The Devil in Silver

34

“WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with you people?”

Pepper and Loochie sat quietly. They didn’t give an answer. And with good reason. This wasn’t meant as a question.

“You look like the rest of us, you were born just like the rest of us, but spend a few hours around you and it becomes obvious. You are not like the rest of us.”

Still, Pepper and Loochie stayed silent.

“I’m not even going to play games anymore. Pretend you’re just ‘different.’ We’re all special and wonderful in our special wonderful goddamn way. It’s a different ability not a disability. You don’t suffer from an illness, just an otherness. I mean, what does that even mean?! Well, forget it. I’m just going to say this because I need to say this. Out loud. To your faces. There is something wrong with you. You people are fucking crazy.”

Pepper and Loochie shifted in their chairs, not sure if they were supposed to laugh.

“I know that seems like a joke, since we’re here in a mental hospital. But it’s not a joke. You are terrible people. And honestly. Truly. Sometimes I want to kill you.”

Now everyone in the room, three bodies sat quietly. The last sentence filled the space like poison gas.

“Yes. Good. Fine. I said it. There are times when I go to bed and pray, please, God, just let me wake up to find out that every mental patient in the world has died. And I don’t even believe in God! Every day I look at your fat, ugly faces and I wish I could slap each one of you. I know it’s supposed to be the medication that makes you obese or slow or dazed or incoherent, but I don’t blame the medication. Look what it has to work with! Brains so warped, so poorly wired, that nothing will ever fix you.”

Pepper and Loochie were wondering when this would end. How long were they expected to just sit here and listen.

“People who have never been around you can talk and talk. I can’t think how many times I’ve been at a dinner with my wife and someone will start telling me about the evils of the mental-health profession. And when they’re done lecturing me, I ask them what the hell they know about it, and they tell me they read some damn book! Or they listened to a story on goddamn NPR! Well fuck them and fuck you!”

And with that, Dr. Anand ran out of breath.

He sat behind his desk, in his office, heaving. His brown face had gone red. (Which made it look sort of chestnut, really.) He’d risen from his chair as he ranted. Now he plopped back down and the cushion of his chair let out a sigh, as if even the furniture was fed up.

It was late morning, April 16. Dorry had killed herself the night before.

Dr. Anand’s “office” was another repurposed room on Northwest 1. The trio sat there, listening to the clock on the wall. The second hand clucked as it spun, and now it was the loudest thing in the room.

Doris Walczak’s body had finally been wheeled out of Northwest only hours ago. Off to the Rose Cottage. Dr. Anand had been called after she was pronounced dead. He’d come to the unit at four a.m. He’d been in this office for the last seven hours, interviewing patients.

The man wore a different pair of glasses than usual. These frames were metal and old and lopsided. The rubber guards on the ends of both arms (called temple tips) were worn down. Dr. Anand had a habit of using the ends to dig into his ears when they itched. Over the years they’d gone white-ish. These were not Dr. Anand’s professional pair, but he’d been so tired when he was called that he put on the wrong ones. It was as if he’d forgotten to put on his professional face. So he’d shown up as Samuel Anand, husband and father, who owned a two-family house in Rego Park. That’s the man who sat down with Pepper and Loochie in his office. And because he was tired he’d said way too much.

Dr. Anand leaned forward in his knockoff Aeron office chair, until his head touched the desktop. It looked like the man had fallen asleep. Pepper and Loochie looked at each other. Loochie still wore that damn towel on her head, which had been the last straw for Dr. Anand when he saw them walk in.

Pepper raised one hand to jostle the doctor, but then Dr. Anand’s shoulders trembled. They watched him a moment longer and that’s when they realized the man was crying.

Weeping.

Well, now what?

Pepper brought his raised hand back down to his lap and looked behind him at the room door, wishing some other staff member — a trained therapist perhaps — would come in here and take over. But that didn’t happen.

So Loochie reached across the desk. She patted the top of the man’s bushy head.

“Don’t cry, Dr. Sam.”

Pepper was surprised to hear Loochie’s charitable tone. But Loochie’s touch, Loochie’s tenor, only wrecked the man even more.

“Don’t cry, Dr. Sam.”

This time, Loochie mushed the doctor’s scalp. And her voice lost some of its kindness. The first time, it was like Loochie wanted to make him feel a little better but by the second, it was like she couldn’t believe that he, of all people in this building, was the one most in need of support. Dorry and Coffee (and Sam) were dead. Glenn’s larynx had been crushed. Loochie’s hair had been torn out. Pepper had spent weeks in manacles, with Dr. Anand’s tacit approval. So who ought to be in tears right then? Dr. Sam? Really?

While Loochie might’ve had a reason for her righteous indignation, Pepper’s perspective differed. He was forty-two to Loochie’s nineteen. At nineteen, the world seems so simple. This is because nineteen-year-olds have it almost completely wrong. Pepper knew differently. Who had a right to a few tears just then? How about every single one of them? Dr. Sam, too.

Dr. Anand pulled his head up. His eyes were wide and wild.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t believe I just said all that.”

Dr. Anand took off his glasses, almost slipped one temple tip into his itchy ear. But he stopped and laughed at himself when he realized which glasses he’d worn to work. He spoke to Pepper and Loochie more evenly now.

“You know how many of us started out together at New Hyde?” he asked. “I’m a forensic psychiatrist. There were three of us when I first arrived. I’m the only one left. I had friends who worked in other departments, not just the psychiatric unit, and do you know where ninety-five percent of them are now? They’re in private practice, or they work for a private hospital, or they went into research. They’re almost all gone, and I stayed. I don’t want to be applauded for that, but I don’t want to be punished, either.”

Pepper cleared his throat. “We’re not …”

Dr. Anand had regained his professional authority. He raised his hand to quiet Pepper.

“I’ve spent years lobbying my superiors for more funds. More staff. Better oversight. I’ve spoken with politicians. I’ve tried the press. I’ve gone to the community-board meetings. No one could ever tell me why the funding never materialized. I mean never. Do you know what Govenor Pataki did to our services when he was governor? The man butchered us.”

Dr. Anand sat back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling.

“One day the truth came to me. A wise man once said that every system is designed to give you the results you actually get. If you understand that, you’ll see that this system is working.”

“For some people,” Pepper said.

Dr. Anand shook his head emphatically. “No. Wrong. The system is working exactly right for those it was intended for. That’s why it hasn’t been fixed. Because it isn’t broken!

“Can you imagine anything more terrible? Doesn’t it hurt? I love being an American and I know it hurts me. I mean, New Hyde’s board knows we’ve got trouble with patients in Northwest. People hurting themselves, even dying. And what’s their solution? Equator Zero! Do you know what that program actually does?!”

Dr. Anand clapped his hands and glared at them, but they didn’t have any idea what Equator Zero was. Dr. Anand said, “The system is working and it hates us.” He shook his head and looked at his empty, open hands. “Sometimes I can see why people believe in the Devil.”

Dr. Anand’s cheeks drooped, his mustache sagged.

“But it can’t just be terrible and that’s that,” Pepper said. “Even on a sinking ship people still want to try to get out, to survive.”

“And you’ll be the one to save them, is that right?” Dr. Anand asked sarcastically. “You want to know your diagnosis? I finally figured it out.”

“I don’t want to hear that.”

Dr. Anand jabbed his finger in the air after each word. “Narcissistic. Personality. Disorder.”

He grinned at Pepper, but it wasn’t pleasant. “You’re going to get a lot of people hurt with your delusions of grandeur, Pepper.” He dropped his hand onto the table. “Maybe you already have.”

Behind them, the office door opened. Scotch Tape peeked in. “Dr. Anand?”

“What is it, Clarence?”

Scotch Tape jerked his head backward. “Cops is here.”

Dr. Anand pushed his glasses up with the knuckle of his pointer finger. “Okay,” he said. “Tell them to give me two minutes. I’m not done here.”

Behind Scotch Tape, the squawk of a police radio made everyone in the room jump. Scotch Tape’s head pulled back and the door opened wider. A cop stood there now, bulky and short. If he’d been out of uniform, you might’ve taken him for a funny guy; he had the build of a neighborhood comedian. The kind who taunts people and causes fights. In uniform, the same dimensions made the man seem petty and easily offended.

“Why don’t you talk to me right now?” the cop said. He had his hand on his police radio as if that were the handle of his gun.

Dr. Anand stood right up. Much to the surprise of Loochie and Pepper.

Dr. Anand walked over to the officer, and the officer said, “We can talk in the hall. I don’t care.”

The doctor looked back at Pepper and Loochie, narrowing his eyes. He tried to guess which would result in greater humiliation: ushering Pepper and Loochie out of the room, perhaps having to fuss with them about it (in front of this bossy cop), or just stepping into the hall as if following a command, here on his own unit. Which promised to wound his pride more? Dr. Anand stepped out into the hall and pulled the door three-quarters closed behind him, but held on to the doorknob. The doctor and cop had their conversation out there. Pepper heard their voices but couldn’t make out their words.

He looked at Loochie.

“Narcissist,” she teased.

He looked away from her. Could already imagine the time (how much time?) on the unit and all the days and weeks and years (decades?) when she’d whisper that word to him and it would be part of their secret language, a joke between lifers, and he despaired.

He scanned Dr. Anand’s desk. He heard the officer raise his voice, shouting to another cop there in the hall. Dr. Anand had been speaking with patients for hours, saving Pepper and Loochie for last. Was he trying to get the others to pin the blame for Dorry on them? On him? (Narcissist.) Pepper might’ve continued thinking this way if his eye hadn’t spied one particular device there on Dr. Anand’s desk.

Dr. Anand’s office phone.

They’d removed the device from the nurses’ station because patients regularly gathered there. But who would’ve thought to do the same in here, the doctor’s inner sanctum? Pepper didn’t hesitate.

“Loochie,” he said. “Will you do me a favor?”

She turned in her chair. “Why should I do anything for you?”

“It’ll piss off Dr. Anand.”

A grin tugged at Loochie’s lips, there under her towel. “Tell me.” She listened.

Pepper whispered, “Will you shut the door and keep them out?”

“That’s going to get us in some shit,” she said.

“Probably.”

Loochie grabbed the towel and pulled it tight around her scalp, tying it up as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. It was a surprise for Pepper to see her face again, unobstructed. To be reminded that he had just talked a child into committing another infraction.

Loochie stood up and jiggled her head from side to side. Limbering up. Then she picked up her chair with one easy motion and walked right up to the three-quarters closed office door. She kicked that bad boy closed.

Dr. Anand still had his hand on the knob, so when it slammed, he yelped with surprise. The cop next to him watched this in dumb paralysis. The door shut and they heard something jostling on the other side.

“They’re locking you out?” the cop chided.

Dr. Anand reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out his set of keys. “The door only locks with one of these.”

But Loochie hadn’t tried to lock it. She’d wedged her chair under the handle and braced her shoulder against the door. A makeshift barricade.

Pepper didn’t waste the opportunity. He jumped from a seated position and onto Dr. Anand’s desk. It didn’t even seem like he rose to his feet. One moment he sat and the next he flew. Landing on top of Dr. Anand’s paperwork with his big boots.

“That was pretty good,” Loochie said, admiringly.

“Lucretia!” Dr. Anand shouted from the other side. “Open this door!”

The cop’s police radio frazzled and bleeped. The cop said, “This is a violation, miss. Miss, you can’t do this.”

“A violation of what law?” Loochie said through the door. “You name the law I’m breaking.”

The cop said, “Unlawful trespass.”

“Dr. Sam invited me into his office!”

The cop was quiet a moment. “Just open the goddamn door, miss.”

One of them rattled the doorknob. Not with any force. Just testing. Loochie had her right shoulder against the door. She grabbed the knob with her left and held it tight.

Pepper picked up the phone. He held the receiver to his ear.

Loochie said, “You have to dial pound-nine-three first.”

Pepper was surprised that Loochie remembered what Dorry told Coffee on that Saturday night, but, of course, she’d been there, too.

Pepper dialed the code first and then the ten-digit number Coffee had written on the last page of his binder. By now Pepper had memorized it.

Someone in the hall heaved against the door. The sound was loud enough, the force heavy enough, that it had to be the cop or maybe Scotch Tape. Loochie didn’t believe Dr. Anand had that much gunpowder in his shell.

No more begging. It was time for battering.

But Loochie held steady.

“You better hurry,” Loochie said.

Pepper crouched on the desk, holding the receiver to one ear. He cupped his free ear with his other hand to drown out the banging at the door.

A dial tone.

Ringing.

A woman’s voice answered.

“Hello?” the woman said.

“Do you have a sister named Xiu?”

This time, Pepper pronounced her name perfectly.

A long pause, then, “Yes.”

“Would you like to save her?” he asked.

Xiu’s sister, Yun, cried on the phone. At first, it sounded like she was sneezing. Pepper didn’t interrupt right way, even though he was in a hurry. She asked him to explain so he did — quickly — and Yun was relieved. At first she’d assumed Pepper had kidnapped her sister. (It happens.) Pepper told her about the judge in Florida, Sue’s stay in immigration jail and the denial of her medication, her escape, her recapture in New York, her stay at New Hyde Hospital, and then being pulled out of Northwest yesterday. Every few seconds, Yun muttered to herself quietly, using her little sister’s pet name, saying, “My girl, oh, my poor A-Xiu.” When Pepper had told Yun everything, she said she must hurry and she hung up immediately. Didn’t even say good-bye. Pepper understood.

He set the receiver back down in its cradle.

Sure, one could wonder if Yun would be able to find help for her sister in time. First step would be to find a lawyer. A lawyer in California? (Where Yun lived.) One in Florida? (Where Sue had been sentenced.) Or one in New York? (Where she had most recently been held.)

And this would have to be a lawyer who was willing to work for nothing because Yun was a cashier at an Albertsons supermarket in Oakland.

Then that lawyer would have to contact the courts in time.

File the proper paperwork to delay the extradition.

Head down to Florida and petition the court for Xiu’s release. (Or would it be handled in a New York court?)

The lawyer might propose that Xiu be released into Yun’s custody so the two could return to Oakland. But what if they had to appear before the same petty dictator who’d sentenced Xiu to deportation? How likely was it that such an unreasonable prick would be reasonable now? (Although bullies like that usually act a whole lot nicer when the bullied person has retained counsel. Probably just a coincidence.) But even with a (free) lawyer, that judge would still have to turn over his original order. Or another judge would have to contest the Florida ruling.

There were so many steps to Xiu’s rescue. Even with Pepper’s phone call, there were a dozen more chances for it to fail.

But if two mental patients at New Hyde Hospital could commandeer a doctor’s office and dial out while police tried battering down the door and if they actually reached the right person using a phone number that a third mental patient pulled out of his ass (or from the vast Internet computer cloud with his brain), if all those steps worked out, well, shit, maybe the others would, too. It could happen. They’d just have to practice patience now. Take the long view. Success is airmail, not email.

Loochie looked back at Pepper when he hung up. Though her body rattled as she held the door, her face burned with pyrotechnic brightness.

Pepper looked as luminous as Loochie just then. Maybe it was the sunlight streaming through the office windows, but for a moment, the man’s aura glowed a triumphal red.

Pepper hung up the phone and told Loochie she could let them in. She kept her shoulder to the door for a minute more. She hadn’t barred the way just for Pepper’s sake.

Loochie didn’t know the Chinese Lady, so it wasn’t for her, either. She’d be the last to admit it, but this whole time she’d been picturing her mother and brother on the other side of that door. Loochie held it closed for that last minute.

Then she stepped back and pulled the chair away.

Loochie felt disappointed when the door opened and the cop and Dr. Anand didn’t fall into the room. She’d been hoping they’d spill across the floor, a little slapstick for the midday show. Instead, the door banged open and the two men stood there, huffing and glaring. Behind them stood two more officers in plain clothes, concerned but confused.

Funniest part? The pair in the second row were two of the three officers who’d brought Pepper to New Hyde. Huey and Louie. Pepper felt a shock because he hadn’t really expected them to come back for him. Yet here they were. Was it finally time for him to go before a judge? Receive his sentence? Huey and Pepper locked eyes and Pepper waited for some reaction.

Zero recognition.

Louie looked at Pepper and his demeanor was the same. Blank. Nothing.

“Where’s Dewey?” Pepper asked. He didn’t mean to say it, the words just came out. Of course, he regretted it — it was like he was trying to remind them who he was.

The question sounded completely random, nutty, so they ignored Pepper. (Dewey was actually back in the parking lot, waiting in the Dodge Charger. He’d refused to come inside the building, no matter what.)

“We done here?” Huey asked the cop in the uniform. It clearly galled the detective to have to ask the patrolman anything.

“Sorry,” said the pudgy one. He barked the same question to Dr. Anand. “We done?”

Dr. Anand stormed inside. He found Pepper sitting again, but remained suspicious. He checked his desk, every drawer. He checked the file cabinets in the corner. What had they been doing in here? What had been taken? What had been defiled? To Pepper’s great satisfaction Dr. Anand never even peeked at the telephone.

Dr. Anand surveyed his desk a second time. He noticed Pepper’s big boot print on the papers. But what did that prove? That Pepper had been stomping on his desktop? In a way, this actually calmed the doctor. They’d just been acting out, venting. A pair of monkeys who’d gotten loose. And, in a way, it had been the doctor’s fault. Samuel Anand chastised himself. He never should’ve left them alone. He’d spoken much too freely, feeling frazzled and forgetting himself, and that had led him to be lax. He must always be wary. He looked at Pepper, and then at Loochie, who had taken her seat again, too. The four cops crowded the doorway.

“You did something,” Dr. Anand said to them.

Loochie said, “We washed the floors for you, Dr. Sam.”

And do you know the four cops actually peeked at the tiles? All four. (Oh, if only Loochie had seen them do it. She would’ve grinned for a week.)

Huey nudged the patrolman.

