The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The microwave starts arcing in earnest and Gus steps back.

  Mila sits on the floor until the microwave starts smoking and only then does she get up. She doesn’t even feel like crying, although her mouth and cheek hurt. She pushes cancel on the microwave and then pulls it out of the alcove and unplugs it. She leaves it half pulled out and goes over to the sink and spits bloody saliva. She rinses her mouth and then washes the sink out.

  “Go on up to bed,” she says.

  Gus looks at her. Is he angry? She steps back, out of range. Now she is scared. He’s not a child, he’s a big man. Is he going to be upset with her because he’s still hungry?

  “I’ll heat you up some soup,” she says. “Okay?”

  Gus looks away, his mouth a little open.

  She grabs an oven mitt, opens the smoking microwave carefully and takes out the macaroni and cheese. The ceramic bowl has cracked in half and the foil is blackened, but she holds it together until she can throw it out. Gus sits down. She takes the microwave outside on the grass. She doesn’t think it’s burning inside, but she isn’t sure. She can’t sit and watch it, not with Gus unsupervised. So if it starts to smolder, it starts to smolder. The grass is damp.

  Back inside she finds Gus in the living room eating ice cream out of the carton with a serving spoon. There is ice cream on him and on the couch.

  She’s afraid to go near him, so she sits on a chair and watches him eat.

  She cannot shake the feeling that the man in front of her should not be Gus, because the Gus she has been married to would not, would never, hit her. The Gus she was married to had certain characteristics that were inalienable to him—his neatness—almost fussiness. His meticulousness. His desperate need to be good, to be oh so good. But this is still Gus, too. Even as the ice cream drips on his legs and on the couch. What exactly is Gus? What defines Gusness? What is it she married? It is not just this familiar body. There is some of Gus inside, too. Something present that she can’t put her finger on, maybe only habits of Gusness.

  Later, when he goes up to bed, sticky with ice cream, she throws out the carton even though it is still half full. Outside, the microwave sits inert and smelling faintly of hot appliance. She goes upstairs and goes to bed in the other bedroom.

  She tries to think of what to do. The Transglycyn is eating out the plaque, but he won’t start to get better until they replace the neurons and the neurons grow and they don’t even go to Atlanta until next month. It will be three months after that before she begins to see any improvement.

  The old bastard. Alzheimer’s is the bastard.

  She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t even afford a leave of absence at work. Saturday, she thinks, she’ll hire a sitter and then she’ll rent a hotel room and sleep for a few hours. That will help. She’ll think better when she’s not so tired.

  * * *

  At work, Mila’s closest friend is Phyllis. Phyllis is also a quality engineer. More and more engineers in QA are women and Phyllis says that’s why QA engineers make $10,000 a year less than design and production engineers. “It’s like Human Resources,” she says. “It’s a girl-ghetto of engineering now.” “Girl-ghetto” is a little ironic, coming from Phyllis who is five foot two inches, weighs close to two hundred pounds, and who has close-cut iron gray hair.

  Phyllis comes by Mila’s cubicle at midmorning and says, “So how’s the old bastard.” Phyllis knew Gus when he was still Gus.

  “A real bastard,” Mila says and looks up away from the computer monitor, up at Phyllis, the side of her face all morning-glory purple.

  “Oh my God!” Phyllis says, “What happened?”

  “Gus decked me.”

  “Oh God,” Phyllis says. In the cafeteria, sitting with a cup of coffee in front of her, she says dryly, “You really look quite amazing,” which is a relief, because Phyllis’s initial shock, her initial speechlessness was almost more than Mila could bear. If Phyllis can’t joke about it. ...

  She does not say, “You’ve got to put him in a home.” The other thing Phyllis does say is, “Gus would be appalled.”

  “He would,” Mila says, utterly grateful. “He would, wouldn’t he.”

  They go to the Cleveland Clinic and Gus is anesthetized and some of his bone marrow is extracted. The frozen bone marrow is shipped to Atlanta so they can extract undifferentiated stem cells to inject in him to replace his own missing neurons.

  After the anesthetic he is agitated for two days. His balance is off and his hip hurts where they extracted the bone marrow and he calls her a bitch.

