“Don’t you get it?” he shouted. “Of course I don’t like being an outsider. But in order to fit in, I have to be stupid. I learned that when I was sixteen, and I never forgot it. Being stupid is the only way I can ever be normal.”
“But you’re not normal,” she said.
“Clearly,” he spat. “But, God, I want to be.” He loosened his fists, but he was still breathing heavily.
She saw the glistening of tears in his eyes, the sad, lost little boy lashing out. That little boy had never been accepted by his peers and had been teased mercilessly at school. The boy had grown to be a man who was defensively protecting the one thing he thought he had going for him. Yvonne walked up to him and ran her fingers through his thick red hair. He twitched uneasily but didn’t pull away.
“I love you, baby,” she whispered. “But if this is going to work, I need to say something.”
“Why wouldn’t it work?” He shuddered. “Yvonne, don’t say that. Don’t.”
Gabriel gawked at her like the lost, uncertain child he was. His hard shell had been cracked, and he looked as if the slightest breeze would send him toppling.
“If you want us to be together”—she gulped—“you’ve gotta embrace your mind. Stop running away from the greatest gift you have. I meant what I told you back on our first date. Do you remember what I said?”
“That you loved my brain?”
“Yes, your brain. That’s why I love you. Because you’re the guy who’s gonna save the future. Because you’re brilliant. I love you for who you are, and that’s why I can’t stand who you pretend to be, because the real person is so much better.”
Gabriel smiled weakly. “That’s what Old Gareth tells me, too.”
“Maybe you should finally introduce me to this priest guy, already. He sounds pretty smart.” Yvonne sniffled. “So stop killing that brain I love with all that alcohol. Okay? You’re so much better than that. You’re so much—”
Gabriel’s mouth met hers, passionately connecting to her soul. As her fingers became tangled in his thick red hair, his lips left moist imprints across her neck and shoulders. All of their frustrations suddenly dissolved. Through his kisses, he told her everything that he would never have been able to put into words. He showed her, by giving her his emotions, his touch, and the most private gift of all, the tears that broke free from his eyes, leaving silvery streaks down his cheeks. He wouldn’t swear off alcohol, not in words, but the kiss was his promise to try, to give it his best shot, for her. She felt that promise beating in his chest, and she recognized it as surely as if he’d signed a contract.
Gabriel raised his head and gazed into her eyes. “I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you too.” She wrapped her arms tighter around him.
“Let’s go back to my sailboat. Let’s see the ocean tonight.”
“Together? Are you sure? With me?”
Gabriel squeezed her hand. “Together.”
Chapter 19:
Stage
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—”
