Kurt, Tom, Jake, and Ringo. That was the Redemption crew. Kurt was the owner of Redemption. He was in his forties, short and muscular with a growing beer belly, often mistaken as languid, even serene, until he rolled up his shirtsleeves and revealed the black and gray ghosts screaming in violent despair down his arms. He had made a living saying yes to whatever asinine idea his customers proposed, tailoring his at times ingenious craft to meet their vulgar needs. He created this Last Day tradition simply so that for twenty-four hours he got to do whatever he wanted at work.
“Is it hopeless?”
The customer who first sat in Kurt’s chair had a jolly face. His hair was strawberry blond and curly, his eyes a bright, easy blue. “I started it this morning,” he said, sipping beer from a red plastic cup. “But, fuck, man, I can’t finish it.”
Kurt probed the man’s bloody sternum with his gloved hand. “You do time, man?”
“Old Colony Correctional. You?”
“South Middlesex. That’s where you learned to tattoo?” Kurt asked him.
“Yeah. And I give myself a new one every year on Last Day since I got out. But this time, I don’t know, this time it hurts. I couldn’t finish.”
“What’s it supposed to be?” There was a mess of sloppy tattoos on the man’s chest. Celtic knots, mostly.
“It’s the letters CEC. For Cecilia.”
Kurt took the man’s plastic cup and handed it to Ringo. “Refill this, man, will ya?” He looked at the brick wall and was quiet. Ringo passed the fresh beer back to Kurt, who handed it to the man.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m not fixing what you’ve done and I’m not finishing it, either. Instead I want to do a hanged man whose foot is just barely touching the petal of a huge fucking flower. A daisy, but a nuclear mutation of a daisy. Enormous. Bigger than the man. Meaning that the petals are firm enough to stand on, to support some but not all of the hanged man’s weight.”
“Where you going to put it?”
“Your left arm. The hanged man takes up the whole outer biceps. The spot where the dangling foot makes contact with the petal will be here, inside your elbow. The daisy or whatever will go down the underside of your forearm.”
The man’s face softened. He had never, in his entire life, felt so seen. He drained the beer and crushed the empty cup in his fist. “Okay,” he finally said. His eyes welled up in a slippery, wobbling membrane he would not allow to break.
On the morning of May 27 the line outside Redemption stretched a mile down Commonwealth Avenue. The next person to appear before Kurt was a woman in an artfully ripped-up T-shirt, attended by a coterie of less attractive girlfriends. A woman, Kurt could tell just by looking at her, who vacationed in the realm of darkness but had never actually lived there.
Kurt bent over his notebook so that she couldn’t see what he was drawing. “Okay, check this out.” He handed her his notebook, then sat back and sipped his beer.
She and her attendants peered at the drawing.
“What is it?”
“Are those twigs?”
“It just looks like a bunch of lines.”
“I don’t get it,” the pretty woman finally declared.
“It spells wrong number. I’ll do it vertically down your spine. Gotta warn you—people say the spine hurts a lot. It’s my personal experience that that’s horseshit. It all fuckin’ hurts. But this is what people, mostly girls, tell me. So I’m telling you. You’ve been warned.”
“Can you do it around my ankle instead?”
“No.”
“Can you do it in a prettier font?”
“If you make one more demand, you have to get out of my studio,” Kurt said, his tone so gentle it sounded like a concession. He took another slug of his beer. He’d been nursing this cup slowly for the last hour. It was warm and delicious. A line of bubbles collected on his upper lip and he made no move to wipe them off.
“I don’t know…,” the lady whined. She was not a regular, no one Kurt recognized anyway. Many first-timers like her waited in line on Last Day, then chickened out at the last minute.
“You can go back to the end of the line, try again with another artist,” he said.
“Nope,” Jake shouted over the din of the crowd. “She’ll never get another chance.” He was delighted by this prospect. Jake had red hair and small, beady eyes that also appeared red. Exclusivity jazzed the hell out of him.
