The Devil in Silver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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