Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [100]
I walk back over to Pighead, and suddenly his eyes are open again. He motions me to lean closer. He wants to whisper something.
“You,” he asks. And then he slowly raises his hand up and points to me. Faintly, he smiles. His hand falls back on the bed and he is asleep.
I whisper back. “You.”
• • •
Foster comes home a little after eight P.M. He looks ragged, horrible. He slinks in the door, sad and defeated. He glances at me only once. Then wordlessly, he collects his few things and puts them in his knapsack. Then he sits on the sofa, head down, and says, “I’m sorry, Auggie.”
“Your friend stopped by last night,” I tell him.
“I know,” Foster says.
I shoot him a glance. “You know? How could you know?”
He looks up at me. “Augusten,” he begins, “I want you to know that I truly love you. I love you so very much. But I can’t . . .” He stops. “I can’t . . . I’m not good for you and I know it.”
“What are you saying?” I ask him.
“I bought a brownstone in Brooklyn,” he tells me.
I cannot believe what I am hearing. “What? You what? When?”
He exhales in utter defeat. “A couple of weeks ago. I bought a brownstone.” Then, as if it can’t possibly get more disgusting, “Kyle’s going to be staying with me. For a while.”
“Wait a minute, Foster,” I say. “Are you telling me that you are moving back in with that psycho Brit?”
“It’s just for a while. He’s doing really bad, Auggie.”
And suddenly, I can see it all very clearly. The insanity. The parallel universe of it. How it mimics normal life enough to fool you while you’re in it. But when you step back, wow. I realize that this is one of those three-hundred-empty-bottles-of-Dewar’s-in-my-apartment-that-I-can’t-see things. Yet instead of rage, I feel sorry for him. He’s caught in the same place I was caught. It dawns on me that to be with him would be like living with my old self again.
I go and sit next to him. I want to think of something profound to say, but nothing comes to me. I put my arm around him and tell him I love him. I say I wish there was something I could do. “But there’s not, I know. Not really.”
On the way out he says, “I’ll give you the new phone number as soon as we have a phone.” He stammers, “Um, I mean, as soon as I have a phone.”
So they’re going to be a We. “Foster, why Brooklyn?”
He pauses in the doorway. Turns. “I wanted to be as far away from Eighth Avenue as I could get.”
Rae appears in my head, as she often does, carrying a quote with her. You can’t move away from your addiction, it will follow you wherever you go.
He sets his bag down and we hug. He feels so fucking good. But then, so does scotch.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
I
’ve been at Pighead’s apartment since six A.M. I’ve changed his diaper three times, given him four injections and watched while he vomited peach Yoplait onto the Philippe Starck hall runner. I can’t help but think that having a hangover while placing the soiled diaper into the red plastic biohazard bag would not be the end of the world. In fact, a hangover might improve my outlook. I took a week off from work, so at least I don’t have to deal with that shit. Just this shit.
Pighead is operating in slow, drooling motion. Within the space of a month he has been transformed into a skeleton without bladder control. The only reason he’s home instead of still at the hospital is because they ran out of tests to perform. Life is a question mark now.
“Do you still feel thick in the head?” I ask him while he sits on the couch watching the TV, which, incidentally, is off.
He nods slowly. A strand of saliva, as thick as yarn, sways from his lower lip. I use a tissue to pinch it off.
The visiting nurse that comes every day taught me how to give Pighead his intramuscular injections. This might be part of the reason Pighead always looks at me as if I am about to harm him. We ordered the tiniest needles possible for the tiniest amount of pain. I even injected myself with water to see how much it hurt. I was surprised