Presence

by Maureen McHugh

  “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 naïve 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, in the garage, 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 afterwards, 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 is 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?”

  Dan grins. “Great, dad, it was great.”

  Is it the treatment that makes Gus remember? Or is it just one of those odd moments?

  Dan is home for Christmas. It's his Christmas gift for her, he says, to give her a break. It's no break because she's been cleaning and trying to buy presents off the net. Thank God for the net. She's bought Dan cookbooks and cds, a beautiful set of German knives that he's always wanted but would never get because he never cooks at home. She's spent way too much money, but what would she buy Gus? She's bought Gus chocolates for a palate gone childlike. A couple of warm bright shirts. A puzzle.

  “I can't believe you're here,” she says, and she can feel her face stretched too wide.

  “I'm here,” he says. “Of course I'm here. Where else would I be? Lisa says hello.”

  Lisa is the new girlfriend. “You could have brought her,” Mila says.

  Gus stands there, vacant and uninterested.

  Dan says, “Dad, I've met a really nice girl.” She's told Gus about Lisa, but mostly it's to hear her own chatter and because Gus seems soothes by chatter. Whether the magpie left of his mind has noticed the name, she doesn't know.

  “I didn't bring her,” Dan says. “I thought I would be enough disruption.”

  Gus doesn't even appear to try to follow the conversation.

  “I'll show you your room,” Mila says. She's putting Dan in the guest room, which means she'll have to sleep with Gus. This week he has been going to sleep at ten or even earlier. And sleeping until early morning, say, five or six. That, she thinks, has to be the treatment.

  * * * *

  On Christmas Eve, Dan makes a fabulous feast. On Christmas Eve they used to eat roast beef, and then on Christmas day they'd eat roast beef sandwiches all day, but in the last few years she's made just a normal meal for the two of them. Dan makes a Christmas roast and Yorkshire pudding. There's pureed chestnuts and roasted potatoes and a salad with pomegranate and champagne dressing. “For desert,” he says, “creme brulee. I borrowed a torch from Corot's.” He brandishes a little handheld torch like the ones in the William's Sonoma catalogue. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever!” he cackles, which has been his joke for years, an ironic reference to all those Christmas television specials.

  Gus does a puzzle. He has been doing them in therapy and the therapist (a different one than the first one, who is now on maternity leave) says that there are definite signs that the cells are grafting, filling in. Gus likes puzzles. She buys the ones for children 8 to 12. Cannonball Adderly is on the cd player. The tightness in her eases a bit. Christmas has never been a time for good things to happen, not in her experience. Too much at stake, she always supposed. All those expectations of the best Christmas ever.

  But at this moment she is profoundly grateful.

  “Do you need help?” she calls into the kitchen. Dan has told her she isn't allowed in on pain of death.

  “No,” Dan calls out.

  The smell of beef drippings is overwhelming. She has been living on microwaveable dinners and food picked up at the grocery where they have already cooked stuff to take home and eat and Chinese take out.

  “Why'd you get rid of the microwave?” Dan asks from the kitchen.

  “It shorted out,” Mila says.

  Gus doesn't look up from his puzzle. Does he reme
mber that evening at all? That was after his brain was scrubbed out, so it isn't something he would have lost. But did he ever have it? Does he know what he is living through, moment to moment, or is it like sand?

  “Are you in there?” she whispers.

  At six o'clock, there is more food than three people could ever eat in a month. Dan has sliced the beef and put beautifully finished slices on their plates. (Gus's is cut up, she notices, and her eyes fill with gratitude.) The beef is cook beautifully, and sits in a brown sauce with a swirl of horseradish. There is a flower cut out of carrot sitting on bay leaves on her plate and on Dan's—Gus's has the flower, but no bay leaf to mistake for food. The salad glistens and the pomegranate berries are like garnets. There is wine in her glass and in Dan's—Gus's glass has juice.

  “Oh, my,” she breathes. It's a dinner for grown-ups in a place that has never seen anything but microwave dinners and Chinese take-out. “Oh, Dan,” she says. “It's so beautiful.”

  “It had better be,” Dan says. “It's what I do for a living.”

  “Gus,” she says. “Come eat Dan's dinner.”

  “I'm not hungry,” Gus says.

  “Come and sit with me while I eat, then.”

  Sometimes he comes and sometimes he doesn't. Tonight he comes and she guides him to his seat.

  “It's Christmas Eve, dad,” Dan says. “It's roast beef for Christmas Eve dinner.” She wants to tell him not to try so hard, to just let Gus make his own way, but he has worked so hard. Please, no trouble, she thinks.

  “Roast beef?” Gus says. He takes his fork and takes a bite. “It's good,” he says. She and Dan smile at each other.

  Mila takes a bite. “Where did you get this meat?” she asks.

  “Reider's Stop and Shop,” Dan says.

  “No you didn't,” she says.

  “Sure I did,” Dan says. “You've just cooked so many years you don't remember how it tastes when you've just been smelling. I got all my cooking talents from you, mom.”

  Not true. He is his father over again, with the same deep thoughtfulness, the same meticulousness. It is always a puzzle, cooking. She cooked as a hobby. Dan cooks with the same deep obsessiveness that Gus brought to model rockets.

  “I don't like that,” Gus says.

  “What?” Dan says.

  “That.” Gus points to the swirl of horseradish. “It's nasty.”

  “Horseradish?” Dan says. “You always liked horseradish.”

  Gus had made a fetish of horseradish. And wasabi and chilies and ginger. He liked licorice and kimchee and stilton cheese and everything else that tasted strongly.

  “It's nasty,” Gus says.

  “I'll get you some without,” Mila says, before Dan fights. Never contradict, she thinks at Dan. It's not important. “He's not used to strong tastes anymore,” she says quickly to Dan, hoping Gus won't pay attention, that she won't have to explain.

  “I'll get it,” Dan says. “You sit.”

  Dan brings a plate. “What have you been eating, Dad?” he asks. “Cottage cheese? Mom, shouldn't he be getting tastes to, I don't know, stimulate him?”

  Gus frowns.

  “Don't,” she says. It's hard enough without Dan making accusations.

  Gus has retreated from all but the bland. He eats like a three year old might. Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Tomato soup. Ice cream. And she's let him because it was easy. She thinks about telling him that Gus has hit her. That they have been getting through the days.

  Maybe inviting Dan was a mistake. Gus needs routine, not disruption.

  “How's that, Dad?” Dan says.

  “Good,” Gus says. Gus eats the roast beef without horseradish, the potatoes, the chestnut puree. He cleans out the ramekin of crème brulee with his index finger while Dan sits, smiling and bemused.

  And then, full, he goes upstairs and goes to bed in his clothes. After an hour she goes up and takes off his shoes and covers him up. He sleeps, childlike and serene, until almost seven on Christmas morning.

  * * * *

  “I'm getting better,” Gus announces after therapy one day in February.

  “Yes,” Mila says, “you are.” He goes to therapy three times a week now, and does the kind of things they do with children who have sensory integration problems. Lots of touching and moving. Evenings after therapy he goes to bed early, worn out.

  “I remember better,” he says.

  He does, too. He remembers, for instance, that the townhouse is where they live. He doesn't ask to go home, although he will say that he wishes they still lived in the other house. She is not sure that there is not some small bit of recrimination in this announcement.

  * * * *

  “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’ old tapes when they moved because there wasn't enough room. He had all the Star Wars tapes include the lousy ones. He had all the Star Trek movies, and 2001, Bladerunner, Back to the Future I and III.

  “This is one of your favorites,” she says. “You made a model of the rocket.”

  Dan when 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 m
uch 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.