EVERYBODY FELT WELL rested.
This was mostly because Dr. Anand had the staff replace every patient’s blood with an equal amount of tranquilizer. Or nearly that much. What else was he going to do? The fallout of the rebellion was a storm cloud of scrutiny. You’re not going to lose two patients (Frank Waverly and Mr. Mack), have another five suffer serious injuries, and experience property damage that totaled $82,000 and not draw some attention.
The harm done to the building caused the most uproar. The board of New Hyde Hospital wasn’t pleased to see such trouble coming out of a department that, frankly, didn’t generate enough in profits. The slapdash security room for Mr. Visserplein was of particular concern. Who had allowed such a thing? It was time to appear concerned. Someone would have to be punished. That person was the legal rep who’d sat in on Pepper’s meeting with Dr. Anand. Mr. iPad. He became a martyr to the cause. The cause being protecting New Hyde Hospital from myriad lawsuits. The man was, metaphorically, burned and buried in an unmarked grave. Only a day after he’d left New Hyde, no one at the hospital could remember the dude’s name. (His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson.)
Dr. Anand quickly figured out that if that guy could be let go so easily, then maybe he could, too. The doctor figured he needed to prove he could get the unit back to full compliance, not running but coasting. Release the sedatives! With the patients sufficiently stupefied, he shuffled them. He turned the conference rooms in Northwest 1 into the women’s bedrooms. And the long-unused rooms of Northwest 4 were aired out and turned into the men’s hall. Repurposing like a motherfucker. He transferred Mr. Visserplein to New Hyde’s geriatric unit, far off in the main building; pawning his troubles off on those staff members (and patients!) without a word of warning. He even oversaw the construction crews who were brought in to permanently seal off the painted-over doors and patch up the ceiling in Pepper’s old room.
There was still the question of how Mr. Visserplein had been able to climb up to the second-story door. An old man doing something like that, how had he managed this? It wasn’t magic. The stairs in the stairwell had been removed, yes, but not the handrails. (You son-of-a-bitch you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones! That kind of thing.) (Anyway, why would they have taken the handrails out? Who, in all sanity, would imagine a patient having the determination — and the Crazy Strength — to pull himself up to the second floor that way? Nobody, that’s who.) In the aftermath they finally removed the railing from the former stairwell, too. They cleared out the thousands of cookie wrappers. They scrubbed out lines from a song the old man had scrawled on the wall beside his bed (Welcome to where time stands still, no one leaves and no one will). In other words, Dr. Anand did some heroic reshuffling at Northwest, and he hoped this would let him keep his job. (For all his despondency earlier, he needed the salary.)
When the patients finally awoke from their medicinal slumber, became truly aware again, they didn’t realize how much had happened while they were out.
Pepper lay in his new bed in his new room. He missed his old room. The view from this window offered little but the single tower of New Hyde Hospital’s off-white main building in the distance. It looked like a giant vanilla wafer. Pepper missed seeing the tops of the trees.
He got out of bed. He wore pajamas, top and bottom, and slipped on his light blue slipper-socks. He looked at the ceiling and listened for the creaking sound. Pepper heard nothing but the low buzz of the lights.
He went to his dresser. Had he brought all his things with him when he transferred rooms? He’d been so medicated, he could hardly remember. One set of outdoor clothes? Check. Coffee’s binder? Check. Sue’s blue accordion folder? The folder was there, but nothing sat inside. The two words were still there. “Nice Dream.” He’d have to fill it with something new.
His boots stood beside the dresser, upright and at attention. He left them there for now.
Pepper stepped out into the hallway, and instinctively, turned left instead of right, thinking he was still on Northwest 2, but he was on Northwest 4 now. The silver door was at the end of the hall, propped open.
Pepper flinched and held his breath as he braced for the Devil (Mr. Visserplein) to come bounding out of the room. But that didn’t happen. Pepper caught his breath again. He stared at the open door.
A light glowed inside. He walked toward the room cautiously but nobody came to stop him. He looked over his shoulder but no one paid attention. He reached the silver door. He touched the stainless steel.
