“Well… hey, Mr. Gore, I’m dying for a cigarette, so I’m going to step outside to the smoking area.” Gabriel put on his tan trench coat and fedora. He wore the same outfit every day, no matter the weather; he was always cold, anyway. Together with the cane, he felt he cut a striking figure like something out of a Bogart movie. In the last year, the nursing staff had come to refer to him as the Detective, a nickname he wasn’t quite sure how to feel about. He tightened a Windsor knot in his black tie. He stepped toward the door, ready to get the hell out of the room. “See you soon. You can—”
“Hey,” Gore said, squinting at him. “Before you go, what’s your name, buddy? I forgot to ask.”
Gabriel hesitated. He subtly positioned his body toward the doorway. He just wanted to get outside and put this morning behind him. Was that too much to ask? “Gabriel Schist,” he answered finally.
“Schist?” Gore chuckled. “Ha! Y’know, I actually just got the Schist vaccine again the other day. Y’know, that vaccine that protects ya from AIDS and stuff? That’s funny! It must be weird whenever ya get the vaccine, since ya got the same name and all. It’d be funny if the guy who made it was related to ya or somethin’.”
Gabriel stiffened and bit his tongue. Relax, Gabriel. Relax, relax, relax. His cane wobbled underneath him, barely holding him up. “Actually, I’ve never taken the Schist vaccine. See you later, Mr. Gore.” He left the room and entered the corridor.
South Wing was the most populated of Bright New Day’s five long-term care wings and occasionally referenced to by staff members as the blue wing. After five years, Gabriel should have grown comfortable. There were days when he felt a sense of familiarity from those indigo-floored hallways, recognizable faces, and repetitive daily routines. And some days, he even felt at home. But most days, he loathed every doorway, corridor, and scrap of blue wallpaper.
At the moment, none of that mattered. After the horrific wakeup he’d just experienced, the only thing he cared about was getting a cigarette. Until he felt smoke in his lungs, everything was an obstacle. He needed an escape—an escape from his morning, an escape from his misery, an escape from people—and possibly more than anything else, he needed to hear the ocean outside the building. He didn’t need to touch the water—he knew that they’d never permit him to actually touch the ocean again—but just hearing it would be enough.
So Gabriel bravely marched down the bleach-scented corridors of Bright New Day. He passed a long series of identical open doors leading to identical bedrooms. His home. His total institution. His prison. His cane tapped along the floor, striking out into the future and carrying his sagging body along with it. Tap. Tap. Tap.
He walked slowly. Everything was always slow for him, or maybe he was normal and the world around him was just a dizzying blur. He couldn’t tell anymore. As he walked, nurses and LNAs—licensed nursing assistants—rushed from room to room, following the ominous rings of ever-present call bells. Fellow residents laughed, screamed, and argued. The staff gossiped. Within the rooms, television sets were cranked up to maximum volume by nearly deaf residents, most of whom were watching the same old TV Land reruns that they’d been watching for the last twenty years.
As usual, the Crooner was sitting outside his room, beaming with enthusiasm. A small, silver-haired man with no teeth, the Crooner offered Gabriel an overzealous, gummy smile and a voice excruciatingly loud enough to match it. “Laaaahhh! La-la-lah! Upstairs la-la-la upstaaaaiiirs is where I must be upstaiiirzzz. Laaaa-deee-daaa-deee-daaahh! Laa! La! Laaaa! Upstairs!”
The Crooner never stopped singing, from early in the morning until well past midnight. Together, he and the call bells were like an ambitious but untalented garage band.
As the Crooner belted out his music, he continually backed his wheelchair against the wall like a battering ram. Gabriel tried not to listen, tried not to look, but the Crooner was staring right at him with big eager eyes. Rumor had it that the Crooner had once been a highly renowned history professor at Yale.
Tap. Tap. On the other end of the hallway, Gabriel approached Bob Baker, a Vietnam veteran with a mouth sharper and thinner than razor wire. He liked Bob. Bob didn’t speak much. That was nice. It was easy.
Bob spent his days sitting in the hallway and scowling at passersby. Gabriel suspected that Bob had auditory schizophrenia because of the way he’d often perk his ears up as if hearing sounds that weren’t there. Bob probably had OCD. He smoked exactly four cigarettes a day, and the only thing he ever ate was hot dogs. According to Dana Kleznowski, an LPN on North Wing and one of Gabriel’s favorite nurses, Bob demanded that the hot dogs be arranged in a special dish and cut into little pieces exactly three-quarter-inch squares.
“Hello, Mr. Baker,” Gabriel said. “Having a good day today?”
