Presence Read online

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  Fictionwise

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©2002 by Maureen McHugh

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 2002

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  Mila sits at her desk in Ohio and picks up the handle of the new disposable razor in ... Shen Zhen, China? Juarez, Mexico? She can't remember where they're assembling the parts. She pans left and right and decides it must be Shen Zhen, because when she looks around there's no one else in camera range. There's a twelve hour time zone difference. It's eleven at night in China, so the only other activity is another production engineer doing telepresence work—waldos sorting through a bin of hinge joints two tables over in a pool of light. Factories are dim and dirty places, but cameras need light, so telepresence stations are islands in the darkness.

  She lifts the dark blue plastic part in front of the CMM and waits for it to measure the cavity. She figures they're running about 20% out of spec, but they are so behind on the razor product launch they can't afford to have the vendor resupply, so tomorrow, underpaid Chinese employees in Shen Zhen raw materials will have to hand inspect the parts, discard the bad ones and send the rest to packaging.

  Her phone rings.

  She disengages the waldos and the visor. The display is her home number and she winces.

  “Hello?” says her husband, Gus. “Hello, who is this?”

  “It's Mila,” she says. “It's Mila, honey.”

  “Mila?” he says. “That's what the Speed Dial said. “Where are you?”

  “I'm at work,” she says.

  “At P&G?” he says.

  “No, honey, now I work for Gillette. You worked for Gillette, too.”

  “I did not,” he says, suspicious. Gus has Alzheimer's. He is 57.

  “Where's Cathy?” Mila asks.

  “Cathy?” his voice lowers. “Is that her name? I was calling because she was here. What is she doing in our house?”

  “She's there to help you,” Mila says helplessly. Cathy is the new home health. She's been watching Gus during the day for almost three weeks now, but Gus still calls to ask who she is.

  “She's black,” Gus says. “Not that it matters. Is she from the neighborhood? Is she Dan's friend?” Dan is their son. He's twenty-five and living in Boulder.

  “Are you hungry?” Mila asks. “Cathy can make you a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich?”

  “I don't need help,” Gus says, “Where's my car? Is it in the shop?”

  “Yes,” Mila says, seizing on the excuse.

  “No it's not,” he says. “You're lying to me. There's a woman here, some strange woman, and she's taken my car.”

  “No, baby,” Mila says. “You want me to come home for lunch?” It's eleven, she could take an early lunch. Not that she really wants to go home if Gus is agitated.

  Gus hangs up the phone.

  Motherfucker. She grabs her purse.

  * * * *

  Cathy is standing at the door, holding her elbows. Cathy is twenty-five and Gus is her first assignment from the home healthcare agency. Mila likes her, likes even her beautifully elaborate long, polished fingernails. “Mrs. Schuster? Mr. Schuster is gone. I was going to follow his minder but he took my locater. I'm sorry, it was in my purse and I never thought he'd take it out—”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Mila says. She runs upstairs and gets her minder from her bedside table. She flicks it on and it says that Gus is within 300 meters. The indicator arrow says he's headed away from Glenwood, where all the traffic is, and down towards the dead end or even the pond.

  “I'm so sorry, Mrs. Schuster,” Cathy says.

  “He's not far,” Mila says. “It's not your fault. He's cunning.”

  They go down the front steps. Cathy is so young. So unhappy right now, still nervously hugging her elbows as if her ribs hurt. Her fingernails are pink with long sprays like a rays from a sunrise on each nail. She trails along behind Mila, scuffing in her cute flats. She's an easy girl, usually unflustered. Mila had so hoped that Gus would like her.

  Gus is around the corner towards the dead end. He's in the side yard of someone's house Mila doesn't know—thank God that nobody is ever home in the daytime except kids. He's squatting in a flower garden and he has his pants down, she can see his hairy thighs. She hopes he isn't shitting on his pants. Behind him, pale pink hollyhocks rise in spikes.

  “Gus!” she calls.

  He waves at her to go away.

  “Gus,” she says. Cathy is still trailing her. “Gus, what are you doing?”

  “Can't a man go to the bathroom in peace?” he says, and he sounds so much like himself that if she wasn't used to all the craziness she might have burst into tears.

  She doesn't cry. She doesn't care. That's when she decides it's all got to stop. Because she just doesn't care.

  * * * *

  “It is sometimes possible to cure Alzheimer's, it's just not possible to cure the person who has Alzheimer's,” the treatment info explains. “We can fix the brain and replace the damaged neurons with new brain but we can't replace the memories that are gone.” It's the way Alzheimer's has been all along, Mila thinks, a creeping insidious disease that takes away the person you knew and leaves this angry, disoriented stranger. The video goes on to explain how the treatment—which is nearly completely effective in only about 30% of cases, but which arrests the progress of the disease in 90% of the cases and provides some functional improvement in almost all cases—cannot fix the parts of the brain that have been destroyed.

  Mila is a quality engineer. This is a place she is accustomed to, a place of percentages and estimations, of statements of certainty about large groups, and only guesses about particular individuals. She can translate it, ‘We can promise you everything, we just can't promise it will happen to Gus.’

  Gus is gone anyway, except in odd moments of habit.

  When Gus was diagnosed they had talked about whether or not they should try this treatment. They had sat at the kitchen table, a couple of engineers, and looked at this carefully. Gus had said no. “In five years,” he'd said, “there's a good chance the Alzheimer's will come back. So then we'll have spent all this money on a treatment that didn't do any good and where will you be then?”

  In some people it reverses in five years. But they've only been doing it for seven years, so who knows.

  Gus had diagramed the benefits. At very best he would be cured. Most likely they would only have spent a lot of money to slow the disease down. “And even if I'm cured, the disease could come roaring back,” he'd said. “I don't think I want to have this disease for a long time. I know I don't want to have it twice.”

  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’ 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 a restaurant himself.

  “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 collar bone, 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 PhD 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.

  “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 so much older than 57. 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.

  “God damn,” Gus says, sitting back down. “God damn 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.”

  “God damn,” Gus says again. Gus never much said ‘God damn’ 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. Complaint 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’ chart. “Most tranquilizers can further agitate patients with Alzheimer's.”

  “I have Alzheimer's,” Gus says dopily. “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 back 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’ 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 that 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.

  * * * *

  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.”