He looked inside.
Imagine a concrete stairwell without stairs (and now without railings). Twenty feet up, in the ceiling, a single strong bulb cast light that filled the room. No shadows. No bed. No evidence at all that anyone had ever lived in here. Been kept here.
Pepper looked at the concrete floor, almost expecting to see Mr. Mack’s small crumpled body. Or at least a bloody stain. But the floor was clean. Power-washed. All the surfaces were so bright because they’d all been repainted.
He left the room and paced back down Northwest 4 slowly. His feet hurt. So did his knees and hips. How long had he been underwater? That’s how he felt. Like a man walking out of the ocean. All but drowned. His nose and eyes even stung. When he reached the nurses’ station, it looked a little different. Another change courtesy of Dr. Anand. The lower half of the nurses’ station was the same split-level rectangular desk but the upper half was no longer open. Shatterproof plastic panes had been installed. The nurses’ station now looked exactly like a ghetto Chinese-food counter.
Pepper walked up to the station. Nurse Washburn sat inside.
Pepper knocked on the plastic with a little force. He wanted to believe this new partition had been put up as a joke. He’d tap it and it would tumble down harmlessly. But that didn’t happen. He knocked and the plastic rattled but stayed firm. Nurse Washburn looked so small inside that clear cage.
“I’ll take the General Tso’s chicken,” Pepper said. “Gimme an extra-spicy mustard.”
Nurse Washburn, to his great surprise, grinned at him.
“You haven’t seen all this yet.”
“How long has it been since …”
He gestured toward Northwest 2, his old room, with his chin.
“Two months,” she said, and looked embarrassed to tell him.
He felt a little shocked, but only a little. He remembered the passing of days. Meals eaten. Television watched. Showers taken. Smoke breaks under the maple tree. He might even have had a few conversations. Two months. Was it June?
Nurse Washburn tilted her head to the right, a look of real sympathy.
“It’s no surprise,” she said. “The doctor just lowered everyone’s meds back to normal.”
“How is Dr. Sam?”
She shook her head. “Not him. He’s gone.”
None of the improvements had helped Dr. Samuel Anand. The board of New Hyde Hospital voted to terminate his contract. He was replaced. The Devil had vanquished the doctor, too.
Aside from the new plastic shielding, the inside of the nurses’ station looked largely the same. The desk phone had been returned. Nurse Washburn sat in front of the same outdated computer screen. On either side of it were more stacks of patient records.
Pepper leaned forward. He read the names on the tabs. Gerald Mack. Frank Waverly.
“What are you doing with those?” Pepper said. “Those men are dead and gone.”
Nurse Washburn, Josephine, looked down at the paperwork and back up at Pepper. “Dead, yes,” she said. “But not gone, not with Equator Zero.”
“Dr. Anand talked about that,” Pepper said. “But he didn’t explain what it meant.”
Josephine rolled backward in her chair. She gestured at the computer screen. “Equator Zero is a program for filing patient records.”
Pepper nodded. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Not just for keeping records. But for filing them.”
Pepper raised both hands, like a scale. “You like Clamato and I like Clamahto.”
“New Hyde is a public hospital,” Nurse Washburn said. “That means it gets city, state, and federal money to take care of its poorest patients. Which is just about all of you. No offense.”
Pepper doffed an invisible cap. “Thanks.”
“All these agencies pay different fees for different treatments,” she continued. “And one of the reasons we charted so much was because we were basically writing up receipts. In the past, we would send copies of those receipts in, and the different agencies would pay the hospital.”
Nurse Washburn opened one folder and waved the sheets of paper under her chin like a fan.
“But now everything is computerized. That means we don’t have to send copies of anything. We just send electronic files from our computer to their computer. Then their computer authorizes money to be deposited in New Hyde’s accounts. But Equator Zero is kind of like automatic billing. Once the patient is in our system, New Hyde Hospital will bill for that patient’s care until the end of time.”
