'A Wild Sostenuto of the Heart'

At the center of the screen is an acute triangle with a rounded bottom. Its shape resembles the pattern left by wipers on a dirty windshield, inverted. Before the device is activated it’s a gray blank and reminded me of the opening sentence of a novel I read more than forty years ago: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” -- the only thing I remember from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. This was my second echocardiogram in less than two weeks. The first detected “reduced systolic function.” The second was performed using contrast. The technician put transparent jelly on the left side of my chest and moved the transducer probe around until she got a clean image. That picture replaces the “dead channel”: my pulsing heart. Seeing it seems miraculous, a gift denied us for most of human history. I remembered the first time I saw an ultrasound performed, which was also the first time I saw my oldest son, in utero. The word that came to mind is…