“I have some big news for ya, big guy,” Yvonne whispered, giggling. “I’d like to share it if you’re done talking about demons, walls, and bottles.”

“But the Klein bottle, it…”

“It can wait.” Yvonne stepped to his side. “I have to tell you something, maybe the most important thing I’ve ever told you.”

Oh no. Not now! Tomorrow, maybe. The day after, perhaps. Any time but right now. Not right now, please, not right now. Please, Yvonne…

Yvonne walked in front of him, an enormous, spirited grin on her face. Gabriel quickly lowered his hand, holding the beer can underneath the chair just before she jumped on his lap. She leaned forward, inches away from his lips.

“Gabriel, I—” She sniffed. Her face crinkled up as if she’d bitten into a lemon. Her eyes widened with horror. “Oh my God.” Yvonne stood up and backed away. He felt lower than a cockroach. “Gabriel, I… I’m pregnant.”

Pregnant. And he’d ruined the moment. Mixed emotions of happiness, angst, and despair swam through his mind. He searched desperately for a suitable response, thinking that there had to be some strange combination of words he could put together that would put the shattered pieces of his life back together.

Gabriel cleared his throat. No magic verbal solution revealed itself. Only a single word spilled from his lips. “Oh.”

Chapter 31:

Misplaced

Summer 2018

“Yvonne!” Gabriel woke up with a start, drenched in sweat and aching. He leapt out of bed and almost slipped to the floor as his legs buckled beneath him.“Yvonne! No, Yvonne, don’t do it. I didn’t mean what I said. I didn’t mean it.”

He saw daylight. It took him a moment to figure out where he was, and once the realization took hold, his horror became even greater: he was in prison, a cold, ugly white cell. He tried to figure out how or when he had been sent there. He didn’t remember committing any crimes or getting arrested. But he somehow knew that Yvonne was also in the prison, locked in another cell.

“Yvonne! Where are you?” Spinning around, Gabriel was amazed to see that the guards had accidently left his cell door open.

Outside in the hall, inmates screamed and rattled their bars while prison guards yelled orders. Gabriel rushed to the door, stumbling like a cripple, though he didn’t remember getting injured. He stepped into a long hallway lined with metal doors. All of the doors were open, just as his was. The concrete floor was dotted with gaping black holes, and spider webs hung from the ceiling.

“Yvonne? Can you hear me?”

Two prison guards in bright-blue jumpsuits rounded the corner and ran toward him. They looked concerned rather than angry, but Gabriel wasn’t going to stick around to verify that. He turned and hustled in the opposite direction of the guards. He peeked inside each door he passed and saw more prisoners sitting in their cells.

At the end of the hall, in the last cell on the right, he found her. His wife, his beautiful young wife, lay peacefully in bed. Wait. She was in their bed, in their bedroom, the same bedroom they’d once shared in their little white house on the shore. Despite the oddness of it, seeing her there made him feel calm and happy. He’d found her at least. After so many years, he’d finally found her. He stepped into the room.

“No, Gabriel!” one guard shouted.

“Stop!” the other one called.

Gabriel ignored them. Even if they locked him up for a thousand years, one more moment with Yvonne was enough to last him a lifetime. He’d made a mistake when he let her go. It wasn’t fair that one mistake could cost him so dearly. He had to redeem himself in her eyes.

He knelt beside the bed. Her face was buried in the pillow, but he would have recognized the back of her head anywhere. It was her. It was really her. It had to be her. Tears of happiness poured down his cheeks.

“Thank God.” He smiled. “I’ve missed you so much. I’m sorry. God, I’m so, so sorry. I… didn’t mean it. I’m excited about your news, about the baby. Really, I am. I love you, Yvonne. I love you so much.”

She stirred beneath the covers, and he embraced her, breathing in the rosy scent of her perfume. He’d found her, and they could finally be happy again. He pulled back to look at her face for the first time in decades.

