The Devil in Silver

13

NO WAY AROUND it, a doctor had to be called in.

Maybe Pepper’s sternum hadn’t actually splintered (since he had pulled himself, painfully, back into bed), but even if his chest plate hadn’t cracked, the man’s pain sure wasn’t a delusion. The morning after his attack, Josephine came with morning meds. When she stood over Pepper, she saw the blood that had seeped through the front of his shirt. A hundred little red dots in the fabric, all bunched around his chest. Pepper opened his eyes and looked at her, but just opening his eyes was an exertion. He spat out a dozen shallow breaths but couldn’t say a word.

Josephine sat on the side of his mattress. There wasn’t much space, but she wasn’t very big. One of the reasons people treated her like a kid, even though she was twenty-four, was because of how her body hid the years.

She set the small white cup with Pepper’s meds down on the floor, and leaned over Pepper. His eyes shut, then opened again. She wasn’t sure he could see her. His eyes wouldn’t focus on her face. She wondered at the pain he was in, and if she wanted to keep doing this job, but then told herself to stop. Even if she quit tomorrow, she was here now.

“I’m going to open your shirt,” she said.

She undid the buttons gingerly. The fabric had stuck to his skin, blood like an adhesive. Finally she got the top two buttons loose and peeked inside and smelled the stale punch of Pepper’s dried blood.

Now she noticed one of the torn restraints, dangling from the side of the bed. She pulled at it and let it swing loose again. She looked at Pepper.

“What did you do to yourself?”

He shook his head so faintly that it looked like a tremor.

“I guess you’ll need to see a doctor,” she said.

When Josephine padded out of the room, Pepper figured that might be the end of it. She might say he needed to see a doctor, but that didn’t mean she’d actually call one. It was just a way to get out of the room. Like last night’s nurse. When he breathed too deeply, his ribs hurt; he was surviving on shallow breaths.

The morning meds remained in their cup, on the floor. Josephine had left without making him take them. He felt grateful for this. His throat felt so tight he couldn’t even imagine ingesting something as small as a pill.

Ten minutes later, Dr. Anand walked in.

The man appeared at the doorway, just as slightly comical as he had been on that first night. Jacket and tie and ID on a plastic cord around his neck. Bushy mustache; cheeks as healthy and round as a brown Santa Claus. But he seemed a bit more rushed this time, maybe the intake meeting was the only time a patient earned the doctor’s complete attention. Now he offered a new performance: the overtaxed physician.

Dr. Anand walked in quickly. Eyes down in concentration, not meekness. He wiggled a clipboard in his left hand. He reached into his pants pocket with the other and jiggled his set of keys. Dr. Anand pulled his hand out of his pocket and scratched his scalp. He patted his chin then the pocket of his coat, looking for a pen. Pantomiming harriedness.

He hadn’t looked at Pepper yet.

“Okay, Mr.…”

When the doctor finally looked up, he grinned genuinely.

“Pepper! Right?” He moved toward Pepper’s bed, reading the chart on the clipboard. When he reached the bed, he kicked the little white cup carrying Pepper’s morning meds. They rolled under the bed but Dr. Anand didn’t notice.

“Sounds like you hurt yourself.”

“It wasn’t me,” Pepper said.

Dr. Anand giggled. “My daughter loved that song. I don’t think she understood what it meant.”

Pepper looked at the doctor directly. “The Devil did this.”

Dr. Anand didn’t respond to that. (Would you?) He finally sat next to Pepper on the bed and undid the rest of the buttons on Pepper’s shirt. He moved more quickly than Josephine. Dr. Anand opened the shirt and looked at Pepper’s bruises. The skin was reddish and purple all over. There were small cuts across Pepper’s chest where the foot (hoof?) had crushed down on him.

Dr. Anand leaned back, his eyebrows raised. “Jiminy …”

The doctor set the clipboard on the floor and used both hands to press against Pepper’s rib cage. He started light and then a little harder. It didn’t take much force to make Pepper wince.

“Can you roll on your side?” the doctor asked. “Your back to me?”

It took a moment, but Pepper pulled it off. Pepper felt the doctor’s hand pressing against his skin.

“Breathe as deeply as you can,” the doctor said. Pepper felt the chilly rim of a stethoscope just below one of his shoulder blades. He always liked that feeling, and he liked it now. When Pepper inhaled, it hurt, and when he exhaled, it hurt more. He concentrated on the comfort of the stethoscope just to keep from crying.

Dr. Anand rolled Pepper onto his back again and pressed the stethoscope to his chest now. Pepper breathed in and out. Dr. Anand looked at his watch. He pulled the stethoscope off and stuffed it back into a pocket of his jacket. He reached down, grunting slightly, and grabbed the clipboard off the floor, wrote on Pepper’s chart.

“Did your roommate do this to you?” Dr. Anand asked.

Pepper shook his head.

“One of the other patients, then?”

Pepper breathed in and spoke as he exhaled. “I already told you who.”

Dr. Anand frowned. “No jokes here, Pepper. I want you to tell me the truth. Did a member of the staff do this to you?”

Right away, Pepper wanted to say yes just because that would be a manageable, rational, realistic problem. The staff had abused him. It wasn’t untrue, was it? Maybe Dr. Anand would transfer him?

“Can you just get me off this unit?” Pepper asked quietly. He imagined being taken to the ICU, or for surgery — who cared what? — and being kept there. Away from whoever, whatever, had nearly killed him.

Dr. Anand held the bottom of the clipboard and tapped the top lightly against his own knees. “Transfer. Well, that’s a problem, Pepper.”

“Why?” Pepper’s voice cracked.

“Because you were admitted here by the police, and you’re being held here pending criminal charges. You understand? So, technically, this unit is your detention center. If you weren’t in here, you’d probably be at Rikers awaiting a hearing. And believe me, this is a lot better place to be.”

Pepper almost laughed, but that would’ve caused too much pain.

Dr. Anand looked down at Pepper’s chest and sighed.

“Generally, this is a lot better place to be.”

“You told me I’d be released in seventy-two hours,” Pepper said. “That was over a month ago.”

Dr. Anand nodded and winced, as if he was a salesman about to explain the unfair return policy of his store. “We did keep you for a seventy-two-hour observation. But what we observed is that you needed more time with us. So we readmitted you, as an involuntary admit.”

“What does that mean?” Pepper asked.

Dr. Anand touched Pepper’s arm lightly, consoling. “It means you stay with us until we feel you’re ready to go. In your case, we might not feel comfortable releasing you until your arraignment date.”

Pepper stared out the windows. “The only way I get out of the hospital is if I’m going to jail.”

Dr. Anand stood up. “Let me be completely honest with you, Pepper. You came to us under a bit of a technicality, that’s true. But while you’ve been here, you’ve been impulsive, quick to anger, in a potentially manic state at least three times according to the records my staff have made. Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness before?”

Pepper tried to sit up, but he could only raise his head. “I know I get heated up, okay? But there’s got to be a line, right? I mean everything can’t be a sign of mental illness.”

“No. Of course not. And despite what you might think, I don’t want to diagnose you with an illness. But you’re here, however it happened, and I wouldn’t be any kind of doctor if I didn’t take a little time to try and see if you need help. And if you do, then I want to help you. That’s the truth.”

Pepper marveled at Dr. Anand’s sincere tone. He knew Dr. Anand meant what he’d said, and yet it didn’t comfort him.

Dr. Anand got up. Pepper watched him leave the room.

“I’ll send one of the nurses to bandage you up. I’ll prescribe a painkiller, too. Did you get your morning meds?”

Pepper rolled, with some difficulty, onto his right side, so he faced Dr. Anand. “I already took them,” Pepper said. “Josephine gave them to me.”

Dr. Anand watched Pepper a moment. Pepper wondered if the doctor would see the white cup, the two pills, under the bed. But finally Dr. Anand nodded. He said, “You’ll meet your demons everywhere, Pepper. Let us help you face them here.”

Josephine did return with a painkiller (Vicodin) and she dressed the cuts on his chest. She wrapped him with bandages. The whole time he kept on with that tight, shallow breathing, seeming impossibly weak. Josephine maintained a professional air but she felt bad for him. Hard to believe this was the same man who’d knocked down three people, herself included, with such ease. When she attached the clips to hold the bandage, Josephine patted him tenderly and, silently, said a prayer.

“I left your meds,” she said, looking down at the floor. “I just realized.”

Pepper reacted quickly. “Dr. Anand saw them. He gave them to me.”

She nodded. Still new enough at the job that she accepted a patient’s word.

“I brought you some clothes,” Josephine said. She had the blue hospital-issue top and bottom, the blue no-skid socks, and set them on his mattress. She left because, sympathetic or not, she wasn’t going to undress him.

Pepper got himself up and peeled off his shirt, but hesitated before slipping on the pajama top. Even if he was trapped, did that mean he had to wear the prisoner’s uniform? But wearing a torn and bloody shirt would only look madder. What choice? No choice. He put the pajama top on. Then he slid off his wrinkled pants, and his whiffy Smartwool socks. Pepper folded the slacks and balled up his socks and left them in the top drawer of his dresser. It had taken a month, but now he even looked like he belonged.

He wanted to throw some cold water on his face, but that would mean standing in front of the makeshift bathroom mirror. Seeing some version of himself looking this way. He wanted to avoid that for a while longer.

Northwest 2 sounded livelier today. A room’s door opened and shut and out walked that mumbly kid who’d been up in the lounge late at night, mouthing the close-captioned words at the bottom of the flat screen. The kid had the kind of pockmarked face that made him look fifty. He walked with his eyes focused on the tops of his feet. He wore faded jeans and a T-shirt with a cartoon figure on it. One word in big beige letters: HEATMISER.

Heatmiser passed Pepper in the hallway. He weaved around the big man without even looking. He hummed to himself and his voice wasn’t half bad. Faint and mournful. Pepper watched Heatmiser until Heatmiser stopped walking and looked back.

Heatmiser said, “Heard you last night.”

He watched Pepper quietly, wore no expression Pepper could read. Pepper touched his bruised ribs instinctively, but before he might say anything, Heatmiser spoke again.

“Better hurry if you want breakfast.”

Then the guy walked on. He didn’t slow down and Pepper couldn’t catch up, with his wounded gait. He shuffled down Northwest 2.

Pepper stopped at the nurses’ station because he needed to rest. His ribs seemed like they wanted to tear through his skin. He burned on the inside, and the heat ran up into his jawline. He might not have wanted the meds, but the painkiller would be nice just then. Pepper dropped one meaty forearm on the nurses’ station and looked down to the desktop. There he could see what had captured the attention of three nurses and two orderlies: a computer.

A desktop device that looked forty years old. It had a big gray monitor with a screen that emitted faint green light. That thing had been out of date in 1982. The rest of the desk space back there showed stacks of paperwork, each a foot high.

The staff had been tasked with digitizing all the information in all those charts. The computer had been installed that morning. The files on the desk space surrounding the machine, files that would total eleven feet three inches if placed in a single stack, was just the paperwork that had been filled out in the last three months. The nurses and orderlies looked at the computer as if it had betrayed them. They looked at one another to see which of them might volunteer for the task of inputting the information. Frankly, you’d have a better chance of getting a Korean to marry a black person.

In an act of bravery or stupidity (both), Josephine parted her colleagues so she could sit at the chair in front of the computer. She opened the software the hospital had purchased to sync up record keeping throughout their system. As soon as she did this, the other nurses patted her gently with approval. The orderlies looked up at Pepper.

One said, “Go eat.”

A pleasant morning to you, too!

Dorry said, “So you understand now?”

She sat across from Pepper. He’d come to join her and thanked her for helping him the night before.

Heatmiser sat with two other men at another table. All three looked up at the screen and didn’t speak with one another. Pepper hadn’t seen the other two men before, maybe he just hadn’t been looking. One Japanese, one East Indian. But the two men seemed, somehow, like family. It took a moment for Pepper to realize it was because they both had some of the most awful teeth he’d seen on this side of the nineteenth century. Wow. Crowded, off-color, some bent in and others bent out. No wonder they’d found each other, brothers of the busted grills. He nicknamed them quick, in his own mind, Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth. (It might seem to make more sense to nickname the Indian guy Freddie Mercury, since Freddie Mercury was an Indian — birth name Farrokh Bulsara — but that’s kind of racist. Sorry. The Japanese guy actually looked like Freddie Mercury. The Indian guy just had a yuckmouth.)

Dorry sat with her back to the raggedy basketball court outside. It was the kind of day where you can see the sun behind a thin fog of clouds, like a lightbulb glowing inside a pillowcase. Dorry leaned forward in her chair so Pepper would stop gazing at the skies and pay attention.

“Do you understand now?” she asked.

It was PB&J for breakfast today. He separated the two halves of the sandwich and set them back down. The vein of dry brown peanut butter, the artery of gummy blueish jam. The sandwich looked as appetizing as an autopsy.

“I understand this meal is criminal,” he said.

He was a bit surprised he’d been able to come up with the line, weak joke that it was. He felt surprised by the way his hands moved, too. They lifted and lowered quickly. When he thought of opening his hands and wiggling his fingers that’s exactly what they did. Why?

He hadn’t taken his medicine.

Dorry said, “You’ve heard of drug trials, right? They test out some new pharmaceutical on a set of people. Some get the real thing, others get a placebo. If the trial is a success, they sell the drug to the intended market. You understand?”

Pepper poked at the top of his sandwich. “What happened to me last night?”

Dorry said, “I’m trying to tell you.” She picked up the pint of milk on her tray. Pepper had one, too. She lifted it and shook it and the milk inside sloshed. Somehow even the PB&J on his tray appeared more appetizing when he imagined washing it down with a nice swallow of milk.

Dorry said, “I can see you smacking your lips already.”

Dorry brought the carton to her face, like right up against the left lens of her big glasses. She tore open the carton at one end. She pulled until she made a little spout. She sniffed it. Then she leaned even farther across the table so Pepper could do the same. He inhaled. He frowned.

“I think that milk is off,” he said.

Dorry nodded, then lifted the carton to her lips and drank. Forget drank, she chugged that pint of questionable milk. The sight made Pepper’s own throat close up. Little beads of milk trickled out the sides of the spout and ran along her cheeks. The stuff looked more yellow than white. When she finished, she set the carton back down and looked at Pepper with high seriousness.

“The milk was bad,” she said. “But you can get used to it.”

Pepper looked at the carton of milk on his tray now and couldn’t imagine doing what she’d just done. Now the sandwich looked even worse than it had. He wondered if everything on this tray was past its sell-by date. Hard to keep from getting paranoid in a place like this. Bad food, constant doses of medication, human beings penned in and observed. He began to understand what Dorry might be telling him.

“You’re saying the staff is experimenting on us?” Pepper asked.

Dorry pointed at him, frowning with disappointment. “You think this is about patients versus the staff. I understand why, but you have to think bigger. This isn’t us.” She pointed at the other patients. “Versus them.” She pointed toward the nurses’ station.

“They aren’t even here,” she said. “Everyone in New Hyde is trapped, in some way. Patients and staff. You think they ever set foot in a place like this unit? No, no. Our lives are a clinical trial, Pepper. We’re all being tested.”

Pepper leaned across the table, as far as he could. “By who?”

“The biggest corporation of all,” she said. “Coffin Industries. They don’t stop exploiting you until you’re dead.”

But what did all this have to with what happened to him last night? What he’d seen wasn’t a man. He felt sure of that, at least. He wanted to grab Dorry’s shoulders and shake her until she understood it, too. Then maybe they could actually talk about the damn thing clearly and not this nonsense about Coffin Industries.

Dorry reached across the table and snatched his carton of quite possibly putrid milk. She lifted it and said, “May I?”

You won’t be too surprised that Pepper left the table before Dorry got to glugging. He hadn’t wanted to watch it once, so why would he want to see it a second time?

His chance to escape witnessing Dorry’s encore performance had come when one of the nurses entered the television lounge, flicking through the keys on her chain. She found one long four-sided key. As she moved through the lounge, half a dozen other patients appeared behind her, matter pulled in her wake. They followed her, and Heatmiser slid back from his place at the table to join them. The nurse stopped at the glass doorway in the lounge. She slid the key into the door’s bottom lock and called out, “Smoke break!”

Pepper found himself excited by those two words. Even if it was only to stand around on a busted old basketball court. This would be the first fresh air he’d known in almost thirty days. He left Dorry, took his PB&J, and got in line to go out.

The breeze. It touched his neck and made him shiver. He opened his mouth and smacked his lips like a child conditioned to feed at the feel of his mother’s nipple. He inhaled the oxygen and swore it even had a taste. His tongue quivered in the cage of his mouth. He had to clamp his teeth closed to be sure it wouldn’t slip free.

Heatmiser and Pepper and a Puerto Rican kid in his twenties marched outside. (When asked, at his intake meeting four months ago, what he wanted to be called, the Puerto Rican kid told Dr. Anand he wanted everyone to use his “professional name,” Wally Gambino, and Anand only blinked and said, “Wally it is!”)

The nurse didn’t walk outside with the patients. She didn’t have to. At the far end of the court stood that chain-link fence with barbed-wire icing. A less addle-minded person might be able to scale it and use a blanket to cover the razor wire, slip himself over to freedom, but that was sort of the point of New Hyde, no? These folks, by and large, couldn’t even coordinate their outfits. Just about every patient wore a pajama top with jeans on the bottom, or pajama bottoms and a stained blouse on top. Some had showered recently, while others (Heatmiser) hadn’t. Not a jailbreak population.

None of the patients wore coats, it was March but still a little chilly. They were all just so happy to feel the real climate that they didn’t register the cold at all.

New Hyde didn’t supply the smokes. Those were brought by family on visiting days. A (semi)cheap gift, but much appreciated. Once outside, each patient pulled out a loosie and sparked it. All Pepper had was his inedible PB&J. But who cared? He stood outside. He walked the length of the half-court. On one end, that raggedy basketball rim hung at an angle, and at the opposite end stood a tall maple tree. The tree threw shade over half the court. That’s where nearly everyone went. Everyone but Pepper, eyes closed and face up toward the sun, and Loochie, who’d been one of the last ones out. She walked right up to the fence line and picked up a handful of rocks and pebbles. Pepper only opened his eyes when he heard Loochie stop in front of him. He heard this regular breathing and looked down to see her staring up at him, left hand heavy with stones. It was hard, for a moment, not to think of David and Goliath.

She squinted from the sunlight. “I want you to apologize.”

He felt so surprised by what she said that he dropped his damn sandwich on the ground. Both he and Loochie looked at it there. What seemed less edible? The PB&J or the pebbles?

She picked up the sandwich and turned it over and brushed off the small bits of dirt and leaves that had stuck to the bread. Once it was mostly clean she brought it to her lips, gave it a faint kiss then held it over her head, toward the sky.

“Kissed it to God,” she said. “Now you can eat it.”

She handed it back up to Pepper and to Pepper’s surprise he took it.

“Thank you?” he said.

She had on that same blue knit cap. She reached underneath and scratched at her scalp with one finger. The movement was so delicate that the pom-poms didn’t even quiver as she did it.

“How come you’re always wearing that hat?” he asked. He thought he was being playful but Loochie ignored him.

“To my mother,” she said. “I want you to apologize for knocking her down.”

“I didn’t mean to hit her,” Pepper said.

“You know that’s not an apology, right?”

Pepper saw that someday this girl was going to be pretty, but for now she was such a teenage girl. Smallish, but stooped forward to hide her chest, which only made her seem even shorter. Her feet were big and only seemed bigger because of the snug jeans she wore over her thin legs. Her long-sleeved top didn’t quite reach her jeans, so a band of her stomach showed and bulged out slightly, and she tugged at the bottom of her shirt to cover it. But the moment she let go, it slipped up again, showing skin. She yearned to be seen but felt awkward each time it happened.

In another context Pepper would’ve sighed when seeing someone like Loochie. Like if he was on the E train coming home from work and she got on with her friends. He’d expect her to be loud (and she would be), he’d expect her to obnoxiously barrel through the crowded car bumping anyone she pleased (and she’d do that, too). He’d hate her, honestly, as he did most teenagers. But taken out of that context, dropped in New Hyde alone, it didn’t matter how tough she might be. Here he saw a kid.

“I’ll apologize,” he said.

She nodded and tossed one of her pebbles at the fence.

“I heard you last night.”

Pepper wiggled the sandwich in his hand and then — why not — he took two bites. “Was I loud?” he asked.

Loochie threw another pebble. “Screaming usually is.”

Now he bit into the sandwich again. “Why doesn’t your mother get you out of here?” Pepper asked.

Loochie dropped all the pebbles. She wiped her hands clean. “She’s the one who committed me.”

“So why would you want me to apologize to her?”

She turned and took a step toward Pepper. Instantly ready to throw down. This seemed so young, too. That thoughtlessness, the rage that just has to become action. But he also understood it. He waved one hand in front of her face.

“Calm down,” he said quietly. “Come on.”

Her lips quivered. She looked away from Pepper and back into the television lounge. She said, “She’s still my mother.”

Pepper finished his sandwich. It had almost no taste at all. The smokers under the maple tree were down to the end of their butts.

“It’s been in my room, too,” she said. “You probably heard me.”

He remembered the night when the women were screaming. When he felt lucky for being passed over. “That was you?”

She shrugged. “Could’ve been. Depends on the night.”

How old was this girl? He wanted to ask but he wasn’t sure how the question would sound. Like a criticism? Like he was about to turn all fatherly? It wasn’t meant as either one. More like he was marveling at what he was up to when he was just eighteen or nineteen. For all the trouble he got into, he wasn’t ever in a place like this.

“Do you really know what it is?” he asked.

The nurse returned to the lounge and unlocked the door that led outside.

Loochie said, “It’s the Devil.” She looked up at him, squinting because of the sun. “I think you know that.”

So she’d confirmed his most delirious idea, unlike Dorry, and it actually felt good to hear the thing named out loud. By someone other than him. But what was supposed to happen right after that? Now what?

14

DR. BARGER SHUT the door to conference room 2 and smiled at the Book Group members. Loochie and Dorry and Coffee and Pepper. Sam and Sammy were not in attendance. Neither was Josephine or the book cart. Just four patients and Dr. Barger.

“Let’s rearrange the tables,” he said.

They did the same work again. One table over by the windows. The other table moved to the center of the room. Five chairs slid close for those in attendance, the others pushed back against the walls. Even Dr. Barger helped. With the chairs.

Then someone knocked on the door, and he said, “I’ve got a little surprise for all of you.”

Dr. Barger opened the door and a woman stood in the doorway, carrying two canisters, one white and one silver. An old woman, black, quite slim, wearing a purple pantsuit and a tidy hat that matched. When Pepper had first arrived, he’d seen Dorry give this woman his box of breakfast cereal in the television lounge. The woman didn’t even look at the doctor, only shuffled into the room in her slightly worn black Easy Spirit shoes. She entered carrying the two canisters close to her chest, as tender as a member of the congregation carrying the body and blood of Christ.

Dr. Barger waved his hand as if he’d conjured the old woman. “I bring you coffee and hot water for tea!” he said.

And against all better judgment, Dorry and Pepper and Coffee actually applauded weakly.

The old woman made it to the free table at the back of the room and set down the canisters. Under one arm she carried a short stack of white disposable coffee cups. She set those down next. Then she turned and left the room and Dr. Barger stayed at the door, held it open, as proud as a pharaoh. He grinned at the group. “See? There are rewards for your attendance.”

Dorry raised her hand. Dr. Barger pointed at her to speak, as if they were in grade school.

“How come you’re only bringing us gifts after four weeks of Group? We had three times as many people at the first meeting.” Dorry leaned toward Pepper and poked at his sleeve. “That was before you joined the cast!”

Dr. Barger shrugged. “I had to ask Dr. Anand for money to buy you all some supplies, and he had to file the request with the board of Northwest who then passed it on to the governing body of New Hyde Hospital. From there, it had to be approved by the president of the hospital, or at least rubber-stamped by his secretary. And I’m guessing that request is still on someone’s desk. Finally, I said forget it and just bought the stuff at Key Food.”

Coffee wagged his finger at Dr. Barger. “You didn’t have faith in the system.”

Pepper looked at Dr. Barger. “Coffee’s not an American. He doesn’t know it’s every man for himself around here.”

Dr. Barger jutted out his lower lip, as if a specimen had finally done something worth noting. “Is that how all of you feel? Dorry? Loochie?”

Dorry waved her hand at Pepper dismissively. “Even Pepper doesn’t believe that. He figures that’s what he’s got to say. You look stupid if you’re sincere these days.”

Dr. Barger pushed the conference-room door closed without thinking. He’d become engaged in this conversation and didn’t want it to end. Because he wasn’t paying attention he bonked the old woman in the purple pantsuit as she walked into the room. The tray in her hands flew; the tea bags, and packets of sugar, and a plastic cup of plastic spoons all tumbled to the floor.

The old woman wasn’t hurt. She hardly stopped moving. She held on to the tray and stumbled into the room. Dr. Barger pulled the door back quickly and sputtered apologies. The old woman set the tray down on their table, lifted one arm and dropped a rectangular box of lemon cookies. She turned toward the mess, which Dr. Barger now stooped forward to clean up, and she pulled at the doctor’s coat to move him. With the doctor out of the way, she bent and gathered up all the fallen items in two quick swipes. She used the plastic cup like a scoop. She set all the items back on the tray. Then she shuffled out of the room. She hadn’t spoken, hardly acknowledged anyone the whole time.

Dorry punched Pepper in the arm lightly. “She’s been here almost as long as me. I don’t think the doctors even know her name anymore. They give her little jobs like that. You would almost think she worked here. We call her the Haint. Haint quite a patient. Haint quite the staff.”

Coffee studied his open blue binder, as if he hadn’t noticed any of this. Loochie snatched the box of lemon cookies.

Pepper said, “I need coffee.”

As he poured it, Pepper realized it was the first cup he’d had in over a month. He used to buy two or three each day before. Before. The word made him feel slightly dizzy. He dipped one finger into the hot coffee and held it there, burning the tip of his finger until he came back to himself.

As he blew on his finger, Josephine arrived at the door pushing that same three-tiered book cart. It entered the room and gathered all attention, the ark of a cut-rate covenant.

The same bevy of professional manuals were on the shelves but now there were seven copies of one book, all in unblemished condition, across the top row. Hardcovers. Jackets in “near fine” condition (a used-booksellers’ term). The background of the jacket was black and on each spine, the title in large red letters: JAWS. JAWS. JAWS. JAWS. JAWS. JAWS. JAWS.

Dr. Barger peeked outside theatrically, finally shutting the door. He sat down at the head of the table. Dr. Barger stretched out his hand and Josephine handed one of the books to him. They could all see the back cover. It showed the author’s photo in black and white. The dude wore a black jacket and white turtleneck, stood in a slightly turned pose, and grinned faintly at all of them in the room. He cut a Hugh Hefner figure. And on the front cover that iconic image, an enormous gray shark’s head moving up from the bottom of the black page and a small gray woman swimming at the top. The woman meant to get a little exercise, but the shark had other plans.

It was an old book-club version of the original. The shipping cost more than the books. Dr. Barger opened the dust jacket and scanned the flap. He read out loud.

“ ‘It’s out there in the water … waiting. Nature’s most fearsome predator. It fears nothing. It attacks anything. It devours everything.’ ”

He closed the flap and sighed.

“Oh, my,” he said.

He dropped the book on the table as if it had dirtied his fingers. Then he looked up at the group, and smiled and said, “I’m really looking forward to discussing this book!”

Loochie ate a lemon cookie, spoke with her mouth full. “Liar.”

Before Dr. Barger could argue, the door opened and in walked Sam. All eyes in the room scanned the doorway for Sammy. But Sam just shut the door.

She looked down at the floor.

Last time, she’d been dressed for the day; now, she wore her pajamas.

She moved behind Pepper and Dorry and took a seat at the far end of the table, directly across from Dr. Barger. Her face looked red, as if she’d been scalded, and they couldn’t see her eyes because she wouldn’t look up. The depth of her silence quieted the others.

Finally, Dorry spoke up. “No jokes today, Sammy?”

She lifted her head. Her eyes were red and veiny. She hadn’t been burnt, she’d been crying. “I’m Sam,” she said quietly.

Dr. Barger said, “You’ve been crying.”

Loochie rolled her eyes. “Is that your professional diagnosis?”

Coffee said, “If you want to add a complaint to my own petition, I can include your name when I reach”—Coffee cleared his throat—“when I reach someone.”

“Sammy’s gone,” Sam said.

Coffee looked down at a page and made a note.

“Dead?” Dorry asked.

Dr. Barger barked, “Dorry!”

Sam pointed at Dr. Barger and Josephine.

“They say they discharged her. But she didn’t even say good-bye? To me? They said I slept through her release, but she didn’t even leave me a note? She just disappears?”

Pepper surprised himself when he spoke. As he’d been listening to Sam, he’d been clenching his teeth. Not consciously, just a tightening in his chest, his neck, his jawline. And the two words found their way out.

“The Devil,” Pepper said.

Sam narrowed her eyes at Pepper. “Maybe it didn’t get who it wanted. So it came after her instead.”

Pepper leaned so far back in his chair, it tilted.

Loochie raised her arm, making a fist. Was she about to hit Sam? Or fly across the table and throttle Pepper? Unclear, but Dr. Barger could see she was about to do something aggressive. Sam’s sadness, her suspicion, her accusation ran through the room like a current. The newest admit had to use those words. The Devil. Dr. Barger thought, Not this again.

Dr. Barger said, “I’m sure Samantha will call you as soon as she’s back home and settled in. You all know it can take a few days to readjust.”

Every patient in here (except Pepper) knew this was true. Coming out of the hospital could feel like emerging from the amniotic sac, or from a tomb.

Dr. Barger added, “So why don’t we give Samantha a few days before we decide that she’s been sacrificed to Beelzebub.”

A bit gruesome, that, but it did work. So much of the job in Northwest was simply about management. The ugly truth was that these patients weren’t here to be cured. There were no cures for them. They had illnesses that had to be managed, by them and by those who treated them. They were like ships that would never find a shore. The most you could do was bring them supplies; the most they could do was get used to the rocking, the unpredictability, of the vast, impenetrable ocean below them.

“Now,” Dr. Barger said, smiling, seemingly relieved to have staved off a storm. He knocked on the front cover of the book. “Let’s get back to this shark.”

Book Group ended and they all fled. They were running from Sam, even if they wouldn’t put it that way. She stank of desperation and loss. Dr. Barger couldn’t stay because he had another job, late-afternoon patients at his private practice, a half hour drive from New Hyde Hospital. (You didn’t think Dr. Barger was living solely on the salary he earned serving the practically destitute population of Northwest, did you?)

Last out of the room was Josephine, whose heart felt sore as she wheeled the book cart. She’d had to evict Sam before locking up. Sam didn’t even argue as she walked out, head down again. Josephine watched her leave and wanted to grab Sam’s hand. Just hold it. But she wanted to be a professional. Best to get back to work or Josephine would soon feel overwhelmed. The cart had to be returned to the supply closet in Northwest 1. Then back to the nurses’ station to log on to the computer, continue transferring information from the charts. Who else would do it? Most of the staff couldn’t handle an automatic transmission.

Pepper and Coffee walked together. Coffee had his binder and his copy of Jaws tucked under one arm. Pepper held his copy of the novel in one hand. They looked like schoolboys just then, walking home from class.

“You think she’s right?” Pepper asked. And he had to repeat himself because Coffee didn’t answer him. He realized he must’ve whispered.

“You think she’s right? It took Sammy when it couldn’t get me?”

They reached the nurses’ station and Coffee said, “I wish I could tell you yes or no. But I can only say I’m happy you’re all right.”

Pepper touched his own chest lightly. “Not that good.”

Coffee waved away any self-pity. “Better than Sammy, I bet.”

It was almost dinnertime and all the staff, besides Josephine, were busy dropping pills into little white plastic cups. Preparing for the dinner rush. Coffee eyed the phone alcove.

Then Pepper reached over and slipped the blue three-ring binder from under Coffee’s arm. The copy of Jaws fell to the floor with a smack, but Coffee didn’t pay it any attention.

“What’s in here?” Pepper asked.

But he didn’t even have time to playfully flip through the pages. Coffee reached up and thumped Pepper directly against his wounded sternum, and Pepper hopped on one foot and his hands flew out and he huffed out one big breath. And Coffee’s binder fell from Pepper’s hands and Coffee caught it. Then he stooped and picked up his copy of Jaws. By the time one of the orderlies looked up from the tray of pills, Coffee was walking toward Northwest 2 and Pepper seemed to be doing some kind of interpretative dance.

The orderly said, “Go get ready for dinner.”

Pepper steadied himself and breathed deeply as he walked. Trying to catch up to Coffee, who was already halfway down Northwest 2, almost at their room. First Loochie, then the staff, the Devil and now even Coffee. What was the point of being as big as he was if no one respected it? He didn’t realize how much it would rattle his confidence to lose the power of his size. Besides that, what did he have? Other things, surely. But what?

He caught up to Coffee, standing in the doorway of their room.

Pepper stopped right behind Coffee and said, “What’s the holdup?”

Coffee pointed. Up.

Pepper said, “Ah, shit.”

The ceiling had sprung a leak.

Right over Pepper’s mattress.

A rust-colored stain, about the diameter of a coffee mug, could be seen in the ceiling tile above his bed.

They watched as a drop fell from the ceiling and landed directly on Pepper’s pillow. It wasn’t the first. There was a reddish blot about as big as a half-dollar.

Pepper put one hand on Coffee’s shoulder, for balance. His chest throbbed, his throat tightened. He whispered, “Should I report this?”

Coffee looked up at the ceiling and down at the pillow. Sadly, he knew this place much better than Pepper. He’d been at New Hyde a year.

Coffee said, “You should just move your bed.”

The spot in the ceiling seemed to darken for a moment, then a bead of moisture gathered and dangled and descended. They watched it fall. As if they hadn’t already seen what would happen. They watched it hit Pepper’s pillow. The reddish blot grew.

“That’s disgusting,” Coffee said.

