn’t attacking the staff, so he spoke as calmly as he could. “That was the doctor’s decision, not mine.”

“I want to see him,” Pepper said.

Miss Chris clapped a hand against her thigh. “You and me both!”

She put one hand on the nurses’ station and pulled herself up from the chair.

“That man makes the rules, but we the ones who enforce them. And we get all your scorn in the bargain.”

Pepper let go of the desktop and stood tall again. “But he can’t just decide to keep me here like that. Without telling me.”

The other nurse, whom Pepper now recognized as the one he had knocked down during his escape attempt weeks before, stopped jimmying the desk drawer and grabbed a three-ring binder. She opened the cover and flipped pages and finally found the one she wanted. She stood up and stepped closer to Scotch Tape, then set the open binder on the desktop so Pepper could see.

A form with four paragraphs of single-spaced legalese. It looked like a warranty.

“So what’s this?” Pepper asked. He barely glanced at it. He didn’t want to read, he wanted to be heard.

Scotch Tape said, “Consent form, big man. Agreeing to be admitted as a patient. Everyone has to sign one if the seventy-two-hour period ends but the doctor thinks you still need to be with us.”

The nurse reached down and tapped the bottom of the page with one finger. Her wrist was still sprained from the fall she’d taken thanks to Pepper.

“You signed it. You agreed,” she said with some satisfaction.

Now Pepper actually looked at the page. That scrawl at the bottom was his signature? It looked more like someone had drooled blue ink on the page.

“I’ve been in half a coma for the last four weeks.”

Miss Chris moved closer, right next to his left arm. She looked at the consent form. “Looks like your hand was working.”

Pepper understood that this was a joke, but not for him. Not even really on him. It was the gallows humor of people who’ve seen this kind of mess happen before. And will again. What can you do? That was the unspoken phrase at the end of every sentence. What can you do? Just go along.

Pepper felt his rage just then like a series of small explosions. In his gut. His chest. His throat. His hands. The rational part of him was howling, Don’t do anything! Don’t do anything! Calm down! But it was like holding a conversation right below a rumbling jet engine. Whatever Pepper did next was going to fuck him, long term. But he felt incapable of stopping himself.

Then Pepper felt the small, bony fingers wrap around his wrist. A touch he knew, even in this state. The only person who’d put her hands on him with any tenderness in this wasteland.

Dorry was there, at his right side, pulling at his wrist, looking up at him serenely.

“You’ve been down there, Pepper. You already know that road. You know exactly where it ends.”

Pepper started to pull back, despite himself.

She said, “More punishment. More drugs. That’s what they’ll give you.”

The nurse next to Scotch Tape said, “That’s not fair, Dorry.”

Dorry sighed. “But it’s still true.”

Pepper’s hands relaxed and his shoulders did, too. That rage in his gut, his chest, his throat — it left him like a bad spirit being cast out. Dorry still held his wrist.

He exhaled. He felt like a lost child who has wandered into the wrong house.

“What should I do instead?” he asked her weakly.

“For now?” Dorry grinned. “Let’s go to Group.”

Then Dorry quietly led Pepper to one of the conference rooms on Northwest 1.

There were already a few people inside the meeting room, on their feet, and when Pepper entered the room, an older man called out to him.

“Grab the end of that table, please.”

But Pepper couldn’t follow the order. Had he even heard it? No. He was repeating the date in his head.

March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17.

The older man clapped his hands loudly and Pepper finally snapped back. The guy looked to be in his fifties, red-faced, bald. The way he grit his teeth, he looked like Bob Hope; the chin like a shovel, the broad forehead and high cheekbones.

He looked at Pepper and said, “The others already know me. I’m Dr. Barger.”

Dr. Barger was broad and short. He seemed unlike any doctor Pepper had ever seen. He wore a sport coat, but the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, the reddish flesh of his chest visible. Thick gray chest hairs ran all the way up to his Adam’s apple. And he wore a thin gold chain that lay in the hair like an extension cord in a shag carpet. Dr. Barger looked like a swinger.

“Let’s go,” he said sternly, pointing at one end of the conference table again.

What did Pepper know better than this? Moving furniture. It was almost comforting to do the work. He grabbed one end. He’d lifted it a foot off the ground before he even asked where he was supposed to take it.

Dr. Barger couldn’t heft the other end. He gave it two tugs and a vein on his forehead throbbed perilously. He stopped trying and looked around the room, at the other patients. “A little help,” the doctor said.

And who came to the rescue? The teenage girl who’d chopped Pepper down. Loochie. The kid didn’t get her end as high as Pepper’s — how could she, she stood a foot shorter — but the weight of the table didn’t seem to bother her any more than it did Pepper. She still wore that light blue knit cap. The pom-poms sat on either side of her head like mouse’s ears.

Pepper and Loochie frowned at each other.

This little thing took me out? Pepper thought. He felt a dose of grudging respect.

Dr. Barger, oblivious to any tension, waved toward the far end of the room. “Put the table over there. Line it up against the back wall.”

As Pepper and Loochie moved the table to the back of the room, the four other patients rearranged chairs. There were only seven people in the room, including the doctor, so they’d only need one table for their group session.

Pepper recognized a few of the patients. Dorry, of course. And Loochie. Coffee, too. A pair of white women who looked like each other — identical short haircuts, similar light blue mom jeans and Old Navy T-shirts showing the American flag. Even their bodies looked alike, bottom-heavy like butternut squash. Not twins, not siblings, but alike.

As everyone sat at the conference table, Dr. Barger smiled. “And now I’d like to welcome you all to our weekly Book Group.”

One of the two short-haired women said, “How can you call it a weekly Book Group when we never have any books?”

The other said, “Don’t be too hard on the doc. Have you looked at this bunch? I’m not too sure all of us can read!”

The first woman pointed across the table at Pepper, and said, “Hey, Frankenstein. You hate books as much as you hate fire?”

