Daniel has been wanting to come with me to my mom’s for a while now. Help out, he says, especially since Mom’s garage pretty much only has Dad’s old furniture. Help put things in boxes, offer to sell things (golf clubs) or trash them (200 copied CDs of ballroom dance music). That’s Daniel -- he spots a problem, announces he can handle it, and he’s right, for the most part. It’s part of why you let him stay. One of the parts, anyway.

I relay it to mom. “Tell him not worry about it,” she says. When I get back to the condo, I tell him she was fine, she had it covered, something like that.

He doesn’t know why she said no. A couple of months back I brought him in to help with her broken toilet and apparently she caught him losing his cool, imagining a stream of obscenities Mom probably heard as she was about to offer him a glass of water or something. He has no idea that happened. She’s never mentioned it to him. I’ve never mentioned it to him.

I’ve been trying to keep the holding pattern. I try, like I always do.

Here’s what goes on in my head at 3am: I watched my father lose his memory over the better part of a decade. I know what it costs. I know, distinctly, what it feels like when someone you love is explaining to you, very patiently, that there are five people coming for dinner and you need to move the chairs when it’s just you. I know what it looks like from the outside, which is its own specific kind of awful.

I also know my odds.

In the dream, I have his disease. Not even like from a vague place — I straight-up have it, in my dreams, the same way he had it, vacant look, don’t know whether I should gasp or swallow or stare off in a corner. The fear isn’t dying; it isn’t even being alone, exactly. It’s that there’d be no one in the room who knew me, before. No one who could say that’s not him, that’s the disease, he was more than this — who could hold the original version of you up against what’s happening and see the gap.

My mom had that for my dad. Imperfectly. Furiously. She did not go gently into that particular good night and neither did he. But she was there, and she knew who he’d been, and that mattered in ways I don’t have words for yet.

In the dream, I get AI android caregivers instead. Very pleasant. Very available. Maybe a twinge uncanny valley. They whisper that everything is fine, over and over, and they mean it, in the way that something optimized for a smooth exit means anything. What’s little left of my potato brain eats it up with a spoon.

The horror isn’t that they’re cruel. It’s that they’re whispering to someone who can no longer tell the difference. They’re doing exactly what they were built to do.

I wake up and the feeling lingers, which is how I know it wasn’t quite a nightmare.

Daniel has been on my couch for a while now. I’m not going to get into how we met or how he ended up there, because some of that story isn’t mine to tell. What I can tell you is that something serious happened to him — something real and violent — and when it happened, I stayed. I’m still staying.

He’s not my boyfriend, never has been. He’s my friend. The way we know each other has been, shall we say, more complicated on occasion, but boyfriend is not the word.

My mom has opinions about the word friend. Which complicates things, because she also described my ex as friend, even when we were in a decades plus relationship. “So, what kind of friend is he? Is he your friend…? Or your FRIEND?”

I’m not keeping him here because I love him, or not only because of that. It took me a while to come to this, but I’m keeping him here because I’m afraid of what happens to him if I don’t. I’m afraid of being the reason someone falls when I was standing close enough to catch them.

I have been in some version of this role — each one of my family and, now Daniel — for long enough that I’ve stopped noticing it. It’s just a Tuesday.

Mom asks it anyway.

Does he take care of you?

She asks this as she serves breakfast, a toaster-ovened 牛肉餅 and some instant coffee. She is not asking from a warm place. She watched what I did for my father, the logistics and the translating and the forms and the drives up the 880, and she is not asking because she hopes the answer is yes. She’s asking because she already knows. She’s giving me one chance to say something true before she moves on to telling me what she actually thinks.

Which is: if he’s not your boyfriend, his ass needs to pay rent.

And if he is — the glare.

I told her we were fine. We were fine. Everything was fine.

“Everything is OK.” I am trying to make it light and jovial. It’s not working.

“mm.” She said this in the way that means she has filed my answer under things she will be right about later.

At some point this all stopped being a series of emergencies and became just... how I live. Dad for years. My sister Angela, who goes missing and comes back and goes missing again, and I hold the space in between. My mom right now, daily, in the way that is its own full-time job without the title. Daniel on the couch. Someone always needs something: a form translated, a garage cleared, an answer when the phone rings at 7am and you already know the area code.

I built a life where I am necessary. Which means I am never actually alone.

Except. It also means I kind of am.

I think about the robots again, the AI caregivers that come in my dreams. The appeal: it isn’t really about a peaceful exit, or not only that. It’s simpler.

It’s that they don’t need anything from me first.

Mom’s questions still hang in the air. The feeling from the dream is still there when I wake up at 3am and the room is quiet and I do the math again, same as always, same answer.

Daniel doesn’t know about the toilet.

He will know by the time you read this.

Little. Yellow. Different.

The Android Caregivers in My Dream Are Very…