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 naпve 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?”
