Nano

CHAPTER 7

The woman drinking her tea had no idea who he was. He knew it, and it no longer surprised him or even upset him very much. If there is a Creator, the man thought, he has a very bleak sense of humor. This was not the way human beings should back out of life.

He had gotten used to the procedure he went through before he saw her, but the necessity for it still eluded him. While he waited in the lounge of the assisted-living home, a young male nurse made preparations for the visit, tidying the woman’s room, making sure she was comfortable and properly dressed, and making two cups of the wretched tea, one of which would sit on its coaster by his chair, untouched. What did all this matter? the man thought. I don’t much care how she looks, and if there’s any embarrassment, she won’t remember anyway.

Zachary Berman looked at his mother, who was staring out of the ground-floor window of her one-room home. There was a tree outside with a bird feeder, and at the best times of year, she sat here all day and watched the birds fly up and feed and squabble over where they would stand on their perches. She put the teacup back on the saucer and looked at her son. Zachary reached behind him and took a picture frame off the bureau that had stood in their New Jersey home for years. It was too big for this room, but Zachary thought it was a good idea to have as many reminders of home as possible. That was before she was completely lost to the world.

The frame held ten small pictures. There was one of his mom and dad on their wedding day; of Zachary and Jonathan as kids; of the next generation of couples and their own children. Zachary held the frame out to his mother and pointed out a picture of his brother.

“This is Jonathan, Susan. Do you remember Jonathan? He was about ten when this picture was taken. I remember that day very well.”

“Why do you remember?” she asked. Zachary no longer maintained that Susan was his mother, or Eli his father, as both these notions upset her terribly. Eli was someone she obviously guarded somewhere safe in her mind.

“I remember it because I took the photograph. We went up to the Poconos in the spring to look at a camp. I borrowed the camera and took the picture. See how he’s smiling? Jonathan always loved that picture, it was his favorite.”

“How do you know it was his favorite?”

“He told me, Susan.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after seven, why?”

“Well, what day is it, dammit?”

“It’s Sunday, Susan.”

“My program’s coming on. At seven.” Susan resumed her watch of the darkened inner courtyard. “I better not miss it.”

The nurse appeared at the door. “How does she seem?” he asked.

“She’s the same as she was several weeks ago, or so she seems to me. Have you noticed any change?”

“She’s getting very agitated, and more frequently,” the nurse said. “There’s a show on TV she’s fixated on seeing, but we can’t figure out what it is. You know she tried to get out through the fire escape last week. It’s such a shame there’s nothing we can really do for her.”

Berman was surprised at the young man’s candor, but he was right. Alzheimer’s had a death grip on his mother and her brain was wasting away, and with it her personality, everything that made her Susan Berman. To all intents and purposes, that person had been erased and replaced by this horribly reduced version of her, one who would soon lose the ability to control any bodily functions as the brain proceeded to shut down completely. His mother was now less functional than a small child, but that wasn’t precisely the right analogy for her. Berman thought she was less capable than even that.

Thanks to his extensive research, Berman knew what was happening to his mother. Her brain was a collection of neurons or nerve cells that passed information from one to another. Thoughts, ideas, memories, such as the ability to recognize her surviving son — all these could be described by chemical or electrical interactions among nerve cells. In some people like Susan, these interactions started to become interrupted, blocked by abnormalities called amyloid plaques, made up of a protein called beta-amyloid, or by neurofibrillary tangles, also caused by misplaced proteins called tau. In each case, the hard proteins built up to such a degree that they blocked neuron transmission, killing the brain one neuron at a time. When tau proteins performed their proper function, they physically assisted in the feeding and maintenance of the neuron, but under certain conditions, the tau came together like strands of thread, to disrupt and destroy the microtubules that made up the structure of the neuron.

Berman shuddered, unable to avoid the horror of imagining himself sitting where his mother was now. Although the home was clean and well run, it still reeked of old, incapacitated people, of urine and God knows what else. He hated to see his mother like this and hated to be in such a depressing place, but still he came, despite his mother’s not recognizing him or even remembering he’d been there.

As he watched his mother, he felt a rising sense of anxiety that he had to speed up the work with the microbivores. They had to be available if and when he started a downhill course, maybe even before that happened. Each day when he couldn’t remember some fact or figure, he worried that it was starting. A few hours earlier, while he was on the plane, he couldn’t remember the name of his favorite movie actor. It hadn’t been until he’d gotten back to his office at Nano that the name Tom Hanks came to him out of the blue and relieved his anxiety.

Berman believed that the microbivores were going to be the answer since they had the theoretical ability to work within the brain, identifying and destroying rogue tau proteins and beta-amyloidal plaque. But if his team followed the typical development path, they were looking at years of work and a huge amount of fund-raising that had been taxing his creativity. But now he had a source. He just had to make sure the spigot stayed open, meaning he needed results.

“Who are you?” Susan suddenly challenged. “What are you doing in my room? Get out of here.” Her voice had risen to a shout, bringing the nurse in at a run.

Zachary said nothing during this short tirade. It had happened in the past, and nothing he had said on those occasions comforted her. She needed the nurse, whom she recognized on some level. He quieted her down, and she went back to watching the birds.

After his initial success in nonmedical nanotechnology, Berman had invested heavily and hired the best minds he could afford to move the company into the medical realm, particularly after the breakthroughs they’d managed in molecular manufacturing. It had been Berman’s idea to mimic the way living cells used ribosomes to manufacture proteins that had put Nano way ahead of the competition in the molecular manufacturing nanorobot arena. With his continued urging, the first product of this method was the Nano microbivore, which had been theoretically designed more than a decade previously.

At the same time the microbivore molecular manufacturing project was under way, Berman launched a private investigation of Alzheimer’s disease. More than a few of the scientists Berman had hired at Nano were working on diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s with the idea that the earlier the protein buildup could be detected, the better chance doctors had of slowing the spread of the disease. It stood to reason. It was around that time that Berman had allowed himself to be secretly tested for the predictive gene, which only served to heighten his general anxiety.

As the light began to fade outside the window of his mother’s room, Berman slowly got to his feet. He truly hated coming to visit her. In a strange way he thought it was disrespectful to her as a person. Inwardly he suspected that if she knew how she was going to end up, she’d be the first to tell him not to come but rather to remember how she had been as a loving mother.

Without trying to say good-bye, Zachary descended the long hall toward the lobby of the facility, breathing shallowly to avoid the smell. He was disgusted, and hated himself for it, knowing as he did how tenuous the threads of nerve fibers were that separated his mental state from that of his mother’s.

Berman emerged into the gathering gloom as the sun had settled behind the mountains to the west. Darkness fell rather quickly as he walked across the lawn and the parking area on his way to his Aston Martin.

With the engine purring under the hood, Berman checked his watch again. It was time to go back to the lab and find out what it was that Stevens, the investigative leader on the Chinese study, who had texted him yet again, wanted to talk to him about so urgently. It sounded ominous, and Berman did not like surprises. Pulling out onto the road, Berman laid a strip of rubber as a defiant adolescent gesture.