Death Is No Picnic

Here is the first section of the first chapter of my novel in progress Hotel Infinity, subtitled Where there’s always a vacancy… The main character has a peculiar form of attention deficit disorder which causes him, not to have many accidents, but to be the cause of other’s accidents. Upon the death of his parents, he goes to live in a nursing home because the local inhabitants of his small town in Louisiana are afraid to take him in…

 

Death is No Picnic

 

Gabriel was waiting patiently in a wheelchair by the entrance. He was good at waiting. He had the turn of mind that would swim around in a few sensual details, like the pattern of light that fell onto his arm from the small, colored panes of glass framing the front door. His attention held the variations of shade and warmth rhythmically against the subtle whir of the ceiling fan and the offbeat, persistent buzz of the receptionist’s multi-line phone. The gentle chirrups requesting answer appealed to him much more than the old rotary’s hammer and bell.

Where others might thumb a magazine without really reading it, thrumming inside to an incessant inner monologue, Gabe eagerly rode his nerves to a bee’s shadow or the taste of raspberry syrup from breakfast. For this sort of mind, solitude made for a bliss of sensation, but it made it hard to understand things. Like why he had to sit in a wheelchair and wait for his friend Jeanette the nurse to take him outside. It was his forty-seventh birthday, and they were to have a picnic to celebrate. Jeanette had to get special permission from Doctor Jensen even to take him just onto the grounds.

When she turned the corridor a little too quickly, disheveled, she saw Gabe and smiled widely. He wasn’t just routine for her. Gabe grinned in return, but the corners of his mouth suddenly drooped. As he started to form the “why,” Jeannette interrupted. Playfully pretending to be exasperated, she put a finger to his lips and anticipated his question.

“You’ve asked me a million times, Gabe,” she said, “and if you stopped to think, you’d remember. People are afraid you’ll get lost or hurt yourself.” She took the brake off the wheelchair, picked up the rectangular wicker basket sitting beside it, and placed it in Gabe’s lap before turning toward the door. “Oh, yes,” he remembered now. “Like that time on my bicycle. At the bridge.” She had opened the door and was wheeling him through, so he had to turn his head back to see her lips pursed at the thought of discussing that again. “I’m sorry,” he said meekly. “It’s all right,” she said abruptly. “Why don’t you try to guess what’s in the basket?”

That time on the bicycle at the bridge referred to the day Gabe’s parents had died. They were out looking for him even though he was twelve. He tended to wander too far and get lost. Although for him too far and lost could mean only around the corner and down the road a piece, as they say in the country. This time, however, Gabe had gone quite far away from their home and was standing with his bike behind a tree. The details get a bit sketchy at this point, for we only have the Gabe’s memory to rely on, and as we have seen above, Gabe’s memory files away often irrelevant details. Suffice to say, Gabe’s parents were driving across a bridge looking for him, Gabe was looking at something up in the tree when he stepped out backwards to get a better look at it, and his parents swerved to miss him, plunging through the guardrail into the waters below.

Only an elderly couple lived up the hill beyond the rickety, one-lane bridge, so it was a couple of days later when they made their monthly trip into town to cash their social security checks and stock up on household goods. They called the sheriff, who found the bodies of Dr. and Mrs. Bennet drowned in their 1955 Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria with their seatbelts still on. Gabe was lying on his side, hugging his knees up to his chest, staring at nothing.

“Jeanette?” Gabe asked tentatively. She was lying back on a burgundy, faux-velvet pillow taken from reception that would have better suited a downscale, nineteenth-century bordello on the bad side of New Orleans. Gabe was carefully arranging the contents of the picnic basket on a blue-checked cloth for maximum visual aesthetics, unsure if the plums would look better to the pitcher of lemonade or by the plate of fried chicken.

“Could I talk about my parents if I promise not to get sad?”

Jeanette sat up and gave him her most maternal, receptive look. “Of course you can,” but she knew he would be sad, at least until he heard a bee nearby or saw a hummingbird.

“My father was a professor, right?”

“Yes,” she replied. “He had a PhD in philosophy and taught Intro to World Religions at the community college in Alexandria.”