“We got this other thing here,” the doughy cop said. Then jerked his head down the hallway. Meaning the reason they’d been called in. Because Dorry’s neck had snapped. Over in the smokers’ court. Where the old woman’s blood soaked the concrete.

Dr. Anand gave Loochie and Pepper the once-over. “You can go back to your rooms,” he said. “We’ll decide what to do with you later.”

“After the cops are gone,” Loochie said quietly.

“Yes,” Dr. Anand said. “Once we have you to ourselves again.”

Pepper and Loochie looked at the pudgy cop.

“You heard that?” Pepper asked. “He’s threatening us.”

The cop rubbed his shirtsleeve across his sweaty forehead and said, “Probably.” Then he and the other officers left the room.

Dr. Anand stooped forward, resting his knuckles on the desk. “Was it worth it?” he asked. “Are you going to keep causing me trouble?”

Pepper felt himself flush with honesty. He couldn’t lie.

And, “Yes,” he said, “yes. I will. Yes.”

35

AFTER PEPPER AND Loochie left Dr. Anand’s office, the doctor made a phone call to a member of New Hyde Hospital’s board of directors. He’d been dreading this moment since he got the call about Dorry. He stood while he talked. He wondered if they would finally fire him. He didn’t think he’d mind.

Pepper and Loochie entered the hall and walked toward the nurses’ station. As they entered the oval room, they saw patients scuttling all over. The unit was abuzz.

The sounds of running showers could be heard from Northwest 2 and 3. The rumbling of dresser drawers in people’s rooms sounded like bowling balls rolling down multiple lanes. Then the drawers slammed shut and it sounded as if every patient had just hit a strike.

Loochie and Pepper reached the nurses’ station. Miss Chris sat in front of the computer; only a very short stack of paper files on the desk. Miss Chris wore a pair of glasses down near the tip of her nose, and she tilted her head backward to see through them. Pepper and Loochie leaned against the high counter of the station.

“What’s going on?” Pepper asked.

“Is someone else dead?” Loochie asked.

Miss Chris sucked her teeth to dismiss Loochie’s question. She looked up at them, over the top of her glasses. “You’re leaving,” she said.

Pepper gestured to him and Loochie. “The two of us?”

The nurse frowned. “All of you.”

“Leaving where?” Loochie asked.

“We’re taking you out. So the police can work without any nonsense.”

Loochie and Pepper recoiled at the suggestion. It was the sound of that sentence: You’re leaving. It’s what Pepper and Loochie wanted, of course, but they both realized they were a little scared by the idea. They’d been to the courtyard but now they were being promised the mountaintop. Outside. Pepper had only been here for three months, Loochie for ten, but already both had kind of forgotten what outside really meant. Right now it sounded like sudden peace at the end of a long and delirious war. The thing everyone had been hoping for even as they stopped believing the day would ever come.

Loochie’s mouth went dry. “Where are we going?”

Pepper leaned almost over the nurses’ station counter, as if pulled by some magnetic force. His lips parted with muted surprise.

Miss Chris took some pleasure in keeping the answer to herself. “You’ll see,” she said. “Soon, soon.”

So many of the patients were showering that there wasn’t even any hot water by the time Loochie and Pepper reached their rooms. That didn’t stop either of them. It didn’t matter how frigid the water temperature, the thrill of stepping outside had started a fire inside. Curiosity fed the furnace. They each had a core temperature of 180 just then. If those showers were cold, they barely noticed.

Those patients who hadn’t worn their outside clothes in years, yes years, pulled them on no matter how tight or semi-tattered or out of style. Women and men brushed or combed or picked their hair. Pepper even tried to get the crinkles out of his shirt by rubbing it back and forth against the edge of his door, working the wood like he held a saw.

He must’ve really been putting some energy into smoothing his shirt. The door vibrated, causing some of the ceiling tiles to bump and shake. The tile with the stain, which had never been changed, even sprinkled a handful of flakes to the floor. The sight of the ceiling cracking caused such a visceral panic in Pepper that he dropped his shirt and jumped into the hallway shirtless and shaking. He stood there watching the ceiling, expecting a monster to come crashing down.

Pepper was shaken out of his trance when Mr. Mack stuck his head out of his room, saw Pepper, and shouted, “Nobody wants to see your pasty chest!”

Pepper ignored the insult (after all, Sue had liked it) and walked back into the room, to the ceiling tile. There were dozens of tiny cracks running from the stain, in the middle now. Pepper doubted this part of the ceiling was strong enough to hold much of anything anymore. A weak spot. Still Pepper found himself crouching slightly as he put on his shirt and left the room.

Scotch Tape stood at the secure door and tried to temper the patients’ enthusiasm. “Relax, everybody,” he told them more than once as they lined up in front of him. “It’s just, like, six blocks.” As if they would be disappointed. But he couldn’t understand. Scotch Tape walked eight blocks at the end of each shift and waited for the Q46. That bus took him to the Q30 and then he transferred one more time for the Q9. All this so he could get to Jamaica, Queens, where he then got on the J train and traveled home to Brooklyn. A ninety-minute commute. Sometimes longer with transit-system delays. He’d been working at New Hyde for three years. Making that commute five, and sometimes six, days a week. So this little trip of six blocks … to him, meant hardly anything.

The patients gathered at the door and Scotch Tape waited. He kept peeking out the plastic windowpane as if he were expecting company to appear on the other side, an armed escort maybe. That’s how some of the patients read his gesture, but of course some of them were clinically paranoid. Really Scotch Tape kept looking out the front door as an excuse to avoid the patients’ gazes, their conversations. The ones who got there first looked to him like dogs do to their masters. Let us out! Open up! He was already exhausted by their undisguised need. But finally they had all arrived. “Ready?” he asked.

“We’ve been ready!” Doris Roberts shouted playfully. She had even done her hair after borrowing Sandra Day O’Connor’s brush.

The other patients stared at the door. Let us out. Open up! Pepper and Loochie were the last patients on line. Loochie had decided against wearing the towel wrapped around her noggin. Instead she’d returned to the blue knit cap. She’d removed the strings that once held the pom-poms. Nurse Washburn and a second nurse were behind them. The patients stood in pairs, like schoolchildren.

Scotch Tape unlocked the secure door. That click barely audible over the twelve patients’ heartbeats. He held the door open.

“Come on now,” he said to Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, the first two in line. Their old sport coats were so crisp they looked steamed. (An easy trick if you run a hot shower and hang the coat inside the bathroom.)

“Don’t rush me,” Mr. Mack told him.

Scotch Tape nodded and waited, exasperated and respectful. Mr. Mack reached up and tried to close the buttons of his coat before moving. But his fingers were trembling so fast they damn near blurred. He had trouble getting the first button through its hole so Frank Waverly tried to help by reaching for Mr. Mack’s coat. But the littler man slapped Frank Waverly’s help away. Leaving Mr. Mack to wrestle with the fabric a little more. Frank Waverly got bored and walked out of the unit without him. The rest filed around him, too.

Mr. Mack was the last patient to go. His sport coat still unbuttoned.

The group passed through the secure ward door and into the hallway. The fluorescent lights above them cast the same old sickly yellow glow, but the lavender walls were a welcome change.

They walked through the empty lobby with its cheap chairs and sofas. These didn’t look any better just because they were on this side.

But then the group reached the double doors that led to the parking lot. Scotch Tape opened one door and the sunlight came in. Somehow this sunlight seemed different from the stuff that reached the smokers’ court. There, the light looked like melted margarine. But out here? You know.

Like butter.

Twelve patients stepped outside and proceeded to act the fool. They squinted up at the sun and covered their eyes with their hands. They sniffed the air theatrically. Some hummed. One yipped at such a high pitch it sounded like a birdcall. They wiped their hands over their faces as if they’d just lifted their heads out of a pool. It was the middle of April, and a wonderfully pleasant day. A strong wind played among the trees and some folks shut their eyes, just listening to the quivering leaves.

Shhhhhhh

Shhhhhhh

Shhhhhhh

“That’s nice,” Loochie said.

Pepper gazed at her and wondered if he looked as happy as she did. He hoped so.

Loochie opened one eye. “I thought someone was watching me.”

“You’re just being paranoid,” Pepper said.

She shut her eye, breathed deep once more. “That’s what the doctors tell me.”

“They have pills for that,” Pepper said.

Loochie laughed with him. The other patients seemed to be having their own reveries. Even Mr. Mack was feeling better out here. With his eyes shut, he found the top button of his sport coat. With steady hands he slipped it through the corresponding hole in one try.

“Everybody ready to walk?” Nurse Washburn asked.

Scotch Tape raised one hand at the front of the group. “Let’s go.”

They took the six blocks slowly. Some of them, like Pepper and Loochie, could probably have done with a faster pace but others, like Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, the Haint, and Sandra Day O’Connor, had more gingerly strides. This wasn’t just the fault of old age or medication. The sidewalks around here were also a mess. On every block, there were a few trees whose roots had finally cracked through the concrete surface, causing the sidewalk panels to buckle and occasionally shatter. Neighborhood joggers didn’t bother running on those sidewalks because it was double hell on the knees. Joggers, bike riders, even folks out walking their dogs tended to move in the street. The only people limber enough to risk the sidewalks were neighborhood children, who found all the dips and rises kind of fun. The staff wouldn’t let the patients walk in the road, even though everyone could tell it was the commonsense choice. What if one of them got smashed by a passing van? All three staff members would lose their jobs for that one. Not to mention the tragedy of someone getting smashed by a van. (But really, the fear of losing a decent-paying job in 2011 could not be overstated.) So if the older patients, or the dazed patients, or the morbidly obese patients took their time to move six blocks, well, no one felt too angry with them.

People from the neighborhood watched the group go by. An old woman dragging her garbage bin out from the side of her house or a middle-aged couple returning home from the grocery store. They didn’t throw eggs or stones. No pitchforks and torches.

Mostly, the neighbors just watched them, as you would any time a parade made its way down your street. The neighbors watched intently but refused to admit it. They did this strange move where they ducked their heads as the patients passed, looking at the sidewalk or their front lawns or their garbage bins, always toward the ground. But anyone could clearly see the eyes shifting up to gawk.

“Hey, Pepper,” Loochie asked. “How come white people do that?”

She mimicked the move; head down but eyes surreptitiously on alert.

Pepper frowned. “Why you asking me?”

“You’re about the only white guy I know,” Loochie said.

Pepper blushed red. “That’s not true.”

“What other white guys you think I come across?” she asked. “I live in Laurelton.”

Now he caught himself looking at the folks in the neighborhood. All the people in front of these homes were white. He hadn’t even been thinking about it. But now he watched the neighbors like he was actually going to explain some behavioral trait to his naïve friend.

And once Loochie had mentioned it, he had to admit it seemed kind of true. Looking without looking. As soon as the group of patients reached them, the locals dropped their heads, but Pepper could see their eyes shifting warily. Was this really something white people did? Only white people? Did he do it, too?

At first, Pepper wanted to tell Loochie it was a way to pretend the patients weren’t there. A trick for making others invisible. That made a simple kind of sense to him. But as Pepper watched it happen again and again, he changed his diagnosis. It began to seem like these people thought that by dipping their heads they were actually making themselves invisible. As if you couldn’t see them if they didn’t look directly at you. Talk about insane!

That’s where things got uncomfortable for Pepper. After all, he was a white guy. So wasn’t Loochie criticizing him? Assuming he knew why white people played this eye-contact game meant that he, too, had probably done it. And had he? Probably! Pepper, who never really thought of himself as some great defender of the white way of life, felt the impulse to fight back.

“Let me ask you something,” Pepper said. “How come black guys are so loud on the subway? Like when they start yelling out rap lyrics? Or they just play music through those little speakers on their phones instead of using the goddamn earphones like normal people do?”

Loochie raised her eyebrows and let them drop. She sighed with disappointment.

“That’s easy,” Loochie said. “Those loud black guys on the subway? They’re being assholes, too.”

Then Loochie broke ranks and walked ahead of him.

Something strange happened after the patients left the hospital. Inside, they were patients, but the farther they walked, the less this seemed true. Pepper turned into a white guy from Elmhurst. Loochie, a black teenager from Laurelton. It’s not like this hadn’t been true (or obvious!) before, but inside Northwest it hadn’t really counted as much of a difference. Not when you considered their enemies: the pills, the restraints, the Devil. But out here, there were no restraints and no pills. Maybe even the Devil had been left behind for now. So something had to rise in the order.

And it wasn’t just the two of them. Suddenly Doris Roberts drifted away from Sandra Day O’Connor and gravitated toward Still Waters, two generations of Jewish women. Sandra Day suddenly found herself pulled toward the Redhead Kingpin. Wally Gambino and Loochie, kids from Queens, slid into step. Only Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly didn’t break off for new friends. Each man walked alone.

Pepper watched these allegiances shift. He did a little quick math. If everybody paired off with the people who looked most like them, he’d be spending this whole field trip with Heatmiser. What was he going to do, listen to that bastard mumble for the next hour because they happened to share skin color and genitalia? He picked up his pace and found Loochie, who was walking side by side with Wally Gambino. Pepper had to balance on the curbside, dodging trees and fire hydrants, if he wanted to keep pace. Wally was in the middle of a sentence when Pepper caught up.

“… and that’s why I’m saying,” Wally purred. “I been had my eye on you girl. I like that bald look. You lookin’ like a sexy mannequin.”

Loochie walked with her head down, not looking at Wally. She tugged her knit cap down lower, so it almost covered her eyes. She watched her feet as they walked, but she cut her eyes to the right, watching Wally warily.

“You’re doing the same thing right now!” Pepper laughed and pointed.

Wally glared at Pepper. “Big man! You got to back up. Me and shorty is having a parlay.”

Loochie jabbed her thumb toward Wally. “This is why women do it. I just didn’t know why white people do.”

Wally was in between them. They talked across him.

“Maybe it’s the same thing,” Pepper offered. “We just don’t want to be bothered.”

Wally leaned closer to Loochie and deepened his voice.

“I’m saying. You need to spend a little time with me.” He looked back at her butt. “You got a bubble I want to pop.”

Pepper couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

“I’m a virgin,” Loochie said with comical sincerity.

But Wally hadn’t heard her. Instead, he looked at Pepper. “Big man, you don’t want to be laughing at me. You know what they call me back home? They call me Bloody Loco! Make sure you recognize that name. ASAP!”

“I thought they call you Wally Gambino,” Pepper said.

“You don’t put no fucking fear in my heart,” Wally shouted. He was smaller than Pepper and much thinner. “You or no fucking man put no fear in my heart!”

Behind them, Nurse Washburn said, “We can take you back to New Hyde, Wilfredo. Turn you right around. ASAP.”

Wally sneered at Pepper. “We ain’t done,” he said.

Then he walked forward until he stomped alongside Scotch Tape. Now Scotch Tape had to listen to Wally grumble.

Pepper looked at Loochie. “Are we cool?”

Loochie nodded. She pointed at Wally Gambino, up ahead. “That’s why I keep my head down,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t even realize I’m doing it. It’s just easier to protect myself from guys like him.”

“Yeah,” Pepper said. “I see.”

“But here’s what I still don’t understand,” Loochie continued. “White people do it to everyone. Even each other.”

Pepper sighed. “So?”

“So how much of the world are you all scared of?”

36

THE CREW REACHED Union Turnpike, and Scotch Tape pointed at the sign on the awning of their destination: Sal’s Restaurant & Bar Incorporated.

“Cheese on bread,” Mr. Mack muttered. “This is it?”

Scotch Tape pointed at the green awning, its white lettering. “Yes-sir!” he said. He tried to sound enthusiastic though he understood the look of disappointment creeping across each patient’s face.

A dozen patients shuffled and mumbled. They looked to the nurses who also nodded to show that indeed they’d reached the destination. Sal’s Restaurant & Bar. The staff tensed, a decision was being made by the group’s mind. Both nurses and the orderly calculated. Twelve patients and three staff. Imagine the debacle if even five or six of them decided to bolt, underwhelmed by this field trip. Half a dozen mental patients scrambling across Union Turnpike, that four-lane roadway with buses and big trucks speeding in both directions, perfect for splattering fleeing patients. There was a bus stop two stores down from the restaurant. Scotch Tape waited there after each shift as he began his ninety-minute journey home. Don’t run, don’t run, don’t run. That’s what the staff members were chanting in their heads.

“Who’s paying?” Loochie asked.

“New Hyde Hospital.” Nurse Washburn patted a sweater pocket where she carried the department’s debit card.

A little more murmuring. A few looks back and forth.

“So let’s get in there!” Scotch Tape said, grinning much too widely. He bounced from one foot to the other. He was getting himself ready to tackle the first person who tried to make a run. Young or old, man or woman. The first one to bolt was going to get whomped. A lesson for the others.

The second nurse said, “They make good pizza. I ate here before.”

“Can we get beer?” Pepper asked.

Nurse Washburn rolled her eyes. “No beer.”

“But you’re paying for the slices,” Loochie clarified.

“Two each.” She patted her pocket again. “That’s right.”

No declarations were made by the patients. No one shook hands or signed a treaty. But the potential rebellion had been quelled. Heatmiser walked to the door of Sal’s Restaurant & Bar Incorporated. He held it open.

Sal’s Restaurant & Bar was bigger than your average pizza place because it really had been a fine establishment once. (It had also once been owned by a guy named Sal. Now it was actually owned and operated by a man named Joseph Angeli, but who was going to pay to fabricate a whole new awning? You?)

The bar had been removed (Sal took his liquor license with him) and replaced with the traditional bank of ovens for cooking up slices. But the dining area remained the same. Seating for fifty, and each table had a maroon tablecloth. The back wall had a faded trompe l’oeil painting of an Italian city under a blue sky. When the patients entered the restaurant, a few of them cooed.

“This is nice,” Redhead Kingpin said.

