The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

His hands are small for a man, which sounds dainty but isn’t. His hands are perfect, the nails neat and smooth, but he hadn’t been fussy. He’d been deft with a pencil, had been good at engineering drawings before they did them on computer, and his diagram of benefits and liabilities on a piece of computer paper had been neat. “Don’t cry,” he’d said.

Gus couldn’t handle it when she cried. For the thirty years of their marriage, when she’d had to cry-which was always at night, at least in her memory-she’d gone downstairs after he’d gone to sleep and sat on the couch and cried. She would have liked him to comfort her, but in marriage you learn what other people’s limits are. And you learn your own.

For the cost of her house, she can have them put an enzyme in Gus’s brain that will scrub out the Alzheimic plaque that has replaced so much of his neural structure. And then they will put in undifferentiated cells and a medium called Transglycyn and that medium will contain a virus that tells the DNA within the cells to create neurons and grow him a new brain.

She calls Dan in Boulder.

“I thought you and Dad didn’t want to do this,” Dan says.

“I thought so, too,” she says. “But I didn’t know what it would be like.”

Dan is silent. Digital silence. You can hear a pin drop silence. “Do you want me to come home?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “No, you stay out there. You just started your job.” Dan is a chef. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America, and spent a couple of years as a line chef in the Four Seasons in New York. Now Etienne Corot is opening a new restaurant in Boulder called, of course, “Corot,” and Dan has gotten a job as sous-chef. It’s a promotion. The next step in making a name for himself, so that someday he can open his own restaurant.

“You need to keep your eye on Schuster’s,” she says. It’s an old joke between them, that he’s going to open a four-star restaurant called Schuster’s. They both agree that Schuster’s sounds like a Big Boy franchise.

“ ‘Artesia,’ ” he says.

“Is that it?” she asks.

“That’s the latest name,” he says. They have been trading names for the restaurant he will someday open since he started at the Culinary Institute. “You like it?”

“As long as I don’t think about the cattle town in New Mexico.”

“No shit,” he says, and she can imagine him at the other end of the phone, ducking his head the way his dad does. Dan is an inch taller than Gus, with the same long legs and arms. Unfortunately, he got her father’s hairline and already, at twenty-five, his bare temples make her tender and protective.

“I can fly out,” he says.

“It’s not like surgery,” she says, suddenly irritated. She wants him to fly out, but there isn’t any point in it. “And I’d get tired of us sitting there holding hands for the next three months while they eradicate the plaque, because as far as you and I will be able to tell, nothing will be happening.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Dan,” she says. “I feel as if I’m spending your money.”

“I don’t care about the money. I don’t like to talk about it that way, anyway,” he says. “I just feel weird because Dad said not to do it.”

“I know,” she says. “But I don’t feel as if this person is your dad anymore.”

“It won’t be Dad when it’s done, will it?” Dan says.

“No,” Mila says. “No, but at least maybe it will be a person who can take care of himself.”

“Look, Mom,” he says, his voice serious and grown-up. “You’re there. You’re dealing with it every day. You do what you have to do. Don’t worry about me.”

She feels tears well up in her eyes. “Okay, honey,” she says. “Well, you’ve got stuff you need to do.”

“Call me if you want me to come out,” he says.

She wants him off the phone before she cries. “I will,” she says.

“Love you, Mom,” he says.

She knows he can tell she was crying.

“I’m not sick,” Gus says.

“It’s a check-up,” Mila says.

Gus sits on the examining room table in his shorts and T-shirt. It used to be that she said the litany of what she loved when she saw him like this-his nose, his blue eyes made to look the distance, the hollow of his collarbone, his long legs. Show me your butt, she’d say, and he’d turn and shake it at her and they’d cackle like children.

“We’ve waited long enough,” Gus says.

“It’s not that long,” Mila says, and at that moment the doctor knocks and opens the door. With him is a technician, a black woman, with a cart.

“Who are you?” Gus says.

“I’m Dr. Feingold.” He is patient, is Dr. Feingold. He met with them for an hour yesterday and he talked with them for a few minutes this morning before Gus had his blood work. But Gus doesn’t remember. Gus was worse than usual. They are in Atlanta for the procedure. Lexington, Kentucky, and Windsor, Ontario, both have clinics that do the procedures, but Dr. Feingold had worked with Raymond Miller, the Ph.D. who originated the treatment. So she picked Atlanta.

Gus is agitated. “You’re not my doctor,” he says.

Dr. Feingold says, “I’m a specialist, Mr. Schuster. I’m going to help you with your memory problems.”

Gus looks at Mila.

“It’s true,” she says.