Summer 2018

Gabriel awoke with tears in his eyes. He was bitterly cold, and the room was dark. The darkness was impenetrable. He was in a void, perhaps even a black hole.

He couldn’t see. His senses were vague, abstract, somehow separated from his mind. He couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel. Couldn’t taste, smell, touch, hear. He was blind. Deaf. Mute. Unreal. Fictitious. Imaginary. He’d made himself up.

In desperation, he flung his body into the darkness, hoping that the vacuum would release him and that gravity would—

Crash!

He slammed onto a hard surface, his tailbone screaming with pain. The skin on his hip tore open as easily as a perforated strip, spilling blood across the obsidian landscape of nonexistence.

Light returned, and his mind cleared. As he reassembled the fragments of his consciousness, it became brutally apparent he hadn’t thrown himself out of the darkness or anything quite so cosmic.

No, he’d fallen out of bed, and he was sprawled out on the floor. The sunlight was so bright that he actually winced in pain. There was a window on one side of him, a twin bed on the other. A table beside the window had medical equipment piled on it. He definitely wasn’t on his sailboat. He’d never seen this place before. Where was he?

Gabriel desperately attempted to scramble onto his feet. His toes felt like useless lumps of clay with no grip. Pain shot through his leg. His heart was pounding so hard it felt as if a heavyweight boxer was punching him in the chest. Through the curtain beside the bed, he saw the shadow of a man—was his name Bernard?—holding a small thing at the end of a cord. The man seemed to be trying to press on it with one finger. A call button, that was what it was called. Yes, the shadow man had pressed the call button.

Panic overtook him. “Help!” Gabriel yelled. “Help me!”

He rolled around on the bleach-scented floor. He was wearing nothing but a pair of blue sweatpants loosely tied at the waist and several sizes too big for him. His vision became blurry again. The darkness was coming, taking away his right to exist. His identity became an abstract set of principles that didn’t quite make sense.

No one was coming to help. They’d abandoned him. He was alone in space, alone, all alone. He was trapped. He was…

Oh, wait.

He relaxed a little. He was Gabriel Schist. That was his name. He was at Bright New Day. The nursing home. The nursing home he’d been at for five years. He was seventy… three? Four? Eight? Seventy-something years old.

His skin dripped with cold perspiration. He’d fallen out of bed. His tailbone hurt, and he had scraped his hip, but he didn’t think he had done any serious damage.

“Zero,” he whispered. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine…” He ran out of breath. His throat was sore and dry.

Every part of him was cold, inside and out. He’d never felt so cold. He looked up at his microscope. It glared back down at him, its circular glass eye cold and unforgiving.

“One hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three, three hundred seventy-seven, six hundred ten—”

“Hello again, Bernard!” Dana Kleznowski said from the doorway. “You rang—”

“Roommate!” Bernard cried.

“Hey, Detective?” She ran over and dropped to her knees beside Gabriel. She placed her hand on his bare back. “Detective? Gabe… I mean, Gabriel, Gabriel. Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay.”

Gabriel shuddered, but he remained silent. It’d been a long time since he’d felt a woman’s hand on his naked skin; her touch brought back memories. Good memories. Painful memories. Skin on skin. It reminded him that, for better or worse, he still had a libido. He still felt things. He was still human. Even if he was crazy. Even if he was locked into the same building forever. Even if his demented condition meant it was probably illegal for anyone to have sex with him ever again. He was still human.

Her face was inches from his, her eyes still widened in alarm. He stared at her blankly, too exhausted to respond. Her eyelids were painted maroon. Her perfume smelled of fresh peaches.

“Smile, Gabriel,” she demanded.

“Fingernails grow… one nanometer… every second,” he replied. “Can you imagine that? Every second.”

Gabriel’s head was swimming. Bright New Day. He was at Bright New Day. His name was Gabriel Schist. He was trying to cure the Black Virus. There were… slugs. The virus. Slugs. Victor, Victor See. No, not See. It was C, Victor C, the letter C.

Dana reached for the call button. “Gabriel, smile, dammit. Smile.”

Oh, right. Dana was trying to see if he was stroking out. When someone had a stroke, his smile was uneven. Fortunately, he wasn’t having one. His last stroke had already caused enough problems. Another one could leave him unable to speak or walk or think.

Gabriel cleared the dirty cobwebs out of his head. Okay, Gabriel, focus your damn mind. He smiled for her, a big, winning smile, packed full of teeth. “I’m fine,” he murmured.

Dana sat back on her bony haunches, sighed, and wiped the sweat from her forehead. The veins on her pale, too-thin hands were popping out.

Still smelling her peach-scented perfume, Gabriel tried to remember how her hand had felt on his naked back. It reminded him of how Yvonne’s hands had felt, long ago. Cool. Textured. Tiny fingertips. “I’m fine,” he repeated.

“Thank God.” She laughed. “Crap! You had me worried as hell, ya bastard.”

Gabriel shrugged. He wanted to smile again, to show her that he appreciated the fact that she cared, but something internal blocked him from expressing himself.

Dana stood up and dusted off the backs of her legs. “Okay. Well, I’ll be right back to get your vitals. So just wait there. Don’t try to stand up. We’ll get you up with the Hoyer, just to be safe.”

“Sure.” He had no intention of waiting around for them to hoist him up with that ridiculous patient-lifting apparatus, but arguing the point was a waste of breath. Legally, they were supposed to use it every time a resident fell.

“Good. Wait here.” She walked out of the room.

As soon as she was out of sight, Gabriel grabbed the side of the bed. He stood up slowly, painfully, just to make sure he was still capable of standing. His legs were shaky and gelatinous but fine. He was just dehydrated. His blood sugar was probably high, too.

He pulled the waistband of the sweatpants up over his navel and tied them a little tighter. He was cold and needed a shirt. He walked over and opened the closet door. Apparently, all of his shirts were in the laundry. “Hey, Bernard?”

“Yep,” Bernard replied.

“This is Gabriel, your roommate. I was wondering if I could perhaps borrow one of your shirts today?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sure, buddy. I’ve got too many.”

Gabriel went over to Bernard’s closet, which was insanely overstuffed with hundreds of those identical white V-necks. He pulled one out and saw the old trucker’s initials, BUH 4, written on the inside of the collar in black permanent marker. Gabriel smiled and stretched the shirt over his head.

Suddenly, something changed. Almost imperceptibly, the air trembled. Gabriel felt it even before it happened. His lungs deflated. His stomach leapt into his ribs and collapsed.

Boom!

Something big and heavy violently crashed out in the hallway. The noise was followed by more crashes, softer ones, though no less violent. The walls shuddered.

Bang! Bang!

“Hurrrrtssss!” a man screeched, his voice echoing down the corridor. “Hurtssss!”

Bang! Bang!

Gabriel shivered. Bernard, who had been shakily lifting a cup of fruit punch to his mouth, dropped the cup and splattered red juice all over his shirt. Someone had collapsed in the hallway, and he was banging the floor, or maybe the wall. Falls weren’t uncommon in the nursing home, but whatever had happened out there seemed unusual. The entire floor felt as if it were still rattling. Gabriel stepped toward the door and peeked around the corner. No one was in sight.