PEPPER FELT CHARGED. He went into the bathroom and found his bath towel, folded and placed it on the floor in his room, right under the dripping ceiling. At the nurses’ station the other patients were waiting in line for their nighttime meds.
Some might doubt the mentally ill could pull off an orderly queue. Aren’t they raving lunatics? Shouldn’t they be wandering off or howling at the moon? That’s more dramatic, admittedly, but inaccurate. If most of these people weren’t wearing blue pajamas, you’d have thought you were in a bank line, waiting to talk to the only available teller.
Pepper and Coffee were behind Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly. Mr. Mack had a well-maintained mustache. Frank Waverly had actually turned a paper napkin into a pocket square for his sport coat. Of all the patients Pepper had seen so far, these two seemed least likely. They were the kind of older folks you see less and less anymore. The ones who cultivate their dignity long after anyone’s checking for it. The ones who don’t think it takes an occasion to wear trousers. Even in here, even considering how long they’d been on the ward (six years for Mr. Mack; seven for Frank Waverly), the gentlemen still made an effort. A fantastic act of will. They were like a pair of leopards, held too long in a zoo. Remarkable, but a little ruined.
Pepper and Coffee got in line behind the pair. The smaller man, Mr. Mack, peeped them, top to bottom, then sighed with boredom and turned forward again. Frank Waverly didn’t bother.
“That was a door!” Pepper whispered.
But Coffee’s eyes were on the phone alcove. He couldn’t move through this room without looking at it. Pepper had to grab Coffee’s elbow to get his attention. When he did this, Coffee’s arm squeezed tight against the binder tucked into his armpit.
Coffee said, “Do you want the staff to hear you talking about that?”
Mr. Mack looked over his shoulder again. Interested.
The line moved forward.
Pepper’s two favorite people were administering the meds at the nurses’ station. Scotch Tape and Miss Chris. She held the clipboard and Scotch Tape handed out the white cups of pills.
The sight of that tray gave Pepper a punch in the gums. His mouth hurt already, thinking of swallowing them. The lunchtime meds had worn off and he felt clearheaded again, like this morning. He felt good. Did he really have to give that up?
“I’m going to refuse my pills,” Pepper said.
Frank Waverly turned his head so hard, the move seemed positively chiropractic. Then he looked ahead again, just as quickly.
Pepper grabbed Coffee’s elbow again. “Do it with me. Say no.”
Coffee didn’t even answer him. The line moved forward.
Pepper said, “Strength in numbers.”
Coffee patted the binder with his free hand. “These are the numbers that give me strength.”
A fair point. Not about the numbers (that was kooky talk), but what Coffee really meant was that he had no history with Pepper. They weren’t partners in crime just because they’d moved a bed. And maybe Pepper hoped to refuse the pills along with someone else. So much harder to do difficult things alone. That’s why so few people try.
The line moved forward. Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly were up. Miss Chris read out each man’s name (even she called Mr. Mack “Mr. Mack”), then Scotch Tape slid their doses over to them.
Pepper leaned close to Coffee. “I’ve got a credit card in my wallet. You can use it like a calling card. Call whoever you want. Even O—”
Coffee cut Pepper off with a glare.
“Even the Black President,” Pepper said. “You can have the card if you do this with me.”
Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly walked around the nurses’ station and toward dinner in the television lounge. Pepper and Coffee were up.
Another nurse sat behind the station. She slapped at the “new” computer, inputting chart info. It wasn’t Josephine. The nurse didn’t seem to be doing well. She had a stack of old files, and she hadn’t logged in one page of the stuff in over an hour. That poor woman was just tapping the Tab key over and over. She planned to do this for six more hours, until her shift ended.
Miss Chris looked at Pepper’s chest very quickly. He saw her do it, though she tried not to be obvious. Dr. Anand, or maybe the nurse, Josephine, had spread the word of his injuries. But if Miss Chris felt any sympathy, she hid it well. She looked at his chest, then back at her chart and scanned for Pepper’s name.
