“Do you want to go out to eat?” she asks one evening. They haven’t gone out to eat in, oh, years. She is out of the habit.
She decides on Applebee’s, where the food is reassuringly bland. These days, Gus might be someone who had a stroke. He no longer looks vacant. There is someone there, although sometimes she feels as if the person there is a stranger.
After dinner at Applebee’s she takes him to rent a DVD. He wanders among the racks of DVDs and stops in the area of the store where they still have video tapes. “We used to watch these,” he says.
“We did,” she says. “With Dan.”
“Dan is my son,” he says. Testing. Although as far as she can tell he’s never forgotten who Dan is.
“Dan is your son,” she agrees.
“But he’s grown,” Gus says.
“Yes,” she says.
“Pick a movie for me,” he says.
“How about a movie you used to like?” She picks out Forbidden Planet. They had the tape until she moved them to the townhouse. She got rid of all of Gus’s old tapes when they moved because there wasn’t enough room. He had all the Star Wars tapes including the lousy ones. He had all the Star Trek movies, and 2001, Blade Runner, Back to the Future I and III.
“This is one of your favorites,” she says. “You made a model of the rocket.”
When Dan was a kid he loved to hear about when he was a baby, and Gus is that way now about what he was like “before.” He turns the DVD over and over in his hands.
At home he puts it in the player and sits in front of the screen. After a few minutes he frowns. “It’s old,” he says.
“It’s in black and white,” she says.
“It’s dumb,” he says. “I didn’t like this.”
She almost says, It was your favorite. They watched it when they were dating, sitting on the couch together. He had shown her all his science fiction movies. They’d watched Them on television. But she doesn’t, doesn’t start a fight. When he gets angry he retreats back into Alzheimer’s behavior, restless and pacing and then opaque.
She turns on the TV and runs the channels.
“Wait,” he says, “go back.”
She goes back until he tells her to stop. It’s a police show, one of the kind everyone is watching now. It’s shot three camera live and to her it looks like a cross between Cops and the old sitcom Barney Miller. Part of the time it’s sort of funny, like a sitcom, and part of the time it’s full of swearing and idiots with too many tattoos and too few teeth.
“I don’t like this,” she says.
“I do,” Gus says. And watches the whole show.
She lets the home health go.
Iris quit to go to another agency, Mila doesn’t know why, and then they got William. Luckily by the time they got William it was okay if Gus was alone sometimes because William never got there before eight-thirty and Mila had to leave for work before eight. William was an affable and inept twenty-something, but Gus seemed to like him. Because William was a man instead of a woman?
Gus says, “Thank you for putting up with me,” and William smiles.
“I’m so glad you got better, Mr. Schuster,” he says. “I never left before because a patient got better.”
“You helped a lot,” he says.
Gus can stay by himself. There’s so much he doesn’t know these days, among the strange things that he does. But he can follow directions. The latest therapist-they have had four in the ten months Gus has been going, and the latest is a patient young man named Chris-the latest therapist says that Gus has the capacity to be pretty much normal. It’s just a matter of re-learning. And he is re-learning as if he was actually much younger than he is, because of those new neurons forming connections.
There is some concern about those new neurons. Children form more and more connections until they hit puberty, and then the brain seems to sort through the connections and weed out some and reinforce others, to make the brain efficient in other ways. Nobody knows what will happen with Gus. And of course, the cause of the Alzheimer’s still lurks somewhere. Maybe in ten years he’ll start to deteriorate again.
“I am so grateful to you,” he says to Mila when William is gone. “You have been through so much for me.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “You’d do the same for me.” Although she doesn’t know what Gus would do. She doesn’t know if she likes this new Gus. This big child.
“I would do the same for you,” he says.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t stick me in some nursing home?” she says. “Only come visit me once a month?” She tries to make her tone broad, broad enough for anyone to see this comment as a joke.
But Gus doesn’t. Teasing distresses him. “No,” he says now, “I promise, Mila. I would look after you the way you looked after me.”
“I know, honey,” she says. “I was just joking.”
He frowns.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s look at your homework.”
He is studying for his G.E.D. It’s a goal he and the therapist came up with. Mila wanted to say that Gus not only had a degree in engineering, he was certified, but of course that was the old Gus.
He’s studying the Civil War, and Mila checks his homework before he goes to his G.E.D. class.
“I think I want to go to college,” he says.
“What do you want to study?” she asks. She almost says, ‘Engineering?’ but the truth is he doesn’t like math. Gus was never very good at arithmetic, but he was great at conceptual math-algebra, calculus, differential equations. But now he doesn’t have enough patience for the drill in fractions and square roots.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I want to be a therapist. I think I want to help people.”
Help me, she thinks. But then she squashes the thought. He is here, he is getting better. He is not squatting in the hollyhocks. She’s not afraid of him anymore. And if she doesn’t love him like a husband anymore, well, she still loves him.
“What was that boy’s name?” Gus says, squinting down the street.
He means the home health.
For a moment she can’t think and her insides twist in fear. It has started happening recently, when she forgets she feels this sudden overwhelming fear. Is it Alzheimer’s?
“William,” she says. “His name is William.”
“He was a nice boy,” Gus says.
“Yes,” Mila says, her voice and face calm but her heart beating too fast.
Halo - CHARLES STROSS
Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead (in fact, as one of the key Writers To Watch in the Oughts), with a sudden burst in the last few years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,” “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” “Dechlorinating the Moderator,” “Toast: A Con Report,” “Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” and “Tourist,” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Odyssey, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. He has “published” a novel online, Scratch Monkey, available to be read on his website (www.antipope.org/charlie/), and is currently serializing another novel, The Atrocity Archive, in the magazine Spectrum SF. His most recent books are another new novel, Festival of Fools, and his first collection, Toast, and