True. But how disgusting? What was it? Pepper took his hand off Coffee’s shoulder. He looked down at Coffee with a look of pleading. Would Coffee go in first? But Coffee just shook his head. Coffee sure wasn’t going in to investigate on Pepper’s behalf. He wasn’t about to be that black guy. (You know, the one who scouts ahead and gets his ass sliced in two. Somewhere near the first ten minutes of the horror movie. Although, to be fair, moviemakers have largely stopped that practice. Now there’s usually one amiable but forgettable white person who dies first, and then they kill off all the nonwhite cast members.)

The ceiling dripped again. The drop fell. The pillow caught it. The reddish blot bloomed.

Coffee stepped aside and Pepper cautiously moved toward his bed, his eyes on the stain. He reached the pillow and pulled it away from the bed. He looked back at Coffee, who hadn’t stepped any farther into the room. His roommate looked poised to book back down the hall.

Pepper lifted the pillow to his face. Up close the stain looked almost the color of a sunset, reddish brown. He thought of Sammy. Was her body right there on the other side of the ceiling tiles? Had that thing dragged her body into the darkness and done to her what it had meant for him? And brought her husk back to Pepper, like a cat presenting a dead bird?

Pepper brought the pillow to his nose.

He sniffed the fabric.

“Rainwater,” Pepper said. “I think it’s rainwater.”

He wasn’t just saying this. That’s really how the pillow smelled. Musty, with a faint whiff of corroded metal. A backed-up rain gutter maybe. This was a worthless old building that hadn’t been well maintained even when it was an ophthalmology ward. Standing water and poor construction and a rusty metal rain guard equals orangish musty water backing up, leaking through the ceiling. Onto his pillow. Obviously he didn’t know that this was true, but it did make sense. Also, it was the preferable explanation. It wasn’t blood.

Rainwater.

Pepper dropped his pillow on the floor. At the very least, they’d have to give him a new one, right? Then he moved to the foot of his bed, clamped one paw around the bed frame and pulled. It hardly moved. He tried again and his rib cage filed a protest. It sent shock waves of pain up into his skull. He actually saw small flashes of light in his eyes. Pepper let go of the bed and breathed and patted his chest and let the pain subside. Then he looked to his roommate — his friend? — Coffee.

“Will you help me?”

Pepper grabbed the bottom end of the bed again and waited there. Coffee watched Pepper for a moment and finally tossed his copy of Jaws onto his mattress. Coffee walked to the head of Pepper’s bed and grabbed the frame with his one free hand.

Pepper gestured at the three-ring binder and said, “I won’t swipe that from you again.”

Coffee nodded. “Okay.” But he didn’t put the binder down.

And Pepper, still aching, decided not to push it. He and Coffee lifted and together they got the bed off the ground. Pepper nodded toward the opposite wall and they moved together, kind of crab-walking.

Picture it: Pepper’s end of the bed tilted up about six inches higher than Coffee’s, and he’s popping a sweat because, even with the help, his injuries have made him weaker. And at the other end, you’ve got Coffee, concentrating more on the book in his right hand than the bed in his left. As a result, the frame wobbles and the legs at his end occasionally bump against the floor. Pepper wanted to give the man a few moving tips. (Paramount being: Use two damn hands!) But no one ever listens to a know-it-all so he tried a different tack.

“You ever reach that guy? The controller?”

“Comptroller,” Coffee corrected. “I spoke to a guy who worked for the man. A ‘fund-raiser.’ ”

“And what did this guy say?”

“He thought I was calling for New Hyde Hospital. Like maybe I was someone high up. He said I could probably talk to the comptroller if …”

“If?” Pepper couldn’t suppress a grin. Though with the trouble he was having holding up the bed it looked more like a grimace.

“If I was interested in donating to the campaign fund. I laughed when he said that and explained that I was a patient.”

The bed bonked the floor again, then screeched as the legs scratched the floor. Pepper wondered if the staff heard, but then he wondered if they would even care. Were patients allowed to rearrange?

“What did this guy do when you said you were a patient?” Pepper asked.

“He hung up.”

They reached the opposite wall and Pepper lowered his end. Coffee just dropped his. The whole frame twanged. Pepper’s chest heaved a bit from the labor. A month without work was like a month without exercise. He felt a little ashamed to have lost so much strength so quickly. But his mind wasn’t quite as weak. He’d taken his midday dose with lunch when he came in from the smoker’s court, but missing the morning dose still had made a difference. His mind felt more vigorous than it had in weeks.

“Where are you from, anyway?” Pepper asked.

Coffee seemed to stiffen, a conversation coming that he didn’t enjoy. “I’m from Uganda,” he said.

The glaze on Pepper’s eyeballs could’ve been used to coat a turkey.

“Uganda,” Pepper said. “Of course. I see.”

Coffee sighed. “It’s in East Africa.”

Pepper nodded as if he’d known all along. “Where else would it be?”

(Pepper had actually thought it was an island in the Caribbean.)

But then Pepper snapped a finger and said, “Idi Amin!”

At this Coffee seemed to deflate. “Still our most famous export.”

Coffee looked at the front door, and Pepper could tell this guy was about to run away. Maybe Idi Amin, the murderous dictator, wasn’t the best way to talk about Coffee’s homeland. Or maybe that just wasn’t what Coffee cared about most now. Pepper needed to bring the talk back to their situation here. They could talk about the glorious history of Samoa (Uganda!) later on.

“The mayor,” Pepper said. “The comptroller. Who are you going to try next? Department of Sanitation?”

“At least I’m trying something!” Coffee yelled back.

Pepper and Coffee pushed the bed up against the wall here. Coffee and Pepper’s beds were in the same position, lining the same wall, on either side of the room’s door.

Only problem now was that Pepper’s bed sat right below the ceiling tile that had cracked and fallen in the night before. Thankfully, someone on staff had come through and removed the pieces of tile (though they hadn’t swept up the dust) but the hole remained. Instead of sleeping under the stain, he’d be sleeping here? Pepper climbed on his bed slowly and rose to his toes. Slipping his head into the crawl space felt like he was slipping it into a tiger’s mouth. The top of his head felt hot. He remembered those two feet dangling down from the darkness. He tried to see to the other end of the room, where his bed had just been. Trying to make out the silhouette of Sammy’s body. But he couldn’t tell. Soon enough the dust floating in the air up there coated his forehead, his eyelids, his lips. He couldn’t stay up there any longer and he hopped down off his bed. He winced and clutched his chest.

“This isn’t going to work,” Pepper said. And he wasn’t just talking about where he’d rest his head. He meant maintaining. He meant facing whatever came next.

Then Coffee walked over to Pepper’s dresser and said, “Help me move this.”

The dresser looked like wood but wasn’t. Didn’t even seem to be some kind of plastic. It might almost have been made of cardboard, that’s how cheap it felt. If they’d painted fake drawers on the back of a refrigerator box, it wouldn’t have been much worse than this.

Pepper pushed the dresser and it slid so easily the move almost seemed graceful. He slid it until it was at the far end of this wall. Now it sat adjacent to the two windows in the room.

“You’ll make fun of me if I tell you who I’m really hoping to reach,” Coffee said.

Pepper tapped the top of the dresser. “Yes,” he said. “I probably will.”

When Coffee said the name it was unintelligible.

“Try again, my friend.”

Coffee set his three-ring binder down on Pepper’s dresser. He opened the cover and flipped through the pages. Columns had been drawn on every page, by Coffee’s own hand. It looked like a ledger. Page after page filled with surprisingly readable script. Coffee had the most elegant handwriting Pepper had ever seen.

“These are my notes,” Coffee began. “Every person I’ve reached in the last year. Their names and numbers, the offices they represent. What they said they would do. What they said they wouldn’t do. What was actually done. You’ll see there’s nothing in that column. Council members. Lawyers. Reporters. Clerks. Secretaries. Everything goes in here. So I can prove my story.”

“Prove that you’ve been ignored?”

Coffee flipped through a series of blank pages until he reached the very last page in the book. This one had two words written at the top.

“Prove that I tried everything. So when I finally reach him, he’ll know I’m a serious man.”

The two words at the top of the page were “Big Boss.”

Pepper touched the letters. “You mean God?”

Coffee laughed, it was a soft sound, and his eyes narrowed when he smiled. “I don’t appeal to God for man’s mistakes. I just have to reach the man who will make things right down here. I don’t write his name because when people see his name, hear his name, they go crazy. They get so angry. They get scared. Or disappointed. But it doesn’t matter. His name means more to them than it does to me. His name could be anything, it’s his power that counts.”

Pepper stepped back and looked at Coffee’s serious round brown face.

“Don’t tell me.…”

Coffee raised his hand, palm open. “Don’t say it. I never use his name. By now it has become like a superstition to me. I am trying to reach the Black President. I mean to tell him of our conditions, and ask him for help.”

Pepper touched his belly lightly. He shook his head and said, “Let me tell you something and you need to believe it. I don’t care who the Big Boss is. I don’t care if someday it’s a Big Lady! The whole game is fixed. Top to bottom. Left to Right. The Black President is just like the White President. ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ ”

Pepper heard what he just said in his own head. Was that racist? (Meh.)

Coffee closed his binder. “Dorry was right. You think all those things you say make you sound smarter, but I think you sound like a fool.”

There might’ve been room for more argument but Pepper stepped away from the dresser, and now he noticed something remarkable about the wall space behind his dresser. It wasn’t a wall.

It was a door.

It had been painted over. The door handle had been removed, but he could still make out the small indent in the paint where a handle would’ve fit. And the lock bulged through the paint as well, like a nipple under a tight shirt. Pepper wondered if the lock still worked. Forget schooling Coffee about his political naiveté, what the hell was this?

Coffee touched the bulge of the painted lock and anticipated Pepper’s question. “All the bedrooms on the unit used to be offices. All the conference rooms used to be exam rooms. The television lounge was a ‘recovery room.’ They don’t tear down and rebuild anything at New Hyde. Too expensive. They just seal off one door and create another one. They call it ‘repurposing.’ ”

Pepper tapped at the sealed door. “So if we could get this open, we could just walk into the next room? We wouldn’t have to step out into the hall?”

Coffee pressed one hand against the door. “I guess not.”

“And if we kept opening the doors, where would the last one lead?”

“Where would you want it to lead?” Coffee asked.

Pepper didn’t want to say the word outside out loud. Speaking the word might jinx it. He’d made fun of Coffee about the “Black President,” but now look at him indulging his own superstition. So he said it to himself.

Outside.

15

PEPPER FELT CHARGED. He went into the bathroom and found his bath towel, folded and placed it on the floor in his room, right under the dripping ceiling. At the nurses’ station the other patients were waiting in line for their nighttime meds.

Some might doubt the mentally ill could pull off an orderly queue. Aren’t they raving lunatics? Shouldn’t they be wandering off or howling at the moon? That’s more dramatic, admittedly, but inaccurate. If most of these people weren’t wearing blue pajamas, you’d have thought you were in a bank line, waiting to talk to the only available teller.

Pepper and Coffee were behind Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly. Mr. Mack had a well-maintained mustache. Frank Waverly had actually turned a paper napkin into a pocket square for his sport coat. Of all the patients Pepper had seen so far, these two seemed least likely. They were the kind of older folks you see less and less anymore. The ones who cultivate their dignity long after anyone’s checking for it. The ones who don’t think it takes an occasion to wear trousers. Even in here, even considering how long they’d been on the ward (six years for Mr. Mack; seven for Frank Waverly), the gentlemen still made an effort. A fantastic act of will. They were like a pair of leopards, held too long in a zoo. Remarkable, but a little ruined.

Pepper and Coffee got in line behind the pair. The smaller man, Mr. Mack, peeped them, top to bottom, then sighed with boredom and turned forward again. Frank Waverly didn’t bother.

“That was a door!” Pepper whispered.

But Coffee’s eyes were on the phone alcove. He couldn’t move through this room without looking at it. Pepper had to grab Coffee’s elbow to get his attention. When he did this, Coffee’s arm squeezed tight against the binder tucked into his armpit.

Coffee said, “Do you want the staff to hear you talking about that?”

Mr. Mack looked over his shoulder again. Interested.

The line moved forward.

Pepper’s two favorite people were administering the meds at the nurses’ station. Scotch Tape and Miss Chris. She held the clipboard and Scotch Tape handed out the white cups of pills.

The sight of that tray gave Pepper a punch in the gums. His mouth hurt already, thinking of swallowing them. The lunchtime meds had worn off and he felt clearheaded again, like this morning. He felt good. Did he really have to give that up?

“I’m going to refuse my pills,” Pepper said.

Frank Waverly turned his head so hard, the move seemed positively chiropractic. Then he looked ahead again, just as quickly.

Pepper grabbed Coffee’s elbow again. “Do it with me. Say no.”

Coffee didn’t even answer him. The line moved forward.

Pepper said, “Strength in numbers.”

Coffee patted the binder with his free hand. “These are the numbers that give me strength.”

A fair point. Not about the numbers (that was kooky talk), but what Coffee really meant was that he had no history with Pepper. They weren’t partners in crime just because they’d moved a bed. And maybe Pepper hoped to refuse the pills along with someone else. So much harder to do difficult things alone. That’s why so few people try.

The line moved forward. Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly were up. Miss Chris read out each man’s name (even she called Mr. Mack “Mr. Mack”), then Scotch Tape slid their doses over to them.

Pepper leaned close to Coffee. “I’ve got a credit card in my wallet. You can use it like a calling card. Call whoever you want. Even O—”

Coffee cut Pepper off with a glare.

“Even the Black President,” Pepper said. “You can have the card if you do this with me.”

Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly walked around the nurses’ station and toward dinner in the television lounge. Pepper and Coffee were up.

Another nurse sat behind the station. She slapped at the “new” computer, inputting chart info. It wasn’t Josephine. The nurse didn’t seem to be doing well. She had a stack of old files, and she hadn’t logged in one page of the stuff in over an hour. That poor woman was just tapping the Tab key over and over. She planned to do this for six more hours, until her shift ended.

Miss Chris looked at Pepper’s chest very quickly. He saw her do it, though she tried not to be obvious. Dr. Anand, or maybe the nurse, Josephine, had spread the word of his injuries. But if Miss Chris felt any sympathy, she hid it well. She looked at his chest, then back at her chart and scanned for Pepper’s name.

But before she could read it aloud, before Scotch Tape could track down Pepper’s white plastic cup, Pepper said, “I don’t want my medication.”

Miss Chris stopped scanning her clipboard and Scotch Tape looked up from his tray. Coffee, too, nearly dropped his binder. He hadn’t believed Pepper was going to say it. The handful of patients behind Pepper even stopped breathing.

Miss Chris held a pen in one hand and she tapped it on the clipboard once. “You’re refusing medication, heh? Against the wishes of your doctor?”

Funny how she made that sound like a breakdown in military discipline. Like refusing the order of your commanding officer.

“Yes,” Pepper said slowly, his voice catching. “I’m refusing.”

The nurse at the computer had been listening on delay, so she didn’t react to Pepper’s words until just then. They surprised her, too. Instead of clicking the Tab key she hit Shift and suddenly her whole screen went blank, and she said, “Shit!” Which echoed the thoughts of her coworkers precisely.

Scotch Tape put both his hands on the nurses’ station desktop and leaned toward Pepper. “You have the right to refuse,” he said. “But refusal is taken as a sign that your illness is in control of you.”

“What if I’m refusing because I’m not ill?”

Miss Chris almost barked. “If you was healthy, you wouldn’t refuse!”

“There’s no way I can win this argument,” Pepper said, more to himself than to them.

“It’s a guilty heart that refuses,” said Miss Chris. “If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t say no.”

Her last line was the one that jolted Pepper. He’d had arguments like this with black friends, about the police. A couple of the younger men on some crew at Farooz Brothers would be talking about all the stop-and-frisk beefs they’d been getting into with the NYPD. The numbers had been just obscene, according to them, starting in maybe 2009. Even worse by 2011. And Pepper used to ask them why they cared about getting searched if they had nothing to hide. If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t say no. That’s exactly what he’d said to them. More than once. And they’d shake their heads like he was just some middle-aged white dude who didn’t know anything worth knowing about such an experience. But in this moment, with Miss Chris and Scotch Tape, with their logic that not taking medication was a sign that a person was deeply ill, well, he wanted to laugh a little and explain — not to Scotch Tape or Miss Chris, but to a couple of young guys on his old crews — that maybe he had an inkling of what he’d sounded like. He suddenly understood this back-and-forth as a kind of conditioning. It wasn’t about whether or not he took his pills, and it wasn’t about whether or not some kids had a little weed in their pockets. This wasn’t about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. Pepper hadn’t considered this a problem before, he realized, because he hadn’t been one of those types. Until now.

“I will be informing the doctor about this,” Miss Chris said. “You can be sure.”

Scotch Tape waved one arm, treating Pepper like a winged pest. “Well, go on, then!” he said.

Scotch Tape knew that most of an orderly’s job on a psych unit was a simple matter of herding. Herd the patients toward their meals and meds, herd the patients toward their group sessions and family visits, herd the patients away from anything that might agitate them. Because an agitated patient was a troublesome patient. And these people could be enough trouble even when calm. So Scotch Tape had to send Pepper away before he and Miss Chris paid attention to the others in line. Let the match flame of that little rebellion burn out. Once it did, you wouldn’t smell the shit.

Pepper looked at Coffee. Maybe he wanted to see his little act bear fruit immediately. (Not maybe.)

But Miss Chris sucked her teeth. “Don’t look so frighten about Coffee. We know him a lot longer than you, heh? You can meet Coffee in the lounge when I done with him. You think we going to eat him?” Then she laughed with that special Caribbean venom. It comes from the back of the throat, like a chest-clearing spit.

And what could Pepper do? As he moved away from the station, Scotch Tape picked up the hospital phone on the desk and dialed a number. He glared at Pepper the whole time. Pepper skedaddled down Northwest 5, toward the television lounge. Looking back over his shoulder only once. Seeing Coffee at the nurses’ station. Miss Chris speaking to him with such gusto that her body shook. And Coffee shrinking under the force of her wind.

He wasn’t sure if Coffee would follow his lead, but as Pepper had moved away from the nurses’ station, he felt something else, too. Pride? Power? Peace?

All of the above. He said no and they backed down.

When Pepper reached the lounge, he found half the tables occupied. Dinner trays and television, a pretty typical American evening.

Dorry sat at one table, alone, and waved for Pepper to join her.

Pepper considered one of the empty tables instead. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, but he wanted to sit alone and see what was going to happen. He’d refused his medication and they’d been a bit pissed, but otherwise? He’d been expecting them to hang him upside down by his ankles. Or maybe just throw him a quick lobotomy. But nothing of the sort happened.

Pepper approached the orderly manning the dinner cart. He didn’t ask for a tray, he just extended his two hands wide enough for a tray to be balanced between them. This wasn’t considered especially rude for the unit. At New Hyde there was less goodwill between server and customer than at a ghetto Burger King.

But the orderly was on his cell phone. A device Pepper found himself eyeing with great envy. (Cell phones weren’t supposed to be used on the unit, not by patients or staff.) Pepper waited until the orderly finished his call. The guy looked directly at Pepper the whole time, nodding and grinning until he hung up. Then the orderly, a big bo-hunk type, grinned and said, “We’re all out of meals, man.”

Pepper counted the six trays still on the rack.

“I guess my mind’s playing tricks on me.”

The orderly didn’t even look back at the cart. He crossed his arms to make his beefy biceps look even fuller. “I hear you’re not really hungry anyway,” he said. “I hear you’re actually turning down the things staff members offer you.”

Aha.

Pepper nodded. “It’s going to be like that.”

The orderly shrugged. “Let’s see if your appetite comes back by breakfast.”

And why did this guy take such pleasure in this little act? It was cruel, but the cruelty wasn’t really the charge for him. It was the rules. The order. Outside the unit (and even inside, mostly) this orderly, Terry, was a pretty decent dude. He volunteered at an animal shelter in Forest Hills and found it easier to care for animals than people. With people, you start getting into choice. To put it another way: Terry worked on a psychiatric unit but he didn’t really believe in mental illness. A series of bad (or stupid) choices led folks to New Hyde’s nut hut, that’s what Terry believed. Like this guy, Pepper. The doctor says you need to take your meds, so why not take them? You can’t leave until the doctors believe you’re improving. They won’t believe that if you’re not dosed up. And maybe the damn things are even helping you act like less of a wackadoo. So why not do it? Why not? Why not? Why not? In this way, not evil, even understandable, Terry justified denying Pepper his dinner. And Pepper could see Terry wasn’t going to become some fifth column among the staff, so he walked away and finally decided to sit with Dorry.

Maybe she would share.

“Hello, Dorry,” Pepper said. Even to himself, he sounded artificial. He wondered how broad a smile he might be showing.

But then he appreciated, enjoyed, that he could feel his lips move. That he could coordinate the thought of sitting at Dorry’s table with the action. That the meds had been beaten back enough that he could feel himself smiling, even if it was just to try to trick an old woman out of a desiccated-looking orange on her dinner tray. (It was either that or, you guessed it, a beet cookie.)

But even as Pepper pulled the chair out, Dorry slapped one hand on that orange and closed her mottled fingers around it. And with that she got to peeling.

Three hunks — bing, bang, boom — right into her mouth. Hardly enough time to chew. It was as if she ate the orange just to spite Pepper. As if this woman, both a mother and grandmother, had learned how to recognize when someone was just being nice in order to get something from her.

When Dorry had finished, a line of juice running down her chin, she said, “You look hungry.”

Pepper pouted. “I am.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you won’t do what they tell you.”

“News travels that fast?”

Dorry nodded toward the next table where Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly sat over their dinner trays. Mr. Mack lifted his head from his carton of juice as if he’d been monitoring Pepper and Dorry’s conversation. He set down his juice, looked directly at Pepper and said, “I am a grown man. I do not gossip.”

Then he returned to his previously scheduled apple juice. Once he did, Dorry raised her right hand and curled it into the shape of a duckbill. She nodded toward Mr. Mack again.

Quack, quack, quack!

The moment Mr. Mack looked up from his meal, Dorry dropped the pantomime.

And, of course, none of this had any bearing on Pepper’s hunger. And, for that matter, on his recent stance. Hadn’t he just gone all Spartacus? Where were his legions of gladiators rallying behind him?

Dorry just wiped her chin.

Mr. Mack looked at his wrist. “It’s just about six thirty. I’ve got the slot.”

The other patients hardly seemed to hear him. They either remained focused on their meals or on the game show playing on the screen.

“No whammies, no whammies, no whammies …!” shouted the man on the television, who hadn’t been well dressed even when this show first aired twenty-six years ago.

“Come on,” Mr. Mack said. “Who’s got the remote? It’s six thirty and I want the news.”

Loochie sat at the table closest to the screen. She raised one hand, holding the remote. “Almost six thirty,” she said.

Mr. Mack glared at her. “That’s fine,” he said. “But as soon as it’s my time I want my show.”

And finally here came Coffee.

Pepper watched as Terry, the orderly, received no follow-up phone call. Coffee just shuffled down Northwest 5, looking slightly dulled, and he reached the orderly. He was given a dinner tray.

Pepper watched as Coffee scanned the lounge. Looking over, through, past Pepper. Pepper didn’t bother waving him over. Instead Pepper became improbably interested in the woman on the screen now and the question of whether or not some little red animated demon would destroy her dreams.

“Come on, no whammies,” she chanted. “Come on, no whammies.”

It was as if Coffee had been a reel of film that hadn’t quite caught on the grooves of a projector wheel. Finally he saw Pepper (meaning his medicated vision and his consciousness synced). Coffee registered Pepper there at the table with Dorry and shambled over.

Coffee sat, and removed the orange, the cookie, and the juice carton from the tray. He slid the cookie to Dorry. He slid the tray, which held franks and beans for the main course, toward Pepper. Baked beans from a can, hot dog from a package, a bun that felt (and tasted) like a soft foam microphone cover. Pepper ate it all gratefully.

While Pepper chomped, Coffee said, “Give me your credit card first. Then I’ll join you.”

Pepper sneaked a look at Dorry.

“That’s certainly one way to destroy your credit,” Dorry said. She slipped the cookie into her lap.

“Stop!”

On television the woman risking five thousand dollars and a vacation to Fiji winced as an animated demon chortled and clawed back all her winnings. The game-show host offered his practiced sympathies, then said good night to the viewers with a vacant grin.

“She lost the trip to Fiji!” Loochie shouted. The kid looked despondent.

Mr. Mack shouted. “That’s six thirty even!” He pointed at his naked wrist. And, sure enough, he was right. “Now stop daydreaming about places you are never going to visit and turn on channel 148.”

But Loochie wasn’t about to do his bidding. She dropped the remote on his table where its plastic casing thunked.

Pepper finished the last of his meal as Mr. Mack pushed his chair back and stood. He aimed the remote at the television. It took a few dozen presses on the controller before the machine did as it was told.

Dorry pointed at Pepper. “You like symbolic victories, I guess. You want to get Coffee here to refuse his medication just like you did and then both of you get written up, both of you get punished, and neither does anything to face the real problem on this unit. That’s a brilliant plan.”

The television roared now. A guy in his fifties who was modular-furniture attractive, sat in front of a nondescript news desk, wearing an expensive but unstylish jacket and tie.

“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Steve Sands. Welcome to News Roll.”

Behind Steve Sands, a large flat screen showed images of Coffee’s idealized leader, the Black President. And after him, a series of men and women in their fifties and sixties, all of them white except one black guy with glasses and a big smile.

“With presidential elections only a year away …”

Not even the local news, it was a “news program.”

Cue the exodus!

Two-thirds of the patients scrambled. The Air Force’s finest fighter squadrons don’t move as fast. Patients skedaddled to avoid the yapping trap of Steve Sands.

Even the orderly, Terry, gathered the empty meal trays fast. Dorry, Coffee, Pepper, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly. They were the only ones who stayed.

Dorry reached out and grabbed Pepper’s forearm. She said, “The real problem here is fear.”

Pepper wanted to say, Fear? Really? I thought the problem was the Devil coming into my room and stomping me out. Fear hadn’t nearly crushed him to death. And she should’ve known, since she’d been there.

On-screen, Steve Sands said, “As we gear up for the blood sport of politics in 2012, I thought we should look back to 2008, just to remember where we were then. And to help us think about where we might be going.”

Mr. Mack tapped Frank Waverly and pointed at the screen, as giddy as a child watching “Elmo’s World.”

Steve Sands said, “Now my producers and writers, even my wife, had a lot of suggestions for the clip that should start us off this evening. But I knew exactly which one has stayed with me the longest. And it’s not a major event. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might never have been noted in the pre-YouTube age. Remember this one?”

Now the screen showed an auditorium during a town-hall meeting. An older man in a black suit stood at a lectern. A microphone on a stand before him. He said, “Okay. Let’s go.… This lady in red has had her hand up for some time.”

The fingers of a right hand could be seen at the bottom of the screen, waving with great energy. When the woman was called on, the hand dropped and the camera pulled back to reveal seven other people up on the stage with the man in the black suit, all seated behind tables. Below those folks on the stage, people’s heads and shoulders could be seen in the rows. The auditorium looked pretty full. The woman in red, her hair pulled up and held with a clip, said, “Thank you, Congressman, um, Castle.…”

The lady, in a red T-shirt, carried a plastic bag with a yellow sheet of paper inside and a tiny American flag. Her other hand gripped the microphone.

She said, “I wanna know … I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I am an American citizen. With a seal on it. Signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time, the date … I wanna go back to January 20, and I wanna know why are you people ignoring his birth certificate. He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am an American. My father fought in World War Two, with the Greatest Generation, in the Pacific theater, for this country, and I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!”

The audience went wild with cheers and that’s when the video stopped. Steve Sands returned to the screen. He shuffled some papers on his desk and raised one eyebrow and leaned forward. It seemed as if he was about to really say something. Risk an opinion about what the woman had just said, or about the audience’s reaction, or even about the President himself.

But instead, Steve Sands only said, “That was definitely a moment of 2008.”

A blander pronouncement has rarely been made, and yet Steve Sands sighed deeply, nodded profoundly, as if he’d just signed the Declaration of Independence.

But back in the lounge, Dorry didn’t have to worry about holding on to a job, or advertisers. She pointed at the screen as Steve Sands moved on to another “moment of 2008.”

Dorry said, “You know what that woman sounds like?”

Mr. Mack turned in his chair and sneered. “I know exactly what she sounds like.”

To this, Dorry merely nodded and grinned without commitment. Satisfied that he’d made his point, Mr. Mack looked back at the screen.

Then Dorry turned to Pepper and Coffee. She spoke in a quieter voice.

“That woman just sounds scared.”

Mr. Mack’s half hour passed and the silent pair — Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth — came in to wordlessly request the remote. They switched to QVC and watched, rapt, as a vaguely familiar celebrity from the eighties talked up a line of skin products. Dorry, Pepper, Coffee, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly exited the lounge posthaste.

Coffee moved fastest because Pepper had handed over his credit card. An act of faith, he called it. (Mr. Mack, when he’d seen Pepper do it, called it “being an ass.”)

Halfway down Northwest 5, Scotch Tape appeared, grinning like a villain. He pointed at Pepper. “You’ve got a curfew now, my man. In your room after dinner. Doctor’s orders.”

Pepper said, “But that other orderly wouldn’t even give me dinner. You know that. You told him not to.”

Scotch Tape said, “Don’t make accusations like that unless you have proof.”

Dorry trailed behind Pepper and Scotch Tape, all the way to the nurses’ station. As she broke for the women’s hall, Dorry called out to Pepper, “Solidarity!”

“Bitch, please,” Scotch Tape muttered.

When Pepper returned to his room, he found that his mattress had been stripped of its sheets and his pillow was missing. A bare mattress lay on the bed frame. And the towel he’d set down on the floor, to catch the leak from the ceiling, had been taken away. In its place someone had stacked his slacks and socks. They were soaked orange.

Pepper had to admit these guys were good. He’d asserted his rights and they’d attacked his quality of living. How many more small cuts like this before he’d just give up? This was a method of control in many arenas. The indignities of an insurance claim come to mind.

Pepper wasn’t sure what he should do about the clothes. The drip from the ceiling seemed to have stopped. Now there was just a dried orange blob on the ceiling tile, like a dollop of apricot jam. But the slacks and socks were still wet. He’d be wearing these pajamas for a lot longer.

Scotch Tape said, “I told you how to get out of this place, but you just couldn’t be cool.” He seemed disappointed in Pepper.

Pepper didn’t feel the need to respond. Anything he said would probably only count against him sometime later. Right now he only wanted to show Scotch Tape that these little degradations hadn’t bothered him. He couldn’t think of a better way to assert his own strength. So he went to his bed where it now rested, against the wall with the painted-over door. He got in bed (on the bed, since there were no sheets). He reached over and pulled his book from the dresser. He held it up as a barrier between him and Scotch Tape.

Jaws.

Scotch Tape said, “Hope it don’t get too cold in here tonight!” Then walked back down the hall.

Pepper stayed focused on the novel. He read in a whisper, a habit since he was little and trying to drown out the sounds of road traffic coming from Kissena Boulevard.

“A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibration and signaled the brain. The fish turned toward shore.”

Pepper lost time. As he continued reading, he lost even more. The late evening passed and, except for getting up to use the bathroom twice, he forgot himself. He wasn’t transported from New Hyde to the beaches of Amity, he didn’t feel the New England sun on his skin or the salty breeze on his tongue, but he was reminded of the life beyond this bare bed, and distracted from all the hard questions he’d face once he put the book down. The reading became a muscle relaxant, a sedative, a salve, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Which is why Pepper wasn’t stressed when Coffee got press-ganged into the room. Terry practically tossed Coffee through the open doorway. Coffee stumbled into the room, and Pepper, at ease from the enjoyable reading, looked up casually. Coffee’s blue binder flapped into the room next. Then Terry slammed the door shut. A second after that, the door was locked.

Even this didn’t cause Pepper much alarm. He grinned at Coffee conspiratorially and said, “We’re the bad boys of this unit!”

Coffee remained serious. He pointed at the door and said, “Listen.”

Terry’s sneakers squeaked as he padded down Northwest 2. Pepper heard the clank of another door being locked. And another. Again, and again. Every room in the men’s hall. The whole unit going on lockdown.

Pepper sat up. “Did everybody but you refuse their meds?”

Pepper’s shoulders tightened as he imagined the glory of such a thing. It had taken a few hours, but they had followed his example!

Coffee rolled his eyes. “You’re not Jesus Christ. You do know that, right?”

Pepper frowned and set the book down, got up from the bed and crept to the door. Since there was no window to look through, he pressed his ear to the metal. “So what is it, then?”

Coffee came to Pepper’s side. “The EMTs are here.”

“Someone’s hurt?” Pepper asked.

“Someone’s dead,” Coffee said.

16

PEPPER AND COFFEE checked the door when they woke at dawn. Still locked. They had to lie down again, try to force themselves to sleep. Coffee managed, but Pepper couldn’t. He showered and returned to bed where he read a little more of Jaws. Now the book was about a marriage, and adultery. Of course, the shark still lived out in the waters off Amity, but the police chief, Martin Brody, had another predator to watch out for. This one walked onshore. The oceanographer Brody brought in to investigate the great white must’ve had his own thin canals of mucus and nerve endings, because he could sense that Mrs. Brody, the chief’s wife, was drifting alone in the sea of her marriage. And that dude smelled blood!

The lock sounded and Pepper and Coffee got up. Pepper peeked outside. Josephine continued down Northwest 2, unlocking all the other doors. Pepper and Coffee walked out of their room, moved down the hall, and found a line at the nurses’ station, like any other morning.

The women had been let out first. There were still five waiting to get their meds. Pepper and Coffee joined the queue without thinking. They were like conscientious objectors who’d mistakenly wandered onto the front line. Sneaking off again, unnoticed, hardly seemed possible in a room that size. Pepper stepped one foot out of the line, and a staff member at the nurses’ station cut her eyes at him. He stepped back in. He didn’t see how he’d have the nerve to refuse his meds this morning if he couldn’t even muster the courage to walk away.

