LITMIR.BIZ

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to my heart. The second photo was of Rex Galore in full costume and full color, breathing fire, and when I saw the photo all over again it was as though he were the one who made me warm that day, not the sun at all but Rex’s breath against my skin, his fire act. I dropped the photos on the cot and fished in my bra again until I found my Clown Union card plastered to the sweat of my lower left boob. It came up stuck to my prize patron saint trading card, St. Julian. There was ink on my skin where the card stuck, transferred and reversed into a tattoo by the heat.

      The union card lay damp and ragged in the nurse’s clean palm. She put it on the counter.

      “I don’t leave home without it,” I said.

      The nurse didn’t say “crazy” but she did say “social worker.” She patted my leg. “Let’s get someone for you to talk to, all right?”

      “Talk to?” Talk therapy was clown treatment. I could barely hear over the knock and flutter of my own pounding heart, the buzz in my head. I needed a doctor. I gathered my wheezy breath. “Do most people take a fast ride here in the Blood Mobile just for the conversation?”

      If I had a broken bone, a concussion, or was in shock, they wouldn’t sign me up with their social worker. What if I were an old man, overweight, near the end of a life of beef and sherry? That’d show a history of self-induced statistics toward cardiac arrest—slow suicide. But still, that man would get more than a layman’s priest.

      I was a clown and got clown treatment: placating voices, a lack of concern. It was Clown Bashing Lite. I said, “If I were a sacred yellow Hopi clown, my people wouldn’t treat me like this.”

      The face swabber came at me again with her damp cotton ball. “Treat you like what, dear?”

      Dear?

      “That’s exactly what I mean!” I pointed at her. I couldn’t explain. She wouldn’t understand, and nothing would change anyway. But if I were a Hopi clown, it might be said that I looked into the grave and climbed back out, traversed a fine tightrope and made it back for an encore. I’d earn a place of honor.

      Instead, the male nurse told the swabber, “She fainted on the street. Fell down.” He made an arm gesture, like a tree falling, from elbow to palm. “Maybe hit her head.”

      The fall was a symptom, not the cause. I said, “I didn’t hit my head.”

      My left arm pulsed and buzzed, my head hummed; my heart beat against my breastbone like a fist throwing a punch. I caught my breath and said, “How about a doctor? Could I talk to a doctor?”

      The triage nurse said, “Do you have family we could call?”

      The photos lay curled on the cot. I had all the family I needed in Rex Galore. Better than a phone call, they could bring Rex home, fly him up from San Francisco, steal him away from his interview with Clown College. Then I’d be cured.

      When Rex was in town, I’d tell him about the baby we lost. I’d look into his painted face, his brown eyes circled with blue. I’d tell him about the rubber chicken, our pet Plucky, our only child, now gone. After I told him, I’d sleep.

      I hadn’t slept in a week.

      I needed to lie down with the solidness of Rex’s bony knuckles, his knobby knees next to mine, his skinny butt and wide acrobat’s shoulders and the length of him stretched out on the bed beside me. His arm would be an awkward rock of a pillow below my head. My chest was tight and my hands were numb. With clumsy hands, I scrawled Rex’s name and a phone number, the number for a clown hostel. I’d seen the hostel once, where it sat on a field of green and overlooked the blue of the San Francisco Bay.

      The nurse said, “Long distance?” Like she expected instead a whole family nearby, maybe packed into a tiny Studebaker idling in the hospital parking lot.

      “He’s the only family I’ve got,” I said.

      The second photo, my parents? That was ancient, ancient history.

      A doctor listened to my chest. Only then did they hook me to an EKG. The EKG spit out a code of dancing lights. On the electrocardiogram, I watched my heart like a muted mouth open wide; it screamed one silent word repeatedly. The emergency room doctor read my heart’s code, and made the translation: Ni-tro, Ni-tro, Ni-tro.

      That was the word, my heart’s demand, the blood pump’s room service order.

      Abnormal Sinus Rhythm, the doctor said. Too little blood pressure in the chambers. “We’ll set you up with a cardiologist,” he said. “Get a second opinion.”

      They gave me nitroglycerin. They gave me potassium. Eensy weensy pills to do a big, big job. I would’ve liked nitroglycerin first thing—that tiny tab of a pill under my tongue was better than breathing, better than food. In seconds it brought my arms into circulation, put my head on my spine, made my spine calm again down my back, my chest at ease.

      Somebody said what I had was a Heart Attack. Cardiac arrest.

      I lay covered with a thin hospital blanket, shivering under the cooling water of the IV drip. In ICU, instead of heart attack, they said Wait for the cardiologist. Wait for his diagnosis. Then my condition became a heart problem, an episode, a bad spell. Anxiety.

      The staff said it was a flutter, palpitations, a murmur. That bird against the window. With each passing minute the need for potassium and nitroglycerin drifted into the faded corners of collective memory, off to intermission, a perpetual smoke break in the cafeteria of the False Alarm Wing.

      It happened, but nobody believed it.

      Don’t tell doctors your dreams, ever. Don’t tell them your menstrual cycle. Don’t say you felt anything in your head, or that you might’ve known. If they ask about street drugs, which they will, say no, no matter what. If you say, I feel anxious all the time, you’ll get Valium. Otherwise, you’ll get what they call “mood equalizers,” daily doses of who knows what, a gambler’s crapshoot in tinctures of chemicals.

      As a clown on the street, I had to keep my wits. I couldn’t take their chemicals.

      Don’t tell doctors anything.

      A woman came to my room and asked, “Are you a certified latex-free clown? I run activities in the children’s wing, and we’re always looking. So many kids have allergies these days—”

      I reached for my bag and pulled out a handful of balloons. She jumped back, like I’d released biological warfare, and left just as fast.

      The intake nurse found me in ICU. She dropped my torn slip of paper on the nightstand. “Mr. Galore is unavailable. We’ve tried a dozen times.”

      Worst of all—and what I did—don’t cry even when they don’t help you, even when they only want a urine sample to charge you for a drug test you don’t need, even when the third or fourth doctor asks you politely, again, about the cocaine you already told them all you don’t use.

      Clowns and coke, clowns as junkies and drunks—doctors can’t see it any other way, but I was an artist. The junkie drunk clown thing wasn’t in my bag of tricks.

      THE NEXT MORNING, THE HOSPITAL CURTAIN WAS PULLED back from around my bed with a sharp scrape of metal rings on a metal bar. “Breakfast,” a man sang. He put a tray on a tiny table across my waist and powered up the bed until I was sitting. “Wake up. Let’s get some lights on.”

      I said, “I like it dim.” The room was a quiet cave, a hiding place, time immaterial.

      He snapped on a light as though he hadn’t heard me, then said, “Or maybe this one, over here,” and flicked on another beaming fluorescent.

      “Off is good,” I said.

      “Or maybe a reading lamp,” and he turned on a third, out of my reach. Soon the whole room was blasting bright, and it was clear who ran the show.

      A dietician’s note on the side of the breakfast tray read, “Low fat, low sodium,

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