“Sammy!” Dr. Barger barked.

Both women laughed together. It didn’t matter to them if anyone else enjoyed the joke.

But Pepper felt too angry about the four weeks he’d lost to be insulted. Instead he pointed at the doctor. “I was supposed to be here for a seventy-two-hour observation, but now …”

Dr. Barger wagged one short red finger.

“I’m at New Hyde as your therapist. Dr. Anand is the staff psychiatrist.”

“So?”

Dorry said, “Dr. Barger doesn’t have the power to release you.”

Dr. Barger’s mouth narrowed into a frown. “I wouldn’t put it that way, Dorry.”

“Well, what would you say then?” Dorry smiled pleasantly.

“Dr. Anand’s authority supersedes my own.”

Loochie crossed her arms and leaned forward in her seat aggressively. “How’s that different from what she said?”

Dr. Barger looked at the teenager, his red face reddening even more. “I have authority here. It’s just not the kind that can …”

Then the doctor stopped himself. He shut his eyes and rested a hand on the top of his head. He breathed quietly for a moment, and when he opened his eyes, all the patients were watching him in silence.

Dr. Barger spoke with overdone civility. “I want to welcome you all to our weekly Book Group. I’m happy to see so many of you back.” He nodded at Pepper. “And to welcome our newest member.”

Pepper and Dorry sat on one long end of the conference table. Loochie, Coffee, and the two jokers sat opposite them. Dr. Barger sat at the head. As they settled, the nurse from Pepper’s escape attempt entered the room, pushing a three-tiered cart full of books. She wheeled it around the table and stopped behind Dr. Barger. Pepper could see that the nurse was young. Probably not much older than Loochie. She stood next to the book cart and smiled. Her cheeks were as plump and smooth as the Gerber baby’s.

Dr. Barger sat back in his chair. He rested his hands on his belly proudly.

“So you see, Sammy? This time we do have books,” he gloated, looking around the table as if awaiting applause.

But only Coffee reacted, raising one hand like a pupil with a question for the teacher.

Dr. Barger ignored him. “As you can see, I’ve been able to acquire these.”

Coffee continued chopping the air with his raised hand. He huffed now, too, and looked even more like that kid in the front row.

Finally, Dr. Barger acknowledged him. “Okay, Coffee, do you have something to say? About Book Group?”

Coffee revealed a thin blue binder. He set it on the table and opened it and flourished a pen. Everyone but Pepper and the new nurse sighed loudly.

“The phone number of New York City Comptroller John Liu,” Coffee said. “Can you please provide it for me?”

Dr. Barger dropped his voice an octave. “What does that have to do with Book Group?”

Coffee ignored that. He said, “Attempts to reach the mayor have failed. I was recently visited by a representative of his office who threatened to have me arrested and to sue me if I don’t stop calling. So I accept that. Mr. Liu seems like a serious alternative. I believe he will help.”

Sammy leaned forward and said, “What does a comptroller do, anyway?” She turned to her best friend, her doubles partner, setting the woman up for a match point. “Sam?”

Sam said, “I don’t know, but if you hum a few bars I can fake it!”

This made the two of them crash backward with laughter. Their chairs buckling. They laughed so loudly that Loochie, right beside them, pulled her knit cap down over her ears. That only made the two women laugh more.

“You’re giving that poor girl brain damage,” said Sammy.

“Well, we’re in the right place for it!” shouted Sam.

Coffee tapped his pen against the table. “Dr. Barger,” he said. “The number?”

Now the doctor knocked on the table with force and the women’s laughter quieted. Even Coffee stopped tapping the pen.

Then the nurse spoke up. “These books won’t be useful anyway.”

Dr. Barger looked over his shoulder. “Excuse me, nurse?”

“Have you looked at the collection lately?”

Everyone in the room scanned the shelves. This Bookmobile was hardly a fine library. It looked like the dumping grounds for vocational-training manuals. (ISP — Industrial Security Professional Exam Manual; Automotive Technician Certification: Test Preparation Manual; Medium/Heavy Duty Truck Technician Certification: Test Preparation Manual, and so on.) There were a few spy novels, a few mysteries, the Book of Common Prayer (it had curse words written in the margins of many pages). Not great reading material maybe, but also only one or two copies of each. Not enough for everyone. The nurse was right. Not only poor quality, but also poor quantity.

Dr. Barger couldn’t pretend to miss the problem. But he could refuse to admit the fault was his. He looked up at the nurse and said, “I told you to bring all the books from the trunk of my car.”

Before the nurse could argue, explain, or apologize, Dorry proposed, “Why don’t we vote on one book we want to read together. Then maybe New Hyde could get us all copies of that.”

Pepper pointed at the book cart. Why did it bring him a childish pleasure to see the choices were so bad?

“What do you mean?” he joked. “Don’t we all want to read the Medium/Heavy Duty Truck Technician Certification: Test Preparation Manual?”

Dorry tapped Pepper’s forearm, another subtle but effective correction. “I can speak to Dr. Anand. I’ll get him to buy us the books.”

Dr. Barger strained forward at the table. “You’ll talk to Dr. Anand?”

Sammy and Sam clapped. Sammy said, “We like this idea. A title to vote for.”

Dr. Barger just shook his head. “Fine then. I’ll buy us the books if I have to.”

Dorry grinned at the other patients, ignoring Dr. Barger’s glare. “Isn’t that generous?”

“Georgina, will you go get us some tape, and a legal pad?” Dr. Barger asked the nurse.

She nodded, but just as she left the room she said, “My name is Josephine.”

“Better bring a black marker, too,” Dr. Barger said.

