So my little brother’s lying in a Chicago hospital bed, having had three seizures in less than twenty-four hours. I am doing what I can: I took a personal day from work and I’m lying in my Brooklyn bed, watching my dingy white curtains bounce against the air from the air conditioner, tracing the gray smudges on the ceiling from wintertime candle burning, trying to ignore the tension headache that always happens when I cry.

I imagine what his seizures must be like. I guess an intense acid trip, twelve hours of weird compressed into minutes. “No, I don’t really see colors,” he told me yesterday when I called him on the phone. His words came deep and slow, his brain soggy from too much electicity – this is how our mother, a native of a Thai village, endearingly pronounces it – and too much drugs to quiet the electicity. “I just have a feeling right before when I know one’s gonna happen.”

I feel bad taking his energy; I know Dad just called him, but it’s good to hear his voice. I imagine his big body on the bed, 6’6” and heavily muscled from lifting weights and aggressively manipulating video game controllers. I think of the off-white phone that must sit on the maple veneer nightstand. Maybe he has some ridiculous baby blue hospital clothing on. He’s far too big for the standard togs, I think. He’s my baby brother.

So I am watching the bottom of my curtains flutter and idly wondering if my period is on its way. I need a reason for the gloom. In college, it was easy: still dealing with the three suicides that happened over a course of six weeks at my tiny residential magnet school, and then two friends of mine sexually assaulted me. So I always had an excuse for why I stayed in bed, covers to chin, until the light outside turned periwinkle and fuzzy.

But this shouldn’t make me sad. He’s going to be fine, it’s been happening for nearly a decade and he’s not dead yet. Our gentle giant. But sometimes I feel – I fear – that I don’t know my brother, that I won’t know my brother. We role play, talk about proven topics. Whenever we talk I feel there is a supertext hovering above the actual words being spoken. Maybe it’s just me. I love you and I miss you.

Now I wish we could discard with the script and jump right into the supertext. What’s important to you? What are your greatest fears? How do you experience the world?

“Well, the doctor said that heavy computer use and video games can exacerbate those with epileptic disorders.” Before I spoke with Danny yesterday, I spoke with his girlfriend. She is in her early forties and he in his mid-twenties; she’s a photographer and he the sports editor of a newspaper outside of Chicago. When I saw her MySpace page it seemed a little too pimped out for someone with an eighteen-year-old son, but I’ve been impressed with how she’s been handling the seizures. Plus, she obviously loves my little brother. I haven’t met her yet but I like her.

“So does this mean no more Xbox?” I ask.

“No, the doctor said that Dan should keep being Dan and do what he loves, but every forty minutes or so he should rest his eyes and walk around.”

I think of timers. I process life mediated through ten minute increments. Rather than letting myself get lost in web surfing or blog coding or living, I set a kitchen timer for an appropriate amount of time – all depends on what else I’ve got going that day – and when the bell rings, I move on to the next task.

A few weeks ago, at the risk of completely scaring him off, I shared this strategy with the man I am seeing, someone who appears at first meeting so spacey that our many mutual friends had incorrectly assumed he’d done a lot of shrooms and acid while we were all at Yale. He’d been talking about getting a video game system, but was worried that he’d be up until 4 a.m. all the time. I offered timers as a fix.

“Timers,” he said, eyes in their customary wide position. I could see the gears in his brain moving. “That’s a good idea.”

When I saw him on Sunday night, at the same time my little brother had the first of his seizure trio, timers came up again.

“I’ve been thinking about your timer system,” he said over a couple dozen oysters.

“Yeah?” I play it cool, although I am pleased that I’ve even crossed his mind over the past couple of weeks. It’s hard to tell.

“Yeah. I’ve been using Outlook to tell me what to do. Go running. Play basketball.”

“Call ANP,” I joke. Or not.

He laughs. “I haven’t paid attention to any of the reminders yet.”

“Did you get your big screen TV yet?” I ask.

As he explains his embarrassment about the size of the TV – 51”; he had no idea; he’s not good at math; it’s growing on him – it dawns on me that we are two adults. I glance up and notice an older gentleman, suit and tie, at the end of the bar watching my date and I. What does he see? Two attractive people of indeterminate ethnic origin – like me, Domingo is mixed – downing two dozen oysters and several glasses of white wine at the bar of Aqua Grill. New York City. Soho. Sunday night. Laughing, gesticulating, enjoying each other’s company. I’m wearing a strapless black dress and despite the humidity am having a good hair day.

