The Devil in Silver

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.