The Devil in Silver

They reached the secure door. Josephine looked through the plastic and spoke loudly to someone on the other side. “Got to wait for the doctor to let you in!” she shouted. She shrugged as if to say, Regulations.

“Hey!” Pepper said. “What was it you had for me? A going-away present?”

“You’re not leaving yet.”

Josephine heard how harsh that sounded. “I mean that’s got to be settled by the new unit head,” she added. “But I don’t think it’ll be too long. Really. You know who’s been telling the new doc that you’re not ill? Miss Chris!”

“She just doesn’t like me,” Pepper said.

“That’s true, but she wouldn’t lie. She means it.”

Pepper waved her off. He didn’t want to start expecting good news. Nothing made waiting worse. At the very least, he hadn’t been removed from the unit and taken to a lockup, so the original case of assaulting the officers probably had not been brought before a judge yet. Josephine walked back toward the nurses’ station. Before Pepper joined her, he pressed his face to the door’s window. On the other side he saw two paramedics, one man and one woman. They looked at him for a moment, standing straighter and widening their eyes. He realized they hoped he was the doctor and was about to let them in.

Pepper didn’t bother trying to explain. Instead he stared at the third person out there. A big man. Not tall but wide. The polite term is heavyset. (The clinical term is hyperobese.) A black guy. Maybe. Or a Latin guy? Pepper couldn’t say for sure. Late twenties or early thirties, his hair was kind of a wild puff and his head was down. The EMTs watched Pepper, but this heavyset guy was more interested in his own toes. He had his arms crossed. He looked thoughtful, morose, like that presidential painting of JFK. Almost identical except this guy wore a bright blue windbreaker and weighed about three hundred pounds. Pepper knocked on the little window hard enough to shake this big guy from his daze.

He looked up at Pepper. Pepper returned the stare.

Then someone tapped his back.

Pepper turned and found Dr. Barger. The man didn’t smile now like he often had in Book Group. And his shirt, once open down to the chest, was buttoned to the top. He wore a tie and a frown.

“Dr. Anand had a lighter touch with patients,” Dr. Barger said. “But I’m going to expect more from you.”

Pepper waited to be recognized.

“Now, I want you out of this hallway,” Dr. Barger said. “It’s for the female patients only.” The doctor looked at him blankly. He didn’t recognize Pepper at all.

Pepper decided not to try to remind the man of the good old days in Book Group. What would be the point?

“Go,” Dr. Barger commanded.

Pepper saluted.

“Yes, Captain!” Pepper said.

He returned to the nurses’ station where Josephine had already let herself back in. When Pepper appeared, she was already moving charts and peeking into drawers.

“Go over there,” Josephine pointed. At the end of the station, opposite the long door, was a window the size of a dinner tray. Josephine opened one last drawer, pulled something out, and came toward him. Inside the nurses’ station there was a small plastic knob that she used to slide the plastic window open.

“Don’t see much mail coming through here,” Josephine said. “But you got a postcard last week.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me when it first came?”

“I couldn’t have a conversation with you,” Josephine explained. “You were just, out, you know, from the meds.”

Pepper nodded and opened his hand to her, right outside the window.

“Plus, I liked looking at the picture on the front,” she said. Josephine handed the postcard through. “It’s by a man named Vincent Van Gogh. Have you ever heard of him? He was a painter. A real genius.”

Pepper let the postcard lie in his large palm with the image facing him. It was in color. Bright yellow and orange. Van Gogh’s Vase with Twelve Sunflowers. The image so vibrant that Pepper felt the warmth of the sun that fed those flowers. Pepper traced a finger over each one. He lifted the card now and turned it over.

The postmark read: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In the space for a message he found two words, in large print (and a punctuation mark):

“LOOCHIE LIVES!”

Pepper’s heart leapt so hard, he almost didn’t survive.

It’s fair to say Pepper haunted the oval room. He didn’t know where else to go. His room seemed sort of lonely, but the lounge—and that big, blaring television—just seemed to promise a different kind of isolation.

Instead he stayed in the oval room, right by the phone alcove, while Josephine returned to logging the paperwork that New Hyde Hospital hoped to flip into fraudulent profits. She continued, rather than walking off the job in protest because she needed the paychecks that would come for another week. Frankly, she was more concerned with how she’d pay for the elder-care home she’d found for her mother. (She couldn’t leave Mom in the house alone, after all, while the Army deployed her to the other side of the world.)