Free Breathers by S. G. Browne

being assaulted with obscenities and disparaging remarks. I can still hear Rita's laughter as we were loaded into the Animal Control van. The laughter wasn't nervous or contemptuous, but full and free—the way someone would laugh on a roller coaster when they forgot their fear and realized it was much more fun to enjoy the ride.
    At the SPCA, Rita and I were given separate holding cages across from one another. Kind of like Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison in the original
Planet of the Apes.
As we stood at the front of our cages, holding on to the bars with our faces pressed against the metal, both of us smiling and not saying a word, I half expected a uniformed gorilla to walk past and beat us back into our cages.
    Rita's mother came to get her not long after we arrived. Before she left, Rita came over to my cage and asked me if Iwas okay. I nodded and gave her a thumb up. Then she motioned me forward, leaned up to the bars, and kissed me on the lips.
    “I'll see you soon, Andy,” she said, and then sauntered away like a goddess.
    When I smile at that memory, there's no sense of the mischief my mother saw in my previous smile. But neither Mom nor Dad notice. They're too busy talking about me in the third person.

… thirty-two … thirty-three … thirty-four …
    I'm sitting in my therapist's office, watching the red numbers on the digital clock tick off the silence again second by second. Nearly five minutes have elapsed since I sat down in the chair and Ted just sits there over my right shoulder, tapping his pen on his notepad, making little faces. He has fewer wrinkles than last time, which means he had another Botox injection.
    The air freshener in the corner hisses, releasing a breath of lilac into the room.
    “How are you feeling today, Andrew?”
    I think a moment, then scribble my answer on my dry erase board:
    Anxious.
    Another two minutes go by. I hope we're not going to sit here for the entire session like this. Otherwise, I could have stayed home and watched
Mystic Pizza
on FX.
    … seventeen … eighteen … nineteen …
    “You felt anxious last time as well, didn't you?” he says.
    At least I know Ted's taking notes. Either that or he's projectinghis own anxiety onto me. After all, he is sitting in a room alone with a zombie.
    “Perhaps we should explore the source of your anxiety,” says Ted.
    I sigh. It doesn't take much exploration to determine that someone who's been made an outcast from society and spends most of his days watching cable television and drinking wine and coveting freedoms prohibited by law might suffer from occasional anxiety. I've done my best to accept my situation and all of the trials it entails. One of Helen's favorite sayings is:
    ACCEPT YOUR REALITY.
    So I try. But ever since Halloween, I've had a harder time accepting mine. I thought the feeling would go away but, if anything, it's grown more pronounced. Over the past few days I've found myself venturing out after my parents have gone to bed, wandering through the gully, barely making it back to the wine cellar before curfew. It's as though I'm searching for something and I can't figure out what it is.
    Ideally, that's what a therapist is supposed to help you with. Understanding yourself and your behaviors. Your motives. Your desires. I'm thinking most Breathers who need that kind of help don't end up sitting in an office with an artificially preserved, self-absorbed therapist whose idea of personal growth is reconstructive surgery.
    Ted's tapping his pen on his notepad again and making faces. I glance up once more at the digital clock, at the seconds counting away the minutes, at the minutes consuming the hour, and I wonder if Ted is ever going to get around to exploring the source of my anxiety.
    “What was your childhood like?” he asks.
    I roll my eyes and wonder how many of Ted's patients commit suicide.
    I consider giving him the stock answer, the always bland and perfunctory
Fine
or
Normal.
Which it was. Dad