Floating

She’s my Doctor. She wears earrings that dangle and sweaters with passive colors, pastels. Her skin is the kind of milky white color that reminds me of eggnog, and when I step inside her office, I choose the brown leather recliner because it smells like my father’s house.

“Mr. Lorimer,” she smiles at me. “How are we this morning?”
I had no idea how we were. I can’t speak for someone who wears chopsticks in her hair. If I had chopsticks in my hair, that’s probably the sign of a bad morning. I imagine Chinese food fights.
“Chinese food fights.”

The Doctor looks puzzled for some reason, but as she rustles through her top desk drawer she doesn’t say anything. I try to explain how I feel today.

“I’m feeling the start of that buzzing kind of feeling today.” The bottom of my feet were, in fact, tingling with vibrations. It usually starts at my feet and swallows my whole body. The doctor calls it anxiety but to me it feels like one hundred cell phones are ringing in one hundred pockets and I can’t ever seem to find one. I just keep patting the spots where I buzz.

“Yes, the buzzing. Are you feeling anxious?” She sits down and takes a sip from a large mug. When she sips her lips purse in a rounded O. She looks like a lovely fish.
“What’s anxious feel like?” I ask her. I’ve asked her before.

“Well, if you feel jumpy or nervous all the time, it probably means you’re anxious.” She makes the fish face again.

“I just feel the cell phones vibrating,” I explain. I’ve explained it before. I’ve explained how I don’t feel nervous the way I felt as a kid on the first day of school. I don’t feel jumpy the way I felt in college before a final exam. I don’t feel butterflies like during my piano recitals, or real nerves like the first time I asked Laura out to dinner.
“Laura out to dinner.”

“What’s that?” the Doctor asks. The Doctor puts her mug down, and rests her chin lightly on the back of her hand, one elbow resting gently on the arm of her squishy, white armchair. It looks like a cloud to me.

“Did I say something?” I ask her. I knew I did. I do that a lot, I knew. It will just slip out, like forgetting to close the front door, and not realizing it until someone has found your dog.

“Yes, you said ‘Laura out to dinner.’ Would you like to take Laura out to dinner tonight?”
The truth was that I hadn’t seen Laura in two weeks. She was tired of me. She was tired of the crying. She never said it, but I knew she thought deep down that men shouldn’t cry. One time she said that her father never cried.
“Her father never cried.”

“What was that?” The doctor sits upright in her chair. Her quick movement makes me jump a little.

“Did I say something again?” I know I did. I always know, without knowing.

“Yes, you said ‘her father never cried.’ Do you mean Laura’s father?” The Doctor took out her notepad and made a little mark on it with a pencil she retrieved from her hair. Pencils and chopsticks, I thought, what else could she have up there?

I’m sorry…what? I think. “I’m sorry…what?” I ask.

“Did you know Laura’s father?”

“No. He died before I even met Laura. Some problem with his lungs, I think. He was a smoker.”

“How do you know he never cried?” she asks me. I caught a brief expression of sympathy wash over her face before she could hide it. The Doctor knew that Laura must’ve said it to me. The Doctor knew why.

“You know that Laura must’ve said it,” I told her. She didn’t need me to tell her. People should never ask a question that they already know the answer to. It makes talking feel like taking a third grade test.

“How did that make you feel?” she asks. Her expression is serene this time. I notice that her brown eyeliner makes her golden eyes seem brighter. The Doctor’s eyes are a molten gold color, but Laura’s are a green that’s just like swimming naked in the river by my Dad’s house.

“Swimming naked in the river by my Dad’s house.”

“What’d you say, dear?” The Doctor asks, all eyebrows.

I wasn’t sure what I said, but I knew she had asked me a question. “What was your question?” I ask her.

“How did it make you feel when Laura told you that her father never cried?”

“It made me feel broken,” I say.

The Doctor nods, and waits. She doesn’t have her notepad out, and I am grateful.

“I felt like a broken faucet with a leak. And the sound of the leak bothers her, like it’d bother anyone in the middle of the night. That drip, drip, drip can make anyone crazy. But the faucet can’t help it, can it?”

“No, it can’t,” the Doctor assures. “You can’t help it when you cry.”

“No,” I agree. “A broken faucet can’t help it when it leaks. It just needs someone to come and fix it. It needs someone to fix it up, so it won’t make Laura crazy anymore. That drip, drip, drip can make anyone crazy. Anyone.”

“That’s why we’re here,” the Doctor confirms.

She waits a minute. She rises from her chair and walks over to her desk. She takes out a piece of paper and a pencil. Sometimes she does this.

I walk over to her desk when she motions for me to sit down in front of it. I sit down. I pick up the pencil. I’m right handed. I know what I am supposed to do. Sometimes I do this. She gives me a final smile and walks back over to the white cloud chair, to wait.

