Clown Girl by Monica Drake; Chuck Palahniuk Page A

swig.
    It was my turn to look with pity.
    “Being a little melodramatic, aren’t you?” I said. “It doesn’t even look like a real gun. Note the ‘Made in China’ sticker?”
    He held a hand out in front of himself, palm flat against the air like a mime marking the hard edge of a box, and his fingers trembled. When he put the bottle down, he reached for the gun. He wrapped trembling fingers around the barrel, took the gun from me gently, and put it on the counter. He leaned in close. “You know, I should call the police,” he said quietly.
    “The police?” My first thought was a secret one, curious, hopeful, and nervous: Mr. Cinnamon?
    The acupuncturist’s breath was the bite of alcohol, the musk of herbs. “We don’t tolerate hostility in the clinic.”
    I said, “It’s a classic joke, old-time clown stuff. You must’ve never been to the circus.”
    “I’ll let it go this time,” he said and took another sip off the bottle. Licked his thin, pale lips. “But you need to find a little help with that. You only alienate yourself.” His arms were scrawny, and for a minute I sensed acupuncture needles maybe weren’t his only needle friends.
    He said, “For now, lay on the table, on your back. Remove your, uh, your other shoe.” He stood up, put the clipboard aside. He didn’t give me his card, didn’t ask me out or offer his phone number. Maybe I’d headed that one off.
    I lay back against the loud rattle of the paper sheet. The acupuncturist breathed out deeply as he tapped tiny needles into the crook of my hand, between my thumb and fingers. The needles didn’t hurt, but they felt like someone had tapped my funny bone, touched a nerve. It was a warm spread of pain that made me want to laugh and cringe and gag all at once—comedy and tragedy, aligned in every cell. I willed myself not to flinch. The silver gun was a pale glimmer on the shelf, tucked between chrome-topped jars of cotton balls and Band-Aids. An ambulance passed outside. The wail of the ambulance grew loud, then faded, as somebody else’s emergency moved into the distance.
    The acupuncturist turned off a lamp on my side of the room and said, “I’ll leave you to rest for twenty minutes.”
    Then I was alone, covered in needles, afraid to move. My heart raced. I wanted to sit up or roll over. My mouth was cottony. My heart spoke again in Morse code: heart trouble, heart trouble, heart trouble…die or go crazy, die or go crazy… The acupuncturist didn’t understand. It wasn’t loneliness, it was something more. I had to tell them—yes, I had heart trouble. Real trouble. I hadn’t filled out the forms right. Nitroglycerin and potassium! Where was the bottle he drank from? I needed medicines. I needed to relax, wanted a balloon, to stretch and tie an animal, twist balloon knots until I was at ease again.
    My body weighed a thousand pounds, I hadn’t slept since Rex left town. In the smoke of a warm incense, I tried to quit listening to the story of my own frantic heart. I let go of the noise in the street, sirens and buses. My arms and legs and spine were heavy against the table. I felt then like two bodies, one outer and one inner, one smaller than even my bones, one large and ballooning. I was a balloon sheep, St. Sebastian of the acupuncture needles. The Virgin Mary. Skin was a membrane thin as rubber. I could see the inside of my eyelids, calm and dark, spotted with orange.
    “OK, that’s it.” The acupuncturist snapped on the lamp. I twitched, suddenly awake. He pulled needles from my feet, hands, and head.
    “That’s it?” I was an inflated balloon in a skin-colored casing, too empty to sit up.
    “I’ve found some medicine that’ll help.” He handed me a palm-sized red box with a picture of a person’s profile on it. “It’s Chinese, to boost the system.” As he said “boost” he made a gesture like a weight lifter, like Natalia-Italia-Nadia flexing her narcissist muscle—shoulder dropped, one curled fist.