The patients crowded the nearby counter. One old man stood behind it, looking bemused. He had his hands in a gray plastic bin of shredded parmesan cheese. His full head of wavy white hair sat flat on his scalp from working near the heat of the ovens. His eyebrows were thinning and his face clean-shaved. His cheeks and forehead were red, and his nose had a high arch, like an Art Deco eagle, which made the man look angry all the time. Another person could be heard behind a swinging door, clattering pans. The patients jammed themselves against the counter, and the old man looked at them. He nodded once, and said, “So what’s all this?”

They called out orders.

“Lemme get two pepperoni!”

“Lemme get one anchovy!”

“Lemme get three with sausage!”

But the guy didn’t even take his hands out of the cheese. He just scanned. Finally Scotch Tape entered the restaurant. “Everybody go take a seat,” he shouted. “Take a seat!”

The patients glumly moved away from the counter.

The old man smiled and pointed at Scotch Tape.

“That’s my guy.”

A teenage couple occupied one table in the restaurant, a single half-eaten slice between them. The girl leafed through a newspaper, and the boy ticked away on his cell phone. But as the patients moved past the pair, they looked up. Were they shocked to see so many mental patients cresting over them like a wave? No, it wasn’t that. These two kids were just amazed to see so many customers. Normally, Sal (they didn’t know his real name was Joseph Angeli) wouldn’t serve this many people in a week.

The patients took their seats. There were plenty of tables, but they clustered near each other, as if afraid to drift too far apart. While the others were discussing their orders, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters paid attention to that newspaper at the teenagers’ table. The girl flipped the pages loudly out of boredom, and those two watched her enviously.

Both nurses took a table together and pushed out a third chair for Scotch Tape. Scotch Tape remained at the counter, jabbering with the owner. Sal looked at the group as Scotch Tape pointed at them. He nodded his head faintly.

Scotch Tape returned to the group. He clapped his hands at the start of his announcement. “I told Sal that everyone is getting two slices apiece.”

Loochie raised her hand, “I want mushrooms on mine.”

Scotch Tape waved one hand. “We’re not getting into all that. Everyone gets two cheese slices and a soda.”

Sal came from behind the counter carrying a plastic tray crammed with Coke cans, all perspiring chilled droplets. He went from table to table plopping down cans. Three people demanded different drinks. Sal didn’t argue. He took the Cokes and returned with two ginger ales and one Diet Coke. Once that was done, he stood before the patients and rubbed his big hands, making a swishing sound.

“I’m happy to have you all here today,” he said. “Call me Sal. I’ll be making your pizza.”

He smiled at them, much too widely. He really waggled his eyebrows. Cartoonish gestures. The kind of thing you might do when first meeting a group of kindergartners.

Pepper leaned toward Loochie. “Why’s he talking to us like that?”

“Have any of you made pizza before?” Sal asked. “It’s not that diffi— hard. But it’s hard to make it right.”

Loochie sighed. “He knows we’re mental patients.”

“Scotch Tape must’ve told him,” Pepper said. Sal was about to explain what dough and cheese were. After that, maybe he’d give a lesson on the oven and the transformative power of heat! Pepper didn’t feel like humoring the guy as he tried to “communicate” with them. They were out for a trip, a kind of vacation. He wanted a reprieve from the unit, not a reminder.

“Hey, Sal,” Pepper called out. “Can you make my slice with Haldol?”

That made Loochie grin. “I’ll take lithium on mine,” she added.

“I want a little Depacot on mine,” Doris Roberts shouted. “A dank!”

Even the silent patients enjoyed themselves. Heatmiser and Yuckmouth and the Haint grinned. Laughter rippled through the group.

Sal wasn’t stupid, he understood he was being ridiculed. But he couldn’t understand why they were doing it. He was being nice! But okay, fine, Sal (Joseph) had his own worries in life. (Like a daughter, an addict, working in the back, who made a habit of lifting money from the register when left to work the shop alone; which is why the man never got a day off; which is why the man was tired; which is why he lost his patience.)

“Ahhh, you can choke on the slices,” Sal said.

Which made even the staff members laugh.

Sal stomped behind the counter to cook.

The teenage boy set down his phone and ate the rest of the slice in two bites. He gave the crust to the girl. She chomped it while getting up, and the pair left.

The girl forgot her newspaper. Didn’t even look back for it as she went. What did she care? It was am New York, a freebie handed out weekday mornings at subway stations and bus stops. If she’d returned, even just a minute later, she wouldn’t have found it anyway, it was already at another table. Still Waters flipped through the pages and now thoroughly ignored Doris Roberts. Each time a page turned, Redhead Kingpin, at the next table, faintly whimpered.

Soon enough, the slices arrived.

Sal didn’t bring them over himself like he had the soda cans. The serving duties fell to Sal’s daughter, a woman in her forties who never introduced herself. A woman who didn’t seem put off by or scared of the patients, didn’t act friendly or solicitous, either. She seemed so utterly indifferent to the patients that they immediately felt quite fond of her. This woman had served that teenage couple in exactly the same way. Equal-opportunity disinterest.

Before their meals began in earnest, Mr. Mack picked up a napkin dispenser and clanged it against the tabletop like a gavel.

“I think we should say a little prayer for Dorry,” Mr. Mack said.

There were many differences about the patients on the outside, but none more so than with Mr. Mack. If inside he was as irritable as a weasel, outside he’d found a new kind of steadiness. Not calm, but more commanding. Less weasel, more badger. Maybe this is how he’d been before he entered New Hyde. Or how he might’ve been had he never been committed. He was at his table alone. He stood up to lead.

Those who were in the practice shut their eyes and whispered the proper words from memory. Even Frank Waverly, at his own table, mouthed the phrases. Those who weren’t the praying types still clasped their hands.

“We wish you the best, Dorry,” Mr. Mack said. “You’re probably talking God’s ear off right now!”

There was a long silence, people squirmed, unsure if the caustic old man was mocking the dead.

“But unlike us,” Mr. Mack added. “The good Lord will appreciate the sound. Amen.”

“Amen,” Loochie whispered.

Pepper found himself unable to speak. He’d been so cruel to that woman with his last words. And, if he thought about it, hadn’t she helped him yet again, even in death? It was because of her suicide that he’d been brought to Dr. Anand’s office. Once in there he was finally able to call Sue’s sister. Even now, sitting in Sal’s pizza shop — the entire patient population getting out so the cops could work on Dorry’s crime scene without interruption — even that was kind of her doing, too. Maybe Dorry really had been like a mother. He’d treated her so badly but still, in her way, she’d taken care of him. How could he thank her for that? How could he ever repay it?

And in this moment, Sal came from around the counter again. The dining area had turned so quiet that he wanted to make sure they hadn’t all somehow dined and dashed. He found the patients and the staff with lowered heads.

Sal watched quietly for a little while.

“That’s good,” he finally said. “I like to see that.”

Pepper and Loochie and all the rest opened their eyes. They looked at Joseph Angeli, who was leaning forward, both hands flat on an empty table. His head dropped, and when he lifted it again, his eyes were moist. He pointed to the painting on the back wall, the Italian city. “That’s Florence,” he said quietly. “The birthplace of Dante.” He shook his head. “Dante knew the truth.”

The thunder of crashing pots came from the kitchen. It shook everyone but Joe, who was used to it. The clatter nearly drowned out his last words.

“The Devil is real,” he said.

The pizza was fine. But the setting made it scrumptious. And the staff didn’t rush the meal. Scotch Tape tried to play like he was being magnanimous. When one patient or the other asked him how much time they had left before they must return to New Hyde, Scotch Tape just waved one arm to let them know there was time. And he was giving it.

So they ate slowly, but eventually Nurse Washburn rose and walked a circuit around the tables.

“All done?” she asked loudly. Not for the patients but for Scotch Tape. She didn’t much care for his benevolent-king routine, especially since she and the other nurse (Nurse Washburn hadn’t learned the woman’s name yet) outranked him. She wandered among the tables twice, as if taking a count, then she stopped alongside Scotch Tape. She stood next to him but didn’t face him. (She didn’t want it to appear like she was reporting to him.) He stayed seated. Nurse Washburn said, “If we’re all done, then we can line up.”

Scotch Tape pointed at his plate, the crusts of his two slices. He hadn’t been meaning to eat them until Nurse Washburn spoke up. “I’m not finished,” he said.

“Can’t you can take them with you?”

Scotch Tape stayed silent. The patients watched both of them. Everywhere you go, someone is vying for power! Nurse Washburn, a white woman who wanted to assert the hard-won dignity of her position. Scotch Tape, a black man who loathed public disrespect. Somehow leaving a pizza parlor had turned into a war of the oppressed.

The stalemate was broken by Sal. He walked into the dining area, waving a slip of paper.

“Who’s going to take the check?” he asked.

That worked like a bell signaling the end of a round. Nurse Washburn walked off to pay the bill, shoulders pulled back proudly as she was the one entrusted with the hospital’s card. Scotch Tape wolfed down his crusts (which he hated), then sprang up and clapped for all the patients to get in line as if that had been his idea. Everyone was happy.

Pepper and Loochie stood side by side. Mr. Mack was in front of them, alone. He turned back and looked at the pair, up and down.

“You two sure got close,” he said, leering at them.

“Close?” Pepper asked, sounding thrown. To him it was like Mr. Mack had suggested he was sleeping with his niece.

Loochie grabbed Pepper’s arm. “Close like Bethlehem and Nazareth.”

Mr. Mack leaned back, surprised. Loochie batted her eyelashes at Pepper and smiled. “Isn’t that right?”

“Most definitely,” Pepper said.

He knew she was just fucking with Mr. Mack, but Loochie had also spoken the truth. To his great surprise, and hers, Loochie was now his closest friend.

They expected this would be enough to shoo Mr. Mack away, but like a fruit fly, the man kept hovering. “Put out your hand,” he said.

Pepper did. If Mr. Mack spat into his palm, he realized, he was going to crack the guy in the chest.

As Nurse Washburn returned from paying the bill, Mr. Mack dropped a white envelope into Pepper’s open hand. As soon as it landed, it curled into a tube.

“Dorry gave that to you,” Mr. Mack said. “But you left it on a table.”

Pepper had totally forgotten about it. Loochie went on her toes then so she could see it better.

“You opened it,” Pepper said. The top of the envelope showed the tear.

“You left it there, so I picked it up,” Mr. Mack said. “Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.”

Pepper sighed. “That’s not what that means.”

“Carpe diem,” he tried.

“That’s better,” Pepper said.

“What was in it?” Loochie asked.

At the front of the line, Nurse Washburn and Scotch Tape were both trying to assert their place of leadership. Until they made peace, the group couldn’t even walk out of Sal’s, let alone march back to the hospital.

Mr. Mack cut his eyes at Loochie. “A map and a …”

“Come on now!” Sal shouted from behind the counter. “You’re blocking my door!”

Food served, prayers shared, bill paid. Now get the fuck outta here.

So Scotch Tape and Nurse Washburn tried to walk through the doorway simultaneously. They crunched each other. Then Scotch Tape held the door and Nurse Washburn waved the patients through. The group moved.

“A map of what?” Pepper asked.

Mr. Mack didn’t answer until they were outside. “The whole building,” he said. “First floor and second floor. Including the exit.”

“An escape?” Loochie asked.

Mr. Mack tapped his temple. “That’s the idea.”

Pepper grabbed at Mr. Mack’s small shoulder. It was like seeing a teenager maul a toddler. But Mr. Mack had more vinegar than a one-year-old. Pepper grabbed him and Mr. Mack smacked the big man’s hand off. And it hurt.

“Let me see it,” Pepper said.

Mr. Mack broke formation and walked alongside Loochie, the three of them in a row. “That idea is void,” Mr. Mack said. “Everything stays with me.”

“Dorry gave it to me.”

Mr. Mack looked ahead of him and behind.

“You think I’m going to let you run the show,” Mr. Mack whispered. “And get myself killed like Coffee did? No. That’s void.”

“Stop saying that,” Loochie told him.

“We’re going for the change-up this time,” Mr. Mack continued in full voice, so the nearest patients would hear him. “You don’t lead, you follow. I’ve already studied Dorry’s map. There’s a way to get from our rooms up to that second floor. From the second floor we can slip out without notice.”

“Fine,” Pepper huffed, wishing he’d been smart enough to just grab the envelope when Dorry offered it. “Who’s going?”

“Mr. Mack!” Nurse Washburn pointed at him as they reached the corner. “Lines of two.”

The old man nodded and waved at her. He slipped in front of Pepper, marching next to Yuckmouth. “All of us are going, because all of us are at risk if we stay. But first, we’ll find that thing,” Mr. Mack promised. “Instead of being trampled, we’re going to do some trampling.”

“And what about when we’re out?” Pepper asked. “Have you thought that far?”

Mr. Mack sighed. “We get out and we’re free. Every man and woman can do whatever the hell they want to. First thing I’m going to do is sneak back into the parking lot and piss on the doctor’s car. I know which one it is.”

They walked, and Pepper let Mr. Mack gloat over his imagined victory to come. A piss-stained tire. Dream big! Pepper had a feeling that Mr. Mack’s plans didn’t go any further than that. He finally had a little power and what did he want to do with it? Ruin shit. Nothing more.

Pepper could still see the sign for the bus stop two stores down from Sal’s. Even if the bus was slow, it would, eventually, come. A six-block sprint. If they ran in the street instead of the sidewalk, they could avoid doing something stupid like tripping and spraining an ankle, a bad scene from a horror movie. If they really could slip out unnoticed by the staff, he and Loochie could wait for that bus as calmly as they pleased. They’d be off long before any alerts were raised. The other patients, if they wanted to, could spend their time relieving themselves all over New Hyde’s parking lot. He’d be gone. And he was taking Loochie with him.

“When?” Pepper asked.

Mr. Mack spoke without turning back, so Pepper and Loochie had to lean forward to hear him. From a distance, you would’ve mistaken them for subjects bowing to an emperor.

“When I’m ready,” Mr. Mack said. “Until then, you just sit tight.”

Loochie opened her mouth to protest, but Pepper touched her arm and shook his head. “You see this path we’re taking? Back to New Hyde?” he whispered. “I want you to memorize it.”

It might seem unnecessary to commit a six-block walk to memory. Compare that with stories of people who marched from one country to another to escape the ravages of some hellacious war. (Like the Von Trapps.) But imagine it’s nighttime and you’re zonked on pharmaceutical drugs. A walk to the damn bathroom might turn you around. Both Pepper and Loochie knew this personally, so they whispered the street names to themselves. Noted little landmarks.

“What’s the signal going to be?” Pepper asked.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Mr. Mack said. “That’s the signal.”

Loochie noted the enormous tree that actually tilted so far over that some of its leaves caressed the roof of a one-family house. You’d remember something like that, night or day.

“You got cut off before,” Loochie said to Mr. Mack. “There were two things in that envelope, right? The map and what else?”

But Mr. Mack didn’t turn his head, didn’t break his stride, and he sure as hell didn’t deign to answer her.

37

SO THEY WAITED.

Pepper thought this might mean hanging back until dinnertime. When he reached the television lounge that evening, he felt a charge seeing Mr. Mack going from table to table, whispering in the ear of each patient gathered there. Pepper had taken his meds but was expert enough by now to know his drowsiness would pass in about twenty minutes. He went to the orderly and took his tray. When he scanned the tables he realized all the patients sat with their backs to the courtyard.

The police had set out a tarp right over the patch of concrete where Dorry had bled out. The crime scene. The tarp was weighed down with fist-sized stones so it wouldn’t blow away. But when the wind slipped underneath, the plastic tarp rose and fell, rose and fell. In the dark it looked like Dorry’s body might still be under there breathing.

Pepper sat with his back to the smokers’ court, just like everybody else. He took a seat with Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters. Back inside the unit, they were a team again. He was surprised to see them. It was only seven p.m.

“You all are up early,” Pepper said.

Redhead Kingpin poked at her macaroni salad with her spoon. “Haven’t gone to sleep since Xiu left.”

Pepper looked to Still Waters, who could barely lift her head, but this time it wasn’t out of shyness.

“You look like you’ve been crying,” Pepper told her, trying to be playful.

She stared at her tray. “I’m all cried out.”

Then Mr. Mack came to their table. He stood across from Pepper. He didn’t even have to lean down to look Pepper in the eye. He held Pepper’s gaze. “Tonight …” Mr. Mack began.

He looked over his shoulder at the orderly who had his now-hospital-approved cell phone out and was texting away.

Mr. Mack looked back at Pepper, who was nodding so enthusiastically that he felt like a mutt.

“… is not the night,” Mr. Mack finished.

Then he bowed slightly and turned away. He walked to the edge of the television lounge and raised one arm. They all looked to him. Mr. Mack twirled his hand, haughty as an aristocrat. After that, he left the lounge.

“He’s enjoying himself,” Redhead Kingpin said.

Pepper scooped up his dollop of macaroni salad in three bites. It felt terrible to have to wait on a man like that. Even worse to imagine Dorry really was still out there in the courtyard, lying under the plastic, suffocating. He could almost hear the flapping of that tarp as it rose and fell.

Redhead Kingpin pushed her chair back and said, “Wait here.”

Still Waters left with her.

On the television they were playing a whole lot of nothing, which was pleasing just now. People talk badly about mindless television, but the shit has its purposes. For instance, it stopped Pepper from tearing the keys off the orderly’s wrist and opening the glass door out to the courtyard and pulling back the tarp so poor Dorry could get some air.

Redhead Kingpin returned to the lounge, Still Waters trailing only inches behind her. Each of them carried an accordion folder. They took their seats again. One folder blue, the other manila.

“Those are Sue’s,” Pepper said.

Still Waters turned the manila folder, so Pepper could see the two words: “No Name.” Still Waters curled her left arm around the bottom of the folder like a boa constrictor.

“We’re keeping that one,” Redhead Kingpin said. She slid the blue folder between him and his dinner tray. “But she wanted you to have this.”

Pepper looked down at the blue folder. He saw two words written in black ink on the side: “Nice Dream.”

“Have you heard anything from her?” he asked. “About her?”

