The Devil in Silver

“They protect it,” Coffee whispered.

Pepper couldn’t look away from the stainless-steel door one hundred feet down Northwest 4. It bent the light cast down from the ceiling so that something seemed to move behind the plastic window. A figure on the other side, or just a reflection of something on this side? Pepper stared at the small window. His legs stiffened. His face turned warm.

He felt watched.

Then he heard his own voice in his head. It was saying, No, no, no, no, no. Not disbelief but refusal.

“I don’t belong here,” he told the other three. “This isn’t my fight.”

His spoken voice sounded so small. He watched Dorry and Loochie and Coffee deflate with disappointment. A story came to him, an explanation.

“In 1969,” he told them, “the Doors performed at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. About twelve thousand fans showed up to hear them play. Jim Morrison was drunk.”

“You were there?” Loochie asked. “You been to Miami?” She sounded jealous.

“No,” Pepper admitted. “I was born in ’69. I read about this. In an interview with Ray Manzarek, their keyboardist.”

Pepper looked to Coffee and Dorry and Loochie, but none of them seemed to recognize the name. Pepper decided not to be disappointed in them for this.

“Morrison performed, but he didn’t sing much. Mostly he yelled at the crowd. And at a certain point he told the crowd he knew why they’d really come to the show that night. ‘You want to see my cock, don’t you?!’ ”

Dorry snorted, a little laugh.

“That’s what he said,” Pepper continued. “Then Morrison waved his shirt in front of his crotch and pulled it away and said, ‘See it? Did you see it?’ ”

Coffee looked confused.

Loochie said, “This doesn’t sound like a very good band.”

“Listen to me. Four days later, the city of Miami issued a warrant for Morrison’s arrest. After a trial, Morrison was convicted of two misdemeanors. Open profanity, I think. And indecent exposure. And yet, Ray Manzarek swears Morrison never exposed himself. No pictures were ever developed, from a crowd of twelve thousand. And no one ever showed real evidence that the … exposure ever happened. Manzarek called it a mass delusion.”

Pepper stopped for a moment, to let the phrase sink in.

“But even years later, there were hundreds, thousands, who swore they’d seen Morrison’s penis. It didn’t happen, but to them it was still real.”

Loochie and Coffee and Dorry backed away from Pepper. Pepper looked at his feet.

“You understand what I’m saying?”

Dorry nodded and shrugged.

“You’re not one of us,” she said. “Sure. We understand.”

Loochie said, “If I had paid to see that concert, I would’ve got my money back.”

Just that fast, they departed. Coffee slipped into the phone alcove. Dorry returned to her room on Northwest 3, where she slipped those cookies into a plastic bag, a kind of care package she was putting together for another patient, one of the many she took care of at New Hyde. And Loochie wandered back down Northwest 5. Her half hour of TV control would be coming soon and she wanted to watch something stupid and fun, music videos maybe; something to make her forget the story about Jim Morrison’s penis. And how Pepper meant it to say she was seeing something that wasn’t really there. Fuck you, Frankenstein. That’s what Loochie wanted to tell him.

And Pepper? He returned to his room alone.

10

THAT NIGHT, THE big man couldn’t fall asleep. He had the room to himself. Coffee stayed away, in the phone alcove trying the number for Comptroller John Liu. Dorry and Loochie ignored Pepper on line for nighttime meds, and at dinner in the lounge. The other patients seemed to be avoiding him, too. So he went to bed early. Pepper lay in bed for hours, but he couldn’t sleep.

When Dorry, Loochie, and Coffee offered him membership in their conspiracy, he’d looked at those three mental patients and recoiled. The shame made it impossible to doze off. He finally rolled out of bed at one a.m. Didn’t know where he was headed, but he couldn’t lie there anymore.

Pepper reached the nurses’ station and found two staff members behind the desk. A man and a woman, neither he recognized. He walked around the station. He didn’t look down Northwest 4, but as he passed that hallway he felt a pinch in his side, as if he’d been grabbed, but kept walking and slipped free from the phantom touch.

Four patients sat in the television lounge. Even at this late hour the room wasn’t empty. The flat screen was on but with the sound set surprisingly low. One young guy had his chair pulled right up under the screen. He had a pockmarked face and stringy brown hair that almost looked like a toupee. The television’s closed-captioning had been turned on, white letters on a black background filled the bottom half of the screen. The guy in the chair scanned the text. Every fourth word was misspelled or mistaken. Protesters around the Middle East were apparently causing Arab governments to “triple.”

The guy in the chair said, “Topple.”