How does this look to the gentleman watching us? What if the younger, depressed version of me was watching us? Can my brother sit on bar stools, or does he think about seizing, spilling off and cracking his skull?

“And did you get your video game thing?” I ask.

He tells me the name but I forget. Xbox, PS2, PlayStation. They are all the same to me. Just as women waste beautiful Saturdays yapping with their girlfriends about their relationships, men waste hours huddled next to each other on couches playing video games or spectating sports.

“Well, good, because I got you a little something.” I reach into my purse and grab a lump wrapped in tissue paper that I’d picked up earlier that day.

“What’s this?” His voice is laughing. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Don’t worry, I really broke the bank on it.”

“What is this,” he asks while unraveling the tissue paper.

Any other date with him and I would’ve taken these utterances, filtered them through my confirmation bias, and taken them as signs he didn’t really want to spend time with me. Data points. But tonight, something’s different. Maybe it’s the dress, maybe the business trip I’ve just returned from has forced my subconscious to chuck outdated notions of self once and for all. I don’t know what it is but something is different, within me and therefore between us. I feel calm and confident, not anxious about whether or not we’ll be seeing each other again. I just know.

He laughs when the tissue paper is removed to reveal a timer, puts his arm around my waist and kisses me on my cheek to thank me.

“Alright, you’ve got seven minutes to tell me when you first realized you were brown,” I say, setting the timer. “Go.”

It’s just that my heart is held inside a cage, a gridded cage that loops through a few algorithms before making its way up through my brain. Data points (over)analyzed, time increments steadily metered, systems created for when money can be spent and emotions can be lent.

I consider other humans to be complicated machines, sit and contemplate what motivates them. In workplace dealings, I can generally zero in on someone’s fears and drivers (they are not discrete) and motivate them accordingly. I have never met a negotiation session that I did not rule. But my friendships and romantic dealings have been more difficult. My fear of vulnerability has resulted in Rube Goldberg machinations of the heart that even I can’t decode. Love, feelings, faith, the irrational: my little robot-box throws exceptions. Electicity.

My heart has seizures.

Neat. Little. Squares.

“Did you see the article in The New York Times about Williams Syndrome?” Domingo asks me. He’s on pinot grigio #3, I’m on muscadet #2, and 24 oysters are gone.

I shake my head. But this is something I love about Domingo: he reads. Five tall bookshelves heaving with books, a couple of Apple boxes, and a large aquarium are the only real items in his apartment. (And now a 51” non-flat-screen TV and a video play thing.) He has more books than I do and might even be smarter than me. It intimidates and thrills me.

“It’s a genetic condition that results in exceptionally talkative people who lack any understanding of social nuance.”

I turn to him, tilt my head, wait a beat – one timer tick – and then reply, “Are you suggesting I have Williams?”

The next day at work I find the article (“The Gregarious Brain”, David Dobbs, July 8, 2007) online. It’s informative for my workplace algorithms, and illuminate much of my overachiever fumblings to fit in.

… a central dilemma of human existence: to survive we must relate and work with others, but we must also compete against them, lest we get left behind… We want to keep a place in the group – we must – and doing so requires not only charming others but also showing we can contribute to their success. This requires a finely calibrated display of smarts, savvy, grit and hustle. Show too little, and you’re voted off the island for being subpar. Show too much, and you’re ousted as a conniving threat.

The article also contains a definition of environment as, “the endless string of challenges and opportunities that life presents any person starting at birth.”

I think of how well I perform under pressure. When Danny had a seizure in Target several years ago, I calmly stepped in and held him up so he wouldn’t flail limbs and body against boxes of neatly organized silverware sets. When a classmate had a seizure during my accounting final in business school, I immediately got up, strode down the aisle of the large lecture hall, and held the man in my arms while hundreds of panicked classmates looked on. Fixing problems I can handle; the metal bars lock down around my heart — like trap doors in any action/adventure flick requiring costume and starring Harrison Ford – and the fix-it robot arrives. I am calm and even – some have referred to it as eerie – but I shuttle everyone smoothly through crisis.

