The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“No, honey, now I work for Gillette. You worked for Gillette, too.”

“I did not,” he says, suspicious. Gus has Alzheimer’s. He is fifty-seven.

“Where’s Cathy?” Mila asks.

“Cathy?” his voice lowers. “Is that her name? I was calling because she was here. What is she doing in our house?”

“She’s there to help you,” Mila says helplessly. Cathy is the new home health. She’s been watching Gus during the day for almost three weeks now, but Gus still calls to ask who she is.

“She’s black,” Gus says. “Not that it matters. Is she from the neighborhood? Is she Dan’s friend?” Dan is their son. He’s twenty-five and living in Boulder.

“Are you hungry?” Mila asks. “Cathy can make you a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich?”

“I don’t need help,” Gus says, “Where’s my car? Is it in the shop?”

“Yes,” Mila says, seizing on the excuse.

“No it’s not,” he says. “You’re lying to me. There’s a woman here, some strange woman, and she’s taken my car.”

“No, baby,” Mila says. “You want me to come home for lunch?” It’s eleven, she could take an early lunch. Not that she really wants to go home if Gus is agitated.

Gus hangs up the phone.

Motherfucker. She grabs her purse.

Cathy is standing at the door, holding her elbows. Cathy is twenty-five and Gus is her first assignment from the home healthcare agency. Mila likes her, likes even her beautifully elaborate long, polished fingernails. “Mrs. Schuster? Mr. Schuster is gone. I was going to follow his minder but he took my locater. I’m sorry, it was in my purse and I never thought he’d take it out-”

“Oh, Jesus,” Mila says. She runs upstairs and gets her minder from her bedside table. She flicks it on and it says that Gus is within 300 meters. The indicator arrow says he’s headed away from Glenwood, where all the traffic is, and down toward the dead end or even the pond.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Schuster,” Cathy says.

“He’s not far,” Mila says. “It’s not your fault. He’s cunning.”

They go down the front steps. Cathy is so young. So unhappy right now, still nervously hugging her elbows as if her ribs hurt. Her fingernails are pink with long sprays like rays from a sunrise on each nail. She trails along behind Mila, scuffing in her cute flats. She’s an easy girl, usually unflustered. Mila had so hoped that Gus would like her.

Gus is around the corner toward the dead end. He’s in the side yard of someone’s house Mila doesn’t know-thank God that nobody is ever home in the daytime except kids. He’s squatting in a flower garden and he has his pants down, she can see his hairy thighs. She hopes he isn’t shitting on his pants. Behind him, pale pink hollyhocks rise in spikes.

“Gus!” she calls.

He waves at her to go away.

“Gus,” she says. Cathy is still trailing her. “Gus, what are you doing?”

“Can’t a man go to the bathroom in peace?” he says, and he sounds so much like himself that if she weren’t used to all the craziness she might have burst into tears.

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t care. That’s when she decides it all has to stop. Because she just doesn’t care.

“It is sometimes possible to cure Alzheimer’s, it’s just not possible to cure the person who has Alzheimer’s,” the treatment info explains. “We can fix the brain and replace the damaged neurons with new brain but we can’t replace the memories that are gone.” It’s the way Alzheimer’s has been all along, Mila thinks, a creeping insidious disease that takes away the person you knew and leaves this angry, disoriented stranger. The video goes on to explain how the treatment-which is nearly completely effective in only about thirty percent of cases, but which arrests the progress of the disease in ninety percent of the cases and provides some functional improvement in almost all cases-cannot fix the parts of the brain that have been destroyed.

Mila is a quality engineer. This is a place she is accustomed to, a place of percentages and estimations, of statements of certainty about large groups, and only guesses about particular individuals. She can translate it, “We can promise you everything, we just can’t promise it will happen to Gus.”

Gus is gone anyway, except in odd moments of habit.

When Gus was diagnosed they had talked about whether or not they should try this treatment. They had sat at the kitchen table, a couple of engineers, and looked at this carefully. Gus had said no. “In five years,” he’d said, “there’s a good chance the Alzheimer’s will come back. So then we’ll have spent all this money on a treatment that didn’t do any good and where will you be then?”

In some people it reverses in five years. But they’ve only been doing it for seven years, so who knows?

Gus had diagrammed the benefits. At very best he would be cured. Most likely they would only have spent a lot of money to slow the disease down. “And even if I’m cured, the disease could come roaring back,” he’d said. “I don’t think I want to have this disease for a long time. I know I don’t want to have it twice.”