Читать книгу The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel and Other Colorful Tales of Transformation and Tattoos - A. R. Morlan - Страница 8

TATTOO

“Like your ’mum,” the girl in the plastic raincoat said, shifting her glass of cola around on the sticky bar surface until the rounded nubs of dying ice cubes sang a soft, desultory melody. Reflexively, I rubbed my right forearm, where the two-dimensional chrysanthemum bloomed soft red, and nodded Thanks.

It was that kind of night in the grimy Village bar: When the jukebox is stuck on “Walk on the Wild Side,” the flames gutter low and smoky in squat, pebbled glass globes, and the neon bar signs flicker and sizzle. And it was hot, hot enough for the thin girl sitting beside me to sip cola with dying ice not three minutes after the bartender had set the glass in front of her. But yet—

The raincoat she was wearing was translucent green, and covered a snug, long-sleeved sweater and skin-tight jeans. There were tiny patches of condensation inside the plastic coat, like when you put a hot roast beef sub into a sandwich bag. Wondering what her temperature was, I longed to take her pulse, listen to her heartbeat and tell her—

What? I thought, stubbing out my cigarette in a hobnail ashtray. That she shouldn’t go trying to smother herself in Saran Wrap? That you’re a doctor, the voice of authority? Not smoking two packs a day, you aren’t.

The girl shifted beside me, the rounded ice cubes piling against her lips as she tilted her glass high, draining it. In the brief silences between the notes of the jukebox and the hum of the neon, I heard the cubes striking her teeth. For no good reason, I shivered.

“You have to keep that out of the sun, y’know,” the steaming girl said, placing her empty glass on the Formica bar top, neatly covering an old burn scar in the artificial wood grain surface.

“Keep what out?” I asked around the cigarette I’d just placed in my mouth. There was no one else sitting at my end of the bar, save for the girl. Her raincoat crinkled damply as she replied, “Your tattoo. They fade. In the sun. Unless you’re careful.” She paused to push a strand of limp, light brown hair out of her eyes; each strand of hair looked thick, coated with sweat. Then:

“I mean, after all the trouble, y’know, to get it—”

I was tempted to either get up and leave or tell her off, but like I said before, it was that kind of night: brownout season, when the sidewalks resemble blackhead-pitted skin, and the air is so grimy you can almost feel it blackening up your nostrils. And down in the subways, all you see are hands, palms up, intruding on your space, and those defensive eyes—

Hell, maybe she doesn’t want to go home either.

Putting my lighter back in my shirt pocket, I said, “Doesn’t matter much if it fades or not. I just got it to cover something up. Looks better than what was under it.”

The girl started nodding, her bangs slithering across her colorless brow, as if she agreed that my tattoo was, indeed, an improvement over the vaguely oval scar which had once graced my arm—even though she couldn’t have known about it.

For a moment, everything swam around me, good old déjà-vu. I felt a need to right the situation, to loop back and give the woman (her coat was now completely steamed over inside; I could barely make out the brown dots on her sweater) a reason for nodding at me.

I took a sip of my beer, another puff, and began, “It was a bite. Human. Good thing it happened in ER. One of the nurses swabbed it out before infection set in, gave me a tetanus. Happened when I was a resident in Manhattan, five, six years back. Some guy I was treating in the same ER suggested it. I was setting his leg—he’d been in a car accident, bad fender-bender—and he’s looking me over, noticing my arm, and said, “Somebody was mad at you, eh, Doc—?”

“But they weren’t, were they?” The girl crossed her legs, thin calves ending in hightops over scrunched cotton socks.

Again, my head swam. Behind the bar, the “d” on a Bud sign fizzled into a glassy colorlessness, and all the lights went slightly darker: Brownout coming.

“No...the person who bit wasn’t mad at me. I was mad at her for a minute there, but....”

How could I tell her about the woman in the ER, the harsh billion-watt lights bouncing off her bruises, her welted flesh? Rape is never pretty, and gang-bangs are ugly. Cops found her, running naked down West 57th, away from the wacko section where women shouldn’t linger come sundown. Some creeps had dragged her into an alley, a bunch of them. Cops caught most of the punks, not quite enough to account for all the different semen, but enough of them to satisfy the brass downtown.

But it didn’t do squat for the woman: No sound left, just this tiny wheeze that’s even worse than a wall-shaking howl. And she wouldn’t let us look her over, she kept trying to cover herself with arms so thin they barely hid her wounded nipples, her damp mons. And before the shot I gave her could work, she leaned over and bit me. Had to grab her by the hair to make her let go of my arm, shake her head like a bird-eating cat. Cops took pictures of her; every time the bulb flashed, it was like her wounds rose off her skin for a second, hovering there before settling back down to hurt her again. And you could see the hurt there; every cut, welt, and bruise spoke to me, and the throbbing bite on my arm answered them.

