The Devil in Silver

The other nurse, whom Pepper now recognized as the one he had knocked down during his escape attempt weeks before, stopped jimmying the desk drawer and grabbed a three-ring binder. She opened the cover and flipped pages and finally found the one she wanted. She stood up and stepped closer to Scotch Tape, then set the open binder on the desktop so Pepper could see.

A form with four paragraphs of single-spaced legalese. It looked like a warranty.

“So what’s this?” Pepper asked. He barely glanced at it. He didn’t want to read, he wanted to be heard.

Scotch Tape said, “Consent form, big man. Agreeing to be admitted as a patient. Everyone has to sign one if the seventy-two-hour period ends but the doctor thinks you still need to be with us.”

The nurse reached down and tapped the bottom of the page with one finger. Her wrist was still sprained from the fall she’d taken thanks to Pepper.

“You signed it. You agreed,” she said with some satisfaction.

Now Pepper actually looked at the page. That scrawl at the bottom was his signature? It looked more like someone had drooled blue ink on the page.

“I’ve been in half a coma for the last four weeks.”

Miss Chris moved closer, right next to his left arm. She looked at the consent form. “Looks like your hand was working.”

Pepper understood that this was a joke, but not for him. Not even really on him. It was the gallows humor of people who’ve seen this kind of mess happen before. And will again. What can you do? That was the unspoken phrase at the end of every sentence. What can you do? Just go along.

Pepper felt his rage just then like a series of small explosions. In his gut. His chest. His throat. His hands. The rational part of him was howling, Don’t do anything! Don’t do anything! Calm down! But it was like holding a conversation right below a rumbling jet engine. Whatever Pepper did next was going to fuck him, long term. But he felt incapable of stopping himself.

Then Pepper felt the small, bony fingers wrap around his wrist. A touch he knew, even in this state. The only person who’d put her hands on him with any tenderness in this wasteland.

Dorry was there, at his right side, pulling at his wrist, looking up at him serenely.

“You’ve been down there, Pepper. You already know that road. You know exactly where it ends.”

Pepper started to pull back, despite himself.

She said, “More punishment. More drugs. That’s what they’ll give you.”

The nurse next to Scotch Tape said, “That’s not fair, Dorry.”

Dorry sighed. “But it’s still true.”

Pepper’s hands relaxed and his shoulders did, too. That rage in his gut, his chest, his throat—it left him like a bad spirit being cast out. Dorry still held his wrist.

He exhaled. He felt like a lost child who has wandered into the wrong house.

“What should I do instead?” he asked her weakly.

“For now?” Dorry grinned. “Let’s go to Group.”

Then Dorry quietly led Pepper to one of the conference rooms on Northwest 1.

There were already a few people inside the meeting room, on their feet, and when Pepper entered the room, an older man called out to him.

“Grab the end of that table, please.”

But Pepper couldn’t follow the order. Had he even heard it? No. He was repeating the date in his head.

March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17. March 17.

The older man clapped his hands loudly and Pepper finally snapped back. The guy looked to be in his fifties, red-faced, bald. The way he grit his teeth, he looked like Bob Hope; the chin like a shovel, the broad forehead and high cheekbones.

He looked at Pepper and said, “The others already know me. I’m Dr. Barger.”

Dr. Barger was broad and short. He seemed unlike any doctor Pepper had ever seen. He wore a sport coat, but the top two buttons of his shirt were undone, the reddish flesh of his chest visible. Thick gray chest hairs ran all the way up to his Adam’s apple. And he wore a thin gold chain that lay in the hair like an extension cord in a shag carpet. Dr. Barger looked like a swinger.

“Let’s go,” he said sternly, pointing at one end of the conference table again.

What did Pepper know better than this? Moving furniture. It was almost comforting to do the work. He grabbed one end. He’d lifted it a foot off the ground before he even asked where he was supposed to take it.

Dr. Barger couldn’t heft the other end. He gave it two tugs and a vein on his forehead throbbed perilously. He stopped trying and looked around the room, at the other patients. “A little help,” the doctor said.

And who came to the rescue? The teenage girl who’d chopped Pepper down. Loochie. The kid didn’t get her end as high as Pepper’s—how could she, she stood a foot shorter—but the weight of the table didn’t seem to bother her any more than it did Pepper. She still wore that light blue knit cap. The pom-poms sat on either side of her head like mouse’s ears.

Pepper and Loochie frowned at each other.