“Noooooope,” Bob growled with a voice that punctured the air like a can opener.
Tap. Tap. The door to the smoking area was still so far, far away. His heart quivered. He just wanted to get outside, have his cigarette, and be done with it. His desperation for tobacco, sunlight, and the sound of the ocean became increasingly severe. He’d already had his social fill for the day. He just wanted to—
A cold, shaky hand grabbed him.
He stared down into the grimacing face of Edna Foster. She clutched his hand with a death grip. He tried to pry himself loose, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Pleeeeeease…” she murmured pitifully.
Gabriel’s heart sank. Edna spent most days roaming the halls, one foot permanently stuck out like an arrow and the other bent inward. Her Parkinson’s symptoms caused her to shake uncontrollably.
“Pleeeease…” she repeated.
Her features remained in a constant scowl, her eyes continuously glaring with reptilian intensity. Her mouth was pulled back into a tight, open-mouthed smile she had little control over. She had no teeth, no dentures, and a long beak-like nose.
But still, there was something amazing about Edna’s face. A powerful tenacity, a century’s worth of strength, and a fierce will to live resided in those eyes. Gabriel admired her, and yet, inside every line, inside every furrowed brow, her pain and loneliness was made just as agonizingly apparent as her strength.
“Hello, Edna,” Gabriel said.
“Hi…” She peered up at him suspiciously.
“How are you, today?”
“Ohhh my God,” she groaned, her face contorting into an angry, flesh-colored raisin. “Everything is terrible. So terrible. Like it always is.”
“Always?”
There was a long pause. Edna often had difficulty finding the right words. “I didn’t see you at first, dear. I’m nearly blind, you know. Blind as a bat. Please give me a… ah… push me somewhere. Please.”
Gabriel knew the routine. She would want to go to her room then to the lobby. Then back to her room. Then to the communal kitchen. No matter where someone pushed her, she would never be happy. “I can’t right now, Edna. I—”
“Oh, cram it. You’re no good. Get outta my way, sonny boy.” She threw Gabriel’s hand away.
Sonny boy? As a man in his seventies, Gabriel couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called that. “But Edna—”
“You go take a walk somewhere and think about what you’ve done, dummy.” She forcefully grabbed the wheels of her chair and slowly rolled away.
Gabriel, not sure how to feel about the interaction, returned to his previous course. Panting with exhaustion, he finally reached the door to the smoking area and pushed it open.
Air. Wind. Sun. The invigorating sunshine was like salve to his wounds. He looked up at the cloudless blue sky, smiling with rapture. Then, he heard it. The ocean. Waves crashed, water collapsing upon a beach, somewhere just out of sight.
A tall, impenetrable, cast-iron gate surrounded the smoking area, equipped with ear-shattering alarms in case anyone tried to escape. Safety… at the cost of freedom.
Gabriel stepped up to the gate, wrapped his fingers around its frosty metal bars, and stared out at the mundane gravel parking lot that was his excuse for a view. He could smell the saltwater. The beach was so close, just a short way down the big hill on the other side of the building. Out of sight and out of reach. He’d asked numerous times if he could walk down to it, but they’d never permitted him to do so, not even with supervision.
He closed his eyes and listened to the waves, trying to feel them and to remember the sensation of water splashing against his bare skin. He imagined his old sailboat and the gentle rocking motion beneath his feet as the moon shimmered over the ocean.
“Zero,” he whispered. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen…”
He placed a cigarette in his mouth and sat down at his regular spot over in the white gazebo, where all the smokers were supposed to do their dirty business. He patted his pockets, searching for a lighter. Nothing. He’d forgotten to bring it.
But it wasn’t his fault. He was expected to forget everything because he was the lucky recipient of life’s final going-away present, that red velvet, chocolate-covered cake of wonderfulness that the doctors liked to call Alzheimer’s. With Alzheimer’s, suddenly nothing was his fault anymore. No fault. No blame. No choice. No freedom.
Many decades ago, someone had once told Gabriel that he had “an amazing mind.” The compliment had meant a lot to him. His mind had defined him.
Not anymore.
Chapter 2:
Before
Summer 1997
Off the shore of California, a tiny sailboat rocked itself to sleep in the rolling arms of an enormous blue giant. Much as mankind was subservient to time, the sailboat was subservient to the water. It could point itself, but only the ocean could propel it forward. For the moment, the boat simply relaxed on the water’s gentle surface, allowing its master to gently carry it wherever it chose.
Down in the cabin, Melanie rolled around in bed. She couldn’t sleep. It was her last night on the West Coast, the end of summer vacation before junior high. It was also the last night she’d get to spend with her dad, until the next summer.
