echo*

I am unable to meet his eyes as I lay open on the de-contaminated table. My chest  spilling out and to the side. I know those eyes are just doing their job. But I look  everywhere else. The ceiling ambering out of its beige self. All those pinprick  holes in its sequestered sky. The fluorescents. Were they on when I came in. Was  their being turned off supposed to make me feel relaxed. He talks through the  steps, till he doesn’t. But he is so young, and I am unable to want to see him.  Want to listen. My body on display. My boots sit rigidly upon one another. Once  I am hooked up to all the wires, my left arm tucked under my skull, I watch the  machine’s screen whir into action. From my peripherals, I can see him apply the  gel to the stick. When it makes contact with my chest, the gel is cold, and he  pushes it hard into me. Before I hear anything, a bulbous organ appears on the  screen in psychedelic colors. My heart is tripping out of me. So I leave my body.  

When I go running, I like to take the familiar path by my home. Or at least the place  I am calling home these days. I don’t tend to stay in one town for too long. If it gets  its claws in me and I cannot escape, I might drown in the soft mountain snow and the  moss that grows here despite there being no ocean rocks to lump itself upon. This  path weaves behind the million-dollar houses that are, honestly not all that nice, piled  so closely next to one another. But I don’t really think about the houses because most  of the time I am focused on being sure I do not clip a rigid stick between my strides.  Like I did that one time. Eventually the trail dumps out near a highly trafficked road  with the paved path descending beneath the street, an underpass for pedestrians. As you first enter the tunnel, the whole thing seems to be decently illuminated. It is not  nearly long enough so that the dark in the middle might concerning. Sometimes debris  gathers in dried puddles near the south end. Both walls are intricately painted with a  series of mildly hallucinogenic, nature images. This amuses me for it is as strange as  it is beautiful. As my father would say, classic Colorado. 

A flash of sound pumps through my brain. I am back in my body, even as my  spine tries to arc away from me. Is the screen even making a sound. Out loud.  Can he hear it. Can he hear me. I cannot tell. He speaks to me, take a small breath  in and hold it. The organ becomes a distorted face morphing in and out of itself,  a demon laughing at me. Laughing at my naivety. Laughing at me for not thinking  of asking for a woman tech. I need to leave. and breath out.  

In computing, echo is a command that is used to display a line of text which is passed on  as an argument. You must first have access to a system running Linux and pull up the  terminal window. You type in “echo” and then whatever you want repeated. For my day  job, I work for a computer consulting company. As I began taking on more  responsibilities, moving past my typical role as scheduler, service ticket data enterer, and invoicing coordinator, I studied deeper into the endless black of the screen. Reviving those old green commands that splintered across memory, a reverberation of childhood.  

The stick moves and now a beak is pecking incessantly at the screen. Is it morse  code. Is there a message in here somewhere, something to learn. The keyboard taps and the beak becomes irradiated with color. The beak mouths out: stupid girl,  you should have known better. Another click. It becomes a smear. I become.  

In high school, I signed up to be part of an after-school group, comprised of several  students from a series of local schools, to paint a mural on a portion of outdoor wall  at the local mall. The instructors chose the theme, unity, and we spent two weeks discussing of what to unify meant. Then we created a layout to blend our ideas across  the twenty plus feet of concrete canvas. Since each of us would be contributing to the  painting, we all had to work as a team to construct the image of togetherness, instead  of allowing our individual talents to stand out brightly against the expanse of space.  We had to meld ourselves into one another. Every hot Saturday afternoon for a couple  months, one of my parents dropped me off and I worked hard focused on fusing  different paint colors perfectly for whatever section I was assigned to work on that  day. Taking the heavy stride of tones and welding them into a cohesive unit that made  sense, that meshed, that meant something. It was an easy task to fall in love with.  

