The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“You’re trying to hurt me,” Gus says. “In fact, you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

“No, honey,” she says. “You’re sick. You have Alzheimer’s. I’m trying to help you.”

“You’ve been poisoning me,” Gus says. Is it because he’s scared? Because everything is so strange?

“Do you want to get dressed?” Dr. Feingold says. “We can try this in an hour.”

“I don’t want to try anything,” Gus says. He stands up. He’s wearing white athletic socks and he has the skinny calves of an old man. The disease has made him much older than fifty-seven. In a way she is killing him. Gus will never come back and now she’s going to replace him with a stranger.

“Take some time,” Dr. Feingold says. Mila has never been to a doctor’s office where the doctor wasn’t scheduled to death. But then again, she’s never paid $74,000 for a doctor’s visit, which is what today’s injection of brain scrubbing Transglycyn will cost. Not really just the visit and the Transglycyn. They’ll stay here two more days and Gus will be monitored.

“Goddamn,” Gus says, sitting back down. “Goddamn you all.”

“All right, Mr. Schuster,” Dr. Feingold says.

The technician pushes the cart over and Dr. Feingold says, “I’m going to give you an injection, Mr. Schuster.”

“Goddamn,” Gus says again. Gus never much said “Goddamn” before.

The Transglycyn with the enzyme is supposed to be injected in the spine but Dr. Feingold takes a hypodermic and gives Gus a shot in the crook of his arm.

“You just lie there a moment,” Dr. Feingold says.

Gus doesn’t say anything.

“Isn’t it supposed to be in his back?” Mila says.

“It is,” Dr. Feingold says, “but right now I want to reduce his agitation. So I’ve given him something to calm him.”

“You didn’t say anything about that,” she says.

“I don’t want him to change his mind while we’re giving him the enzyme. This will relax him and make him compliant.”

“Compliant,” she says. She’s supposed to complain, they’re drugging him and they didn’t tell her they would. But she’s pretty used to him not being compliant. Compliant sounds good. It sounds excellent. “Is it a tranquilizer?” she asks.

“It’s a new drug,” Dr. Feingold says. He is writing it down on Gus’s chart. “Most tranquilizers can further agitate patients with Alzheimer’s.”

“I have Alzheimer’s,” Gus says. “It makes me agitated. But sometimes I know it.”

“Yes, Mr. Schuster,” Dr. Feingold says. “You do. This is Vicki. Vicki is someone who helps me with this all the time, and we’re very good at doing it, but when we roll you on your side, I need you to lie very still, all right?”

Gus, who hated when doctors patronized him, says dopily, “All right.” Gus, who during a colonoscopy, higher than a kite on Demerol, asked his doctor if they had gotten to the ileum, because even with his brain cradled in opiates, Gus just liked to know.

Vicki and Dr. Feingold roll Gus onto his side.

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Schuster?” Vicki asks. She has a down-home Atlanta accent.

Dr. Feingold goes out the door. He comes back in with two more people, both men, and they put a cushion behind Gus’s knees so it’s hard for him to roll over, and then another cushion at the back of his neck.

“Are you all right, Mr. Schuster?” Dr. Feingold asks. “Are you comfortable?”

“Okay,” Gus says, fuzzy.

Vicki pulls his undershirt up and exposes his knobby backbone. Dr. Feingold marks a place with a black pen. He feels Gus’s back like a blind woman, his face absent with concentration, and then he takes a needle and says, “There will be a prick, Mr. Schuster. This will make the skin on your back numb, okay?” He gives Gus another shot.

Gus says “Ow” solemnly.

And then Dr. Feingold and Vicki make some marks with the pen. Then there is another needle, and Dr. Feingold makes a careful injection in Gus’s back. He leaves the needle in a moment, pulls the part of the hypodermic out that had medication in it, and Vicki takes it and gives him another one and he puts that in the hypodermic and injects it.

Mila isn’t sure if that’s more painkiller or the Transglycyn.

“Okay, Mr. Schuster,” Dr. Feingold says. “We’re done with the medicine. But you lie still for a few minutes.”

“Is it like a spinal tap?” Mila asks. “Will he get a headache?”

Dr. Feingold shakes his head. “No, Mrs. Schuster, that’s it. When he feels like sitting up, he can.”

So now it is inside him. Soon it will start eating the plaque in his brain.

The places it will eat clean were not Gus anymore, anyway. It’s not as if Gus is losing anything more. It bothers her, though, the Transglycyn goo moving along the silver-gray pathways of his neurons, dissolving the Swiss cheese damage of the disease. And then, what, there are gaps in his head? Fluid-filled gaps in his brain, the tissue porous as a sponge and poor Gus, shambling along, angry and desperate.

She wants to stroke his poor head. But he is quiet now, sedated, and maybe it’s best to let him be.

***