Loochie stood two places ahead. She’d looked back at him as he’d put one foot out and pulled it back again. Her eyes were red, the pouches under them so dark they looked black. The pom-poms on her blue knit cap drooped down to her ears. The kid looked wrecked. Not beat up, worn out. She let the woman between them go ahead so she and Pepper could talk.

Pepper said, “I heard someone got hurt.”

Loochie said, “Sam.”

Pepper looked down Northwest 1, toward the conference room where they’d had Book Group the afternoon before. Almost as if he were watching Sam now, walking out of that room the day before, distraught because of Sammy’s disappearance.

Loochie pointed toward the nurses’ station, the staff members. “They said she killed herself.”

“They told you that?” Coffee asked.

Loochie shook her head. “I heard them say it. My room was right next to hers.”

“But did anybody see her do it?” Pepper asked.

Loochie shrugged. “With Sammy gone, Sam had the room alone.”

Coffee and Pepper and Loochie took a step forward on the line together.

Loochie said, “The Chinese lady saw Sam’s body before they took her out. Right before they put us on lockdown.”

“What Chinese lady?”

Loochie sniffed at Pepper, ignoring his question. She looked at her hands and pooched out her lips. Forget about crying, the kid looked like she was going to melt.

Loochie said, “Sam took Sammy’s bedsheet and drowned herself with it.”

“Hung herself,” Pepper corrected. “That what you mean?”

Loochie clenched her hands. “If I meant ‘hang’ I would have said ‘hang.’ The Chinese lady said Sam got the sheet down her throat. She swallowed it.”

Coffee and Pepper couldn’t respond. They only breathed quietly, focused on the feeling of air in their tracheas. Each one imagining the feeling of a bedsheet clogging the pathway.

Loochie said, “The Chinese lady said one of the nurses pulled the sheet out of Sam’s throat and the end of it was bright yellow. It was yellow because it was down in Sam’s stomach.”

“Who kills themselves like that?” Pepper said.

Coffee huffed. “Nobody does.”

Then the trio reached the nurses’ station. The nurse read off Loochie’s name — Lucretia Gardner — it was the first time Pepper had ever heard it. He felt compelled to share his real name with her, right then, to be fair. But the nurse handed over Loochie’s meds and moved on to Pepper quickly, and that feeling passed. The orderly placed Pepper’s little white cup on the desktop like a bartender setting down a shot. Before the nurse could read his name out, Pepper placed his hands behind his back and said, “I refuse.”

The orderly laughed. “You refuse? You sound real dumb right now.”

Then Pepper looked directly at the orderly and said, “I’m not taking that shit.” He gestured at the white cup with his chin. “Smart enough?”

These two took the news with a lot less shock than the staff from the night before. The nurse just wrote something on the clipboard and began to say Coffee’s name.

But before she could finish, Coffee said, “I refuse.”

When they reached the lounge, most of the tables were full. Pepper hadn’t seen a turnout like this, outside of visitors’ hours, in all his weeks on Northwest. There were some patients who woke up only long enough to snack on their morning pills, then slept through the breakfast hours; others who snuck their food back to their rooms and ate alone, or with their roommates. (Sam and Sammy had been like that.) And others who were usually up all night and only went to bed when dawn light crept through the grand windows of the television lounge.

But this morning, all the patients were up and out of their rooms. Maybe it was a reaction to having been locked in overnight. Maybe none of them wanted to feel isolated, all by themselves, alone in their rooms. Whatever the reason, the lounge stayed packed.

“That was real stupid,” Loochie said as they moved toward the orderly handing out breakfast trays.

Before they reached him, his cell phone rang.

Pepper said, “They can’t make you take those pills. If you say no, they have to respect that.”

Loochie snorted. “Think you have to tell me? I’ve been on psych units since I was thirteen. I know the laws.”

Pepper stopped short and reached out for Loochie’s arm. “You’ve been at Northwest for six years?”

Loochie laughed with genuine glee. “Not here. They have juvenile psychiatric units, and adult ones. I was in the juvenile ones, on and off, since I was—”

Pepper cut her off. “Thirteen.”

He looked at Coffee, who seemed just as stunned. Both men were struck by the idea of being in a place like this — whether juvenile or adult — since that age. How could anyone stand it? Right then, Loochie looked like some battle-hardened centurion to both men.

But Loochie didn’t linger in their surprise. She knew what usually came soon after. Pity. And she sure wasn’t interested in something like that. Especially not from Pepper and Coffee; she would’ve called them Abbott and Costello, but she was decades too young for a reference like that.

“You accept the pills so they don’t punish you,” Loochie said. “Simple.”

They reached the orderly and he gave Loochie her breakfast. The other two he waved off and they knew why.

Pepper said, “But then you end up taking the medicine and getting all …” Pepper rolled his eyes back in his head and let his mouth go slack.

Loochie slipped her tongue into the pouch of her cheek and dug out all three of her meds, still intact. She had her back to the orderly so he wouldn’t see this. Then she slipped the pills back into the side of her mouth with an expert’s ease.

She said, “You think I could’ve brought you down so hard if I took all the pills they give me? I skip at least one round a day.”

Pepper muttered, “I didn’t go down that bad.”

Loochie ignored him, still focused on the trick of tucking away her pills. “Didn’t you ever hide your vegetables as a kid?”

Pepper shook his head, almost proudly. “My parents never made me eat them.”

“The all-American diet,” Coffee said disdainfully.

Only one table had three seats free. It was the table closest to the garbage bin. Also, Dorry sat in the fourth chair. She caught Pepper’s eye, but this time she didn’t have to wave him over. Pepper came to her right away. Coffee and Loochie in tow.

When they sat, Dorry handed out portions from her tray. The apple for Coffee, the dry toast for Pepper. She liked giving it out when she wasn’t being manipulated. Loochie looked down at her own tray and, not to be outdone, gave her dry toast to Pepper. Coffee got her small box of Froot Loops. The four of them broke bread.

Dorry took off her glasses and pulled at the right sleeve of her nightdress. She buffed the lenses while they watched her. When she put them back on, the damn things looked even cloudier than before.

“You may be wondering why I summoned you all here tonight,” Dorry said.

Loochie said, “It’s morning.”

“And you didn’t summon us. We showed up,” Pepper said.

Dorry raised one hand, the pointer finger standing straight. “I’m going for a little atmosphere here.”

Coffee, less prone to bursting bubbles, said, “We’re here to talk about Sam. And Sammy.”

Dorry closed her eyes for a moment. “And about Marcus, and Bernadette, and Gustavo, and on and on.”

They sat quietly, even as the rest of the lounge filled with conversation.

“We’re here to talk about what’s to be done. And the best way to do it,” Dorry said.

Loochie bit into her apple, and to the other three, the crunch sounded louder than the television nearby.

Dorry said, “Making phone calls hasn’t brought in the cavalry.” She looked at Coffee and tilted her head slightly. “I’m sorry, Coffee, that’s no reflection on you.”

Coffee shook his head. “I just haven’t reached him yet. But thanks to Pepper I’ve been able to make a lot more calls. And I finally got the number for the White House switchboard.”

Pepper and Dorry and Loochie watched Coffee quietly. He leaned forward in his seat; he grinned at them with such enthusiasm that no one wanted to be snide.

Pepper said, “What if we made a plan for what we might do just in case the Big Boss is … delayed in helping us? Just to have a backup.”

Coffee nodded. “I guess that would be smart.”

Dorry said, “So what’s the first big problem we face?”

“The Devil is trying to kill us,” Loochie said.

“That’s our final problem,” Dorry said. “We can’t face that man until we’re ready.”

Pepper opened his mouth and closed it. Opened and closed it. On the third try he actually produced sound, words. “We all have to get off these medications. That’s first. You can’t fight if you can’t think straight.”

Loochie said, “If we did that I might stop …” She didn’t finish the sentence, but one hand rose and touched the side of her knit cap.

“… I might stop doing harm to myself,” she finished.

Dorry rapped the tabletop, right in front of Coffee. “And you might do better with the people you reach if you sounded a little more …”

Coffee stiffened. “I’m always polite and direct.”

Loochie said, “Really? ’Cause a lot of the times it sounds like you’re just yelling into those phones. Maybe you think you’re really saying something, but a lot of times it just sounds like noise.”

Dorry lowered her eyes. “I’d have to agree.”

Coffee brought one hand to his throat. “Really? That’s what I sound like?” He looked to Pepper but what could Pepper say? He hadn’t actually heard any of Coffee’s calls. But from Loochie’s description they sounded bonkers.

Coffee dropped his head. “Maybe that’s why they never call me back.”

He sounded so despondent that Pepper wanted to give the small bald dude a hug.

“And I …” Dorry began. “I’d just like to get one night of true rest. I don’t think I’ve had a natural sleep in”—she pointed at Loochie—“since before this girl was even alive.”

To sleep, to be less self-destructive, to communicate clearly with the world. Those all sounded like reasonable dreams to Pepper. But what came after that? Once they all cleared their minds of the pharmaceutical junk and found themselves, in a word, potent again. Then what?

“I almost made it to the silver door,” Pepper told them.

The others looked at him patiently. It seemed as though all the other people in the room, and even the sunlight warming the lounge, moved at a different speed than the four people at this table now. With the mere mention of the silver door, time left them behind.

Coffee shook his head. “No, you did not.”

“You didn’t see me. I touched the door handle. That’s why they put me in restraints.”

Coffee sighed. “It does not matter. You’ll never get inside its room. They’d never let you.”

“Well, then,” Loochie said. “What if we let it out?”

But, as Dorry pointed out, first things first. The problem of the pills and how to avoid the punishments Pepper had already experienced. The staff had worse than that at their disposal, too. There were so many ways to punish patients! No more bath soap, not for weeks, until even the patients on the other end of New Hyde’s grounds would complain about your odor. You could be exiled to your room, no television privileges. Denied family visitation. And, of course, the date of your release could be pushed back indefinitely.

All these methods came into play if staff merely suspected you weren’t doing as told. A hint of cognition aroused suspicion. The lack of slurred speech raised doubts. The staff were trying to stave off more than just hard work. A psychiatric patient without meds was like having a cyclone in your living room. That’s the fear, anyway. On the meds that same patient becomes a passing breeze. You can’t really blame the staff if they want to avoid storms. But what does the weather want?

When Pepper and Dorry and Loochie and Coffee got in line for their lunchtime meds, they all understood the pills weren’t their arena for insurrection. The point wasn’t to spit the pills into some staff member’s face. The four of them had to stop taking the antipsychotics and the antidepressants and the tranquilizers, all the various “stabilizers,” in order to mutiny. The rebellion required a little subterfuge first. So at lunch they got in line and plopped the pills into their mouths, tucked them under the tongue or by the gums and then discreetly spit them out later. No real challenge there. That wasn’t actually the hard part.

The trick was to seem medicated even as their bodies kicked. Because staff wouldn’t actually prod open their mouths and swish a finger over their gums. As long as the pills went in the staff assumed the pills went down. They were actually supposed to take every patient’s blood each week and test it to be sure the dosages weren’t too high or low, but this, like so many sensible hospital practices, went undone. Instead, the staff just tracked behavior. They noticed if the patient was being a little more aggressive recently. If the patient questioned staff commands more often. Even if he or she moved with new grace. These were all tip-offs. (And they didn’t generate lab costs.) So Pepper and Dorry and Loochie and Coffee had to enroll in acting class. To slouch like always; to let drool drip past their lips and onto their clothes at indiscreet times; to waver and wobble as they walked the halls; to never break character.

And the nominees for best actor in the role of reduced capacity are …

17

THREE DAYS OF practice and Pepper thought he’d mastered a thoroughly convincing slur. At this point he could make his lower lip dip down so far, make himself so damn unintelligible, that even Mushmouth from the Cosby Kids would be like, whatbee da fuckbee is dis guy talking abeebout?

He’d also learned to drag his left leg slightly when he walked. Step lively with the right but throw a little hitch into the left. The stride of the medically polluted.

This is why it took Pepper about fifteen minutes to get from his room to conference room 2 for Book Group. Truthfully, he wasn’t even sure if he should attend the meeting. What was the point? He was ready to get to the next stage of their uncertain project: figuring out how to open the silver door.

But he had finished Jaws, read it even more quickly with his mind cleared, and actually wanted to discuss it. Though he wasn’t sure how he should handle slipping intelligent conversation between his fake droopy lip. He thought on this as he moved down Northwest 2 and into the oval room that held the nurses’ station. He pretended not to notice the three staff members all hunched in front of the computer, each one squinting at the screen in exasperated bafflement.

“What kind of program is this?”

“I booted it up three times. You can’t read what it says?”

“ ‘Equator. Equator. Equator.’ I see it, but that’s not the same as understanding it!”

Pepper passed them quietly, which was for the best. Those three were so angry at the computer and its almost willfully impenetrable program that they might’ve stuck him with a needle just to release their frustrations.

He reached Northwest 1 and looked at the ceiling, the tiled floors, the closed doors of the other conference rooms, the insipid nature paintings, looked at anything but the front door because he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t break character and go running for it again. The dream of freedom is a hard one to forget. But he managed to ignore it until he’d reached conference room 2.

To find that he was the first patient in attendance. Dr. Barger was clicking on the keypad of his Smartphone. His copy of the Benchley book facedown on the table. Next to that, a notepad and one pen.

“Pepper,” he said evenly, without seeming to even look up.

Pepper sat quietly. He felt like a student who’s made the mortal error of being the first kid to walk in the classroom, and he squirmed awkwardly.

In just another second, Dr. Barger set his phone down and said, “You look well.”

“I do?”

Pepper felt worried. Maybe his speech had been a little too clear when he responded just now? His face flushed. He did an internal check on his features: mouth slack? Check. Shoulders slumped? Check. Eyes vacant? Check. But then Pepper realized that to Dr. Barger all this counted as well, and Pepper felt the pride of accomplishment.

Dr. Barger said, “I was just in Aruba.”

“Yuh?” (That’s a slurred “Oh, yes? Do go on!”)

The doctor smiled warmly and leaned back in his chair. He rested one hand on his large hard belly. “I go down and do work with locals who don’t have any other access to treatment.” He wiggled his head side to side. “And I slip in a day or two of relaxation.”

Dr. Barger laughed and Pepper didn’t begrudge him. He actually kind of liked that this guy didn’t pretend life wasn’t happening outside the unit. Liked, even, that the doctor talked about things like vacation, relaxation, joy. He would’ve preferred to hear about the days on the beach more than the days at some clinic for locals. Sometimes, when you’re in bad straits, it’s actually nice to hear about pleasure and not more gloom. Pepper almost asked Dr. Barger about the good days down in Aruba but the next member of Book Group arrived. It was Dorry. And she was not acting well.

Dr. Barger said, “Dorry?”

The woman wore a purple cardigan and pink blouse underneath. The lapels of the blouse flared out over the lapels of the cardigan and the top two buttons of the blouse sat open. Exposing a string of fake pearls! Dorry still rocked her gigantic glasses, but they were so clean, it was as if they’d been sandblasted. And she’d washed her hair; it now sat in a blunt bob that made her look fifteen years younger. She used to look like Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd. Now she looked like Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote.

Pepper might actually have started hyperventilating at the sight of her. What happened to their pact? There were supposed to be no obvious signs they’d stopped taking their meds.

But if Pepper experienced a mild panic, Dorry didn’t seem to notice or care. She swayed as she entered the room, looking serene. “I woke up this morning and just had to spruce up,” she said.

Dr. Barger nodded and lifted his pen and wrote something down on his pad. Pepper craned his neck to try to read the words upside down. But he was too far away and Dr. Barger caught him trying to peek, so Pepper returned to his routine, making his face as soft as a bowl of porridge. Any words he might have for Dorry would have to be saved for after Book Group.

Then Loochie arrived.

Her transformation was less of an overhaul. She’d already been the type to wash up and change clothes pretty regularly. And she remained the same stylish teenager. But she wasn’t wearing the blue knit cap. What could have been more jarring to Pepper? Maybe it was finally seeing what lay underneath. Half Loochie’s scalp was hairless. She had dark brown hair that came down to the bottom of her ears, but there were irregularly shaped bald spots in five different places. The largest was the size of a softball. But when Loochie entered the room, she strode as gracefully as Dorry.

Dr. Barger couldn’t hide his surprise. “This is the first time I’ve seen you … so confident,” he said, trying to be kind.

Loochie nodded as if he’d meant the line as a compliment. She touched her head, one of the hairless patches, as she sat. “I think the Geodon was making me pull my hair out at night. I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

“Was?” Dr. Barger asked.

Loochie shrugged, dramatic nonchalance. “I don’t know why, but I just haven’t felt the compulsion recently.”

“That’s wonderful,” Dr. Barger said dispassionately. He wrote something else down on his pad.

Loochie said, “I talked to my mother, and she told me I needed to let my scalp breathe so the hair could start growing again.” She shook her head from side to side as if it had already all come in. “So that’s what I’m doing.”

Pepper glared at Loochie. He would’ve expected a teenage girl to be existentially mortified by exposing her patchy scalp this way, but she wasn’t acting that way at all. She seemed almost proud of her audacity.

Dr. Barger said, “There’s a different air to the room today. Have you noticed?”

Pepper wondered why he bothered to maintain his pretense. A different air in the room? There might as well be a whole new atmosphere.

“Hello, my friends,” Coffee said when he entered.

Pepper did the quick up and down. The man hadn’t suddenly grown some enormous glorious afro. He hadn’t walked into the room wearing an African suit. (Pepper didn’t know what he meant by that exactly. A bright draping cloth? A Western suit made out of that bright draping cloth? Better to not dwell on it.)

Coffee looked like the same man as always. He still wore his pajamas, still wore the blue slipper-socks, and his face maintained the look of concentrated dissatisfaction it had always worn. In fact, if Pepper hadn’t watched Coffee dropping his meds into the bathroom sink in their room these last few days, he would’ve sworn Coffee remained medicated. So okay, at least he and Coffee would carry the torch for subterfuge.

But when Coffee sat down, he looked at Dr. Barger and said, “I liked seeing the sun through my windows this morning.”

And Dr. Barger stared back, baffled.

As did Pepper.

Coffee said, “Doctor?”

Finally, Dr. Barger coughed and squeezed his lips in a tight smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention anything but the phone numbers of governmental employees. Not in even one of our interactions over the past year.”

Coffee looked at Pepper quickly, then down at the table. “I’m sorry.…”

Dr. Barger laughed. “Don’t say ‘sorry.’ It’s nice. Makes me feel like, well, maybe I’ve been of some help.”

Coffee looked up again and offered the doctor a generous smile. “Oh, of course you have.”

Dr. Barger rubbed his belly proudly.

Pepper watched Coffee for another moment and realized he had missed something. There was one glaring difference to Coffee that should’ve been obvious from the moment the man arrived.

No binder.

“I was sorry to hear about Sam,” Dr. Barger said.

No reaction from anyone in the room. None of them knew what to say or do. They were sorry, too. Maybe there was nothing more.

Dr. Barger recovered by smiling. He hoped to return to the elation in the room just before he’d mentioned the death. He said, “All this good cheer only makes my bad news more difficult to share.”

Pepper looked at Dr. Barger. He’d wondered how the man couldn’t have noticed all the signs of reversion; the slip back into attentiveness, empathy, self-control. In other words, normalcy. How could this trained professional miss all that?

Dr. Barger said, “Unfortunately, this is going to be our last Book Group session together. The board of New Hyde Hospital has informed me that my services aren’t affordable.”

The doctor paused there, as if the patients were going to cry out in horror. When they didn’t, he said, “And keep in mind, my work here is subsidized by both the city and the state, since New Hyde is a public hospital. So that means the board has decided that I’m not worth even the pittance they have to pay out of their own account in order for me to work with all of you. They’ve basically told me I’m worth nothing and I just …”

The man had been looking at his own hands as he spoke, the volume of his voice increasing. But now he stopped speaking all together. He looked at Coffee and Loochie and Dorry and Pepper, and though he smiled, his eyes were small and wet.

“It’s silly of me to complain. Especially to you. Each of us has a burden and I shouldn’t share mine. I guess I just hoped for time. With a little more of it I thought we might really do some good.”

God bless her, Loochie responded fastest. Veering away from the maudlin, changing the subject. “So what do we do instead? Watch TV?”

“Book Group isn’t ending,” Dr. Barger said. “My contract is ending.”

Dr. Barger got up and walked around the table and stepped outside the room. He called out, “You can come along now!”

Josephine arrived, pushing the Bookmobile.

Now don’t worry, this wasn’t about to turn all Dangerous Minds. Josephine entered the room and rolled the cart around until it sat right beside Dr. Barger’s chair.

He said, “New Hyde Hospital has enough in its budget for keeping this room heated while you use it for Book Group. And for this Bookmobile to be made available to you. So that’s what you’re going to get. And, as a part of the salary she already receives, Muriel will stay in the room and supervise.”

Pepper looked at Josephine. “So she’s going to lead our discussions?”

“No.” Dr. Barger leaned forward in his seat and lifted his pen and tapped the tip against the table. “There is no money for a facilitator. And she isn’t trained as one. She can only bring the cart and take the cart.”

“Well, then, what’s the point of being in this room?” Loochie asked.

Dr. Barger sighed. “Truthfully? It’s so that New Hyde Hospital can tell the city and the state that it provides group sessions to its patients. Not therapy, but sessions. That way, they comply with the letter of the law, if not the spirit. That way, they’ll continue to receive state and federal grants for the sessions, but cut out the cost of a professional like me.”

Dr. Barger looked toward the door, as if he expected the board of the hospital, or at least Dr. Anand, to rush into the room and charge him with excess honesty.

Josephine tapped the side of the cart. All three tiers were full of new books. “I listened to what you all said last time,” she began.

The doctor seemed surprised to hear her voice. He’d been expecting to milk the pained silence for another minute or five. But he also didn’t interrupt her. What would be the point? When he left this room, this unit, he’d never be back. Too much paperwork to fill out for compensation anyway. And too many different agencies spitting up some small portion of the total bill. He looked at the four patients, two men and two women, and felt a stabbing kind of sympathy. This was the new American Austerity. The reality of our lives in the aftermath of economic disaster. The tighter belts, the slashed spending, the death of compromise. The twenty-first century threatened to look a bit like the nineteenth. The Century of Sharp Elbows was upon us. This economic prudence was supposed to affect everyone, but you could bet it was going to whip some people much worse. Dr. Barger felt the pain of these realizations but with a little time, and distance, his discomfort would pass.

“My library was having a book sale,” Josephine said. “Getting rid of a lot of things. My mother and I went there on Saturday and Sunday. I found a bunch of stuff that I thought you might like. I had fifty dollars to spend and they were selling titles cheap.”

Dr. Barger snorted. “At least New Hyde spit up the cash for that!”

Josephine shook her head. “Actually, the money came from me.”

Dr. Barger looked back at her again and nodded. He didn’t offer anything more.

Josephine said, “You don’t have to wait for Book Group to pick something. If you come find me, I’ll let you borrow a title.”

Dr. Barger turned back to the table and looked at his copy of Jaws. He said, “How many of you actually read it?”

Every hand, including Josephine’s, went up.

Dorry said, “We’re ready.”

And Dr. Barger nodded, opened his copy of the book.

“We’re ready,” Dorry repeated, and the doctor waved to let her know he’d heard.

He heard but didn’t understand.

Dorry wasn’t speaking to him.

She watched Pepper who finally looked up from his book. The old woman stared at him.

“We’re ready,” she said.

But ready for what, exactly? The spirit was willing, but the flesh was a little … disorganized. They’d stopped taking their medications with the hopes that it would allow some clarity. So they could make their next decision — how to confront the Devil? And what to do when they released it?

That wasn’t a conversation for Book Group, though.

So they talked about Jaws and passed an hour. Dr. Barger shook each person’s hand before he had Josephine walk him to the secure door and let him out for good. She looked over her shoulder before sliding the key in the door this time. When Josephine returned to conference room 2, the four patients had left for the television lounge where they waited on the next smoke break. Miss Chris was the one who opened the way this time. She unlocked the shatterproof glass door and did a head count as the patients shuffled past.

“Eight out!” she shouted, for no one’s benefit. It’s not like one of the orderlies, or another nurse, or any of the higher-paid staff, was standing around with a clipboard, taking count. No. Miss Chris called out the number only to alert the other staff members back at the nurses’ station that she had monitored this break and she better not be bothered to cover another soon.

Four of the eight patients spent their time smoking. Japanese Freddy Mercury and Yuckmouth, Wally Gambino and, of all people, the Haint. They stood around the tilted basketball rim and lit up. The other four gathered under the maple tree. The ground showed dozens of maple seeds, gone brown because they’d fallen and found only concrete. Nowhere to grow so they died. Dorry reached down and picked one up and twirled the stem between her thumb and forefinger.

“My son used to like playing helicopters with these.”

“He never visits you?” Coffee asked. He didn’t realize the line might sound harsh.

Dorry let the husk go and it fell without whirling. “I like to think he’s always near me. But my daughter visits.” She seemed glum but smiled after a moment. “And she brings my grandsons.”

Out here, away from the watchful eye of a moderately vigilant staff, Pepper dropped the droopy lip and straightened his left leg.

Loochie said, “Why are you acting like that?”

“I’m trying to make them think I’m still on my medication. We were all supposed to do that. Remember?”

Loochie said, “I was!”

Dorry and Coffee nodded, too. As if their chicanery had been clear. And Pepper understood that this, right now, was how they thought they appeared all the time, even when the medication had been wrecking them. Even Dorry, who’d been at New Hyde for decades, had never seen herself as she’d been seen by others.

And what about Pepper? Before he got all incredulous about the distance between the reality and the perception of Dorry, Coffee, and Loochie, maybe he’d better consider the difference between the man he believed he was and the man so many others encountered. His brother and sister-in-law. His mom and dad. The super of his building, once or twice when his apartment had no heat in the depths of winter. And, of course, Mari. He’d hoped she thought of him as a valiant knight, but from that phone call, she seemed to think of him as, at best, a bother. He wondered if she’d ever found his brother’s number. So far Ralph sure hadn’t called or come by. Maybe nobody ever saw themselves completely objectively. Every self-image needs a flattering mirror or two.

Pepper said, “Well, let’s talk about now. Let’s talk about what’s next.”

Loochie, without thinking, crouched and found a half dozen pebbles there on the ground and as she gathered them up she said, “We let it out. Then we light it up.”

She stood again and shook the handful of small stones in her palm.

Pepper said, “That’s one vote for fighting.”

Coffee said, “I just want to get the right people in here so they can make this place work the way it’s supposed to.”

Pepper said, “That’s one vote for insane faith.”

Coffee cut his eyes at Pepper and Pepper corrected himself.

“That’s one vote for optimism. How about that?”

Coffee said, “Accurate.”

“I want to talk with him,” Dorry said. “He needs to hear us. We need to make him understand that he’s hurting us. Maybe he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. Have you considered that? Once you know someone, it’s a lot harder to remain enemies.”

Loochie shook her closed fist at Dorry. “So you want to make friends with the Devil? That’s your plan?”

“He’s a man!” Dorry shouted. The patients by the rim looked over quickly but soon returned their attention to their cigarettes.

“And I would think that if anyone should be able to feel a little sympathy for a person with troubles,” Dorry added, “it’s people like us.”

Loochie said, “People like you, maybe. People like me? We don’t shake hands with monsters.”

Dorry laughed. “What does that mean? ‘People like me.’ Teenagers? I’ve got bras that are older than you.”

Loochie scrunched her nose. “That’s nasty.”

Coffee poked Pepper in the arm. “What about you, then? What do you want to do?”

“I want to get out of here,” Pepper admitted. “I don’t want to open that door or fight or have peace talks with that thing. I want us to leave. It’s like you people forgot what it’s like to live anywhere but here!”

Loochie and Coffee and Dorry flinched at that.

Dorry squinted at Pepper. “And where will we go once you open the big door? Will I stay with my daughter in Greenpoint? Where she’ll treat me like a burden every single day? Until eventually she calls an ambulance for me, because I just don’t fit into her life there, and I’m escorted back to New Hyde Hospital by the EMTs. That’s your plan?”

Pepper tried to speak, but Dorry reached across and touched Loochie lightly on the side of her head.

“And Loochie will go back with her mother and her brother, yes? At least until they call the police to come get her after one too many fights. And then she’ll be right back at New Hyde, you can bet.”

Dorry pointed at Coffee next. “And he’ll be free for as long as he doesn’t attract anyone’s notice. But as soon as he does, they’ll come talk to him about his status in this country. And when they find out that he’s overstayed his original visa? They’ll send him right back to Tora Bora.”

“Uganda,” Coffee said.

Dorry nodded. “You’re welcome.”

She stepped right up to Pepper, one shoulder bumping him in the gut.

“So when you say you want us to leave, who are you really thinking of? We can’t run from what’s coming. But if you want to go, you can go. Why don’t you climb that fence right now?”

Pepper looked at the chain link, the kind he’d been climbing since he was a kid, all around Queens. Even with the lingering ache in his rib cage, even with the barbed wire bundled along the top edge, he thought he could do it. Strip off his pajama top and toss it over the barbs to protect his skin. He’d get cut, but he could manage. With the meds out of his system for three days, he felt in so much more command of his body. He felt sure even his wounds had healed faster. He watched the fence line and the other three watched him. Until Miss Chris opened the door to the lounge again and called the patients back in.

Miss Chris shouted, “Eight in!”

“If you’re going to stay with us,” Dorry said, calmer now, “I think we should wait until Saturday night.”

“Overnight weekend shift,” Coffee added.

Loochie said, “Only two staff on duty then. That’s smart.”

Saturday night.

Two days from then. Forty-eight more hours of dumping their meds down bathroom sinks; 2,880 minutes of gaining strength; 172,800 seconds before Pepper had to decide if he would fight alongside them, or flee.

18

SATURDAY MORNING, PEPPER woke up to find himself alone in the room and its door halfway open. Since his bed sat right beside the hidden door in the wall, he’d taken to touching it at the bulge where the handle used to be. In the last two days, he’d probably rubbed the spot two dozen times. The motion had become reassuring, soothing, as he tried to decide what he’d do tonight. Pepper touched it now but, in a flash, saw this behavior as if watching himself from across the room. He thought of Coffee at the phones, dialing and dialing. Or Loochie, pulling out her own hair on so many nights. Obsessive ticks. Maybe he was developing one, too. Pepper pulled his hand away. He jumped out of bed. He needed to do something else, to focus on anything else.

Pepper closed the door. He went across the room to Coffee’s dresser, and slid it away from the wall. He wanted to see if there was a door outlined under the paint here, too. But when Pepper moved the dresser, he found all these small black droppings on the floor. Rat turds. Wonderful.

Pepper rested one arm on Coffee’s dresser, which made the flimsy thing slide toward Coffee’s bed. When it connected, he heard a rattling sound. Pepper stooped and pulled open the bottom drawer and found pills. Handfuls of them. He’d seen Coffee dump some of his meds down the bathroom sink for the past few days, but who knew how many were assigned to the man each day? Pepper had been kept on a steady diet of two pills, three times a day, so he’d assumed that was about normal. In fact, there were patients on the unit who took six, seven, nine pills per meal. Imagine that. Twenty-seven doses a day. Coffee was one of those. This drawer full of pills represented just five days of abstaining.

The sight made Pepper downright nostalgic for the days of Coffee pestering him for coins. It was a wonder Coffee had been able to do that much with this many pharmaceuticals in his blood. Nickels, dimes, and quarters. For a moment Pepper was reminded of the simple — stupid! — pleasure he used to take in gathering up his coins and going to a Coinstar machine at the Key Food near his apartment. Feeding the change into that swiss-cheese grill and listening to it all rattle as the machine counted up the currency. Sometimes he’d even forget to take the slip to the register and redeem it for cash right away. The joy had been in finding out how much he’d collected. That’s the kind of thing that being inside the unit made a person miss.

As Pepper slid the drawer shut again, he wondered if, and when, the police would ever return for him. When they’d bring him before a judge. When he’d receive sentencing. Or was this the sentence? Not what they’d intended when they picked him up but just as good. He wondered where he might be in the NYPD’s system. How long after the paperwork was filed before Huey, Dewey, and Louie would return for him? In books, movies, television, the justice system worked with a ruthless efficiency. Arrest, arraignment, trial, and verdict, all in forty-six minutes and forty-eight seconds.

Not here.

Since the conversation under the maple tree, Pepper had been evading the other members of his revolutionary cell. When Coffee went out to “take” his meds and get breakfast, Pepper pretended to still be sleeping. Yesterday, he didn’t eat one meal with Coffee or Dorry or Loochie. If they’d noticed, they didn’t stress him about it. All that mattered, for their purposes, was what he’d do tonight. But he still didn’t know.

Before leaving the room, Pepper went to his dresser and took out his street clothes. The slacks and socks had dried. They were a little stale, but they didn’t stink. They now showed large orange splotches where the dirty water had soaked through and stained. On the right butt cheek of his slacks, and in spots down both legs. The heels of both socks, too. And yet Pepper put them on. His shirt had been ruined so he still had to wear the pajama top.

With those spotted clothes on he almost looked like a man wearing desert camouflage pants. He even put on his boots again.

Pepper walked to the nurses’ station after all the other patients had been there and gone. Miss Chris and Josephine had been on duty together, but only Miss Chris stood waiting for him now. Josephine sat in front of the computer again. The screen glowed slightly green, and she stared at it with an expression beyond confusion, beyond frustration. Josephine almost looked serene as she watched the screen. Her arms were crossed, as if waiting for the computer to address her. As if it might offer an ingot of wisdom if she sat there long enough.

Miss Chris, on the other hand, waggled the clipboard at Pepper when he entered the oval room. “This the one I waiting on.” She took one look at his stained, spotty slacks but said nothing. At least he wasn’t walking around without them.

Pepper reached the nurses’ station and stretched out his right hand for his pills.

“Eh-heh, just like that? You come late-late and don’t even apologize?”