“At least you all won’t have to keep doing it yourselves every month.”
Nurse Washburn put the papers back into their folder, closed it, and set it neatly at the top of a stack. “No, Pepper. You don’t understand. Equator Zero will continue to charge for the care of a patient even after that patient is gone.”
“Discharged?” Pepper asked.
She put her hands on the paperwork again. One on Frank Waverly’s pile. One on Mr. Mack’s. “Deceased,” she said.
“But what about when they get caught?”
“If they ever get caught, they’ll call it a computer error. They’ll repay some portion of what they made in a settlement. But the amount they take in before they’re ever called out will be ten thousand times what they have to pay. Equator Zero makes patients profitable in perpetuity. That’s how Dr. Anand put it once. You all are worth more to them missing than present. More lucrative dead than alive.”
Pepper nodded appreciatively.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s devilish.”
“Dead souls,” Josephine sighed. “Good business.”
And quickly, instantly, Pepper saw himself trying to tell someone about Equator Zero. Nurse Washburn, Josephine, had just offered him quite a lot. He had the name of the program, he had the names of at least four dead patients (Kofi Acholi, Doris Walczak, Frank Waverly, Gerald Mack), and if he thought back a bit, he could probably list the exact dates when they died. Compare that to the dates on the bills recently submitted in their names and you had a report — verifiable, credible, simple, clear — that could force someone else outside the walls of New Hyde to take a goddamn interest. Pepper even saw himself using Coffee’s blue binder and trolling through the list of names and numbers of public officials that his friend spent so long amassing. And if those channels failed, maybe he could even try the reporter who’d written about Sue. Pepper wouldn’t change Coffee’s plan, just complete it.
Josephine tapped at the plastic pane, as if she was about to hand him his food order. She scanned the nurses’ station.
“I’ve got something here for you.”
Now one of the lines on the newly returned staff phone lit up. A bright red beacon on the cheap tan plastic phone. Josephine stopped searching for Pepper’s item and picked it up, didn’t even listen for a voice. “Be right there,” she said, then hung up again.
She walked to the formerly open end of the nurses’ station. There was a shatterproof plastic door there, running from ceiling to floor. Josephine slipped the red plastic key chain from a pants pocket.
Pepper walked toward the door of the nurses’ station, almost like he was the nurse’s escort.
“Stay where you are, Pepper.” Josephine didn’t sound scared like she might have a couple of months ago. She locked eyes with Pepper when she spoke, held his gaze until he nodded and backed away. She unlocked the door and stepped through, shut it again and locked it.
“That’s new regulations,” she told him. “I wasn’t trying to snap at you.”
Pepper put his hands up. “I didn’t take it that way.”
She nodded and, as proof of her comfort, she let him walk alongside her freely. He followed her. She began down Northwest 1, toward the front door. This was the only item on the unit that cost too much to move. Pepper passed the threshold of the hall, and Josephine put her hand out, just a millimeter away from his belly.
“No men on the women’s hall,” she said. “You know that.”
Pepper looked at the doors of the former conference rooms.
“But then how do you get male patients in and out of the unit?”
He pointed at the front door as proof of his clear logic. And Josephine didn’t fight him. She just shrugged and waved him toward her.
“That was easier than I thought,” he said.
“Maybe I don’t care because I’m leaving.”
“You got another job?”
As she walked, she looked from side to side, from one room door to the next. The swivel of a seasoned staff member. She was leaving just as she got good at the job. “I found something a little less … unpredictable,” she said.
“Bomb squad?” Pepper asked.
“Close!” Josephine laughed. “I joined the Army.”
“Get out of here!”
“Better pay,” she said. “Sad as that is. And I already feel like I’ve had some war training.”
“That’s kind of insulting,” Pepper said. “But I see your point.”
They reached the secure door. Josephine looked through the plastic and spoke loudly to someone on the other side. “Got to wait for the doctor to let you in!” she shouted. She shrugged as if to say, Regulations.
“Hey!” Pepper said. “What was it you had for me? A going-away present?”
