THE ECHOCARDIAC MAN
A heart-pounding adventure

Unfortunately, these days, all you need to get a glimpse of your interior space is an Aetna card with $10 co-pay and an echocardiogram machine. (And, frankly, if that includes Journey, then the elite class is getting a little too goddamn democratized.) I would contend that I had a loftier, purer echocardiogram experience at the doctor's office than the rest of today's rabble, being that I went with no foreknowledge of the machine, but rather to get a tetanus shot and an informed opinion on a certain dermal oddity that turned out to be nothing at all. Halfway through and safe from lockjaw, I realized that I should milk my insurance, so I asked for a full physical.

Anybody who played sports in high school knows the details here -- I ran a little bit, had my ear scoped, coughed in trilogy while my boxers kissed the cold, cold floor. (Ah, the inguinal hernia check -- I would rather play barehanded grab-bag in the big red box of biohazards on the counter than undergo it, but a full exam is a full exam.) However, unlike in the hills of Virginia from which I come, this physical did not end here. To my great curiosity and mild shame, I was thrown a magenta gown to cover my unsaintly body and led into a room that looked like a low budget sci-fi film's mission control. I laid down, exposed a nipple, and gave myself up to a physician's assistant who slathered gray jelly on my chest and then started rolling and pressing it with something like an ultra-evolved stick of Ban roll-on. Ultra-evolved, partially, because the Ban roll-on was attached to a monitor. On that monitor a show soon began, aired on location beneath my ribs, and the two of us intently tuned in.

(The technology, from what I can gather, is identical to that used in a sonogram. The visual quality is limited - colorless and badly occluded at the edges. Still, something normally interpreted by the ears is being interpreted for the eyes, so what little you get is impressive. Unfortunately, what little you get, you get for an excruciating lying-on-the-slab ten minutes, which was enough time for me to grow uneasy.)

In the initial moments, I was fascinated. I forgave the PA for telling me, "Exhale," and then quickly, "Breath out," as if I'd never received a BA in English. As if I were an illiterate orphan come to her wearing a Pilsbury flour sack with three X's on the front. As if I had not already demonstrated my extensive knowledge of medicine by commenting on the color of my oxygen-poor veinal blood during it's earlier removal ("It's very dark," I said. And it is.). Perhaps I didn't so much forgive her, but the fact is I couldn't keep my mind on the insult, not while I was staring at a beneficent fist-sized knot of muscle. A beneficent fist-sized knot of muscle that lived within me and would meet or exceed any level of output I required, or else burst, John Henry-style. My heart. Pounding out the drumbeats of my life and well-being. Do you know I loved it and it loved me? Do you know I wanted to get a tattoo, a heart within a heart?

But after several minutes of scrutiny, I was less sure. I became suspicious. Why should it beat so ceaselessly? Not gallantry, surely. Not altruism. What was in it for my heart, I wondered? A thing I had so easily anthropomorphized on first glance now seemed so oddly shaped, an imperfect cone that collapsed and filled every three-quarters of a second. A fine appearance goes a long way even well beneath the skin, and this organ was to me the equal of some deep sea creature, blind and dumb and incomprehensible. I turned away.

Later, the appointment over, I talked to my father. After describing the sight of my heart to him, he said, "It's just a pump, after all." And of course he's right. It makes me wonder if I would be so hard on my other organs. Probably not. Things like the kidneys, pancreas. They're not very well-sung in the first place, almost completely unromanticized. Even the liver, which has the anti-terrorist-like job of detoxifying poisons, never spawned a Robert Burns poem.

So what would I make of my brain? If you get a CAT scan, or so movies and television have led me to believe, it comes up in an fan of elemental colors, almost like a well-dealt hand of go-fish, and I admit, that could be exciting, but if I saw it in a mere day at the office . . . it would look pretty dull, I bet. I prefer to imagine my brain (for which, interestingly, I have to employ it. Ponder the metaphysics of that...and that! ...and that! . . . ) That thought again: I prefer to imagine my brain as a Wizard of Oz-type figure: reclusive, eccentric, but a showman when the occasion calls. A showman and more. Pyrotechnician, tinker, improviseur, false god.

Hmm. I'll have to look into a discreet brain within a heart tattoo.

Anyone can see what's happening here. It's these pre-conceived notions that are dragging me down. Maybe my heart is just a pump, but I happen to belong to a generation for which the word pump evokes a multi-national corporation's $200 patented wonder that gives you a tighter fit, a better vertical leap, and a higher, more perfect arc on your jump shot. (Hearts and shoes. There must be a functional equation in there somewhere for basic female motivation.) My fist-sized knot of muscle. My pump. It has a great deal to live up to, even with the days long gone when the chest was seat of the soul. Let the poets and lovers say what they will of the heart. Believe them, even. But fair warning: if you come face to face with it you'll find, as I'm sure buyers of the $200 patented wonder did, it's all hype.