Both women pinched their mouths and shut their reddened eyes. That was their only answer.

He undid the elastic string that held the blue cover down. He opened the folder and saw all those pages from all those magazines. Reykjavik, Accra, Fiji, Wichita, Holland.

“She’ll never get to visit those places,” Redhead Kingpin said. “But it would make her happy if you ever saw even one of them.”

Pepper leafed through the pages. There were hundreds of them.

“How’s that ever going to happen?” Pepper whispered. “I’m stuck in here like everyone else.”

Still Waters leaned forward, pulling Sue’s No Name folder even closer to her chest. She concentrated on the tabletop when she spoke. “You be patient,” she whispered. “Let Mr. Mack enjoy his little games.”

“Then you escape,” Redhead Kingpin added. “Just like the rest of us.”

A nice dream, but Sue’s file had a nightmarish effect on Pepper. Holding the glossy pages, knowing she’d left without them, only made him grim. Why not hold on to these beautiful photos at least? Unless Sue had left New Hyde in the deepest pit of despair imaginable. A place where even fantasies must be abandoned. And because Pepper loved her, this thought filled him with anguish.

By the time he returned to his room after dinner, he’d decided to wait up for the Devil.

He didn’t know if it would come tonight, but let it come tonight.

He sat on the windowsill, his back to the two giant panes. He held the blue folder in his lap. He watched the ceiling. Let it come.

But the Devil didn’t show up.

Both it and Mr. Mack were going to make him wait.

Three more days and nothing going. Mr. Mack made the rounds each night, letting people know he’d decided to push the date back. He claimed he was giving people a chance to get their houses in order, but what did that mean exactly? Who fucking knew?

And over these three days Pepper disintegrated. He spent his mornings and afternoons sorting Sue’s magazine clippings by continent or climate or even just by how far away they were. And at night he sat in the windowsill and waited for the Devil. Three nights like that and the man wasn’t doing well. He hadn’t showered. He’d hardly eaten.

On the fourth morning, April 20, Scotch Tape visited Pepper’s room. The big man had been tardy for his morning meds. Scotch Tape found him lying on his double bed, clutching at a blue accordion folder.

“You got to get up,” Scotch Tape said. “Come on, Pepper.”

It was the first time Scotch Tape had said the name without a little salt in it.

“And you’re going to have to take these beds apart.”

Pepper sat up. He’d been sleeping on Sue’s side.

“You’re getting a new roommate,” Scotch Tape said.

“Today?”

“Soon.”

Scotch Tape watched as Pepper got out of bed. Pepper wore the blue pajama top and bottom. He had a little trouble getting out of bed because he wouldn’t put the folder down. Scotch Tape had believed this man was fine, mentally, only sixty-two days ago. But now?

“Let’s go,” Scotch Tape said brusquely, just to stop thinking.

Pepper walked with Scotch Tape to the nurses’ station. He took his meds. As he swallowed, he heard all this conversation coming from the television lounge.

“What’s going on?” Pepper asked, pointing to Northwest 5.

Scotch Tape was back inside the nurses’ station already. A stack of files sat next to the computer. Pepper could read the name on the tabs. “Doris Walczak.” There were fifty-two different files. The records of Doris Walczak’s entire stay at New Hyde. Ready to be logged.

Pepper decided he had no questions about what her files were doing there. He decided to forget them. Instead, he pointed at the lounge and asked again. “What’s going on?”

Scotch Tape sat down in front of the computer. “It’s visiting day,” he said. “And it looks like everybody’s family decided to come.”

Pepper nodded. He didn’t say, Not everyone’s.

He went to the lounge anyway. If only because it spared him a little time before he’d have to pull apart his double bed. Before another body filled the mattress that had carried Sue’s.

Every table was full, and there were still so many folks that many had to stand around. The lounge looked like a cocktail party thrown on a New York City subway train.

Doris Roberts and her extended family. Mr. Mack and his. Heatmiser had a sister there and a fucking girlfriend! Yuckmouth and his peoples. Wally Gambino had a whole damn crew. (How did that happen? Each patient was only allowed two visitors at a time but Wally had ten; they’d probably just bum rushed the door.) The Haint sat with two members of her church. Sandra Day O’Connor sat with an old man, her husband. Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters had pulled two tables together and were introducing their family members to one another. Frank Waverly stood outside in the courtyard, alone, smoking.

“Well, shit,” Pepper said to himself. He was practically caressing the blue accordion folder just to have contact with something.

“Pepper.”

He heard his name but he ignored it. You know the only person he wanted to speak with right then. Not Sue. Not Mari. It’s almost too embarrassing to share.

His mother.

He wanted to hear his mom’s voice.

“Pepper!”

But of course that wasn’t his mother.

It was Loochie.

At a table with her mother and brother.

The same mother and brother he’d sworn he’d apologize to.

Loochie waved Pepper over. If there’s one person who wouldn’t forget her promise, it was definitely Loochie.

Pepper lumbered to the table. His feet slapped on the cool floor.

There were three white cartons of Chinese food set out at the Gardners’ table and a game that all three were playing. The game was called That’s So Raven Girl Talk Game. There was a small circular board, and in the middle was a little electronic device meant to look like a purple crystal ball sitting on a golden stand. Cards and little round chips were spread all around the table. A note on the side of the box recommended the game for children eight and up.

“Come say hi to my mom,” Loochie said.

He got close and pointed at Loochie’s head. There was something quite different about it. No more knit cap, no more towel. Loochie wore a wig.

“You’ve got a new look,” Pepper said.

Loochie touched the wig tentatively. “I told my mother what happened. She brought me one of her wigs until my hair grows back.”

Pepper could tell it was her mother’s. A fifty-year-old woman’s style. Jet-black and shaped into a poof that screamed “legal secretary!” No doubt it suited Loochie’s mother at her job, but it had a different effect on the daughter. Not entirely negative. A fifty-year-old woman’s wig on a nineteen-year-old, it served to age Loochie by about ten years. That might sound flattering — and Pepper certainly wouldn’t say that to the kid — but it matured Loochie in a way that seemed fitting. All she’d experienced, just in the time Pepper had known her, she sure as hell wasn’t your average American nineteen. Better this way. She looked like a woman. Herself, but wiser.

“It looks good,” Pepper said.

Loochie smiled. “I wish I could argue with you.”

Pepper laughed as he grabbed the free seat. “Can I sit?” he asked Loochie.

Loochie’s mother huffed. “You ask her, but you’re the grown-up.”

“She looks like an adult to me,” Pepper said.

The brother leaned forward to introduce himself, but didn’t offer his hand.

“I’m Louis,” he said.

Pepper looked from mother to daughter to son. Funny when you see family members together like this and begin that job of detecting the traits that have been passed down. The tangible and the intangible. Both Loochie and Louis had their mother’s slim neck. Their mother’s narrow head and even the same shape to their eyes. Their mother had to be in her fifties but looked ten years younger. A little heavy but her face retained its beauty. Large brown eyes that were only more striking on the mother because the mother was black (dark brown, actually). Loochie and Louis were lighter-skinned so Pepper figured the dad was white or maybe a Latin guy. Mom wore a faint red lipstick and her eyes were done, but her black wig sat slightly too low on one side. The slanted wig made her look like she’d gotten dressed a little too fast. Like she hadn’t planned to come visit today. Maybe Mr. Mack’s suggestion, about getting one’s house in order, made Loochie push or plead. And now her mother and brother were here.

“I owe you an apology,” Pepper said to Loochie’s mother. “About a month ago, I bumped into you. And your son. By mistake.”

Loochie’s mother looked at her daughter.

“This is the guy who knocked you down,” Loochie said. “And Louis.”

Now her mother stared at Pepper again. “That was you?”

He smiled because he liked the idea that she’d forgotten. Something so ridiculous on his part being hardly a blip in her life. But then he saw her scan down his unwashed hair and his tired face, the blue folder still clutched in one arm. His pajamas and bare feet. She didn’t recognize him. Had he really changed so much since then? Inside, he didn’t feel so different but the woman across from him showed otherwise. Pepper felt so embarrassed that his stomach clutched up and his thighs tensed and he wanted to get up, walk away. But he stayed.

The brother, Louis, opened his carton of Chinese food, steamed vegetables, and picked up a piece of broccoli with his fork.

“Well, I want to thank you for saving us from this game,” he said, motioning at That’s So Raven. “We’ve been playing it for six years.”

Their mother laughed quietly and looked at Pepper with slight embarrassment. “Not that long,” she said.

“Loochie was thirteen when we got this,” Louis said. “We took it to her when she was at Long Island Jewish.”

“And why did you do that to her?” Pepper asked Loochie’s mother. Even he was surprised by his bluntness.

All three members of the Gardner family snapped their eyes at Pepper. Louis stopped chewing his broccoli. Mom set the goofy game’s little chips down on the table.

Loochie’s eyes narrowed. “Watch yourself now, Pepper.”

He ignored her. “I’m really curious. What could she have been doing at thirteen that made you give her up like that?”

Loochie’s mother looked at Loochie, then at Pepper. She sat up in her chair as tension ran through her back and into her shoulders. “Do you have children?” she asked.

“Are you going to tell me that if I don’t have children I can’t understand?”

Louis finished chewing his food. “I used to have a plant,” he offered.

Loochie, surprisingly, had dropped her head and sat back in her seat. As if she was getting out of the way of Pepper and her mother. As if she actually wanted to hear her mother’s answer to Pepper’s question, too, but never could’ve mustered the courage to ask.

“I ask you that,” Loochie’s mother said, “because I want to know if there’s anyone you ever really cared for. Not just loved, but looked after.”

“I’ve tried to be there for people,” Pepper said. “If that’s what you mean.”

“Okay. And what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“How are they doing?” she asked.

Pepper pulled the blue folder against his belly.

“I don’t know.”

Loochie’s mother nodded. “That’s the worst part, isn’t it? You try, you really mean well, but you still don’t know what’s going to come of it.”

She placed her hand on the top of Loochie’s wigged head, very lightly, then pulled it away. “I tried to get help for my daughter. But the help she needed was more than I could give. So I searched everywhere, I asked everyone. What do I do? I don’t want to embarrass my daughter, so I’m not going to say how she was acting. But we checked her health. Blood tests. Scans. The best that Medicaid could provide!” She laughed bitterly. “And finally we ended up at Long Island Jewish. They spoke to me about her mental health. And I didn’t want to hear that.” She was quiet a moment. “But eventually I had to.”

Pepper said, “But she’s just locked away in here. A kid her age. All she knows about the world is these five hallways and what she sees on that television. That’s her whole life!”

Loochie’s mother reached for the little round game chips and squeezed a few of them in one hand. She opened and closed that hand, feeling the faint pain of the shape against her palm and squeezing harder so she felt the pain even more. She didn’t speak.

“You asked me if I ever cared for someone,” Pepper said. “There’s a woman I met here that I really cared for. If I’d had to, I would’ve died for her. That’s how much I wanted her to be safe.”

Loochie’s mother looked at Pepper. Her eyes were dry. She wasn’t going to cry because of what Pepper said. Think she hadn’t said much worse to herself already? But it was Pepper’s last words that made her speak.

“That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.”

Loochie’s mother had reached out for Loochie’s arm. Her fingers were held tight around her daughter’s wrist. Loochie was crying quietly.

“Once Lucretia asked me why I didn’t just let her die. Can you imagine it? She was fourteen years old. ‘Why don’t you just let me die?’ I told her that my life without her wasn’t worth living. As long as she lives, I live. Those words are written on every good mother’s heart.”

She pressed her forehead to the side of her daughter’s face. “As long as you live, I live,” she whispered to Loochie.

The brother had watched all this quietly. Now Louis sat up in his chair and grinned at Pepper. His face looked tight, faintly gray, like he felt sick. Do you know that this grown man, twenty-nine years old, was jealous? Not in a way he could name, or explain, but it was real. So Louis wanted to change the atmosphere. Otherwise he imagined his sister and mother doing a lot more hugging and loving while he sat there poking at a carton of steamed vegetables.

“My sister tells me that you all think there’s a monster in the hospital,” Louis said.

“The Devil,” Loochie said, pulling her arm away from her mother’s hand. “That’s what I said. And I told Mom.”

But Louis didn’t look at his sister. He kept his gaze trained on Pepper.

“You believe that?” Louis asked.

Loochie’s mother lost her pensive air and looked at her son with a frown. “All right,” she said. “Don’t start something.”

“I’m asking the man a question,” Louis said.

Pepper assessed this guy. He was short-ish and fat-ish and wore thick glasses in stylish frames. His hairline was receding and he already had a fair amount of ear hair. And yet this guy was obviously so pleased with himself. Pepper always marveled at this kind of man. Who calculated his value based on some mystery math. Simple addition would assess this man a dud but Louis was using calculus plus.

Loochie’s mother picked up a card from the game deck and waved it over the purple crystal ball twice. An electric whoosh played, a sound like water crashing on rocks or a hundred plates smashing against a floor.

A moment later Raven Symoné’s voice played loudly.

“I don’t think so, girlfriend!” Raven shouted.

Mom was trying to distract the table from the line of conversation, but it wasn’t enough to stop her bullheaded boy.

“Come on,” Louis pressed. “Do you believe that, too?”

“There’s something going on behind that silver door,” Pepper said.

“Yeah,” Loochie said, looking at Pepper with mild disgust because he wouldn’t just come out and say its name. “The Devil.”

Now Louis slumped back in his chair, his mouth hanging open slightly. He looked incredulous.

“What do you know about the history of silver mining in this country?” Louis asked.

Aha. Now Pepper understood the source of this man’s massive overconfidence. He thought he was brilliant. Pepper remembered a quote he’d read once, it was attributed to James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica. Hetfield was asked the difference between himself and Sting. (Why that comparison? Who can say?) Hetfield said the difference between him and Sting was that he read a lot of books, too, but he didn’t need you to know that. Now, whatever Louis might say next, Pepper couldn’t help but hear dreadful late-era Sting music being strummed (on a fucking lute, no doubt) in the distance.

“Silver mining in the United States didn’t start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s,” Louis said. “And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California.”

“Okay,” Pepper said. He kind of hoped that was it.

“My brother thinks he should have been a scientist,” Loochie said.

Louis grinned. “Everyone at my job does call me the Professor.”

“Not behind your back,” Loochie said.

Their mother waved another card over the purple crystal ball. It was her only defense, really, when her grown-ass children reverted like this. Would it work?

“Not gonna happen!” Raven Symoné shouted.

“I’m a manager at Hertz at JFK Airport,” Louis explained. “And when I have downtime I read. Unlike everybody else there.”

That lute playing got a little louder.

“Anyway,” Louis continued, “the silver deposits found at the Comstock Lode only caused people to go digging around for it everywhere. Silver mines popped up in Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana. People thought they were going to find more and more silver, so whole towns were built to accommodate them. And not some little wooden shacks. Luxury homes and fine businesses. People were sure the good times would only get better.”

“But they didn’t,” Pepper offered, trying to beat him to the point.

Louis grabbed his mother’s hand and pulled it away from the purple crystal ball when she moved toward it with a card for the third time.

“No, you’re right,” Louis agreed. “It didn’t. Lots of people went bust. But I’m really trying to tell you about what happened to the miners during the silver rush.

“It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it’s mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?”

Pepper nodded. “Moroccan guy who ran the bodega around the corner from my apartment?”

Neither Loochie nor her mother laughed because, hell, they thought that might be who this person was.

Louis smiled without mirth.

“The problem with the silver fumes,” Louis continued, “is that, over time, they gave the miners delusions. Bad enough that they had to stop mining. Their health deteriorated. And a bunch of them even died.”

Hard to make fun of something like that, so Pepper didn’t.

“Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, ‘What happened to Mike?’ And the answer was always the same. ‘The Devil in Silver got him.’ ”

Louis sat straight and crossed his arms and surveyed the table. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

“You’re saying we’re just making this thing up,” Pepper said quietly.

Louis seemed disappointed. He dropped his hands into his lap and folded them there. He looked at his sister and Pepper. He turned his head to take in the other patients gathered with their family members there in the hospital.

“I’m saying they were dying,” Louis said. “They definitely weren’t making that up. But it wasn’t a monster that was killing them. It was the mine.”

Visiting hours continued and Pepper stayed at the table with Loochie and her family. They didn’t keep talking about the Devil in Silver, about slow death and delusions, because that shit is grim. Instead, they spent the last half hour of visiting playing Raven Symoné’s game. If it never became fun, it did pass the time. (Pepper also learned that someone liked liked him, which is always nice to hear.)

At the end of the visit, Loochie’s mother gave her a handful of change as per custom. Then she took Pepper’s hand, and dropped two dollars’ worth of quarters into his palm.

“Call your mother,” she said. “I’m sure she’d like to hear from you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Pepper said, laughing.

“I do,” Loochie’s mother said.

“I don’t even have her number,” Pepper told her.

Loochie’s mother pointed at Louis. “You’re always bragging about your little phone, aren’t you?” she asked. “Show me what it can do.”

Louis probably hadn’t looked more pleased at any point that afternoon. He made his mother and sister watch while he used his Smartphone. A quick search, not more than two minues, and he had Pepper’s brother’s number. He beamed at his mother. “See?”

“Very nice,” she said, patting her son’s back. Then she looked at Pepper. “Well?”

Rather than dithering, he walked straight into the phone alcove. It sat empty. He didn’t hesitate.

He dialed the Maryland number, and Ralph picked up on the second ring. It seemed so simple, so normal, that it almost couldn’t be real. After all his time, his younger brother was on the line.

As soon as Pepper heard his brother’s voice, he wanted to hang up. He was so scared. But he remembered Loochie’s mother and that he wanted to speak with his own. He couldn’t just stand there breathing heavily and expect to be put on with her.

“Ralph S. Mouse!” he said, a bit too loud.

The line stayed quiet.

“Peter Rabbit,” Ralph finally answered.

