Float
‘Have you floated before?’ the woman asks me.
The man next to her looks up from behind the front desk. I shake my head. The woman stands up and hands me an iPad with the terms and conditions. She invites me to take a seat on the bulbous couch opposite us. I perch on the curve of its cushioned seat and look around the reception area. My eyes zig-zag down trembling lines of lime green painted across the walls. These rows of leafless trees feebly contain the man, woman and me in the reception.
Two men emerge from rooms along the corridor leading from reception, bulldozing the silence flat. Their jandals make happy slapping sounds against their wet feet.
‘That was my first time floating,’ one of them says as he sits down, hauling his gym bag onto the carpet. The woman’s lips press into a smile. She walks to the tea counter and flicks on the jug, then retreats down the corridor. The men discuss their floats. As they talk, their gazes flicker towards the man behind the desk. He nods and smiles at them, but says nothing. The woman returns to make the men their cups of tea. The men are silent as they drink, tense like dogs waiting for the man to throw them something, but nothing comes. Before they leave, they promise they will return.
I turn back to the iPad. There are a lot more terms and conditions than I had expected. It says you can’t float if:
- You are feeling sick: cough, fever, and shortness of breath
- You have open wounds
- You have Infectious diseases
- You suffer from psychotic attacks
- You had diarrhea in the past 14 days
- You’re menstruating or in the first trimester of pregnancy
- You’re under the influence of drugs or alcohol
- You have recently dyed your hair or applied tanning products
I have my period, but I don’t want to cancel my booking now and pay a fee. I pretend I don’t see that term and wonkily sign the iPad with my finger. A YouTube tutorial on how to float pops up on the screen. The presenter is a woman wearing a polka-dot bikini. She talks through each step of the process. The montage of close-ups on the presenter lathering soap on her arms and legs seems to go on forever before she gets in the tank to float. The tutorial ends.
The woman drifts over to me.
‘Your room is ready,’ she whispers, looking down at the floor.
I follow the woman down the corridor. The rooms all have different names, like Cosmic Room and Lake Room. She opens the door to the Forest Room. Inside the dimly lit room there is a stretched photo of some trees printed onto the wallpaper. The photo is the start and end of the room’s forest theme.
I feel seedy inside the Forest Room. There’s a basin, which has a tube of Vaseline, ear plugs, cotton buds and various creams. There’s a shower and a toilet. The rest of the room is taken up by the sensory deprivation tank. Its curved lid is parted open like an abandoned cockle shell with a pool of seawater inside. The woman clears her throat and repeats the same speech from the YouTube tutorial. I feel tense. I can’t tell if it’s her lack of eye contact or mine.
‘There’s no wrong way to float,’ she ends her speech.
I can think of at least one wrong way to float, but I don’t say anything. She closes the door and I’m alone.
I’m careful to follow every instruction (except the menstruating one) given the terms and conditions, tutorial and speech. I have no idea what will happen if I don’t. I take off my clothes, shower, step into the tank and close the lid. The milky water is shallow and warm, but not hot. It gently receives me. Purple lights radiate up through the water from the tank’s floor. I press a button on the inside of the tank for the ten minute transition music. I press another button to turn the lights off, which plunges me into darkness.
Soon after the transition music stops I panic. The salt water stings my face and I have to keep grasping for the water bottle to spray water at my eyes. I turn the purple lights on again. I look around me. Everything is fine. I turn the lights off and take several deep breaths.
After a while, I’m not sure how long, maybe five minutes or maybe much longer, I think about love. The other day I watched a documentary about wedding photography in China. Near the end, an elderly woman who had just taken wedding photos with her husband for the first time talked about love.
‘When we come together, we remove all the edges from ourselves, which halves us… after the edges are removed, you will be complete,’ she said.
The water is the same temperature as me so I don’t know where I end and the water begins. I think this is what it’s like to love you. When you hold me, I don’t know where your hands end and my back begins. The lines that once defined the end of me and the beginning of you have dissolved.
I told you this recently and you asked me when I first felt that way. I thought about a time about a year ago. It was New Year’s Eve. I was at a party where I felt heavy. Everyone else moved in cohesion, like a dance, but I kept losing my balance. You were sitting on the lawn in a circle of people. You glowed, the only one caught in the light from the setting sun. My boyfriend at the time was also in the group. He didn’t look up as I walked over. He hadn’t talked to me most of the night. I told him that I felt panicked, but he had drunk too much and didn’t know how to help me. I told him I felt sick, but the dance distracted him; he allowed it to swallow him whole. Alone, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Then you touched my arm. You sat with me and spoke, your words a gentle breeze against my hot cheeks.
I move my arms and the ripples carry me to one side of the tank. My head bumps softly against the wall. I push myself back to the middle, but end up on the other side. It takes me a while to get back to the middle and for the water to still.
A week ago, I told you what I thought our options were. I gave you five days to choose one or come up with something else. On the fifth day you told me you still didn’t know what you wanted. I was on your blue swivel chair; you were lying on your bed not expecting this conversation again. You were wearing your yellow top and your duvet was the same yellow. It was like talking to a sunflower.
‘Isn’t not knowing your choice?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ you said, your petals trembling.
‘Let’s end this.’
I gave you this option, because I knew you would refuse it. My mascara ran and my nose dripped. You got up from the bed and tucked my hair behind my ears. You wiped my eyes and nose with your hand. You held me and I became still.
I’m back in the float tank, cradled in an edgeless embrace.
I am surprised when the music comes on. It feels like it’s only been a short time, but the music means almost 90 minutes have passed. I don’t linger in the water even though the woman said I could. In the shower, I notice I am covered in a white crust, like a salt-baked fish.
When I return to the reception the woman asks me how I found my first float. Her tone is pleasant, but her eyes are flat. I feel skeptical about my own euphoria. I need someone to explain it back to me. Instead, the man and woman behind the counter run through their float deals.
‘One float is $110, but three floats are $225!’ she says.
For the first time I see a sparkle in her eyes. She gives me three pamphlets, which I tuck into my bag. I promise her I’ll come back and make my way into the rude blue of outside.
Loulou Callister-Baker is an employment lawyer and freelancer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. She has written for The Physics Room, Art News, Contemporary Hum, The Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff and Radio New Zealand. She is also the host of a podcast called Inside the Jewel Box.