Page 27 of That's Not a Thing

“Want to go wait in line at Barney Greengrass?” Aaron asks, mentioning my favorite bagel shop uptown. He looks at his watch and adds, “It’s so late, there’s probably not even a line anymore.”

He turns his head to look at me and abruptly stops walking. “What is it? What happened?”

I have the urge to sit down in the middle of the dusty sidewalk, to let the passersby just maneuver around me. I cannot handle the weight of what I have been told.

“Wesley’s dying.” And then I do begin to sink, but Aaron catches me and pulls me up.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He has me in both of his hands. I can feel the confusion that must be etched on my face. He puts one arm around my shoulders, the other around my waist, and steers me over to a side street toward the steps of the closest brownstone.

“Sit.” He lowers himself beside me and takes my hand. He looks at me, waiting for me to speak, but all I can do is shake my head. I don’t want to start crying for Wesley in front of Aaron, but if I speak any words, I won’t be able to hold back the tears. I just shake my head a second time.

Aaron leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Look, I know I said I didn’t want to know about your first fiancé, that we should keep the subject off-limits, but that was before he reappeared in your life. It was different when he was living in a foreign country. But it seems like you’re going to be seeing him at the soup kitchen, and wherever else now, and obviously something is upsetting you. What good am I if I can’t be here for you to unload on? Can you tell me what’s going on?” He knocks his knee lightly into mine, and I just want to rest my head in his lap, close out everything but his nearness.

“He has ALS.”

“Oh.” Silence. “Well, shit.”

“Yeah.” I look down at my black leather boots, noticing that one of them has a new gray scuff mark on the outer edge.

“How long has it been since he was diagnosed?”

“I don’t know.”

“How are his symptoms?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is he being treated?”

“Jesus, Aaron, I don’t know!” I stand as I snap at him. “I didn’t think to give him the third degree, okay?”

“You’re right, you’re right,” he says, standing too. “I know it’s got to be a lot to process. I’m sorry.” He reaches out to put his arm around me and I shrug him off, now not wanting his touch, not wanting to feel anything at all.

He stares at me for a hard moment.

“We can go,” I say, pulling myself back together and stepping down from the concrete steps. “Let’s just go.”

TWO HOURS LATER,I’m alone in my apartment. I’m supposed to be packing boxes for the move to Aaron’s loft, but instead I’m frozen in front of Google, learning all sorts of information about ALS. Horrible information. Each sentence I read is more distressing than the last.

The life expectancy after diagnosis can often be as little as two years, or sometimes even a shorter span of time. The brain stops sending messages to the muscles. Progression of the disease varies and can move slowly in some, way too rapidly in others. Unused, the muscles began to twitch, to weaken and atrophy. Eventually, the brain loses the ability to control voluntary movement. Gradually, people lose their ability to speak, eat, move. Breathe.

In my mind’s eye, Wesley has always, always been a fireball, filled with more light and movement than anyone I’ve known. And now all of that energy and verve is going to seep out of him, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch, day by day. It’s too hard to bear, thinking of him fading like that. Like someone dismantling the Eiffel Tower, pulling the iron apart spoke by spoke.

I remember how he said I dodged a bullet earlier today. I suppose. I get to marry Aaron, who is the picture of health, with his football player’s physique and many salutary habits, his penchant for kale smoothies and avocado toast. If Wesley and I had married as planned, if his parents had never died, I’d be well on my way to widow-hood by now. I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet, though. I feel robbed of the opportunity to care for Wesley during this time, robbed of the chance to be with him during his last good years, or months. Or weeks.

I read and read everything I can find online, as if I’m somehow going to find a cure for Wesley, or a cure for the aching strain I feel in my heart.

Aaron sends me a text from the hospital, where he is working the night shift. He wants to know how I’m doing, how the packing is going. I stand and look at my apartment, where I haven’t packed a single box. I type out a quick response saying I’ve been procrastinating, but then quickly delete it. I don’t want to give him the impression that I’m not excited about moving in with him, because I am, even though at this very moment I feel excited about exactly nothing. Aaron’s not the type to get self-conscious from a flippant text. Still, given my reaction to Wesley’s illness earlier today, I feel I ought to tread lightly, so I respond:

Me: Moving slowly. Could have used that bagel earlier today, I think. Now carb-deprived and lethargic.

I put a little heart emoji at the end so he knows we’re all good, and then I head into the kitchen, where I start pulling plates from the cabinet and wrapping them one by one in the bone-colored packing paper the moving company delivered with the boxes yesterday. I fold and flip and fold again, hoping that my ministrations will be sufficient to protect the ceramic dishes as they travel downtown in the back of the moving truck. I find myself progressing too quickly through the recycled packing paper, using too many sheets per dish, and I berate myself for having declined the moving company’s packing service, where the professionals come in and pack up your kitchen or other areas. The additional charge would have been negligible compared with the cost of the move itself, but I figured I could wrap breakables just as easily as anyone else and that I might as well save the money. I place the wrapped plates into a brown cardboard box, one after another, thinking all the while that they will most likely end up shattered, useless shards of memory.

I’VE BEEN DISTRACTEDat work all week. We finished clawing our way through a few final boxes of documents for the chewing tobacco case on Monday night, and since then, I’ve had almost three full days to work on Moe’s I-589 and supporting documentation. I think I’m just flying under the radar and none of the senior attorneys have realized I’m not currently busting my butt on some corporate, billable case. As I study up on Moe’s history and dig for additional historical or political details that will bolster his application, I am struck by the staggering amount of information I myself have learned from working on this case. As much as I was a diligent student throughout my schooling, I never learned anything about the tension between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar. In fact, I was never taught anything about Myanmar at all. I can still spout all sorts of trivia about the Magna Carta or King George III, but when it comes to actual current events in countries that do not have a clear impact on the United States, I am more ignorant than I care to admit.

Only from working on this case have I learned that Myanmar is also called Burma, that the countries those labels denote are one and the same, except that the different terms are politically loaded, so people had better choose carefully which one they use. I was also previously unaware that there is a place in the world where Buddhists behave violently. It’s antithetical to everything I thought I knew about Buddhism. The more I learn about Moe’s past, the better I understand the fear and torment he has suffered at the hands of his country’s military, though the militants would claim that Myanmar is not his country, that his ethnic status as a Rohingya deprives him of any of the rights of citizenship. Regardless of the citizenship question, the violence and destruction that have been foisted relentlessly upon his people take my breath away again and again. Coming to the United States was his last hope, and it’s on me to make sure he receives permission to stay here. No pressure or anything.

This morning, I spoke on the phone with a country conditions expert who will be emailing me a report that I can attach to the I-589 to support Moe’s story. I also have those articles that Aaron found for me, many of which I’m planning to photocopy and affix to the application as additional supporting material.