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After a scare, Brian opens up a bit about Justin.

The Art of Introductions

LaVieEnRose



I guess in retrospect it began a few hours before that, but for me, it all started at three AM on a Saturday night, in my shitty Brooklyn apartment I share with my three roommates and, that night, with Evan. We were asleep, squished into my double bed, when I jumped awake to the loudest fucking beeping I’d ever heard in my life. I thought there was some kind of fire alarm going off at first, and then my sleep-brain finally recognized it as Evan’s ringtone. His phone buzzes and lights up too, but obviously he needs it that loud if there’s any chance he’s going to hear it. It was under his pillow, doing the aforementioned buzzing and lighting up while it screamed, but he just mumbled and rolled over, nuzzling his pillow, not really awake at all.


I fished the phone out and saw Brian’s name on the display, trying to start a Facetime call. And I knew enough about Evan’s home life for my stomach to sink.


Evan hadn’t ever been too specific with me about everything going on with Justin. I knew he had epilepsy, and I’d heard him breathe, so obviously I knew something was up there, but Evan hadn’t offered up any details and I hadn’t asked, even though I was curious. I’d met Justin a handful of times–more than Brian, at least–but since he’s Deaf and I don’t know sign language, I still didn’t really know him. Evan would interpret, but…I don’t know, it still felt like talking to Evan. I didn’t really feel like I knew much about what Justin was like, so it felt pretty gross to like, pry into his health history when I didn’t even know him as a human.


But yeah. I had enough context to know this wasn’t good. I turned on the light and shook Evan awake, but the phone had been ringing for a bit at that point, so I answered it before the call could decline.


Brain was–shit–very obviously in a hospital, standing in some hallway with people rushing around. He was in a thin t-shirt and his hair was messed up, and his eyes were wild and red. He looked at me like he was confused, signed something, and then shook his head a little and said, “Evan.”


“Yeah, he’s right here, just a second.” I shook Evan again and this time he rolled over and squinted at me. “it’s Brian,” I said to him.


Evan groaned and pushed himself up and took the phone. “Hey, is…” he started, and then his voice kind of died while he watched Brian sign. The color fell out of his face and he covered his mouth with his hand. There was something so fucking eerie about the whole situation, that I was sitting where I could see the phone and we were both watching Brian do the same thing, but to me it meant nothing, and to Evan it was everything.


He started scrambling out of bed, trying to hold the phone and sign and get dressed all at the same time, and I said, “Give me the phone,” and held it for him so he could see the screen while he rushed around my tiny bedroom, getting his stuff together. He nodded to me eventually and I handed it back to him, and he signed a few more things and then put the phone in the pocket of his jeans. He ran his hand through his hair, looking at me but not really looking at me. “Um…” he said.


“You need to go, right?”


“Yeah, I’m sorry…”


“No, no. How are you going to get there? There aren’t going to be cabs out here this late. Maybe if we start walking towards the bridge, but…”


“I’ll just take the train.”


“I’ll walk with you.”


He shook his head. “I don’t want you walking back by yourself.”


“I’ll be okay.”


Another headshake. “I’m gonna go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”


“Okay. I hope everything’s okay…”


“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, me too.”


**


He didn’t call me tomorrow, or the next day. I got a few texts from him throughout that week, short, vague, and at unpredictable times, so I knew Justin was okay, but not a whole lot else. And after a week of that? I don’t know, I’d kind of had it. Even though it was closer to stalking than I would have preferred, it got to the point where I didn’t know what else to do besides just go to the house.


I didn’t want to show up empty-handed, so I spent the whole day cooking and went over with my arms full at around 6 PM on Saturday. Obviously I’d texted Evan to give him a heads up, but he ignored that text just as he had the last five. Which I understood, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I was looking for his attention right now. I just…couldn’t take another day of not knowing what was going on.


I rang the doorbell and waited a long time before the door opened, and there was Brian in a wrinkled t-shirt and jeans, unshaved, looking like warmed over shit. For some reason it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might be the one to answer the door, I don’t know, and I felt immediately like I’d made a mistake coming here.


