Neighbors — Michael H. Payne

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your neighbors. For a full quarter of his life, twenty-year-old Gus Lancer has been a resident patient at Haven Space, a sanatorium and rehab clinic once isolated in the chaparral of southern California but now surrounded by the suburban sprawl of inland Orange County. The peculiar degenerative condition shredding his nervous system has paralyzed him from the waist down and robbed him of all but the most strangled attempts at human speech, but he has recently discovered that he can apparently understand and communicate with the various animals he meets. Rolling his wheelchair out under the care of El Brujo, one of Haven's therapy cats, he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the humans, dogs, cats, crows, squirrels and others forced into the close proximity of the neighborhood. And when some of these neighbors begin acting in a most unneighborly fashion, Gus finds that he might be the only one capable of keeping events from spiraling completely out of control.