A click pauses the light show, and a measurement is taken. I apologize to my  breasts for what they are going through. I do not forgive myself. let out a breath  and hold it. My boots shove heavy weight up my legs toward my knees, which  are safe tightly knitted next to one another. My quads stay engaged. In case they  need to kick. They won’t be a fool. They stay ready. In case. and breathe  normally. The stick moves hard under my left breast. The air around it stays cold  and awkward. I try to tell my body to relax. It does not listen. It cannot listen in this canyon of itself cracked open and spilling sky radiant around the center. I  want to watch the screen, be fascinated by the procedure, but my nakedness feels  sick. I glance at the sign illuminated over the door. EXIT. I wish I could. I look  back at the monitor. The organ on the screen grabs itself and pulls me through. 

As you get closer to the middle of the tunnel, your foot falls pounding the cracked  pavement, there you notice the echo of yourself pummeling around you. An echo is  defined as an acoustic phenomenon in which a reflection of sound arrives at the  listener with a delay after the direct sound. It is an audible shadow. A sound ghost. 

The beak reappears, and I wonder if it is normal to have a bird in your chest. How  long have I lived with her. What species is she. Can we talk. The stick moves  again, and she descends into a hint of a dance. Four bodies turning themselves  inside out while they combine a waltz with some techno gyration. take a short  breath and hold it. He disappears into my shame. I should have asked for a  woman. I know better. I tug at the gown, begging it to cover more of me. It does  not listen. Another measurement is taken, the stick moves. I leave with it.  

A command, like “echo,” is an instruction telling the computer to do a particular action.  An agreement is input data for the command. A string is a finite sequence of characters,  such as numbers, letters, symbols, and punctuation. Standard output is a display screen,  but it can be redirected to a file or printer, if desired. The string you type in to follow the  echo command will display alone on its own line within the code, and if you have it configured, appear as a status on the display screen when the action or argument  preceding it is activated. For example, echo is also commonly used to have a shell script  display a message or instructions, such as: a screen displaying Enter Y or N in an  interactive session with users. It allows you to see only what you need to. Or want.  

The stick makes hard contact across my ribs before pushing into my sternum.  What kind of bodies has he practiced on. Doesn’t he know how this hurts. I cannot  make my mouth move. The beating looks consistent, but what do I know. What  does he. What does the bird know. Will she tell me. take a deep breath and hold  it. His words move around me, so I close my eyes. Does my heart know. It doesn’t  stop beating. It doesn’t even slow. Why is holding breath so hard. I cannot wait  for his words. Something leaks out of me. breathe normally. I open my eyes to  the screen, which is far enough away from his face. The bodies turn into lines and  move in circles, four. They vibrate their hands into one another and shake about  in front of me. I watch my core convulse in my chest. My little horror show. What  is normal. Outside, the sky changes clothes. Shifting on the table, I sift into the  pale tones of the atmosphere, where breath and beat are easy.  

The mural in the underpass appears to be less cohesive than the project I was a part  of, in that it more resembles many scenes mushed together, blended only by the tender  background tones rather than a pre-constructed, pre-determined image that morphs  through itself into another image or idea. On the left side, there is a mountain with a  small person at the base, then aspens hiding buffalo, then an eagle coming in for a landing, then rabbits and other assorted plains animals two-dimensionally affixed to  the wall, while also somewhat standing out. On the right side, you begin with frogs  in reeds – a kind of imagined swamp recreation of the wet basin nearly fifty feet from  the tunnel, then there is a mouse riding a sky-bound bicycle, a hot air balloon, then a  nest with birthed birds, twin owls perched on branches of a tree, and finally an osprey  flying out toward the exit. I wonder if this was the creation of a similar after-school  group, under the direction of a well-meaning teacher hoping to create cohesion  between angsty, young people desperate for their lives to mean something beyond  what they know. Or if its construction was by a more singular figure instead of a  chorus. One attempt to make sense of this gathered sensation of forgettablness.  

He tells me, lay on your back. It is time for my abdominal region to be reviewed.  The stick is heavy under the precipice of my patience and pushing. I watch the  ceiling above me and try to see my heart through the silence. I cannot see it. I  cannot hear it. Maybe it has never been a good guide. It let too much in. It gave  too much away. let out a deep breath and hold it. I hold onto my jeans with my  cold hands, as my left breast lies out on the table. I stop holding air in my mouth  long before he cues me to breathe. as if I need him for that too. The rest of my  chest falls open as I try to hold it. I tell myself this will be over soon. It must be.  and breathe normally. What is normal. I don’t want to. I slope away from myself. 