“Did my friend Mari ever call you?” Pepper asked. Instantly, he wished he hadn’t said it; two sentences into the conversation and he sounded critical.

“I think she spoke to Maureen,” Ralph said. “But that was awhile ago. I’m sorry I didn’t call; we’ve just had so much going on here. Denny got sick so we all got sick. He had to stay out of school.”

He wondered what Mari might’ve told Ralph’s wife. Maybe just that Pepper was in some trouble, since Ralph didn’t mention the hospital. Was there any point in telling him now?

“How’s Mom?” Pepper asked.

Pepper realized he still had the blue folder under his arm and he was choking the poor thing just now. He balanced it on top of the pay phone.

“Mom’s going to outlive both of us,” Ralph said, sounding lighter for the first time.

Pepper rested his forehead against the cool wall. He’d been a little afraid that Ralph would tell him their mother had died while he’d been in here. Something irreversible.

“Is she there?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said, sounding relieved to hand off the baton. “Let me bring the phone to her.”

Then a little jostling as Ralph walked from his bedroom, off to find their mother. Pepper heard the creak of different doors being opened, Ralph calling their mother’s name in room after room. So much space, Pepper thought. Then Ralph’s voice on the line again. “Listen, man,” he said. “I just want to say …”

Then quiet again.

Pepper spoke instead. “Ralph,” he said. “Thanks for taking care of Mom, yeah?”

Ralph sighed and Pepper could almost see his kid brother, six or seven years old, actually blushing because his big brother had, in some way, acknowledged him. “It’s okay,” Ralph said quietly. “You take care of yourself.”

And then his mother’s voice on the line.

“Is that Peter?”

“Ma.”

“Peter Rabbit,” she said serenely.

The automated voice on the phone piped in telling him to add more coins or the call would be cut off. He did. First, the quick little bleeps and bloops, then he was permitted to speak with his mother again.

She asked how he was doing. Pepper didn’t tell his mother where he was. He asked how she liked Maryland. She told him that everyone in the family had his or her own room with a few more rooms left over.

“I know I’m supposed to like it,” his mother said. “But all I do is worry if they can afford it. With the economy and the housing market. It’s always on the news. You know. Where are you living now? Still in the same apartment?”

“Still in Queens,” he said. This was true.

“Still moving furniture?”

“I gave that up for a little while.”

“Trying something else?”

He pulled away from the wall. Soon enough it would be time to take his evening meds. He didn’t want his mother to hear them calling him for that.

“You sound tired, Peter.”

“Maybe I’m a little tired,” he admitted.

His mother breathed on the line, in and out, and the next voice he heard was the damn electronic drone telling him to give more coins, but he was out.

“Mom,” he said so quietly it sounded weaker than a whisper. “I’m going to have to go.”

“Do you want to go?” she asked.

“No, but I’m out of money.”

“Are you at this new job now? Why don’t you give me the number and I’ll call you back? Ralph gets long-distance free.”

The number was right there under the phone’s cradle. He read it to her. A moment later they were disconnected.

Pepper set the receiver back down and waited. He counted to himself and hoped his mother had written the digits down correctly. When the phone rang he snatched it up.

“Anyway,” his mother said, as if they hadn’t been cut off, as if her son weren’t keeping all the particulars in his life mysterious. “I want to tell you a little story.”

Pepper leaned to the right, the receiver still to his ear, and saw the patients forming a line in front of the nurses’ station. As soon as those folks had been dosed, one of the staff would come looking for him. He’d rather hang up on his mother, in the middle of a sentence, than to let her get some clue about the state he was in.

“When your father and I still had the video store,” his mother began, “we used to take inventory of the tapes at the end of each week. You remember?”

“Siesta Sundays,” Pepper said, smiling faintly. Pepper and Ralph would have twenty dollars to spend on whatever dinner they pleased. Did Nehi orange soda and Rolos count as dinner? They did on Siesta Sundays.

“Raymond and I would close up at nine and spend three hours checking to make sure all our videos were accounted for. We were meticulous about keeping track. On the week I’m thinking about, you must’ve been about fourteen or fifteen, we discovered two tapes missing.” She made a faint humming noise as she tried to remember the titles.

Pepper leaned back again, the line of patients was moving forward. Half as long as it had been only a minute ago.

“Tales from the Buttside,” his mother said. “And … Chesty Murphy, Double-D Detective.”

“Ma!”

She laughed on the line. “You remember.”

He felt suddenly exposed. As if his mother and father were in the alcove with him and he had no pants on.

“Your father wanted to turn your room upside down to find them,” his mother said. “Do you know how much the adult tapes were worth to us? This is before the Internet. Nothing made bigger profits for us.”

“I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” Pepper said. But he could believe it. His mother, bless her, had always enjoyed giving her sons a little hell.

Outside the alcove, he heard a staff member call out. “Who’s left?”

His mother, meanwhile, just kept raconteuring. “Raymond would’ve torn your and Ralphie’s room apart, and taken you to small claims court. But I told him to wait a week.”

“Where’s Loochie?” Scotch Tape called out.

“I’m here!” Loochie shouted. “I’m coming.”

“A week later Tales from the Buttside and …”

“Stop saying the titles, Ma, please.”

His mother chuckled again. “A week later those two films were right back where they were supposed to be.”

He brought one hand over his eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know what you might be going through right now, Peter. I wish you’d tell me, but I can’t make you. So I told you that story because there’s something I want you to always remember. You took those tapes, but you put them back.”

“Come on,” Pepper said. “What does that prove?”

“It told me something about your character, Peter. It might sound silly to you, but even those small indiscretions reveal so much.”

“We got one more missing!” Scotch Tape called out. “Don’t make me come looking for you.”

Pepper spoke softly into the receiver, looking over his shoulder for an orderly or nurse. “I had to return those tapes, Ma. I wasn’t being noble. I stole them from you and Dad. Anyone would’ve put them back.”

“Really?” His mother laughed quietly. “Because Ralph never did.”

38

PEPPER LEFT THE alcove feeling like gold bullion. So good that he didn’t mind taking the meds. As soon as he was done, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters crowded around him. Standing so close they could’ve picked his pockets. (If his pajamas had pockets, that is.)

“What’s this?” he asked.

Redhead Kingpin looked at Still Waters. “Show him,” she said.

Still Waters carried her manila folder, “No Name” on the flap. She opened it.

“I don’t want to know,” Pepper said. They were carrying the terrible folder that only housed the terrible news. Whatever they were going to pull out from there would only wreck his mood. He moved around them and started toward Northwest 2. If he made it to the threshold of the men’s hall, the pair, and their news, would be left behind.

But the pair double-teamed him. Redhead Kingpin squaring off in front of him, while Still Waters dug through the crowded folder. Before he could bob and weave around the redhead, Still Waters had found the article in question.

“Read,” she said.

Pepper scanned the top of the page. This one had been torn out of the newspaper quickly. One edge uneven and ragged. It was from The New York Times. The byline read “Nina Bernstein.” It was accompanied by a picture of two women sitting in a train car.

Reluctantly, Pepper read aloud.

“ ‘Holding tight to her sister’s hand in the bustling streets of Oakland’s Chinatown, Xiu Quan Hong looked a little dazed, like someone who has stepped from a dark, windowless place into a sunny afternoon.’

“ ‘In a sense, she has. For a year and a half, Ms. Hong, a waitress with no criminal record and a history of attempted suicide’ ”—Pepper stopped there a moment, then began again—” ‘was locked away in an immigration jail in Florida and then held in a psychiatric unit in Queens, New York.’

“ ‘With no lawyer to plead for asylum on her behalf, she had been ordered to be deported to her native China, which her family had fled when she was only four years old. She was trapped in an immigration limbo: a fate that detainee advocates say is common in a system that has no rules for determining mental competency and no obligation to provide anyone with legal representation.’ ”

Pepper found his hand was shaking, but he read on.

“ ‘Then, through a fluke, her sister discovered her whereabouts in New York only three days before her deportation order was to be executed. Her sister, Yun Hong, a cashier at a supermarket in Oakland, found Theodore Cox, a New York immigration lawyer, through an Internet search and convinced him to take her sister’s case for free.’

“ ‘Now Ms. Hong, 41, is free on bail and living with her sister in Oakland.’ ”

That’s where he stopped.

He looked up at the picture again. Two women sitting in a train car. He didn’t know the woman on the right. He knew, but didn’t recognize, the one on the left. “That’s Sue?” he whispered.

Her hair had been cut short and now framed her face, where before, her face had been hidden. She didn’t look at the camera but her head was held up. She seemed to be looking out the window behind the photographer. She wore a pink short-sleeved T-shirt and black slacks. In her lap sat a big stylish yellow purse. The woman on her right, her sister, was caught in profile because she looked at Sue. In the snapshot she had one hand up and was gently fixing Sue’s hair.

Still Waters pulled the paper away from Pepper’s face.

At least that’s what seemed to happen next.

In reality Pepper had staggered backward and came to a stop only when his back touched the wall behind him. And his legs trembled, they were about to give out, so he slid down the wall until he smacked the floor.

Now Ms. Hong, 41, is free on bail and living with her sister in Oakland.

Pepper spread his legs and lifted his knees and leaned forward so his head faced the floor. His shoulders trembled, and, to his great surprise, he sobbed openly. It sounded like he was choking. He felt Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters come down to the floor and surround him. Still Waters actually put one hand on his back and patted him there.

“We knew you’d be happy to see that,” Redhead Kingpin said.

He looked up into their faces and could see that, if they weren’t crying now, they had been very recently.

“It’s really true?” Pepper asked.

They stayed there with him as other patients passed through the room, as staff members logged in files at the computer. If anyone noticed the trio there on the floor, it was only to walk around them.

“You can keep the article if you want it,” Redhead Kingpin said.

Pepper looked at Redhead Kingpin, who grinned tightly and nodded. Then at Still Waters who clutched the paper and kept her head down.

“But you need it for your files, don’t you?” he asked.

Still Waters looked up at him with a broad smile of relief.

The women stood up when Pepper clambered to his feet.

In the article he’d been downgraded to a “fluke.” But Pepper didn’t even notice. Pepper’s part wasn’t the bulletin. Nor Sue’s sister’s efforts. The kindness of the lawyer. The diligence of the reporter. All incredible, but secondary. Sue was safe. That was the lead. Sue was safe.

Is there ever any good news in this world?

Yes.

Then Mr. Mack had to go and change the subject.

He entered the oval room and walked right up to Pepper, Redhead Kingpin, and Still Waters. He moved around them, on his way into the phone alcove.

But just before he passed them, he hissed, “Tonight.”

“How will we know when?” Pepper asked.

Mr. Mack had one foot in the alcove already.

“I’ll come knocking on your door,” he said.

39

AND THE OLD man wasn’t lying. Pepper had just finished separating the beds in his room. (What did that matter now?) He put on the street clothes Dr. Anand gave him. He pulled his boots on. Then a faint rapping began. Rapping, tapping at his door. But when Pepper opened the door to his room?

No one was there.

He peeked into the hallway and saw that every other door to every other room in Northwest 2 was shut. Down at the nurses’ station, Miss Chris and Nurse Washburn and Scotch Tape were on night duty. All three sitting or standing in there, looking serene. Probably a first for them on the unit. Everyone seemed to have gone to sleep. Not even the late-night crew of Heatmiser, Redhead Kingpin, and Still Waters were up. Quiet rooms were good. Logging files into the computer was all they had to do now. The clacks of the keyboard were audible. Pepper ducked his head back into his room.

But before he could shut the door, he heard the faint knocking again. It was coming from the wall, where his dresser had once been. From the door that had been painted over, sealed shut.

For the third time he heard the knocking.

Pepper brought his face to the wall. (Door?) “Mr. Mack?”

From the other side, a harsh whisper. “Hush!”

Then came this chipping and chopping sound from the other side of the wall. It seemed to go on so long, though really it was only minutes. That rust-colored ceiling tile, the site of the leak, quivered each time the door in the wall was hit. More small cracks appeared up there. Pepper thought it would almost be funny if all Mr. Mack’s work caused the ceiling to cave in.

Then a few bits of paint fell from the wall on his side. A small hole, no bigger than a dime, appeared at waist height. A moment after that, a piece of metal poked through. The business end of a flathead screwdriver.

The screwdriver blade stayed still in the hole for a moment, but then, slowly, it turned.

“Push,” Mr. Mack whispered from the other side of the door.

Pepper pressed at it. Mr. Mack had chipped away at the paint around the door frame on his side, but on Pepper’s side it remained intact.

“Put your weight behind it,” Mr. Mack commanded.

Pepper shouldered the door hard. When the paint separated, it sounded like ice cracking, a frozen lake splitting under someone’s weight, and Pepper felt his face go cold, as if he’d been dunked. It was the fear that he might’ve been heard by Miss Chris, Scotch Tape, and Nurse Washburn. Pepper stopped pushing and watched the other door.

When he turned back, Mr. Mack had pulled the former wall door open.

Now Pepper could move freely from this room to the next. No need to walk out into the hallway and risk the wrath of the staff. Thank you, Repurposing. In order to cut costs, the hospital had inadvertently provided them with a secret path.

Mr. Mack held the screwdriver like a scepter. He used it to wave Pepper through. Into room seven. The floor here was littered with off-white paint chips. They looked like pencil shavings. Pepper stepped into the doorway, but didn’t enter the other room yet. Being right here, where a threshold had suddenly just appeared, made the moment seem so magical that he expected to step through and be transported to some fantasy kingdom.

(The Lion, the Witch, and the Psych Unit.)

But that didn’t happen, of course. This moment was fantastic enough as it was. Pepper entered room 7 and saw, in the far wall, that another doorway, exactly like this one, had been pried open. It led to room 9, and past that, another doorway that led to room 11. Room after room, all the way to the last in line. The door in room fifteen, down there, was still sealed. A white wall. What was behind that? The sidewalk?

What if this was the last time he’d be in this place? He stepped back into room 5. What should he take? His wallet, yes. And Sue’s blue accordion folder? It seemed cumbersome to carry the whole thing. He’d probably drop it. How bad would he feel if somehow that was the thing that got him caught, the staff following the trail of magazine pages like bread crumbs? Instead, he opened the folder and stuffed as many pages as possible into the front pockets of his pants. He hoped he was taking enough of Sue’s dreams with him. Then he went back into room 7 and followed Mr. Mack.

“Where’d you get a screwdriver?” Pepper asked as they walked to the next room.

“When I said get your houses in order, what did you think I meant?” Mr. Mack asked. “Share a few kisses with your family? Shit. I asked a little bit more of mine.”

Pepper entered room 9. It looked just like his, generally. Two beds, two dressers. But this room hadn’t been occupied in a long time, so there weren’t any personal effects. It felt like the showroom version of a mental hospital’s bedroom. Pepper almost expected to find a mannequin in the bed, but that would’ve been hellaciously weird.

“This isn’t prison!” Mr. Mack squawked on, lifting the screwdriver like a prize. “They might check your visitor’s purse or bag, but they’re not sniffing anyone’s booty cheeks for contraband.”

“You had someone put a screwdriver up their ass?” Pepper asked.

Mr. Mack sniffed with disdain at Pepper. “It was up my nephew’s coat sleeve, if you really want to know.”

They entered room 11. This one had been occupied. Pages from magazines had been taped up to the wall over one bed. Lots of shots of black and Latino and a few white teenagers either squinting at the camera with a sneer or posing with cars, girls, and guns. Wally Gambino’s little acre.

“Rooms one and three are empty, so we don’t need to pop them open,” Mr. Mack said. “That’s better anyway, we don’t have to get too close to the nurses’ station.”

Finally, they reached the last room in this lane. Room 15. The one shared by Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly. They’d been there for many years. Relatively speaking, the place was quite nicely appointed. The same beds and dressers, but there was a low bookshelf near one of the beds. And these guys had even set up a kind of garment rack. They’d run a cheap tension bar across the windowsill so they could hang up their sport coats, shirts, and slacks.

Frank Waverly waited in the room. He sat on his bed, reading a book. Wally Gambino walked out of the bathroom, wiping his hands against his jeans.

Wally saw Pepper. “This motherfucker?” he said.

“Don’t start with that,” Mr. Mack told him.

Wally squinted at the old man (a lot like the dudes in the magazine pages taped to his wall), but he acquiesced.

Mr. Mack walked to Frank Waverly’s bed and held out the screwdriver.

“Your turn,” he said.

Frank Waverly sat there, still reading. Mr. Mack repeated himself. Reluctantly, Frank Waverly set his book facedown on his bed, leaving it open as if he expected to return to it quite soon. Pepper couldn’t help himself, he peeked at the cover. Emma. By Jane Austen.

“Is it good?” Pepper asked Frank Waverly, pointing at the book.

Frank Waverly gave the thumbs-up.

“You two want tea and goddamn biscuits?” Mr. Mack snapped. “Or can we get to work?”

Frank Waverly touched at the outline of the door in this wall. He found the groove between door and frame and stabbed the screwdriver into the layers of paint. Once he cracked through, he dragged the screwdriver blade along the top edge, slowly chipping off more.

“What if we pop this door,” Wally asked. “And get outside and some alarm goes off?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Mr. Mack said.

Pepper had moved to the jerry-rigged clothing rack, eyeing the changes of clothes with envy. “How do you know that?” Pepper asked.

“Because this door doesn’t lead outside,” Mr. Mack said matter-of-factly.

Frank Waverly had already chipped away the paint at the top of the doorway and moved on to the right side. Though he’d seemed hesitant, though he was at least as old as Mr. Mack, he moved quickly and with vigor.

“Best I can tell from Dorry’s map”—Mr. Mack patted the breast pocket of his sport coat—“the space on the other side of this wall used to be the front of the building. Maybe from when it was an eye clinic. The front of Northwest faced the sidewalk. People could just pull up out front and drop off the patient who would walk right in. But when it became our Northwest, for mental patients, they sealed that entrance off. It was like the building turned its back to the neighbors.”