She gave Pepper the sharp eyes. But he’d been on the unit for a month and a half and felt less intimidated by her now. It wasn’t that he thought she was harmless, he just couldn’t hide that he also found her to be a pain in the ass. Pepper kept his hand out and did not apologize. He looked her directly, defiantly, in the eye.

“You think rudeness is how you strike back at Miss Chris? Heh? When all I do for you around here?”

He still didn’t respond.

Miss Chris read Pepper’s medications aloud, practically shouting. She slammed the little white cup on the counter as best she could with an item that weighed all of an ounce.

“Put it in my hand,” Pepper said.

What happened to keeping up the pretense of the compliant patient, Pep? He couldn’t manage it just then. And not with Miss Chris. They entered a contest of wills. She wouldn’t lift the cup and he wouldn’t move his hand, and the whole scene was beneath the dignity of six-year-olds.

Josephine was the one who asserted adulthood. She left her place in front of the computer, even as she suspected — on some paranoid level available to us all in the face of willful technology — that the machine would flash the secret of its inner wisdom at the moment when she left her chair. Nevertheless, she stood up and she took the white cup and turned it over so the pills fell into Pepper’s palm.

Miss Chris and Pepper looked at Josephine with scorn and relief, though neither of them would ever admit to the latter.

Miss Chris patted Josephine. “You too soft for this line of work, child.”

Josephine nodded and thought, You’re welcome.

Pepper brought his palm up to his mouth, slowly, showing the back of his hand to the two staff members. As he’d learned to do by now he slipped the two pills into the space between his lower lip and gums.

Miss Chris nodded at him, satisfied, then set down the clipboard with a clatter and left the nurses’ station to go and double-check the rooms in the men’s hall. Looking for lollygaggers. She knew there were none — all medications had been administered — but some part of her always suspected trickery and that life required vigilance.

Leaving Pepper and Josephine at the nurses’ station. Josephine, hoping to avoid a return to the computer, to that program whose name she even dreaded thinking. (Equator!) And Pepper, who wanted to avoid thinking about what was to come that night. Pepper coughed once, bringing his hand to his mouth, and spat the Haldol and lithium into his palm.

With that done, Pepper said, “You didn’t talk much during our last Book Group.”

“I didn’t want to hear the doctor give me another wrong name.”

Josephine looked back at the desktop computer, as she’d feared the menu on the screen had changed; it had actually gone back a step, to the log-in page. Where a staff member was to input his or her employee ID number in order to process the mounds of intake forms for electronic collection. They had all figured out how to log in, but little more than that. Equator discouraged all attempts equally, whether by Josephine or Miss Chris or Scotch Tape or Terry. (Thus far, none of the doctors could be persuaded to try. And the social worker had been let go three weeks back.)

There was actually a very good reason for all the headaches this computer caused the staff: The hospital had acquired the wrong program for their system. Equator was a program used by banks, to help home owners who were trying to avoid foreclosure of their homes. People would call to speak to a representative but would only reach the voice-command operator instead. That operator would then walk the home owner through the Equator program, which helped to explain which forms were required, when and where to submit them, and how soon the home owner might expect to see their foreclosure issue processed. And Equator was a ripping success for the banks. It was less of a success for the troubled home owners. The number of successful foreclosures almost quadrupled once the banks started using the program. It regularly misfiled forms, misstated the dates when those forms were due, and most often it simply lost all records of the home owner ever having tried to negotiate adjustments to their mortgages. By the time a human representative from the bank (let’s say, Bank of America, for instance) finally got in touch with the home owner, who’d been calling frantically for months, the case would’ve already been ruled in the bank’s favor. So, really, that human representative was only calling to let the home owner know they were now homeless. At least three major American banks would consistently claim these errors were aberrations, glitches in the software, but if you were caught in the loop of this program’s machinations you’d start to believe it had actually been designed to erase people’s traces of home ownership. You’d believe because it so often did just that.

So why on earth had New Hyde Hospital arranged to purchase and use this fantastically inappropriate software? Because most systems (particularly a public hospital’s IT department) barely work. Which means that most systems regularly fail.

Like when New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric unit, generally known as Northwest, had been deemed in dire need of modernization, and in its zeal to get the work done, the hospital had saddled the unit with a computer program whose only real-world application was to mishandle struggling home owners. A program to take advantage of people who were being ground down. That’s what the hospital bought. So while it was the wrong program for Northwest’s specific needs, it did fit Northwest’s overall theme.

And why would Josephine want to return to dealing with all of that?

Which is why she wanted to extend the conversation with Pepper. Better to linger with him than grapple with Equator again.

“I’ll tell you something I did find out,” Josephine said. “Peter Benchley felt guilty about Jaws for many years after it came out. He turned into an activist for sharks!”

She slapped the top of the nurses’ station desktop.

“He said that, in one year, in the whole world, only twelve human beings are attacked by sharks, on average. But every year human beings kill one hundred million sharks. Isn’t that crazy? He made us scared of them, but they’re the ones who should be scared of us.”

“Where’d you read that?” Pepper asked. He, too, appreciated the diversion this conversation provided.

“I watched a video of him on YouTube. But I didn’t bring it up during Book Group because, I don’t know. I was just listening mostly.”

Pepper felt a pang similar to the one he’d had when he remembered the Coinstar. YouTube! How quickly that silly phrase sounded like a high point in human culture. To go online and witness someone’s ugly kid doing something cute. To watch snippets of great movies that had been overdubbed with grating music by some moron who thought they were improving the film. To stumble across human beings with insipid thoughts, video cameras, and the utter lack of humility that made them use one to immortalize the other! Of course, Pepper should’ve registered Josephine’s remark about the sharks. The horror of those numbers. The outsized power of fear and the way it reshapes reality. But instead, Pepper felt a throbbing nostalgia for YouTube, and it was, sad to say, the detail that made him decide what he was going to do tonight. Dorry was right, he could fit back into the outside world. And that’s where he wanted to be. Tonight, when the other three ran toward the silver door, Pepper would be walking out.

Pepper said, “I’d like to take you up on that offer. The books you bought for us.”

Josephine exhaled happily. Another chance to avoid that computer.

“Come with me,” she said.

She led him to Northwest 1, but when they reached the door where the cart was kept, she waved Pepper backward until he stood against the opposite wall. “You wait there.”

Josephine came out a moment later, pushing the three-tiered book cart. Pepper touched the side of the cart as they returned to the nurses’ station, as if they were guiding the vessel together. Josephine popped inside the station to find her handbag, from which she pulled out a small spiral notebook with a plain green face.

On the front she’d written two words: “Washburn Library.”

“What’s that mean?” Pepper asked.

Josephine shrugged. “I paid for the books, so I figured the library should be named after me. Josephine Washburn.”

Pepper looked at the books. “What did you pick?”

Josephine brushed her hands along the top tier of titles. Like many books bought at library sales, these were a bit battered. Mostly hard-covers, a few paperbacks.

“Believe it or not, I really did listen at the last Book Group. What Dorry said. I tried to pick books that were more about people like you.”

Like me?

But rather than protest, Pepper let her comment pass. He looked at the books instead.

Ariel, Darkness Visible, The Noonday Demon, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Golden Notebook, Wide Sargasso Sea, Hard Cash, He Knew He Was Right, Angelhead, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. And more.

“I don’t know any of these,” Pepper said, feeling embarrassed.

Finally, he found one book that at least carried a name he recognized. A paperback. He straightened and Josephine went onto her toes slightly, to see the cover.

“Is this a book of his paintings?” Pepper leafed through the pages but found only a handful of images, toward the center of the book. All in black and white.

“Letters,” Josephine said. “He wrote lots of letters in his life.”

Pepper weighed the book in his open hand. The cover showed a painting of the artist’s face; at least this was in color. The man looked both dour and vibrant, somehow. Pepper thought, strangely, that he recognized the expression on the guy’s grill. “I want this one,” he said.

Josephine felt more gratified than she could say when Pepper tucked the book under his arm. It seemed to erase Dorry’s dismissal from the week before, and the frustrations of the computer program and the always-curt Miss Chris. Josephine took this job because she needed the paycheck, but she chose this line of work — nursing — because she thought she was good at helping others. She’d had very little chance to prove it since she’d started at New Hyde. The job often felt like triage, not care. Under such circumstances, lending Pepper this paperback seemed like a small victory. Take them wherever you can, Josephine.

She opened her spiral notebook to the first page and wrote out the title in full: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his Brother and Others (1872–1890).

“Just put your initials here next to the title,” she said.

Pepper looked at the pen in her hand, the page of the spiral notebook, but hesitated.

“It’s a library, right? You don’t keep the books. You borrow them.”

She didn’t say this with an attitude. More like this was another part of the fun, the game. So Pepper wrote his real initials—“P.R.”—and Josephine watched him do this with a grin.

“You can keep it as long as you like.” She snapped her notebook shut. “No late fees!”

He appreciated Josephine’s enthusiasm. She saw this book as a loan, but Pepper knew it was more of a parting gift. He’d be taking it with him tonight and he wouldn’t be back to return it.

“Thanks,” he said. “And good-bye.”

She pushed the Bookmobile back toward Northwest 1. “I’ll see you again on Monday,” she said. “Don’t be such a drama queen.” She laughed.

Pepper nodded slightly and squeezed the book with two hands.

“Sure,” he said. “What could happen between now and then?”

19

FIRST THING THAT happened after he said good-bye to Josephine was that Pepper ran into Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly. He was returning to his room, library book under his arm. The old men were out for their midmorning constitutional. As Pepper passed the pair, Mr. Mack pinched the sleeve of Pepper’s shirt and tugged at it. Pulled his coat, as old heads used to say.

Pepper turned back and Mr. Mack spoke as if they’d already been conversing for a while. “Now the way I see it,” Mr. Mack began. “And I do see it. The big problem you face is how to stay hid once you make it out the front door.”

Pepper pulled his sleeve away, took two extra steps, before he realized what Mr. Mack had just said. The larger, watchful Frank Waverly remained silent.

Mr. Mack grinned and nodded at Pepper.

“You escape out of here and they just go into your file and find out where you live, where you worked, who your people are. You told them all that at the intake meeting, am I right? That’s enough information for triangulation. They’ll snatch you back up before the sun rises.”

Pepper looked past these two men. He saw Josephine at the nurses’ station. And at the far end of Northwest 1, Miss Chris, opening the front door, walking out and shutting it again. Neither one had heard Mr. Mack broadcasting Pepper’s escape plan.

Mr. Mack slipped his hands into the pockets of his sport coat, which gave him a professorial air. “Now you could go on the run, leave the city or even the state. But here’s something they don’t tell you about being a fugitive. That mess is expensive. And you don’t look independently wealthy to me. No offense.” Then Mr. Mack snickered to show he certainly did mean to offend.

Pepper hardly registered the slight. Who blabbed? That’s what he wanted to know. Not that Mr. Mack would’ve told him.

“The trick, for you, big boy, is going to be getting your records. That’s where they’ll have all the facts you related on your first night. You go to another hospital and the record here will eventually make its way there. I’ve had it happen to me. So the trick, before you run, is to leave no records behind. No file, and you could settle right down the block. They would never realize you were you. I promise you that.”

Mr. Mack squared up close to Pepper’s chest, like the two men were boxers meeting in the middle of a ring.

“But whatever you do, you need to remember you’re taking the coward’s way out, big boy. Sound harsh? It is harsh. But I’m trying to get through to you. There’s only one thing that needs to be done with the motherfucker in that room. It won’t stop until somebody stops it.”

“Why don’t you do it, then?” Pepper asked.

“I’m an idea man,” Mr. Mack said. He poked Pepper’s beefy arm. “And my idea is that you’ve got the strength. But not the resolve.”

With that, Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly walked off.

Pepper returned to the room and posted himself at the two large windows and surveyed the land before him. It seemed even more urgent that he work out his route if, already, some of the others were talking to patients freely. How long before word made its way to the staff? Rather than panic, he planned.

The fence line around the basketball court had a barbed-wire buffer at the top, and the parking lot of New Hyde Hospital was (nominally) manned by an (underpaid) guard. So if he did get that secure door open, it would be smarter to slip around to this side of the building, pad through the grass in front of his windows, climb the sweet-gum tree right near the fence, inch out on a branch, and drop down to the sidewalk. Leave New Hyde Hospital and disappear into Queens. Maybe it would be smart to have his file tucked under his arm when he left. But how would he get it? Where to even look?

All this planning turned Pepper a bit distracted, so he didn’t notice Coffee had entered the room until Coffee came to his side and set his precious blue binder down on the sill.

“You told those old guys a lot,” Pepper said.

Coffee looked out the window, too.

“I’ve been making contacts, morning and night, on the pay phones. I haven’t even had time to sleep. So I sure wasn’t talking with anyone.”

“Did you burn out my card?”

Coffee reached into the breast pocket of his pajama top. The “gold” card was really more of a muddy yellow. He dropped it on the windowsill.

“All done. But it was useful.”

Outside, the sun shone brightly and Pepper wondered at how good the air must feel. He put his hand to the pane and enjoyed the chill.

Coffee said, “I tracked down his number.”

Pepper nodded, not really listening, still imagining the fresh air.

“His number,” Coffee said quietly.

That broke Pepper’s spell. He looked at his roommate. “Come on.”

“Well, not really his, but his social secretary’s. The private line.”

“You want to get invited to a party at the White House? I hear you can just crash if you look like you’ve got money.”

Coffee rolled his eyes at Pepper. “Don’t bring me gossip and tell me it’s news. I have the number for a real someone, not just that stupid switchboard. I’m not going to yell. I’m going to be clear. I know I can do that now. Without all the meds. I’ll explain our situation and then you’ll see what He does for us.”

“I already know what’s going to happen,” Pepper said.

Coffee looked up at Pepper wearily. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t know,” Coffee said. “But you will never admit that.”

Pepper could see Coffee wouldn’t be swayed by anything he had to say, so he knocked on the cover of Coffee’s blue binder. “Why didn’t you bring this to Book Group?”

“I don’t need it anymore,” Coffee said.

“Because you have that new number?”

Coffee shook his head. He placed his hand on the cover of the binder. “I have all these numbers. Memorized. I’ve called each one so many times. But until we stopped taking the pills, I couldn’t remember even one. Now, they’re all here.”

Coffee pressed two fingers against his temple.

“The numbers come to me fast, fast, fast now. I wouldn’t have had the courage to do it alone. I don’t think Dorry and Loochie would have, either. So I have you to thank for that. And I mean it.”

Pepper did feel good to hear it. To know the lucidity in Coffee’s eyes was, at least in part, due to him. Vanity? Of course. But that’s okay. No one here was a martyr or a saint.

Lunch and dinner passed without event. Pepper sat in the television lounge and read some of Van Gogh’s letters. He found he could drown out the television if he concentrated on the page hard enough. He liked being in the lounge, around others, instead of alone in his room. He had nothing more to say to Coffee. Not to Dorry or Loochie, either. They were only waiting for the overnight shift to begin.

By eight thirty, all four members of the small conspiracy sat in the television lounge, though they weren’t together. Dorry and Loochie and Coffee and Pepper, each at a different table.

Scotch Tape and Josephine were on the night shift. This was much to Josephine’s surprise. She was meant to be relieved by Miss Chris, but Miss Chris had walked out that front door earlier and hadn’t returned. When Josephine used her cell phone to call Miss Chris around dinnertime, the call went straight to voice mail. As did Josephine’s next five tries. To put it plainly: The old lady had bounced. Leaving Josephine to work a double until the next shift change, around four a.m. Josephine sure didn’t like this, but what could she do? Leave Scotch Tape alone?

(Yes!)

No.

At nine, Dorry rose from her seat and beckoned the other three toward her. When they were together, Dorry said, “I think it’s time. Don’t you?”

The words seemed to rest on each of their shoulders like a heavy cloak. They all stooped forward slightly from the weight. Dorry saw the burden and nodded. She was dressed just like she had been at Book Group. Well, almost the same. Pepper realized her sweater was on inside out.

He looked at Loochie, who wore a bright red scarf tied around her head. He hated to admit it, but he felt relieved by this. The site of her patchy scalp had been depressing. He knew it was selfish, but he was happy she’d covered it. Then her right hand floated up and two fingers slipped under the red scarf. Loochie hardly seemed aware of the action. Then, as if waking up from a bad dream, her eyes shifted and she caught herself and pulled her hand back down to her side again.

“Once we take care of the staff,” Coffee began, “each of us has a choice to make. I’m using the staff phone to make my call. After that, I’ll support whatever the group wants to do.”

Dorry said, “Why don’t we try working together on this. First, Coffee gets his phone call. Then, I have a talk with the man behind the silver door. Then, Loochie gets to … What do you want to do, Loochie?”

Loochie’s eyes had trailed off to the lounge’s windows.

“Loochie?” Dorry asked again. “What do you want to do?”

“I just want to be a girl,” she said quietly.

Pepper almost laughed. “You are one!” he said.

Her eyes drooped. She looked soul-tired for a moment. “I haven’t been a girl since I was thirteen. I’m just a diagnosis.”

Dorry raised one hand for peace. “Loochie, I’m sorry, but that’s probably not something we can fix tonight.”

Coffee sensed that they might be about to spin off into some grand philosophical conversation that would derail any concrete action. And he was ready to act. “It’s time,” he reminded them. “We’re ready enough.”

He moved. Loochie got in step beside him. Dorry came around the table and pinched Pepper out of a moment’s paralysis. They hadn’t asked him what he wanted to do. Maybe they didn’t really want to know. Find my file. Find my way out. That’s what he would’ve said.

Josephine sat at the nurses’ station. With paper and pen she filled out a complaint against Miss Chris. She wasn’t even looking up as Dorry, Loochie, Coffee, and Pepper entered the oval room. Scotch Tape was in Northwest 1, pushing the meal rack, and all those empty dinner trays, into the conference room that had long ago been repurposed as the storage room.

Coffee knocked on the nurses’ station desktop and said, “I need to use the phone.”

Josephine didn’t even look up. She was in the middle of writing the word negligence and had lost herself in the pleasure of using it to describe Miss Chris.

While they waited on Josephine to look up, Pepper said, “Hey, Coffee. How did you get the social secretary’s private number? You never said. I’m sure the White House switchboard didn’t just give it out.”

In the storage room, Scotch Tape slid the meal rack to its usual place near the back of the room. If he didn’t keep it far from the hallway door, the rats (he believed it was actually only one enormous, graying rat; he’d seen it so often he felt familiar with it), the rat might be tempted to slip into the hall and then it would be sprinting down Northwest 1 openly, causing panic among patients. And who would be sent to try to kill it again? Him. Clarence Green. (He didn’t refer to himself as Scotch Tape, obviously.) He’d been sent on that mission before, dropping poison pellets all over the abandoned second floor, and learned his lesson. That rat had the run of this building, more than any other living thing. (But what about the freak on Northwest 4? What about the …? Shut up with that, Clarence. Shut up with that, right now.) Scotch Tape got the rack to the back of the storage room and switched off the light and pulled the door closed. He locked it and returned to the nurses’ station.

Where he heard Coffee’s answer to Pepper’s question.

Coffee said, “I went online. That’s how I got the social secretary’s number.”

Josephine looked up from her complaint form.

“Coffee, you know patients make all calls on the pay phones.”

Coffee pouted. “But I don’t have enough coins for a long-distance call, and Pepper’s card is maxed out. I don’t think he had very good credit.”

Pepper said, “Hey!”

Scotch Tape entered the oval room, saw four patients crowding around the station and said, “What’s going on over here?”

Dorry ignored the question, imploring Josephine. “It’ll only take a minute, sweetheart.”

But by this time of night, Josephine couldn’t muster any more goodwill. “Pay phone, Dorry,” she growled. “Pay phone.”

Scotch Tape came around the station so he could see the group’s faces and they could see his. “I asked you all a question.”

Loochie brushed him away with one hand. “Go mind your own business.”

Scotch Tape roared with laughter. “My business is you. Now you can make it pleasant business … or unpleasant business.”

Pepper touched Coffee’s shoulder. “Wait. How did you go online?”

Josephine pushed her chair back so she could stand as well. Feeling edgy because of what Loochie had said to Scotch Tape. Her move left the staff phone unguarded on the desk. Boldly, Coffee grabbed the receiver.

“Coffee!” Josephine shouted.

Pepper shouted now, too. Repeating himself. “How did you go online, Coffee?”

Coffee looked back at Pepper. “The mind was the first computer!”

A line that silenced everyone for a moment.

Finally Pepper said, “Well, what the fuck does that mean?”

“The mind is technology beyond anything human beings have invented so far,” Coffee said. “Without all those meds in my bloodstream, I could access the Internet with my will. From anywhere. I only had to shut my eyes and concentrate. I have full use of my mind’s power now. You see?”

And this is the moment when Pepper thought of Dorry’s sweater, inside out; of Coffee discarding his binder; even Loochie’s fingers slipping under her red scarf. Each person slightly different from the healthier picture presented only two days ago. Maybe these folks were on psychiatric medications because they actually needed them. Why hadn’t Pepper seriously considered that before now?

Two words slipped out of his mouth. Pepper said, “Oh, shit.…”

But it was too late for turning back.

Scotch Tape grabbed Coffee’s wrist. He looked like he’d tear Coffee’s hand off just to get the receiver back.

Dorry shouted, “Wait! Wait! We can talk this out!”

“Talking is done,” Scotch Tape growled.

Loochie said, “You got that right.”

Then she punched Scotch Tape square in the throat.

Scotch Tape went down easier than Josephine. The guy straight-up collapsed after Loochie yapped him.

That isn’t meant to clown Scotch Tape, or make him seem weak. Really. One punch from Loochie Gardner could topple small governments. The man simply found himself overmatched. As Pepper had been when he made the mistake of giving Loochie’s mother (and brother) the bum rush.

By comparison, Josephine was much luckier than Scotch Tape; she only faced Pepper and Coffee and Dorry.

In light of what happened to Scotch Tape, Josephine didn’t hesitate. She scrambled. Over the nurses’ station. Climbing on the low desk and vaulting right over the higher counter. She fled. But when she landed on the other side she slipped and nearly fell. Pepper and Coffee caught her. To them, this looked like gallantry, but from Josephine’s perspective, two wild men had just grabbed her arms.

And then Josephine just freaked.

She hollered, yes, but that was actually the least of it. Her arms went stiff and her hands balled into fists and her legs dropped out from under her so fast that Coffee and Pepper nearly went to the floor themselves. It was like her lower half fainted.

Meanwhile her mouth continued to wail.

Boy, did it.

Pepper became annoyed instantly. Maybe she thought they were going to rob her? Rape her? She acted like they were going to cut open her belly and feast on her organs. All this after he’d just borrowed a copy of Van Gogh’s letters! Funny to say it, but Pepper’s feelings were really hurt just then.

But here’s the thing: Pepper had it wrong. Josephine wasn’t thinking about them when she snapped. Not really. She didn’t scream just out of fear for herself in that moment. It was also a deeper terror. When Loochie punched the orderly, Josephine felt a raw, cold shock, of course. But when the two men grabbed her, she felt the fear.

Because she thought of her mother. Lorraine Washburn.

Who lived with Josephine, the only child, in a two-family house out in Rego Park. Her mother hadn’t been able to take good care of herself anymore and moved in with Josephine in 2009. And Josephine had welcomed her mother. Because, even though she was young, Josephine had spent the last few years cultivating little more than her own loneliness. Then here came her mother, Lorraine, a woman who’d been quite independent herself once, but couldn’t manage it any longer. And Josephine received the woman as the wick welcomes the match. Josephine appreciated her mother’s company, now that she was becoming a woman and no longer a girl. So when Pepper and Coffee grabbed Josephine, she screamed, and struggled, from a place beyond self-preservation. Josephine saw Lorraine waking up tomorrow morning to find her daughter hadn’t returned home. Josephine saw Lorraine mystified by this sudden change in their soothing routine; saw her mother retreating to the living-room couch out of fear; sitting there, unable to imagine who else she might rely on. Unable to recall even a cousin’s phone number. Paralyzed and puzzled. So scared she might not even eat, as was her way. Starving from fright. Dying on the second floor of the two-family house after days of confusion and despair. (The first floor reserved for the home owners, Mr. and Mrs. Martinez-Black.) Josephine was going to leave her mother to that? A woman who’d raised her so decently? No. No. No.

Josephine fought hard to make her mouth work, to talk these patients out of doing anything with lasting repercussions. But she couldn’t master speech at the moment. Yelling seemed the best she could do. Josephine Washburn would not let herself die today. No, she would’ve begged if she could. Please. But the only sound that came out of her was this primal howl.

So Coffee and Pepper continued to restrain her.

Then Loochie raised her arm. Loochie made a fist. But Loochie didn’t throw the punch.

Instead, Dorry spoke.

Calmly.

Dorry said, “All right now. All right. Everybody stop and think. Loochie, you don’t want to hit her. And she doesn’t want you to hit her.”

Loochie lowered her arm. It was true. She didn’t want to hit Josephine. She didn’t like the nurse, but she didn’t dislike her, either. She couldn’t say that about Scotch Tape, which is why it had felt so satisfying when he crumbled. And even Scotch Tape wasn’t someone she hated. There was only one person around here that she hated.

One thing.

Josephine looked everywhere but at the old woman. This wasn’t on purpose, but an instinctive response. The reptile part of Josephine’s brain, trying to figure how to save its tail.

Dorry said, “Look at me now. Look at me.”

Josephine’s shoulders went looser at the soothing measure of Dorry’s voice. She unclenched her fists. Pepper and Coffee didn’t let go of her wrists.

“I’m a mother,” Dorry said. “And a grandmother. So believe me, I know you’re somebody’s little girl, too. No one wants to hurt you. That’s not what we’re here to do.”

Dorry touched the pearls around her neck. As if drawing Josephine’s eyes to the pearls would prove these four patients weren’t murderous, violent psychopath cannibals. Would such people wear jewelry? In fact, the pearls only made Dorry seem more peculiar in these circumstances. But what could Josephine do but trust the old ambassador? At least while she found herself trapped between the salt-and-pepper sentries.

“What do you want?” Josephine asked quietly.

“Keys,” Pepper answered, and the nurse looked at him nervously.

“I can’t let you all out of here. I’m sorry but I can’t. You’ll hurt … yourselves.”

Dorry frowned at Pepper to shut him up. She tugged at Pepper’s fingers until he let go of Josephine’s wrist. Then she did the same with Coffee.

Dorry said, “We don’t want to escape.”

“What, then?”

Coffee blew out a deep breath. “The silver door.”

Josephine looked up at Pepper and at Coffee. “I’m not going to let you hurt another patient.”

“You got a lot of rules for a bitch that’s outnumbered,” Loochie said.

Josephine crossed her arms and both Pepper and Coffee winced, afraid of another eruption. They placed their hands over their crotches, just in case; they looked like two soccer players awaiting a direct free kick.

Dorry said, “Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

Josephine sucked her teeth. “Sure.”

Dorry said, “Look at me. We want to speak with him. You give us the keys. We put you and Clarence into one of the rooms. As soon as we’re done, we let you out. And we’ll take any punishment that comes after that. Okay?”

This all could’ve been over much quicker. Just let Loochie start swinging. But it seemed important to Dorry that the nurse hand over the keys on her own. That the nurse trust Dorry. This didn’t matter so much to the other three at first, but as they listened to Dorry, they, too, felt a change. They didn’t want to batter and steal like criminals. They didn’t want to rampage like frenzied animals. They were human. Dorry put out her hand to accept the nurse’s keys and the others waited patiently.

Josephine looked at each of them, moving from one face to the next. Josephine made twelve dollars an hour at this job. That should put all cries for courageousness into context. Taking this job for that pay had already been an act of bravery.

Finally, Josephine opened her hand and the looped red plastic key chain dangled from her thumb. It swayed side to side. All five of them listened to the keys as they jangled like a wind chime.

Finally Josephine set the keys in Dorry’s palm.

Dorry led Josephine toward Northwest 1. Conference room 2 awaited. Pepper and Coffee followed behind them like members of a broke-ass Praetorian Guard. And last was Loochie, dragging the unconscious orderly backward by the arms. She’d demanded that Pepper and Coffee let her do this alone. Like hauling what you’ve hunted. It was an effort, but she managed.

They brought Josephine and Scotch Tape to the room. Loochie laid the orderly flat on the floor with more tenderness than any of the others might’ve expected.

Dorry sat Josephine in one of the chairs. Pepper and Coffee and Loochie left the room. As Dorry pulled the door shut she said, “We won’t be long. And thank you.”

Josephine didn’t respond. She watched her hands, gathered limply in her lap. After the door was closed and locked, she listened as the footsteps receded.

When Josephine couldn’t hear them anymore, she reached into her pants pocket. They hadn’t thought to pat her down before they locked her in. Josephine pulled out her cell phone.

20

WHEN ALL FOUR patients returned to the oval room, they found themselves stopped up. Like froze up. Shocked. They found a nurses’ station without a staff member behind it. And they didn’t quite know how to react. They weren’t actually free, still stuck inside New Hyde, but even an unattended desk felt like liberation.

And not only for them.

Heatmiser, Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth, Wally Gambino and the Haint, those three women Pepper had seen poring through magazines one night — the redhead and the mousy-looking woman and the Asian (this had to be Loochie’s “Chinese Lady,” right? The one who’d seen Sam’s corpse?) — all these patients surrounded the vacant nurses’ station now, and Pepper’s crew joined them. Wally Gambino leaned over the top of the station and peeked under the desk space as if another nurse or orderly might be hiding there. This was a trick. Had to be.

The patients walked around the station in a circle. All of them, like a game. Inspecting the empty station closely. If only the Trojans had been this methodical! But even after everyone made the circuit, all fourteen patients, they still couldn’t believe it. They kept a prudent distance from the nurses’ station, as if it were a bull that had only been stunned.

Then Coffee broke the spell.

He stepped inside the nurses’ station. A bit of a jolt, just to see that. Then he grabbed one of the wheeled chairs sitting under the desk, pulled it out, and rolled it to the lip of Northwest 5. The others watched him quietly. Then Coffee pushed the chair as hard as he could and it went spinning. It didn’t stop rolling until it reached the television lounge.

“Look at that,” Dorry said quietly.

The patients all turned to Coffee again. As if he should do another act of magic. There was a second chair under the table, but that little trick wouldn’t work twice.

You might expect them to smash the computer next. It was still on, its fan rumbling louder than a dryer in a Laundromat. But these mental patients only gawked at the shoddy equipment, almost like they pitied the staff for having to do their jobs with it. Yes, even this population was well aware of laptops and Smartphones.

Dorry lifted her right hand.

All thirteen other patients looked up at her. What next?

Even Pepper and Loochie and Coffee wondered.

Dorry opened her hand and let the nurse’s keys dangle. They clinked and all the patients looked over their shoulders, around the various bends, so used to having staff members appear seconds after that sound. Heatmiser’s mouth even dripped slightly with saliva. But no one else appeared.

“Does anyone know which of these keys opens the desk drawers?” Dorry asked.

Pepper felt a hot flash of concern. What did that have to do with anything? He’d been choking back his anxieties, but they threatened to spill out now. Coffee with his Internet brain; Loochie whose strength and ferocity only seemed to have increased between the time she’d tangled with him and with Scotch Tape; and now Dorry wanted to do some drawer hopping. It wasn’t just fear that he felt, but guilt. He’d urged Coffee to join him in turning down the meds. And then helped enlist Dorry and Loochie. He’d thought he was doing them a solid, freeing them from the shackles of their sedative servitude, but already it seemed likely he’d been wrong.

Dorry looked at Pepper and whispered, “Have a little faith in me.”

None of the patients knew which key opened which drawers, so they waited as Dorry tried one, then the next. Finally, she found the right key for the right drawer and Dorry peeked inside. She smiled at all the patients who hadn’t joined their Velvet Revolution. (Velvetish, counting Loochie’s punch.) Then Dorry made a big show of stepping back, sweeping her hands over the open drawer. The patients crowded closer. They peeked around and over one another. One voice cried out.

“Cigarettes!”

“This is the staff’s stash.” Dorry smiled. “Take as many as you like.”

Half a dozen hands went into the drawer right away. The staff didn’t stockpile packs, but cartons. (This job was stressful.) There was enough in the drawer for each patient to walk away with a pack of his or her own. Even the ones who weren’t smokers figured, Why not? — and took some for themselves. It was the surprise of the moment, the fact that the stuff belonged to the staff. The idea made all of them a bit giddy. Even if it made them sick, they were going to puff.

Dorry opened her hand again and the keys jangled as they swung. She reached into the drawer and plucked out one cigarette for herself. She didn’t smoke. It was a trophy. A memento. She tucked it into her bra.

She smiled at Pepper, and Pepper did feel relieved by the seeming sanity of this step. Distract the others. Dorry spoke to the patients still milling about. She said, “Now, how about a long smoke break outside?”

All this negotiation took only ten minutes.

Back in conference room 2, Josephine Washburn couldn’t get her phone call through. She hadn’t dialed the police directly because that wasn’t hospital protocol. Instead, she was to first call the head of security on the grounds of New Hyde Hospital. That’s the system that had been put in place, and no one making twelve dollars per hour was encouraged to improvise. The head of security’s phone rang and rang and rang until finally the guy’s voice mail picked up. But even then, Josephine recognized there was a problem. Namely, the voice on the hospital’s security-greeting message was someone she didn’t recognize. It was actually a guy who’d been fired almost a year before. The former head of hospital security. Eugene Klutch. A man who’d been caught stealing food from the hospital kitchens. Not a turkey sandwich, but one hundred frozen turkeys. He’d been behind a series of pantry thefts that had been going on for three years at New Hyde Hospital. At their most brazen, the Klutch crew had stolen two ovens (industrial ovens) from one of the kitchens over in the main building on the campus. Klutch hadn’t gone to jail, just been forced to retire. And now, nearly a year later, that man’s voice still hadn’t been changed on the security center’s answering machine. Josephine knew another man had been hired because he was the one who’d given the new employees the lecture about the hospital-security protocols. He’d growled at the new hires, but hadn’t been savvy enough to record a new message? How much faith could Josephine have in hospital security? But she left a message because she was smart enough to know there needed to be evidence that she’d followed protocol.

