The Devil in Silver

She gave Pepper the sharp eyes. But he’d been on the unit for a month and a half and felt less intimidated by her now. It wasn’t that he thought she was harmless, he just couldn’t hide that he also found her to be a pain in the ass. Pepper kept his hand out and did not apologize. He looked her directly, defiantly, in the eye.

“You think rudeness is how you strike back at Miss Chris? Heh? When all I do for you around here?”

He still didn’t respond.

Miss Chris read Pepper’s medications aloud, practically shouting. She slammed the little white cup on the counter as best she could with an item that weighed all of an ounce.

“Put it in my hand,” Pepper said.

What happened to keeping up the pretense of the compliant patient, Pep? He couldn’t manage it just then. And not with Miss Chris. They entered a contest of wills. She wouldn’t lift the cup and he wouldn’t move his hand, and the whole scene was beneath the dignity of six-year-olds.

Josephine was the one who asserted adulthood. She left her place in front of the computer, even as she suspected—on some paranoid level available to us all in the face of willful technology—that the machine would flash the secret of its inner wisdom at the moment when she left her chair. Nevertheless, she stood up and she took the white cup and turned it over so the pills fell into Pepper’s palm.

Miss Chris and Pepper looked at Josephine with scorn and relief, though neither of them would ever admit to the latter.

Miss Chris patted Josephine. “You too soft for this line of work, child.”

Josephine nodded and thought, You’re welcome.

Pepper brought his palm up to his mouth, slowly, showing the back of his hand to the two staff members. As he’d learned to do by now he slipped the two pills into the space between his lower lip and gums.

Miss Chris nodded at him, satisfied, then set down the clipboard with a clatter and left the nurses’ station to go and double-check the rooms in the men’s hall. Looking for lollygaggers. She knew there were none—all medications had been administered—but some part of her always suspected trickery and that life required vigilance.

Leaving Pepper and Josephine at the nurses’ station. Josephine, hoping to avoid a return to the computer, to that program whose name she even dreaded thinking. (Equator!) And Pepper, who wanted to avoid thinking about what was to come that night. Pepper coughed once, bringing his hand to his mouth, and spat the Haldol and lithium into his palm.

With that done, Pepper said, “You didn’t talk much during our last Book Group.”

“I didn’t want to hear the doctor give me another wrong name.”

Josephine looked back at the desktop computer, as she’d feared the menu on the screen had changed; it had actually gone back a step, to the log-in page. Where a staff member was to input his or her employee ID number in order to process the mounds of intake forms for electronic collection. They had all figured out how to log in, but little more than that. Equator discouraged all attempts equally, whether by Josephine or Miss Chris or Scotch Tape or Terry. (Thus far, none of the doctors could be persuaded to try. And the social worker had been let go three weeks back.)

There was actually a very good reason for all the headaches this computer caused the staff: The hospital had acquired the wrong program for their system. Equator was a program used by banks, to help home owners who were trying to avoid foreclosure of their homes. People would call to speak to a representative but would only reach the voice-command operator instead. That operator would then walk the home owner through the Equator program, which helped to explain which forms were required, when and where to submit them, and how soon the home owner might expect to see their foreclosure issue processed. And Equator was a ripping success for the banks. It was less of a success for the troubled home owners. The number of successful foreclosures almost quadrupled once the banks started using the program. It regularly misfiled forms, misstated the dates when those forms were due, and most often it simply lost all records of the home owner ever having tried to negotiate adjustments to their mortgages. By the time a human representative from the bank (let’s say, Bank of America, for instance) finally got in touch with the home owner, who’d been calling frantically for months, the case would’ve already been ruled in the bank’s favor. So, really, that human representative was only calling to let the home owner know they were now homeless. At least three major American banks would consistently claim these errors were aberrations, glitches in the software, but if you were caught in the loop of this program’s machinations you’d start to believe it had actually been designed to erase people’s traces of home ownership. You’d believe because it so often did just that.