But before she could read it aloud, before Scotch Tape could track down Pepper’s white plastic cup, Pepper said, “I don’t want my medication.”
Miss Chris stopped scanning her clipboard and Scotch Tape looked up from his tray. Coffee, too, nearly dropped his binder. He hadn’t believed Pepper was going to say it. The handful of patients behind Pepper even stopped breathing.
Miss Chris held a pen in one hand and she tapped it on the clipboard once. “You’re refusing medication, heh? Against the wishes of your doctor?”
Funny how she made that sound like a breakdown in military discipline. Like refusing the order of your commanding officer.
“Yes,” Pepper said slowly, his voice catching. “I’m refusing.”
The nurse at the computer had been listening on delay, so she didn’t react to Pepper’s words until just then. They surprised her, too. Instead of clicking the Tab key she hit Shift and suddenly her whole screen went blank, and she said, “Shit!” Which echoed the thoughts of her coworkers precisely.
Scotch Tape put both his hands on the nurses’ station desktop and leaned toward Pepper. “You have the right to refuse,” he said. “But refusal is taken as a sign that your illness is in control of you.”
“What if I’m refusing because I’m not ill?”
Miss Chris almost barked. “If you was healthy, you wouldn’t refuse!”
“There’s no way I can win this argument,” Pepper said, more to himself than to them.
“It’s a guilty heart that refuses,” said Miss Chris. “If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t say no.”
Her last line was the one that jolted Pepper. He’d had arguments like this with black friends, about the police. A couple of the younger men on some crew at Farooz Brothers would be talking about all the stop-and-frisk beefs they’d been getting into with the NYPD. The numbers had been just obscene, according to them, starting in maybe 2009. Even worse by 2011. And Pepper used to ask them why they cared about getting searched if they had nothing to hide. If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t say no. That’s exactly what he’d said to them. More than once. And they’d shake their heads like he was just some middle-aged white dude who didn’t know anything worth knowing about such an experience. But in this moment, with Miss Chris and Scotch Tape, with their logic that not taking medication was a sign that a person was deeply ill, well, he wanted to laugh a little and explain—not to Scotch Tape or Miss Chris, but to a couple of young guys on his old crews—that maybe he had an inkling of what he’d sounded like. He suddenly understood this back-and-forth as a kind of conditioning. It wasn’t about whether or not he took his pills, and it wasn’t about whether or not some kids had a little weed in their pockets. This wasn’t about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. Pepper hadn’t considered this a problem before, he realized, because he hadn’t been one of those types. Until now.
“I will be informing the doctor about this,” Miss Chris said. “You can be sure.”
Scotch Tape waved one arm, treating Pepper like a winged pest. “Well, go on, then!” he said.
Scotch Tape knew that most of an orderly’s job on a psych unit was a simple matter of herding. Herd the patients toward their meals and meds, herd the patients toward their group sessions and family visits, herd the patients away from anything that might agitate them. Because an agitated patient was a troublesome patient. And these people could be enough trouble even when calm. So Scotch Tape had to send Pepper away before he and Miss Chris paid attention to the others in line. Let the match flame of that little rebellion burn out. Once it did, you wouldn’t smell the shit.
Pepper looked at Coffee. Maybe he wanted to see his little act bear fruit immediately. (Not maybe.)
But Miss Chris sucked her teeth. “Don’t look so frighten about Coffee. We know him a lot longer than you, heh? You can meet Coffee in the lounge when I done with him. You think we going to eat him?” Then she laughed with that special Caribbean venom. It comes from the back of the throat, like a chest-clearing spit.
And what could Pepper do? As he moved away from the station, Scotch Tape picked up the hospital phone on the desk and dialed a number. He glared at Pepper the whole time. Pepper skedaddled down Northwest 5, toward the television lounge. Looking back over his shoulder only once. Seeing Coffee at the nurses’ station. Miss Chris speaking to him with such gusto that her body shook. And Coffee shrinking under the force of her wind.