Next, she called the head of hospital administration. Also as per guidelines. The one rule at New Hyde, above all others, was to avoid embarrassment. (Embarrass, meaning “leave vulnerable to lawsuits.”)

While it was nearly ten p.m., the head of hospital administration could be reached. Or, if not him, then his answering service. (Yes, they do still exist.) So Josephine called those offices (all numbers she’d programmed into her phone at Orientation) and left a message with the woman who answered the line. Josephine explained what had happened, that she was a nurse over in Northwest, that the patients had overpowered her and the orderly (who still hadn’t woken up), and now those patients were roaming the ward freely. “Doing what?” the woman on the line asked, though she sounded magnificently disinterested. Setting fires? Taking drugs? Who knew? The fact that Josephine was locked in a room made it impossible to say. At the end of all this, the woman only sighed, and said, “Please hold the line while I connect you directly.”

Josephine said, “What was the point of asking me those questions if you’re just—”

Then instead of connecting the call the lady hung up on her.

Quite a system.

At that moment, Josephine should’ve called the cops. She’d done all she could to protect New Hyde Hospital. She’d tried to follow protocol, but the protocol was ass.

But for a few seconds she could only stare at the cell phone. Going through all this nonsense to reach someone in charge, this was the first time she’d ever been treated like, well, a patient. With rules that defied all common logic; people employed to help you who are unable, really, to even hear you; the sense that the system’s goal is only to keep trouble contained. It’s not like Josephine had been so all-fired powerful when she was a nurse, but supervising the patients had at least allowed the illusion of some difference between her and them. But now it felt damn hard to pretend. In many ways, at this moment of crisis, she was just as powerless as they were. Josephine didn’t make this connection consciously, but it tickled at her in a way that made her mind freeze. She looked at the phone and knew what she should do, but she couldn’t make her hand act the way her mind wanted. (And even this was quite like the average patient’s day.) Josephine wondered how anyone was supposed to live under such conditions and remain sane.

This is what was happening to Josephine while Dorry handed out cigarettes, walked to the television lounge, and unlocked the door to the basketball court. Pepper propped the door open with a heavy chair, which allowed a fresh breeze to blow into the unit. First time in a long while for that. You could almost see the walls inhaling.

Josephine stared at the keypad of her cell phone and willed herself to dial 911. Dorry and Loochie and Coffee and Pepper left the television lounge, marching down Northwest 5. The police hadn’t been called yet. Whatever they were going to do could still get done.

They still had time.

Pepper, Dorry, Loochie, and Coffee returned to the nurses’ station. They were much quieter than the patients in the lounge, whose voices played louder than the television. It seemed like a party was being thrown. There was an undertone of forced cheer, though. As if those patients were working hard to celebrate. Hoping to drown out the sounds of whatever was coming next.

Coffee walked into the nurses’ station and touched the beige plastic phone. He seemed to forget the others. He whispered the phone number to himself now, ten digits: “5102821833. 5102821833. 5102821833.”

Dorry and Pepper watched Coffee with concern. Even Dorry couldn’t ignore what Coffee had said about accessing the Internet with his mind. Let him dial the number, if that made him feel better. The rest of them would do the real work.

“What now?” Dorry asked Pepper. “You want me to unlock the front door for you?”

Pepper took a step inside the nurses’ station, too. There were so many files, multiple stacks. Was his there? He grabbed a handful of folders and looked at the names written on the tabs.

“I could make it,” Pepper said as he scanned for his name. Those files were for one patient: Samantha Forrester. Was that Sam?

Dorry hesitated a moment, she hadn’t expected him to leave. Finally she said, “Where would you go?”

“I’ve got an apartment. Rent’s paid automatically.”

Dorry looked bereft. She put her hand against the nurses’ station desktop for balance. Coffee was clearly cuckoo. In a moment Pepper would walk away. Not much of a team.

Coffee mashed at the phone with an open palm. “It won’t let me make the call.”

Coffee tried again while Dorry and Pepper watched.

Dorry sighed. “You have to press the pound sign, then nine, then three. Then you can make an outside call.”

Coffee did as she said. He looked up from the keypad. “It’s ringing!”

Dorry looked at Pepper, who’d taken up another handful of files, hunting for his. She leaned her elbows on the desktop.

“As soon as the police brought you in, I knew why you’d ended up here.”

Pepper set down the next handful of files and lifted another.

“I’m not talking about your crime,” Dorry continued. “I’m talking about something bigger than that.”

“Destiny?”

He didn’t even look up. Destiny. Fate. Solace for losers. And a defense for the ones who’d hoarded success. By almost anyone’s math, he hadn’t made too much of his life. Not as much as he would’ve imagined by forty-two. Not referring to money here, or some kind of fame, but worth. He’d wanted — let’s say, expected — to be valuable by this age. Somehow. But so far he’d done little worth treasuring. So if that was his fate, then fuck fate.

He dropped the folders to the floor. The papers scattered at his feet.

“I’m talking about a calling,” Dorry said. “When they brought you in here, I saw you and knew you were here to meet your purpose.”

That got Pepper’s attention. Dorry looked into his face, and while it’s true that her sweater was inside out and her hair maybe didn’t look quite as well kept as it had been two days before, but her halfblind eyes didn’t look wild just then. If the time off the meds had been just a little too long for Coffee, maybe Dorry had been off them just long enough to say something absolutely right. Maybe she could see something in him that even he couldn’t right now. She believed in him. Who doesn’t hope for something like that, at least once?

But before Pepper could ask what purpose Dorry saw for him, Coffee yelled into the phone. “Hello? Yes! Who am I speaking to?”

Coffee stood straighter, erect with pride.

“It’s good to speak with you Ms. Hong. I am called Kofi Acholi, and I wish to speak with your superior. What? Yes, that’s Kofi, K-O-F-I.”

Dorry slapped the top of the nurses’ station. “Your name is Kofi? Do you know we’ve been calling you Coffee all this time?”

Coffee covered the receiver with one hand. “I am aware,” he said.

Then Pepper finally asked the question that should’ve come up minutes ago. “Where’s Loochie?”

Coffee returned to the phone. “You do know who I mean, Ms. Hong. Of course you do. Our President. The Big Boss. I don’t need to say any more. Now, let him know I am calling about conditions in New Hyde.”

Dorry and Pepper were less concerned about the phone call that wasn’t apparently magically connecting to the fucking President’s social secretary, and instead they moved around the nurses’ station to seek out their fourth member.

“Maybe she went to smoke?” Dorry asked.

Pepper said, “No.”

Dorry turned and saw Loochie walking calmly as you please. She was three-quarters of the way down Northwest 4.

“What are you doing?” Dorry shouted. “We haven’t even figured out what we should say to him yet!”

Loochie looked over her shoulder. “You all were stalling! You weren’t going to ever open this fucking door!”

Coffee’s voice rose. He was screeching. “Washington, D.C.! The nation’s capital. No, that’s not where I am. That’s where you are! What do you mean ‘Oakland’? The President doesn’t live in Oakland!”

Dorry called to Loochie. “Well, how are you going to open the damn door if I’ve got the keys?!”

Loochie didn’t even look back, only extended her right arm, and there, dangling from her wrist was Scotch Tape’s set. They hadn’t searched Josephine for her cell phone, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they’d forgotten to secure the extra set of keys, too. When Loochie dragged Scotch Tape to the conference room, she’d snatched them off his wrist. That’s really why she’d volunteered to haul him.

Coffee pleaded with the person on the other end of the line. “Do not hang up on me! Please! Do not hang up!” His voice softened, it quieted. “You are my last resort.”

Then the receiver fell out of Coffee’s hand and bounced against the floor.

But there wasn’t any time to comfort Coffee. Kofi. Not for Pepper, anyway. He sped toward Loochie. When she heard his boots clomping, she picked up the pace. She sprinted.

Running aggravated Pepper’s still-tender ribs. He winced and hunched forward when he sped up. He almost tripped. The closer he came to Loochie, the closer he was to the silver door. The air became warmer, just like the last time he got this close.

There was that smell again. The one from the first night the Devil visited Pepper’s room. The scent on an unclean body. So strong here that it tainted the walls, the floor, the silver door. An unclean place. The air so sour his throat closed up and his eyes burned.

Down the hall, Kofi howled. “Okay, then! I tried!”

Loochie slid the key into the lock. There were twenty keys to choose from, but she found the exact right one on the first try.

“Don’t,” Pepper pleaded.

But Loochie turned the key.

She let the Devil out.

21

THE SILVER DOOR didn’t just open; it seemed to explode.

The stainless steel swung back so hard, its handle clanged against the wall and busted a small hole in the Sheetrock. It was as if the Devil had been inside the room, straining to get out, too.

Then: animal fur, sour and matted, passed between Loochie and Pepper.

The smell of waste, worse than from a public toilet, hit them, too. Sewer water, sewage, sweat, and saliva that have caked and dried. Loochie and Pepper’s eyelids fluttered. Their eyes watered. From a distance, this looked like tears.

The Devil rushed into the hallway. Its enormous crown leading the charge. Animal fur, sour and matted and curled into knots.

There were two smallish ears on its long, enormous head. They were small compared to the skull’s grand dimensions. The ears were the size of children’s mittens and about the same shape; they flipped and shook, as if bitten by gnats.

Just above those ears were its horns. Not very long, but thick and gnarled. Points turned upward, toward the ceiling. They were grayish white, the color of exposed bone. Each tip seemed as sharp as a lance’s. Animal fur, sour and matted and curled into knots, all of it brown as mud.

The head of a plains bison charged through the open door. The sight unmistakable under the hallway lights.

And somewhere, in all that hair, were the Devil’s two small eyes. Glassy and white and without fear.

Pepper actually cackled at the sight of thing. Not laughter or bravado, but something crazed. He stood in Northwest 4 with a monster. Such things were impossible, he knew this, but there it was.

The Devil rushed right past Loochie and Pepper. Its head tilted down. It was charging. The horns aiming to gore.

Dorry stood at the lip of Northwest 4. She watched the Devil stampede.

“That’s fine!” Kofi howled again, inside the nurses’ station. He pulled at every drawer in there. Dorry had only unlocked the one that held the staff’s cigarettes, so the others remained locked tight. “Dorry,” he called. “Give me the keys!”

Loochie and Pepper watched the Devil bolt forward. It had passed between them without any resistance. In twenty paces it would smash into Dorry.

The old woman stood, paralyzed. She held the key chain in one hand and in the other a clipboard. It was the one the staff read from when handing out medication to patients. She looked as if she planned to read off the Devil’s name and proper doses.

“I see you,” she muttered, looking into the Devil’s empty eyes.

Luckily, for all of them, the Devil looked different from behind. A fiend from the front but from the back, the Devil had the body of an old man. A skinny, half-naked old man running down the hall. Now who’s going to be scared of that?

Not Loochie. Not Pepper.

The pair finally got their wits back. They ran down the hall now. The Devil had a head start, but they would catch up quickly.

Its body looked even thinner than Pepper remembered, saggier. The flesh jiggled and swayed. The skin looked reddish, like there was a heat rash all over it, the color of a stewed tomato. Splotchy and mottled. Weak.

But they could still see the back of that vast head, its weight driving the puny figure forward. And its feet, the bottoms hard and nearly gray, clopped like hooves.

Loochie caught up to the Devil first, halfway down Northwest 4. She came from behind and grasped its right horn with her right hand. She held the horn and leaned backward, her weight would do the rest. This was a variation on the way she’d taken Pepper out. Apply a little weight and momentum properly and nearly anybody will go down. Loochie was small but she knew how to tussle. She’d learned how to protect herself on the juvenile psychiatric ward.

The Devil’s head jerked to the right, hard, and for the first time it looked back at her. It noticed her. And she saw more of it. The white eyes and the twitching ears and those two sharp horns. The long slope of its face, leading down to its wet nose, which sniffled and snuffed. And last its mouth, which fell open with surprise. Then its tongue shot out, almost a foot long and the color of uncooked dough.

Loochie Gardner had yoked the Devil.

It didn’t speak, it grumbled like an old Johnny Popper tractor. The Devil snorted, once, and from its nose snot slapped against the floor. A gray puddle the size of Pepper’s foot. The Devil shook its head twice and, just that fast, Loochie lost her grip. She was flipped forward. She went down to the floor, on her stomach, right in front of the thing.

The Devil raised its right foot to stomp her in the small of her back. But she wasn’t alone. Pepper was there, too.

He didn’t have the finesse to go grabbing horns like rodeo-riding Loochie, so instead, he just full-body tackled the beast. Well, that makes it sound a bit too graceful. Pepper threw his body at the Devil’s left leg, which was supporting all its weight. This was a variation on the way Pepper had taken down Loochie’s family. It didn’t take much to topple the Devil just then, and Pepper gave it all the not-much he had.

The Devil and Pepper fell into a heap. Loochie scrambled off safely.

Right after they both fell, Pepper felt like he’d been dropped into a freezing pool. The pain in his chest, all along his rib cage, made him lose his breath. He gasped from it. He shivered. His vision went nearly black.

The Devil fell face-forward, onto its stomach. Its head slammed hard against the floor, a thump as loud as a couch being dropped. In that position it couldn’t right itself. The thin arms, frail branches, pushed and strained but didn’t have the strength to lift that enormous head. The Devil huffed on the ground, spraying more snot as it breathed, the mucus catching in the fur around its mouth and nose. Its legs scrambled, but they were pretty powerless, too. The Devil couldn’t get up. Now it looked as vulnerable as any living thing.

So when Loochie climbed onto its back again, when she grabbed both horns from behind, when she pulled with all the strength her wiry shoulders could muster, it was difficult not to feel just a spark of sympathy, yes, for the Devil. Pepper experienced shivers of recognition: when the cops had him in handcuffs, or the orderly wrestled him to his bed, or the days stuck in restraints. Pepper didn’t want to make that connection when looking upon the Devil, but he did.

That empathy wasn’t lost on Loochie, either. She pulled the great head and it reared back. She smelled the fur, sour and unwashed, and she recognized the scent. If she shut her eyes, she might believe this was just another patient, trapped on the unit for so long that he’d stopped bathing, stopped caring. Heatmiser was like that. Hadn’t she felt the same at more than one point?

But then the Devil bucked and kicked and Loochie lost her grip.

Her right hand slipped loose from one horn. The Devil thrust its head up in the next moment. Its horn stabbed Loochie’s palm. It burst through her skin and dug in. Then the Devil yanked its head left and the horn tore out of Loochie’s flesh. Right away, her blood ran fast, down her forearm.

The sound Loochie made, it wasn’t a yell or a cry, it was more like a honk. And yet she wasn’t actually in pain. She was saved by her acute-stress reaction. The trauma of this moment would hit her later, but right now she just had to stay alive. So she stayed where she was, on the beast’s back. Her left hand gripped its left horn. And when she spoke, it was only to give instructions.

“Grab his legs,” Loochie muttered. The blood from her wounded right hand had soaked her whole shirtsleeve already.

Pepper had only half-recovered from the pain of his tackle, but there wasn’t any more time.

Loochie shouted, “Pepper! Please!”

Pepper moved on his hands and knees and dropped all his weight on the backs of the Devil’s spindly legs while Loochie tried to regain control of the head. Her left hand stayed in place and despite the gash in her palm she squeezed her right hand around the right horn again. Loochie held on even tighter than before. She pulled the Devil’s head so far backward that its nose pointed up at the ceiling. Like this, its throat was exposed.

“Now what?” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

Kofi had stopped calling for Dorry to give him the nurse’s keys. He wasn’t actually thinking at all in this moment. He was so confused. He’d been sure he had the solution to their collective dilemma, but with each second he felt stupider for having made that phone call. For having faith that someone else would fix everything. How silly he’d been. How naïve. How crazy. A new desperation filled him now. It made Kofi feel powerful in an ugly way. A fierceness fueled by disappointment. Which is why Kofi stopped asking Dorry for the keys to the locked drawers of the nurses’ station. He didn’t need them. In his desperation Kofi found access to that Crazy Strength. He tore each of those locked fucking drawers right out of the desk.

He dumped the contents of each drawer onto the ground as Pepper and Loochie wrestled the Devil. Finally he found the right drawer. Where the staff stored the syringes used on unruly patients. Kofi grabbed the largest ones he could find: 18-gauge Seldinger needles. Coffee tore two of them from their plastic wrapping and moved out of the nurses’ station. It looked like he held a tiny fencing saber in each hand.

He reached Dorry at the lip of Northwest 4. The old woman remained impassive. Mumbling to herself. She’d dropped the keys and they’d landed on her right foot. The keys looked like a small brass spider, about to crawl up her leg. She still clutched the clipboard, but it wouldn’t serve as much of a shield.

“Now what?!” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

Kofi raised his hands. Pepper saw the syringes and smiled.

Then there was a new sound, someone rattling the big door on Northwest 1.

“Police!” a man shouted. “We are entering the premises!”

“Hurry, Coffee!” Loochie grunted, straining to hold the Devil’s head up.

Kofi moved past Dorry. Down the hall. “I’m going to stab out its eyes.”

“Do it fast!” Pepper begged from the floor.

The police slammed at the front door, using a two-man Stinger battering ram. The sound like a series of small explosions.

“Hurry now,” Loochie muttered. The blood from her wounded hand had soaked her shirtsleeve and half her back.

And the Devil?

It stopped bucking. It almost seemed to wilt. Its legs went limp and the head stopped twisting. The Devil actually whimpered. A quiet little bleat, like a sheep. Not even a sheep. Like a lamb.

Kofi spoke to himself as he approached it. “I came all this way. I came all this way.” He looked at the Devil. “I can go a little farther.”

The front door of the unit thumped even louder now. The strain on the lock could be heard. It creaked, almost in tune with the Devil’s bleating. Both about to break.

Finally Dorry came out of her slumber. Just as the secure door flew open. She heard the cops — a tactical squad — clomping down Northwest 1. They’d be on the group soon. Dorry looked around, still slightly dazed. What to do? What to do? Dorry had the clipboard. No other weapon in hand.

“Hold them off!” Pepper shouted to her.

“Just another minute!” Loochie said.

The Devil kept bleating, a kind of pleading. Dorry lifted the clipboard over her head. Her best chance of delaying the cops was probably to cause pure confusion. No one was going to shoot an old woman, right?

She saw the black uniforms of the tactical force. They were carrying guns, though she could hardly discern them. They were just figures — phantoms — filling the oval room. The Devil’s cries rose behind her, even louder, desperate. Dorry ran. Waving the clipboard. But she wasn’t racing toward the cops.

She moved down Northwest 4. A dozen steps. Until she was behind Kofi. Then she slammed the clipboard against the back of Kofi’s head.

Dorry hit him once. Twice.

Loochie shrieked.

And Kofi turned toward his attacker. Such confusion on his smooth round face. He held the syringes up but no longer seemed sure of how to use them. Or who to use them on.

“I can’t let you kill him!” Dorry shouted. “I can’t!”

Kofi opened his mouth to ask the question—Why? — but she bashed him with the clipboard for a third time.

“He’s mine!” Dorry moaned, desperate and inconsolable.

The Devil bleated again, a babe calling out for protection.

“He’s my son.”

By then the tactical force had reached Northwest 4.

And what did they find? Kofi waving two large gauge syringes at Dorry.

An old white woman fighting off an armed black attacker? That’s not a difficult equation to solve. You can do it at home, without a calculator.

Kofi saw it happening. Time moved more slowly for him than for all the rest.

One of the officers ran forward and tackled the old woman out of the way. The rest fired on the crazed man. Him.

Kofi thought, Why have you forsaken me?

Then the cops fired forty-one shots.

The assailant was hit nineteen times.

Kofi Acholi died of his wounds later that night.

22

WELL, FUCK.

The black guy did die first after all.

(Excluding Sam and, possibly, Sammy, yes. Amiable white folks that they were.)

Coffee’s death was reported in the New York Post and Daily News, only a day after it happened. Small items. Not even a quarter of a page. The day after that, the Daily News ran a longer feature that highlighted the poor supervision at New Hyde. There was mention of how the suspect (listed as Kufi Acholi) assaulted two staff members before menacing a fellow patient. This second, longer article included a photo of Kufi looking absolutely homicidal. Where had they found the picture, buried in an abattoir? It made Coffee (or Kofi or Kufi, poor guy) resemble, at least in spirit, that famous old woodcut of a wild man: on his knees and wearing rags, a baby in his mouth and a woman’s severed head in the background. The woodcut is of a man who believes he’s a werewolf. That’s how the photo in the Daily News article made Coffee seem. Like something inhuman, too bizarre to be real. The kind of monster any sane person would hope to see killed in a thunderstorm of gunfire. Good riddance. Coffee’s photo inspired only one emotion. Horror.

Not that Pepper and Loochie and Dorry had the luxury of pondering such an injustice to their friend’s memory. The direct aftermath of the takeover was arrest. Once Josephine and Scotch Tape were freed, they fingered the other three as coconspirators. While Coffee was wheeled into the emergency room of NHH, the others were handcuffed and placed into three separate cruisers.

Though an NYPD tactical unit had been called in, Loochie, Dorry, and Pepper were held on the New Hyde Hospital campus. The hospital’s security chief was completely ineffective when it came to preventing a mess, but he was better at sweeping up afterward. All he had to do was make sure the trio was driven from Northwest to New Hyde’s main building. There, he handed them over to actual officers employed by the New York City Department of Health and Hospitals Police. (The main building was operated by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, a city agency, so it was entitled to a security detail made up of NYPD officers. But Northwest — along with two other units — was operated by a private organization called the New Hyde Health and Hospital Corporation. Its security was contracted out to a low-budget security firm that would have trouble guarding a Waffle House.)

When Loochie, Dorry, and Pepper were taken to the main building’s detention “center” (two conference rooms and an out-of-order bathroom), they were officially being handed over to police custody but without — here’s the important part — without having to leave the New Hyde campus. How do you keep a family problem within the family? You don’t let the children out. Only Loochie had a short detour when she was taken away to have her hand cleaned, stitched up, and bandaged. By the next day, all three patients would be returned to the custody of Northwest’s security detail. They’d be driven four minutes across campus and returned to the psychiatric unit. Most systems barely work, but those same systems cover their asses much more successfully.

And Coffee? His body went to the emergency room. Then, briefly, to the Intensive Care Unit. Then, last, to the hospital’s morgue, a place the staff called the “Rose Cottage.”

Loochie and Dorry were originally supposed to spend the night together in one of the two detention rooms. But if they were in the same room, Loochie made a habit of trying to tear Dorry’s head from her neck. Dorry didn’t fight back, either. So the cops had to separate the pair. Loochie spent the night in one room and Dorry in the other. (Neither room had beds, so they slept in chairs.) Pepper had to spend the night in the out-of-service bathroom. Which actually wasn’t as terrible as it sounds. It had been out of service so long that the place was cleaner than either detention room.

Once alone, Loochie and Dorry fell into fitful sleep.

Kofi was at rest in the Rose Cottage.

Pepper sat on the toilet in that bathroom. He couldn’t get comfortable enough to drift off, so instead, all night, he remembered: Pepper and Loochie had gone flat on the floor when the cops started shooting. They were handcuffed only moments after Kofi fell.

The police left the Devil to itself. They didn’t touch it. They moved around the body. Peeked at it and, just as fast, averted their eyes.

It lay on the floor, facedown. It didn’t move, or even seem to breathe. Pepper and Loochie entertained the wish that it had died somehow. A stray bullet maybe. Could that happen? Could the Devil die? But when Josephine and Scotch Tape appeared, it moved again. It whimpered. Seeming to call out for their help.

The cops watched quietly as Josephine and Scotch Tape checked the Devil for injuries. Scotch Tape and Josephine helped the Devil to its feet and walked it back to its room. Josephine pulled the silver door open and all three shuffled inside. Soon Josephine and Scotch Tape returned to the police, who were grouped by the nurses’ station. Pepper and Loochie sat on the floor, surrounded by them. Pepper’s hands were bound behind him. Loochie held up her torn right hand as if signaling a waitress to bring the check. Dorry had been walked to the other side of the nurses’ station where she’d collapsed. A young cop sat with her and held her hand tenderly because he thought she looked just like his great-aunt.

The cops and the staff milled around, still coming down from the chaos. A tall cop pointed toward the silver door and asked, What’s wrong with that one? Scotch Tape frowned and shook his head regretfully. He said, That’s the sorriest case we got. Doctors don’t know what to do for him.

How could Scotch Tape talk about the Devil like that? Pepper wondered. As if it was just another patient and not the thing they’d seen. Could anyone work so hard to deny reality that he’d mistake the Devil for a man?

In a way it felt better to focus on such questions than to remember his friend, Kofi, being shot to death. A pair of syringes in his hands. What had he really planned to do with them? They weren’t knives or swords. Was he going to poke the Devil into submission?

Pepper had seen Kofi’s face just before the shooting began. A thought seemed to pass across his friend’s eyes. Pepper wished he might know what that thought was. Had it been something ridiculous? Maybe wishing he had one last quarter, even after all that had proved so damn useless. What was that last thought? Sitting on the inoperable toilet, Pepper feared he might fall into a loop. One where he wondered about Coffee’s last thoughts for hours and days and weeks. Until he might drive himself screwy trying to grasp at one last connection with the man he’d come to know. Better to think of anything else. Something concrete, tangible, real.

Kofi’s blood traveled up to the fluorescent lights when he was shot.

Now Pepper couldn’t get that image out of his head.

Kofi’s blood, up there, on the ceiling.

The next the morning Loochie and Dorry and Pepper were returned to Northwest, much to the staff’s unhappiness. When the security officers left, the staff put each patient into restraints. Dorry had been in her own room for years. Loochie was moved to a room of her own as well. Loochie’s previous roommate, the Haint, hardly waved good-bye as Loochie took her stuff out. And Pepper was returned to his room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s Iron Maiden,” Pepper said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No cheating,” Miss Chris taunted.

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

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

“Tongue,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

Who cared? Who cared? Who cared?

Pepper ate but tasted nothing. He blinked and breathed.

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

23

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

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

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

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

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

But for how long?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You eating that?”

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

Loochie.

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

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

His reaction time still needed work.

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

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

Pepper set the Frosted Flakes down and opened the back of the box. While he opened the plastic and poured the milk, Loochie went to the nurses’ station and demanded a plastic spoon. When she returned, Pepper pushed the box toward her, it sat halfway between them. They took turns dipping their spoons in. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Loochie finished her last spoonful and said, “Thanks.”

Pepper touched the plastic spoon to his forehead in a salute.

“So, we going to kill that old bitch or what?” Loochie asked.

Pepper actually ate one more spoonful of cereal. It wasn’t until he’d finished chewing that he understood what Loochie had said.

“You with me?” she asked, smiling like she’d just asked him to go hang out at the mall.

No.

That was his answer. The only answer. Loochie looked at him, confused. “Pepper?”

On the television, Steve Sands looked into the camera and seemed to speak directly to Pepper. “My friends, the world gets more frightening every day. The news I report to you stays with me when I go home to my wife and children every night. As our politicians fail us, and our once-mighty institutions suffer from rigor mortis, it’s become clear that we’re kind of on our own out here. Am I right? That’s just how it seems to me. It may sound harsh, but the new American reality is this: every man for himself. Make sure your butt is covered.”

Mr. Mack actually applauded from his chair. “That man is speaking the truth right there! You can’t save nobody but yourself.”

At the same table Frank Waverly picked at his scrambled eggs. When Mr. Mack slapped his friend’s shoulder, looking for a little corroboration, Frank Waverly leaned away from the touch.

Pepper returned to his room and read. At lunch, he came out to the nurses’ station, took his pills, then ate. Though they were making sure he took his pills, his body was starting to react with slightly less tilt. The body adapts. At eleven p.m. he found himself awake instead of zonked into a narco-coma. His body had adapted in another way, too. Weeks spent walking the ward from eight in the evening to four a.m. meant that his clock had readjusted. He came to life during the haunted hours.

Pepper still hadn’t been given a new roommate, though the staff had at least cleared Coffee’s bedsheets. The only thing they’d left behind was his blue binder. It had been on the windowsill, and when one of the nurses went to grab it, Pepper said it was his. They’d cleaned out the bottom drawer full of pills without comment. Scotch Tape even moved Coffee’s dresser away from the wall and swept up all the rat droppings. The room had been cleaned, cleared, but that didn’t make it feel empty.

Eleven thirty, and Pepper put down Van Gogh’s letters and left his room.

He passed the rooms of the other men in Northwest 2. Nearly all the doors were shut. He passed the nurses’ station and didn’t pay attention to the staff. Since he’d taken his evening meds, they had no reason to linger over him. They were making more stacks of paperwork for the electronic filing to come. They’d been promised a solution to the computer problem. The proper program would soon appear. So they prepared.

Pepper paced down Northwest 5, to the television lounge. He only realized he wasn’t wearing shoes or socks when the chill in the floor leached into his soles. Since it was late, he found the late-shift patients on duty. The night birds.

There were still only four of them: Heatmiser, who still watched the silent television screen and read along with the closed captioning. He had a chair right under the television. Footage of a tornado-wracked territory showed on the screen. The closed-captioned text read: “Residents of Alabama are bracing for moors.”

“More,” Heatmiser corrected.

The other three patients were there, too. The redhead, the woman who never seemed to make eye contact with anyone, and the Chinese Lady. Each sat at a table by herself like a sovereign, newspapers spread out across her tabletop like scrolls.

Pepper repeated one sentence to himself as he walked toward them: Do not call her the Chinese Lady. Do not call her the Chinese Lady. But the more times he thought this phrase, the more afraid he became that he’d say it. He approached the redhead because that seemed safer. She was also the only one who’d spoken to him that night, long ago now, so she seemed like the leader. Make introductions to the Redhead Kingpin, and the others would follow.

“You reading all those papers?” he asked her, smiling lightly.

Redhead Kingpin didn’t so much as sigh.

Pepper, feeling slighted, moved around Heatmiser, reached up to the television set, and turned the volume up. Now the news was being yelled at them. A childish act, no doubt.

He pulled a chair up beside Heatmiser. Heatmiser rose from his seat, mumbled something, and wandered from the television lounge, looking confused. On-screen, footage from the Kentucky Derby played. The hoofbeats on the track sounded louder than bombs at high volume.

Finally, Redhead Kingpin turned in her chair. She watched Pepper quietly for maybe one more minute. “You’re just going to make noise until we invite you to play with us,” she said.

Pepper’s only response was to cross his arms. Was the man actually pouting?

The redhead cleared her throat. The other two women — the one who never made eye contact and not “the Chinese Lady”—stopped their reading and looked up for the first time. “Does anyone have a problem with …”

“Pepper.”

“Does anyone have a problem with Pepper joining us?”

The one at the next table still didn’t lift her head, but her hand did rise, as if she was in a classroom. Then she waved the hand side to side.

Redhead Kingpin said, “Say your piece.”

The woman lowered her hand. She spoke into her clavicle. “He can stay, but he can’t read any of my periodicals.”

Pepper sniffed at her. “I don’t even want to read any of your periodicals.”

Just like that, the woman lifted her head. The woman had the coloring, and shape, of a sweet potato. Hardly the type to seem threatening. But what Pepper saw in her eyes actually made him tremble. She looked more rageful than Loochie just then. A scowl that would’ve made the Devil quake. He’d had thugged out guys (thugged out black guys) who hadn’t stiffened his spine so quickly. (Was that racist?) (Probably.)

“It was just a joke,” Pepper muttered.

The woman nodded once, like Pepper had apologized, and looked back down at her magazine.

Redhead Kingpin splayed her hands flat and wide apart on her table. Three or four newspapers were spread out there. She adjusted each, just slightly, the way you might straighten an off-center painting.

“Well, my table’s all full,” Redhead Kingpin said.

Finally, the third woman (not the … you know) said, “He can sit with me.”

Pepper walked to her table. But before he sat, Redhead Kingpin cleared her throat again. She pointed at the television. “How about you lower that before you get all comfy?”

After he did, the redhead added, “And please don’t start the same trouble you did with your other friends.”

“I didn’t—” he began to explain. He stopped when he realized these three women (and probably all the other patients) blamed him for what happened. Were they wrong?

Pepper sat at the Chinese woman’s table. She had newspapers and a few magazines. She offered him a copy of Backpacker magazine, which he accepted. But he couldn’t concentrate.

The woman was generous enough to let him sit, to offer the reading material, but she didn’t make conversation. She wasn’t interested. She scanned a copy of The Washington Post. When she found some article that snagged her interest, she pulled out a pen and underlined the text. Finally, she folded the page with great precision, until there were deeply creased lines around the piece. Carefully she tore it free. Didn’t even need scissors. (She wasn’t going to be given any in here.)

“What’s that for?” Pepper asked. He spoke quietly.

“For the files,” she answered, as she turned the page, scanning new articles.

Ah, yes, the files. Pepper kept making the mistake of confusing the appearance of sanity with the real thing. Did she mean The X-Files? The Rockford Files? The Wackadoo Files? Who knew? But Pepper wouldn’t push. It didn’t matter if she was saving these articles to use as toilet paper in her room. She’d let him sit for a while, right? Being quiet in her company was kind of nice, wasn’t it? Just be happy with that.

Pepper looked out the windows of the lounge. He saw the disused basketball court. At the edge of the court stood the not-so-tall fence with barbed-wire curlicues at the top. He saw the empty parking lot of New Hyde Hospital. He decided, just now, to find peace in even this view. To sit quietly and let the sound of turning pages become like white noise. A lullaby. In a little while, he might want to move again.

But not yet.

24

ESMIN GREEN DIED at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York; she was only forty-nine. A patient on the hospital’s psych unit, she’d been brought to the psychiatric emergency room for “agitation.” After waiting to be seen for twenty-four hours, she collapsed on the dirty waiting-room floor. She lay there like salmon on a skillet, the heat rising below the pan and making the flesh jump. Her head slipped under one of the waiting-room chairs. Her legs splayed out straight. She lay there and two security guards looked into the room on two separate occasions. A doctor did, too. All three men watched her lying there on the floor. They didn’t even step into the waiting room. At last, a nurse arrived to check on Esmin Green, who’d been on her back for an hour. To see if the woman was conscious, the nurse kicked Esmin Green’s leg.