He looked at me for a second too long, like he couldn’t place me right away, and then said, “Hey, Thalia.”


“Hi.” I shifted my weight. “Sorry, just…is Evan here?’


“No, he’s, uh…” He gestured vaguely. “He’s at the hospital. I, um…” He rubbed his forehead. “Um. Sorry.”


“No…are you okay?”


“I’m okay. Evan’s at the hospital, sorry. With Justin.” He touched next to his mouth when he said his name. “They sent me back here to sleep some.”


“You look like you could use it,” I said gently.


“Yeah, I…” he dropped his hands. “Tried. Can’t.”


I was just standing there with my arms full of food, so I said, “I can come back later, or…”


“Oh. I mean, come in, yeah.” He stepped out of the way and stood by the doorway while I went to the kitchen, looking around with this vaguely lost expression on his face.


“Brian?” I said.


He shook himself off, closed the door, and followed me in. “Sorry.” He laughed a little. “I kind of forget what to do when Justin’s not here.”


I unloaded my bags and took out a dish of macaroni and cheese to heat up. “How is he?”


“Oh. He’s fine. Mostly he’s just sleeping a lot, now,” Brian said. “A lot more than usual. I asked if that’s normal, I thought maybe it was a side effect of one of the meds, because he…yeah, he’s out. But they said he’s probably just worn out from what he went through.” He sighed and dropped his chin into his hand.


I was pretty sure that was the most words Brian had ever spoken to me.


I’d had a few conversations with Brian over the couple of months I’d been seeing Evan, but I didn’t really know him, and I’d definitely never seen him like this. Brian was always composed, collected, almost rehearsed. He was charming, definitely, but there was something a little bit…insincere? I don’t want to sound mean. Evan loves him and he’d always been nice to me, but I didn’t really feel like I had any idea who he was.


And now he was in this awful situation, and I was virtually a stranger coming into his house and bothering him, and if you’d asked me, this is where I would have guessed he’d be the most closed off. But here he was telling me that he wasn’t sleeping and that he didn’t know what to do without Justin. He just seemed…raw. Real. Maybe he was just too worn out to bother being guarded.


Or maybe he…


So I’m an actor, you know? It’s my job to get inside people, try to be in their heads. And just the way those words had fallen out of him so easily, when he’d barely been able to get a sentence out before…I don’t know, I just felt like maybe he wanted to talk about Justin. That maybe after an ordeal like they’d been through–I didn’t know details, but I knew it was something–that he needed someone to say it out loud to to try to make it all make sense.


And he was probably used to talking about Justin, right? I don’t know how you’d have a chronically ill partner and not get used to answering questions from worried people about how they were doing. Maybe this would bring some normalcy back.


So I said, “Can I ask what happened? Evan hasn’t really been up to talking.”


And he said, “Oh, yeah, sure.” Just like that. He cleared his throat. “He uh…So he hadn’t been feeling right all day. He was really low-energy and he told me a few times that he wasn’t feeling good. But he didn’t have a fever, wasn’t having seizures. Breathing wasn’t great. I figured it was allergies, he…has these fucking awful allergies. It’s usually that. I thought it was that.”


Oof. “You can’t blame yourself for not knowing,” I said.


He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t, not really. Not after all this time. It’s just…I don’t know. It’s sad. It’s objectively sad when he’s really sick and no one realizes.”


I nodded a little. The truth was, except for the very little I’d gotten out of Evan, most of what I knew about being very sick or about being with a very sick person was just stuff I’d absorbed from books and movies or…I don’t know, scenarios I’d worked out in my head about what it would feel like or how I would act. I hadn’t really had anyone with a chronic illness in my life before all this.


“So the day was pretty normal,” Brian said. “He wasn’t feeling well, but…you know. He doesn’t feel well a lot. And so…you know, normal day, whatever, we went to bed. And that night he woke me up, shook my arm. And I heard him breathing right away and it sounded…strange. Wet, which is never a good sign, but kind of…I don’t know. Really wet. So pretty clear off the bat something was wrong.”