  Two weeks later they go to Atlanta and the procedure to inject the undifferentiated cells and virus trigger are almost identical to the first procedure. Gus swings at her twice more; once at the clinic in Atlanta and once back in the townhouse, but she’s watching because she’s afraid of him now, and she gets out of the way both times. She warns Iris, the new home health. (Cathy left because her boyfriend has a cousin in Tampa who can get him some sort of job.) Iris is in her thirties, heavy and not friendly. Not unfriendly. Iris says Gus never gets that way around her. Is she lying? Mila wonders. And then, why would she?

  Is Iris saying that Gus likes Iris better than Mila? Mila always has the feeling that Iris thinks Mila should be home more. That Mila should be taking care of Gus herself.

  Gus likes car rides, sometimes. They climb into her car.

  “Where are we going?” he asks.

  “To therapy,” she says. He’ll start to get agitated now, she thinks.

  But he puts the window down and the trees go past, and he leans his head back and croons.

  “Are you happy, Saxophone Man?” Mila says.

  Everything is in stasis now—he grows no better but no worse until something happens with the cells they put in his brain. Three months until they see any difference, at the earliest. But now, one month after they injected new cells into his gap-ridden brain, they will do some tests to benchmark.

  It all makes perfect sense. Too bad we never benchmark when we’re healthy, she thinks. Maybe she should have herself benchmarked. Mila Schuster, cognitive function raw scores at age fifty-one. Then if dementia got her in its jaws, they could chart the whole cycle. Hell, benchmark the whole population, like they benchmark women with mammograms between the ages of forty-five and fifty.

  Unless it has already started. She forgets things at work. She knows it is just because she is so worried about Alzheimer’s. Senior moments, Allen, one of the home health used to call those times when you stand in the kitchen and can’t remember what you came for.

  If she got Alzheimer’s, who would take care of her? She and Gus would end up in an institution, both in diapers and unaware of each other.

  Gus croons.

  “Saxophone Man,” she says. There is something dear to her about the ruined Gus, even through all the fear and the anger and the dismay. This great ruin of a fine brain. This engineer who could so often put his finger on a problem and say, “There. That’s it. The higher the strength of the plastic in the handle, the more brittle it is. You want to back off on the strength a bit and let the thing flex or it’s going to shatter. Particularly if it sits in sunlight and the UV starts breaking down the plastic.”

  What a marvelous brain you had, she thinks. You’d say it and I’d see it, everybody would see it, obvious then. But everything is obvious once you see it.

  The therapy is done at a place called Baobab Tree Rehab in a strip shopping mall. The anchor store in the mall is a Sears Hardware, which is Sears with just tools. Inside, Baobab Tree Rehab is like insurance companies and mortgage companies—there are ficus trees in pots in front of the windows, and rat’s maze cubicles like there are in older office buildings. Once, years before, Gus was walking with Mila at work when suddenly he crouched a bit so he was her height—she is five three—and said, it really is a maze for you. That was the first time she realized he could see over the tops of the cubicles, and so they didn’t really work like walls for him.

 
Gus is looking over the cubicles now, too.

  Their therapist is young. She comes out to meet them. “Mr. Schuster, Mrs. Schuster, I’m Eileen.”

  Mila likes that she talks to Gus. Gus may or may not care, but Mila figures it means that they think about things.

  Eileen takes them back past the cubicles to a real room with a table in it. There are shelves on the wall.

  “Mrs. Schuster,” she says, “I’d like you to sit in with us this first time.” Mila has not even thought about not sitting in, but now, suddenly she longs to be allowed to leave. She could go for a walk. Go take a nap. But Gus will probably get upset if she leaves him with a stranger.

  And nearly everyone is a stranger.

  Gus sits down at the table, bemused.

  Eileen takes a puzzle with big wooden pieces off of a shelf and says, “Mr. Schuster? Do you like to do puzzles?”

  Gus says, “No.”