But the woman was already dead.

And the only thing that made the case against that doctor (fired), the nurse (suspended), and the two security guards (both suspended) was the hospital’s surveillance tape. Someone on staff had doctored the medical records so they read that at 6:20 a.m. Ms. Green was “sitting quietly in waiting room.” If not for the video footage, and its time stamp, Esmin would’ve been passed off as an unforeseeable accident, the kind of thing, as is said “that no one could’ve prevented.”

Who would’ve challenged the official version? One cosigned by four staff members. Would anyone give credence to the other two patients, clearly seen in the video, also stuck in that waiting room — the ones who saw Ms. Green’s death happen? How would they be treated as witnesses? How easy would it be to make wackos seem nuts? Were the good people of the jury supposed to take their word over a nurse’s? Over a doctor’s? It was just too horrible to believe that such a thing could happen. People don’t get treated that way. A nurse wouldn’t do that. A doctor takes an oath. Security guards … well, okay, maybe no one would be too surprised that some security guards fucked up.

The jury’s verdict (at best) might’ve been: We really feel terrible for these people. (And here’s the hard part, they really would.) We feel terrible, but we have doubts. We doubt the world works this way, because it has never worked this way against us.

Luckily for Esmin Green’s family, cameras are considered legally sane. Their testimony above reproach. Kings County Hospital reached a settlement with the Green family. Turns out Esmin had blood clots in her leg; her complaints of pain were legitimate. The clots caused her heart to stop, and because she was left unaided, she expired.

This happened in 2008.

25

THE NEXT NIGHT, Pepper returned to the television lounge just before midnight. He found Heatmiser under the television screen, Redhead Kingpin at her table, and Still Waters sitting at the next. Pepper grabbed the back of a free chair at the third table, but before he pulled it out he asked, “May I join you?”

She shrugged. Good enough! Pepper sat across from her.

The Chinese woman flipped through a copy of the New York Post, the pages slightly spotty because she’d had to fish it out of the trash.

“Anything interesting?” he asked.

“Not yet.” She looked up from the page. “You don’t have anything to read?”

“I left my book in my room.” Pepper pointed at her piles of newsprint and periodicals. “Maybe I could borrow one of yours?”

She smiled without opening her mouth; a tight grin. “You better think of something else,” she said.

Pepper didn’t see why she had to be hardheaded about it, but also didn’t want to get booted out. He liked the lounge at this hour. No Loochie, no Dorry, and far from his empty room. But without anything to read, he wanted conversation. He said, “You want to hear about Vincent Van Gogh?”

She frowned, surprised. “The painter?”

“The Dutch painter,” Pepper said, proud he could be more specific.

This seemed to please her. That he didn’t back down or apologize. She smiled again, a little wider this time, but still showing no teeth.

Behind him, Pepper heard the Redhead Kingpin clear her throat. The Chinese woman looked over his shoulder and rolled her eyes.

“Tell me something interesting about his birth,” she said, speaking loud enough that it seemed defiant.

“He was born on March 30,” Pepper said, “in 1853.”

“Everyone is born sometime.”

Pepper considered this. “His father was a pastor.”

She peeked at another magazine on the table. Pepper was losing her. Behind him, another bout of throat clearing. Which only made him speak a bit more loudly, too.

“But he wasn’t a very good one,” Pepper said. “People adored Van Gogh’s dad, as a person, but as a pastor he was second-rate.”

This made the Chinese woman look up again with some interest. “It’s not a good scandal or anything. But I do like to hear about people who aren’t very good at their jobs. Not terrible, not great, just okay. I like people who are just okay.”

Pepper said, “So what’s your name?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded. “But until then …”

“Sue.”

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

“I’m Pepper,” he said.

“I know who you are.”

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

“You tried to escape,” she said.

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

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

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

“I think I’ll go into real estate.”

“Commercial or residential?”

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

“How much will you offer?”

“A dollar forty-nine.”

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

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

“For the files,” Pepper said.

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

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

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

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

On the third night, Pepper arrived early.

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

And now there were five.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No Name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like clones?” Sue asked.

Pepper laughed loudly.

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

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

“Tits,” Sue said dryly.

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

“How long did he live?”

“He was dead at thirty-seven.”

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

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

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

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

“Tangent!” Pepper hissed and laughed.

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

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

Pepper watched her quietly. “And?”

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

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

Pepper smiled. “Now we’re talking.”

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

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

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

26

“Randolph Maddix, a schizophrenic who lived at a private home for the mentally ill in Brooklyn, was often left alone to suffer seizures, his body crumpling to the floor of his squalid room. The home, Seaport Manor, is responsible for 325 starkly ill people, yet many of its workers could barely qualify for fast-food jobs. So it was no surprise that Mr. Maddix, 51, was dead for more than 12 hours before an aide finally checked on him. His back, curled and stiff with rigor mortis, had to be broken to fit him into a body bag.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

April 28, 2002

27

“I’LL BE GONE in less than a week.”

Sue told him this on the fourth night.

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re getting discharged?” he whispered.

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

“You’re getting discharged!”

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

“I’m getting deported,” Sue said.

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

“Everything all right down there?” she shouted.

Not just a nurse, but Josephine. Back on the job. Working an overnight shift, but wary in a way she hadn’t been before. A little afraid to come down to the lounge on her own. (Especially with Pepper in there; don’t think she hadn’t tracked him passing by.) Then she felt resentful that this job had swiped some of her confidence, her ease. She was no longer Josephine; now she was Nurse Washburn. She’d already started telling patients to address her that way.

In the lounge, Sue cupped her hands and shouted, “One hundred percent all right down here!”

Nurse Washburn’s chair creaked as she sat back down. Then, very faintly, they all heard the clacking of computer keys.

“Come on,” Pepper said quietly. “Stop playing with me.”

He ran his hand down Sue’s thigh, toward her knee. She clasped his wrist. She pinched her lips and softened her eyes as if Pepper were the one in need of sympathy. “I’m not playing,” she whispered. “I have less than seven days.”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Deport you for what? Deport you to where?”

“To China.”

This was the first time he really thought about the crispness of her English. “But you speak English so well,” he said.

Pepper said those words before he had time to think them through. But you speak English so well. Just a burp produced in a fetid little chamber of his mind. The wrong thing to say. He knew it. He knew it. But that didn’t mean shit to Sue.

She squinted her eyes into slits. She curled her upper lip until her teeth bucked out. “Oh, sank you velly much,” she said. “Missa GI Joe Amelican!”

Pepper kissed the side of her face. Their first kiss, and it came because of this. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”

She pulled away from him. She crossed her arms. A fight had begun. One Pepper couldn’t win with apologies. But then he noticed something new. He pointed at her mouth. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen your teeth.”

Sue gasped as if her skirt had blown up over her head. She dropped her upper lip. She brought one hand up to her mouth and covered it.

Ah, yes, the one concern that might trump an unfortunate detour into flagrant ethnic stereotyping. Vanity! Or, more specifically, crippling insecurity. Sue kept her hand over her mouth and twisted away from Pepper.

“Come on,” Pepper said. “They look nice.”

Which was a lie. (Her teeth were jacked.)

“I like it when you smile,” he said.

Which was true. And she could hear that in his voice.

She turned back to him. Her hand still hadn’t moved. He reached out, pulled it down. He leaned toward her so he could whisper. “If you need me to say racist things to make you smile, I’ll do it,” Pepper said. “But only if you ask nice.”

Sue pulled her hand from his, raised it one more time, and plunked him on his forehead. He overplayed the pain. Rearing back and stretching his mouth open, he pantomimed a howl without breaking the room’s hush.

Sue grabbed Pepper’s hand and put it back on her thigh now. She watched him until he returned her intense gaze. She pulled his hand higher, to the top of her thigh. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly. Not the cheek, but the lips this time. When he pulled away, her shuttered eyes seemed to have grown brighter, as if she’d drawn the blinds.

She said, “I’ve been held in one kind of detention or another for almost a year now.”

Pepper wasn’t sure what to do with this. Here they were, getting warm, and she drops a bit of information sure to cool any room. When he frowned at her and remained still, Sue said, “I’m telling you I’m horny.”

He kissed her much harder the second time.

Then he slipped his hand between her thighs. He felt the mound of her pussy, warm through her nightdress. She put her hand over his and pressed him closer to her. Pepper rubbed through the fabric and she ground against his fingers. She breathed more quickly, tight and shallow little sounds. The television showed pictures of night skies from a weather forecast, showering the room in blue light.

Sue arched her back; Pepper kept rubbing.

They both wanted to kiss, but Sue had her head arched too far backward. The muscles of his right arm were already sore but he kept at it. Sue huffed, hissed really, through her clenched teeth.

Pepper closed his eyes. He didn’t want to watch her, but to feel her. And he didn’t want to get all aware of the three other people in the room; folks who couldn’t help but understand what was going on ten feet from them. If Pepper started thinking of them, he couldn’t keep rubbing Sue. It was just so ridiculous. Like all good public sex.

Sue had been louder in the buildup than in the finale. Maybe this is because she had opened her eyes. She’d seen her two friends (Rachel and Marjolein) so focused on their newspapers that they could only be listening to her and Pepper. What would they think if she really let it out, like she wanted to, at the end? This was already embarrassing enough! So when Sue came, she cut the sound off, as best she could, in her throat.

Sue had sweated across her neck and chin. The top of her nightdress showed the wetness. Pepper slipped his sore hand back into his own lap and kneaded the palm with his other hand. The top of his shoulder ached and burned, but he refused to show the pain.

Sue leaned in to him and smiled. Without self-consciousness. She was hardly there, at the table, in Northwest. She was just, momentarily, relaxed. It had been a looooong time since she’d been with a man. Most women appreciate busting a good nut, too (so to speak!).

Sue returned to her body. Returned to the television lounge. And this chair. Where this man sat beside her. She kissed Pepper absently. She huffed through her nose, one long breath. If she wasn’t smiling, she sure felt like smiling. She tugged at Pepper’s zipper.

There is a lot of sex going on in the nation’s psychiatric units. (Not to mention the adult homes and residential units that also cater to, and care for, the mentally ill in the United States.) Adults cooped up for weeks and months and years (and sometimes decades). What do you think will result from being so tightly packed? Friction.

(We’re not counting the sexual abuse that goes largely unreported, because that’s abuse not sex. The horrible stuff happens, too: patient on patient, staff on patient, even patient on staff.)

We’re focused, here, on the consensual business — a.k.a. affection; dating; courting. Hell, even just hooking up. The niceness. Because, ladies and gentlemen, despite the perceived differences between them and you, the mentally ill like jooking, too!

Unfortunately, actual intercourse is about the hardest thing to achieve on the unit. The staff might huff and shout about kissing and fondling, but they’d often let the couple be. They will dole out discipline for more, though. A patient will be likely to get his butt in restraints, at the very least. There’s even a chance they’ll transfer him to another hospital, and how good would that be for the budding romance?

So second-tier sex becomes king. A little bit of sucking in the phone alcove, or maybe a handjob in the blind spot of the television lounge. Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman might sneak into a man’s room. That’s rare, though, because even if the staff doesn’t catch you, there’s your roommate to contend with. He isn’t necessarily overjoyed that you’re getting a little play and he’s left cuddling his antidepressants. Some grouchy patient will snitch in record time. It’s a real feat — let’s go ahead and say it’s a miracle—if two people sneak some actual lovemaking inside the psych unit’s walls.

Which is why we might marvel, offer our fair share of respect to the powers of Providence. (Or Plotting?) The confluences of life. Because the very next night, Pepper snuck Sue into his room. She stayed with him until dawn. An actual sleepover. The kind of delight most folks take so for granted that they denigrate it with the term “one-night stand.” But it’s hard to dismiss a whole night when your trysts don’t usually last an hour.

Pepper didn’t manage this alone however. He had help.

From Loochie and Dorry.

Pepper hoped to have Sue over to his place. All their groping in front of others struck him as embarrassingly juvenile. Two people over forty should not be wrasslin’ in ways that invite maximum humiliation unless they’re in a Nancy Meyers film.

Pepper knew he had to get Sue back to his room. Not just so they could make love, but so they could be alone. As soon as she said she’d be gone in less than a week — as soon as Pepper realized she was serious — he began thinking about how he might yank her from the jaws of doom and deportation. The news had tickled that heroic nerve of his.

At six in the morning, everyone in the lounge — Pepper, Sue, Rachel, Marjolein, and Elliott — rose from their tables, collected magazines and newspapers and accordion files. The others didn’t look at Pepper and Sue, still mortified by the way they’d been groping like teenagers. They all walked to the nurses’ station and accepted their morning meds. Each went to his or her room to sleep.

Pepper and Sue took their meds and parted ways at the base of Northwest 3. He’d walked her as close to her door as hospital rules allowed. He watched her sashay down the hall. He felt the hot loss of her like a blush. That was the moment, right there, when he became determined to get her alone.

He’d taken his pills, seen Sue enter her room. As he wandered back to Northwest 2, the first stages of medicinal drowsiness bumped against the back of his legs like a dog, nearly tripping him. But when he reached his room, he resisted the urge to rest. Instead, he tried to drag the second bed, Coffee’s old bed, to the middle of the room. As soon as he pulled it, the scrape of the metal feet echoed. Even though he had the door shut he felt sure the staff would hear. So he went to the bathroom and unspooled reams of toilet paper. He bunched it into balls and tucked the paper under the two legs at the head of Coffee’s bed. Enough padding that the bed slid quietly once he lifted the other end. He did the same with his bed. Together they formed a cozy looking queen-sized.

He stretched the top sheets so they covered both mattresses. Tucked the sheets around them so it looked like one mattress. He fluffed the thin pillows. Got down on his hands and knees and swept the entire floor with his bare hands. (There were no new rat droppings, thank goodness.) If he could get Sue in the room tomorrow, how unsexy would it be to ask her to wait while he made all these changes? Imagine her clipping news articles on the floor while he worked up a sweat in the wrong way. Better to do this now, risk having the staff see it and make him take it apart, than to wait until his woman was with him. He knew that seduction was 96 percent preparation. (The other 4 percent was brushing your teeth.)

When Pepper finished, he actually felt reenergized, so he went out to get breakfast. He didn’t eat much of it. Instead he pocketed the cereal box and palmed the milk carton. (He checked the expiration date; it was still good.) If Sue got hungry, he’d offer her a late-night dessert of Cocoa Puffs. He walked the midnight meal back to his room. He drew the room’s curtains. What else to do at this point?

Get some sleep, Pepper. Tonight is going to be a motherfucker.

28

THAT NIGHT, PEPPER didn’t drag Sue to the far table. She moved to that spot and Pepper tugged her back. She didn’t like that.

“Tired of me already,” she said, trying to make it sound playful, which only made her sound more wounded instead.

Pepper pulled her to one of the tables closest to the television set. Heatmiser had to hump his chair two spaces to the left so they could get around him and sit. This made the kid grumble, but neither of them noticed. Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters took notice, and Sue felt a twitch of embarrassment. This time because she’d let this man influence her in a way the other two would never allow.

That small shame is what made Sue ignore Pepper once they sat down. A different table, but she still had her materials. She perused her newspapers with an intensity she hadn’t shown in days. Pepper remained fantastically unaware until he tried to take Sue’s hand. She pulled away. He tried a second time, thinking she was being playful, and got more of the same. He felt a tension growing between them.

Ask her something, Pepper. About herself. Her work.

He peered under her chair. “How come that file says ‘No Name’?” He pointed to the one under her desk.

Sue hadn’t heard him because she was busy scolding herself. It was stupid to get close with a man when she was about to be deported! It was childish to wish the two of them might run off somewhere. And to abandon her two friends now, just because this guy started sniffing around. She ought to gather her things and leave the table, hole up in her room until the folks from Immigration came. At least there’d be diginity in that.

Three times Pepper asked Sue about her “No Name” file until, finally, Redhead Kingpin yelled at him from the next table. “I’ll explain it if it’ll make you shut up.”

Embarrassed, Pepper stomped over to Redhead Kingpin, and stood over her with his arms crossed.

“Okay. Explain.”

To her credit, Redhead Kingpin didn’t return the wrath. Besides, she wanted to explain. Why work so hard on something and keep it to herself?

She had a manila accordion folder, just like Sue’s. Written in red marker the same two words: “No Name.” She stood and undid the cord that held the manila folder closed. She turned it upside down. Articles and magazine clippings fell across the tabletop. A downpour. Hundreds of clippings. They covered the table. They spilled off the side and fluttered to the floor. The sound was like the crackle of footsteps in fallen leaves.

As soon as she was done, Still Waters, at the next table, stood up. She had her own manila accordion folder. On the side, two words written with red crayon. “No Name.”

Still Waters came to the redhead’s table. She turned her folder over and let the clippings fall. Across the tabletop and onto the floor.

Last came Sue. Who didn’t care if Pepper understood but at that moment, she was standing with her friends. No matter how wild or theatrical this seemed, she was with them. Sue turned her manila folder upside down. The clippings fell on the table, cascaded to the floor. Hundreds of them, just like the others. When it was finished, Pepper couldn’t even see his feet.

All four of them were up to their ankles.

But in what?

“What you see here is the work that we’ve been doing here at Northwest for a total of eleven years.”

To Pepper’s great surprise, Still Waters was talking. She didn’t look at him, didn’t look up at all, but her voice resounded loudly. With confidence.

Pepper looked at the clippings. Some were yellow and brittle with age. Others showed fresh ink. Some pieces were long, accompanied by photos, but only a few. They were all, basically, death notices.

“These are just the fatalities we know about,” Still Waters said. She nudged her foot through the pile. “Clipped out of newspapers we could get our hands on.”

“Is Coffee’s article in there?” Pepper asked. “Dr. Anand showed it to me. Did you see it?”

“It’s there,” Redhead Kingpin said.

Pepper stepped backward gingerly, out of the pile of papers, as if he’d been standing on a corpse.

“Coffee’s got written,” Still Waters said. “But people like this, people like us, usually don’t even rate a paragraph. No money, sometimes no family, maybe not even a marked grave. No names.”

“You keep these to remember them,” Pepper said.

“You’ve got it,” the redhead said. She touched the top of Still Waters’ head. “Marjolein here, she’s got the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known. She’s the one who started clipping. It hurt her to think of people just reading the paper, folding up these names, and throwing them away.”

“So these folders are like a kind of war memorial,” Pepper said.

Still Waters didn’t look up but she nodded. “I like that.”

Behind them Heatmiser said, “You guys are kind of making a mess, man.”

Sue and Pepper and Still Waters and the Redhead Kingpin turned to look at Heatmiser. Would the women eviscerate him?

Heatmiser scratched his head absently. “Staff’ll probably take all that from you if they see it like that.”

A fine point. The man had saved himself a disemboweling. The women scooped articles back into their manila folders by the handful. They didn’t bother to figure out which was whose. Pepper even got on one knee and passed clippings to Sue in great bunches, handfuls of epitaphs.

When they were almost done a terrific scream came down the hall. Terrific meaning intense. Terrific meaning awesome and astounding. Terrific meaning causing great fear.

A howl, coming from Northwest 3. It sounded so bad that Rachel and Marjolein dropped their folders on the table and booked it toward the ruckus. Pepper and Sue followed. Heatmiser didn’t run after them. For one perfect moment he was alone in the lounge.

He climbed onto his chair. After a moment’s hesitation he climbed onto the empty table. Then he sang, just loud enough for his fragile falsetto to fill the room. “You disappoint me, you people raking in on the world.” His voice was beautiful and tender. He took a breath, sang louder. “The devil’s script sells you the heart of a blackbird.” Standing on the table he threw his arms out and took a bow. With his eyes closed he really could hear thunderous applause. He smiled so brightly that he shined.

The others tracked the screams, which continued, and grew louder. The staff leapt from their station. Nurse Washburn fumbled, trying to unlock one of the drawers. She cursed herself for her clumsiness, which only slowed her down more. The two orderlies on duty moved much faster. One bounded over the top of the desk.

The doors on Northwest 2 and 3 opened with the same quickness. Patients streamed out, most groggy, some smiling, pleased by the disturbance; it was something new.

It was Loochie Gardner.

Getting her ass kicked.

By an old woman.

When Pepper and Sue finally reached Northwest 3, they had trouble seeing clearly. There were too many spectators in the way. Pepper had to go on his toes to see over everyone else. Sue was out of luck.

“What is it?” Sue shouted. “Who is it?!”

“It’s Dorry,” Pepper said. “She’s scalping Loochie.”

The two women, young and old, were wrestling on the floor. The patients had formed a circle around them like this was a school yard fight. Dorry was on top. Loochie struggled. Her blue knit cap had already been snatched off. Everyone could see the girl’s patchy scalp. Except it looked even worse now. More hair had been pulled out. The kid almost looked like a Hare Krishna, completely bald except for a little topknot. That last handful of hair was in Dorry’s clutches. And Dorry seemed determined to have it out, too.

“Get off me!” Loochie cried. She sounded scared. Pepper couldn’t blame her. The howls they’d heard had come from the kid.

“Get her off me!” Loochie begged. She grabbed at the last of her hair. There were small dots of blood on her scalp, where other strands had recently been yanked out.

The two orderlies cut through the crowd, but were clearly confused. They would’ve assumed they were coming to save Dorry from Loochie, but obviously that wasn’t the case. Even though the orderlies both saw what everyone else just saw — Dorry laying the smack-down on Loochie — they still grabbed Loochie. It was like their minds had delivered a verdict long before their eyes could judge the evidence. They pulled the girl’s hands away from her head, a man holding each of her wrists.

“What the fuck?!” Loochie yelled as the orderlies worked to restrain her. Even the other patients agreed.

“That’s not right!” shouted the Redhead Kingpin.

Wally Gambino raised one hand high and whipped his extended fingers to make a snapping sound. “That shit is cold, yo! Y’all are foul.”

Mr. Mack’s face had a pillow crease from where he’d been sleeping just moments before. He had his sport coat on, but had only managed to get one arm through its sleeve. He pointed at Dorry and Loochie. “I am so tired of these two. Throw ’em both in lockup! It’s folks like them who make life hard in here for the rest of us. They’re enemies of the state! That’s how I see it.”

Mr. Mack slapped to his right, reaching for Frank Waverly’s elbow. But Frank Waverly stepped away and Mr. Mack swatted the air. Mr. Mack looked up at his friend, but Frank Waverly didn’t return his gaze, and Mr. Mack sneered, “Well fuck you, too, then.”

In a moment the orderlies would realize their mistake. They’d grabbed the wrong woman. They were about to be given unambiguous proof.

Dorry leapt at Loochie, whose arms were still being held. She was defenseless. Dorry got hold of that last little knot of Loochie’s hair and she wrenched it so hard Pepper swore he heard the stuff tear out of Loochie’s head. It sounded like a siren wailing. Or maybe that was just the kid.

Loochie’s body bucked forward so hard that Dorry knocked backward. The old woman stumbled and bumped against a wall. The orderlies let go of Loochie and she scrambled away to the opposite wall. The kid’s scream cut off immediately and she just sat there, holding her now totally bald head. Loochie’s mouth hung open, a terrible gasp in her throat. And a moment later she did cry. It was horrible and high-pitched, like a newborn’s night cries. And every person in the hall who’d ever raised a child felt the same stab of horror and sympathy and overwhelming anxiety, and suddenly they were nearly crying, too.

The Haint slipped through the crowd. In her wrinkled purple pantsuit she got down beside Loochie and put her arms around the girl’s head. Pepper thought Loochie would pull away, but she didn’t. She rested her head against the older woman’s shoulder. Loochie wept.

The two orderlies finally hemmed Dorry up. Each grabbed an arm and lifted the old woman who hardly seemed to notice them. Dorry hadn’t been softened by Loochie’s cries. She growled at Loochie even now.

“You say it one more time. One more! And I’ll bite off your fucking tongue.”

Loochie gulped and gasped. She kept one hand on top of her tender head. She watched Dorry for a moment. She pulled her head away from the Haint’s shoulder. Despite the pain, there remained another quality to Loochie Gardner, probably the most essential. That kid was stubborn. She sniffed and swallowed, clearing her throat.

“Say it,” Dorry said, grinning with loathing. “Say it. Say it and see.”

Loochie pulled away from the Haint. She sat straight. Met Dorry’s gaze. Then, as calmly as she could, Loochie spoke the phrase she’d been repeating for six weeks now; while Pepper was off falling in love, Loochie had been tormenting Dorry with this chant — in the lounge, in the hall, when passing Dorry’s room — anywhere and everywhere for a month and a half.

“He’s my son,” Loochie chanted. “He’s my son!”

Dorry strained forward and the orderlies holding her buckled. They gasped as they tried to keep the old woman back. They feared Dorry, just a little bit, right then.

Dorry didn’t have any rage left. The orderlies held her arms up but the rest of her crumpled. “I told you I was sorry,” Dorry moaned. “I said it and I said it.”

“And Coffee’s still dead.” Loochie spoke so evenly it was eerie.

Then Nurse Washburn arrived.

She waded through the patients. She’d finally unlocked the drawer. She carried a needle, full of the great immobilizer. Hearing Coffee’s name made Pepper remember his roommate. Coffee’s last moment. Pepper looked up. Kofi’s blood up there, on the ceiling. The nurse injected Dorry, in front of everyone. Then one orderly escorted her back to her room.

After that, the nurse went to her knees and pulled bandages from a shirt pocket and administered to Loochie’s scalp.

And at this moment, Pepper realized he had his chance.

The nurses’ station sat empty; the staff were all occupied. The patients had yet to filter back toward their rooms. Pepper and Sue, at the rear of the crowd, were suddenly invisible.

But it wouldn’t last.

Sue stood on her toes, one hand against Pepper’s forearm for balance, taking in what she could. Pepper pulled away from her grip. He touched the small of her back. She looked at him. He nodded toward Northwest 2. She looked back at the nurses’ station, at the patients clustered in the hall. She understood. Pepper put his hand out and Sue took it.

He walked her to his place.

29

THEY ENTERED HIS room. The lights were out. Only moonlight filtered in through the windows and clarified the space. Strange to come from the fight in Northwest 3 and step into this quiet room. When Pepper shut the door behind them, the distance seemed even greater. Their heart rates were still up. Their eyes still wide with surprise. So the two of them were out of place in here, too, at least for a moment. They stayed right at the lip of the room. They didn’t step in any farther yet. Sue raised her right hand and stuck out her pointer finger. She spun it in a little circle.

“That was crazy,” she said.

“So to speak,” Pepper added.

They both laughed because what they’d just seen was terrible and surprising, and those feelings had to come out. Then they stopped laughing just as abruptly. They stood in silence a little while.

Finally, Sue grabbed Pepper’s right thumb.

“This is nicer,” she said.

They were slowing down. Their shoulders loosened. Their jaws unclenched. They were finally ready. They walked farther into the room.

They reached the beds, but didn’t sit down. Sue let go of Pepper’s thumb, and ran her hands across the top sheet.

“It’s like we’re in a hotel,” she whispered.

He scooped her up, swayed her in his arms, and settled her onto the mattresses. The metal frames creaked, but they weren’t very loud. Pepper looked down at Sue. She shut her eyes.

“That’s much better,” she said.

He climbed on top of her. He kissed her on the forehead. He kissed each of her closed eyes. As his lips touched her face, he imagined a fire in his belly, growing and growing. And each time he kissed her, the heat traveled from his lips to her skin. The more the fire grew, the warmer his kisses became. He wanted to put her hand on his stomach so she could touch his hearth. When he finally kissed her lips, she rose up to meet him.

Her mouth full of embers, just like his.

They undressed each other. Not fast and wild, not tearing off stuff. All that would make too much noise. They had to be cautious. They were passionate, but could still see the chain-link fence outside his windows. They couldn’t forget where they were.

So they got off the bed and she undid the zipper of his pants. Slid the slacks down. He put one hand on her shoulder as he stepped out and kicked the pants away. He slid her sweater off and undid the buttons of her nightdress. She raised her arms and he pulled it over her head. Finally both were just in their underwear. Sue wasn’t wearing a bra.

Pepper pointed at her chest.

“I like those nipples,” he said.

She forgot herself and jumped on him. He spun around as if he couldn’t handle her weight. They fell back on the beds together. Now the frames made a powerful squeal. Much more noise than when he’d laid her on alone.

They stopped moving.

Both watched the bottom of the closed door and waited for shadows to appear. The specters of the staff. Pepper and Sue gave it a minute. An actual minute. She counted to sixty in a quiet whisper. But no one came.

Sue returned to climbing over Pepper’s body until those nipples he’d admired were right over his face. He kissed one while the other tickled his shoulder. Then he traded. He nipped at them very lightly.

“Do you have gums?” she whispered. “Or teeth?”

He bit her nipples harder. She wriggled with happiness.

He slid back on the beds now, using his elbows to move. And she slid off him so they lay side by side. They turned to each other and kissed again. He reached around and squeezed her thigh. Moved his hand up and felt her butt. Oh, that butt! He smacked it. The sound seemed hellaciously loud.

Stop.

His hand hung in midair.

They watched the door again.

Counted all the way to sixty, again.

Pepper brought his hand back down, lightly resting it on her thigh.

“I think spanking’s too risky,” he whispered.

They both took a moment to feel unhappy about that.

“Let’s get under the covers,” Sue said.

They clambered around on the two mattresses, trying not to make too much noise, and trying not to separate the makeshift double bed. It took a little work. Once they were under the sheets, they’d even worked up faint sweats. Each could see perspiration on the other’s forehead.

Pepper rubbed at his hairline and looked at his moist fingertips.

“This is just pathetic,” he said.

Sue couldn’t answer him because she was laughing. They were so ridiculous. But in the good kind of way she hadn’t enjoyed in too damn long. She covered her mouth, but that didn’t quite do it, so she rolled over and rested her face against a pillow and kept laughing.

Pepper touched her back firmly.

He rubbed between her shoulder blades, pressing against her spine, running his fingers down to her butt. But he didn’t grab her ass. He brought his hand up and down, kneading her spine.

Sue stopped laughing and relaxed. She breathed deeply. Her body seemed to fall deeper into the bed. She raised her feet slightly and dropped them again. She groaned. So Pepper slid closer to her, and he pressed his thumb into the muscles just below her neck. When he pressed there, her feet raised slightly again, and dropped. She shimmied on her stomach, rubbing side to side, letting the good feeling of his touch pass throughout her body.

Now Pepper slid his hands under the sheets and plucked at the band of her underwear. He lifted the band and let it snap back against her skin. He then slid her panties down and lifted the sheets so he could really appreciate her posterior. He liked seeing it so much. Sue sensed this so she swayed it, side to side, while he watched. People compare that kind of movement to a clock’s pendulum or a metronome, but really they must be fucking joking. To compare a woman’s butt with anything man-made is to denigrate the first and elevate the second.

Pepper finally slid her panties down as far as he could. Then she kicked them off.

He rolled on his back now and she lifted her head from the pillow. Her face looked a bit darker because she was flushed. She smiled, and showed her small teeth. They were kind of gray, not even. He was so happy to see them that he smiled, too.

Sue lifted the covers so she could pull down Pepper’s underwear, but right then her hand stopped moving. His underwear was already gone.

“When did you take them off?” Sue asked. “When did you have time?”

Pepper jutted out his chin and smirked as if he’d achieved some great scientific breakthrough and could not be cajoled into sharing the secret.

“Never mind,” Sue whispered. She wanted to kiss that goofy look right off Pepper’s face. She climbed on top of him and began.

“That was good,” Pepper said.

The sun hadn’t risen yet. It was only a little after four in the morning. They’d fucked, then dozed, and now woke together as couples all over the world like to do.

“You’re right,” Sue said. “You’re right.”

Pepper smiled at the ceiling. He looked out the window, where he could see only the tops of the trees, and a sky the color of cobwebs. It was going to be an overcast day.

“They’re not really deporting you, right?”

“No,” she admitted. “They’re trying to deport me. I have to stand before a judge one more time before it’s official.”

He rolled onto his side toward her. “Come on,” he said, sounding like a child whose older sibling is trying to scare him. “Stop playing. Tell me the truth.”

Sue said, “I went to Canada, from China, when I was four. Me and my older sister, together. We were inside a shipping container with another family. I don’t remember them. My sister said they weren’t very nice to us. We had buckets for the bathroom. A little generator inside so we had power. I don’t remember any of this. It’s all what my sister told me. She was fourteen.”

Sue lay on her back. She looked at the ceiling as if she could see this history playing up there, like a home movie.

“When we reached Vancouver, they took me and my sister out, and the same day they drove us into the U.S. I was so small they put me in a little suitcase.”

Sue raised both hands and held them apart. A piece of carry-on luggage, no larger than that.

“They got us through the border and drove us down to a city called Everett. They let us out right on the street. In front of a place called the Imagine Children’s Museum. Maybe they thought that was pretty funny. Our family had paid to get us to San Francisco, but we didn’t make it that far. What could we do? The driver told us to get out, so we got out. We didn’t know what San Francisco looked like. And we weren’t with that other family anymore. There were just two of us. Two girls. Four and fourteen.”

Sue pulled her covers down until her whole upper body was exposed. The small brown nipples hardened in the morning’s slight chill. Pepper put his hand on one breast and touched the nipple with the tip of his thumb.

“My sister was strong. She found Chinese like us. Hakka Chinese. In Everett. They helped us contact our aunt and uncle back in China.”

“What about your parents?” Pepper asked.

“They both died in a hard winter,” she said matter-of-factly. “I never really knew them.”

A pair of footsteps passed in the hallway. Pepper and Sue stayed quiet until they were sure the person had moved on.

“We got as far south as Portland. That’s where we stopped. No more money. So that’s where we found people to stay with. My sister took a job right away. I started working a couple of years later. By the time I turned sixteen, I’d been working for eight years. I went to school during the day and worked most evenings until midnight. In restaurants and markets, always with my sister. She never went to school. It was a lot, but it was okay.”