“Like it was ashamed,” Wally said.

Frank Waverly worked hard but remained as quiet as ever. He didn’t even grunt as he chopped at the doorway. The only sound was the sawing of the screwdriver against old paint. The way the chips flew, you would’ve thought Frank Waverly was using an electric saw.

“Now Dorry has this map all laid out,” Mr. Mack continued. “She drew it by hand but it’s detailed. She was in fifteen on Northwest 3, last in her row. She didn’t have a roommate. So who knows how many times she was back there. Plenty, I’m guessing.”

“Why would she?” Pepper asked.

“Maybe she’s been leaving the building whenever she wants,” Wally said.

Mr. Mack said, “I don’t think so, Mr. Gambino.”

An address that made Wally smile.

“That wasn’t Dorry’s way. Each one of us got the greeting and the tour from that woman. She never just thought of herself. She could be a trial sometimes, but she was never selfish.”

You should see a friendly face first. That was one of the first things she’d said to Pepper. And so he had. So had all of them.

Frank Waverly moved to the other side of the doorway and got to chopping. They watched him quietly for a moment. As hard as Frank Waverly was working, each man willed him to go even faster.

“But because Dorry was a soft touch,” Mr. Mack continued, “I’m going to tell you what I think she was really doing back there all these years. The map shows a way to get out of this building. Through an air duct on the second floor. But the map also shows a back path that leads to one room in particular. One that’s off-limits to patients, normally.”

“The silver door,” Pepper whispered.

Mr. Mack reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, but instead of pulling out that map, he revealed something else.

A key.

Mr. Mack said, “I think she took care of that thing like she took care of all of us.”

Wally slapped his own leg. “She took care of a fucking monster?! Nah, that ain’t right.”

Pepper looked at the ceiling. “She always said it was just a man.”

“She even wrote his name down,” Mr. Mack said.

Frank Waverly continued to chip and Wally Gambino laughed.

“That old bitch was double crazy!”

Mr. Mack pulled out the map. The sheet of paper had been folded into a small square. He handed it to Pepper.

“Why are you giving this up?”

“I got it memorized already.”

Pepper unfolded it. Wally couldn’t help himself, he went up on his toes and tried to see the map, too. They looked like two boys who’d just found a page ripped out of a porn magazine.

“Now what we’re going to do,” Mr. Mack announced, “is break through this door and then move over to the other side of the men’s hall and get the two fellas there. Then we go to the women’s hall and we do the same. Everyone’s expecting us. It’s going to take us awhile, I know, but everyone needs to be involved.”

“Involved with what?” Pepper asked.

Mr. Mack pointed at the door, slowly being revealed. “We’re going to teach that thing a lesson or three.”

Pepper scanned the map. Dorry was so good that she’d even detailed the number of steps they would find on the staircase that led from the first floor to the second. (Dorry had a bit of that OCD going strong.) The route to the air duct looked simple enough. As did the path to the Devil. She’d also scribbled a note. Funnily enough, the note wasn’t addressed to Pepper. Not to anyone specifically. Which made Pepper wonder how long Dorry had been planning to pass on this knowledge. How long she’d been hoping to take her rest.

Hello, my friend

,

I’ve been in here a

very

long time, and I don’t want to be here anymore. I’ve stayed this long not for myself, but for everybody else. How much longer can I give until there’s nothing left? If you’re reading this, then I guess you have the answer

.

This is the last thing I’m going to do. Giving you this map and this key. If you want to leave, there is a way. I’ve marked it. But let me ask you this: Where will you run? I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned over my long life. This is the world, my friend. As much as anyplace else. Our trials don’t change, only the court

.

This key opens a second silver door. I hope I’ve passed this on to the right person. Please don’t hurt Mr. Visserplein. If you look into his face, truly see his face, you’ll understand

.

Please forgive me for my weaknesses

.

Doris

Mr. Mack made each of them chip and crack a doorway open. The men and the women. All in a spirit of fair play. Everyone’s hands getting dirty. The group learning to act as one. The only doorway they didn’t have to crack open was the one that led into Dorry’s room. She’d opened that one many, many years ago. The doorway was so well trod that the doorjamb dipped in the middle.

By the time every patient had been gathered, it was three in the morning. All of them were sweaty. All of them were out of their rooms and standing in the darkened chamber once known as the New Hyde Hospital Ophthalmology Welcome Pavilion.

(Though nobody had ever really called it that. This was Queens; people just said “the eye clinic.”)

The pavilion had been stripped down decades ago, so now it was like being in the shell of a structure waiting to be finished or torn down. The skeleton intact, but no organs. The only nice touch that remained was the gray granite floors.

The windows along the far wall had all been removed (once there’d been a bank of them, each twenty feet tall). Now it was all dry wall. The center of the ceiling, two stories above, showed an enormous oval pane of glass. It looked vaguely like a single almond-shaped eye. That had been intentional. Moonlight drifted down through the glass and caught the speckles in the granite tiles. This made the floor seem to glow, as if a layer of low fog filled the room.

“So here we are,” Mr. Mack said.

Twelve patients. Pepper and Loochie, Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters, The Haint, Heatmiser, Wally Gambino and Yuckmouth. Even the two newer admits, Doris Roberts and Sandra Day O’Connor. They gathered in a tight circle directly beneath the great glass eye in the ceiling.

Pepper couldn’t help but imagine Dorry in this cavernous space — how many times? — alone at night. Back here on a mission much too batty to believe. To comfort the Devil. (What the fuck was a Mr. Visserplein?!)

They stood in the large empty space, in the circle of direct moonlight, and none of them dared to step out of the circle alone. There used to be two sets of double doors not fifty feet in front of them, the front entrance to the clinic, but the doors had been sealed over just as surely as the windows. The moonlight lit the room, but only so much. There were shadows on all sides. Mr. Mack was the first one to step out of the moonlight alone. All of them, even Pepper, held their breath.

Once he was out, he spread his arms wide. “I’m fine,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

With that, more of them moved. Just a few steps. Fanning out. Until only Frank Waverly remained under the moonlight.

“There’s a staircase over here,” Doris Roberts called out.

“Here, too,” mumbled Heatmiser.

Two sets of staircases, at either end of the lobby. Leading up to a second-floor landing. Everyone followed Doris Roberts’s voice and used her stairs.

Only Heatmiser went his own way. His low, affectless voice could be heard in the dim hall.

“That’s fucked up,” he muttered as the others moved off.

Then the lonesome yelp of his sneakers, alone, on his set of stairs.

The patients gathered all together again on the landing and looked down at the first floor. Because the room was so dark, the hall so stark, the granite tiles looked much farther below them. Fifty feet instead of only ten. A railing ran at about waist height on the landing. The braver patients leaned over it to give themselves the thrill of faux vertigo. They were having a little fun, playing tag in the graveyard.

Finally, Mr. Mack called them to order.

“We’ve got things to do and there’s no point in waiting,” he said.

Their eyes had adjusted enough to understand the layout here. It was exactly like on the first floor. They stood before the doors that would lead to the second-floor version of Northwest 2 and Northwest 3. The rooms above their rooms. They’d all known this second floor was up here, of course, but the idea had remained academic. Now, standing on this landing, looking at the actual doors, it was like coming across an alternate universe and being shocked because, all along, it had been this close.

Mr. Mack walked farther along the landing. They followed him. And right there in front of them, they saw it, another silver door. Mr. Mack slapped it. The sight of him actually touching the door caused every patient to tense up, recoil. They expected staff members to appear and tackle the old man.

But that didn’t happen.

Mr. Mack left his hand on the silver door because he, too, couldn’t quite believe Miss Chris wasn’t running toward him with a needle. Now the others wanted a touch. They didn’t take turns. They mobbed the door. Each one placing a hand where he or she could. When Pepper did it, up near the top, he expected the silver door to feel cold or hot. Maybe that smell again, of piss and filth. Something. But a different surprise awaited them.

Wally Gambino shouted, “Yo!”

Even though they were as far from the nurses’ station as they could be, Wally’s voice still sounded too damn loud there in the pavilion. Everyone flinched or curled up expecting some kind of attack. But Wally remained oblivious, too excited by his realization to feel afraid.

“It’s a fucking exit door!” he said.

“Keep your voice down!” Mr. Mack snapped.

Wally looked around, as if he’d just stepped into traffic and someone had called out that a truck was bearing down.

“Oh, yeah,” he said more quietly. “My bad.”

But now that Wally said it, all the others could see the door more clearly. As he’d just described it. Before it had been repurposed. The stainless steel door of a stairwell exit. Only silver from a distance.

“They’ve got it living in a stairwell?” Redhead Kingpin asked.

She almost sounded sympathetic. Even in the dimness Mr. Mack saw the spark of pity burnishing her face.

“I want to remind you what’s on the other side of this door,” Mr. Mack said. “I don’t care if it has a lazy eye and a wooden leg. That damn Devil has been feeding on us like we were the sheep! And it is the wolf at the door.”

He knocked on the door to make his point. The sound echoed across the landing and the patients drew closer to one another.

“Before you get all weepy about where this beast makes its bed,” Mr. Mack continued, “please remember a few names. Dennis Drayton, who we all called Fogey. Miss Grace. And Sam. Coffee. Dorry. Maybe Glenn, too, if he ends up dying in the ICU. Remember them before you go feeling sorry for their predator.”

Mr. Mack reached back and knocked on the silver door lightly. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his sport coat. He pulled out a small gold key.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said. “I’m going to ask you a question. How long have you been scared?”

They watched Mr. Mack silently, but each seemed to lean toward him, his voice so full of gravity.

“How old is that fear we all been feeling?” he asked. “Sometimes I think I’ve been afraid my whole life. Like I got born with it and didn’t realize it was with me all along.”

The moonlight streaming through the great glass eye in the ceiling couldn’t reach them on the landing. Standing in the dark, they appeared nearly like phantoms, even to one another.

“Well, I’m tired of that feeling,” Mr. Mack admitted. “And more than that, I’m angry. I find myself wanting to send a message. You’re not going to abuse me no more. I don’t care what is on the other side of this door, I only know it is my enemy. And I want to finally fight what’s out to kill me.

“I vote for taking a stand.” Mr. Mack raised one hand. “Who’s with me?”

When Pepper looked at Loochie he was surprised to find she’d already raised her hand. And she looked just as startled, because his big paw was in the air. He hadn’t even realized he’d done it. Other hands rose as well. Seemed like everyone’s went up.

Then Frank Waverly reached out from the crowd. He plucked the little key right out of Mr. Mack’s fingers.

Frank Waverly put his body between the crowd and the silver door. When he turned to the crowd, what did he see? So many angry faces. Stupified with rage. Not shouting or cursing but seething silently. They weren’t really looking at him. Their eyes locked on his right hand, the small gold key.

“Don’t be dumb,” Mr. Mack barked. “You can’t save nobody.”

Frank Waverly’s mouth opened, the lips hung open for just a moment. “But you can help,” Frank Waverly finally said.

It was the first time any of them — even Mr. Mack — had heard old Frank say a word. His voice sounded raspy from disuse, it wavered and showed he was scared. But everybody heard him. Surprise kept them rooted as Frank Waverly lifted the key to his lips. And then, do you know what he did?

He swallowed it.

Suddenly, it was like Mr. Mack’s spell had been broken. At least for Pepper. He didn’t wait a beat. He grabbed Loochie by the arm. He yanked her sideways, hard.

She stumbled into Pepper, looked up at him with confusion.

“Let’s go,” Pepper said. “This is about to get ugly.”

Consider Loochie and Pepper the breakaway vote. Loochie went with Pepper when he pulled her. Who else did she trust as much? Only herself. And even she wasn’t sure what to do just then.

They ran along the landing. Leaving the others behind. They reached the door to the room that sat right above Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly’s room.

Pepper pushed at it, but couldn’t open the door all the way. Just wide enough to fit his head and shoulders through, but no more. Pepper peeked inside but couldn’t make out what might be blocking the doorway because the windows had been boarded over. His eyes had adjusted to the level of darkness on the landing, but in here he found darker shadows.

Pepper reached inside, too keyed-up to be cautious. His hand caused a clang when it connected with some enormous piece of metal. Pepper strained and finally slipped into the room. Then Pepper reached out of the doorway and clapped a hand around Loochie’s wrist.

“Stay with me,” he told her.

Pepper’s plan was simple: Enter this room, then slip back into the hallway that ran right above Northwest 2. Book it until they reached the hallway directly above Northwest 1. Find the air duct marked on Dorry’s map. The one mentioned by Mr. Mack. Climb up, climb out, escape.

Now that she was inside the room, too, Loochie’s eyes adjusted. She could see that the big metal thing blocking the doorway was just a filing cabinet. An old-school model. Back when they made everything out of lead or something. When even forks and knives weighed five pounds each. Loochie pulled her hand from Pepper’s grip so she could feel around the dark room and get her bearings.

There were four of those enormous filing cabinets in here. Two desks that had been stacked in front of the boarded windows. How many typewriters on the floor. Ten? Twenty? All this in one room.

The second floor had been turned into a warehouse. Storing the office equipment of decades past. It occurred to Loochie that all this stuff might be valuable in an Antiques Roadshow sort of way. She even tried to lift one of the typewriters, like some brave knight from a fairy tale, trying to take just one piece of treasure out of a dragon’s cave. But that machine seemed to weigh fifty pounds, and Loochie couldn’t see how she could haul it easily. She set it back down, and when she turned, Pepper had crouched down right beside her.

“I thought of doing the same thing,” Pepper whispered, patting her shoulder consolingly.

But now, down that close to the floor, another thought occurred to both Loochie and Pepper. In a space like this, so dark and full of nooks, there should’ve been pests everywhere. Pepper had seen one giant rat, so why wouldn’t there be thousands more? Wasn’t that how rats rolled? In great numbers?

But there were none.

Nothing scurrying underfoot. No roaches moving along the walls. No spiders spinning webs in the corners. No flies. No mosquitos. The room was cluttered and chaotic, but lifeless.

Then a howl came, from the landing. A man.

“What if they’re hurting Frank Waverly?” Loochie asked.

Pepper rose to his feet. “They’re definitely hurting Frank Waverly,” he said. He patted his surroundings, feeling for the nearest wall.

“What should we do?” Loochie asked, still crouched.

Pepper had found the door he wanted. Not the one they’d just come through, the one that led back onto the landing. The other one. The one that would take them farther away. It led out into a hallway. Pepper opened it.

“This is what we should do,” he said.

He held it open for her, and Loochie, after a moment’s hesitation, followed Pepper’s lead. Once they both stepped through, Pepper shut the door behind him. Now the two stood right above Northwest 2. The staff, on the first floor, could they even imagine what was going on above their heads?

The lights worked here. At least a little. One bulb lighting the hallway.

Maybe it was left lit as a basic safety precaution. Maybe some idiot had just forgotten to unscrew it.

Loochie and Pepper walked down the hall now, following the same floor plan as the level below. They left Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly’s room. They passed Wally Gambino’s. Then the empty room. All these doors were closed. And finally they reached room 5. Pepper’s room. This door sat half open. As if someone (something?) had recently been inside. Had been stalking across the floor right above Pepper’s head.

Pepper couldn’t help it. He had to look in. Unlike the last room, this one was almost empty. Only one piece of equipment, but it was a beast. A reclining chair, like you find in a dentist’s office. This one had a small crane attached at the top. The crane hung over the seat and had five metal attachments hanging down. The crane was like a wrist, the attachments enormous fingers. Pepper imagined a patient strapped into this device. Someone on his back, looking up at that rusted hand. The digits reaching down to do what? He pictured the giant, inorganic hand slowly, methodically plucking out the patient’s eyes. One at a time. Say you’re having trouble with your eyes? Bet you won’t have that trouble now.

Pepper moved around the chair, circling it, as Loochie watched from the doorway. Whatever this machine used to do, it had once been the height of modern medicine. Ophthalmologists probably heard about it and drooled. The chance to use a PX-1000! And now it was entombed in a dark room. He doubted anyone even knew it was there anymore. I will decay, Pepper thought touching the abandoned machine. I will be buried. I will be forgotten. What was my life worth?

Pepper moved around to the spot in the ceiling that had leaked into his room. Here the floor trembled from his weight. He knelt and felt the residue of rainwater. He traced it back to one of the boarded-up windows. A piece of the board had rotted through. He thrust two fingers through the hole and felt a night breeze on his skin. It felt cool and comfortable outside. “Let’s go,” Pepper said.

Loochie was still in the hallway. “I’m waiting on you,” she whispered.

They followed the hallway all the way to the oval room. This corresponded with the first floor, too. Right below their feet sat the nurses’ station. The staff members logging files onto the computer. Talking with one another. Checking email on their phones. Living normally. Up here, in place of a nurses’ station, they found only a chair on the second floor. One office chair, very old, three wheels instead of four. It tipped forward slightly, forlorn in the dim light.

When Pepper and Loochie trod across this room, they hardly lifted their feet. They moved like cross-country skiers to quiet their footfalls as they passed over the staff’s heads.

They reached the hallway above Northwest 1. They walked even slower, more quietly just because they were so close.

And finally they found the air duct.

It was exactly where Dorry had drawn it on her map. It corresponded to the place right above the secure ward door.

The grill over the air duct had been lost long ago. The hole, that crawl space, sat open. The faint light from the hallway illuminated the mouth of the duct. It wasn’t even that high up. Pepper would give Loochie a boost, but with a little effort she could’ve pulled herself up.

“Okay,” Loochie said, looking at the air duct. “This is it, right? We’re really here?”

Pepper took out the map as if he didn’t know. He triple-checked. He shook the sheet of paper. “No question.”

Loochie pulled her wig down so it was tighter on her scalp. She knelt and retied the laces of her baby-blue Nikes. When she rose again, Pepper said, “Why didn’t Dorry leave?”

He wasn’t really speaking to Loochie, just out loud. But she answered him anyway. “She probably couldn’t climb up by herself.”