The woman bit her lip. She squinted, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, paused, then took another. It was a pantomime, this deliberation; she was riding a three-mimosa buzz and not in the mood to give much thought to anything today.
“Okay,” she exhaled. “I’ll do it!”
Her gaggle of friends woo-hooed and high-fived. They’d brought with them a shopping bag full of holiday-themed party favors and started handing out strands of purple and gold beads, fake engagement rings, and novelty condoms to all the people in line behind them.
She was lucky she hadn’t gotten stuck with Jake. By that point in the morning he was so swirly, woozy, rope-a-dope drunk that every single tattoo he gave for the rest of the day and night was the single word: REDEMPTION.
“It’s an exercise in formalism, eh, man?” said a hipster with a goatee and a Mao Zedong T-shirt.
“Shut your whore mouth,” Jake drooled as he needled REDEMPTION in sloppy cursive across the man’s left calf.
It was like this every year, and yet people still waited for their turn. They waited for hours in all kinds of weather, happy to sign the waiver releasing all rights to any expanse of skin claimed by the artist as his canvas. People brought beach chairs and blankets and picnic baskets to the line. Outside the studio, strangers were sharing sandwiches and beers. This year it was seventy-nine degrees out, the smog-blue sky covered in a gauzy heat. Magnolia, forsythia, and cherry blossoms were past bloom, carpeting the sidewalk with a confetti of browning petals.
“Nothing like last year,” someone said far down the line, slurping the dregs of her iced coffee.
“Our basement flooded,” a fellow line-waiter chimed in. “And our insurance had lapsed. We got black mold. I’m still paying for that storm.”
“What a nightmare that storm was,” another man said, spitting brown tobacco juice into an empty seltzer can.
“You kids don’t even know. Before you were even born we had the Last Day nor’easter. The bums in Public Works were all shitfaced. Good for nothing. I had to drive around with a chainsaw to break up the fallen trees blocking the roads.”
“Yeah, 1985. I remember. We lost power for two friggin’ weeks.”
“Remember the year that asshole set off fireworks inside North Station?”
“To be honest, I thought that was kind of awesome.”
“A lady got burned. Like, bad. Her ear was maimed for life.”
“It’s just an ear. It could be worse.”
Back at Redemption, Tom was inking those exact words, it could be worse, onto a customer’s rib cage. Tom was the looker of this quartet. The women always gravitated toward him. The other guys joked that Tom laced the ink with aphrodisiacs, though it was the much simpler combination of good looks, confidence, and implicit willingness. He had large brown eyes and a handsome face you knew without any picture of proof was the mirror image of a very pretty mother. He kept his dark hair combed back in a neat pompadour and wore T-shirts and jeans that showed off his muscular body without appearing to try too hard. When dressed in long sleeves and a tie, Tom could pass for a respectable family man with a white-collar job, but in reality it was a miracle that he had maintained employment at Redemption for as long as he had. Color was not Tom’s strong suit—Kurt was the master of color—but his black and gray shading was impeccable, the best in New England.
Tom had started celebrating the night before and had woken up that morning already feeling tired. H
e wanted to call it quits, but one look of disappointment from Kurt would set off a slew of latent emotions he did not have time to drink away today. So he’d decided to forgo his typical Gothic images, and taking a page from drunk Jake’s playbook, he began tattooing simple words. Lettering was easy—all you had to worry about was proportion. It was like taking a break without taking a break, if only the man on his table now would stop squirming. The man was probably in his late thirties but had the scrawny build of a twelve-year-old who happened to hit the gym and hit it hard. His rib cage was delicate and narrow, like the hull of a toy canoe. The man mentioned that he was a lawyer. Tom pulled the gun away.
“You signed the waiver, right? It’s airtight. You can’t sue me later.”
“It is absolutely not airtight but, no, I’m not going to sue you. Jesus.”
