The Devil in Silver

Coffee raised his Sprite as if he was giving a toast.

“But listen to me because I’m serious. America is not broken yet.”

Pepper wanted to argue. To educate this outsider. He knew the way systems ran in this country. For instance, he wondered how long it would take for Coffee to reach the mayor. A week? No chance. How about a thousand years? And then to be heard? To have something done about New Hyde? Count that shit in eons.

He wanted to say all that, but maybe he should’ve been more concerned about the sound of Miss Chris’s shoes coming down the hallway. In one hand she carried a small white plastic cup. In that cup were two small pills for Pepper. His midday meds.

Miss Chris plus Haldol plus lithium. A recipe for bed rest. He’d lost the morning and now it seemed he was going to lose the afternoon. She entered the room, ignored Coffee (because he’d already gotten his dose), and practically tossed the two meds down Pepper’s throat. As he drifted away, it occurred to him that he might end up spending the entire seventy-two-hour observation period with his eyes shut. Practically comatose. Then it occurred to him that this might be intentional.

So he slept through the afternoon, and in the evening Coffee did Pepper the kindness of bringing the dinner tray. A scoop of macaroni and cheese, a spoonful of green beans, two slices of plain white bread, a plastic container of apple juice. (Again with the apple juice?) And another sugar cookie with a beet-looking blob stuck in the middle. This dessert, like the afternoon’s, would remain in its plastic.

Pepper ate the food, and a nurse, one he hadn’t seen before, came in to bring his nighttime meds. New nurse, same pills. He was knocked out even before the nurse had returned to the nurses’ station.

And that, friends, was almost all of Pepper’s first full day on the psychiatric unit.

The last thing to happen was this:

He opened his eyes at 2:45 a.m. He was on his side, facing the door. He saw Coffee under the covers of his own bed. The room’s lights were out, the door shut; behind Pepper the moon was up. Pepper got up to use the bathroom and this took a little while. He had to roll himself off his mattress, and then he spent a few minutes on his hands and knees on the floor. The tiles felt cold against his palms and even through his slacks. He planned to stand up and walk to the toilet, but he just couldn’t coordinate his muscles. So he crawled to the bathroom on his hands and knees while Coffee watched in silence.

In the bathroom Pepper clutched on to the sink to pull himself up. Who was that in the bathroom, grunting and groaning? It was him, but the sound seemed so far away.

He splashed water on his hands and face. He peed. He washed his hands again. He returned to bed. This time he lay down facing the windows.

The view wasn’t so bad at this hour. Pepper could see the tops of the trees outside and the starless dark sky and the moon, nearly full. He couldn’t see the chain-link fence or the barbed wire at the top or make out the headlights of cars in the distance. It felt good.

Which is why the intrusion bothered him so much.

Pepper heard a muted thump. It could’ve been something dropping from above, but Pepper couldn’t figure out what that might be. Then he thought of a set of bedcovers being tossed to the floor, and Pepper assumed that Coffee had climbed out of bed.

Next there was a shuffling back and forth on the tile floor, and Pepper remembered Coffee’s routine from the night before. He imagined Coffee was getting up the courage to ask Pepper for the coins in his pocket. Maybe he’d only been bringing the food so he could ask for even more money. No kindness without a cost.

Finally a shadow moved across Pepper’s top sheet.

He smelled an unclean body. Something sour. Like the ammonia-haunted corner of a subway platform that has never been truly cleaned.

Pepper kept his back to the room. Hadn’t he and Coffee made a sort of truce? Talking, eating together, sharing soda and oranges—didn’t that earn Pepper a night without panhandling? The more Pepper thought this way the angrier he felt. The more Pepper anticipated that tap he was about to feel against his shoulder, the more he wanted to finish the fight they’d begun in the phone alcove.

But then someone just leaned close to Pepper’s ear and breathed into it. Fuck! Pepper’s ear felt so hot that he instinctively pulled the covers up to hide his face. But the breathing stayed steady on the other side. Still right by Pepper’s ear. So hot it soaked the fabric, and the covers turned damp at the spot. The breath felt so hot that it actually began to burn.

Pepper pulled the covers back down now, trying to inch away, toward the windows, but able to move only so quickly in his addled state. And when the covers came down from his head, he felt the touch of rough hair against his neck. Rough like gnarled wool, matted. And the burning breath kept coming as though pumped from a bellows, until Pepper’s skin felt like it was puckering.