Something in Josephine wanted to argue the point—Say my name, say my name! — but realized Dr. Barger was one of a dwindling population: old mutts who were never trained to find others terribly worthwhile. Have an hour’s conversation and these men might be charming, funny, captivating, and kind. But they wouldn’t ask you a single question about yourself. Not one. They simply wouldn’t be interested. They were never trained to be curious about others, and they sure weren’t going to start now. At twenty-four, Josephine already knew she could spend the next minute trying and failing to make Dr. Barger hear her, or she could do something to help these patients. Only one choice was worth it. She left the room to fetch the man his pad and pen and tape.

Dr. Barger said, “Okay, so let’s have some suggestions for books.”

One of the two jokers raised her hand.

“Thank you, Sammy.”

“I’m Sam,” the woman said. “She’s Sammy.”

Dr. Barger said, “What’s your choice then, Sam.”

But it was Sammy who answered. “Ask Click and Clack,” she said.

Dr. Barger’s nostrils flared. “I have no idea what that is.”

Pepper leaned across the table, toward Sammy and Sam. “The Tappet brothers, right?” He looked at the doctor. “It’s a radio show called Car Talk. I love that show.”

Sam pointed at Pepper enthusiastically. “See that, Frankenstein knows what we’re talking about.”

Despite himself, Pepper laughed.

Sammy applauded him. “Hey, that’s nice. Frankenstein’s got a sense of humor.”

Sam and Sammy whistled and cheered.

Dr. Barger knocked on the table again. “We’re not reading a car book.”

Then Loochie spoke, no hand raised, no permission requested. She said, “Magazines.”

“What does that mean?” the doctor asked.

Loochie shrugged. “Magazines. That’s what I like to read in here. Vibe. XXL. Black Hair.”

Pepper said, “You want us all to read Black Hair in Book Group?”

Sammy opened her mouth, she had a joke, but thought better of sharing it.

Dorry spoke calmly. “No offense, Loochie, but I think the rest of us are too old for XXVibe or whatever it’s called.”

Loochie laughed like a native speaker at a foreigner attempting to master her tongue.

Josephine returned with the materials.

“How about Ken Kesey?” Josephine suggested. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? That book meant a lot to me in high school. I think you all might really like it.”

Sammy frowned. “Well, why don’t you read Slaughterhouse Five to a roomful of cattle.”

Sam shook her head. “You’ll have to excuse my best friend. She only reads the covers of great books.”

Sammy grinned. “That’s usually the best part!”

Josephine didn’t give up.

“I just thought you all might like it because it’s about a mental hospital.”

Dorry took off her glasses, which instantly made her look less nuts. Her eyes were smaller, and she seemed younger by ten years. She blew on the lenses, and small specks of dust, flakes of skin, and dandruff fell like flurries toward the tabletop. She put the glasses back on and, nutty again, looked at the nurse.

“Here’s what you have to understand about that book, Josephine. As good as it is, it isn’t about mentally ill people. It takes places in a mental hospital, yes. But that book is about the way a certain young generation felt that society was designed to destroy them. Make them into thoughtless parts of a machine. To lobotomize them. That book is about them, not about people like us.”

Josephine stammered, trying to respond, but Dorry didn’t stop talking.

“If you remember the patients who really mattered in that story, most of them were voluntary. Do you remember what the main characters called the other ones? The ones who would never leave because they could never be cured?”

“No,” Josephine admitted quietly.

“The Chronics. Most of them were vegetables. Brain-deads. Maybe violent. Chronically sick. Diagnosed as everlastingly damaged. All of us here at Northwest? That’s who we are. Northwest is nothing but Chronics. We’ve all been committed, and most of us are not voluntary. So why would we want to read a book that barely mentions us except to tell us we’re fucked in the anus?”

Dr. Barger shouted, “Dorry!”

Josephine could withstand Dr. Barger’s callousness, but to get torn down by Dorry actually hurt.

“I was only trying to …”

Her eyes reddened, and she quickly walked out of the conference room without looking back.

How could Dorry know all this? Josephine thought. How does some daffy old lady mental patient in a New Hyde psych unit understand that book better than me? Josephine didn’t mean to be so dismissive, but it came surprisingly easily. Then, almost as quickly, she questioned many of the judgments she’d made in her life. Mental patients can’t be intelligent. Junkies can’t be articulate. And so on. But really, honestly, how many did she actually know? Josephine left the room feeling embarrassed and shallow, but also determined to do better, to know these people, with time.

Back in the conference room, Pepper realized there was only one thing he wanted to discuss.

“I want to read about a monster,” he said.

This quieted everyone.

Dr. Barger finally said, “Why?”

Pepper said, “Because I’ve seen one.”

Why did everyone in the room suddenly sit up straight? All except Dr. Barger. The doctor lifted a black marker and pulled off the cap. He watched Pepper coolly. “That’s a belief we’ll have to discuss more in Group next week. But, okay. We can read a horror story. Nothing too gory, though. I can’t stand things like that.”

“Let’s read Jaws,” Pepper said. It was like he could only look at the monster obliquely, to avoid being stricken blind by the horror of direct sight.

Loochie raised her eyebrows at him. “About the shark?”

“Yes.”

Loochie, to her own great surprise, felt interested. She raised her hand to vote yes. So did Sam and Sammy and Coffee and Dorry.

Dr. Barger, underwhelmed, said, “Jaws. All right then. I’ll order it.”

Every hand went down except one.

Dr. Barger sighed. “What is it, Coffee?”

“The comptroller’s number, please. You can find it for me on your phone.”

9

BOOK GROUP ENDED with a silent march. The patients left the conference room quietly. Sam and Sammy went together. The others, one by one. Only Pepper remained at the table. Dr. Barger and Josephine waited for him to leave so they could lock the door behind him.

What had Pepper been expecting? To declare he’d been trapped here through deceit and have the others, who’d been trapped even longer, gnash their teeth and weep for him? To confess he’d seen a monster and have everyone melt and hold him close? Maybe so. But that’s not what he’d gotten. He’d admitted to being frightened. The reaction of his peers? They wanted lunch.

Pepper finally left the room.