Is this because the “endless string of challenges” that I’ve faced since childhood forced a premature leadership role onto me as I navigated various crises (real or inflated)? Is Danny’s laissez-faire, actively unplanned life his response to his string of challenges? Try planning for fifty minutes of anything when you could have a seizure at any moment! And what use stockpiling chocolates, cash, or pleasure? Life is deeply finite. Better to indulge. Or, to use the word that my childhood self used to describe childhood Danny’s relationship with Wyler’s: better to guzzle.

I measure and hedge risk because I fear what I see happening to him. He lets life all hang out because why not? Taking his meds every day and following the rules hasn’t stopped the seizures from coming.

NB: video game thingy

“Are you doing okay?” It’s my older sister. I’ve just told her that Danny’s in the hospital and now she’s cooing at me from her hotel room in D.C.

It annoys me. I’m not interested in feeling right now. I want to fix. Don’t touch me, I think. “I’m fine.” I look over at the TV and let it distract me while Rahnee continues talking.

I don’t want to talk about my fear he’ll get his by a bus while seizing, or fall into a subway track, or lose control behind the wheel of a car. I don’t want to talk about the fact that I’m afraid he and I will never be able to dive into our supertext, that we’ll stay on script. I don’t want to talk about any of this, or how I am feeling, or whether or not I am doing okay. My heart is locked inside its cage.

Danno & Rahnee on her wedding day

After drinks, I let Domingo convince me into sitting me on the back of his motorcycle for a spin.

“But I’m wearing a dress!” I protest.

“You were wearing a dress last time, too.” He’s pulling an extra helmet out of his bag.

“Good point. Come to think of it, I always wear dresses when I’m with you.” He makes me feel like a girl. Or, I allow myself to feel like a girl with him.

He motions me towards him, and plops the helmet on my head, securing the strap under my chin then flipping the eye cover up. I put my purse and my book – some faux-sense by Habermas – into his bag, and then swing onto the sport for the passenger.

Sitting on a sport bike like his, your body is basically hunkered into a low squat. My dress is hiked up well above mid-thigh, and my hands alternate between pushing against the body of the bike in front of him and holding tightly onto him. Occasionally our helmets bop into one another. My thighs squeeze against the bike, gripping tightly. We are off.

At a stoplight, my dancing eyes look over and are met by those of a scowling middle aged woman in an SUV. Her husband looks on from the driver’s seat with a hint of wist. It occurs to me that this woman may actually be my age. It occurs to me that she cannot see the shit eating grin beneath my helmet.

The light turns green. Domingo growls for me to hang on. I press the palm of my right hand firmly against his muscly abdomen. I close my eyes and let the inky night ribbon around me. I feel the vibrating warmth of the bike beneath my thighs and Domingo’s firm body inside of my arms, as the summertime air speedily yanking algorithms and the tick-tick-tick of timers out of me and onto the pavement of the West Side Highway. I feel calm and happy and relaxed and excited all at once, in a rush. The cage is up. He guns the engine and I let out a squeal, holding him more tightly. “We’ve got to get you one of these,” he shouts.

When we dismount, my heart is bursting, drunk on muscadet, adrenaline, and the warmth of Domingo’s company. In this delirium and perhaps fuelled by a different kind of timer, I concentrate on not speaking the thought that beats loudly in my giddy brain: I want to have, like, 10,000 of your babies.

2or3.com. I ain’t greedy.

“Why can’t they figure out what’s going on in his head?” asks my younger sister as we eat dinner together in our Brooklyn apartment.

“I don’t know,” I reply, thinking how difficult it is to get inside anyone’s head.

“Understanding one another, it seems, is our greatest cognitive challenge,” reads a line from the article about Williams syndrome.

My cell phone alerts me of a new text message. Domingo. “I love my timer!”

I imagine him in his luxury apartment, sitting in the glow of a TV so large it topples over the TV stand. He’s playing video games, probably with his buddy Nerz. Maybe the timer went off just before Nerz was about to win.

I think of my little brother, having to get up and walk around after forty minutes of playing video games. I think of what I can do, here in Brooklyn, for him in Chicago. It’s not like we’re in Target anymore; I can’t hold on to him, be his cage, keep him safe.

And so instead I decide that I will do what I can. I will consciously attempt to wade into the supertext. I will be aware and present when he flies to New York City this weekend. I will allow my love for him to grip me, to seize me with life’s pain, life’s joy.

I will buy him a timer.

And then he’ll give me this look