She slid Pepper’s big hand down from her chest to her belly and held him there.

“Once I got much older, we split up. It had to happen eventually. My sister found me a job in Florida. I was already thirty-four, but I was more scared of making that trip than the whole journey from China! Or maybe I just remember how scared I was because I was older. Plus, I was going alone.”

“Why did you have to leave her at all?” Pepper asked. He found himself spinning, right there on the bed. What had he ever complained about? A brother who didn’t get along with him? Being raised by a decent mom and dad in Queens?

“You have to go where there’s work. We didn’t leave China because we wanted a long boat ride!”

“Sorry,” Pepper said. “So Florida. For a job.”

“Yes. But that’s when it all went really bad. When I had my sister around, I don’t know, she could help me if I got confused. If I made some mistakes of thinking. They were nice at the job in Florida. In West Palm Beach. I was a waitress. But they had their own problems to worry about. They couldn’t help me every time I got confused. And it kept happening to me, more and more. I basically lived alone.”

Sue pressed her hand down on Pepper’s. He squeezed her soft stomach. She liked the hold.

“I lived like that, four years. Five years? I worked. I sent some money to my sister, who sent more money back to my aunt and uncle in China. I talked with my sister a lot. I even dated a little bit.”

Sue looked over at Pepper and pinched his chin.

“Don’t be jealous.”

Pepper hadn’t brushed his teeth last night; they’d leapt right into bed. And he’d slept for a few hours. So by now he had a little wolf breath going. After she let go of his chin, he blew in Sue’s face, and she waved one hand in front of her nose. “That’s not attractive,” she said.

He kissed her more tenderly, and she returned the kiss.

“Then what?” Pepper asked. “I still don’t see how you got here.”

“After five years, I had enough. Anyway, Florida had exploded. Nobody had jobs, nobody had money. On the block where I lived, four different families just abandoned their homes. Where did they go? I saw one family; they moved down the road and were living out of a motel room. It was hard times in Florida and I didn’t want to stay there anymore. The restaurant was probably going to close anyway, just like everything else. I told my sister I was coming back to her in Portland.

“I spoke good English. Even you noticed that. I picked it up fast because I was so young when we came. I could find another job. I told her all this. She was my sister. She knew me. Maybe she could hear in my voice that I was having trouble with my thoughts. Maybe I sounded more confused than I thought. She said okay, take the bus. Cheap and you don’t always need to show ID.

“I was waiting for that bus when they picked me up. Immigration cops who spend their whole day at the Greyhound station! I never knew there was such a thing. They asked to see my visa and I laughed at them.”

“Why did you laugh?” Pepper fell back on the bed, as if she’d made such an obvious and stupid mistake.

“I thought they were kidding! Do you know how many times people said something like that to me in Florida? ‘Where’s your papers?’ ‘Show me your passport.’ The white people and the black people and the Puerto Ricans. They thought it was so funny. So when these two men said it, I thought it was just another joke. Being mean. But they didn’t like me laughing. They took me, just like that. I spent a year in a Florida jail. A psychiatrist saw me and prescribed medication, just like this place. But the guards weren’t used to people like me. Or they just didn’t care. They refused to give me the medication unless I cooperated with all their rules first. But without the medication, I was too confused to cooperate! By the time I got out, I couldn’t even say my own name.”

“Your lawyer got you out?”

Sue shook her head. “If I had stolen something or stabbed somebody, that would put me in criminal court. Then I would have a right to an attorney. You don’t get an attorney in immigration court. That’s not your right. They give you a translator. But I didn’t need one of those. I understood English fine. Even the translator could see I was just having trouble with my thoughts. But she would just hold my hand and tell me how sorry she felt about it. Sometimes she cried.

“But in the courtroom, whenever I tried to answer the judge for myself, like if he asked my name or something, he would yell at me to wait for the translator. I said, ‘I don’t need the translator. I need my lithium.’ But that only made the judge mad. When I tried to speak again, to explain, he finished with the case. I remember the words exactly: ‘The respondent, after proper notice, has failed to appear.’ I was right there when he said it but they put it in the record. And if I don’t ‘appear,’ then they don’t have to have a trial. The judge can just make his verdict. He ordered them to deport me back to China. That’s it. The end. I will die now. That’s what I thought when he gave the sentence. I will die.”

Pepper tried to imagine Sue inside that courtroom. Standing alone before that judge, who refused to see her.

“I spent another six months being held in Glades County,” Sue said. “Waiting for them to throw me across the water. All this time, and my sister never knew what happened. For her, it’s like I just stepped into a hole and disappeared. I’m scared for me, but I feel so bad for her. Every day she must be crying.”

Pepper climbed over Sue, out of the bed, and went to the bathroom. He had a plastic cup in there and he filled it with cold water. He came back to the bed, sat on the edge and gave it to Sue. “What’s this for?” she asked.

“I thought you could use a drink.”

Sue sat up, the covers bunching right over her waist. She took the cup gratefully and smiled.

She sniffed it. She grimaced.

“This is water.”

“Well, what did you think?”

“The way you said it, I thought you had some beer or something.”

“Sorry,” Pepper whispered. She shrugged. She sipped.

“So that’s Florida. How’d you get to New York? How’d you get in here?”

“The police took us to church one day. Maybe for Easter. I didn’t even ask to go, but they made everyone attend. It was a big church. So many people. Like thousands. We sat in the back. They only left two guards near us. Two men. I asked to use the bathroom. One guard came with me, but he couldn’t go inside. Not at a nice church. So I went in, washed my face, and climbed out the window. Easy. I even went back to the same Greyhound station after I borrowed money from my old boss at the restaurant.

“I took a bus to New York because I thought there was enough Chinese here for me to hide. And maybe it was true. But when I came to the Port Authority, the immigration police were waiting for me! I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes the world is broken and sometimes it works too well. I slipped right out of a church bathroom, no problem. I come to one of the most crowded cities on earth, and they pick me out five minutes after I get off the bus. But by then it had been a long time since I had my medication. I wasn’t doing good. Laughing out loud for no reason. Shouting. Maybe the bus driver turned me in just because he was tired of me. They stuck me here until they can send me back to Florida. I’m a fugitive, Pepper. You just had sex with a fugitive.”

Pepper took the plastic cup from Sue. “You’re not a fugitive once you get caught. Then you’re just a prisoner again.”

Now, he wanted to go get her another cup of water, or maybe one for himself. Or to offer her the Cocoa Puffs, but that hardly seemed like enough. He wanted to do something. But what? Honestly. Dawn light hadn’t crept into the room yet, but soon enough it would. The next day was arriving and their night together felt so brief.

I’ll be gone in less than a week. That’s what she’d said.

Pepper touched Sue’s knee, the sheet so thin it hardly seemed to come between them. His throat felt warm and the back of his neck burned. “I don’t want you to … You shouldn’t have to …”

He couldn’t finish.

Sue put her hand on top of his.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

But what was she going to do? Was she supposed to comfort him about how he couldn’t protect her? When she was the one actually facing extradition?

Fuck that.

Sue couldn’t dredge up the patience. She also hadn’t told him the straight truth. She’d told him she had less than a week before she’d be deported, but really it was happening later today. (Less than a week could mean six days, after all, or two.)

She couldn’t dream of a better way to spend her last night. Sharing these feelings, those touches, with him. All that might’ve been ruined if he knew how close to the end they really were.

“Why are you so quiet now?” Sue asked.

Pepper lay with his right arm out and her head on his bicep. He closed his arm around her chest.

“I guess I was just imagining …”

“Tell me.”

“I was just picturing us out in the woods somewhere. And it’s the middle of winter and no one else is anywhere around.”

“That’s nice,” she whispered.

“And a tree snaps,” Pepper said. “A big one. Maybe under the weight of too much snow. And the tree comes down right on top of you. And you’re pinned underneath it. You can’t get out. I have to find a way to lift it so you’ll be okay.”

Sue wriggled free from his forearm. “You’re daydreaming about me getting killed?”

Pepper rolled over, confused. “I’m dreaming about saving you.”

The first morning’s light seeped into the room. Pepper saw Sue’s face. She was watching him. Studying him.

“You actually think what you just told me is romantic,” she said.

“It is romantic. If you think about it.”

“If you think about it, your romantic dream includes the possibility that I will be paralyzed from the neck down.”

“That’s not how I meant it,” he said.

Sue grabbed Pepper’s arm, a mix of aggravation and affection. Her fingernails pressed into his skin.

“Your dream is about what you want to do, not what I need.”

Pepper threw his hands up. “Well, what do you need? You want me to break you out of here? I’ll do it. We can go on the run. I don’t care.”

Sue turned her back to Pepper and lay down. She reached back with one arm and pulled at him. He moved beside her, put his left arm around her chest, and pulled her closer. He squeezed Sue’s ribs tight, just like she wanted. They faced the room’s door. Eventually it would open but not yet. Behind them the sky had become a lighter gray. Sue said, “Did you ever finish the book about the painter?”

“Van Gogh,” Pepper said. “Yes, I did.”

“Okay, then, let me hear about that. We’ll lie still and I’ll listen to your voice. That’s what I need. Tell me.”

30

VINCENT VAN GOGH (pronounced “Van-GOCK” by the Dutch, and sundry pretentious American twits) was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland, in 1853 to Theodorus and Anna Van Gogh. The pair had three boys and three girls, and Vincent was the oldest. Their father, Theodoras, was a well liked, respected, but not terribly gifted preacher. Anna cared for the family and was also greatly loved.

In 1869, at sixteen, Vincent went to work at an art dealership, Goupil & Cie., which had ties to his uncle, and namesake, Vincent. Young Vincent was being groomed to join the trade. He worked with them in the Hague. In 1873 he moved to their offices in London. There, he roomed with a mother and daughter. He fell hard for the daughter, Ursula.

Ursula bumped him back, though. She was already engaged to another man. But Vincent was a sensitive dude and he took the news hard. Went into a depression and found solace in a deeper sense of religious faith. He also stopped rooming with Ursula and her mother. Considering the general trajectory of Vincent’s adult life, this is about the most sensible thing he ever did.

He left Ursula’s home but she hadn’t left his heart. The man was depressed! So much so that his family worried and had him transferred to the Paris branch of the art dealership. But this only compounded his pain and Vincent worked less and less well. Instead, he spent all his free time holed up reading the Bible with a friend. And in 1876, twenty-three-year-old Vincent was fired from the art dealer’s. His family had suggestions for what he should do next (they were a close bunch) — he could open his own shop, become a painter (his closest sibling and greatest friend, Theo, suggested this) — but Vincent decided to return to London to become a teacher.

Vincent got work at two different schools as a kind of curate, assisting the head of each institution. But he didn’t last long there. Pretty quickly his uncle lined up a job at a bookshop. Vincent was a terrific reader his entire life, but wasn’t enthusiastic about the bookstore. At twenty-four, Vincent switched gears again and decided to study theology. Some family members supported him in this plan, but others, like Uncle Vincent, were sick of his shit. The theology degree demanded seven years of study. There was some question as to whether Vincent had the seriousness, the fortitude, to concentrate on the subject for so long. Did he?

Nope!

Vincent stayed for only a year. He hated studying grammar and doing writing exercises. He didn’t want to be an academic. He wanted to bring good cheer through the Gospels. That’s it. Pretty soon his tutor agreed that Vincent was not cut out for theology school.

Instead, Vincent decided to become an evangelist in Belgium. This only required a certificate of study, no Latin or Greek, only three months of work at the School of Evangelization in Brussels. Around this time Vincent’s parents wrote, in a letter, “that he deliberately chooses the most difficult path.”

(We know so much about Vincent, about his family, because they were all wonderful letter writers, and many of those letters have survived. Vincent becomes famous for the letters he shared with his dear brother Theo but he wrote to many others, too.)

Back at the evangelical school it turned out that Vincent was a lousy student. He dressed strangely (meaning, he didn’t pay much attention to his clothes and their care). He couldn’t speak off the cuff, so he had to prepare all his remarks and read from the pages. And he didn’t even do that very well. And worst of all, for the school’s purposes, he wasn’t “submissive.” He argued with the school’s leaders, didn’t do exactly as told. When his three months of training were up, they refused to give him a position anywhere.

Much as he dealt with the aftermath of Ursula, Vincent took his failure at school pretty hard. He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, got thin and weak. He was in a constant nervous state. This is around the first time that people close to him began to notice his “humour” and “constitution.” To put it bluntly: They thought the boy was a little off. (Of course, they never came right out and stated this.)

Vincent’s father came to Brussels to see him and used his influence to get Vincent a trial appointment in Wasmes, a small coal-mining town, for six months. He would get a very small salary, but he didn’t get to give Bible lectures, teach children, and visit the sick — the things he actually wanted to do. He worked with the people of the mining town, but after six months his job wasn’t renewed and Vincent left town. On foot, which would become a pretty standard method for him, since he never had money to spare for trains.

Time passed after the loss of the job, and Vincent lost his religious zeal. He fell into a funk and isolated himself. Theo and his parents started sending Vincent money just so he could eat, have a place to stay, that kind of stuff, but it wasn’t much and wasn’t regular.

Around this time, Vincent made pilgrimages to the studio of an artist he greatly admired named Jules Breton. He walked all the way to Breton’s place in another town and was so intimidated and so ashamed of himself, that he just turned right back around and walked all the way home. Along the way, Vincent slept in haylofts or outdoors. He’d begun doing some art of his own, and he traded drawings for bread when he could, but his health deteriorated.

Finally, around 1880, Vincent declared himself a painter. He rented a room in a miner’s home. (Vincent shared the room with the miner’s children.) This was his first studio! He drew the miners, going to and from work. Sometimes he worked out in the garden. But in October of 1880 he moved to Brussels again to work in a small hotel. He needed the money, but he also wanted to meet other artists and Brussels offered more chances than the mining town. He wanted some camaraderie.

In 1881 Vincent moved back in with his parents. He had a good run with them but over the summer he met an older cousin, Kee. Kee was grieving over the loss of her husband and raising a four-year-old boy on her own. Vincent fell for her but she rejected him. Guess how Vincent reacted.

Yup.

This time he flipped out even harder. He didn’t just go into a depression; he became irritable and unstable and pushed at this cousin, trying to win her over. It got so bad that the whole family was just embarrassed. Vincent had a really bad fight with his father over the matter and finally moved out. He returned to the Hague, and lived there for two years.

While he was there he met a new woman. She was poor, “rough,” a heavy drinker, a fighter, and smallpox survivor. Also, possibly, a prostitute. In other words, Vincent hooked up with a hoodrat. And all the “fine” friends and family members got pissy about this. They told him this woman wasn’t proper for him. And, in truth, Vincent and this woman don’t sound like they were actually in love. Vincent had always wanted to do good, to help, and had failed at it again and again. This woman (admittedly only from Vincent’s account) was having a hard time supporting herself and her son. If Vincent wanted to offer companionship and (nominal) financial support, why would she ever say no? So they stayed together, but it didn’t last. Vincent still spent most of his money on art supplies, and not on the new family. Also, Vincent was a bit judgmental himself. He kept trying to change her ways. Eventually they parted.

In 1883 Vincent, despondent, returned to his parents’ home. He lived with them for two more years. He argued with them a lot. (Folks give credit to Vincent’s brother Theo, but Anna and Theodorus were wonderful to him, considering what a dick he could be.) In 1884 Vincent’s mom suffered a fall and broke her leg, and Vincent, to everyone’s great happiness, turned out to be a loving and attentive caretaker for her while she healed up. Good feeling returned to his relationship with his parents. And that’s Vincent all over. Utterly selfish and magnificently selfless, all one or all the other, depending on the day.

While he was still with his parents, Vincent got one more chance at romance. This time with a neighbor’s daughter. Maybe they weren’t in love, but they seemed to enjoy each other’s company, which is a hell of a lot of happiness sometimes. But the neighbor’s family refused to accept the union. The daughter, in her despair, tried to commit suicide. (She lived.) Their relationship was over and Vincent seemed to lose hope entirely for that kind of pleasure in his life. (Pleasure meaning love, because he visited prostitutes plenty over the years.)

So, no love, but during this time, Vincent had been working constantly. He sketched and painted with fervor. The early stuff, like most early stuff, wasn’t great but the man hoped that he could produce worthwhile art eventually. (From letter 106: “O Theo, Theo old boy, if only it might happen to me and that deluge of downcastness about everything which I undertook and failed at, that torrent of reproaches I’ve heard and felt, if it might be taken away from me and if I might be given the opportunity and the strength and the love required to develop and to persevere and to stand firm in that for which my Father and I would offer the Lord such heartfelt thanks.”)

In 1885 Vincent’s father died, after a long walk, right at the threshold of his home. Vincent moved out of his mother’s home and went off painting people and scenes from the world around him. (During this time, he hoped to make a splash, do something great, be noticed, with a painting called The Potato Eaters. It’s a dark, sludgy work, aping the style generally respected in the day. It didn’t make him famous. It didn’t sell. And for good reason. It stinks.)

In 1886 Vincent moved to Paris and lived with his brother Theo. Theo had joined the family business and worked as an art dealer. This time was good for Vincent. His health improved, and he even had an operation to replace almost all his teeth. (Because Vincent had lived on a diet of mostly beer and black bread — literally, bread so old it was going black, which was cheaper to buy than fresh bread — the majority of Vincent’s teeth had fallen out. You know the reason he’s not smiling in those self-portraits? It’s not just because of his melancholy soul. It’s because that poor bastard was practically toothless!) It was a good time for Vincent, but less so for Theo. As Vincent’s parents learned, as nearly anyone who ever lived with Vincent learned, Vincent Van Gogh was an asshole. Often. Even his beloved Theo came to fight and dislike the brother he believed to be an artistic genius. (It’s also worth noting that, all these years, Theo had been sending money to Vincent, wherever he was living, so he could spend as much time as possible painting and not holding a job. Despite this, Vincent treated Theo much the same as everyone. He was messy, argumentative, and bossy. During all the years they wrote to each other, there was one request Vincent made more than any other: Send more money! And Theo did.)

In 1888 Vincent left Theo. He now hit the creative high point of his life. It would last only two years. During that time he produced thousands of paintings and sketches. Theo worked his butt off to try to sell the stuff. He failed. Vincent produced, Theo believed, the world was blind.

This period, from 1888 on, was the time when Vincent did the stuff he became famous for. The romantic round. This was when he roomed with Paul Gauguin. (That didn’t last.) Cut off a part of his ear in an absolute frenzy and presented it as a gift to a local prostitute. (She fainted.)

This was also the time when Vincent began his commitments to mental institutions. In 1889 Vincent’s neighbors became tired of him and his antics, and they signed a petition to have him put away. Involuntary commitment, nineteenth-century style.

Vincent got out but soon after he commited himself to an asylum in Saint-Rémy. He stayed there for a year. While the paintings from 1888 show the style that would make him legendary — rich with color, sensory and explosive — the ones he made in 1889 began to show another side. The colors became duller here and there. A deep and lasting sadness seemed almost visible on the canvas.

In 1890 Vincent returned to Paris where he visited Theo, who had married a woman named Johanna. (The woman who would, really, take up the mantle of her husband and expose Vincent’s genius to the world.) There he also met Theo and Johanna’s first child, a son, named Vincent.

In May of 1890 Vincent left Paris. He went to Auvers to paint again.

On July 27, 1890, Vincent walked out into a field alone and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. (There have been rumors Vincent was shot by someone else and Vincent didn’t name names, allowed everyone to think his death was pure suicide. Is it true? The evidence is sketchy at best. But the bullet wound is no rumor, nor is its effect.) The bullet didn’t kill Vincent out in the field, so he dragged himself back to his home. A watch was kept as he lay in agonizing pain. Theo made it to town in time to see his brother still alive. On the morning of July 29, Vincent died of his wounds.

Of course now, over a century later, this end (and the death of Theo, from a complete breakdown six months later) is cast as some epic denouement. But imagine the article that might’ve run then. Or now. One that might’ve been creased and clipped by three (soon to be two) women late at night in the television lounge of Northwest. Maybe the headline would read this way: “Drifter Commits Suicide.”

But, really, something like that wouldn’t even be considered news.

31

PEPPER AND SUE fell asleep holding each other and stayed that way for another hour. Pepper woke first. To a familiar sound over his head. The faint creaking. Directly above their makeshift double bed. Over them.

Sue stretched next to him as she woke up. Even in the gray morning light she looked lovely to him. Who would’ve called either Pepper or Sue beautiful? Maybe his mother; her sister. Besides them? Just each other. Which was plenty right then.

“How long have you been awake?” Sue asked him.

“You hear that?” He pointed at the ceiling with his left hand.

She lay quietly. “I don’t know what I’m listening for.”

“Like a creaking sound. You don’t hear it?”

Sue shut her eyes. She pursed her lips tight so she wouldn’t breathe too loudly.

“I know that sound,” she said quietly.

As soon as she said that, the creaking stopped.

She opened her eyes. Pepper scanned the ceiling and she joined him. They lay there, vigilant, for quite a while. But the creaking didn’t return. Finally Pepper felt less fear and he remembered their talk from only hours ago. Pepper said, “What do you need, then?”

Sue looked at him, her mouth open with confusion.

“I was listening,” Pepper said. “What do you need now?”

Before she could even answer him, she just flushed with happiness that he’d asked the question. He’d heard her. She kissed him for that.

But, of course, that didn’t mean he could actually do anything. She wasn’t going to take him up on the offer of a prison break. Look how well the fugitive plan had worked out for her before. Anyway, she didn’t want to do that to Pepper. He’d come in to New Hyde with a local case, no need to leave with something federal. Besides, she didn’t really like being an outlaw. It was exhausting.

“I need my sister,” Sue said.

“So let’s get in touch with her.”

Sue said, “I’ve tried that. I called the number I had for her in Portland. Then I tried every number I could with my last name in the whole city. Do you know how many Hongs there are in Portland? Too many. But I never reached her. I think she must have left. And I don’t know where she might have moved to now.”

“Why would she leave?” Pepper asked. “Wasn’t she expecting you?”

“A year and a half ago. That’s when she expected me. She probably thinks I’m dead. Maybe she left Portland so she could forget me. If she did, I don’t blame her.”

And Sue really wouldn’t blame her sister. Sometimes hope just fades out. But that generosity, that pragmatism, didn’t make the next steps of Sue’s life any less frightening. The United States government would send her back to China, and maybe she’d find her aunt and uncle waiting at the airport. They’d see her, deep in a depression (compounded by great confusion if they didn’t supply her with her meds during the trip), and what would her aunt and uncle do for her? Think the United States has a bad way with the mentally ill? Holy shit, you better check out the rest of the world. Here’s what Sue could look forward to in China: arrive at the airport, likely be thrown into some kind of detention center, and someday she could look forward to dying. Any wonder the lady had turned tense?

Pepper was still focused on a solution. He said, “If she left Portland, where do you think she might go?”

“How would I know?”

“You know her. Think about her. Would she move east?”

She wanted to tear the lips off Pepper’s face right then, but she knew that anxiety, the anger, wasn’t about him. He was just talking things through. Why not humor him? “I think she’d stay out west. She liked it out there, except for the weather.”

“Okay. So she stays on the West Coast, but she wants to be somewhere warm. Los Angeles?”

“There’s a lot of Chinese, which she would like, but I don’t think she’d go that far. Maybe San Francisco. Or somewhere near there. That’s where we were supposed to end up at first, anyway. But what does it matter? God, Pepper, you’re doing it again! Stop trying to fix things! Just shut up. It’s like even you’re trying to kill me.”

“You make me sound like a monster,” Pepper muttered.

She took a breath and when she came back, she put her head on his chest. She listened to the thick thumping sound of his heart.

“I’m sorry, Pepper. I am. Hard times make people scared. And scared people see monsters everywhere.”

Pepper nodded, he wasn’t offended, but before he could explain he caught himself. He lifted his head.

“Isn’t Oakland right next to San Francisco?”

Which is the moment when the room’s door blasted open. Pepper wouldn’t be blamed for having flashbacks to when the NYPD’s tactical unit had powered through the front door. Both Pepper and Sue recoiled like they’d been sprayed.

Miss Chris stood in the doorway.

Sue grabbed the sheets and pulled them up to her neck. Pepper stammered, just repeating the word we until it didn’t even sound like itself. Just a stream of noise.

“We, we, we, uh, we …”

But Miss Chris wasn’t even looking at them. She’d opened the door and reached in to flick the lights on. (Didn’t even have to turn her head to find the switch, that’s how well she knew the rooms.) Miss Chris shouted, “Wake-up hour! Come for breakfast!”

Then she walked to the door across the hall and did the same.

Door banged open, light flicked on. “Wake-up hour! Come for breakfast!”

Then Miss Chris moved ten feet down the hall to rooms 8 and 9.

Pepper and Sue still shivered there where they were. Sue took another moment before she let go of the sheets and Pepper still hadn’t stopped blabbering.

“We, we, uhhh, we, uh …”

Sue touched the side of his face and that calmed him down.

“Stop talking,” she said.

They looked at each other quietly. From down the hall they heard the routine.

Door banging, the click of the light switch being flicked.

“Wake-up hour! Come for breakfast!”

Which is when Pepper and Sue laughed. All that fear turned to its happy opposite. They clutched each other as Miss Chris awakened the patients in room 10. And rather than getting up, getting dressed, Pepper and Sue settled down again. Just enjoy the last minute, fuck it. They spooned one last time. “Whose room is that?” Sue asked, pointing to the one across from his.

“Room six. That’s … Japanese Freddie Mercury.”

Sue lay quiet a moment. Down the hall, they heard Miss Chris, at room 11.

Sue said, “You mean Glenn?”

“Is that his name? How would I know? The guy never speaks.”

Sue laughed quietly. “That’s not right, Pepper.”

Pepper raised himself on his right elbow, so he could lean over and see her face. “You don’t think he looks like a Japanese Freddie Mercury?”

“Because of the teeth?”

“Well, it’s not because he’s a great singer.”

They watched the open door of the room across the hall now. Pepper and Sue wanted to see him, since they’d just been talking about him. Pepper even wanted to call him out by name. Hey, Glenn! If Sue knew his name he must be able to talk, the man just hadn’t spoken to him. Then he thought maybe Glenn only spoke to other Asian people like Sue. Which seemed kind of racist to him. Then Pepper just had to admit he’d never introduced himself to the guy, probably he was just shy and maybe that — the simple, clear explanation, as Dr. Anand would stress — was the truth.

They watched Glenn’s room, but could see little more than the floor and a pair of blue footies that Glenn had probably kicked off before going to sleep. They saw the same double windows as in Pepper’s room but Glenn’s faced the New Hyde parking lot, a sight much worse than Pepper’s lawn and trees. Then one of the ceiling panels in room six shook.

“What?” Sue whispered.

The wood-fiber ceiling tile buckled. There was a weight, on the other side, pressing down.

“No,” Pepper said.

Miss Chris reached room 12 (there were sixteen rooms in each hall). The door slammed open. From this far off, they couldn’t hear the light switch flip up. Miss Chris gave the same call as before.

“Wake-up hour! Come for breakfast!” Her breakfast call camouflaged the sound of the ceiling tile when it snapped. The two pieces of the panel dangled for a moment before tumbling to the ground.

Sue and Pepper watched but couldn’t speak now. They couldn’t move. They forgot about Miss Chris. What could her wrath compare to the sky falling in?

Just a moment later, they watched as something plopped out from the darkness overhead. It landed on the tiled floor.

A rat.

It was as long as Pepper’s forearm if you included the tail. Its fur was gray. It fell and stayed there on the floor, on its side, stunned from the impact. Its paws were curled close to its body. The long whiskers on the right side of its face stood up slightly. Every few seconds, they quivered.

“That thing must weigh twenty pounds,” Pepper said. “To break through the ceiling like that.”

And yet, despite his disgust, Pepper felt such relief. It was a rat, yes, but only a rat. At New Hyde that almost seemed like a happy ending. “People say there’s thousands of them living up there,” Sue said.

“Rats in the walls?”

“On the second floor,” Sue clarified.

The rat’s whole body shook once now. Its paws clawed the air. Slowly at first, but then more frantically. Until it worked up enough momentum to rock itself upright.

Miss Chris reached room 14 now, and Pepper wondered if there were even any patients in all these rooms. Maybe it didn’t matter. Do every room quickly and you’ll get everyone. Stop and check, room to room, and you’ll waste more time.

“Wake-up hour! Breakfast!”

Now that it was up, the rat scurried right out of Glenn’s room. It crossed into the hall, hustled into Pepper’s room, shot under the bed, came out the other side, and went right for the box of Cocoa Puffs Pepper had brought to the room the night before. It had been close enough that he could’ve reached for it if Sue had been hungry. Now the rat had sniffed it out.

The rat reached the box of sugared cereal. Pepper and Sue watched, absolutely gobsmacked. It bumped the box so the box fell flat. Then in one swift motion, the rat clamped its teeth into the nutritional-information chart. Prey captured, the rat plowed right back under the bed. It came out the other side, wobbling a bit. It kept its head up so the box didn’t drag on the floor. Imagine a man carrying a sofa in his arms on his own. Better yet, imagine a man carrying your sofa off like that. That little rat gangster shuffled through the open doorway and into the hall.

“Vermin!” They heard Miss Chris shouting from down the hall. The rat didn’t return to room six, it fled down the hall, away from Miss Chris, headed for the nurses’ station. In a moment, Miss Chris, moving with more agility than Pepper had seen her employ in more than two months, came shuttling past the open doorway.

“Vermin!” she shouted to the staff members at the far end of the hall. “Get the broom!”

Who would win? The staff or the rat?

Hard to say which side Pepper was rooting for.

Sue and Pepper lay there in shocked silence.

Sue finally looked at Pepper. “Why do you keep cereal on the floor?”

Pepper laughed and thought about how to explain, but any response was interrupted when he looked over Sue’s shoulder into Glenn’s room and saw a pair of feet dangle down from that hole in the ceiling.

Pepper opened his mouth but nothing escaped.

Sue turned in time to see the legs appear. Thin and pallid. The skin mottled and loose. They swayed, forward and back, floating in Glenn’s room. The soles of the feet looked gray and hard.

Then the figure dropped. They saw the lean, cadaverous body. The impossible, monstrous head.

The Devil stood in room six. It gazed at them. “Do you see that?” Pepper whispered.

“Yes,” Sue said.

Even from across the hall they heard it breathing, heaving.

And if Miss Chris, the rest of the staff, the rest of the world was making any noise, they sure couldn’t hear it now.

Pepper held Sue’s left arm and she grabbed his hand tightly.

The last time he’d seen the Devil it had been bleating with panic; Loochie’s hands had wrestled its horns back and Pepper had been draped across the backs of those skeletal legs. It had seemed so weak for a moment. Spent. All the vigor knocked out of it. Maybe Coffee could’ve blinded it with those two needles.

If only Dorry hadn’t been there!

Then maybe it wouldn’t be here now.

But there it was.

The Devil pulled its lips back, exposing teeth the color of oyster shells. The tangles of fur below its chin were clumped and wet; they swung like curtains of moss. Pepper heard a muffled sniff. But it wasn’t the monster this time. Sue was crying.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. He kissed her cheek.

“I heard you cry once,” Pepper said loudly. “You were scared.” He wasn’t talking to Sue.

The Devil turned its enormous head sideways, as if to see Pepper more clearly. One gray-white eye fixed on him. It inhaled deeply. It took two steps toward them.

It grabbed room six’s doorknob for balance.

“You’re not getting her,” Pepper gloated. “At least she’s leaving.”

Sue sniffled. When she spoke, she whispered.

“There’s a Devil waiting for me in China, too. If this one doesn’t get me, that one will.”

The Devil’s head tipped forward, then lifted again. It seemed to be nodding, agreeing with Sue. But if that was the case, if Sue was meant to be taken, why not just come into this room and try? Just fucking try it! Pepper’s arms and legs got stiffer, his chest filled with hot air, his face felt like it was vibrating. He was getting amped. It was going to come in here for Sue. Win or lose, he was going to fight. He was ready.

But Pepper wasn’t prepared for what happened next. The Devil didn’t come out for them. It stayed over there.

The Devil slammed Glenn’s door shut.

When that happened, Pepper and Sue had the same thought: We’re safe.

Pepper and Sue watched Glenn’s door. They didn’t move. They didn’t touch each other. Each was too shocked, too ashamed, by how relieved they felt.

“Vermin!” Miss Chris shouted again from the end of the hall. The squeaking sound beneath her cry might’ve been the rat getting bashed or the soles of Miss Chris’s old Crocs.

“Maybe Glenn’s not even in there,” Pepper offered.

“Maybe,” Sue agreed, though neither of them was convinced.

Pepper hopped out of bed and was in the hallway before he remembered he was naked. No time to turn around for a costume change! Pepper went through the door. What did he find?

Glenn’s body being pulled up into the ceiling.

The man’s head and neck and shoulders had already gone through the open hole. The rest of him dangled, four limbs flailing as they rose. Picture a large fish being yanked into a boat.

Pepper rushed toward the man, a guy he hardly knew, and threw his arms around the thighs. Pepper bear-hugged them and pulled.

Glenn’s body slipped down. Everything from the shoulders up reappeared. A bedsheet had been tied around Glenn’s shoulders, pinning the arms against his sides. The sheet ran into the crawl space, into the dark. The tension on the sheet fell slack. Pepper still held him up, arms around the thighs. Glenn’s eyes fluttered and opened. He saw Pepper there. He grinned, showing all those fucked-up teeth, and the overwhelming beauty — the spark of life in that grateful smile — made Pepper’s breath catch in his throat.

Pepper heard a gruff snort from the crawl space. Then the sheet went taut and Glenn’s body rose toward the shadows again.

But Pepper squared off. He tightened his hold on Glenn’s legs. He spread his feet and planted himself. One time, in a fourth-floor walkup, an upright piano had slipped loose from Pepper’s partner on a flight of stairs and Pepper had steadied himself like this. That day he’d stopped a piano that should, by all rights, have crushed him.

