LITMIR.BIZ

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electric sun.

      I stabbed a plastic spork into the sponge of pancake, lifted it, and the heavy dough fell off the stubby tines. I tried again. Halfway to my mouth, pancake dropped to the front of my robe in a sticky smooch. I picked the food up with my fingers, syrup trailing, and licked the empty spork; the grease slick of margarine on the back of the rounded plastic was a non-food I hadn’t tasted in years.

      Mid-lick of the spork, a cardiologist ducked into my room. He reached to shake my hand, and blew into the steam on a Styrofoam cup of coffee held in his other hand. I reached back with sticky fingers, breakfast rocking like a raft on the ocean of my lap.

      “Well, yes,” the cardiologist said, and drew his hand away. “Nice to meet you.” He searched for a place to set his coffee on the bedside table, then reached for my thin paper napkin and wiped his fingers. Napkin stuck to his fingers in shredded tufts like an old man’s ear hair. He sat on the edge of my bed and puzzled over my chart like it was the Sunday Times.

      “Don’t take it personally,” he said, finally. “The long delay yesterday, the difficulty with diagnosis. We go by statistics, judge by likelihood. Thin women, young as you are, generally don’t have heart trouble.” He slid a pen from his front pocket. Made a note.

      Thin women. Clown women. Skinny girls like me.

      Not heart attacks, no. Skinny women have other problems. They double over, pelvis in knots, and drop stillborn babies in public places—bloody, tiny, and blue. Women have anxiety attacks, not heart attacks; they worry too much, burst into tears, faint. Ta da!

      Crazy.

      “It seems your mitral valve wasn’t closing properly,” he said, and made a hand gesture like a quacking duck. His thumb snapped against his fingers. His pen, still in hand, pointed up through the duck’s beak like an oversized cigar. “That made your aortal valve work overtime. Maybe a lack of potassium. Do you eat regularly?” The duck flattened, and swirled down to my plate of pancakes.

      I shrugged.

      He said, “What’d you have for lunch yesterday?”

      “I worked through lunch. A gig,” I said. “I had a latex ham sandwich. It makes pig sounds, squeals under pressure.”

      He didn’t laugh but only nodded, made a note, then tugged at an invisible beard on the tip of his chin. I said “It’s a prop, right? For the joke: how’s a ham sandwich like a stoolie?”

      “What else, what else?” He waved a hand in circles, like a traffic cop asking me to pull forward.

      “Exploding bonbons, smoking gum. A self-refilling pitcher of white fake milk. That’s a sight gag that wins every time. I’m trying to cut back on the fake milk, but it’s hard. Audiences love it, Doc. I can’t give it up.”

      He made another note. Without looking at me, he said, “What about real food?”

      Real food made me want to vomit. For weeks, I had no interest. My pelvis was an empty room, food an unwelcome guest. Instead of answering, I asked, “You think caffeine could’ve brought this on?” It read decaf only all over the dietician’s card on the side of my breakfast tray.

      The cardiologist looked up from the notes he was writing. “You know, that’d be an interesting experiment. We could get you all jacked up on caffeine, see what happens. But for now, try to eat a little more. Start with your breakfast.” He tapped my tray. “It’s good stuff.”

      He had the sort of personality that would let a body live a long time—inquisitive, delighted, and unconscionable. He was money and science, old skin and thinning hair and rings worn into grooves below his knuckles like metal around wood. He cleared his throat and said, “Your chart shows you were admitted through the ER not too long back.”

      I didn’t answer.

      “What’s this about a miscarriage?” he asked. He smoothed a frazzled eyebrow with the side of his thumb.

      Miscarriage! The word made it sound like I dropped my juggling pins or fumbled a football instead of floundered my way through the blood and cramps of lost life. I said, “Let’s talk about the exploding bonbons again. I’ve got this great act. I call it the Girl Scout Shuffle.”

      “D&C performed,” he read. “It’s been…” he counted out the days. “Almost two weeks. Are you still bleeding?”

      “What do you think, it was twins? Died a week apart?”

      “I assure you, it doesn’t work that way.” Then he asked again, “Tell me, are you bleeding?”

      “You tell me—when are my fluids no longer your business?” I was barely bleeding. Nothing to mention. There was no dead baby cradled between my hips. Not anymore.

      He said, “Dear, we’re in the body-fluid business. You don’t have a fever…cramps?”

      I said, “I came in for help a while back, and that’s over now. I’m here again, sure, but it’s a new show. Act One.” I didn’t even want to think about the last round in the ER: pregnant, then not pregnant, and the drama was over. Curtains closed. There would be no tiny Mr. Galore. No miniature Rex. No granddaughter to my lost mother, grandson to my once-present dad, our tightly pruned bonsai of a family tree.

      Soon enough I’d tell Rex about the trip to the ER, but I’d tell him when he came home. And until I told Rex, why tell anyone else? I was two months pregnant when the blood started. Rex was one week out of town.

      The cardiologist nodded and wrote on his chart. “Any pain now? Bloating?”

      I shook my head, a slow side to side.

      “In a miscarriage, you can lose a lot of blood. Become anemic, have complications. Maybe we should get someone in here to do a pelvic.”

      I said, “It was my heart this time, right? A whole different issue, different tissue.” I didn’t have claws digging into my sciatic nerve or the wrenching in my gut. I wasn’t sifting through blood clots brown and gelatinous as chicken liver, looking for the blue tint of the birth sac. “You can’t reach my heart through my hoo-ha—and you’re not the first man I’ve warned that way.”

      “Your hoo-ha?”

      “No pelvic,” I said. I looked around for a balloon to tie, a way to ease my nerves. “Can I have one of those rubber gloves?” I’d make the five fingers into a tiny Madonna of the Rocks.

      The cardiologist nodded, a meaningless gesture, and didn’t hand me a glove. He said, “OK, well. There is one more test I’d like your help with.” He lifted my sticky hand, looked at my fingernails. Each nail was painted a different color, like a box of crayons.

      “For clowning,” I said.

      He put my hand back on the bedspread carefully, as though my hand were breakable. “We’d like to check your adrenals.” He patted the back of my hand. His own hand was laced with a rope of veins, like rivers drawn on a map.

      A nurse came in with a paper bag. She said, “Excuse me. Your friends brought this.”

      “Friends?” I repeated, hopeful, and took the bag from her. Rex was my friend. He topped the list, my only friend at times.

      Inside the bag was one juggling ball and an envelope of twenties. No rubber chicken. In blue pen, on the outside of the envelope, it said, They docked you for leav’n early. Otherwise, it’s all here.—Crack.

      Matey and Crack. They were co-workers, not friends. I put the bag beside the bed.

      The doctor wrote a note on a prescription pad. “The adrenal test is simple. And it’s precise. But we need you to collect twenty-four hours of urine.” He gave me the note. “Take this down to the lab, they’ll explain the process. You’re heart seems OK. Today’s EKG looks good.”

      Still, I could point to a place in the front of my skull where my head was full of the hum of bees, an incessant and

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