“And my mother was a librarian?” Gabe stopped fiddling with the plums and picked up a chicken leg to determine if he really wanted it or whether it ruined the arrangement.

“Yes, and that’s why you like to read so much. Your parents were very proud of how much you loved to learn things. I’m going to eat some chicken even if it spoils the tableaux.” She gave him a mock stern look, pronouncing tableaux in a nasal accent as if it had a set of quotes around it and she were wearing a pince-nez.

Gabe laughed. A slight breeze stirred the napkins held down by a plate of brie, so he stared at it for a moment before he remembered the next question he meant to ask. It had been asked and answered many times, even in the same order, as Anglican worshippers might recite aloud from the common book of prayer to remind themselves of what they believed. “Did you know them? Is that how you know they were proud of me?”

“No,” she said solemnly. “I never met them, or you, until you came here. I just know what Dr. Jensen told me when you came to stay.” She finished the leg, put the bone into a plastic bag and picked up a plum.

“How did I come to stay here then?” He absentmindedly picked up a plum and bit into it, letting the juice spill out the corner of his mouth. It was slightly bitter, a bit too firm, and he grimaced slightly, albeit unconsciously.

“After the police found you, you stayed with Sheriff Verlaine. Government programs overseeing foster parents were relatively new back in ’72 so there weren’t many to be found in Rapides parish back then. Those that were available were afraid to take you in because so many accidents seemed to happen around you.” She wanted to leave out that part, but she knew Gabe would complain if she left it out. It was like a fairy tale to him, and she dare not leave out any details he had come to expect.

“So Dr. Jensen suggested I come stay here at Serenity Village?”

“Yes,” she replied, mentally wincing at that name. She always hated it, because it was neither serene nor a village. The inmates, er, residents that were ambulatory tended to wander off, or had quirks like hiding others’ precious mementos which caused a great deal of howling and gnashing of false teeth. At least it had retained the spirit of the original plantation house it had been during the antebellum south complete with conservatory and library, so the residents felt more at home there than in the newer drab, hospital-like institutions. It still smelled like pee and ammonia, though.

“Yes,” she continued. “The good doctor and the sheriff were playing poker at the VA, when the topic of what to do with you came…” Gabe stopped playing with the plate of brie, moving it to various positions around a tray of smoked salmon, when a thought outside of the script suddenly occurred to him. “Where is Doc Jensen, Jeanette? I haven’t seen him in a while, I think.”

Oh, Gott in Himmel, Jeanette thought. Whenever she got frustrated, she lapsed into the German her immigrant mother spoke. She had hoped to avoid this. “Gabe,” she said, gently grasping the hand that had been fiddling with the cheese. “He died last week, honey.” She had been told in her most recent re-certification inservice by a rather eager traveling nurse practitioner in very sensible shoes that it was inappropriate to call her patients “sweetheart” or “honey,” as was tradition south of Mason-Dixon. Any of her clients from the North or even a stranger culture than that might find it too familiar and thus offensive. Jeanette ignored her immediately.

“Look, Gabe, I know you loved him like a father…”

“He was, Jeanette,” Gabe replied, removing his hand from hers, “for all practical purposes.”

That remark startled Jeanette, as it usually did when he sounded suddenly like a grown-up. Although, she reminded herself, he does read an awful lot. “You went to his funeral, remember?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, picking up a fork and stabbing a small piece of salmon and brie, suddenly shoving them into his mouth. After swallowing, he continued. “They had that really fancy mahogany coffin with the silver handles on it and his daughter played ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ on the banjo. I bet that’s the most played song at funerals in New Orleans,” he added. He had, after all, read a lot of books and seen even more movies during his life long incarceration at Serenity Village.

“I’m tired,” he finished, leaving Jeanette to her private relief that the conversation was over and stretched out on the table cloth. The last thing he noticed (before the tiny piece of atherosclerotic plaque jumped off the wall of his aorta, passed safely through his lungs and managed to get clogged in his brain causing a cerebral hemorrhage) was just how divine the criss-cross lacing of light and shadow felt from the Ann Magnolia tree on his sweaty skin. He’d always loved staring at that tree from the French windows in the drawing room because it had such pretty reddish purple blooms. Then he died.