“You’re not leaving yet.”
Josephine heard how harsh that sounded. “I mean that’s got to be settled by the new unit head,” she added. “But I don’t think it’ll be too long. Really. You know who’s been telling the new doc that you’re not ill? Miss Chris!”
“She just doesn’t like me,” Pepper said.
“That’s true, but she wouldn’t lie. She means it.”
Pepper waved her off. He didn’t want to start expecting good news. Nothing made waiting worse. At the very least, he hadn’t been removed from the unit and taken to a lockup, so the original case of assaulting the officers probably had not been brought before a judge yet. Josephine walked back toward the nurses’ station. Before Pepper joined her, he pressed his face to the door’s window. On the other side he saw two paramedics, one man and one woman. They looked at him for a moment, standing straighter and widening their eyes. He realized they hoped he was the doctor and was about to let them in.
Pepper didn’t bother trying to explain. Instead he stared at the third person out there. A big man. Not tall but wide. The polite term is heavyset. (The clinical term is hyperobese.) A black guy. Maybe. Or a Latin guy? Pepper couldn’t say for sure. Late twenties or early thirties, his hair was kind of a wild puff and his head was down. The EMTs watched Pepper, but this heavyset guy was more interested in his own toes. He had his arms crossed. He looked thoughtful, morose, like that presidential painting of JFK. Almost identical except this guy wore a bright blue windbreaker and weighed about three hundred pounds. Pepper knocked on the little window hard enough to shake this big guy from his daze.
He looked up at Pepper. Pepper returned the stare.
Then someone tapped his back.
Pepper turned and found Dr. Barger. The man didn’t smile now like he often had in Book Group. And his shirt, once open down to the chest, was buttoned to the top. He wore a tie and a frown.
“Dr. Anand had a lighter touch with patients,” Dr. Barger said. “But I’m going to expect more from you.”
Pepper waited to be recognized.
“Now, I want you out of this hallway,” Dr. Barger said. “It’s for the female patients only.” The doctor looked at him blankly. He didn’t recognize Pepper at all.
Pepper decided not to try to remind the man of the good old days in Book Group. What would be the point?
“Go,” Dr. Barger commanded.
Pepper saluted.
“Yes, Captain!” Pepper said.
He returned to the nurses’ station where Josephine had already let herself back in. When Pepper appeared, she was already moving charts and peeking into drawers.
“Go over there,” Josephine pointed. At the end of the station, opposite the long door, was a window the size of a dinner tray. Josephine opened one last drawer, pulled something out, and came toward him. Inside the nurses’ station there was a small plastic knob that she used to slide the plastic window open.
“Don’t see much mail coming through here,” Josephine said. “But you got a postcard last week.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me when it first came?”
“I couldn’t have a conversation with you,” Josephine explained. “You were just, out, you know, from the meds.”
Pepper nodded and opened his hand to her, right outside the window.
“Plus, I liked looking at the picture on the front,” she said. Josephine handed the postcard through. “It’s by a man named Vincent Van Gogh. Have you ever heard of him? He was a painter. A real genius.”
Pepper let the postcard lie in his large palm with the image facing him. It was in color. Bright yellow and orange. Van Gogh’s Vase with Twelve Sunflowers. The image so vibrant that Pepper felt the warmth of the sun that fed those flowers. Pepper traced a finger over each one. He lifted the card now and turned it over.
The postmark read: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
In the space for a message he found two words, in large print (and a punctuation mark):
“LOOCHIE LIVES!”
Pepper’s heart leapt so hard, he almost didn’t survive.
It’s fair to say Pepper haunted the oval room. He didn’t know where else to go. His room seemed sort of lonely, but the lounge — and that big, blaring television — just seemed to promise a different kind of isolation.
Instead he stayed in the oval room, right by the phone alcove, while Josephine returned to logging the paperwork that New Hyde Hospital hoped to flip into fraudulent profits. She continued, rather than walking off the job in protest because she needed the paychecks that would come for another week. Frankly, she was more concerned with how she’d pay for the elder-care home she’d found for her mother. (She couldn’t leave Mom in the house alone, after all, while the Army deployed her to the other side of the world.)