“Did you see her scale that fence?” Pepper asked.

“I don’t know why she didn’t,” Loochie told him. “But I know we can.”

Loochie patted her face, opened and closed her fists. Getting her courage up. The air duct looked relatively big to her. It might be a little tight around Pepper, but she’d have a little more room to breathe.

Why didn’t Dorry leave? Pepper couldn’t let the question rest.

“Gimme a boost,” Loochie said.

Why didn’t she?

He knew why.

“I’ve got something I want you to do for me,” Pepper said quietly.

Loochie was already at the air duct. Reaching up, she grazed the opening with her fingertips. She turned around. “What are you waiting for?”

Pepper reached into his pants. He pulled out a single glossy magazine page. It was crumpled up. He handed it to her.

“Open it,” he said.

He didn’t know what she would find any more than she did.

She scanned the headline. “The penguins of Antarctica,” she read.

Pepper shook his head. “That’s a little ambitious.”

He reached into his pocket again. Pulled out another page.

“Borneo’s best beaches,” she said after scanning.

“Well, fuck,” Pepper muttered.

He pulled a handful of magazine sheets out of one pocket. He held them up to his face so he could read each one. He snapped through them until finally he found one that seemed right.

Loochie held the paper close. “Van Gogh’s Amsterdam.”

“That’s the one,” Pepper said.

She dropped her hand. “What is this?”

“I got interested in this guy,” Pepper said. “He’s a painter. But they only had black-and-white versions of his stuff in the book I read. This article says they have a whole museum devoted to his stuff. I want you to go there. See his paintings. For me.”

And what he didn’t say, but could’ve added: and for Sue.

Loochie crumpled the article in her fist.

“See it for yourself, Pepper.”

He nodded, but didn’t respond to what she’d said. “You’ll have to apply for a passport first,” Pepper instructed. “You can do that at the post office. Then you buy a plane ticket. Then you go.”

Loochie almost laughed. “Okay, fine, let’s play this game. You know a passport costs money, right? And the plane ticket? You think they’ll let me fly free if I ask nicely?”

Now Pepper went into his back pocket. He took out his wallet and removed a blue card. “This is my ATM card,” he said. “Go to any branch. You can’t take out more than a thousand a day. But take it out. It’s yours.” He told her the code.

She looked down at the ATM card. Why was her face feeling so warm?

“Should be four thousand dollars left,” Pepper said. “But take it all out before the end of the month or else Time Warner and a few other assholes are going to take their cut. I’d be happier if you had it.”

Loochie shook her head and thrust the card back at him. “I’m not …” she began, but couldn’t finish. She raised her free hand, balled into a fist, and hit him in the chest, but there wasn’t any power in it. She hit him again.

“Come on now,” Pepper said.

She looked up at him. “I’m scared to go alone.”

Pepper went down on one knee. He looped his fingers so she could put one foot in them. “You put that card and that article in your pocket,” he said clearly and loudly. She was so stunned that, probably for the first time since grade school, she just did what an adult told her to do.

“Now give me your foot.”

Loochie did that, too. And next thing, she was climbing into the air duct. Scrambling really. She had enough space that, if she curled herself tight, she could turn herself around. She did that, and looked down at Pepper.

Being inside the air duct, hearing the tinny echo of her movements, caused a panic to rise in Loochie. It felt like bile climbing up her throat. She shook. She almost felt angry. “Why are you doing this!” she shouted. She didn’t concern herself with whether or not the staff on the first floor might hear her. “Just come on. We can both make it. Why won’t you leave?!”

Far behind them there was a second howl. Even louder and, somehow, wetter. Like someone was screaming underwater. Pepper looked over his shoulder, then back to Loochie.

“I gotta go help,” he said.

Loochie looked past Pepper, down the long hallway.

“You let me know that you got there,” Pepper said. He waved one hand in front of her face to get her attention back. “That’s how you repay me.”

Loochie couldn’t speak. She only nodded.

Pepper saw that, with the wig on, Loochie really looked like a new version of herself. If she walked right past him in another context, he doubted he’d even recognize her. In a way, Loochie’s mother had supplied her daughter with a great disguise.

“Turn around now,” he said.

Loochie focused on his face. Her eyes became less cloudy, her lips firm. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered.

Pepper grinned. “That’s the Loochie I know.”

She slowly turned herself around in the air duct again. She crept forward on her belly.

Pepper watched her go. It took less than a minute before he couldn’t see her in there. He listened to the squeak of her sneakers as she inched ahead. Finally Pepper turned away.

He retraced his steps.

He went back in.

40

PEPPER AND LOOCHIE had been right earlier, that the second floor of the unit was surprisingly critter-free. No water bugs. No gnats. No rats. (Plural.)

There was one rat in the entire two-story. Pepper had seen it come tumbling from the ceiling in Glenn’s room. A single common rat roamed. His name was LeClair.

LeClair the Rat.

And he was old.

That point is less about his age than his inflexibility. LeClair had been at Northwest his entire life, four years. Now that might not sound so amazing, but the average rat life span is two to three years. So roughly speaking, LeClair had lived the equivalent of 120 human years.

He hadn’t seen another rat, though, in over a year. (That’s thirty human years.) Long ago, they’d bred on the second floor like, yes, rats. The females, called does, matured like rats everywhere do, reaching puberty at only six to eight weeks old. They went into heat every four to five days, for about twenty-four hours at a time. The average litter size was twelve. So you want to talk about a population explosion? If you’re talking about rats, it’s not even an explosion, it’s an expectation.

And yet the back spaces of Northwest were barren. Why? There were three reasons: 1) New Hyde Hospital didn’t make a habit of spending its money, as staff salaries and the profoundly wack-ass computer at the nurses’ station should attest; but there was one expenditure that did enjoy New Hyde’s enthusiastic financial support. Besides administrative salaries, which were astronomical at the very top, New Hyde paid for pest control. Nothing shuts down a hospital faster than vermin, so New Hyde paid for exterminators without hesitation. Practically had the trucks on standby. Northwest’s second floor got bombarded with nerve toxin — type poisons at least twice a year. (Don’t mention that to the patients on the first floor.) That’s reason number one for why the second floor was so lifeless.

2) Human beings weren’t the only living things the Devil stalked. It fed on warm bodies and fostered fear; rats would do just as well as humans. The Devil had been wandering these halls for years — longer than LeClair had been alive. Dropping down into a patient’s room was the main course, but a passing rat might serve as an aperitif. The rats even had their own name for the beast. Not the Devil. What do rats know of such things? They called him “With Teeth.” Named for the way he killed their kind. He became a kind of legend among the rats, a tale told to make children cower in the dark. But eventually, the rats grew tired of such haunted grounds. They decided to leave Northwest. To flee from With Teeth. A mass exodus.

(Spiders and roaches and all other small life following not far behind.)

So that explains why the rats fled, but not why LeClair the Rat remained behind. That’s because he — LeClair the Rat — was the third reason the other rats all left, en masse. To put it bluntly, nobody liked the guy.

LeClair the Rat was profoundly intelligent. Unfortunately, he felt it was terribly important that every other rat in the world know this about him. He was a real bore and a pedant, but worst of all he was just a weenie. But so what, right? Why not just ignore a rat like that? Why abandon him? The problem was that LeClair was also a good scavenger. He foraged food, rummaged nesting materials — but when he returned with the goods, he wouldn’t share them freely. Instead, he’d force the other rats to sit around and listen to him — all his brilliant thoughts — before handing over the precious materials. You say you just want to know if those kernels of corn LeClair discovered were edible? Plebeian. You’d just hoped to use these bits of shredded newspaper to line a nest? Troglodyte. Didn’t you want to hear what LeClair thought about newspapers? And the dangers of how humans artificially increased the size of their corn? And, while he was at it, let him weave in the history of …

The point here wasn’t that LeClair the Rat was hated because all the other rats were dull-witted, anti-intellectuals. (Though, of course, some were.) The point was that LeClair the Rat had ideas, and he divided the entire rat population into two groups: those whose ideas agreed with his and those who had none. He couldn’t fathom that other rats might simply value different ideas and methods from his own. (That possibility was void, as Mr. Mack would say.)

As time passed, the other rats grew tired of their lives in Northwest: dodging the exterminators and their arsenal of poisons, cowering as With Teeth plagued the second floor, avoiding the increasingly sanctimonious LeClair. Some of the elder rats told stories of another world, someplace beyond Northwest. Outside. Where they might procreate and forage and procreate and die. What more could a rat ask for?

And eventually the rats did leave. Some lived in the wilds of New Hyde’s poorly maintained grounds; others found their way to the main buildings of the hospital; and others reached human homes beyond the fence line and their descendants still live there now. (Sorry, but it’s true.) But none of the rats ever told LeClair that they were going. He’d heard them talk about that place, Outside, but dismissed it as a myth. (If it was real, he would’ve been the one to think of it.) And one day LeClair the Rat found himself living alone on Northwest’s second floor. Nearly alone. Him and With Teeth. LeClair at least knew enough to keep his distance from that one. (In fact, the day he’d come crashing through Glenn’s ceiling was because With Teeth had been chasing him, trying to take a bite.)

He tried to stay brave in the face of his isolation. He didn’t admit to missing his fellow rats; instead, he cultivated a growing disdain for them. And that helped him make it through the year of solitude. But today, LeClair the Rat had to finally admit the truth.

He was lonely.

He’d tried, one last time, to find purpose in his work. He’d boldly leapt out, in plain view of the humans, and annexed a box of sugared corn. He almost got clocked, one of the humans chopping at him with a broom, but he escaped. And returned to the second floor. He’d felt pride in his daring, but could share the story, and the cereal, with no one. That’s when he came to realize that it can be honorable to stand alone, arguing for a righteous cause. But sometimes “taking a stance” becomes confused with “just being an asshole.” It had taken quite awhile, but on this late night LeClair the Rat finally accepted that, long ago, he’d turned into a prick.

But today LeClair the Rat was going to change.

Could he really, though? Hard to say. At least he might try.

So that night he’d passed through every room on Northwest’s second floor. Surveying the discarded furniture where he’d made his nests, the wiring he’d chewed through, it was surprisingly difficult for him to give up the grounds he’d cultivated, no matter how barren and lifeless now. He might not have gone through with it, but then he heard the humans nearby. They’d found their way into his realm. Sure, there’d been the old woman, who sometimes sprinkled bits of food on the floor for him, but this night there were a dozen humans crashing around. Howling and battling and encroaching on his territory. This, finally, was what convinced LeClair to go. He thought he might make his way to that place—Outside—where the other rats had gone. Maybe he would find some of them. Or maybe he would die. But at least he wouldn’t be stuck in here, bereft, adrift, alone.

This is how LeClair the Rat came to be in a section of the air duct when Loochie appeared. She found that big old rat directly ahead of her.

Wow! She could scream. The only thing that shut her up was when the rat turned toward her. She thought LeClair the Rat might charge and bite off her nose. This threw her into a dazed silence.

She tried to turn around, or scoot backward, but pushing back only seemed to wedge her in tight. She imagined getting stuck here, unable to wriggle free, dying in a fucking pipe. She didn’t know what to do. She could slide her hands up in front of her, one at a time. At the very least she could try to guard her face. Bat the big rat back if it came at her.

But what did LeClair the Rat know about this human in front of him? Zip. As far as he was concerned, this body in the air duct might be kin to With Teeth. It hadn’t been able to catch LeClair, so it sent this smaller one. It wasn’t only Loochie who was smacked with a sudden case of fright.

Loochie watched the rat.

And LeClair watched her.

Finally, the rat turned away from Loochie. It moved again.

Loochie thought she’d wait long enough to let the rat disappear. That was what her revulsion suggested she do. But she had to admit that she felt lost. The air duct hadn’t just run a straight line out of the building. The air duct twisted here and there like bends in a road. She wasn’t entirely sure if, at the end of her journey, she’d be looking out on a night sky or just back into the second-floor hallway, where she’d started. Pepper hadn’t given her Dorry’s map after all. In here, she was on her own.

In her mind, she’d already retraced her path to the bus stop in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. (Or whatever it had been called.) She was already looking for the tree that leaned so far over that its leaves touched the roof of one home. She was already planning on the face she’d pull when she pretended she left her MetroCard at home and could the bus driver please just let her ride to the depot. She imagined the letter she would write to her mother, explaining why this, as wild as it seemed, was the sanest choice she’d made for herself in many years. For all her hesitation, her fear of hurting her mother, Loochie was already determined to leave.

Then Loochie thought about that rat. Like rats fleeing from a sinking ship. That’s the cliché, right? But the point of the line, really, is this: Life wants to live. She didn’t know her way around an air duct, but she bet that rat did. If she followed it, where would it lead? Right back into the building, maybe. But in that case she wouldn’t be doing any worse than she already was. But the rat might also make its way outside. And she would come tumbling after it.

Loochie followed the rat, at a distance. She could barely make it out ahead, its claws scritching on the air-duct metal as it moved. But she managed. And in this way, for once in his life, LeClair the Rat helped someone without being a prick about it.

Loochie reached the end of the air duct. The panel here had been knocked off by hordes of fleeing rats long ago. She saw the big gray rat slip right out. She saw the starry night ahead. She peeked out. A Dumpster sat directly below the duct, lid closed. A one-story drop. Dangerous but manageable. Even if she would have to go out hands-(and head) first.

Loochie watched the rat where it lay on the Dumpster. It surveyed the open parking lot. She shifted in the duct, making noise. The rat looked up at her. Then it shot off the Dumpster and ran into the parking lot. She watched it dart between parked cars and off into the distance. As silly as it sounds, she wished that big old rat well.

She slipped partway out of the duct. She inhaled the air, hoping it would be fresh, but nothing so poetic awaited her. She was right over a Dumpster. She smelled garbage. She hadn’t reached the last step, but the next step. She looked down at the drop. She tried to breathe slowly.

She would curl into a ball, protect her head with her arms. She imagined that was the best way to do it, but she’d never tried anything like this before. Unbidden, she saw herself falling at the wrong angle. Flailing. Her head smacking the Dumpster. Her body crumpled on the ground. Bleeding out, alone. Just some trash. She couldn’t stop imagining it now. She talked to herself, trying to calm down. But there is only so much that talking can do. She had to move. Right now. Right now.

Lucretia Gardner went out.

41

PEPPER LEFT THE air duct and tracked his way back down the hall. He passed the single off-kilter chair in the oval room. He reached the hall right above Northwest 2. He passed the room right above his own, the one with the machine inside. The half-open door made him scurry past, as if the big machine inside might reach out to snatch him. Then he entered the room with all the old equipment. As he felt his way through the filing cabinets, stepping over errant typewriters, he hoped Loochie was safe. Then he reached the other door. He stepped back out to the second-floor landing. Moonlight still filtered down in a beam cast through the glass eye in the pavilion’s ceiling. Pepper felt as if he’d been gone from here for quite awhile. That was because Pepper didn’t hear anything. Meaning that the screaming, those howls, had ceased. Just a heavy silence now.

His valiant urge had already ebbed. He should have gone with Loochie. She was probably getting on a bus right now. Already a guest of the MTA. They were shuttling her to safety. Meanwhile he was here. You volunteered to return to this? he asked himself. You must be fucking crazy after all.

Pepper walked with hunched shoulders, his head swiveling left and right. He didn’t see the others until he was practically on top of them. Their backs were to him. He counted six standing together. And farther back, in another clump were three more. He couldn’t say who was who. They were all so still, so quiet, he felt like he’d stumbled across a crew of sleepwalkers.

“It’s Pepper,” he said, just to avoid startling them.

They didn’t answer. The six people with their backs to him stood adjacent to the silver door. When Pepper got closer, he could finally hear something. This group breathed hard, grunting and panting. Their shoulders rose and fell.

Pepper walked around the group. He stood between the cluster of six people and the clump of three others. He wasn’t sure who he should be wary of. From his new position he could make out the trio: Redhead Kingpin, the Haint, and Wally Gambino. Proton, neutron, electron, that’s how tightly packed they were. They didn’t even seem to notice Pepper. Their gazes trained intently, guardedly on the six: Doris Roberts, Heatmiser, Still Waters, Sandra Day O’Connor, Yuckmouth, and Mr. Mack.

Pepper moved toward the larger group. His boots squelched, like he’d stepped in jelly. The floor between him and them was slick.

Pepper’s eyes followed the trail of slickness, more like oil really. To their feet. All six of them were standing in it. There were blotches of it, like dark paint, on the fronts of their clothes. Their hands were so wet they dripped.

Of those Pepper had accounted for, Loochie and he made eleven.

“Where’s Frank Waverly?” Pepper demanded.

No one answered. No one moved.

Pepper padded to the edge of the landing and looked over the railing, but Frank Waverly wasn’t down there. The moonlight brightened Pepper’s boots here at the edge of the landing. The soles, the toes, they were almost a reddish brown. The stuff he’d just stepped in almost looked like mud. Pepper returned to the others. Stood in front of Mr. Mack directly.

“Where is Frank Waverly?”

Mr. Mack raised a fist slowly. It looked like it had been dipped in balsamic vinegar.

The fingers opened. A small gold key sat on Mr. Mack’s palm.

“They just …” Redhead Kingpin whispered.

Pepper looked back at her.

“They just … opened him,” she said blankly.

It wasn’t possible. Pepper couldn’t move.

“They just …” Redhead Kingpin began again.

Where was Frank Waverly’s body? Tossed aside, in some dark corner, like a torn candy wrapper? If breathing wasn’t an involuntary function, Pepper would’ve choked.

Mr. Mack walked to the silver door. Triumphant. Not only did the man have numbers on his side, he also had insanity. Not mental illness, but true madness now. Mr. Mack slipped the key in the lock. The other five members crowded closer to Mr. Mack. Imagine trying to talk them down at this moment, to bring them back to the rational, even if ill, human beings they’d very recently been. Pepper doubted that even a volley of tranquilizer darts could stop those six now.

