The Devil in Silver

Heatmiser sat with two other men at another table. All three looked up at the screen and didn’t speak with one another. Pepper hadn’t seen the other two men before, maybe he just hadn’t been looking. One Japanese, one East Indian. But the two men seemed, somehow, like family. It took a moment for Pepper to realize it was because they both had some of the most awful teeth he’d seen on this side of the nineteenth century. Wow. Crowded, off-color, some bent in and others bent out. No wonder they’d found each other, brothers of the busted grills. He nicknamed them quick, in his own mind, Japanese Freddie Mercury and Yuckmouth. (It might seem to make more sense to nickname the Indian guy Freddie Mercury, since Freddie Mercury was an Indian—birth name Farrokh Bulsara—but that’s kind of racist. Sorry. The Japanese guy actually looked like Freddie Mercury. The Indian guy just had a yuckmouth.)

Dorry sat with her back to the raggedy basketball court outside. It was the kind of day where you can see the sun behind a thin fog of clouds, like a lightbulb glowing inside a pillowcase. Dorry leaned forward in her chair so Pepper would stop gazing at the skies and pay attention.

“Do you understand now?” she asked.

It was PB&J for breakfast today. He separated the two halves of the sandwich and set them back down. The vein of dry brown peanut butter, the artery of gummy blueish jam. The sandwich looked as appetizing as an autopsy.

“I understand this meal is criminal,” he said.

He was a bit surprised he’d been able to come up with the line, weak joke that it was. He felt surprised by the way his hands moved, too. They lifted and lowered quickly. When he thought of opening his hands and wiggling his fingers that’s exactly what they did. Why?

He hadn’t taken his medicine.

Dorry said, “You’ve heard of drug trials, right? They test out some new pharmaceutical on a set of people. Some get the real thing, others get a placebo. If the trial is a success, they sell the drug to the intended market. You understand?”

Pepper poked at the top of his sandwich. “What happened to me last night?”

Dorry said, “I’m trying to tell you.” She picked up the pint of milk on her tray. Pepper had one, too. She lifted it and shook it and the milk inside sloshed. Somehow even the PB&J on his tray appeared more appetizing when he imagined washing it down with a nice swallow of milk.

Dorry said, “I can see you smacking your lips already.”

Dorry brought the carton to her face, like right up against the left lens of her big glasses. She tore open the carton at one end. She pulled until she made a little spout. She sniffed it. Then she leaned even farther across the table so Pepper could do the same. He inhaled. He frowned.

“I think that milk is off,” he said.

Dorry nodded, then lifted the carton to her lips and drank. Forget drank, she chugged that pint of questionable milk. The sight made Pepper’s own throat close up. Little beads of milk trickled out the sides of the spout and ran along her cheeks. The stuff looked more yellow than white. When she finished, she set the carton back down and looked at Pepper with high seriousness.

“The milk was bad,” she said. “But you can get used to it.”

Pepper looked at the carton of milk on his tray now and couldn’t imagine doing what she’d just done. Now the sandwich looked even worse than it had. He wondered if everything on this tray was past its sell-by date. Hard to keep from getting paranoid in a place like this. Bad food, constant doses of medication, human beings penned in and observed. He began to understand what Dorry might be telling him.

“You’re saying the staff is experimenting on us?” Pepper asked.

Dorry pointed at him, frowning with disappointment. “You think this is about patients versus the staff. I understand why, but you have to think bigger. This isn’t us.” She pointed at the other patients. “Versus them.” She pointed toward the nurses’ station.

“They aren’t even here,” she said. “Everyone in New Hyde is trapped, in some way. Patients and staff. You think they ever set foot in a place like this unit? No, no. Our lives are a clinical trial, Pepper. We’re all being tested.”

Pepper leaned across the table, as far as he could. “By who?”

“The biggest corporation of all,” she said. “Coffin Industries. They don’t stop exploiting you until you’re dead.”

But what did all this have to with what happened to him last night? What he’d seen wasn’t a man. He felt sure of that, at least. He wanted to grab Dorry’s shoulders and shake her until she understood it, too. Then maybe they could actually talk about the damn thing clearly and not this nonsense about Coffin Industries.

Dorry reached across the table and snatched his carton of quite possibly putrid milk. She lifted it and said, “May I?”

You won’t be too surprised that Pepper left the table before Dorry got to glugging. He hadn’t wanted to watch it once, so why would he want to see it a second time?