I made myself stare at the flickering Bud sign, my cigarette ashed almost to the filter before I went on, “I don’t even think she knew she’d done it...maybe she thought I was one of the cruds who did it. Attacked her. Things like that happen in ERs more than you realize. Too much hurt has to spill over somewhere. Whitecoats make easy targets. Anyhow, the bite scarred me, was easy to see what happened to me. Rough types, they got to thinking it was an invite to abuse me some more. Easy mark. I could’ve had the thing removed, but I couldn’t see losing skin like that. And even then, the new scar would’ve reminded me of the old, like it was never gone at all.

“But this—” I twisted my arm, watched the flat flower glisten in the murky bar light (the girl stared at it, mesmerized) “—it hides the whole scar. Guy who did it suggested a ’mum, said the petals followed the same configuration of the scar, the teeth, you know. And he said even if the tattoo did fade, the scar would still look like some of the petals.” I ran my finger over the flower; lubricated with sweat, the outlines of the scar were easy to feel, impossible to see. But I always knew they were there, those two almost-connected half-moon ridges on my flesh.

“—a good job,” the girl was saying; somehow, she’d asked for and gotten a fresh glass of cola, without my noticing. The fresh but sweating cubes tinkled brashly as she slid the glass around on the bar top, before asking, “But does it...uhm, does it make you feel strong? Inside, y’know, like the bite really isn’t there?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow—”

The green raincoat crinkled as she shifted on her stool to completely face me, her knees almost touching my jeans-covered hip. Brushing her pale, stubby fingers (her nails were short, with no white tips remaining) through her hair, she said softly, urgently, “Does it give you strength? So no one thinks you’re an easy mark anymore, in the ER? Or anywhere? Do people...fear it?”

I ground my butt into a mash of filter before replying carefully, mindful of her abrupt intensity, “The little kids who come in are fascinated by it. Some guys have asked me where I had it done. Only complaint I ever got was from an old woman—and she had a head and feet on her fox stole, so I didn’t take her too seriously—”

The girl smiled, slightly, perfunctorily, before going on, “Yeah...I suppose a flower wouldn’t do that to people.... But they must think you’re strong, right, to go through with it?”

“Well...yes, the children I see sometimes ask if it hurts, but that’s about it. I guess that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded vigorously, her right hand wrapped around the weeping glass of cola. Suddenly the gritty sidewalks and the panhandlers in the subway didn’t look so bad, nor did the air seem too coarse. Sliding some bills across the bar, toward the distant bartender, I shifted in my seat saying, “It’s been nice, Miss, but I have to be—”

“I’m sorry, y’know?” the girl said quickly, before turning to stare at the sputtering sign, where the “B” was on the verge of winking out.

My head wasn’t swimming then; it pounded in time with the blood-roar in my ears.

I’m sorry, y’know?

With her face turned to the bar, and her eyes focused away from me, I finally recognized the girl. From the ER. Clothing made a big difference; when someone is nude, your eyes instinctively go to the parts you can’t see otherwise, the parts you shouldn’t really stare at, but do anyhow. And being a doctor, I was supposed to look there. Her face wasn’t a primary concern, until her teeth were sunk in my skin.

Were still sunk in my skin.

“I don’t know how many of them there were...just a blur of dicks and faces, crowding in on me...looking. That was the worst, y’know? Their bodies wouldn’t remember me, but their eyes would. I was so...exposed. Like I was transparent, and they could see all of me. What I was, inside. What made me me. Nothing hidden, nothing I could hold dear to me, nothing I could choose to reveal anymore. Everything was naked about me. And for a long, long time there weren’t enough clothes in the world I could wear. All at once. It was like the clothes weren’t enough to cover me, make me not naked anymore.” She made the word “naked” sound hideous, filthy.

“You went to get help,” I asked rhetorically, my voice not rising at all at the end of my sentence, and I was mildly surprised when she nodded, took a gulp of cola, and replied, “Oh yes, I did get help...it took a long time, but...I think it’s okay now. At least...I...at least—” She chewed flaky skin off her bottom lip, then went on quickly, her voice a gentle, yet triumphant whisper, “—at least I don’t have to worry about being naked again. That’s why I asked you, but maybe it isn’t the same for you—”

“What ‘isn’t the same’?” I fumbled another cigarette out of my pack, and patted my chest, feeling for my lighter, all the while not taking my eyes off the girl, as she casually, innocently loosened her raincoat, undoing the belt just enough to let the top gape. With her dark sweater coming down to her wrists and up to her neck, the gesture was somehow unsexual, unprovocative. I smelled a strong tang of sweat, and in the dim glow of the globe candles near her elbow, I finally saw—

That she was naked...naked, but covered. Completely.

