Classical music plays from a portable radio, very loudly. Missy turns the radio off, then she says, “Hello, Vernon.”
The fat man says, “Hello Missy. You come for your old job back?”
This is the Doctor, I decide, for he is too big, too round, too magnificently well-fed to be Pierrot, too unselfconscious to be Pantaloon. His face creases with delight to see Missy, and she smiles to see him, and I am jealous: I feel a stab of pain shoot through my heart （currently in a plastic sandwich bag in Missy’s coat pocket） sharper than I felt when I stabbed it with my hatpin and stuck it to her door.
And speaking of my heart, she has pulled it from her pocket, and is waving it at the pathologist, Vernon. “Do you know what this is?” she says.
“Heart,” he says. “Kidneys don’t have the ventricles, and brains are bigger and squishier. Where’d you get it?”
“I was hoping that you could tell me,” she says. “Doesn’t it come from here? Is it your idea of a Valentine’s card, Vernon? A human heart stuck to my front door?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t come from here,” he says. “You want I should call the police?”
She shakes her head. “With my luck,” she says, “they’ll decide I’m a serial killer and send me to the chair.”
The Doctor opens the sandwich bag and prods at the heart with stubby fingers in latex gloves. “Adult, in pretty good shape, took care of his heart,” he said. “Cut out by an expert.”
I smile proudly at this, and bend down to talk to the dead black man on the table, with his chest all open and his callused string bass-picking fingers. “Go ’way Harlequin,” he mutters, quietly, not to offend Missy and his doctor. “Don’t you go causing trouble here.”
“Hush yourself. I will cause trouble wherever I wish,” I tell him. “It is my function.” But, for a moment, I feel a void about me: I am wistful, almost Pierrotish, which is a poor thing for a harlequin to be.
Oh Missy, I saw you yesterday in the street, and followed you into Al’s Super-Valu Foods and More, elation and joy rising within me. In you, I recognized someone who could transport me, take me from myself. In you I recognized my Valentine, my Columbine.
I did not sleep last night, and instead I turned the town topsy and turvy, befuddling the unfuddled. I caused three sober bankers to make fools of themselves with drag queens from Madame Zora’s Revue and Bar. I slid into the bedrooms of the sleeping, unseen and unimagined, slipping the evidence of mysterious and exotic trysts into pockets and under pillows and into crevices, able only to imagine the fun that would ignite the following day as soiled split-crotch fantasy panties would be found poorly hidden under sofa cushions and in the inner pockets of respectable suits. But my heart was not in it, and the only face I could see was Missy’s.
Oh, Harlequin in love is a sorry creature.
I wonder what she will do with my gift. Some girls spurn my heart; others touch it, kiss it, caress it, punish it with all manner of endearments before they return it to my keeping. Some never even see it.
Missy takes the heart back, puts it in the sandwich bag again, pushes the snap-shut top of it closed.
“Shall I incinerate it?” she asks.
“Might as well. You know where the incinerator is,” says the Doctor, returning to the dead musician on the table. “And I meant what I said about your old job. I need a good lab assistant.”
I imagine my heart trickling up to the sky as ashes and smoke, covering the world. I do not know what I think of this, but, her jaw set, she shakes her head and she bids good-bye to Vernon the pathologist. She has thrust my heart into her pocket and she is walking out of the building and up Cemetery Road and back into town.
I caper ahead of her. Interaction would be a fine thing, I decide, and fitting word to deed I disguise myself as a bent old woman on her way to the market, covering the red spangles of my costume with a tattered cloak, hiding my masked face with a voluminous hood, and at the top of Cemetery Road I step out and block her way.
Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous me, and I say to her, in the voice of the oldest of women, “Spare a copper coin for a bent old woman dearie and I’ll tell you a fortune will make your eyes spin with joy,” and Missy stops. She opens her purse and takes out a dollar bill.
“Here,” says Missy.
And I have it in my head to tell her all about the mysterious man she will meet, all dressed in red and yellow, with his domino mask, who will thrill her and love her and never, never leave her （for it is not a good thing to tell your Columbine the entire truth）， but instead I find myself saying, in a cracked old voice, “Have you ever heard of Harlequin?”