He took out a pack of cigarettes and patted down his jacket for a lighter. It was in his inner pocket. When the flame sparked, he buried the smoke deep inside his chest, baking his lungs. His cigarette twitched unsteadily between two shaking fingers. Already, it was burning down, dissipating into nothing. Its tobacco-filled life was short and empty. It served one purpose, and then it died.
Gabriel looked back at the window. A nurse entered the infected woman’s room to fix her IV, noticed him outside, and closed the blinds.
Every fiber of his being, every piece of the man he once was, told him that he—Gabriel Schist, the oh-so-great-and-wonderful creator of the Schist vaccine—was the only one who could stop the virus. Years and years ago, he’d stopped a prior epidemic in its tracks. Why not this one?
But the Gabriel of the past was an altogether different Gabriel than the fidgety, broken creature that existed in his place. The real Gabriel Schist had been a younger man. A better man. A brilliant man.
As the cigarette’s glowing ember slowly burned to ashes, Gabriel wondered what had happened to that great man. Where had he gone?
ACT I of III:
GREY MATTER
“Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call complex; such are beauty, gratitude, an army, the universe.”
John Locke
Chapter 1:
Legacy
Spring 2018
Gabriel woke up in bed. He stretched out his stiff, aching arms, feeling years of trivial injuries, hey-this-will-get-better-soon wounds, and supposedly healed muscle tears ripple throughout his entire body. The years went by so fast. One day he was young, strong, and athletic, and the next, he woke up in a place like—
Wait. Hold on. Where the hell was he?
A sky-blue curtain hung on his left, blocking off the other side of the room. A bulky television set was suspended from the ceiling. The walls were the same color, and he caught the faint stinging odor of antiseptic. To his right was an open door exposing a hallway, from which came the sounds of sirens, loud voices, and beeping.
He carefully rolled over onto his side. His aching muscles resisted the turn, and his bones weren’t much friendlier. His back immediately felt as though it had been exposed to dry ice. He realized that he was wearing a bare-backed johnny gown instead of his usual pajamas.
Tied to the railing of the bed was a vine-like wire, with a red push button on the end. Oh, no. He was in the hospital. But how? When? Was he sick? Had he gotten into a motorcycle accident? Why couldn’t he remember?
Gabriel panicked, breathing heavily. His heart raced. His skin was coated in a hot, syrupy sheen of perspiration. He struggled to sit upright, but his entire skeleton felt so stiff that it might snap at the slightest strain. He was trapped. He threw off the blanket and examined his body for wounds.
Instead, he found wrinkles. His thin, nearly transparent skin had become a crumpled-up piece of tissue paper. Liver spots. Reticular veins. Painful varicose veins on his ankle.
Oh. That’s right. Slowly, tentatively, Gabriel’s memory volunteered its services to him again. He wasn’t in a hospital. He was in a nursing home in New Hampshire, the same nursing home where he’d lived in for five years. Bright New Day Skilled Nursing Center. Yes, that was it.
He frenetically cycled through his usual checkmark system. His name was Gabriel Schist. That part was easy. The president was Bill Clint… no. George? No, Barack. Barack Obama. Wait. Was that the last one? Well, how about the year? The year was 2018. He knew that, at least. As far as his age, he was… what, seventy-five years old? Seventy-two? Seventy-three?
Well, his age had never been important to him, anyway. As long as he remembered the sequence, he was still okay. That was the most important part, the only way to determine if the gears of his mind were still turning properly.
“Zero,” he whispered. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four…”
Finally, he felt strong enough to pull himself up into a sitting position. He shivered, his bare feet resting on the cool linoleum floor. He waited for the sharp lines and blurry geometric figures of the world to come into sharper focus.
“Fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four…”
Tacked on his wall were dozens of graphs, a small blackboard with hundreds of tiny equations written on it, analytical essays on his work, and articles on the latest medical advances. Several hastily-written scraps of notebook paper were haphazardly taped wherever they could fit. Beside those were photographs of all the people who’d once loved him. A photo of Yvonne, her arms raised to the sky, was next to one of Melanie. Yearbook-style Polaroid photos of the various nurses, staff, and housekeepers at Bright New Day had been added so that he would remember their faces more quickly.
“Two hundred thirty-three, three hundred seventy-seven, six hundred ten, nine hundred eighty-seven. Okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Gabriel sighed with relief. His mind was intact, for the time being. He almost smiled until right then, right at his moment of liberation, he felt a soggy dampness beneath him. He’d wet the bed again. Gabriel slowly, shakily rose to his feet, and a spasm shot down his sciatic nerve. The sight of that moist, miserable yellow circle on the white sheets was as horrifying as that of a mutilated corpse. He yanked the blanket up to cover the wet spot.
A stream of urine dribbled off the mattress and onto the floor. Wetting the bed. It was degrading to see, degrading to smell, and even more degrading that he had to hide it like a scared little boy. But he refused to wear diapers. Briefs. Depends. Elderly water-soaking-underwear-devices.
The stench was nauseating. He grabbed a face cloth from his counter, intending to wipe up the urine that had escaped to the floor. A gruff cough interrupted him. Someone was moving about on the other side of the curtain, the window side of the room. When did he get a new roommate?
“Ah, hell!” a man shouted. “Did you piss the bed?”
“No,” Gabriel answered. “Certainly not.”
“C’mon, man. Don’t be shy! Y’kiddin’ me? I do that shit all the time!” The man laughed uproariously.
Then, much to Gabriel’s chagrin, his new roommate rolled over to Gabriel’s side of the room in a wheelchair. He was a stout, potbellied man with a scraggly grey beard and lots of skull tattoos. “How are ya?” The man’s mouth stretched into a wide, gap-toothed smile. He was a rough-looking character, though his wheelchair and pale atrophied legs managed to counteract the fiendish menace he probably once wielded. A dangling purple stump hung as a memorial to his right foot’s prior existence. A nasal cannula was plugged into his nostrils and hooked into a cylindrical oxygen tank on the back of his chair, feeding him a constant stream of O2.
Hoarse, raspy breathing that sounded like someone was dropping a bag full of dirty rocks into a rusted gutter filled the room. He had clearly been a heavy smoker. End-stage COPD? Probably.
“The name’s Robbie.” The gruff man offered his hand. “Robbie Gore.”
Gore’s fingernails were dark, almost black, and spoon-shaped, likely because of all the smoking. It could also be diabetes, judging by the missing foot. He seemed to have arthritis, as well. Lymphatic system disorders. Possibly a lack of vitamin B-12.
Gabriel shook his new roommate’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Gore seemed friendly enough. So far, Gabriel liked him, which was rare. He’d always had difficulty adjusting to new roommates.
