I Shadow the Psychiatrist

Placating lighting, paintings of lighthouses, a god's-eye view of the city out one side of the small office.

There was this young black girl sitting across from us, her tiny shoulders rounded like folded wings. Dug out eyes, glowing skin. She'd cut off her hair. It stood up all over, bird-like, in perky, indifferent tufts.

"And depression?" asks the doctor, pen hovering. "How is the depression?" he said, as if it was a pet she fed;

she raised her face slowly. Locked on me, and we just looked at each other, into the black center of each other's eyes.

After a long time--"It drowning me," she said.

She looked back down, silently rubbing her palms up and down her thighs.

"I can't ever get my head above the dirty water," she said, slowly.

"So--no better," said the doctor. He checks the box.

There was a military man looking at us from somewhere deep inside his head, from the other side of the world.

"I can't sleep, doctor. I can't;" he whispered, "they're waiting, all of them, waiting for me to. I know it. Their faces when I close my eyes; you tell me I don't."

"And depression?" said the doctor. He checked the box insomnia. "Are you having any depression?"

A manic blonde with a kitten's face and five kids out in the waiting room.

Her spanking new boyfriend shepherds her into the chair. The skin is still brightly tender, pale where his wedding band was. She watches me warily. Watches him warily. They are as faithless as snakes.

Depression for the them both, check check.

An old drunk, a young drunk, a beaten woman. A forgetful woman.

A boy with eyes like basement windows. He'd beaten his lover, throwing mangoes after her in the street.

"I'm a monster."

You aren't.

They came in and sat in the old chair, one after the other, and all of them wept. There was a box to check for each of them.

The boxes to check made it seem very simple, and maybe it was.

People like geometric objects, bobbing in and out of tetris.

The doctor says the right things kindly, writing out his scripts of mercy, and never looks at the clock.

Between the patients he shuts the door and turns full face to me, hands on his knees.
He'd been a surgeon for twenty years before he became a psychiatrist.
He loves people, he says. That was how he got into it.

Inside and out, I say. You love people inside and out, I say.

He grins at me, gregarious handsome Arabic man with his studious eyes.

"Who listens to you?" I say.

The receptionist came in when we'd talked too long.

"You have a crowd forming, doctor," she says gently, exactly the kind of receptionist you should have in an office where there are paintings of lighthouses;



the end of the day. Saying goodbye, and the doctor takes my hand.

(I don't think this happens to most people when they've finished shadowing. Sometimes I think there must be something distractingly wrong with me, that people paying attention can see so clearly through my skin; something very, very wrong in me.)

"You are going to do well," he said to me. "I wanted to tell you this. You are very sincere, and you have a good heart. Small things get to you too much, I think. -You don't mind?- You are going to be very much more than fine. Okay, sweetheart?"

Saying this last part carefully, the word sweetheart, a word that might break in his mouth like glass. A blessing with edges.

"Okay," he says.

My hands are cool where his held me.

The sound of silence in the long, carpeted hallway; the lights unblinking over me.
In the elevator a crooked old man, and I smile at him.

"I used to stand up straight," he says.

"Oh."

A drove of old ladies press through the doors gently, patiently, like cows. I almost expect them to low.
-The powdery smell, the old air smell, of very old people filling the elevator. Someone pushes the button, and we start to go down,

rows of little white boxes, outlined in black, on unlined paper

"You just stand up straight for the rest of us," says the man.
The women titter politely.

They can't see my crooked little Grinch heart inside its crooked little cage.

And so--I smile back. I can't see theirs either.