He wasn’t sure if Coffee would follow his lead, but as Pepper had moved away from the nurses’ station, he felt something else, too. Pride? Power? Peace?
All of the above. He said no and they backed down.
When Pepper reached the lounge, he found half the tables occupied. Dinner trays and television, a pretty typical American evening.
Dorry sat at one table, alone, and waved for Pepper to join her.
Pepper considered one of the empty tables instead. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, but he wanted to sit alone and see what was going to happen. He’d refused his medication and they’d been a bit pissed, but otherwise? He’d been expecting them to hang him upside down by his ankles. Or maybe just throw him a quick lobotomy. But nothing of the sort happened.
Pepper approached the orderly manning the dinner cart. He didn’t ask for a tray, he just extended his two hands wide enough for a tray to be balanced between them. This wasn’t considered especially rude for the unit. At New Hyde there was less goodwill between server and customer than at a ghetto Burger King.
But the orderly was on his cell phone. A device Pepper found himself eyeing with great envy. (Cell phones weren’t supposed to be used on the unit, not by patients or staff.) Pepper waited until the orderly finished his call. The guy looked directly at Pepper the whole time, nodding and grinning until he hung up. Then the orderly, a big bo-hunk type, grinned and said, “We’re all out of meals, man.”
Pepper counted the six trays still on the rack.
“I guess my mind’s playing tricks on me.”
The orderly didn’t even look back at the cart. He crossed his arms to make his beefy biceps look even fuller. “I hear you’re not really hungry anyway,” he said. “I hear you’re actually turning down the things staff members offer you.”
Aha.
Pepper nodded. “It’s going to be like that.”
The orderly shrugged. “Let’s see if your appetite comes back by breakfast.”
And why did this guy take such pleasure in this little act? It was cruel, but the cruelty wasn’t really the charge for him. It was the rules. The order. Outside the unit (and even inside, mostly) this orderly, Terry, was a pretty decent dude. He volunteered at an animal shelter in Forest Hills and found it easier to care for animals than people. With people, you start getting into choice. To put it another way: Terry worked on a psychiatric unit but he didn’t really believe in mental illness. A series of bad (or stupid) choices led folks to New Hyde’s nut hut, that’s what Terry believed. Like this guy, Pepper. The doctor says you need to take your meds, so why not take them? You can’t leave until the doctors believe you’re improving. They won’t believe that if you’re not dosed up. And maybe the damn things are even helping you act like less of a wackadoo. So why not do it? Why not? Why not? Why not? In this way, not evil, even understandable, Terry justified denying Pepper his dinner. And Pepper could see Terry wasn’t going to become some fifth column among the staff, so he walked away and finally decided to sit with Dorry.
Maybe she would share.
“Hello, Dorry,” Pepper said. Even to himself, he sounded artificial. He wondered how broad a smile he might be showing.
But then he appreciated, enjoyed, that he could feel his lips move. That he could coordinate the thought of sitting at Dorry’s table with the action. That the meds had been beaten back enough that he could feel himself smiling, even if it was just to try to trick an old woman out of a desiccated-looking orange on her dinner tray. (It was either that or, you guessed it, a beet cookie.)
But even as Pepper pulled the chair out, Dorry slapped one hand on that orange and closed her mottled fingers around it. And with that she got to peeling.
Three hunks—bing, bang, boom—right into her mouth. Hardly enough time to chew. It was as if she ate the orange just to spite Pepper. As if this woman, both a mother and grandmother, had learned how to recognize when someone was just being nice in order to get something from her.
When Dorry had finished, a line of juice running down her chin, she said, “You look hungry.”
Pepper pouted. “I am.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you won’t do what they tell you.”
“News travels that fast?”