Pepper didn’t bother her again. He hovered near the phone alcove, and every few minutes he slipped Loochie’s postcard out of the breast pocket of his pajama top and looked at it. Van Gogh’s painting and Loochie’s note, which was more beautiful? (Okay, the painting, but not by much.) Loochie was out there in the world. He felt so happy it almost made him nauseous. He wondered where she was. Still in Amsterdam? Back in the United States? Maybe even somewhere else by now.
But really, it didn’t matter where Loochie had gone. Didn’t matter if she’d ever face hard times again. (Of course she would, like anyone.) For now Loochie was something she hadn’t been through six years of on-and-off institutionalization. Loochie was alive.
Beside the phone alcove, he watched some of the other patients emerge from their rooms. He watched Northwest 1, the new women’s hallway, and the female patients who turned in the wrong direction, too. Disoriented by the rearrangements. Facing the front door rather than the nurses’ station and getting totally rattled until they saw Pepper, eyes so bright he shined like a lighthouse. He waved and they set course toward him.
He greeted each one, then sent him or her to the lounge. As those men and women ate breakfast — those who’d survived the terrible night — the food on their trays tasted damn near gourmet.
And finally the new admit finished his intake meeting. Dr. Barger and his team had kept the first room, right next to the secure door, as a meeting space. But since the new patient was a man, Dr. Barger escorted him all the way down Northwest 1 to the nurses’ station. Dr. Barger told the new admit to wait there for Josephine, who had run to the bathroom. (Though the doctor remembered her name as Karen.) Then Dr. Barger returned to his team in the intake room.
The new admit hadn’t responded to Dr. Barger, or anyone else during the meeting. He waited at the nurses’ station now in the same pose as Pepper had seen before. Head down, arms crossed, he didn’t take in the surroundings at all.
Pepper knew what he was going to do even before he began. He slipped Loochie’s postcard into the breast pocket of his pajama top. There, it fortified him, like any good talisman.
Pepper approached the new guy slowly. What to say now? How to break the ice, one dude to another? Pepper didn’t want to look stupid. Suppose he spoke and this guy only glared at him, or tried to bite off his nose, or laughed at him. It seemed so ridiculous to be nervous about saying hello to a stranger after what he’d been through at New Hyde. But there it was, even here, just some mundane social anxiety. Pepper rested one hand on Loochie’s postcard. This made it look like he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He felt himself calm.
Now Pepper walked closer and extended his hand. “What’s your name?”
The new admit left Pepper’s hand hanging there. Kept his arms crossed.
“Anthony,” he finally said.
“People call me Pepper.” He lowered his hand.
Anthony grinned to himself. He kept his head down, but spoke loud enough to be heard.
“Is that because you give everybody the squirts?”
Pepper laughed. Anthony grinned, then returned his gaze to the floor.
At the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, there’s a bit of text printed on the wall of the second-floor landing. It explains Van Gogh’s ambition as a painter; that Van Gogh viewed his work as a kind of “love letter” to humanity. He hoped to be a great artist, but not simply to bring praise upon himself, his talent. (Though that would’ve been nice, dammit.) He hoped to reflect the world’s own glory, with love. An artistic impulse, but one not exclusive to artists. For instance, Coffee. For instance, Dorry. And now, Pepper. The aspiration is so rarely rewarded, or even understood, that most people don’t even try. But wherever it’s found, whenever it’s displayed, it’s an act of genius.
Soon enough Pepper would be released, but until then what would he do? Sit in his room and wait, or might there be more he could offer? Like now, with this new guy, so overwhelmed, so clearly scared, helpless. Pepper touched Anthony’s arm lightly.
“I like to greet the new admits,” he said. “You should see a friendly face first.”
Pepper raised his free hand and waved as if to take in the entire world. He smiled at Anthony.
“Let me give you the tour.”