The Tattooed Heart

by Michael Grant

  Against the back wall were empty spaces that would once have held refrigerated cases.

  “It was a convenience store,” I announced proudly, as though I really was playing Watson to Messenger’s Sherlock.

  Messenger was not wildly impressed by my powers of deduction.

  The place stank of human and animal waste, of rotting garbage and dust. The room appeared empty. I heard a slight scratching sound, assumed it was a rat and carefully scanned the floor around me while wondering if there was a weapon at hand should the rat come my way.

  Messenger moved to the back of the room, to the empty rectangles where the cold cases had once dispensed beer and soda and packs of salami and cheese. The glow of streetlights did not reach this far, but to my surprise the space was not entirely dark. There seemed to be a candle within, judging from the buttery light that flickered and at times disappeared entirely.

  The scratching sound came again and something about it contradicted my assumption that it was an animal. It was too slow to be a rat. Too random.

  I leaned into the void and saw the candle first, and the person lying near the candle second. I saw that it was a girl, a girl hard to place age-wise, though I guessed she might be seventeen or so. She had dark hair that looked as if she had made an effort to gather it all together with a scrunchie, but wisps and entire hanks of hair had escaped. Her face might be pretty. I wasn’t entirely sure, as it was both dirty and marked with too much makeup.

  She was dressed like a bargain basement Oriax, but the net effect spoke not of supernatural allure but rather of vulnerability and despair.

  I don’t know why it took me so long to notice the syringe in the crook of her elbow. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it.

  It lay there, the needle still in the vein. A trickle of blood had started to dry. A leather belt lay loosened around her bicep. A tablespoon with a blackened bottom was on the floor beside the guttering candle.

  “Her name is Graciella Jayne, though she has taken to calling herself Candy. She is seventeen.”

  “Is?” I asked sharply, for I had leaped to the sad conclusion that she was dead.

  “She lives still,” Messenger said. He cocked his head, as did I upon hearing a sound of footsteps and low conversation. From the direction of what must have been the store’s back door came a boy and a girl, both much the same age as Graciella.

  Both looked to be in the same . . . business . . . as Graciella, the boy dressed in a skintight T-shirt that bared his lean midriff, while the girl wore the shortest of shorts and a top that would have doubled for a bathing suit.

  “Candy!” the boy cried. They rushed to Graciella and knelt beside her. The rush of bodies extinguished the flame and for a moment they were in near pitch-darkness. Then a lighter flared in the boy’s hand and the candle was relit.

  “Oh, my God, she OD’d,” the girl said.

  “Is that the stuff she got off Jenks?”

  “Same stuff we’ve got, Mouse. Jesus.”

  The two of them looked at each other and slowly the boy named Mouse pulled a small, rectangular packet of white powder from his pocket. A logo had been stamped on it. A pink pony.

  “We have to call 911,” Mouse said.

  “I have to boot up first,” the girl said.

  “Are you crazy? You want to end up like her? That stuff is cut with something bad.”

  “Maybe not, maybe it’s just real high-test, you know? Too pure will kill you. So I could just shoot half a spoon. Three-quarters, you know?”

  Mouse stood up. “I’m calling 911.” He pulled out a cell phone and, shaking his head at the girl’s plaintive look, called in an overdose.

  The girl began slapping Graciella’s face, saying, “Wake up, Candy, come on. Wake up.”

  Graciella managed a low moan, but only one, and then she slid back into coma.

  “Okay, come on Sue Lynn, we gotta get out of here before the EMTs show up,” Mouse said.

  “This neighborhood, it’ll take them twenty minutes,” the girl said. “And don’t call me Sue Lynn. I’m Jessica now. And I have got to fix. It’s nighttime, Mouse, I’m getting sick.”

  All the while I watched Graciella. Her breathing was shallow. Her skin was gray and covered in sweat. Gray even by the gentle amber light of the candle. It was all I could do to stop myself asking Messenger the question: Can’t we help her?