Josephine moved behind him, keeping the Bookmobile between them.

Dr. Barger locked the door.

Lunchtime.

When Pepper reached the nurses’ station, he found half the patients in an orderly line. Scotch Tape stood inside the station, holding a clipboard. He caught Pepper’s eye.

“No more room service for you, my man. Before every meal, you come here first to get your meds, like everyone else.”

Pepper didn’t see any point in refusing. He went to the back of the line. Where Loochie and Coffee and Dorry and Sammy and Sam were. They didn’t speak to him. They didn’t even look at him. Had he said something wrong in there?

Miss Chris was beside Scotch Tape, holding a tray of small white cups. As each patient stepped up to the desktop, Scotch Tape read off a series of medicines: Risperdal. Topomax. Depakote. Celexa. Luvox. Nardil. Dalmane. Haldol. Lithium. (Just to name about a third of Scotch Tape’s list.) Miss Chris checked the cup to be sure the right pills were in each. Then she handed the cup to the patient and both staff members carefully watched each one swallow.

That was the system. Meds at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Pepper swallowed his Haldol and lithium. He was strangely grateful for the pills. They shaved down the sharp edges of his emotions. Until he felt smooth and round. Easier to roll along, no matter the bumps and curves. He walked down Northwest 5, toward the television lounge, alone. No doubt he’d lost his job with Farooz Brothers by now. Those guys would fire someone if he missed more than two days. Forget about four weeks. But Pepper just kept rolling.

His rent was paid automatically from his checking account. A system that his landlord (an agency rather than a person) had demanded of all tenants back in 2009 when layoffs first began in big numbers. Electricity, gas, even the cable was probably still working. His life had been disrupted, but not his billing cycles. His cell phone was paid automatically, too. Which meant he might still have service. Where had they put his phone? In a baggie with his boot laces and belt. (That baggie then went into a cubby, like in kindergarten, kept with all the others in a locked room on Northwest 1.) How long could he keep current on his bills? How long would his life outside wait for him? He had about four thousand dollars in his checking account. Which would last longer — his savings or his captivity? Keep rolling.

He reached the television lounge and the orderly handed him a lunch tray. The gray tray, with its little segmented sections, reminded Pepper of the ones they used to hand out in grade school.

Pepper moved to an empty table, as far away from the television as possible. The flat screen showed the local news. There was a remote control for the TV, an old man held it like a scepter. He lifted it high and increased the volume so he could hear over the chatter of the growing lunch crowd.

The orderly said, “Not too loud, Mr. Mack.”

The old man turned and glowered at the orderly, a kid. “It’s my half hour to control the remote,” he said. “That includes the volume.”

Mr. Mack looked to his best friend, who sat beside him. “Is this youngblood giving me orders?”

His friend shrugged noncommittally.

Both men wore threadbare sport coats. Under these were their patient-issue blue pajamas; theirs were bright and stain-free. Both had on worn-down loafers, too. They looked sharp, especially in here. Compared with everyone else, they looked like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.

The orderly raised his voice now. “You’ve got to think of everyone in the room.”

“Fuck everyone in the room,” Mr. Mack muttered.

“Language!”

Mr. Mack put up a hand in a gesture of peace. “I mean I’m trying to help these people learn about current events.” Mr. Mack looked back at the orderly. “And Frank Waverly doesn’t think I need to listen to you anyway.”

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.

“No,” Pepper admitted. “I was born in ’69. I read about this. In an interview with Ray Manzarek, their keyboardist.”

Pepper looked to Coffee and Dorry and Loochie, but none of them seemed to recognize the name. Pepper decided not to be disappointed in them for this.

“Morrison performed, but he didn’t sing much. Mostly he yelled at the crowd. And at a certain point he told the crowd he knew why they’d really come to the show that night. ‘You want to see my cock, don’t you?!’ ”

Dorry snorted, a little laugh.

“That’s what he said,” Pepper continued. “Then Morrison waved his shirt in front of his crotch and pulled it away and said, ‘See it? Did you see it?’ ”

Coffee looked confused.

Loochie said, “This doesn’t sound like a very good band.”

“Listen to me. Four days later, the city of Miami issued a warrant for Morrison’s arrest. After a trial, Morrison was convicted of two misdemeanors. Open profanity, I think. And indecent exposure. And yet, Ray Manzarek swears Morrison never exposed himself. No pictures were ever developed, from a crowd of twelve thousand. And no one ever showed real evidence that the … exposure ever happened. Manzarek called it a mass delusion.”

Pepper stopped for a moment, to let the phrase sink in.

“But even years later, there were hundreds, thousands, who swore they’d seen Morrison’s penis. It didn’t happen, but to them it was still real.”

Loochie and Coffee and Dorry backed away from Pepper. Pepper looked at his feet.

“You understand what I’m saying?”

Dorry nodded and shrugged.

“You’re not one of us,” she said. “Sure. We understand.”

Loochie said, “If I had paid to see that concert, I would’ve got my money back.”

Just that fast, they departed. Coffee slipped into the phone alcove. Dorry returned to her room on Northwest 3, where she slipped those cookies into a plastic bag, a kind of care package she was putting together for another patient, one of the many she took care of at New Hyde. And Loochie wandered back down Northwest 5. Her half hour of TV control would be coming soon and she wanted to watch something stupid and fun, music videos maybe; something to make her forget the story about Jim Morrison’s penis. And how Pepper meant it to say she was seeing something that wasn’t really there. Fuck you, Frankenstein. That’s what Loochie wanted to tell him.

And Pepper? He returned to his room alone.

10

THAT NIGHT, THE big man couldn’t fall asleep. He had the room to himself. Coffee stayed away, in the phone alcove trying the number for Comptroller John Liu. Dorry and Loochie ignored Pepper on line for nighttime meds, and at dinner in the lounge. The other patients seemed to be avoiding him, too. So he went to bed early. Pepper lay in bed for hours, but he couldn’t sleep.

