Clown Girl - Monica Drake [83]
The nurse bent to peer at the burns.
“A beauty salon, that’d do the trick. Or a dressing room.” I said, “Bad hair day, and all those little lines and wrinkles…Think I’ll be going.” I made a move.
The nurse stepped between me and the curtain. “And how did you do this?” She pointed with the back of her pen at the burns along my hands and the streaks of blisters forming on the inside of my arms.
“Industrial accident, you might say. Injured in the line of duty. Working on a skit, I lit one too many torches. A little spilled turpentine.”
“Turpentine and torches, at four in the morning?” she said. She wrote something down.
“What’s time to a torch?” I said. “Besides, they’re meant to be lit on fire.” I hoped this helped my case.
The doctor came in and the nurse handed the pills to the doctor. “She took these.”
The doctor put on his half-frame glasses and looked at the jar, the picture and the words in Chinese. His face was the red of a lifetime of drink, or a bad trip to Cancún. His neck was heavy with folds and wrinkles, and he wheezed like he’d just run a marathon. Oh doctor, heal thyself! “Why would you take these?” he asked. “You don’t even know what’s in here.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in aspirin, really. I don’t know what’s in cough syrup, except alcohol.”
He looked at me, tugged at a stray nose hair, then looked at the bottle again. “You took this before or after you burned your hands?”
I shrugged. “I took them all week. I can’t tell if they’re working.”
“Habitual,” he said, and tapped the nurse’s clipboard. She made a note. He said, “What were you trying to cure, with this so-called medicine?”
“My pulse, my heartbeat. It’s too strong sometimes. My heart and kidneys don’t communicate.” I quoted the acupuncturist and his expertise.
“Ah, communicate?” The doctor said, “Communicate with whom? Extraterrestrials perhaps?” He smirked.
I said, “Don’t be crazy. With each other. They’re out of balance.”
He said, “Your heart wasn’t speaking with your kidneys, so you wanted to cure your pulse. Did I get that right?”
I said, “Sometimes, Doc, I can’t stand it. I lie in bed and feel my heart beat. I feel it in my legs, in my arms, in my back. My chest gets tight, and I can’t breathe.” The only reason I told the doctor anything was in case he could help.
He nodded. “Cure your heartbeat…Very Edgar Allan Poe. Do you have other, what you’d call, symptoms?”
I said, “I get splitting headaches sometimes, right at the top of my head, mostly when I’m premenstrual.”
The doctor nodded. “Probably a little cranial neuralgia.”
“Cranial neuralgia?” I said, “What’s that? Sounds serious.”
He said, “Not at all. It’s nerve pain, a sort of pain in the head.”
Great. I said, “So you’re diagnosing my headaches as pain in the head. How scientific is that?”
The doctor looked at the nurse, then at the clipboard chart. “Anal neuralgia,” he said, and tapped the chart again.
“Anal neuralgia?” I said, “Hey, I can do the math. A sort of pain in the ass?”
The doctor smirked again, gave a flirty chuckle. “You’re a sharp cookie. Now tell us, how did the fire come in?”
“The fire,” I said. “That’s another thing entirely. An accident. Juggling.”
The doctor wrote in his notes, and said, “You have first-degree burns.”
I said, “First degree—is that the worst, or the best? With murder, it’s the worst.”
“With burns it’s the opposite. If this were murder, it’d be third degree.” He opened a drawer and took out a small silver hammer.
He tapped my knee. My leg bounced.
I said, “Now you’re giving me the third degree?”
He said, “They’re first degree. Definitely first.”
I said, “Funny thing is, once I was working on my second degree, a master’s in Clowning, but they kicked me out of school for drinking the helium.”
“You make a habit of taking helium?” He motioned for the nurse to add that to her notes.
“Doc, I thought it would raise my grades—”
This whole conversation was a mistake. But I couldn’t stop. I was scared, nervous. Jittery and