  I knew the answer to that. The answer is always the same. We may not interfere. We are not there for the victims. We are there for the people who create victims.

  Yet first we must understand what has been done, that is the rule, that is the way of the Messengers of Fear.

  The EMTs arrived, as Jessica had predicted, after about twenty minutes. By then Mouse and Jessica were gone. Did they go to shoot up? Almost certainly. Would their lives end in tragedy? Probably.

  Would I find myself someday looking down at the dead body of one or the other or both, wondering what wickedness I was there to punish? That was a grim thought that would bring feelings of hopelessness in its wake. I pushed the thought away.

  The arrival of the EMTs gave me my first inkling of where we were. The patch on their shoulders indicated Nashville, Tennessee.

  The EMTs, a man and a woman, moved with practiced efficiency, barely speaking because they had seen OD’d junkies before, many times. They hung a transparent bag of fluid and pushed a needle into Graciella’s arm. But the veins had been weakened to near collapse and the needle did not work. The EMT pulled it out, tried again. Again nothing. It took her six tries to find a vein that could handle the flow of fluids. The other EMT took her pulse, blood pressure, checked her eyes, and said, “Pinpoint. BP is seventy over thirty-five. Breathing shallow and irregular.”

  “Naloxone?”

  “Yep.”

  A shot into the muscle of her thigh this time. They radioed in to the emergency room at Vanderbilt University Hospital.

  “BP’s rising, ninety over forty.”

  “She’ll live,” I said, as though I were part of their conversation and not invisible and inaudible.

  We watched as they brought in a gurney, kicking trash aside to allow them to roll it. A third EMT arrived and helped them lift Graciella onto it and pass a strap over her waist.

  Then, without warning, Messenger and I were outside the red brick hospital. Ambulances pulled up but none were carrying Graciella; she was already inside. We walked through the doors, slid past nurses, technicians, doctors, and patients, and came upon Graciella in one of the beds. A young foreign doctor stood at the foot of her bed addressing half a dozen medical students.

  “Heroin overdose. EMTs reported low BP, low pulse, nonresponsive, breathing shallow. They administered fluids and Naloxone. The workup indicated what we already knew: OD. When results come in I expect we’ll find she’s positive for at least one STD, and almost certainly positive for hepatitis. Malnourished, of course.”

  “She looks young,” one medical student offered.

  “I’d say fifteen, sixteen, give or take, younger than she looks,” the doctor said wearily. “She’s most likely a runaway turning tricks. She is still in a coma, but brain function appears normal.”

  I turned away. She looked too vulnerable lying there being discussed by strangers as though she wasn’t even present. Of course in a way she wasn’t present.

  “She’s a junkie,” I said to Messenger, and perhaps my distaste was too obvious for he shot me a cold and disapproving look that I took as a rebuke.

  I bristled at that. “It’s what happens to junkies,” I said harshly.

  “Yes,” Messenger said.

  “People shouldn’t take drugs,” I said, coming off more self-righteous than I intended. “I mean, come on, who doesn’t know that heroin is dangerous?”

  “And you want to look no further?” he asked.

  “I guess I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who screw up their lives in some obviously stupid way. There’s people who have terrible things just happen to them. Th
ere are people being shot in the back in a school yard. That boy . . . those girls . . . and now this stupid girl, who nearly killed herself and may do so yet.”

  “You spare no pity for the foolish.”

  “I do have pity, it’s just . . . I mean, you can’t compare that brave boy standing up to gunmen and this girl here.”

  He was silent, but it was a silence that carried the weight of disapproval.

  The doctor and the medical students had moved on to another case. Graciella lay alone. All alone. A pretty but ragged girl with tubes in her arms and up her nose, scabs on her inner arms.

  “Where are her parents, for God’s sake?” I snapped. “That’s who should be taking care of her.”

  I should have known what would happen next—we stood outside a very nice, upscale suburban home in a location I could not guess at. There was a suggestion of impressive, pine-covered hills in the distance, the sky was threatening, and the air was chilly but not cold.