In the early days of my preteen experience on the computer, I would wait for my father’s  slow dial up connection to bring my brother and myself infinite hours of joyous  destruction through the game, Duke Nukem. The endless-seeming scroll of commands  running across the left side of the screen as the old machine whirred into action always  had me on the verge of tempting fate by slamming my hands onto the keyboard. This was  a worthless trait that I still am unable to shake and has brought death to many of my  subsequent computer’s bottom halves. The computer, on the other hand, was only doing  what it was preset to do. It was only moving as fast as it was able. The green or white  text sliding up the screen, the ghost guidelines of the device bringing it to life, it meant  nothing to me. I had to learn to wait. I had to let this time pass, let procedure come first. 

I want to know the version of myself before I walked into this room. Before I  realized that his brown eyes were coming back into this desolate space after I had  taken off my shirt, my bra. Before I drove to the hospital too fast, worried only  about being late. Before my father’s heart surgeon told me that aortic aneurisms are often genetic, I should get checked too. Before it all. breathe out and hold it.  

The ricochet of my body moving comes through clearest near the end part of the  tunnel. The part where I let my fingers graze the brushed image of the dual owls, dust  and microscopic specks of paint gathering on the tips of my limbs. It is also the  darkest part of the underpass. You can easily see all which lies beyond the exit. Out  there, the sun glazes over the objects with a charged brightness. But everything which  is immediately in front of or around you is still murky or shadow. A kind of holding. Where is my pulse. Isn’t it supposed to save me. Shouldn’t it spike. Or something.  Why is this taking so long. Where is that bird inside me. Can we fly off. Can we. 

Coding requires the individual to spend endless hours staring at their screen, focusing  intricately on the details they punch in with their thin fingers, teaching the green  sequences to fuse and work together. To create something complex and beautiful.  Something that works. Requiring patience to know the deep under-layers of a thing.  

He doesn’t tell me that the test is over. My heart just disappears from everything  as he unhooks me. Gone with the bird. He takes the sticky nodes off, their  adhesive clinging to my tender breast skin. He tells me to get dressed, and that he  will wait for me in the hall. I don’t want him to wait. I want my heart to.  

The waves of a sonic echo can only be distinguished by the human ear if the delay is  less that one tenth of a second. The more echoes one hears, the more degraded the  modulation becomes. To this effect, an echo allows us to hear distance. How many  times the echo occurs tells you how far away the origin point of the sound occurred.  The sound of me running through this tunnel creates an echo that strikes just as I am  leaving it. I wonder if I cannot hear the echo of my own feet, what is the distance my  sound-ghost moves with me. How far away are we from one another. Where does it  disappear. Do we ever re-intersect. Can the ghost and the self ever become one again. 

Before leaving, he hands me a white, thin towel. I wait till he is gone to wipe  away the tears stuck in my eyes. Wipe the gel residue covering my chest off. Wipe  who I was away. My bird-heart is gone from the screen. Only my name remains.  The letters stark against the thin lines and white background of the screen. A  resonance of everything I was before this. Everything I will have to become.  

The syntax for creating an echo is: echo [option(s)] [string(s)] or echo [-neE] 

[ARGUMENTS]. Here is an example of how to use this command:  

Syntax: 

$ echo I am the ghost.  

Output display:  

I am the ghost.  

The displayed text, what the viewer sees, is real.  

 The command is the ghost moving back into itself. 

When I open the heavy door of the exam room, I do not wait, I just go.

Footnote:__________________________________________________________

*An ECHO test is actually called an echocardiogram and uses sound waves that  move through the skin and bounce (or “echo”) off the heart structures to produce  images of the heart for analysis. This procedure typically costs around five to eight  thousand dollars depending on insurance and coverage. The only way to get an  echocardiogram is to have it requested by your primary care provider, cardiologist,  or obstetrician. It takes about forty-five to fifty minutes to complete.