Dorry nodded toward the next table where Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly sat over their dinner trays. Mr. Mack lifted his head from his carton of juice as if he’d been monitoring Pepper and Dorry’s conversation. He set down his juice, looked directly at Pepper and said, “I am a grown man. I do not gossip.”
Then he returned to his previously scheduled apple juice. Once he did, Dorry raised her right hand and curled it into the shape of a duckbill. She nodded toward Mr. Mack again.
Quack, quack, quack!
The moment Mr. Mack looked up from his meal, Dorry dropped the pantomime.
And, of course, none of this had any bearing on Pepper’s hunger. And, for that matter, on his recent stance. Hadn’t he just gone all Spartacus? Where were his legions of gladiators rallying behind him?
Dorry just wiped her chin.
Mr. Mack looked at his wrist. “It’s just about six thirty. I’ve got the slot.”
The other patients hardly seemed to hear him. They either remained focused on their meals or on the game show playing on the screen.
“No whammies, no whammies, no whammies …!” shouted the man on the television, who hadn’t been well dressed even when this show first aired twenty-six years ago.
“Come on,” Mr. Mack said. “Who’s got the remote? It’s six thirty and I want the news.”
Loochie sat at the table closest to the screen. She raised one hand, holding the remote. “Almost six thirty,” she said.
Mr. Mack glared at her. “That’s fine,” he said. “But as soon as it’s my time I want my show.”
And finally here came Coffee.
Pepper watched as Terry, the orderly, received no follow-up phone call. Coffee just shuffled down Northwest 5, looking slightly dulled, and he reached the orderly. He was given a dinner tray.
Pepper watched as Coffee scanned the lounge. Looking over, through, past Pepper. Pepper didn’t bother waving him over. Instead Pepper became improbably interested in the woman on the screen now and the question of whether or not some little red animated demon would destroy her dreams.
“Come on, no whammies,” she chanted. “Come on, no whammies.”
It was as if Coffee had been a reel of film that hadn’t quite caught on the grooves of a projector wheel. Finally he saw Pepper (meaning his medicated vision and his consciousness synced). Coffee registered Pepper there at the table with Dorry and shambled over.
Coffee sat, and removed the orange, the cookie, and the juice carton from the tray. He slid the cookie to Dorry. He slid the tray, which held franks and beans for the main course, toward Pepper. Baked beans from a can, hot dog from a package, a bun that felt (and tasted) like a soft foam microphone cover. Pepper ate it all gratefully.
While Pepper chomped, Coffee said, “Give me your credit card first. Then I’ll join you.”
Pepper sneaked a look at Dorry.
“That’s certainly one way to destroy your credit,” Dorry said. She slipped the cookie into her lap.
“Stop!”
On television the woman risking five thousand dollars and a vacation to Fiji winced as an animated demon chortled and clawed back all her winnings. The game-show host offered his practiced sympathies, then said good night to the viewers with a vacant grin.
“She lost the trip to Fiji!” Loochie shouted. The kid looked despondent.
Mr. Mack shouted. “That’s six thirty even!” He pointed at his naked wrist. And, sure enough, he was right. “Now stop daydreaming about places you are never going to visit and turn on channel 148.”
But Loochie wasn’t about to do his bidding. She dropped the remote on his table where its plastic casing thunked.
Pepper finished the last of his meal as Mr. Mack pushed his chair back and stood. He aimed the remote at the television. It took a few dozen presses on the controller before the machine did as it was told.
Dorry pointed at Pepper. “You like symbolic victories, I guess. You want to get Coffee here to refuse his medication just like you did and then both of you get written up, both of you get punished, and neither does anything to face the real problem on this unit. That’s a brilliant plan.”
The television roared now. A guy in his fifties who was modular-furniture attractive, sat in front of a nondescript news desk, wearing an expensive but unstylish jacket and tie.
“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Steve Sands. Welcome to News Roll.”