  “Her home?”

  “It was,” Messenger said. “And it is still, in this time.”

  “You mean she’s in there right now?” Did my reluctance show? For I was strangely resistant to seeing her in a time before she became a disease-ridden drug addict. But I couldn’t fail in my duties. Messenger was deliberately waiting, patient as always, and I knew he was testing me.

  I took a deep breath and walked straight up the sidewalk and through the front door into a tall entrance hall that revealed twin, curved staircases going up, with a formal dining room to the right and an equally formal living room, both furnished in a heavy, rather old-fashioned way, all dark wood and embroidered upholstery.

  I heard laughter and the sound of running feet. A girl, no more than six years old, came running past, giggling, chased by an enthusiastic terrier.

  It might be Graciella, I thought, but this child was a universe away from the scabbed junkie who lay in a Nashville hospital.

  We walked on, heading back toward the kitchen where a woman with a blond ponytail stood slicing vegetables for a salad. She worked awkwardly due to a cast on her left arm.

  “Her mother,” I said, and at that a man entered. He was a strikingly handsome man of perhaps thirty-five but with prematurely silvered hair. He came up quietly behind his wife and made to put his arms around her waist but at his touch she flinched and cried out, “No, please!”

  It was more than a startled sound, there was something brittle and high-strung in it, a panicky sound. Something was going on between the two parents. The man’s face darkened in anger.

  “I hate it when you do that,” he snapped.

  “Do what?” the woman asked, trying to conceal her emotions. “You just startled me is all.”

  “I haven’t had a drink in two days and you still treat me like . . . like, I don’t know. Like you hate me touching you.”

  She turned and I saw naked fear on her face. It was so surprising that I took a step back.

  “John, I didn’t mean . . . I mean, I was just startled.”

  “Have I ever laid a hand on you when I was sober?” the man asked, his expression one of hurt and perhaps wounded pride. “I just want to give my beautiful wife a hug.”

  “Of course,” she said, but it came out almost as a gasp.

  He carefully, gently, raised her injured arm and seemed to be inspecting the cast.

  She stood rigid.

  “It was an accident,” he said firmly.

  “I know, John, you didn’t mean to . . . It’s just that when you. . .” She looked into his eyes and looked away quickly.

  “So, it’s like that, is it?” He seemed almost pleased in a spiteful way. “Make a mistake, pay forever, right? Well, you ever hear the phrase, ‘might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb’?”

  “I don’t . . . I . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” he said with savage mockery. “Is that a little over your head? Let me explain it in words of a single syllable. It means if you’re going to blame me for what I haven’t done, I might as well go ahead and do it for real.”

  He opened the door of their expensive refrigerator, drew out a bottle of beer, and rummaged in a drawer for a bottle opener.

  “John, please.”

  “Please, John. Please, John.” He popped the bottle top and drank half the bottle in a single long swig. “Please, John, please work like a dog to buy me this beautiful home, John. Please, John, buy me a nice new car. Please, John, pay for the country club and the private school.”

  “Sweetheart, you know—”

  “Shut the hell up. Just shut up.”

  I saw Graciella, the six-year-old Graciella, standing at the edge of the room, framed in an arched doorway.

  “What do you want, honey?” her mother asked.

  Graciella shook her head.

  “Then go up to your room and play. Or outside. But don’t bother Mommy and Daddy right now, okay, sweetie?”

  “You’re scaring her, Alison. You don’t have to leave, Graciella. You can stay. Daddy’s all right.” He said “all right” in a way that elongated the vowels, sardonic, sullen. “Daddy just wanted a little affection. But I guess that’s too much to ask, isn’t it?”

  Graciella knew something was wrong. Her face was serious, her eyes huge, looking from her mother to her father. I felt extremely uncomfortable but, I told myself, a difficult childhood is not a reason to become a junkie. I was pretty sure of that. After all, who doesn’t have some kind of problem with their parents?

  Messenger turned away and headed up the magnificent staircase to the bedrooms upstairs. It had been day, now it was night. And I sensed that more time than that had passed.

  Messenger hesitated at a door. “This may be difficult to watch.”

  I almost laughed. Suddenly now Messenger was concerned for me? I’d already seen things that could haunt my dreams for a dozen lifetimes.

  I nodded. But secretly I smiled. What was there left that could possibly be that awful?

  We passed through the door and into a darkened bedroom. Graciella was asleep, but she was an older Graciella, perhaps nine or ten now. Her curls lay spread across her pillow. She breathed softly. A stuffed animal, a small white bear, lay beside her, its button eyes staring up in the dark. A ceiling fan turned and ruffled her hair just ever so slightly. From outside came the sound of sprinklers coming on.

  It was a nice room, there were—

  The door opened, briefly spilling light and silhouetting her father, John. He closed the door silently behind him and tiptoed to Graciella’s bed.

  My father used to come and check on me like this, when I was little. I remember pretending to be asleep, and he would watch me for a while, and whisper increasingly silly jokes until I cracked up. Then he would say, “Night, sweetheart,” and—

  Graciella’s father kicked the side rail of her bed, hard. Graciella’s eyes flew open.

  “You didn’t take out the trash,” John yelled.

  “I . . . I . . .” She tried to wipe the sleep from her eyes, blinking up at him. But it was not surprise I saw on her face, but mute dread: this was not the first time this had happened.

  “I-I-I?” he mocked. “You stupid little pig. That’s why you don’t take out the trash, you’re a stupid, fat little piggy who loves garbage, aren’t you?”

  “Dad, I need to sleep, I have school—” She cowered, pulling the covers around her, trying to hold the blanket while covering her ears.

  He cursed vilely, a machine-gun assault of abuse, a constant, sickening rant of filth and degradation. Then he knelt beside her, bringing his rage-transformed face down close to hers. “You don’t need school, you’re too stupid to learn anything. You know it’s true. You’re dumb as a brick, Graciella, and just as ugly. Now get your fat ass out of bed and take out the—”

  “Okay, I’m coming, I—”

  “Oh, please, don’t start blubbering, you look like an animal, like a baboon or something when you start in with that. I can barely look at you! Filthy little waste of br
eath!”

  I turned to Messenger, struggling to maintain my own self-control, trying to be the cool, detached Messenger’s apprentice, but feeling all the while as if I would explode. “Is it always like this?”

  In response Messenger waved a hand through the air, and from his fingers drifted bright silvery rectangles, each a tiny screen. And on each screen was a scene.

  “Pig!”

  “Worthless!”

  “Fat!”

  “Ugly!”

  “Stupid!”

  Dozens of these screens floated around me, each showing John, Graciella’s father, heaping the most wounding of insults on her. I have transcribed here all that I can bring myself to say, but there were others worse. And they would not end, the screens multiplied until they threatened to fill the room like a tornado of filth and contempt.

  It battered me. It was not directed at me, but it was as if I was being buried alive beneath the sheer weight of the verbal violence. It was awful to witness from the outside, to have endured it day after day, week after week, as Graciella had, to be attacked, ridiculed, subjected to this raw, unshielded hatred . . .

  “No!” I cried. “No. No. Enough, freeze this, freeze time!”

  Time froze. Graciella was absolutely still. The ceiling fan stopped. The sprinklers outside no longer chattered. Everything stopped.

  Except for John.

  The father was still for a moment, almost as if he, too, were frozen, but then he turned his face to us. He squinted, tilted his head sideways a little. Then his eyes widened, and he saw.

  A sound came from him. It was not a sound I had ever heard before, and not one I wish ever to hear again. It was a growl, the growl of a hyena guarding a dead prey. But there were layers within that animal growl, cries and shrieks, the sound of a lash on flesh, of bludgeon blows striking bone.

  In the time I had been with Messenger, no one had ever seen us until we revealed ourselves. No one had ever moved when we froze time.