Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets Read Free Page A

night Jorie came into my room and said she heard me crying. I told her about the dream and she told me about a dream she had where she was a teacher.
    “Who wants to be a teacher?” she said. “I don’t want to be in school all day teaching people stuff I already know.”
    I can’t remember what I said. Probably nothing. Jorie didn’t always make sense to me when we were little.
    That night, to help me sleep, Jorie gave me one of her stuffed animals—a shark with these huge felt teeth.
    “This shark eats bad dreams,” she said.
    I carried it everywhere for months because it was soft and because it really did make my dreams go away.
    Tonight, thinking of that shark, I put the journals back—loosely and disorganized, the way my sister would prefer.
    I have a moment of profound, stomach-aching, palm-sweating guilt. I have many moments of guilt, actually, but this one feels acute and fresh. I’m not supposed to be in this room at night when my sister isn’t around and isn’t coming back.
    I’m among the reasons she’s not here.
    I know she wasn’t happy or safe here, but maybe if I’d helped her . . . . There are certain things that I did and certain things I failed to do.
    Then, life decides to freak me the heck out: My cell phone vibrates with a text from Jorie! There’s no actual text, just a close-up image of some orange berries on thin limbs against an intense blue sky. I reply, asking if she’s okay, if she needs anything. She’s probably far away, falling asleep. I wait a few minutes but get no response.
    I decide to leave the room forever, but then I step on The Board. A perfectly inconvenient floorboard located in a place where it cannot be avoided. It acts as an alarm, letting out the kind of jagged belch that can rouse even the heaviest of sleepers (i.e., my father).
    As Jorie probably did many times, I freeze. I am convinced that I can remove my weight from the board without creating a follow-up—and more alarming—belch.
    I have a few memories about this damn floorboard and the fights it started, but for the moment I begin to slowly lift my foot. Microscopically slow. In my head, I know I’m making no sound. I pretend it’s outer space in my sister’s room. Things happen but sound waves don’t travel.
    In reality, though, the sound is not unlike a starving lion about to chainsaw through a thousand crying baby caribou.
    “What the hell is going on?” My father’s voice cares not for walls. He speaks, you hear it.
    I dart for the door, but once I’m in the hallway, the Brute spots me.
    “What are you doing in her room?”
    I turn around and see my father standing there—he’s an unimposing man this late at night. He sleeps in tightie-whities and an undershirt with yellow pit stains. It’s not that he’s a messy man—out of shape, unattractive, bearlike—or anything. He’s normally a shaven, successful man who lunches with people. He deals in commercial real estate. He once grabbed Jorie’s forearm so hard it bruised.
    But in the cool glow of the evening, this is my lame father. His knees look girlish and bony. He reeks of cigarettes. He is angry.
    I say I haven’t done anything in Jorie’s room.
    “I’m gonna bolt that room shut. Now go to bed. You’re rude, making noise at
whatever-the-fuck-o’clock
it is.”
    I apologize and go to my room, ready for another sleepless night. I don’t even mutter a “yawp” before closing the door.

5.
    FOR A YEAR , I’ve been seeing an imaginary therapist. Her name is Dr. Bird. She is a large pigeon, human-size. She wears no clothes. Because she’s a bird. I imagine that we’re meeting in a dim therapy office. She doesn’t have a desk or a chair. She will pace and circle and bob her head while I talk.
    Pigeons strike me as good listeners—they discern the voices of mates over the cacophony of the natural world. They move the right way too. A pigeon’s head-tilts suggest the kinds of things that I imagine therapists say: