Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [97]
So, I look at a shirt that I wore once, just to run to the store, and threw carelessly across the back of a chair. I will fold it. Put it back. A numb coward with folded shirts.
I almost sob. Like an almost sneeze that, at the last moment, swallows itself. I almost sob and then I’m blank. I light a peachscented candle to mask the cigarette smoke, to sweeten the room.
I called. Just now. He’s so tired that he couldn’t talk for a full minute, even to me. I told him I could come up. But he’s running a fever of a hundred and four and has chills and can barely breathe and is due for medication in an hour and he’s just so tired. It seemed okay that I’m not there with him. He’s busy concentrating on the business of breathing.
He said, “I want them to find out what this is and I want them to treat it, no matter how horrible the treatment, and I just want to move on.” They say it could be a parasite or lymphoma or any other number of things his AIDS-wracked immune system can’t contend with.
Who knows? Nobody. I feel as if something essential is rushing out of me and there is nothing I can do to stop it. I cannot find the valve. I’m bleeding out, deflating. There is the sensation of speed. Spiraling. Of falling.
Foster is lying on my sofa, shirt off, eating Ben & Jerry’s Rocky Road ice cream from the carton and reading the Narcotics Anonymous Blue Book. “This is really fascinating, profound stuff,” he says with his mouth full. “It’s so true. I can see it all so clearly now—shit, this stuff is so cold it hurts.” He opens his mouth to warm the ice cream, then he sets the pint on the floor beside the couch. Every once in a while, he laughs out loud or says, “So true, so true.” He could almost pass for a normal boyfriend, if only the cover of his book was something like Investment Strategies You Can Live With.
Foster is staying with me for five days, until he moves into his new apartment. He decided that part of the reason he’s feeling so crazy is because he’s still living in the same apartment he shared with the crazy Brit. When he asked to stay here, I thought it was the only good, friendly thing to do. I also thought it would be a good minitest of us together. A relationship terrarium. And I needed him, that’s the truth. I needed somebody to be with me. Somebody to stop the spinning.
I go over to the couch. “Shove over,” I say. He sets the book down next to the ice cream on the floor and opens his arms. “C’mere,” he says warmly. I wrap my arms around the mess and close my eyes. Foster is my source of comfort. A frightening fact.
“I’m really worried,” I say.
“I know,” he whispers. “Just close your eyes and take a nap, right here next to me.”
Shit, I wish I could count on you, I think.
“I know,” Foster whispers.
At my last therapy session, I tell Wendy about Pighead being in the hospital, Foster being in my apartment and me being a mess.
“Are you going to meetings?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her flatly.
“Well, they might help,” she says. “I really wish you’d go.”
I nod as if I plan to. But the truth is I hate AA meetings and have no intention of going back, ever.
As always, the subject returns to Foster. “Even if he does go to rehab or start taking his sobriety really seriously, I’m always going to be living on the edge, waiting for his relapse. I just don’t see how it’s possible. It’s bad enough having to make sure I don’t relapse, but then having to worry about him.”
I ask her if there are any precedents. “As a general principle, should recovering alcoholics be with other recovering alcoholics? Or should we find teetotalers?”
She, of course, says there are no hard and fast rules. And this annoys me because I want her to tell me what to do. I explain