  Did Gus like to do puzzles? Isn’t engineering a kind of puzzle? Mila can’t remember Gus ever doing regular puzzles—but they were so busy. Their life wasn’t exactly conducive to sitting down and doing puzzles. Gus built telescopes for a while. And then he built model rockets. He made such beautiful rockets. He would sit in front of the television and sand the rocket fins to get the perfect airfoil shape, sawdust falling into a towel on his lap, and then he would glue them to the rocket body using a slow setting epoxy, and finally, when they were about set, he’d dip his finger in rubbing alcohol and run it down the seam to make the fillet smooth and perfect. He made beautiful rockets and then shot them off, risking everything.

  “Let’s try a puzzle,” Eileen says.

  “Mila?” It is Gus on the phone.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Mila tells Roger. Roger is the manufacturing engineer on the project she’s working on.

  “Look,” Roger says, “I just need a signature and I’ll get out of your hair—”

  “It’s Gus,” Mila says.

  “Mila, honey,” Roger says, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got four thousand parts in IQA.” He wants her to sign off on allowing the parts to be used, even though they’re not quite to spec, and she’s pretty sure he’s right that they can use them. But her job is to be sure.

  “Mila,” Gus says in her ear, “I think I’ve got bees in my head.”

  Roger knew Gus. And Roger is a short-sighted bastard who doesn’t care about anything but four thousand pieces of ABS plastic pieces. Actually Roger is just doing his job. Roger is thorough.

  “I promise it’s okay,” Roger says. “I assembled twenty of them, they worked fine.”

  Mila signs.

  “Mila?” Gus says. “Can you hear me? I think I’ve got bees in my head.”

  “What do you mean, honey,” she says.

  “It itches in my head.”

  Gus isn’t supposed to feel anything from the procedures. There aren’t nerve endings in the brain, he can’t be feeling anything. It’s been four months since the second procedure.

  “It itches in your head,” Mila says.

  “That’s right,” Gus says. “Can you come pick me up? I’m ready to go home now.”

  Gus is at home, of course, with Iris, the home health. But if Mila says that he’s at home, Gus will get upset. “I’ll be there in a while to pick you up. Let me talk to Iris.”

  “My head itches,” Gus says. “Inside.”

  “Okay, honey,” Mila says. “Let me talk to Iris.”

  Gus doesn’t want to give the phone to Iris. He wants ... something. He wants Mila to take care of this head itching thing, or whatever it is that’s going on. Mila doesn’t know what Gus knows about the procedure. Maybe he’s sort of pieced this together to get her to come and take him home. Maybe something strange is going on. It is an experimental procedure. Maybe this is just more weird Alzheimer’s behavior. Maybe he has a headache and this is what he can say.

  “It’s bees,” he says.

  Finally he lets her talk to Iris.

  “Does he have a temperature? Does anything seem wrong?” she asks Iris.

  “No,” says Iris. “He’s real good today, Mrs. Schuster. I think that brain cells are growing back because he’s really good these last couple of days.”

  “Do I need to come home?” Mila asks.

  “No, ma’am. He just insisted on calling you. I don’t know where the bees thing comes from, he didn’t say that to me.”

  Maybe the tissue in his head is being rejected. It shouldn’t be. The cells are naïve stem cells. They’re from his own body. Maybe there was a mistake.

  When she gets home he doesn’t mention it.

  Sitting across from him at the dinner table, she can’t decide if he’s better or not. Is he handling a fork better?

  “Gus?” she says. “Do you want to look at some photographs after dinner?”

  “Okay,” he says.

  She sits him down on the couch and pulls out a photo album. She just grabs one, but it turns out to be from when Dan was in first grade. “There’s Dan,” she says. “There’s our son.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gus says. His eyes wander across the page. He flips to the next page, not really looking.

  So much is gone. If he does get smarter, she’ll have to teach him his past again.

  There is a picture of Dan sitting on a big pumpkin. There is someone, a stranger, off to one side, and there are rows of pumpkins, clearly for sale. Dan is sitting with his face upturned, smiling the over-big smile he used to make every time his picture was being taken. He looks as if he is about six.

  Mila can’t remember where they took the picture.

