Gabriel glanced back at the bed. “I’ll make a deal with you, Harry. You can change the bed. Just don’t say a word about this to anyone, okay? I don’t want nurses inspecting me every hour or putting me in diapers. This here was… an isolated occurrence.” Gabriel felt a blush rising into his cheeks. It wasn’t like him to be so openly vulnerable, but he liked this Harry Brenton fellow.
Harry’s eyes kept darting around as he looked at Gabriel’s notes, the blackboard, and the photos. It was almost as if he was looking for something in particular. “No, I won’t say a word.” Harry shook his head. “Definitely not, no.”
Gabriel moved aside, and Harry yanked off all of the old sheets, stuffed them in a bag, and stretched on new ones. He had an almost manic work ethic. Once the bed was remade, Harry beamed with confidence.
“So, Harry, are you a military man, perchance?”
“Oh, you can tell?”
“The haircut. Your work ethic. You say sir quite a bit.”
“Um, yeah. Not anymore, though, if that’s what you mean. Now that I’m back from overseas, I’m just focusing on college.”
“What subject are you studying?”
Harry blushed and crossed his arms. “Microbiology.” He grinned, arms clenched tighter around his chest. “Mr. Schist, I… God, I’m thrilled to meet you, sir. You’ve been my hero ever since—you’ve been my role model since I was a kid. I was totally excited when I found out you were a resident here.”
Gabriel smiled. For a moment, the first in a long time, he felt like the old Gabriel Schist again. “Thank you, Harry. You’re a good kid. Really, it means a great deal to me. I didn’t realize that anyone even still looked at my work.”
“Are you kidding me? Sir, you’re an inspiration to all of us. All of us in my class, anyway. I mean, c’mon, the Schist vaccine? It’s practically Tylenol these days. Probably every resident in this facility has had the Schist vac.”
Gabriel smiled. “Not every resident.”
Harry looked confused. “You haven’t? Really?”
“It’s a long story.” Gabriel shrugged. “But anyhow, you’re a microbiology student? What brings you here?”
“I guess, um… I like helping people. I feel like the older generation, all you folks, you really deserve good help. And jeez, even though the military covers all my class expenses, I still need to pay the bills on my apartment.” Harry swallowed. “Sorry if I’m being awkward. It’s just… I can’t believe I have this opportunity to talk to you. I want to find out everything I can, y’know? Like I can’t imagine what it must be like being as brilliant as you are, if you don’t mind me saying, and then to suddenly get the diagnosis of Alzhei—oh. Oh, jeez. I’m sorry. I mean to say, uh…”
Gabriel chuckled, hoping to allay the boy’s embarrassment. In his high school years, the poor kid had probably had a million awkward encounters with girls. “It’s okay,” Gabriel said. “I can explain it this way. Can you get me a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and some tape? Top drawer of the bureau.”
Harry complied, finding all three items rather easily. Gabriel cut a long, thin rectangle out of the paper. Pathetic as it seemed, he was actually surprised by the dexterity of his own hands. Next, Gabriel held the two ends of the paper, gave the strip a half-twist, and taped the short ends together.
“I’m sure you recognize a Möbius strip,” Gabriel said. “A loop. It has only one side. I know that an educated young man like you has seen it before, but humor me for a moment.” He put the tip of the pen to the paper and slowly drew a line down the middle of the strip. “Imagine that my pen is a child aging into adulthood.”
Harry watched intently. Gabriel continued the line down, all the way until it reached the end, which was also the starting point. His line had gone all the way around on both sides of the loop, even though he never lifted his pen or crossed the edge.
“Harry, life is a Möbius strip. I began as a drooling mess in diapers, unable to talk, unable to feed myself, unable to think. As the story continues, I progress. I advance further. My life twists around, and then, at the end, I return to the beginning. After everything I’ve been through, after that long, long walk, I slowly devolve back into a drooling mess in diapers. An infant, once again.”
“That’s… oh, gosh.”
“The only thing I haven’t yet figured out,” Gabriel said, “is what the twist in my life was, exactly. Was it the Schist vaccine? The terrific irony of me getting Alzheimer’s? I don’t think so. Personally, I like to believe that I still haven’t hit the twist yet.”
Harry nodded, looking a bit meek and traumatized. He turned to study Gabriel’s notes on the wall, digging his hands into his pockets.
“Harry, can I ask you for a favor? Can I take your photo? Since you’re new, I mean. If you look up there on the wall, you can see that I take photos of everyone who works here. You know, just so that I can remember their faces. It makes it easier for me.”
That was only partly true. The photos were also Gabriel’s weak attempt at socialization, his silly way of trying to make friends, a skill he’d never quite mastered. But Harry didn’t need to know that.
“Sure. Wow, that’d be cool!” Harry replied.
Gabriel took out his Polaroid camera and snapped the photo. A flash then Harry’s beaming smile was frozen in time forever. With a flourish, Gabriel took out his pen and wrote “Harry” on the white strip at the bottom of the picture. “What was your last name again, Harry? Bartlett? Bernard? No. Barnett?”
“Brenton, sir.”
Gabriel wrote it down before he could forget it again. As soon as he finished, he heard a loud knock. He looked up at Harry, who responded by nervously gesturing toward the door.
A young redheaded woman stood in the doorway, biting her lip. It was probably another nurse or a new employee, perhaps.
Gabriel shook his head. “Yes? What is it, more goddamn pills?”
“No,” the woman whispered. “It’s me.”
Gabriel stared at the woman’s attractive features. She had an intelligent face of long, sharp edges and smooth contours, complemented by dynamic brown eyes. Her mother’s eyes. Her grim expression was enough to break him in two, but seeing her again lifted his spirits. He stood up, shivering, and took the girl into his arms, squeezing her bony little body, never wanting to let her go, never wanting to let her escape again into a harsh world he couldn’t protect her from.
He smiled. “It’s great to see you, Melanie.”
Chapter 4:
Stranded
Gabriel went to the nursing home’s front lobby and sat down on the leather couch. His daughter, Melanie Schist, sat on the identical couch across from him. No, wait…was it Melanie Schist, or was she still Melanie Tompkins? He seemed to remember that she and Bill had divorced, but he wasn’t certain.
Yes. Yes, they had. She was Melanie Schist again. He was pretty sure.
The lobby was beautiful with bay windows overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Michelangelo paintings on the walls, and an abstract wave-shaped fountain sculpture standing in the entrance hall to the three chessboards in the back. The lobby was one of his favored daily hangouts, though he preferred the smoking area. The windows tortured him with their presentation of the ocean’s face but not its smell. Though he could see the waves lapping at the beach, they didn’t seem real, and that rendered the window view as little more than a moving painting. Even the sound of the waves was blocked out by the jazz music that played from the lobby’s overhead speaker twenty-four hours a day. All in all, both areas were terrible teases of what he couldn’t have.
The couches were positioned next to a spectacular wall-sized aquarium filled with all manner of brilliantly colored swimming creatures. Gabriel stared into the blank eyes and flapping tail of a particularly active goldfish.
