The Devil in Silver

Coffee set his three-ring binder down on Pepper’s dresser. He opened the cover and flipped through the pages. Columns had been drawn on every page, by Coffee’s own hand. It looked like a ledger. Page after page filled with surprisingly readable script. Coffee had the most elegant handwriting Pepper had ever seen.

“These are my notes,” Coffee began. “Every person I’ve reached in the last year. Their names and numbers, the offices they represent. What they said they would do. What they said they wouldn’t do. What was actually done. You’ll see there’s nothing in that column. Council members. Lawyers. Reporters. Clerks. Secretaries. Everything goes in here. So I can prove my story.”

“Prove that you’ve been ignored?”

Coffee flipped through a series of blank pages until he reached the very last page in the book. This one had two words written at the top.

“Prove that I tried everything. So when I finally reach him, he’ll know I’m a serious man.”

The two words at the top of the page were “Big Boss.”

Pepper touched the letters. “You mean God?”

Coffee laughed, it was a soft sound, and his eyes narrowed when he smiled. “I don’t appeal to God for man’s mistakes. I just have to reach the man who will make things right down here. I don’t write his name because when people see his name, hear his name, they go crazy. They get so angry. They get scared. Or disappointed. But it doesn’t matter. His name means more to them than it does to me. His name could be anything, it’s his power that counts.”

Pepper stepped back and looked at Coffee’s serious round brown face.

“Don’t tell me.…”

Coffee raised his hand, palm open. “Don’t say it. I never use his name. By now it has become like a superstition to me. I am trying to reach the Black President. I mean to tell him of our conditions, and ask him for help.”

Pepper touched his belly lightly. He shook his head and said, “Let me tell you something and you need to believe it. I don’t care who the Big Boss is. I don’t care if someday it’s a Big Lady! The whole game is fixed. Top to bottom. Left to Right. The Black President is just like the White President. ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ ”

Pepper heard what he just said in his own head. Was that racist? (Meh.)

Coffee closed his binder. “Dorry was right. You think all those things you say make you sound smarter, but I think you sound like a fool.”

There might’ve been room for more argument but Pepper stepped away from the dresser, and now he noticed something remarkable about the wall space behind his dresser. It wasn’t a wall.

It was a door.

It had been painted over. The door handle had been removed, but he could still make out the small indent in the paint where a handle would’ve fit. And the lock bulged through the paint as well, like a nipple under a tight shirt. Pepper wondered if the lock still worked. Forget schooling Coffee about his political naiveté, what the hell was this?

Coffee touched the bulge of the painted lock and anticipated Pepper’s question. “All the bedrooms on the unit used to be offices. All the conference rooms used to be exam rooms. The television lounge was a ‘recovery room.’ They don’t tear down and rebuild anything at New Hyde. Too expensive. They just seal off one door and create another one. They call it ‘repurposing.’ ”

Pepper tapped at the sealed door. “So if we could get this open, we could just walk into the next room? We wouldn’t have to step out into the hall?”

Coffee pressed one hand against the door. “I guess not.”

“And if we kept opening the doors, where would the last one lead?”

“Where would you want it to lead?” Coffee asked.

Pepper didn’t want to say the word outside out loud. Speaking the word might jinx it. He’d made fun of Coffee about the “Black President,” but now look at him indulging his own superstition. So he said it to himself.

Outside.

15

PEPPER FELT CHARGED. He went into the bathroom and found his bath towel, folded and placed it on the floor in his room, right under the dripping ceiling. At the nurses’ station the other patients were waiting in line for their nighttime meds.

Some might doubt the mentally ill could pull off an orderly queue. Aren’t they raving lunatics? Shouldn’t they be wandering off or howling at the moon? That’s more dramatic, admittedly, but inaccurate. If most of these people weren’t wearing blue pajamas, you’d have thought you were in a bank line, waiting to talk to the only available teller.