I put the dish in the oven and poured us both some water. It felt strange, moving around this kitchen like it was mine, but not as strange as standing still, staring.


“He sat on the side of the bed, and…let’s see. Yeah. He was sitting on the side of the bed, his hand like this on his chest, and he said he felt like his lungs were filling up.” His eyes were narrowed a little, looking at nothing in particular, and between that and the soft, halting way he was speaking, I don’t know, it almost was like he was watching the memory play back in real time and narrating to me as he saw it. “I asked him if we needed to go to the hospital, which…he always fights me. I was pretty sure we needed to, but I knew he would fight me. And he said, um. He said, ‘you need to call an ambulance.’’ He nodded a little. “Yeah. He’s never said that before. Do you need help finding anything?”


“I’m okay.”


He cleared his throat. “Right. So…uh, yeah, anyway. I called the ambulance. Told them, you know, he has asthma, he can’t breathe, sounds congested, but I wasn’t…that’s what I thought it was, you know? He didn’t feel feverish so I thought, what could this be but some awful asthma attack? I told them he was Deaf and I needed to help him stay calm, so they let me get off the phone. And we waited, and I sat with him and gave him oxygen and tried to talk him through it, but…it was getting worse. He was coughing, which, you know, whatever, but then he started choking up this bloody foam which, uh, that was new, didn’t really seem like a good sign, and then he started telling me that he’d never felt like this before. That this was something different. So that finally kind of clicked for me and from that point…” He shook his head.


For a moment I thought he was done talking, and then he started speaking again, his voice softer.


“Eventually he told me…he, um.. That he thought he might die. He knew…” He gestured a little. “You know, I’d want to hear it. Would want a warning.” He cleared his throat. “So he let me know that was on the table. But…you know. I knew that already at that point. you could tell. It was really bad by then. It felt like the ambulance was taking forever and I almost just picked him up and took him to the car, but it came, and they, you know, they did some stuff, and I got to ride with him, and they were rushing around in the back doing all kinds of whatever but, uh, even with all that, by the time we got there they said he was in respiratory failure and he, uh. He wasn’t really conscious.”


I didn’t really mean to, but I reached across the bar and took his hand. He didn’t exactly hold on, but he didn’t pull away, either.


“They took him away in the ER, worked on him for a while,” Brian said, still like he was reciting lines. “They wouldn’t let me in. I called Evan. Uh, you know that part.”


Obviously logically he couldn’t have called Evan before that point, but…I don’t know, it hadn’t really registered for me until then that the Brian I saw that night over Facetime had already been through the fucking unimaginable shit he’d just described to me. That, God, he’d just been scared out of his fucking mind, was still scared out of his fucking mind, and I'd picked up that phone with no idea.


"They came out and they told me…they said, ‘He’s stable. We’re worried about him.’ That’s what they said. These total fucking strangers, they were worried about him.” He cleared his throat. “But, uh, they let me see him then. That was good.” His voice was low now, so much that I could barely hear it. “He was awake…drugged up, tired. He was sweet. Joking with me.”


“What happened?” I said. “Evan didn’t tell me.”


“Oh, he probably didn’t even know the English term for it,” Brain said, normal volume again, casual as could be. “Pulmonary edema. Fluid in your lungs, basically. And that actually opened up this whole other can of bullshit, because it turns out the most common causes of that are lung cancer and heart failure.”


“Oh…”


He waved his hand. “No, no, I mean, it can also be caused by just having shitty lungs, just…most people don’t have lungs shitty enough for it to happen very often. But obviously they had to check to see if he had lung cancer or heart failure, so that was another process. And it’s not like we were ever actually that worried about that possibility, but…you know. There in the back of our minds until they ruled that out, so that was a whole thing. And meanwhile he’s just…” Brian shrugged. “He’s sick, he was really sick.”


“Will he be home soon?”


“Yeah, he will. He’s back to worrying about me and whether I’m sleeping enough, so. Business as usual.”


I tapped my fingers on the counter a few times, then said, “Brian?”


“Mmm.”


“What’s Justin like?”