When Dorry, Loochie, and Coffee offered him membership in their conspiracy, he’d looked at those three mental patients and recoiled. The shame made it impossible to doze off. He finally rolled out of bed at one a.m. Didn’t know where he was headed, but he couldn’t lie there anymore.

Pepper reached the nurses’ station and found two staff members behind the desk. A man and a woman, neither he recognized. He walked around the station. He didn’t look down Northwest 4, but as he passed that hallway he felt a pinch in his side, as if he’d been grabbed, but kept walking and slipped free from the phantom touch.

Four patients sat in the television lounge. Even at this late hour the room wasn’t empty. The flat screen was on but with the sound set surprisingly low. One young guy had his chair pulled right up under the screen. He had a pockmarked face and stringy brown hair that almost looked like a toupee. The television’s closed-captioning had been turned on, white letters on a black background filled the bottom half of the screen. The guy in the chair scanned the text. Every fourth word was misspelled or mistaken. Protesters around the Middle East were apparently causing Arab governments to “triple.”

The guy in the chair said, “Topple.”

The other three patients in the lounge were women. Three women at three different tables, leafing through stacks of magazines and newspapers. Their lips moved as they scanned the pages.

“Study hall?” Pepper asked.

One of the women, with long reddish hair pulled up into a bun, looked at Pepper, then back down at her copy of Outside magazine.

Pepper swayed there a moment. The vibe of the lounge, of New Hyde, seemed so much more peaceful at night. Not just lower volume, but also more thoughtful. Look at all these people reading. The lounge seemed like a library now.

Pepper hovered another minute before the redhead looked at him and said, “You don’t belong here.”

Pepper looked over his shoulder, as if she must’ve been addressing someone else.

The women at the other tables — one Chinese, the other Jewish — finally looked at Pepper. The guy sitting under the television even turned around in his chair.

The redhead said, “We hear you’re not like us.”

Pepper felt completely exposed and he crossed his arms.

“I didn’t say that,” he pleaded.

But just as quickly they ignored him again. The point had been made. Pepper shuffled out of the television lounge as quickly as he could, wondering if he looked as red as his face felt. He was a pariah on a psych unit. He couldn’t imagine a lower state.

He reached the nurses’ station again, staff members working inside. He heard one of them yawn in there. They were tired and preoccupied. Without another thought, Pepper turned right. He crossed the threshold of Northwest 4 without losing a step.

He marched toward the stainless-steel door.

The window in the silver door remained as dark as it had been that afternoon. He wanted to what? Touch it? Open it? He didn’t know yet. As Pepper moved closer to it, the air itself felt warmer.

Pepper moved even closer. In lieu of a plan, he focused on the tangible details ahead. The silver door had a handle. The silver door had two locks. Now his face felt as if he’d walked through a cloud of steam. Moist. Sweaty. He smelled something new. Like the dirt of a freshly dug grave. At this point Pepper couldn’t stop himself. He felt that pinch again, a grip closed around him. Was he walking toward the silver door, or being pulled?

“What the fuck!”

Pepper only registered those words after he’d been grabbed. The orderly on duty yoked Pepper from behind. Pepper reached out and, because his arms were so long, his fingertips grasped the door handle, just for a moment. The metal was so hot it burned his fingers.

The orderly, a big man, too, dragged Pepper backward down Northwest 4. Away from the stainless-steel door. “We got rules!” the orderly shouted in Pepper’s ear. “You got no business in this hallway! You leave that door be!”

The farther they moved from the silver door, the less heat Pepper felt against his skin. The scent of fresh dirt dissipated and was replaced by that stale, hospitalized anti-smell again.

And the farther Pepper moved backward down Northwest 4, the greater his relief. His heart thrummed in his rib cage. Deep breaths expanded his lungs. He felt like he’d just missed being hit by a car, like the orderly had saved him. Without quite meaning to, Pepper laughed with gratitude.

The nurse appeared and she had the needle.

She remained silent, assessing Pepper, the wild affect on his face. His laughter didn’t help his case. She watched him with displeasure.

The nurse, the orderly, and Pepper moved past the nurses’ station and down Northwest 2. The doors of other patients’ rooms creaked open. The trio of nurse, orderly, and unruly patient blasted into Pepper’s room.

The orderly shook Pepper as if they were fighting, but Pepper wasn’t resisting. Au contraire, mon minimum-wage frère. Pepper felt a relief that he didn’t fully understand, and gratitude. He’d been about to do something very stupid. He felt sure of that now. And this orderly had saved him. Thank you! That’s what he was trying to say. But Pepper couldn’t explain. The only sounds coming out of his mouth were laughter and deep gulping coughs as he tried to take in air and talk. He seemed like a maniac.

But it was all still salvageable. Pepper would accept the needle. He’d been through that once before. He’d lose more time, but if that was the worst, he could bounce back. After this, he could avoid, all together, the games patients played on the unit. Whatever was on the other side of that door had nothing to do with Pepper and the world he planned on returning to as soon as he could. Let the patients tell all the spooky stories they liked, he would snub them just like they’d snubbed him tonight. Who gave a shit? He could weather it. He could ride out this time at New Hyde if he’d stop getting overwhelmed, emotional, and stick to the larger point. He’d tried and failed before, but he’d really do it now. All systems had their glitches, and Pepper’s mistaken commitment to New Hyde was just one of them. It would work itself out, and he’d be released. He believed this. He knew this. He just had to keep the bigger picture in mind. Like now, stop fighting. Step one in getting on the staff’s good side. Accept the needle — that was step two. After all, things couldn’t get any worse than that.

But then Pepper noticed the orderly had straps with him.

Who were those for?

The orderly pushed Pepper onto his bed and pulled Pepper’s arms down to his sides. He tied Pepper’s wrists to the bed frame with the straps. First the right. Then the left.