Behind Steve Sands, a large flat screen showed images of Coffee’s idealized leader, the Black President. And after him, a series of men and women in their fifties and sixties, all of them white except one black guy with glasses and a big smile.
“With presidential elections only a year away …”
Not even the local news, it was a “news program.”
Cue the exodus!
Two-thirds of the patients scrambled. The Air Force’s finest fighter squadrons don’t move as fast. Patients skedaddled to avoid the yapping trap of Steve Sands.
Even the orderly, Terry, gathered the empty meal trays fast. Dorry, Coffee, Pepper, Mr. Mack, and Frank Waverly. They were the only ones who stayed.
Dorry reached out and grabbed Pepper’s forearm. She said, “The real problem here is fear.”
Pepper wanted to say, Fear? Really? I thought the problem was the Devil coming into my room and stomping me out. Fear hadn’t nearly crushed him to death. And she should’ve known, since she’d been there.
On-screen, Steve Sands said, “As we gear up for the blood sport of politics in 2012, I thought we should look back to 2008, just to remember where we were then. And to help us think about where we might be going.”
Mr. Mack tapped Frank Waverly and pointed at the screen, as giddy as a child watching “Elmo’s World.”
Steve Sands said, “Now my producers and writers, even my wife, had a lot of suggestions for the clip that should start us off this evening. But I knew exactly which one has stayed with me the longest. And it’s not a major event. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that might never have been noted in the pre-YouTube age. Remember this one?”
Now the screen showed an auditorium during a town-hall meeting. An older man in a black suit stood at a lectern. A microphone on a stand before him. He said, “Okay. Let’s go.… This lady in red has had her hand up for some time.”
The fingers of a right hand could be seen at the bottom of the screen, waving with great energy. When the woman was called on, the hand dropped and the camera pulled back to reveal seven other people up on the stage with the man in the black suit, all seated behind tables. Below those folks on the stage, people’s heads and shoulders could be seen in the rows. The auditorium looked pretty full. The woman in red, her hair pulled up and held with a clip, said, “Thank you, Congressman, um, Castle.…”
The lady, in a red T-shirt, carried a plastic bag with a yellow sheet of paper inside and a tiny American flag. Her other hand gripped the microphone.
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.”
Pepper lost time. As he continued reading, he lost even more. The late evening passed and, except for getting up to use the bathroom twice, he forgot himself. He wasn’t transported from New Hyde to the beaches of Amity, he didn’t feel the New England sun on his skin or the salty breeze on his tongue, but he was reminded of the life beyond this bare bed, and distracted from all the hard questions he’d face once he put the book down. The reading became a muscle relaxant, a sedative, a salve, and there was nothing wrong with that.
Which is why Pepper wasn’t stressed when Coffee got press-ganged into the room. Terry practically tossed Coffee through the open doorway. Coffee stumbled into the room, and Pepper, at ease from the enjoyable reading, looked up casually. Coffee’s blue binder flapped into the room next. Then Terry slammed the door shut. A second after that, the door was locked.
Even this didn’t cause Pepper much alarm. He grinned at Coffee conspiratorially and said, “We’re the bad boys of this unit!”
Coffee remained serious. He pointed at the door and said, “Listen.”
Terry’s sneakers squeaked as he padded down Northwest 2. Pepper heard the clank of another door being locked. And another. Again, and again. Every room in the men’s hall. The whole unit going on lockdown.
Pepper sat up. “Did everybody but you refuse their meds?”
Pepper’s shoulders tightened as he imagined the glory of such a thing. It had taken a few hours, but they had followed his example!
Coffee rolled his eyes. “You’re not Jesus Christ. You do know that, right?”
Pepper frowned and set the book down, got up from the bed and crept to the door. Since there was no window to look through, he pressed his ear to the metal. “So what is it, then?”
Coffee came to Pepper’s side. “The EMTs are here.”
“Someone’s hurt?” Pepper asked.
“Someone’s dead,” Coffee said.