“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.
The clinic is more like a hotel than a hospital, the bed has a floral bedspread and over it is a painting of cream and peach roses in a vase. After being sedated during the day, Gus is restless. He will not go to bed. If she goes to bed he’ll try to go out into the hall, but the door is locked from the inside so he can’t get out. There’s a touchpad next to the door and she’s used 0815, Dan’s birthday, as the code. She doesn’t think Gus knows Dan’s birthday anymore. A sign on the door says, IN CASE OF FIRE, ALL DOORS WILL OPEN AUTOMATICALLY. Gus runs his fingers along the crack between the door and the wall. “I want to go out,” he says, and she says that he can’t. “I want to go out,” he says, and she says, “We’re not home, we have to stay here.”
“I want to go out,” he says, again and again, long after she stops answering him. He finally sits and watches five minutes of television but then he gets up and goes back to the door. “Let’s go home,” he says this time, and when she doesn’t answer, he runs his long fingers like spiders up and down the edge of the door. He sits, he gets up and stands at the door for minutes, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, until she is blind with fatigue and her eyes burn with tears and she finally shrieks, “There’s no way out!”
For a moment he looks at her, befuddled. The he turns back to the door and says querulously, “I want to go out.”
At one point she goes to him and folds both his hands in hers and says, “We’re both trapped.” She is dizzy with fatigue but if she cries he will just get worse. He looks at her and then goes back to searching the door, moth fingers fluttering. She turns out the light and he howls, “Oww-ow-oww-ow-” until she snaps the light back on.
Finally, she shoves past him and locks him in the room. She goes down to the lounge and sits on a couch, pulling her bare feet up and tucking them under her nightgown. The lounge is deserted. She thinks about sleeping here for a few hours. She feels vacant and exposed. She leans her head back and closes her eyes and there is the distant white noise of the ventilation system and the strange audible emptiness of a big room and she can feel her brain swooping instantly into a kind of nightmare where she is sliding into sleep thinking someone is sick and she needs to do something and when she jerks awake her whole body feels a flush of exhaustion.
She can’t stay here. Is Gus howling in the room?
When she opens the door he is standing there, but she has the odd feeling he may not have noticed she was gone.
He finally lets her talk him into lying down around 3:15 in the morning but he is up again a little after six.
She asks the next day if it is the stuff they’ve injected, but of course, it’s not. It’s the strangeness. The strange room, the strange place, the Alzheimer’s, the ruin of his brain.
The social worker suggests that until they are ready to insert the cellular material and stimulate neural growth, Gus should go to a nursing facility for elderly with dementia.
Even if she could afford it, Mila thinks she would have to say no. When they resculpt his brain, he will be a different person, but she will still be married to him, and she wants to stay with him and to be part of the whole process, so that maybe her new husband, the new Gus, will still be someone she loves. Or at least someone she can be married to.
Mila is lucky they can afford this. It is an experimental treatment so insurance doesn’t cover the cost. She and Gus have money put away for retirement from his parents and hers, but she can’t touch that or capital gains taxes will go off, as her accountant says, like a time bomb. But they can sell their house.
The old house sells for $217,000. The first half of the treatment is about $74,000. The second half of the treatment is a little over $38,000. Physical therapy is expected to cost a little over $2,100 a month. Home health is $32,000 through an agency (insurance will no longer pay because this is an experimental treatment). That doesn’t include airfare and a thousand incidentals. At least the house is paid off, and the tax man does some finagling and manages to save her $30,000 for a down payment on a little townhouse.
It has two floors, a postage stamp-sized backyard, and monthly maintenance fees of $223 a month. Her mortgage is $739 a month.
It has a living room and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. The carpet is a pale gray, and her living room furniture, which is all rich medieval reds and ochre and ivory, doesn’t go well, but it doesn’t look bad, either.
“Why is our couch here?” Gus asks plaintively. “When can we go home?”
One evening when he says he wants to go home she puts him in the car and starts driving. When Dan was a baby, when he wouldn’t go to sleep, the sound of a car engine would soothe him, and this evening it seems to have the same effect on Gus. He settles happily into the passenger seat of their seven-year-old Honda sedan, and as she drives he strokes the armrest and croons. She’s not sure at first if the crooning means he’s agitated, but after a while she decides it’s a happy sound.
“You like going for a ride?” she says to him.
He doesn’t answer but he keeps on crooning, “ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.”
Another night she wakes up alone in the bed. Alzheimer’s victims don’t sleep much. Used to be that if Gus or Dan got up in the night she heard them, but she’s pretty tired these days.
She finds him downstairs in the kitchen, taking the bowl of macaroni and cheese out of the refrigerator. It’s covered in foil because she’s out of plastic wrap. “Are you hungry?” she asks.
Gus says, “I can take care of it.” His tone is ordinary and reassuring. He puts the bowl in the microwave.
“You can’t put it in the microwave, honey,” Mila says. “You have to take the foil off the top first.” She hates that she only calls him “honey” when she is exasperated with him, and when she doesn’t want to make him angry. It feels passive aggressive. Or something.
Gus closes the microwave door and pushes the time button.
“Gus,” she says, “don’t do that.” She reaches past him and opens the microwave door, and he pushes her away.
“Gus,” she says, “don’t.” She reaches for the door and he pushes her away again.
“Leave it alone,” he says.
“You can’t,” she says. “It’s got foil on it.” Gus is an engineer, for God’s sake. Or was.
She tries to stop him, puts her hand on his forearm, and he turns to face her, his face a grimace of anger, and he pulls his arm back and punches her in the face.
He is still a strong, tall man and the punch knocks her down.
She doesn’t even know how to feel it. No one has punched her since she was maybe twelve, and that was a pretty ineffective punch, even if her nose did bleed. It stops her from thinking. She is lying on the kitchen floor. Gus pushes the start button on the microwave.
Mila touches her face. Her lip is cut, she can taste the blood. Her face hurts.
There is a flicker as the microwave arcs. She doesn’t have it in her to get up and do anything about it. Gus frowns. Not at her, at the microwave.
Mila sits up and explores her face. One of her teeth feels wobbly to her tongue. Gus doesn’t pay any attention, he’s watching the microwave. He’s intent. It’s a parody of the engineer solving a problem.
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.