The orderly tied up each of Pepper’s ankles next.

Wait.

Wait.

They didn’t need to do this. He was going to be compliant from now on. Didn’t they understand?

The orderly shouted, “We been nice to you, my man! But you ain’t been nice to us.”

“No,” Pepper muttered. “Please.”

His arms and legs pulled at the straps. He wasn’t resisting. It was a reaction beyond his control. These people were tying him down. What else were his limbs going to do but buckle?

The staff members didn’t see it that way.

The nurse needed three tries to hit the vein in his forearm. The first two times she was just stabbing him. When she finally injected a big dose of Diazepam into Pepper’s bloodstream, the doorway of his room was crowded with male patients, watching.

As Pepper faded, he scanned the faces in the doorway. Was Dorry really there? Had she snuck down Northwest 2 so she could see?

The nurse and orderly watched Pepper. Both were huffing from the scuffle. They scowled at him. Pepper pulled at the restraints, but they held.

Now the nurse and orderly shooed the patients from the doorway. They flicked off the lights, left the room, and locked the door behind them.

“Please,” Pepper whimpered in the empty room.

11

PEPPER WOKE UP the next day. His ankles and wrists still bound. This was illegal. According to official guidelines, this should never be allowed. Restraints were acceptable for up to four consecutive hours, then the staff must release the patient. That’s the law. Absolutely. But where were the regulators? A question worth asking in so many fields.

When Pepper had to go to the bathroom he called out for a nurse until Miss Chris heard him and appeared with a bedpan; a plastic bowl with a top shaped like a toilet seat. In her other hand she had a hard plastic pillow the shape and color of a wedge of cheddar cheese. She entered the room and undid one of Pepper’s wrist straps then slid the wedge pillow behind Pepper’s back so he could sit upright. Then she pointed at his butt and said, “Lift.”

He raised his butt as high as it would go and Miss Chris slid his wrinkled pants down. She slipped the bedpan underneath him. She pulled the top sheet over him and as she left the room she said, “I’ll give you some time.”

The back of the bedpan rose higher than the front so it aimed his pelvis at an angle. This allowed all waste to remain in the bowl. Pepper had to shit so that’s what he did. Miss Chris didn’t return to the room for half an hour.

Pepper balanced on the bedpan while one wrist and both ankles were still attached to the bed frame. His body wracked into a bit of a corkscrew. The bedpan dug into his skin and the small of his back closed like a fist. The smell of his own shit rose to his nose. He breathed through his mouth.

Miss Chris wasn’t even the first one back in the room. It was Coffee, blue three-ring binder in hand. He walked in and saw Pepper’s forehead beading with sweat. Pepper waved Coffee closer with his free hand. For a moment Coffee looked stricken, concerned, but then his face dropped all expression. He entered the room and pulled a fresh pen from the plastic cup on his dresser. Then Coffee left.

“That’s cold, Joe!” Pepper shouted.

But a minute after that, Miss Chris returned to the room. “I hear you’re ready for me.”

Pepper said, “I was ready for you twenty minutes ago.”

Miss Chris said nothing, only reached into her pocket and brought out a packet of wet naps. She wiped Pepper’s privates clean and did it thoroughly.

When she was done, she slipped the bedpan from beneath him and set it on the floor. She pulled his pants back up, slipped the pillow from behind his back and, without asking permission, grabbed his free wrist and slipped it back into its restraint. He didn’t even try to stop her. She slid the wedge pillow under Pepper’s bed. This is when Pepper realized they meant to keep him tied up for a while longer. Why leave the pillow in the room, otherwise? He didn’t have any reaction to this. The stiff pain in his back took his attention.

At lunchtime Miss Chris returned with his food. She undid the strap on his wrist, slipped the pillow behind his back, held out his two pills and watched him swallow them. Then she set the tray down on his thighs, and from this position, Pepper had his meal. He ate everything. Even the cookie. It took a while because he only had one free hand.

Miss Chris returned and set his tray on the floor. Slipped the pillow from behind his back and under the bed. Without asking, she grabbed his wrist and pulled it back into its restraint. Pepper knew this step was coming this time, but that didn’t seem to help him. His arm was attached to his body, but it no longer seemed like his property.

Pepper remained in restraints for a second night and learned how to sleep in this position. The meds could still knock him out quickly, if he let them. If he didn’t fight the effects by being active. He complied with the general will of the psychiatric hospital: Shut up and don’t cause trouble.

Only once did he wake up. Around two in the morning.

A woman screamed on Northwest 3. Two women, actually.

Pepper looked to Coffee, to corroborate that the sound was real, but Coffee’s messy bed remained empty.

The women on Northwest 3 screamed until the staff huffed down their hallway, burst into their room. That must’ve been what Pepper and Coffee sounded like, weeks ago, when they were visited.

Better them than me, Pepper thought.

He was too demoralized to even feel ashamed of the sentiment.

12

BY THE THIRD morning, the restraints no longer seemed like a punishment. Pepper had just been forgotten. When a shift ended, the staff were supposed to chart any changes in the patients’ health or behavior, but no one was going to note that they’d kept Pepper tied to his bed for the whole eight-hour stint. (And they sure as hell weren’t going to note that he’d been pinned down for over forty-eight hours by now.) To avoid making notes about Pepper, the staff avoided him. They brought his meds and meals, and if he called for a bedpan, they obliged. But the rest of the time it was as if Pepper had disappeared. Lost in a fog. When staff members passed room 5, they averted their eyes. None of this was conscious. The staff didn’t know they were doing it. Besides, there was so much else to handle at New Hyde every day. Every hour. Like charting. Plus fifteen other patients with needs. Pepper didn’t slip through the cracks; he was stuffed behind a couch cushion.

