Clown Girl - Monica Drake [7]
I sipped the air-conditioned air of the hospital like water, in tiny breaths. My heart knocked against my chest like a bird against a window.
She said, “Do you have I D?”
I sat up, fished a hand around inside my sun-hot bra, and pulled out two curled photos. The first photo was of a couple standing on the end of a pier, far away and blurred. Unrecognizable. It was a photo of my parents, so young they weren’t even my parents yet, so young they were still in black and white. So young they were still alive, hadn’t met their fate on a winding California highway. This was the only picture I had of them and I kept it against my skin, close 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