Laura, I write. I’m thinking about Laura and the way she always smells like some kind of flower. I like flowers. My mother had a garden when I was a kid. I could play in it. I could water it. The Doctor is here now. I know the Doctor, she knows me. Laura knows me too, but in a different way. Laura gets mad, and when she gets mad I think the little crease on the bridge of her nose is adorable. But it’s not a good idea to call a woman adorable when she’s mad. You can never really say what you think. You especially cant say what you feel, even though you want to. If you want people to like you, you have to tell them things that make them smile, and never under any circumstances, say things that are true. Even if you want to. Not telling the truth is the same as telling a lie. Lying is bad, but you have to do it. If you tell the truth people become afraid of you, people run away from you. People will-
“Okay, very good,” the Doctor says from the spot on the white cloud chair. “You can come back to your seat now,” she tells me. “If you would like me to see what you have written, we can discuss it. If you’d rather keep it to yourself, that’s okay too.”

She always says this. Every time I let her read it, but she always asks me anyway. Why not? I think. “Why not?” I say.

I hand her the paper and sit back down on the leather couch. It really does smell like my father’s house, I think. His house was also mostly brown: the furniture, the rugs, the walls, the brandy.
“The brandy.”
“What was that?” the Doctor asks, looking up from the page.

I shrug. “What did I say?”

“Never mind.”

She finishes reading what I just wrote. When she reads she wears small, silver-rimmed, square glasses. They make her look as intelligent as anyone can be.

“May I ask you a question about this?” she asks, looking up again. She knows she can. She knows that I give her money to ask questions like this.

“Sure,” I say.

“Do you really feel that people won’t like you unless you lie to them?”

Did I write that? I think. “Did I write that?” I say.

“You did.”

I think about this. “Yes,” I say. The Doctor waits. “Yes I feel that people will not like me unless I lie to them.”

The Doctor nods. When she nods, I imagine her dancing. “Her dancing.”

The Doctor looks at me curiously. I realize I must’ve let the dog out again, but she doesn’t ask me why I’ve said it, and I don’t ask her what I’ve said.

“People can’t handle honesty,” I tell her. She waits.

I go on: “People are afraid of the truth. Afraid of what might happen if you say true things. They don’t want to hear the bad things.”

“And this bothers you,” she nods.

“Yes. I don’t like living in a world that’s pretend. I don’t like having to say things I don’t feel. It makes what you say like air.”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow but doesn’t speak. She waits for me. She’s a patient Doctor. I’m her patient.
“ Patient.”
I take a deep breath. “When you lie, the words are on their own. There’s no love or hate or reality inside them. They are as light as a feather. If you fill your life up with a lot of a lies, if you fill your head up with ‘em, you’re liable to…float away.”
The Doctor nods. Her nodding looks like dancing again. I imagine Laura dancing. At that moment I want to call her right away. I’ll call her as soon as I get to a phone.
“I feel like I would like to call Laura when I get home,” I tell the Doctor.

The Doctor smiles a distant smile, and waits. She looks out the window. I look out the window. Down the street is an elementary school, and I can hear the children outside playing “follow the leader.” We listen to them. I can hear the full, ebbing sound of children’s laughter, like breaking waves. Right beneath the surface of laughter, I hear the sound of a little boy crying. I imagine he has fallen down. Falling down.

I think about Aunt May. I think about chocolate cake.
“Chocolate cake.”
She looks at me thoughtfully. “What about chocolate cake? Would you like some?”

Then suddenly the cell phones are ringing in every pocket on my body. I can’t hear the children, anymore, only the buzz, buzz, buzz. I vibrate so hard I feel the whole couch vibrate.

“No,” I hear myself say, from far away. “No I will not like any chocolate cake, please. I want my mom.”

“How will your mom help you?”

“She’ll take me away,” I hear myself say. “She’ll make it quiet. I don’t want any more chocolate cake.”

“Who gave you the chocolate cake, dear?”

I feel tears stream down my face. I don’t tell.

“Momma,” I hear myself cry. I’m only five years old. “Why wont she come?!”

When I open my eyes, my face is wet. “Doctor?” I ask. She’s lightly perched on the arm of the brown recliner. Her nearness to me is startling. I wonder what I have said.

“Yes?”

“The buzzing has stopped, Doctor.”

She smiles, but her smile looks sad. “I thought that it might. I’m glad that it has.”

There is silence. Her golden eyes are glistening like burning planets. Laura’s eyes glisten, but like a deep, green sea.

She looks like she would like to ask another question, but instead she says, “I’ll see you on Friday, Mr. Lorimer. Same time, if that’s okay with you.”

She always asks me if it’s okay with me. It always is.

On my way home I think about Aunt May. “Bad boys lie,” she used to tell me, “Lies are nasty stories. If you tell any stories about me,” she told me, “the devil himself will take you down to hell.”

I didn’t tell any stories. And then my head filled up with air. And I felt the emptiness in my voice. And after that, I just floated away.