  What was Dan that year for Halloween? She used to make his costumes. Was that the year he was the knight? And she made him a shield and it was too heavy to carry, so Gus ended up carrying it? No, because she made the shield in the garage in the house on Talladega Trail, and they didn’t move there until Dan was eight. Dan had been disappointed in the shield, although she couldn’t remember why. Something about the emblem. She couldn’t even remember the emblem, just that the shield was red and white. She had spent hours making it. It had been a disaster, although he had used it for a couple of years afterward, playing sword fight in the front yard.

  How much memory did anybody have? And how much of it was even worth keeping?

  “Who is that?” Gus asks, pointing.

  “That’s my mother,” Mila says. “Do you remember my mother?”

  “Sure,” Gus says, which doesn’t mean anything. Then he says, “Cards.”

  “Yeah,” Mila says. “My mother played bridge.”

  “And poker,” Gus says. “With Dan.”

  The magpie mind, she thinks. He can’t remember where he lives but he can remember that my mother taught Dan to play poker.

  “Who is that?” he asks.

  “That’s our neighbor on South Bend,” Mila says. Thankfully, his name is written next to the photo. “Mike. That’s Mike. He was a volunteer fireman, remember?”

  Gus isn’t even looking at the photos. He’s looking at the room. “I think I’m ready to go home now,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says. “We’ll go home in a few minutes.”

  That satisfies him until he forgets and asks again.

  * * *

  Dan comes in the door with his suitcase.

  “It’s nice, Mom,” he says. “It’s really nice. The way you talked I thought you were living in a project.”

  Mila laughs, so delighted to see him, so grateful. “I didn’t say it was that bad.”

  “It’s plain,” he says, his voice high to mimic her, “it’s just a box, but it’s all right.”

  “Who’s there?” Gus calls.

  “It’s me, Dad. It’s Dan.” His face tightens with ... worry? Nervousness, she decides.

  “Dan?” his dad says.

  “Hi Dad,” he says. “It’s me, Dan. Your son.” He is searching his father’s face for recognition.

  It is one of Gus’s good days, and Mila has only a moment of fear before
Gus says, “Dan. Visiting. Hello.” And then in that astonishingly normal way he sometimes does, “How was your flight?”

  Dan grins. “Great, Dad, it was great.”

  Is it the treatment that makes Gus remember? Or is it just one of those odd moments?

  Dan is home for Christmas. It’s his Christmas gift for her, he says, to give her a break. It’s no break because she’s been cleaning and trying to buy presents off the net. Thank God for the net. She’s bought Dan cookbooks and cds, a beautiful set of German knives that he’s always wanted but would never get because he never cooks at home. She’s spent way too much money, but what would she buy Gus? She’s bought Gus chocolates for a palate gone childlike. A couple of warm bright shirts. A puzzle.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” she says, and she can feel her face stretched too wide.

  “I’m here,” he says. “Of course I’m here. Where else would I be? Lisa says hello.”

  Lisa is the new girlfriend. “You could have brought her,” Mila says.

  Gus stands there, vacant and uninterested.

  Dan says, “Dad, I’ve met a really nice girl.” She’s told Gus about Lisa, but mostly it’s to hear her own chatter and because Gus seems soothed by chatter. Whether the magpie left of his mind has noticed the name, she doesn’t know.

  “I didn’t bring her,” Dan says. “I thought I would be enough disruption.”

  Gus doesn’t even appear to try to follow the conversation.

  “I’ll show you your room,” Mila says. She’s putting Dan in the guest room, which means she’ll have to sleep with Gus. This week he has been going to sleep at ten or even earlier. And sleeping until early morning, say, five or six. That, she thinks, has to be the treatment.

  On Christmas Eve, Dan makes a fabulous feast. On Christmas Eve they used to eat roast beef, and then on Christmas day they’d eat roast beef sandwiches all day, but in the last few years she’s made just a normal meal for the two of them. Dan makes a Christmas roast and Yorkshire pudding. There are puréed chestnuts and roasted potatoes and a salad with pomegranate and champagne dressing. “For dessert,” he says, “crème brûlée. I borrowed a torch from Corot’s.” He brandishes a little handheld torch like the ones in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever!” he cackles, which has been his joke for years, an ironic reference to all those Christmas television specials.