“I have nothing,” Tom replied. “I live in the back room of my friends’ apartment. We call it a room but it’s actually a porch. Beautiful this time of year but fucking freezing in the winter, and you know what? I will stay there until those guys kick me out, because I spend all my money as soon as I make it on bars and restaurants and grass and girls. Sometimes coke, but mostly I let people buy coke for me, which is easy, because cokeheads never want to get high alone. I own nothing and have zero dollars in savings. If I ever get sick, with, like, cancer or something, I will invite that shit to multiply all it wants because I will never, ever be able to afford treatment. See these boots?” Tom lifted his foot up so that the man lying prone and shirtless in his chair could see it. “These boots were three hundred dollars and I will wear them until they fall off my fuckin’ feet. The boots I had before these ones I wore for eight years and not until I started feeling the pavement through the soles did I buy these replacements. If you sued me, these steel-toed bad boys would be the best thing you would get.”
“The legal system doesn’t work like that, asshole. And don’t worry. I don’t want your boots.”
“I don’t want the headache of showing up at court, either. I’d rather be flogged than sit around and wait. Hit me in the face with a brick. Pry out my toenails. I’d take that any day over waiting for the judge to call me.”
“Just finish my tattoo, all right? I got a party to go to later tonight.”
“I know all about you lawyers,” Tom said.
“You’re right, okay? Lawyers are bastards. I’m a bastard. She fucking left me because I was a coldhearted bastard….”
* * *
—
RINGO WAS BOTH the youngest and the newest artist at Redemption. His real name was Patrick. The other guys had christened him Ringo as a joke, and after a while it stuck. Ringo was a good sport about things, and he had a long, beak-like nose, so the name seemed to suit him. He was twenty-three and wide-eyed, a tall skinny boy whose specialty was flowers. Ringo had been raised by his widowed grandmother, a gardener who’d taught him the name of everything green that grew. As a young boy he liked to draw pictures of flowers, filled whole notebooks with them; then, with a twist of pride and shame, he hid the notebooks under his pillow, knowing that his grandmother made his bed every morning after he left for school. The old woman would look at his drawings, then place the notebook in the same position as she’d found it under the pillow, never saying a word.
Ringo’s first customer on Last Day was a man with broken yellow teeth who asked for a derringer pointing down his calf. Ringo gave him a lilac cluster shaped like a gun. This man was followed by a college kid who asked for Jesus on his back. Ringo gave him a skull blooming daisies out of the eye sockets. One lady asked for the dates of her daughter’s birth and death inscribed inside a heart. The kid was not even three years old when she died. Ringo thought long and hard about that one. He gave her a piñata burro exploding with every kind of flower he could fit on her shoulder.
Kurt had taken a break to check his text messages, coming to terms with yet another promise he had made in a drunken state that he was now regretting. Staring at his phone, he overheard the young mother crying softly to Ringo, who made an effort to touch her body with care, even as he made permanent scars in her skin.
“You are too good for this world,” Kurt said, shaking his head.
“Who is?” Ringo asked. He had just been thinking the opposite—that he had such an easy life and he’d done nothing to deserve it, while other people, like the grieving mother in his chair, had to live with a reality that was unbearable. It felt cruel and unfair, even if such things were beyond fairness. “Not me,” Ringo said, dabbing at the red trickle bleeding from the rose he’d just finished.
“We all are,” Kurt said, already looking exhausted.
BY POPULAR VOTE, the local classical station was piped into the weight room at the YMCA. That day the entire fifteen hours of Wagner’s Ring cycle was being broadcast without interruption in honor of the holiday. At that point in the morning, mortals and gods were still wrestling for control, as if they had a chance.
“Rosette, do you ever feel like your shoes might hurt just as much as your feet do?”
“My shoes take me where I need to go,” Rosette answered, “and that’s all they need to do.”
Rosette was watching with great admiration her own body as she did squats in front of the giant mirror. Her charge, Mr. Cox, sat on the floor snoozing against a stack of yoga blankets. He was sixty-three, physically healthy enough to live another twenty active years, except for the plaque in his brain, gumming up the pathway of his thoughts, even simple thoughts like Red means stop, Don’t drink the Windex, My name is George Dean Cox. For twenty bucks an hour under the table, Rosette picked him up at Morning Pines and took him with her to do whatever she wanted to do that day. “A program of enrichment,” she billed it to his adult daughters, who were happy to pay any price not to worry about him.
