How to Be Alone

LaVieEnRose

I was at my desk, finishing up a concept write-up for the most boring motherfucking client you could possibly imagine, when Evan knocked on my door and stuck his head in.

Hey, I said. Want to get lunch?

He shook his head. I have to get back to work. Have you talked to Justin?

I'd bitched at him before we left that morning about why he goes through ten different fucking water glasses a day, but I didn't think that was what he had in mind. No, why?

I wanted to ask him for advice on the mock-up I'm doing but I can't get him to answer the phone. I've been trying for an hour. And he seemed sick this morning.

He seems sick every morning. But he had been a little spacey. Still, He's probably sleeping.

His phone would wake him up. He sleeps with it under his pillow, so the vibrate will get him.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah...

I sighed. What do you want me to do, Evan, run out to Flushing in the middle of the day to make sure he hasn't fallen and he can't get up? I have work to do.

I can go check on him.

You have work to do. My phone started ringing, and I checked the caller ID. I have to take this. I'll keep trying him, okay?

Okay.

He's probably fine. You know he sleeps like it's a sport.

Yeah. Okay.

Evan left, and I took the call, and while I charmed the pants off a mercifully less-boring client I spun my Rubik's cube and doodled dirty shit on a napkin and made a dick out of Play-doh and otherwise distracted myself from thinking about anything other than the call. Once it was over I went through and answered a few emails, but I noticed my responses were a little more testy than one might like, and I drummed my nails on my desk.

I called Justin. Once, twice. Three times.

Goddamn it, I said, and I ran out to Flushing in the middle of the day to make sure he hadn't fallen and he couldn't get up.

I flashed the lights on and off when I entered, but there was no sign of him in the living room or the kitchen. I didn't really worry about that, not until I checked our bedroom and the bathroom and he wasn't there either.

Obviously he could have gone out, but then he would have his phone on him, so this wasn't looking too great. I checked Evan's basement, and the upstairs, even though Justin never even goes up there, and then, finally, I thought to check the back porch, where he likes to paint on the rare intersection of days when the weather's nice but his allergies aren't killing him. Sure enough, his easel was set up, and his painting was half finished, and Justin was a fully unconscious heap on the porch.

“Shit.” I knelt down next to him and checked his pulse, and when that was strong and his breathing was okay I calmed down a pretty significant amount. “God, I hate when Evan's right.” I tapped on Justin's collarbone. “Come on, time to get up.”

He stirred a little but didn't really wake up. He did grab at his head a little bit and made a noise that let me know he was in pain, so that was kind of rough. I picked him up, trying to keep his head still on my shoulder so it wouldn't jostle too badly, and brought him inside and to bed.

All that excitement woke him up a little, and he shivered and blinked at me. “Brian?”

Hey. You remember anything? I thought about how long Evan had been trying to reach him, and my stomach did an unflattering flip. I think you were out there for a while, Sunshine.

“Brian?”

Yeah. I know. I ran my hand over his head, feeling for a bump. Are you cold?

He shuddered. Brian.

Yeah, you've got that part down. Good job. I kept checking him for injuries, but I wasn't finding anything. But it wasn't normal for him to be unconscious for that long after a seizure.

Unless it was a very, very bad one.

I called Evan, and God, the look on his face when he realized I was at home. Oh no, he said.

Get your stuff and come home, okay? It's okay.

What happened?

Just a seizure. We've got to take him in, though. I don't know if he hit his head. Goddamn it.

Evan was already gathering his things. “How is he?”

Pretty out of it. I think he's asleep again. He's going to be fucking miserable at the hospital. I so hate having to bring him in after seizures. At least when I have to haul him in for an asthma attack he knows what's going on. He's so fucking dumb when he's postictal.

I squeezed his hand.

“We should have brought him with us today,” Evan said, like I wasn't already thinking it. Reviewing every single minute this morning where I'd said anything other than come sit in the office, come do nothing and come out of your skin with boredom but be where I can see you.

Just hurry, I said.