The silver door unlocked with a click as loud as a grandfather clock.

Mr. Mack waved the others back so he could open the door.

The doorway was as dark as an elevator shaft.

Pepper hadn’t realized he’d stepped backward until he was beside Redhead Kingpin, and the Haint, and Wally Gambino. Those three were holding hands. Pepper joined in.

“Don’t hide now,” Mr. Mack taunted the darkness. “Don’t run.”

No movements inside the doorway. No sounds. This made Mr. Mack feel bolder. He took a step toward the open doorway, the darkened room.

“Wait.” One of Mr. Mack’s group called out to him. Hard to tell which one. That one seemed to be speaking for all of them. And even for the other four, watching from farther back.

Another step.

Wait.

But the caution of the others only fueled Mr. Mack’s brashness. One more step and his foot passed through the doorway.

Then Mr. Mack lost his balance. He fell, headfirst, into the shadows. He didn’t even yelp when he fell.

Mr. Mack was there and then he wasn’t.

Everyone, all nine of them, just stood there, dumbstruck.

Wally Gambino was the first to break the silence.

He laughed.

And not a little laugh, either. A real gut-buster. He had to let go of the Haint’s hand. He leaned forward with his hands on his thighs for balance. And he kept on laughing.

“Old boy took a lump,” Wally shouted.

And that was that. The cloud that had been hanging over all of them parted. The others didn’t laugh, not at all, but they’d all been teetering over a precipice just then. Wally Gambino’s utterly inappropriate reaction bonked them from that edge.

“Be quiet,” Pepper said, after a moment. “Listen.”

They heard this low, insistent huffing coming from the darkened doorway. As a group they moved closer. The ones at the front had the good sense to brace their hands against the door frame to keep from falling in, too.

“Mr. Mack?” Pepper called.

The huffing sound rose again. Its pace quickened but then slowed. A deep breath taken. “I landed hard,” a weak voice said. “On my leg.”

The huffing again. Then a crinkling noise, hard to place.

“What’s that other sound?” Pepper asked.

The same thing — huffing speeding up, then slowing down. A deep breath.

“I landed in a pile of plastic,” Mr. Mack said.

“Plastic?” Doris Roberts asked.

“Wrappers,” Mr. Mack grunted. “From those goddamn cookies they’re always giving us. Got to be thousands in here.”

“That’s probably what broke your fall,” Pepper said.

Pepper remembered Dorry tucking those cookies into her lap at every meal. She must’ve been bringing them to the Devil for years. Of course the Devil would like them, they were as vile as he was.

“How far down are you?” Doris Roberts asked.

“About ten feet, I think.”

Mr. Mack had fallen to the first floor.

New Hyde Hospital, in its relentless penny-pinching, had indeed repurposed a stairwell and made it into a room. When they’d closed off the second floor, they’d seen that this stairwell would essentially go to waste. (There was a main stairwell already, on the other side of the secure door.) And they needed a room where a violent patient could be kept. Now contrary to most news reports — and the storylines of commercial television and movies — the vast majority of mentally ill people weren’t remotely violent. If they hurt anyone it was usually themselves. But it was true that a very small number of mentally ill patients did cause others harm. For those patients, it was necessary to have a room where they could be sequestered. In the case of Northwest, that would’ve meant constructing a reinforced room. And do you know what that costs? Much more than New Hyde Hospital was willing to spend. But they were already repurposing so much of the building for its transition into a psychiatric unit, so why not be creative. Someone who worked with the board (it was actually that legal rep guy who’d used an iPad at Pepper’s meeting after Coffee’s death), suggested that a concrete stairwell could serve their needs as a holding room for any violent patient. The space already had a stainless-steel door, much more resilient than wood, and the walls were reinforced as per the fire code. All New Hyde had to do was remove the stairs. As simple as pulling teeth. Then they’d have one secure room, as legal standards demanded.

“Do you want us to try and get you out?” Pepper asked.

They listened to the huffing and let it play out its natural rise and fall. But after the inhalation of breath, there was no response.

“Mr. Mack?” Doris Roberts called.

“I’m not down here alone,” he finally said.

They heard shuffling. Then a hard clopping on the concrete floor. Then a deep inhalation followed by a short puff of air, like a bodybuilder lifting a great weight up over his head. A moment after that, a heavy whomp, like a fully packed suitcase being slammed to the floor.

A moment after that, Mr. Mack whimpered softly.

Then in the dark, the Devil inhaled deeply again, lifted the old man up with a short puff of air. And again, the heavy whomp of Mr. Mack’s body hitting the floor. Mr. Mack whimpered once more.

“Stop it!” one of them up on the second floor landing shouted.

“Please,” another said.

“Why won’t you leave us alone?”

The same routine again, ending with the whomp of Mr. Mack’s body against the floor for a third time. Every patient strained to listen, but Mr. Mack didn’t even whimper this time.

They waited. What to do? Forget rescuing the old man. What about them? Each of them wanted to run, in their minds they were already sprinting, but they couldn’t make their bodies move.

They heard the sounds of some new exertion from down below, in the dark room. Puffing and straining. Who else could it be but the Devil? One quality of the noise had changed, though. It was much closer now.

They all saw a shape moving down there, in the darkness. It seemed to be floating. Up from the depths. Down by their feet a pair of mottled hands appeared, gripping at the very bottom of the doorway.

It wasn’t flying. It climbed.

Yuckmouth lifted his foot, as best he could in the crowded space, and stamped down on one of the hands. He landed hard with his heel. He might’ve done it again, but already the Devil was emerging from the open doorway. It seemed to catapult out, headfirst out of the shadows. It rammed right into Yuckmouth’s guts and that was it. Yuckmouth soared backward, right over the people behind him. He landed on his side and wasn’t even stunned. His survival instinct took over. Yuckmouth scrambled away on hands and knees.

And now the Devil was among them.

It moved so fast. Bashed right into Sandra Day O’Connor’s back. The poor woman went facedown, hard, and the Devil trampled over her. His hooves did the most damage. One came down—clop—on her hand.

Doris Roberts turned back when her friend cried out in pain. That’s when Doris Roberts got clipped. Not full-on impact, more like she got grazed. But one of the Devil’s horns tore her exposed forearm, a gash that ran from elbow to wrist.

Now the patients were all hollering. The Devil seemed to be coughing loudly, or was it laughter? Moonlight had turned to the first rays of dawn. That new light burned the first floor orange.

Heatmiser, poor Heatmiser, he ran along the landing toward the far staircase. He took the first step down and the Devil reached him. It had built up speed. When its head connected with the small of Heatmiser’s back, that mumbling kid got clobbered. His body went into the air and hit the wall, then he bounced off the wall and skipped down the stairs like a stone expertly tossed across a pond. Five hops and Heatmiser lay motionless on the first floor.

Still on the second floor, Pepper stood alone.

Unlike the others, he hadn’t tried to flee down one of the staircases. He’d held close to the shadows along the landing.

Pepper watched as the Devil descended the far staircase. It stood over Heatmiser and snorted at him. It bumped the body with the side of its head, rolling Heatmiser onto his back. Heatmiser shivered and sputtered. The Devil looked down into its victim’s face, almost daring the body to move again.

It’s just a man.

Pepper said this to himself. He tried to play Dorry’s voice in his head. She’d been so sure when she said it.

It’s just a man.

But Pepper’s eyes just wouldn’t agree. Here in the pavilion, the chaos like a toxin in the air, the fear a hallucinogenic, he couldn’t say what, exactly, he saw. Reality, or the reality they’d all agreed upon?

Heatmiser remained still. This disappointed the Devil. It bumped his body one more time, then abandoned it. It rushed back up the staircase to the second floor. When it did, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters moved to Heatmiser and tried to help him up.

The Devil returned to the landing. Come to see who else it could hurt. He found the Haint, too shocked to move, too old to run. She stood there in her purple pantsuit. Her matching hat had been lost. Her hands were crossed in front of her, daintily, as if she were waiting for a streetlight to change from red to green. The Devil didn’t even charge her. It didn’t have to. He could lean on her and she’d snap in two. It stalked toward the old woman slowly.

But someone stepped in between the Devil and the Haint.

It was Wally Gambino.

“Nah!” he shouted at the Devil. “That’s out. You ain’t fucking with this old bird. Not while I’m around. You wanna fuck with me? When I was twelve I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus!”

The Haint hardly seemed to notice Wally’s chivalry. She kept the same pose, hands crossed in front of her, patiently waiting. But the Devil’s stance switched. Lowering its head so the horns could gore the brave kid’s flesh.

It’s just a man, Pepper repeated in his head. It’s just a man.

Wally Gambino worked himself up. A little chemical change to the mind and body before entering combat. A mechanism as old as battling. “You know what they call me back home?” he yelled. And then silence. He’d forgotten the answer to his own question. The kid was brave, but also terrified. In that frozen moment, Pepper ran up behind the Devil and clutched it around the throat with one meaty arm. Pepper’s eyes were shut. He whispered to himself, “It’s only a man.”

The Devil thrashed in Pepper’s grip. A trapped animal, a hemmed-up human being, the same beast at that point. It hissed and flailed. It bucked. Pepper kept his eyes closed and repeated those four words—It’s only a man—as he dragged the Devil backward. Away from all the others. Back toward the door he and Loochie had used minutes ago.

“I don’t need you protecting me!” Wally Gambino said.

But his voice, it wavered. He sounded so relieved. He turned to the Haint. He took her by the arm and quickly led her down.

Pepper slammed into the door with his back, using his momentum and the combined weight of two bodies to force it open. The filing cabinet on the other side groaned as it fell. When it landed it sounded thunderous in Pepper’s ears, like a skyscraper had been tipped over. Pepper pulled the Devil into the darkened room.

In here, alone, Pepper looked down at the figure in his arms. What did he see in the lightless gloom?

The same grand bison’s head. The gray-white eyes rolling in their sockets. The long, fat pink tongue shooting out of its mouth.

“I know what you are,” Pepper said. He moved backward with the Devil. Where was he taking it? (Him.) Pepper wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d stuff the thing (man) inside that air duct. Let it (him) stay there, stuck, until it (he) rotted away.

Pepper pulled the Devil out into the same hallway he and Loochie had just been in. Here and there he could still see Loochie’s small footprints in the dust. The bulb here cast new light on Pepper and the Devil. And when Pepper looked down, he finally saw it. Him.

No bison’s head. An old man.

Pepper grunted, triumphant. He looked down into the wild eyes of an old man. The old man had a head covered with graying hair that fell as low as his shoulders. The tips of his ears peeked through his hair. He had a full graying beard, the hair knotty and unkempt. The old man’s eyes were waxy and dry and red all over, with veins the color of bloodworms.

“Mr. Visserplein,” Pepper said.

The old man shook his head, but it wasn’t clear if he was refusing the name or trying to break free.

“You’ve got problems,” Pepper said. “I guess that’s why you’re here. But you’re hurting people. You’re hurting us.”

The old man puckered his lips. His eyes grew wet and weak tears ran down his cheeks. They dotted Pepper’s forearms. Pepper didn’t understand what the old man was trying to tell him. Finally, the man raised one hand and patted at Pepper’s arm faintly, the one around his throat. Pepper loosened his grip and the old man breathed.

The old man craned his head backward so that he looked up into Pepper’s face. And Pepper looked down into his.

Years ago, Pepper had dated a woman who had kid, a girl eleven months old at the time. Sometimes Pepper would hold that little girl just like this. She’d peer into his face, upside down, just like Mr. Visserplein did now. She’d seem confused by the angle at first, almost dazed, but sometimes she’d break into this smile, showing her handful of tiny teeth. And in those moments Pepper experienced such uncomplicated love for that child. She wasn’t his daughter but it didn’t matter at all. Her joy was a universal language. The memory of those times could make Pepper feel tender even years after he and the mother had stopped dating.

So maybe that’s why Pepper experienced a jarring swelling in his throat as Mr. Visserplein stared up at him. Because Pepper realized that even this man had probably shared that same kind of smile with his parents. He had been a baby in someone’s arms. That’s all he was once. Not yet this man. And had those parents ever dreamed their baby would be dumped in a place like this? How could they? And yet here he was. Here they all were. And who would ever have guessed?

“Now that’s sweet,” a woman said.

Pepper looked up to find the other patients hadn’t skedaddled back to their rooms. They’d regrouped. They’d followed Pepper’s tracks. They were all there in the second-floor hallway. Still Waters, Redhead Kingpin. Heatmiser. The Haint. Wally Gambino. Yuckmouth, Doris Roberts, and Sandra Day O’Connor. They crowded together. They stood around Pepper and the old man.

“Now that you’ve got him,” Redhead Kingpin said. “What are we going to do with him?”

Mr. Visserplein howled. And Pepper, without thinking, tightened his grip around the throat again.

“That’s it,” Heatmiser mumbled.

“Just choke him right here,” Sandra Day O’Connor said plainly.

The group crowded closer, all as one. Were they grinning or was that just a trick of the dark?

“Choke him and let us listen,” Redhead Kingpin said.

Pepper inched himself and the old man backward down the hall.

Wally Gambino moved to the front of the group. He landed a damn powerful kick right into Mr. Visserplein’s thigh. Yuckmouth followed Wally’s example, kicking Mr. Visserplein in the ribs.

Pepper tried to get up off the floor. while keeping hold of the old man and pushing backward. The other patients followed. They didn’t speak but only made sounds. When Pepper looked down at the figure in his arms, he got confused. One moment, he looked down and saw the same gaunt, bearded man. But in the next, he saw the bison’s head again. And the more confused he became, the more scared he felt. Mr. Visserplein was becoming the Devil again.

Heatmiser and Doris Roberts landed punches against Mr. Visserplein’s chest, his spindly arms. At this point, Pepper realized he was holding the old man still so the others could pummel him. It was an old-school beatdown. Eight on one. They meant to kill the old man. They’d open him up, just like Frank Waverly. But what was the last thing, the only thing, Frank Waverly had said?

Pepper rose to his feet and dragged Mr. Visserplein backward, yoking the old man off his feet. He turned so the others couldn’t land any more blows on Mr. Visserplein. So instead they hit him. They didn’t care now. They probably didn’t even notice. Pepper got to room 5. Because he’d left the door half open it was easy to slip inside. And just as quickly, he slammed the door shut with his butt. The rest were on the other side instantly, their grunts and cries muffled. Hands slammed against the door and feet kicked. The wood rattled.

“You’re safe,” Pepper said to the old man. “You’re okay.”

But Mr. Visserplein had recovered. Pepper tried to calm him, but the old man only hissed through his clenched teeth. Then, of all things, he laughed, as if this was the most fun he’d had in decades.

That was when Pepper grasped just how far gone this old man must’ve been. So detached from this reality that maybe all of them seemed like figments of some grand dream. As Mr. Visserplein’s laughter grew louder, Pepper understood why Dorry must’ve snuck out of her room every night. Why she brought nourishment, even, to him. Because Dorry saw that this man wasn’t monstrous, he was tragic.

The pressure on the other side of the door only increased. There were eight people over there determined to get through.

The door didn’t splinter, it bent.

Pepper couldn’t wait. Whatever he was going to do must be done now. But what? He guessed it had to be five or six a.m. (Six thirty-three, actually.) The morning shift and the overnight shift might all be in the building. He needed to introduce a new element. He needed to get them all — including Mr. Visserplein — away from this floor, this room. Suppose the others did kill this old man. How soon before they turned on him for helping the Devil? Then on one another?

Pepper lifted Mr. Visserplein. He carried the old man in front of him, like a baby being cradled. He ran toward the great old chair sitting in the middle of the room. The door finally gave up. The upper half cracked from the attack on the other side. The patients crowded, climbing over one another to get through the broken door.

Pepper moved around the far side of the chair. When he reached the proper spot, weak from leaked rainwater, he jumped up and down just once, as if he and Mr. Visserplein were playing on a trampoline. The floor couldn’t hold their combined weight.

The floor caved in. The two of them fell through. Down to the first floor.

They landed back in Pepper’s room. Mr. Visserplein provided Pepper with a bit of cushion because the old man hit the floor first. He cried out like he’d been struck by the Holy Spirit, but it was just Pepper’s elbow. Considering the circumstance, Pepper didn’t feel too bad about bashing the guy once in the nose.

The other patients reached the hole but had the good sense not to drop. They looked down at Pepper and the Devil and, for that moment, in the light coming through the windows of Pepper’s room, even they saw an old man, lying on his back, blood running from his nose and across his cheeks and chin so profusely that it looked like he wore a red kerchief.

The door to Pepper’s room opened. The morning shift hadn’t clocked in yet, but the night shift was still there. Miss Chris, Nurse Washburn, and Scotch Tape entered the room. They saw Pepper and Mr. Visserplein from Northwest 4 on the floor. They saw a hole in the ceiling the size of a washing machine. They walked closer, looked up through the hole and saw eight other patients peering down.

“I gonna quit,” Miss Chris said.

And she might. But not just then. Order must be restored and she was still on duty. The three staff members had to corral those upstairs, see to Mr. Visserplein’s bloody face injuries, and call Dr. Anand to report all this wildness. Eventually they would discover the bodies of Frank Waverly and Mr. Mack, both men dead from brutal injuries. Both, somehow, would be written up as suicides.

Because of all this, no one paid attention to the enormous smile on Pepper’s face for the rest of the morning. He did his best to hide it while helping the others down once Scotch Tape retrieved a service ladder. Pepper kept his face near his armpit as he reached up to steady patients on the ladder. He looked out the window, at the sunlight crossing the tops of the trees, rather than at anyone in particular. But he couldn’t stop grinning.

It had taken a while, he’d certainly failed and fumbled along the way, but right now Loochie at least might have escaped, Mr. Visserplein — that malevolent nut — was going to live, and the other eight patients had all survived this terrible ordeal. He’d done more right than wrong tonight. He’d helped as much as he could and many had come through.