“How do you know when you, specifically, are doing what your God wants you to do? I mean, anything can be an augury of anything. Like, a leaf on the sidewalk shiny side down could mean yes as well as no, depending on your interpretation.”
“No leaves, Karen baby. God trying to tell you to follow Him and you looking at the ground.”
“Yeah but follow where?”
“If what you want is so hard to get, if you have to stop all the time and red lights are everywhere, and no no no is all you hear, and you still do it, and then you feel terrible after, that was because you not on God’s path. If God is making a way for you, it’s always easy.”
“But bad things are so easy.”
“Because sometimes what we think meant evil for us meant good for God’s plan. Sometimes God uses us to make pain because then that can make others do good. Jesus would never have died if Judas didn’t betray him.”
“Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to Karen, in all her studies, that she could use her powers for evil. Or that she ought to. She picked a corner off a pockmarked old yoga block. Rolling the purple foam between her fingers, she heard a twitter. Do it. Karen plopped the bit of foam into her mouth and swallowed it.
“Mr. Cox!” Rosette slapped her hands together, trying to wake the old man. He had slid off the pile of blankets and was lying awkwardly on the floor. “Help me get him up, Karen. Now. Before he gets stuck like this.”
“I want some candy. Can I borrow some money for the vending machine?”
“No. You can eat lunch when it is lunchtime.”
“I didn’t bring a lunch,” Karen said. A lie. She’d eaten both of her frozen pizzas in the first hour of her shift.
“I always bring extra for you, my friend,” Rosette said. She had made fried pork chops, a fact she kept to herself for now, or the girl would be begging like a stray dog until it was time to eat.
Karen both was and was not a girl, Rosette felt. Bulk collected around her hips like a mother of ten, but her voice fluttered and shrieked like a toddler’s. Her breasts were enormous and scored by the lines of an i
ll-fitting bra. Her blond hair curled in girlish ringlets and her big blue eyes protruded with the never-ending alacrity of a curious, slightly stunned child. Rosette didn’t know Karen’s whole story, but she could tell the girl had been raped at least once, probably more. Karen bore the unmistakable stain of sexual trauma. There was the way she walked, a broken, yelping gait, not quite mannish but definitely not feminine. And she was obviously protecting herself from fleshly danger through many extra pounds of fat. That much was obvious. Rosette didn’t need to ask, nor did she want to. The fountain of Karen’s crazy was hard to shut off once it started, she’d learned regretfully after giving Karen her phone number.
All Rosette knew for sure was that Karen had no family, no one to teach her right from wrong. Such a pity, though unsurprising in this godforsaken country. Rosette had been in the U.S. for twenty years, long enough to know it was a beautiful land tilled for doom. Her island in the Azores had its problems, yes, but was superior to her new home in most ways. Though of course superiority did not guarantee admittance to the afterlife. You had to work because it was good to work, to sacrifice and be glad about it. In time Rosette knew she could make Karen understand. As insufferable as the girl could be, she had a good heart, and Rosette wanted to prepare her for the possibility of deliverance. Why else had God put this annoying woman into her life?
First Karen would need to lose weight. She was big as a hippo. It would be rude to arrive in Paradise with all that fat, like showing up as a guest in someone’s house carrying more luggage than could fit in your room. Also, Karen’s mind jumped around like a grasshopper. She needed the focus of the one true God. More than once Rosette had had to reprimand Karen for reading YMCA members’ palms. “The Devil’s sideshow!” Rosette had screamed, and had given a reproving tug, short but sharp, on Karen’s bouncy ponytail. But even these palm readings she did with good intentions, Rosette had to admit. Karen just wanted to be liked, and she was willing to learn, especially when Rosette offered to feed her.
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