The Devil wanted Glenn?

Well, it couldn’t fucking have him.

Pepper held on tight and leaned backward. That brought Glenn’s body back down again. But this time, the sheet stayed tense, and the grunting in the crawl space was followed by a scratching sound, like the Devil was bearing down, and the sheet slipped from around Glenn’s shoulders. But it caught around his throat. It had become a noose.

Glenn opened his mouth to shout but only spit came out. The man’s cries were being choked off. Pepper didn’t have enough weight to win this tussle alone.

But he wasn’t alone. Now Sue was with Pepper. She clambered around him until she’d grabbed Glenn’s ankles. She squeezed them in her arms just like Pepper did with Glenn’s thighs. And in the darkness of the crawl space they heard another snort, but this time it sounded weaker.

And in a moment, Glenn’s body fell toward them. Pepper and Sue tried to hold him up but he slipped and his back slapped hard against the tiled floor. At least it wasn’t his head. The sheet came spooling down after him. It gathered over Glenn, cloaking his face. Sue let go of his ankles and Pepper set his legs down. Sue pulled the sheets from Glenn’s face. His mouth lay open, his tongue fat. His eyes were closed and his skin as purple as a plum. Sue put her fingers under his nose and held them there. She whispered, “He’s breathing.”

Sue and Pepper were on their knees like attendants preparing Glenn’s body for mummification. The sheet remained tied around Glenn’s neck. Sue touched it, but wasn’t sure if she should untie it. Would that hurt Glenn more?

“Now how you like this?”

Pepper and Sue found Miss Chris there in the doorway. The red plastic key chain was around her wrist, and the keys dangled near her knee. They swung loosely and clinked against the door frame.

Pepper and Sue hopped to their feet. Naked, they looked like John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the cover of Two Virgins. But less attractive. Pepper said, “We found him like this.”

Miss Chris looked at Glenn, who looked dead. Miss Chris’s face betrayed no emotion. She alerted the rest of the staff by calling out the code for a suicide attempt.

“Red Jack! Red Jack! Red Jack!” she yelled. “Northwest Two! Room six!”

Miss Chris waved Pepper and Sue out of the room. “Move now!” she said. “They coming with the cart.”

Pepper and Sue did as told. Miss Chris grabbed Sue’s arm as they passed her.

“You get dressed and you come back to me, hear?”

Sue dropped her head and nodded.

Miss Chris now ran into Glenn’s room. She kneeled, she looked into his eyes, and grabbed his wrist. Pepper didn’t keep watching. He went back into his room with Sue. He pushed the door shut.

“You think he’ll live?” Pepper asked as they dressed. His eyes were bright and wide. He still felt charged.

“I guess he’s got a chance,” Sue said. She almost sounded jealous.

Pepper held her. He slouched so his chin rested on the top of her head. She pressed her face into his chest so she could smell him.

Miss Chris walked into the room without knocking.

“Let’s go now. Let’s go.” She had one hand on her hip but her voice hardly sounded angry. Just tired, like an aunt who’s been put in charge of her fast little niece.

“I have an idea about your sister,” Pepper said. “It’s kind of wild, but Coffee—”

Sue kissed Pepper. Even while Miss Chris watched. Pepper laughed and returned the kiss. He squeezed her with the kind of hug that nearly every human being loves. An embrace.

When she pulled away, he said, “Coffee had this number. It was in Oakland.”

Miss Chris grabbed Sue’s wrist and led her away.

He said, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if …”

But now Pepper spoke to an empty room.

It didn’t matter. He figured he’d get in some trouble for sneaking her in — maybe they’d throw him in irons for a bit — but they’d probably let him up for dinner. And he’d have Coffee’s binder with him, the one Coffee left behind. He’d pull Sue into the phone alcove and show her the last phone number Coffee had scrawled on a sheet of paper: 5102821833. It would be Sue’s sister. Pepper believed it. And Pepper would help Sue with the conversation, just in case she got confused. He’d put the two sisters back in touch and the older sister would come through. How would that save Sue? He couldn’t guess yet. Not exactly. But he’d listened to Sue. Heard what she needed. She needed her sister. Good enough. He’d get her that much. And let the sister do something he couldn’t manage from in here.

Pepper didn’t realize he would never see Sue again.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true.

He would see her one more time.

In an article, clipped from a newspaper.

32

PEPPER WAS WRONG about his punishment, too. They didn’t snap him into restraints, lash him to the bed. Miss Chris had enough to do with inputting her notes about Glenn’s “episode” into the computer. The inappropriate program, Equator, had been swapped out for the proper record-keeping program, Equator Zero. Instead of “charting,” the staff would now spend much of their shifts “logging.” Even Miss Chris, the stalwart, had been trained well enough that she could log in, find “Incident Report” on the main menu, and type out, however slowly, the facts about Glenn. She left out the part about Pepper and Sue. As for the Devil’s role in this, she made no mention. She hadn’t seen it, after all.

The staff put all the patients on lockdown. Keeping them in their rooms for as long as it took to move Glenn to the ICU. Pepper spent the time clutching Coffee’s binder as if it contained ICBM launch codes. Inside he found the pages and pages of meticulously kept records. Coffee had done some formidable charting of his own. He’d reached out to government representatives at every level: neighborhood council members, community reps, borough presidents, city-wide officeholders, state and federal representatives. No success with any of them.

Coffee had reached members of the press as well. And had better luck teasing them with the catnip of exposé and scandal. Since New Hyde was a New York City hospital, he’d had particular interest from a reporter from The New York Times. A woman who, even from Coffee’s notes, clearly worked hard to use Coffee as a source. But inevitably, the ties were severed. Relationships with reporters lost. In his notes Coffee entertained the paranoid fear that all these journalists had been visited by thugs from “Coffin Industries.” Told to button up or, even worse, killed. What were the chances he’d come up with that company’s name randomly? Dorry probably spun the same tales to every new admit. The tour, the stampeding buffalo, the cliff, and Coffin Industries. Like a speech given to incoming freshman by a college president. The ward’s common myths.

But all that really mattered now was scrawled on the last page in the binder. Ten digits in blue ink. The last number Coffee ever dialed. Pepper could even hear Coffee just now.

Washington, D.C.! The nation’s capital. No that’s not where I am. That’s where you are! What do you mean “Oakland”? The President doesn’t live in Oakland.

Pepper spent the morning in the makeshift bed he’d shared with Sue. Every wrinkle in the sheets, each indentation in the pillows seemed to hold a trace of her. Pepper lay in the bed, dressed in his street clothes. The binder held tight in the crook of his right arm. When staff let all the patients out of their rooms for lunch and midday meds, Pepper was the first in line. He swiped his little white cup out of Scotch Tape’s hand. He swallowed the pills so eagerly that Scotch Tape and Nurse Washburn suspected a trick. After he slugged the pills, Nurse Washburn put her hand out. “I’ll throw out your cup.”

When Pepper handed it back to her, she peeked inside.

But Pepper felt too good to take insult. Today he was going to help Sue, and nothing could break his great mood. “You don’t trust me?” Pepper asked.

Nurse Washburn, the former Josephine, looked at Pepper coolly. She closed her fingers around the empty white cup, crushed it into a ball, looked over Pepper’s shoulder and said, “Next.”

Pepper went on his way, almost dancing toward the television lounge. Where he found a new orderly manning the lunch rack. Pepper accepted his lunch tray and took the far table. Where he’d first kissed Sue, first touched her. Pepper practically bounced in his chair. He didn’t even eat.

The regulars rolled through for their food. Wally Gambino bopped along and Heatmiser shuffled. The Haint appeared, somehow looking as spiffy as ever even though she wore the same purple pantsuit and matching hat every day. Yuckmouth showed up, too, took his lunch and sat alone. He might’ve been bereft at the damage done to his friend but who could say? His expression was as impassive as always. Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly arrived together. No one had claimed the television, so Mr. Mack flipped to the station, and the show, he loved most. Mr. Mack clapped when that stone idol, Steve Sands, filled the screen. Frank Waverly huffed like an agitated mutt.

Mr. Mack glared at his roommate. “Oh, hush.”

And there were the two new admits. The older women Pepper had seen on the night Dorry attacked Loochie. They weren’t Sam and Sammy, he could see that clearly. Older and a bit more professional-looking in their air. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Doris Roberts from Everybody Loves Raymond. That’s who they looked like. Sandra Day O’Connor and Doris Roberts.

They sat down one table over from Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly.

“Now everybody listen to this man,” Mr. Mack announced. He raised the volume on the set. “He grew up right here in Queens!”

“Yo,” Wally Gambino said, with a mouthful of macaroni. “How’s this motherfucker’s show always on?!”

“Language,” the new orderly said, but it came out weakly, like he was still practicing giving commands. Everyone ignored him.

“He’s popular,” Mr. Mack said to Wally. “That’s why they air his show three times a day.”

“When does this dude sleep?!” Wally pressed.

“The truth don’t need a rest,” Mr. Mack said.

Frank Waverly huffed again but Mr. Mack didn’t notice.

Steve Sands, as per usual, looked as though he’d just been thawed. Not soft enough to melt yet, but starting to bead.

“Welcome back to News Roll. And I’m Steve Sands. You might remember a month ago when I brought you the story of a mental patient who had to be put down by New York City Police when he tried to harm another patient. There was some outcry about the case. Some felt the police went too far, but I wondered if people wanted the police to wait until the man hurt or killed some innocent person before they stopped him. But we won’t get back into that debate.”

The picture of Coffee from the news piece appeared over Steve Sands’s right shoulder. It hadn’t become any more pleasant since the last time Pepper had seen it. If anything, it looked worse because now, projected on that flat television screen, the image was about the size of a magazine page.

“Well, I’d also mentioned in that piece that this man, Kofi Acholi, was an illegal. He overstayed his time in this country by abusing our work-visa program. And today, we’ve found out that his body will be shipped back to his home country. The nation of Ooganda. Am I pronouncing that right, Beth? You-ganda? Thank you. He’ll be shipped back to Uganda where he’ll be buried, or whatever they do over there.”

Pepper remembered sitting in his room with Coffee, each man on his bed, lunch tray in his lap. He looked down at the tray in front of him now. He peeled the small orange they’d given him. He’d traded a few orange wedges for a can of Sprite. Such a stupid, insignificant way to remember a man. And yet as Pepper ate the orange, his face softened. He looked at his lap and, very quietly, he cried.

When he looked up to the screen, the picture behind Steve Sands had changed from Coffee’s face to a giant green dollar sign.

“But here’s my question,” Steve continued. “Who’s paying to send Mr. Acholi back? You know the answer. The same people who paid for Mr. Acholi’s stay in the hospital. Where he enjoyed the finest health care services in the world. For free. Well, it was free for him. But for you and me? We picked up the bill for this man to spend a year getting medical care in one of our nation’s hospitals. So what should we call this plane ride back home? The tip? This system carries some of us, but it’s on the backs of the rest of us. That’s the ugly truth. Well, we’ve been used for too long, my friends. We can’t afford it. Every man for himself. Make sure your butt is covered.”

Doris Roberts and Sandra Day O’Connor frowned at each other as the show went to commercial. Doris Roberts said, “Well, I don’t like that.”

Mr. Mack sniffed at her. “I suppose you’d like it if we all go bankrupt taking care of deadbeats? Well, I’m about through with kicking back while our enemies prey on us.” Mr. Mack waved a finger at the ceiling. “Steve Sands is on my wavelength.”

Sandra Day O’Conner forced down a few bites of her tuna-fish sandwich, then she unwrapped her cookie. She bit into it and almost immediately spat it out. “That man makes more money in one year than you’ve made in your whole lifetime,” she said.

Mr. Mack nodded. “Yes. He’s very successful.”

Sandra Day O’Connor looked at Mr. Mack, bewildered, and he smiled back. Pepper couldn’t take the glee on Mr. Mack’s face. He shouted at the old man. “You know Steve Sands would deport you, too.”

Mr. Mack, three tables away, narrowed his eyes at Pepper. “I’m an American citizen.”

Pepper pointed at the television. “Not his America.”

Mr. Mack glowered. Next to him, Frank Waverly grinned.

Pepper stomped out of the lounge and to the nurses’ station, where Nurse Washburn sat alone, logging, now that Miss Chris had finished Glenn’s incident report. There were four stacks of paperwork on the desk. All of it had to do with Coffee or Glenn. Nurse Washburn had been told to hurry and get all this information into the computer. The faster they updated the records, the faster they could move on to the next step, the whole point of Equator Zero.

But none of that mattered to Pepper.

“I’m looking for Sue,” Pepper said. “I thought she’d be at lunch since we didn’t get breakfast.”

Nurse Washburn looked up from the computer and stood up. “Repeat yourself,” she commanded.

“Xiu.” He tried her Chinese name but did no better with the pronunciation than before. “The Chinese Lady.”

Nurse Washburn looked toward Northwest 1.

“Oh, her. Yes. They took her this morning. She’s gone.”

Did Nurse Washburn take a certain pleasure in telling Pepper the news? Best to stop thinking about it before she had to admit the truth. Get back to the paperwork, converting paperwork into electronic files. Ignore the big man, who was leaning against the nurses’ station and moaning like an abandoned child

She’s gone.

Pepper stumbled into the phone alcove and found it empty. He took out his wallet, tried to use his credit card to make a call, but when he punched in his card number, an automated voice told him the card had been declined. He’d forgotten it was maxed out.

Then the phone rang.

Pepper picked it up so enthusiastically it nearly fell. He bobbled it like a football, but the pass remained complete. He held the receiver to his ear. Who would be on the other side? Sue? Her sister? (Somehow?) Maybe his brother, Ralph? The moment felt primed for magic.

“Hello,” Pepper said hopefully.

“Hey, there.” A woman’s voice. Cheerful. Bouncy.

“This is Pepper.”

“This is Sammy,” the woman said. “You remember me?”

“Sammy?”

“I was in there, too. Been gone about a month, though it feels like a lifetime!” She laughed into the line.

Pepper’s hand felt cold. He felt like he was hearing from a ghost.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m trying to reach Sam, but every time I call, people just get quiet and—”

He hung up on her.

Sammy was alive.

As soon as Pepper set the phone down in the cradle, he wanted to pick it back up again. He wanted to explain to Sammy. That everyone knew Sam had killed herself because she thought the Devil had taken her friend. And now, to hear Sammy’s happy laughter on the line, to think Sam took her own life simply because her best friend had been a little preoccupied? It was too much. It was absurd. Pepper almost couldn’t register the enormity of such a cosmic joke.

But he couldn’t explain any of that to Sammy because Sammy wasn’t on the line. Only a dial tone. How many times would Sammy have to call before someone had the presence of mind to explain? Pepper set the receiver back into the cradle. Remember Sue. It was too late to explain anything to Sammy. (And much too late for poor Sam.) But for Sue there was still time.

Pepper left the alcove and knew what he had to do. Regardless of pride. (And irony.) Nurse Washburn and Scotch Tape stood inside the nurses’ station now. After Nurse Washburn finished inputting a file, Scotch Tape took each one and tossed it into a blue plastic bag. There were two bags at his feet, already full. Paperwork that had been logged into the computer, and now would be sent out for shredding.

This sort of hurt Scotch Tape. Right in the wrists. Him and Miss Chris and all the staff who’d been working at New Hyde for a while. How many years had they committed to charting. Now it would all be turned into shavings. The same information saved with the press of a button. Progress, yes, but he wished it had come long before he’d developed some kind of early-onset arthritis.

Pepper shlumped up to the nurses’ station, giving Scotch Tape and Nurse Washburn a start. He leaned his elbows on the counter. He bowed his head before he met Scotch Tape’s gaze.

“Let me borrow a quarter?” Pepper said.

Panhandling is hard work.

Pepper sure found out.

Neither Scotch Tape nor Nurse Washburn was inclined to give him any coins. And Mr. Mack cackled when Pepper asked. Frank Waverly at least looked pained when he reached into his pockets and came out with nothing. Nothing from Heatmiser or Yuckmouth. Wally Gambino shouted, “Hells-fuckin’-no!” The Haint didn’t even seem to hear him, she shuffled past and didn’t look up from the floor. Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters weren’t up and about during midday. Doris Roberts told him she’d write him an IOU and give him something when her family came for visiting hours later in the week. And Sandra Day O’Connor scowled and told him to “get a job.” (“What job can I get inside a mental hospital?” he asked. Her response? “Get a job!”—only louder.)

He met Loochie as she was leaving the television lounge. She had a white towel inelegantly draped over her head. The rest of her remained as polished as ever, baby-blue Nikes, clean jeans and a sporty little sweatshirt, but her head was hidden. It made her seem like a ghoul. He wouldn’t have recognized her if not for the sneakers. She almost walked right past him, lost in a daze. But he touched her arm.

“Loochie,” he said.

The shrouded figure stopped. It looked down at his hand, still touching her elbow. Pepper pulled his hand away. Then Loochie looked up at him. He could make out her eyes under the towel, but little else.

“How are you?” he asked quietly.

She stared at him.

“I’m sorry.…” He put his hand on the top of his head.

“My mother hasn’t seen it yet,” Loochie said.

Pepper couldn’t see her lips move when she said this. It was disconcerting. As if she hadn’t said it, only thought it, and he’d read her mind. “Did you tell her?” he asked.

“You think I should?”

“Call her,” Pepper said. “It’s going to be worse if she just shows up and sees you like … this.”

“It looks bad?” She patted the towel with one hand, as if she’d only just realized how absolutely bizarre she must look.

“You’ve looked better,” Pepper said. He didn’t mean that harshly, but that’s how Loochie took it.

“Well, your girlfriend is gone,” Loochie snapped back.

Pepper smiled. At least Loochie hadn’t lost her fighting spirit. He admired her very much for holding on to it. But there was still the important business at hand. The reason he’d been roaming the halls, accosting everyone.

Pepper said, “Can I borrow a quarter?”

Loochie’s surprised laugh made the sides of the towel shake. “You know who you sounded like just then?”

Then she lost her smile, as if she was embarrassed by it. “I don’t have a quarter,” she said. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Loochie pointed into the television lounge. Where Dorry sat alone. Not just by herself, but in an empty room.

Pepper looked at Dorry, then back at Loochie. But Loochie had already walked off.

Pepper walked into the lounge and looked up at the screen. The Weather Channel gave the five-day forecast.

Pepper approached Dorry.

“What you watching?” he asked.

She lifted the remote, turned the volume down. “I’ll give you a quarter,” Dorry said. “But you have to sit with me.”

Pepper rested one hand on the tabletop. He didn’t want to sit, but he did want that money.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Dorry said. She peered at the empty lounge. “Everyone has.”

Her white hair was brushed back, fully exposing her face. She looked thinner. Her eyes were red and dry. “Notice something different?” she asked.

“No more glasses,” Pepper said, still standing.

“Loochie broke them in our fight. Staff won’t replace them. That’s one of my punishments, I guess.”

Pepper pulled a chair back and sat down.

“I thought I could do it,” she said quietly. “I really did. I’m so tired, you see? I thought maybe we could work something out. Like a truce. I don’t know. I was kidding myself. Maybe I wanted you to stop him. But then I saw Coffee with those needles and …”

She stopped and looked out the lounge’s windows. She tapped the remote against her forehead a little too hard. Instinctively, Pepper reached out and pulled her hand down.

“I feel so bad about it, Pepper, you have to know I do. But I couldn’t see him hurt any more than I could see any one of you hurt.”

Pepper pulled his hand back. His mouth went dry. “But one of us did get hurt, Dorry.”

“I know! I know. You’re all like my children. Doesn’t matter how old or young. My sons and daughters. And I try to be good to all of you. Don’t you know that’s why I’m the first person who comes to the door? The first face a patient sees should be a friendly one. I show each of you around. Get you a little more food if you need it. Dorry does that. For everyone. Even him.”

Pepper strained forward in his seat. Suddenly he wanted to shake her.

“But why do you have to be that way? Can’t you just use a little common fucking sense! Take a look at that thing and figure out it doesn’t deserve to be treated like … one of us?”

Dorry slid the remote control toward him as if she was passing him a baton.

“Should I have done that when you came in?” she asked. “You weren’t one of us. You said it yourself.”

Pepper stood up and pushed his chair back so hard it fell over.

“All your best intentions,” he said. “And we’re still stuck in this hell. So what’s the point?”

Was he scolding Dorry, or himself?

Dorry gave Pepper a tight-lipped smile. “You help,” she said. “That’s the point.”

Pepper crowded over her. From a distance, it must’ve looked like he was about to crush the old woman. And he was. “You haven’t helped anyone. You’ve made every life you’ve touched — me, Loochie, Coffee — worse.”

Dorry’s eyes fluttered. He thought she might actually faint. But he couldn’t stop himself now. The anxiety he’d been feeling for Sue, the grief for Coffee, the pity for himself, it all became rage. He wanted to trample Dorry just then.

“So what good are you really?” he asked. “What good are you to anyone?” Dorry pursed her lips and blew out quietly. She looked down at her hands.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I guess I see what you mean.”

She reached into her bra and took out her “coin purse.” It was really just a length of paper towel folded and wrapped around some change. She put the whole thing on the table.

“I said I’d give this to you if you sat with me,” she told him.

Pepper grabbed it right away. He felt no remorse for what he’d just said to her. He was too busy unwrapping the paper towel and counting the money.

Dorry looked toward the window again but could hardly see anything beyond blurs. She sighed deeply.

“Maybe this is the world. Northwest, I mean. If you think about it, what’s so different? Wake up in the morning, eat some breakfast, take a few pills to start the day. Go to a conference room and waste time. Go to lunch, take a few more pills. Bullshit the afternoon away. Eat dinner while you watch TV. Take a few more pills and go to bed. Isn’t that how most people are living? It’s been awhile since I was outside, but that’s what the news is always saying. Maybe out there is a lot like in here. The United States of New Hyde.”

Pepper felt dejected when he finished counting. Only eighty-five cents. Enough to reach Oakland? Maybe the initial three-minute call. He’d have to pack all the important information into that window. No greetings. No explanations. Just Sue — immigration jail — New Hyde Hospital — extradition.

“One big asylum,” Dorry muttered.

The old woman walked away from Pepper. She pushed a chair up to the windows as Pepper left the lounge. She sat and stared at the broad, cloudless sky, watching afternoon turn to evening.

33

BY DINNERTIME DORRY still remained in that chair.

She didn’t get up to eat dinner. Didn’t notice when other patients filtered back into the lounge. They turned on their shows, ate their meals, enjoyed some conversation, and Dorry hardly noticed any of it. One of the nurses on the night shift appeared with her evening meds. She took them without incident.

Meanwhile Pepper felt terrible.

You know what eighty-five cents got him? A recorded message that still demanded sixty-five cents more to connect the call. And where would he get that? He’d tried all the other patients, and the staff members on the night shift rebuffed him.

Now what? Pepper had been asking himself that question for a few hours by the time Dorry took her evening meds. The only solution he could see was to get behind that nurses’ station again and use their phone. Once again, he’d be mimicking Coffee! (And, of course, he had to wonder if that last step — gunshots — would follow.)

This plan had no chance of success, though. New Hyde’s phone protocol had been changed. The staff’s phone had been removed. Poof. Vamoose.

Son of a bitch!

Staff members had been approved for cell-phone use. Simple. No more need for a machine on the desk. Especially if it was going to incite a riot. Pepper entertained the idea of pickpocketing one of the staff members, but he knew he could never pull it off. Pepper was as subtle as a sonic boom.

When he reentered the television lounge that evening, the man was just salty. He wore a grimace that would’ve struck fear into the hearts of a well-armed militia. More than a few of the patients went on alert when Pepper entered the lounge. Think of the great white shark roaming the shores of Amity.

Mr. Mack watched Pepper wander the lounge for a full thirty seconds, feeling the agitation flying off him like hot sparks. Finally Mr. Mack said, “Sit your ass down or move on.”

But Pepper felt like a failure right then, not a thug. His grimace was just a sign that the contents had spoiled. Pepper spun toward Mr. Mack but he didn’t argue or even glower. He sat his ass down, across the table from Heatmiser. Heatmiser looked at Pepper quickly, and turned his chair away ninety degrees.

“It’s my half hour,” Mr. Mack announced.

Nearly everyone in the room groaned.

“Like it or not, we got a system,” Mr. Mack said. “And that means it’s my time.”

The remote was passed to him, and Mr. Mack flipped the channels until he reached his favorite station. Pepper wondered if Mr. Mack truly loved this show so much, or just loved forcing everyone else to sit through it.

“Hello, and welcome to News Roll. I’m—”

That’s all they heard because Frank Waverly, right next to Mr. Mack as always, snatched the remote out of his friend’s hand. Frank Waverly pointed the remote at the screen and turned it off. First time that had been done in over five years.

Mr. Mack looked at his friend, too shocked to be cruel. He almost whined when he said, “Well, now what are we supposed to do?”

Frank Waverly tucked the remote in his lap, under the table, and picked at his dinner quietly.

Doris Roberts grinned at Mr. Mack. “It’s actually Frank Waverly’s half hour.”

Mr. Mack’s mouth dropped open like he’d been gutted. “Oh, that’s fine,” Mr. Mack said, now picking at his dinner with a plastic fork. He looked across the table. “That you, Frank? I don’t even recognize you right now.”

Frank Waverly chewed his substandard food and did not look up.

The rest of the room stayed quiet, too. As if they were all getting used to the lack of the television’s sounds and sights. Soon people began speaking with one another. When other patients’ television times arrived, they chose to keep the set off. The conversations continued and many of the people lingered. For so long that when Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters arrived, they had to share one table. The lounge had gone all Old World, where the point of dinner was to talk with people, not just to clear your plate.

It was nice. Only Dorry was left out of the pleasure. No one tried to make conversation with her. They just left her there in her chair at the window.

Even Pepper let himself rest. A momentary reprieve. What else could he do, at this very moment, for anyone? Tomorrow, he would ask any visiting family members for change. They couldn’t get Sue down to Florida, process her deportation order, and shove her on a plane in just one night. No system on earth worked that well.

One of the night nurses entered the lounge. She was accompanied by an orderly. He walked behind her and scanned the room, paying particular attention to Pepper.

The nurse reached the glass door in the television lounge and said, “Smoke break. Everyone who wants one, line up.”

Here and there people pushed back their chairs. For the first time in hours.

Dorry moved, too. As a line formed, Dorry walked to Pepper’s table. She held a white envelope. She’d had it curled in her palm for so long that it had rolled into a tube when she set it down in front of Pepper.

He looked at it but didn’t speak. It had been hours since he’d said those cruel things to her, and guilt finally crept across his scalp like a chill.

Dorry pointed at the envelope.

“When they brought you in, I knew you were here to find your purpose,” she said. “But I can’t force you to be what I hoped you would be. I should’ve learned that from raising my children.”

The line of patients going on smoke break continued to grow. The room, without television, was quiet enough that nearly every patient in the room could hear what Dorry said.

“There is a way out,” she told Pepper. “I’ve seen it.” She tapped the curled envelope with two fingers. “This will show you how to get there.”

The room seemed to get quieter, conversations dying down. The only people making as much noise as ever were the oblivious staff members. The nurse and orderly were flirting with each other.

“You think you’re cute,” the nurse teased.

The orderly laughed quietly. “You think so, too.”

Dorry swept one hand, indicating the patients in the room. “You can take them all, or just save yourself. I leave that choice to you.”

Pepper put his hand over the envelope after Dorry pulled hers away. She joined the smokers line. The nurse finally looked away from the orderly and noticed the patients waiting there. She unlocked the door while the orderly stood beside her, ready to bodycheck anyone who might get unruly.

The patients filed outside.

Mr. Mack stood up, hands on his hips like a cartoon villain. He said, “I have been waiting for a while just so I could say this.” He stuck his hand out toward Frank Waverly, who still had the remote in his lap. “It’s my turn now, according to the schedule.”

“Why don’t you just leave it off?” Sandra Day O’Connor asked.

“Why don’t you wipe the gravy off your chin,” Mr. Mack replied.

Sandra Day O’Connor looked at her friend, Doris Roberts, who hadn’t had the heart to point out the small brown smudge. Doris Roberts pointed to the spot and Sandra Day O’Connor daubed at it with her napkin.

Frank Waverly, meanwhile, had not given up the remote. So Mr. Mack reached across the table and slapped Frank Waverly’s tray. The empty juice carton flew to the floor.

The orderly at the glass door saw this and said, “You can’t use your hands like that, Mr. Mack.”

Mr. Mack looked over his shoulder and scowled. “When I want to hear from you, I’ll tell you what to say.”

The nurse joined in. “You don’t speak to Rudy like that.”

“Big girls shouldn’t have big mouths,” Mr. Mack spat back.

Rudy, the orderly, stomped over to his table, the nurse right beside him. But the nurse caught herself. She remembered Pepper was nearby and went back to the glass door leading out to the court. She locked it, then returned to Rudy’s side. The patients out on the court didn’t notice this, they were trying to smoke down three or four cigarettes before being called back in.

“You going to apologize to Clio, my man.” The orderly loomed over Mr. Mack. Frank Waverly, at the same table, hadn’t looked up yet. He ate even more slowly. The remote remained in his lap.

The nurse, Clio, said, “Please give me the remote, Mr. Waverly.”

Frank Waverly handed it to her.

“Now this is a reasonable man,” Rudy said, pointing at Frank Waverly.

“He’s a turncoat,” Mr. Mack growled. “I got a Judas as my roommate.”

Rudy, a new employee at Northwest, tried to be reasonable. “There’s no need for this fuss …” he began.

Clio touched Rudy’s shoulder lightly, appreciatively, but also trying to call him off. They weren’t going to get an apology out of Mr. Mack.

This was turning into an entertaining little dessert course for all the other patients. At the very least they might see Mr. Mack disciplined, and Lord knew everyone wanted to see that. A little theater before bedtime. Well worth watching. Except. Except.

Except Dorry had just taken off her nightdress in the courtyard.

Dorry pulled it right over her head and stood there exposed.

Then, naked, she finished smoking her cigarette.

Rudy and Clio were focused on Mr. Mack, who grabbed at the remote control even though it was in the nurse’s hand. Those three were busy.

Which is why only the patients noticed what Dorry had done. Stripped down to her altogether. The ones inside stopped talking with one another quickly. They gathered at the windows of the lounge. The ones outside continued to smoke and watched Dorry coolly. What were they going to do? Best to let her have her freak-out. Soon enough, the staff would escort Dorry back to her room and sedate her. Nobody found this moment unfathomable. If you haven’t caused a scene in a psych unit, it’s just because you haven’t been inside long enough.

Dorry held the nightdress in one hand. It hung there like a line of rope. She pulled the cigarette from her lips with her free hand, blew out a small wisp of smoke. Then she looked into the lounge, saw the other patients, seemed surprised by their attention. Not embarrassed but almost amused.

She threw her nightdress over one shoulder. She looked like a nude bather. She waved at them, as if she was about to go for a swim.

Dorry turned her back to them. She walked toward the fence. Her flesh quavered with each step. Her skin sagged. The backs of her knees, her calves, were mottled blue.

Dorry reached the chain-link fence. She tossed her nightdress over the top so it covered the barbed wire. The white nightdress rested on the top like snow covering a hedge.

Pepper watched her, like all the others, absolutely smacked.

He’d been so surprised by her actions that he left Dorry’s envelope behind when he walked up to the windows with everyone else. It lay curled into a tube on the tabletop.

She’s making a jailbreak, Pepper thought. Then he felt slightly angry. She stole my fucking idea!

Clio finally noticed the atmosphere in the lounge. She turned away from the intractable Mr. Mack, the impassive Frank Waverly, and saw all the patients gathered at the windows. When she joined them, she saw Dorry climbing the chain-link fence.

Actually, Dorry was already at the top.

A rush and a push and she’d be on the other side.

“Oh, my good Jesus,” Clio muttered.

“Code two! Northwest Five!” Rudy shouted seeing Dorry. Loud enough that Dr. Anand almost heard him, and Dr. Anand was four miles away, at home. “Code two! Northwest Five!”

The rest of the night staff, an orderly and another nurse, scrambled from the station. Clio pushed her way through the crowd of patients, trying to reach the door that would get her outside. But the patients? They didn’t part for her. Their loyalties were split. They’d been trained, and medicated, for maximum docility, but despite all this, they remained willful human beings. If Dorry wanted out and had the fire to make the climb, then let her go.

But when Dorry reached the top of the fence, she didn’t hop over. Instead, she perched herself up there, in a crouch, like a gargoyle at the top of a building. Despite the nightdress the barbed wire was digging into her soles, but her face showed no pain. No exhaustion. No worry. Dorry had balanced herself in that crouched position and then, even more remarkable, she stood.

Because it was night, the dull silver fence was practically invisible, so the old woman seemed to be floating eight feet above the concrete court.

Dorry levitated.

More than a few of the witnesses would remember the moment that way.

The other staff members reached the lounge. They pulled patients aside. Rudy fussed with his keys, trying to find the right one for the door. But he had fallen into a panic, and his fingers wouldn’t work. Even when he found the right key, it didn’t help. Each time Rudy tried to slide the key in the lock, he lost his aim. He was just stabbing at it, grunting with frustration. Clio, try as she might, couldn’t get Rudy to step aside and let her open it.

Dorry scanned the lounge until she found Pepper’s flabbergasted face. She smiled, as tenderly as when she’d given him the tour of New Hyde.

Dorry mouthed one word to him.

Rest.

She took a step forward, as if she was just walking down the sidewalk. One foot out and she plunged. It wasn’t that far to fall. About eight feet.

Dorry landed on the side of her head. Her neck bent so hard, so fast, that for a moment her ear touched her elbow.

Then her body smacked flat on the concrete. She shivered once.

Rudy finally got the door open.

Three staff members ran out to Dorry’s body while Clio stayed in the lounge and used her cell phone to call the trauma unit.

The patients could not be ushered back to their rooms, no matter what the staff threatened. They wouldn’t stop staring at the old woman’s body. Her head had come to rest in a cluster of old stubbed cigarettes.

Before the crash cart arrived, Doris Walczak bled to death.