**

The hospital fucking sucked, as predicted. They didn't admit him, which meant we never got a decent bed, just a stall in the ER when they weren't hauling him away for one test or another. It was becoming clearer and clearer that it must have been a fucking awful seizure, because Justin was miserably sick, shaking and vomiting and retaining exactly no information about what was going on and where he was. We finally got the all-clear to send him home at about ten at night, and he slept in the backseat while I drove us home and didn't even stir when I brought him to bed and Evan retreated to the basement. I shook Justin awake to give him his meds, changed out of my clothes, slung an arm over Justin to keep him still, and slept like a fucking rock.

He was still fast asleep when I woke up in the morning, which wasn't surprising, but I could hear Evan moving around, so I got up and headed to the kitchen, where he immediately handed me a cup of coffee. Just a lovely kid.

“How is he?” he asked.

Slept through the night. He's still out.

“Are you going to drug him up today?” Sometimes after a major seizure he gets a huge dose of Klonopin, but that knocks him on his ass for ages.

Only if he wants it. I sipped the coffee. Thank God it's Saturday. I don't want to pull him out of bed.

“Low-key today.”

Definitely. Pick out some movies for when he wakes up.

That ended up being sooner than I expected. Justin came wandering out when Evan and I were cleaning up breakfast, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

Hey, I said, probably a little more eagerly than my self-esteem would like. How are you feeling?

He did a so-so hand.

You remember anything?

He shrugged. Hospital, vaguely.

Yeah, they were all very impressed with you. Sounds like this was one for the books.

Another shrug. Don't remember. He was clearly just beat.

I came over and kissed his cheek. Go sit on the couch. Evan's got movies lined up. You want coffee?

Yeah, like a bucket.

Okay.

So we settled down on the couch, Justin sprawled on top of me and Evan like a bird in a nest. He was so locked up, couldn’t really move well at all, so I tried to massage some of the tension out of his muscles while Evan did an inane Pirates of the Caribbean commentary to make him smile. After the second movie Justin asked to be drugged up, and I could tell he was really feeling it, so I dosed him up with benzos and the good painkillers and he was snoring before I’d closed the bedroom door.

I haven’t seen him this bad in a while, I said to Evan.

It must have been bad. Did it scare him?

He hasn’t said anything. I don’t know that he would. I signed. It must have.

Sometimes the enormity of how fucking unfair this all is just hits me like a truck. How is Justin supposed to just fucking adjust, even after all this time, to something that is by definition unpredictable? How do you plan to completely lose your autonomy at random intervals, in ways that could hurt or even kill you? How do you ask someone as independent as Justin to live with a disease that means it’s dangerous to leave him home alone for a day, an hour, a minute?

I try not to think about it, I try so hard, but what I wouldn’t do to rip that fucker Hobbs from limb to limb. You don’t do this to someone. You don’t take this much. Justin loves his life, Justin works so hard to love his life, but there is always a part of him that wishes he’d just died and you cannot make that fact stop hurting.

Dying would have been a lot easier for him.

That doesn’t stop hurting.

I hadn’t even wanted to check on him.

“Brian,” Evan said, and I shook my head a little.

He didn’t eat breakfast. Let’s order in from that Mediterranean place he loves. Maybe he’ll eat something when he wakes up.

You okay?

 I’m fine, I just don’t know how I’m going to leave him alone again.

**

Turns out Justin had been having similar thoughts. I came into our room to check on him a few times and for a couple he was awake, looking at something on his phone. I didn’t think anything of it until we sat down for dinner and he said, I’ve been thinking, while Evan handed me a whiskey. Just a lovely, lovely kid.

I hate when you do that. You’re here to look pretty.

I’ve been thinking, Justin said sternly. That I want to see about getting a service dog.

I sighed. Justin.

Evan lit up like a damn Christmas tree. We're getting a dog?

We are not getting a dog, I said.

I thought service dogs were for blind people, said Evan, who lacks Justin’s robust disability studies background.

They’re for all sorts of things, Justin said. But I want a seizure alert one.

How can it tell if you’re going to have a seizure? Evan said.