And for the third night, Coffee seemed to be sleeping elsewhere, too. Where had Pepper’s roommate gone? Were patients allowed to change rooms? Or was Coffee so stubborn, he’d rather sleep in the television lounge than bunk with Pepper anymore? Pepper tilted his head backward and peeked at Coffee’s messy bed. He really missed that malt ball — headed bastard. Forget giving the guy a quarter; if Coffee had come in and just talked with Pepper for a while, Pepper would’ve given Coffee the credit card in his wallet. Coffee could even burn out the card’s five-hundred-dollar limit (secured) if he wanted! Just come in here. Pepper watched the room’s door and willed it to open.

His body had stopped communicating with him in the usual ways. Sometimes it sent an angry throb from the middle of the shoulders or the hips or the ankles. These felt like bursts of static. The small of his back had stopped feeling like a curled fist a day ago and now was just a pocket of cold fire burning through his waist.

He ignored all this and willed the room’s door to open.

Just come in. Just come in. Come in and talk with me.

Pepper was so preoccupied with this silent petition that he didn’t notice the ceiling tile in the far corner of the room when it buckled. The same tile that had fallen so many weeks ago. Pepper didn’t notice when it bent. When it cracked.

Only when the two halves of the tile smacked on the floor did Pepper look from the doorway to the corner. From the ceiling, a pair of feet dangled out. They were long and wide. They kicked faintly and slid down.

Now a pair of legs came into view. Draped in the hospital-issue blue pajama pants. The cotton billowed loose around the thin legs as the figure continued to descend.

Pepper heard this hoarse wheezing, a congested person’s breathing.

The upper body appeared next. An old man’s naked torso, the skin sallow and mottled, a little paunch that jiggled as it moved. The hands clung to the ceiling frame, a pull-up in reverse. This thing wasn’t falling. It was lowering itself.

Its wheezing continued, grew more forced, louder, with each move.

Its arms looked thinner than kindling, the shoulders soft. Pepper could even make out the fingers on its hands as it let go of the ceiling frame. Each finger was twiglike, gnarled at the knuckles and curled.

Then it landed.

And when its heels touched the tiles, they clopped like horseshoes on cobblestones. It huffed and tilted forward, stumbling, but righted itself.

An old man’s frail body, but its head was massive, covered in matted fur that hung down to those small shoulders. In the moonlight its fur looked as gray as shale. It had a bison’s head. Pepper saw this and couldn’t deny it. But its body, from the shoulders down, remained gangly and feeble. Hairless. Human.

Somebody else’s myth, somebody else’s nightmare, had plunged into Pepper’s room.

It watched Pepper. It huffed again and its wide, wet nose wriggled. Just below the nose, the fur parted and Pepper saw its mouth as a deep, wet pit. The hoarse wheeze sounded even louder now. It breathed and it watched Pepper. He couldn’t hold its gaze. He looked away, in a panic, to the door. He willed Coffee into the room. Or Dr. Anand. Even those three cops — Huey, Dewey, and Louie — would be welcome.

But the only one who’d come to see him was this monster.

Pepper only looked back at it when he heard that clopping sound again.

Its feet lifted and fell. It stalked toward him.

Pepper would’ve liked to struggle against his restraints, but his limbs had stopped listening. He felt trapped inside his own body, the numbed vessel holding a panicked mind.

As the thing moved toward him, its body slumped forward again, stumbling. That massive head seemed too heavy for its body. The shoulders shrank, the small paunch quivered, the head dipped down until the thing seemed to bow.

But then it huffed again and righted itself. And Pepper saw its face again: those dead white eyes, the nose sniffing the air like a predator tracking prey. The mouth opened again and from this close, Pepper could finally see its teeth. They looked like stone arrowheads.

It wheezed again but this time, when it exhaled, he thought he heard his name.

“Peter,” it whispered, or was that just its breath playing through those jagged teeth?

It shambled closer and again the clopping of its heels echoed.

At that moment Pepper’s body shivered. It mirrored the fear in his mind. Finally! It was such a strange relief to have his body and his mind coordinating again. His fingers dug into the sides of his mattress. His feet kicked at the bottom of his bed. They hit the metal frame so hard it sounded like a temple bell.

Gong.

Gong.

Gong.

Someone would hear that, right? Hear that and come to him.

Then it was there. Right by his bed. Over him.

Pepper looked out the window, at the moon. He would’ve prayed to it, if he thought that would help.

The thing grabbed the restraint on his right wrist and yanked at it. Pepper’s whole body shook. The bed creaked under him. Three tugs and the rubberized restraint snapped off the frame.

The thing moved down to his right ankle and did the same again. Grabbed on to the strap and pulled. This time, it took only one great effort and the restraint shredded, as simple as pulling apart a rubber band.

Now the thing stopped and heaved and wheezed there at the foot of the bed. Out of breath. Pepper’s right arm and right leg, finally free, just lay there limp. He tried to shake them, get the blood moving, but before he could, the attacker grabbed Pepper’s left ankle, lifted the leg, and brought its nose close, like a cook inspecting a cut of meat. It grabbed the restraint and with two pulls the leg was free.

It wheezed as it moved back around the bed, heels striking the floor in uneven tempo. It grabbed the top of Pepper’s head and yanked. Pepper’s left shoulder howled in the socket because his wrist was still in a restraint.

The thing pulled at his hair even harder. For a moment Pepper’s upper body actually rose off the mattress, the restraint and this monster battling for him.

Finally the restraint tore and Pepper’s body crashed to the floor. He couldn’t see for a moment. Everything went gray. A loud blast seemed to play in his ears. Cold rose up through the floor, into Pepper’s clothes. His skin puckered all over. His upper body shot up at the waist, like he was doing a sit-up. But he was pushed flat against the floor again. A foot on his chest.

Pepper looked up at his attacker, but from here he could only focus on its foot. The one pressing against his sternum. Its heel gray and hard as a hoof.

The thing’s thin leg trembled as it stomped down and Pepper swore he heard his sternum creak. In his ears it sounded like a Styrofoam cup being squeezed.

