The Devil in Silver

She said, “I wanna know … I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I am an American citizen. With a seal on it. Signed by a doctor, with a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time, the date … I wanna go back to January 20, and I wanna know why are you people ignoring his birth certificate. He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am an American. My father fought in World War Two, with the Greatest Generation, in the Pacific theater, for this country, and I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!”

The audience went wild with cheers and that’s when the video stopped. Steve Sands returned to the screen. He shuffled some papers on his desk and raised one eyebrow and leaned forward. It seemed as if he was about to really say something. Risk an opinion about what the woman had just said, or about the audience’s reaction, or even about the President himself.

But instead, Steve Sands only said, “That was definitely a moment of 2008.”

A blander pronouncement has rarely been made, and yet Steve Sands sighed deeply, nodded profoundly, as if he’d just signed the Declaration of Independence.

But back in the lounge, Dorry didn’t have to worry about holding on to a job, or advertisers. She pointed at the screen as Steve Sands moved on to another “moment of 2008.”

Dorry said, “You know what that woman sounds like?”

Mr. Mack turned in his chair and sneered. “I know exactly what she sounds like.”

To this, Dorry merely nodded and grinned without commitment. Satisfied that he’d made his point, Mr. Mack looked back at the screen.

Then Dorry turned to Pepper and Coffee. She spoke in a quieter voice.

“That woman just sounds scared.”

Mr. Mack’s half hour passed and the silent pair—Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth—came in to wordlessly request the remote. They switched to QVC and watched, rapt, as a vaguely familiar celebrity from the eighties talked up a line of skin products. Dorry, Pepper, Coffee, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly exited the lounge posthaste.

Coffee moved fastest because Pepper had handed over his credit card. An act of faith, he called it. (Mr. Mack, when he’d seen Pepper do it, called it “being an ass.”)

Halfway down Northwest 5, Scotch Tape appeared, grinning like a villain. He pointed at Pepper. “You’ve got a curfew now, my man. In your room after dinner. Doctor’s orders.”

Pepper said, “But that other orderly wouldn’t even give me dinner. You know that. You told him not to.”

Scotch Tape said, “Don’t make accusations like that unless you have proof.”

Dorry trailed behind Pepper and Scotch Tape, all the way to the nurses’ station. As she broke for the women’s hall, Dorry called out to Pepper, “Solidarity!”

“Bitch, please,” Scotch Tape muttered.

When Pepper returned to his room, he found that his mattress had been stripped of its sheets and his pillow was missing. A bare mattress lay on the bed frame. And the towel he’d set down on the floor, to catch the leak from the ceiling, had been taken away. In its place someone had stacked his slacks and socks. They were soaked orange.

Pepper had to admit these guys were good. He’d asserted his rights and they’d attacked his quality of living. How many more small cuts like this before he’d just give up? This was a method of control in many arenas. The indignities of an insurance claim come to mind.

Pepper wasn’t sure what he should do about the clothes. The drip from the ceiling seemed to have stopped. Now there was just a dried orange blob on the ceiling tile, like a dollop of apricot jam. But the slacks and socks were still wet. He’d be wearing these pajamas for a lot longer.

Scotch Tape said, “I told you how to get out of this place, but you just couldn’t be cool.” He seemed disappointed in Pepper.

Pepper didn’t feel the need to respond. Anything he said would probably only count against him sometime later. Right now he only wanted to show Scotch Tape that these little degradations hadn’t bothered him. He couldn’t think of a better way to assert his own strength. So he went to his bed where it now rested, against the wall with the painted-over door. He got in bed (on the bed, since there were no sheets). He reached over and pulled his book from the dresser. He held it up as a barrier between him and Scotch Tape.

Jaws.

Scotch Tape said, “Hope it don’t get too cold in here tonight!” Then walked back down the hall.

Pepper stayed focused on the novel. He read in a whisper, a habit since he was little and trying to drown out the sounds of road traffic coming from Kissena Boulevard.

“A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibration and signaled the brain. The fish turned toward shore.”