He laughed a little. “What?”


“I don’t…know him. What’s he like?”


“Evan doesn’t talk about him?”


“Sometimes.”


“What does he say?”


“That he’s kind. Thoughtful. Really talented.”


Brian nodded to the kitchen wall next to us. “That’s one of his paintings, there.”


“Oh.” I don’t really know much about visual art, to be honest, but I liked the colors. “It’s beautiful.”


But I was waiting for more, and I guess he could tell, because he laughed kind of awkwardly and said, “I don’t really know where to start.”


“Well…pretend I don’t know anything.”


“It’s just…I don’t really like talking about him in English.”


“Oh.”


“It’s just weird, you know? He should be able to understand things that are about him.”


So maybe that’s why he was pausing so much relaying that night to me, why he sounded stilted and uncomfortable. Because I was coming in here asking him to use the wrong language to talk about something that was already impossible.


God. I’d really thought I was helping.


I started kind of packing my shit up, and Brian was quiet, and then he said, “He was born in Erie.”


I paused.


“Close to Pittsburgh,” Brian said. “He has a little sister, Molly, and a half-brother who’s almost a teenager now. She lives in Manhattan now, Luke’s in Pittsburgh. He started losing his hearing when he was twenty-three. When he was eighteen he had a severe traumatic brain injury, and a lot of the issues he has now stem from that. And he’s one of the most incredible artists currently living. And that’s not me talking, that’s multiple sources. Objective fact.”


I sat down across from him.


“He…” Brian pulled his lips into his mouth and paused. “He can see goodness in people when other people can’t. He just notices everything, it’s like he’s here to research all of us and report back to someone. There’s this newness about him no matter how old he gets where he’s just fascinated with everything and where he appreciates all these tiny things that other people wouldn’t even think to take note of. It’s always, look, the neighbors changed their mailbox, that must be because they’re having that new baby, which I know because of a package I saw them get the other day, oh, look at the way the light scatters when it goes through those tree branches, look at how happy Evan was when you surprised him with that croissant, we need to do more things like that, it’s just…he notices. He’s fired up and he argues like he had his lines planned in advance, which is terrifying. Fiercely protective of Evan and what he considers Evan’s God-given right to have whatever he wants at any given time, but who could blame him for that, given…anyway. His working memory isn’t what it was, and you should have seen him back then, but he still collects information the best he can, analyzes it, makes pictures out of it that explain everything: the weather, politics. You. Which means that when he can’t understand something he gets overwhelmed, paralyzed. Doesn’t like crowds. Has a lot of seizures. Allergic to fucking everything. In constant, intractable pain, which he will do his best to make you forget, and it affects every single part of his life. Gracious. Patient. Ashamed. A lot of trouble with his right hand. Incredible signer. Intuitive. Ingenious. Fucking…doesn’t age. Kinky. Laughs with his whole body. Catches every fucking germ that comes his way. I call him Sunshine sometimes.” He shrugged a little. “Thirty-two.”


“Is he really?”


“I told you. Doesn’t age.”


‘God.” I breathed out. “I wish I could…know him.”


Brian nodded slowly and said, “Well. He’s not going anywhere.”


**


 


Evan texted me three days later, saying he’d been the worst and he was so sorry, and of course I told him he hadn’t been and he shouldn’t be. He told me everything was a lot better now and asked if I wanted to come over to play this video game we’d been messing with before all of this happened.


Brian answered the door again.


“Please tell me he’s actually here this time,” I said.


He snorted. “Downstairs. Come in. We’re still working through that mac and cheese, by the way. That’s some good shit.”


“Old family recipe,” I said, coming in and taking off my jacket.


Justin was on the couch, wearing sweats and working on something on his laptop. He waved a little and said, “Good to see you.”


“You too. Um. Wait,” I said, and I hesitantly raised my hands. I’m glad you’re okay, I said, hesitantly, and Justin beamed. “Did I do that right?” I asked Brian.

 

Brian’s eyes glowed, and he placed his hand gently between Justin’s shoulders. “Yeah. That was perfect.”

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