Pepper had a mouth, but he couldn’t scream. He had no air in his lungs. His lips parted and his tongue stuck straight out. His feet rose and slapped against the cold floor.

Pepper looked up and saw the beast’s great head pitch forward, the weak body out of balance again. Its white eyes seemed to be looking at him and through him, both at once. What could he call this creature? He wasn’t a religious man, but only one name came to him.

The Devil.

The Devil stomped down on his chest again and snorted.

You don’t want to be awake, aware, when your rib cage breaks. When your rib cage breaks you want to be passed out.

But somehow, Pepper hadn’t.

It didn’t hurt. He’d already gone into shock, which is the human body’s last line of defense. Your body loves you too much to let you really feel trauma like that. So it wasn’t pain that made the breaking rib cage such a terror for Pepper. It was a sound.

He’d heard the creaking of his sternum, so he almost felt prepared for the final crack, the tune of grinding bones, but he absolutely was not prepared to hear the ocean. That thing smashed his rib cage and suddenly Pepper heard the sea.

His gasping breaths, the snorts and wheezing of the Devil above him, even the thumps as the back of his head rose and fell, rose and fell while he thrashed on the floor. All of that was drowned out.

His ears filled with the splash of an ocean rolling toward the shore and breaking. If he shut his eyes, he would’ve sworn he was at Jones Beach. Or the dirty curl of Coney Island. Maybe it was just the sound of liquid filling his brain cavity, Pepper didn’t know and he didn’t care anymore.

Let the sea roll over me, he thought.

See the sea?

So when the room’s lights snapped on, Pepper wasn’t prepared.

Not just because of the brightness, or because the pressure on his chest suddenly stopped, but because he’d forgotten about psych units and shatterproof windows and meds three times a day; all the tortures of New Hyde. He’d inhabited a different world. He’d been on that shoreline.

So by the time he returned, drawn back into the hospital and his room and his own body on the floor, by then Pepper’s life had already been saved.

Not by a nurse or orderly.

Not by his roommate, Coffee.

It was Dorry.

Dorry!

She stood over Pepper’s body.

Wielding her bath towel as a weapon.

She had it rolled tight and snapped it like a whip. She aimed it at the corner where the ceiling tile had fallen in, but Pepper couldn’t see around her. Couldn’t focus well enough to see much of anything except that beautiful, badass old woman standing between him and his end.

“Hyah!” Dorry shouted.

She snapped her towel at the corner as if facing a lion in a cage.

“Bad boy!”

Somehow the staff on duty hadn’t heard Pepper kicking his bed frame, but they sure couldn’t ignore that old lady.

“Hyah!”

The towel’s snap echoed in the room again.

“Dorry!”

The night nurse stood in Pepper’s doorway. She looked at the big man, flat on the floor, and her mouth fell open in horror.

“What in the hell did you do to him, Dorry?”

Pepper shook his head, or at least he thought he did. He wanted to clear Dorry’s name, but to everyone else it looked like he was having a seizure.

Dorry said, “I didn’t do that and you know it!”

Scotch Tape, on night duty, stood behind the nurse, as stunned as his coworker.

“Don’t back talk,” he said.

Dorry snapped the towel at the corner again. This time, instead of snorting and wheezing, the thing only whimpered softly, like a whipped dog. A sound that everyone in the room seemed to hear, not just Pepper.

The nurse put one foot into the room. “This is a male hall, Dorry. How you even get here? You been sneaking?”

Dorry dropped the big towel and it landed across Pepper’s legs. He felt its weight on his thighs. Scotch Tape and the nurse surrounded Dorry. Pepper curled up as best he could, afraid one of them would kick him in the head by mistake. This movement made his rib cage stab sharply and he gasped.

But before the nurse gave Dorry any tranquilizers, before Scotch Tape checked on Pepper there on the ground, before all other concerns, came the thing in the corner. It was practically mewling over there.

Scotch Tape stooped over Pepper and pulled the big body towel off him. Scotch Tape unfurled the towel and walked over to the corner where Dorry had been aiming her attack. A moment later Pepper watched Scotch Tape escort that thing out of the room.

Pepper couldn’t see the head, or much of the body, because Scotch Tape had draped the towel over it. Only the pajama bottoms and those calloused heels. The soles slapped the floor tiles loudly as Scotch Tape led it out of the room. The Devil leaned against Scotch Tape for balance. Scotch Tape whispered soft assurances to it.

The Devil was there.

Even once the lights came on.

Even with the staff in the room.

No delusion. No dream. It was real. Pepper almost howled at the terrible truth of it, but he couldn’t muster the sound.

“Okay now,” Scotch Tape whispered to it. “We’ll get you back. Come on.”

Dorry looked down at Pepper.

“Maybe you feel like they’ve pushed you off the cliff already,” she said.

The nurse peeked at Pepper, too. She saw him watching Scotch Tape and the thing under the towel. And the nurse shifted her body to block Pepper’s view! In the same movement, she put an open hand to Dorry’s mouth. Pepper knew what the nurse had in her palm. And Dorry didn’t argue, she took the pills and swallowed them.

Dorry looked at Pepper once more, lips pursed in a sympathetic frown.

“You have to climb back up,” she said.

The nurse sucked her teeth and squeezed Dorry’s upper arm.

“Enough foolishness, Dorry. Why you come to this boy’s room anyway? You forgot you’re an old woman? He too young for you!”

The nurse laughed loudly, as if she could make everyone (herself included) forget what had just happened in this room. She pulled Dorry out.

The pair stepped into the hallway, and the nurse looked back at Pepper, who was still on the floor, on his back. His breathing stayed weak but at least it came steady.

“I’ll be back to help you, soon come,” the nurse promised.

Who would ever doubt her return? It just wasn’t possible that Pepper would be left after such an attack.

But forty minutes later, no one had returned to check on him so he finally had to pull himself off the floor.