The old lady screamed at the top of her lungs.

Gabriel did a double-take. The woman in his arms wasn’t Yvonne. Instead, he held a wrinkled, white-haired woman with only a few teeth, grey gums, and reddened eyes. She let out another screech and tried to shove him away. An alarm went off, and a sharp ringing noise sliced through the air like a blade.

Gabriel stood. “Who are you? Why were you pretending to be Yvonne?”

As he stepped back, he noticed an albino white slug crawling up the wall beside him. He turned and faced the creature. A hazy sense of recognition nudged his mind. What is it about slugs? Why are they important?

The slug angled its head toward him. “Wake up, you old fool!”

Gabriel’s heart pounded. Did that slug just talk? He screamed.

The guards ran into the room then stared at him for a few seconds as if they were scared of him. They tried to grab him, but Gabriel ducked and stumbled back into the hallway, gripping the side rail for balance. Nothing made any sense. He was in prison, a slug had talked, some crazy woman was pretending to be Yvonne, and he was—

Oh.

Everything flooded back, and he clung to the rail, using it as a replacement for his missing cane. Cane, yes. I have a cane. He was Gabriel Schist. He was seventy… seventy-something years old. He had Alzheimer’s. He lived in Bright New Day. He was working on a cure for the—no, wait. He couldn’t call it the Black Virus anymore.

Gabriel started muttering, “Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five… damn, what’s next? Eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four…”

The guards circled him like a pack of coyotes. No, not guards. They were nurses.

The one on the left, Dana Kleznowski, said, “Gabriel?”

Gabriel’s mouth moved to continue his recitations, but he didn’t have enough saliva to voice the numbers. His foot slipped, and he almost fell. When he looked down, he realized something that made his entire situation that much more degrading. He was completely naked.

His pale, saggy body was on display for everyone to see. In that one moment, his dignity was forever stripped away. If he died tomorrow, his nudity would be all they would remember, not the Nobel Prize, not the Schist vaccine. No, his humiliation would be his legacy.

One of the nurses ran in to comfort the crying old lady—Gabriel had finally recognized the woman as Marge Beckinsale. Gabriel cupped his hands over his crotch. Dana stepped over and wrapped a johnny gown around him.

He tried to remember what had brought him there, what had made him wake up in such a state. When the memory came rushing back, it felt as painful as tearing the scab off an unhealed wound. Her. He’d been thinking about her as he fell asleep. He whispered her name—the name of the only woman he’d ever loved—and as Dana tied the gown around his neck, he let his love’s name linger in the air and become real, like a tiny cloud of floating dust being penetrated by a sharp beam of sunlight. “I’m sorry, Yvonne.”

Chapter 32:

Authentic

The world was replaced by darkness. The black hole grew deeper, its horizon expanded, then it emitted the sound of breathing.

A comforting hand landed on his shoulder, and it was soon accompanied by a scratchy, quiet voice. “Hello there, Gabriel.”

Gabriel woke up in bed, and for once, he had no cloud of disorientation or panicked thoughts. It was nighttime, he was Gabriel Schist, and he lived in Bright New Day. Everything was clear. The hand on his shoulder belonged to Victor, who sat beside his bed like a worried parent checking up on a child who’d had terrible nightmares.

“I tried to find you.” Gabriel cleared his throat. “The other day. Nurse wouldn’t let me onto your wing.”

“I know. My apologies for disappearing. I’ve been quite busy.”

“I have to say”—Gabriel reached for the pack of cigarettes on his bedside table then remembered that he couldn’t light up inside—“this is an unusual wakeup call.”

Gabriel sat up. If Victor were anyone else, he would have found the midnight wakeup call creepy. But Victor possessed a calming demeanor that made him set aside such worries. Very few people in Gabriel’s life had ever had such a quality. Father Gareth, Victor, and perhaps Michael the slug, though Gabriel wasn’t sure if Michael counted as a person.