The tattoo ran from just below the hollow of her throat down to her raincoat-belted waist, then down, down, into a mass of darkness, until her indigo blue legs met with her crumpled cotton socks. The pattern of the tattoo was dense, fabric-complete; and when I leaned a couple of inches closer, I saw why her “sweater” bore a pattern of brown dots. Two of the dots were her nipples. And when she pushed up her plastic sleeves, I realized that she’d removed the hair from her forearms, had most likely removed the hair elsewhere on her body—permanently, no doubt. There were even pocket lines and seams on her lower limbs. I could just make them out under the green folds of her raincoat. One look, even two, and you’d see clothes, clothes so sexless you wouldn’t bother to look a third time.

And she acted as if she were covered with them, layer on top of layer, never to be naked again. And she wouldn’t be, never, never again. Not if she took care of them, kept them from the sun.

I hadn’t had my scar removed because I couldn’t get rid of the memory of it, the ugly sights and sounds of that evening in the ER. I’d covered it, made it something pretty, something whimsical for a doctor, something to charm frightened young patients. But I still had the scar. I wasn’t strong enough to make it go away.

But she’d made herself strong...made herself clothed, forever. Never to be truly naked again—it was a heady thought, a powerful concept.

Does it give you strength? So no one thinks you’re an easy mark anymore.... Do people...fear it?

I wanted to tell her that it was a toss-up: yes for the strength, but no for the fear—unless a person was easily frightened by an ultimate show of discipline, of wanting to be whole again in such a desperate way, such a beautiful way. Never again would a bruise ruin her, show her to be weak. Never again would she be quite so exposed.

I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, comment on how strong she must have been, to endure her nakedness for one last time, while the person who did her tattoo worked...and worked on her (it took a “long time,” she’d said—but how long, how very long?). But she got up before I could speak, placed some money on the bar, and was gone, out the door and onto the dark, sour-smelling streets.

As I was watching her, the lights went dim, dimmer, then remained brownish-yellow. Through the distant window, I saw the whole city darken, guttering like a dying candle. But I didn’t watch where she went. She was clothed, and she was strong. I went back to my beer.

It was that kind of night, y’know?

AFTERWORD TO “TATTOO”

Of all the works in this collection, this is the one readers might be most familiar with, since it’s appeared in two anthologies (Sinister: An Anthology of Rituals, Horror’s Head Press, 1993, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, 1994), as well as in a very-limited collection of my own work published in 2007 (2008 by the time the book was actually printed, but the copyright date says 2007) which is by now out-of-print and—since I was thoroughly displeased with both the collection and certain things and people connected with it—unlikely to see publication again, so I’m not bothering to even name it here. Originally, the story was titled “Strength,” and under that title it was almost published by two different magazines, one a tattoo-oriented publication, and the other, a now defunct magazine run by two of the most unprofessional and reprehensible individuals who ever ran a self-owned publishing house...the story was dumped (along with many other contracted works) after I dared to complain about the editor’s writer/editor wife writing a review of my first novel The Amulet which not only contained many falsehoods and instances of misinformation, but several outright lies (including the assertion that she had never spoken to me, when I had the phone bill which listed a call I’d made to her a couple of years before which ran for over half an hour; and some statements about me and my book which were totally 180º out from what I’d both told and written to her about said novel)—rather than admit that Mrs. Perfect had written something in error, he negated all the contracts and wrote a vicious letter saying I was the one who’d somehow “slandered” his wife by even claiming she had done something wrong. Their little publishing empire in the Pacific Northwest is now long-gone, and after a brief burst of literary acclaim (but some negative reviews along the way), both of them have been more or less off the radar for a while. I’ve spoken to and written to several other writers who were similarly burned by these two; one person said she thought their publishing house resembled a cult with two leaders. Others also had their work dumped after long periods of holding onto the material with no kill fees or even apologies in the offing.

At least the publisher who did take this piece, George Hatch, was a decent, honorable person—all he had was one small request in regard to this piece...a name change. He thought “Tattoo” was a better title, and since he was the one buying the piece, I had no objection.

As one can guess, this was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man,” with a reverse twist. I hadn’t read it in many years, but when I started to write this afterword, I gave it another look, and it holds up fairly well. I’ve read up on tattooing since then, and now that I know more about it, the thought of doing what this un-named woman does is cringe-inducing. The pain would have to be unbearable, but probably therapeutic, too. But since I referenced her in a couple of later, published pieces (never actually giving her name; I felt she should always remain an Everywoman), I felt that her tale was worth another printing, in that it brings her story into context within the greater body of work which follows—and also spares the reader from having to either look through his or her personal library for a story which he or she might vaguely recall reading, or go out and borrow or buy the other source anthologies.

Besides, this is the only work in this collection which was ever honored in a “Year’s Best” anthology—not much of my work has been honored in that way, and since this story was chosen, I figured it was worth another look....