We don’t really know. They can sense something we can’t. But they can let you know in time to get to safe place. And that's not even it, they can lie on you during it to keep you from hurting yourself, help wake you up after...you can even get special phones with like one button on them, so if I'm unconscious he can call you guys or 911 or whatever we program it to do.

Sunshine, I said.

It would be really good for me.

Yeah, I agree with you, it would be a great solution in a world where you weren't horribly allergic. Remember the saga of him and Ethan and the cat? Yeah, dogs are worse.

There are hypoallergenic dogs, he fingerspelled.

Hypoallergenic means less allergenic, I said, mostly for Evan's sake, since I knew Justin already fucking knew this. It doesn't mean not at all.

We still have a garden, Justin said. We still have a lawn. We've made the decision that those things are worth it.

We've made the decision that the homeowner's association would come after us with pitchforks if we had a nice pile of dirt as a front yard.

So a homeowner's association is a bigger incentive than my seizure disorder.

Don't twist my fucking words. It wasn't cute when you were seventeen, it's not cute now.

Poodles make amazing service dogs and they're great for allergies, Justin said. I could at least meet with them and see how much I react.

It was clear to both of us that we were getting nowhere here, so we turned to Evan.

This sounds like it would be amazing if we could make it work, he said.

I said, I know that it would be, but his fucking lungs...

He should meet with them, Evan said. We should know if it's on the table.

I don't even want a fucking dog, I said.

**

So that weekend we drove out to a poodle rescue in New Jersey. Jesus Christ, the words in that sentence. At some point you just don't have any dignity left. You get used to it.

They were kind of cute, in a weird, curly way. They weren't shaved down into some stupid cut like I'd imagined, and they came in about eighty different sizes, apparently. These weren't trained service dogs, and if Justin got one he'd be going through an agency that handled that kind of thing, so they were just running around playing fetch and....I don't know, whatever dogs do. Seriously, I'm not a fucking dog person.

Anyway, I barely paid attention to the dogs, even though Evan was having the time of his life; I was busy watching Justin like a hawk. He'd been a little wheezy that morning to begin with, and it certainly didn't get better while we were there, but it didn't seem like it got a lot worse. But his eyes got red and weepy and I could hear how congested he was when he spoke. We stayed for about half an hour, which was enough time to be sure that he was definitely allergic. He sneezed his head off on the drive home, but thankfully his breathing stayed pretty okay. I shoved him towards the shower as soon as we got home and a few minutes later figured I should get the dander off me, too, and followed him in. He leaned his head back and let me wash his hair.

I'm sorry, I said. I know you were excited about this.

He rinsed his hair out and shook it. “I still want to do it.”

Justin.

“There were like fifteen of them there in her tiny house and it was a really manageable reaction. One dog here? I'll be fine.”

This isn't a negotiation, I said, and he gave me a look and got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist.

“You're right,” he said. “It's not.”

I turned off the water. What the fuck are you talking about?

“It's not a negotiation. This is a medical treatment that I'm choosing for my health—"

God, come on—

“And just like any medical treatment, there are side effects, but I'm the one who gets to decide whether I can live with the side effects, just like if this was some new pill. And I'm telling you what I can live with and what I can't. And I can live with some sneezing but I can't live like this any longer."

God.

You can't argue with this kid.

And worse than that, you don't even want to argue with him.

I took a deep breath. You'll start allergy shots right away.

Obviously.

I'm not taking it for walks.

His mouth twitched. “Okay.”

And I don't want some huge thing hulking around the house. Be a good gay and get a little dog.

“Okay.”

And it doesn't sleep on our bed. You snore enough as it is.

“Okay.”

And if...Justin, if you're suffering, you tell me. I won't make you get rid of it, but let me help figure out a solution.

“I will,” he said, his eyes so big and so goddamn blue. “I always do.”

I covered my face with one hand and said, God, you two are going to be the death of me, and Justin made some kind of squealing noise, so loud and ridiculous and Deaf and happy, and wrapped himself around my neck.