The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The bluish light that comes just before dark suffused the trailer, and the shadows seemed to become more concrete than the walls or paintings.

  The older woman I had seen on Sunday was back. She was sitting in Nathan’s studio, in what looked like a variation of a dentist chair. Beside the chair was a cabinet and a sink with a high, elongated faucet, the kind usually seen in examination rooms. Pigments, dyes, paper towels, napkins, bandages, charcoal for stencils, needle tubes and bottles of soap and alcohol were neatly displayed beside an autoclave. I was surprised to see this woman in the chair, even though I knew she had been desperate to see Nathan. But she just didn’t seem the sort to be getting a tattoo, although that probably didn’t mean a thing: anyone could have hidden tattoos: old ladies, senators, presidents. Didn’t Barry Goldwater brag that he had two dots tattooed on his hand to represent the bite of a snake? Who the hell knew why.

  “I’ll be done in a few minutes,” Nathan said to me. “Sit down. Would you like a drink? I’ve got some beer, I think. If you’re hungry, I’ve got soup on the stove.” Nathan was a vegetarian; he always used to make the same miso soup, which he’d start when he got up in the morning, every morning.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit,” I said, and I sat down on an old green Art Deco couch. The living room was made up of the couch, two slat-back chairs, and a television set on a battered oak desk. The kitchenette behind Nathan’s work area had a stove, a small refrigerator, and a table attached to the wall. And, indeed, I could smell the familiar aroma of Nathan’s soup.

  “Steve, this is Mrs. Stramm,” Nathan said, and he seemed to be drawn toward me, away from Mrs. Stramm, who looked nervous. I wanted to talk with him … connect with him … find the man I used to know.

  “Mister Tarot,” the woman said, “I’m ready now, you can go ahead.”

  Nathan sat down in the chair beside her and switched on a gooseneck adjustable lamp, which produced a strong, intense white light. The flash and paintings in the room lost their fire and brilliance, as the darkness in the trailer seemed to gain substance.

  “Do you think you can help me?” she asked. “Do you think it will work?”

  “If you wish to believe in it,” Nathan said. He picked up his electrical tattoo machine, examined it, and then examined her wrist, where the concentration camp tattoo had faded into seven smudgy blue marks.

  “You know, when I got these numbers at the camp, it was a doctor who put them on. He was a prisoner, like I was. He didn’t have a machine like yours. He worked for Dr. Mengele.” She looked away from Nathan while she spoke, just as many people look away from a nurse about to stick a needle in their vein. But she seemed to have a need to talk. Perhaps it was just nerves.

  Nathan turned on his instrument, which made a staticky, electric noise, and began tattooing her wrist. I watched him work; he didn’t seem to have heard a word she said. He looked tense and bit his lip, as if it was his own wrist that was being tattooed. “I knew Mengele,” the woman continued. “Do you know who he was?” she asked Nathan. Nathan didn’t answer. “Of course you do,” she said. “He was such a nice-looking man. Kept his hair very neat, clipped his mustache, and he had blue eyes. Like the sky. Everything else in the camp was gray, and the sky would get black from the furnaces, like the world was turned upside down.” She continued to talk while Nathan worked. She grimaced from the pain of the tattoo needle.

  I tried to imagine what she might have looked like when she was young, when she was in the camp. It would have been Auschwitz, I surmised, if Mengele was there.

  But why was a Jew getting a tattoo?

  Perhaps she wasn’t Jewish.

  And then I noticed that Nathan’s wrist was bleeding. Tiny beads of blood soaked through his shirt, which was like a blotter.

  “Nathan—” I said, as I reflexively stood up.

  But Nathan looked at me sharply and shook his head, indicating that I should stay where I was. “It’s all right, David. We’ll talk about it later.”

  I sat back down and watched them, mesmerized.

  Mrs. Stramm stopped talking; she seemed calmer now. There was only the sound of the machine, and the background noise of the fair. The air seemed heavier in the darkness, almost smothering. “Yesterday you told me that you came here to see me to find out about your husband,” Nathan said to her. “You lied to me, didn’t you.”

  “I had to know if he was alive,” she said. “He was a strong man, he could have survived. I left messages through the agencies for him when I was in Italy. I couldn’t stand to go back to Germany. I thought to go to South America, I had friends in Sao Paulo.”

  “You came to America to cut yourself off from the past,” Nathan said in a low voice. “You knew your husband had died. I can feel that you buried him … in your heart. But you couldn’t bury everything. The tattoo is changing. Do you want me to stop? I have covered the numbers.”

  I couldn’t see what design he had made. Her wrist was bleeding, though … as was his.

  Then she began to cry, and suddenly seemed angry. But she was directing her pain and anger at herself. Nathan stopped working, but made no move to comfort her. When Mrs. Stramm’s crying subsided and she regained control of her breathing, she said, “I murdered my infant. I had help from another, who thought she was saving my life.” She seemed surprised at her own words.

  “Do you want me to stop,” Nathan asked again, but his voice was gentle.

  “You do what you think, you’re the tattooist.”

  Nathan began again. The noise of his machine was teeth-jarring. Mrs. Stramm continued talking to him, even though she still looked away from the machine. But she talked in a low voice now. I had to lean forward and strain to hear her. My eyes were fixed on Nathan’s wrist; the dots of blood had connected into a large bright stain on his shirt cuff.

  “I was only seventeen,” Mrs. Stramm continued. “Just married and pregnant. I had my baby in the camp and Dr. Mengele delivered it himself. It wasn’t so bad in the hospital. I was taken care of as if I were in a hospital in Berlin. Everything was nice, clean. I even pretended that what was going on outside the hospital in the camp, in the ovens, wasn’t true. When I had the baby—his name was Stefan—everything was perfect. Dr. Mengele was very careful when he cut the cord; and another doctor assisted him, a Jewish doctor from the camp. Ach!” she said, flinching; she looked down at her wrist, where Nathan was working, but she didn’t say a word about the blood soaking through his shirtsleeve. She seemed to accept it as part of the process. Nathan must have told her what to expect. He stopped, and refilled his instrument with another ink pigment.

  “But then I was sent to a barracks, which was filthy, but not terribly crowded,” she continued. “There were other children in there, mutilated. One set of twins had been sewn together, back to back, arm to arm, and they smelled terrible. They were an experiment, of course. I knew that my baby and I were going to be an experiment. There was a woman in the barracks looking after us. She couldn’t do much but watch the children die. She felt sorry for me. She told me that nothing could be done for my baby. And after they had finished their experiment and killed my son, then I would be killed also; it was the way it was done. Dr. Mengele killed all surviving parents and healthy siblings for comparison. My only hope, she said, was to kill my baby myself. If my baby died ‘naturally’ before Mengele began his experiment, then he might let me live. I remember thinking to myself that it was the only way I could save my baby the agony of a terrible death at the hands of Mengele.

  “So I suffocated my baby. I pinched his nose and held his mouth shut while my friend held us both and cried for us. I remember that very well. Dr. Mengele learned of my baby’s death and came to the barracks himself. He said he was very sorry, and, you know, I believed him. I took comfort from the man who had made me kill my child. I should have begged him to kill me. But I said nothing.”

  “What could you have done?” Nathan asked, as he was working. “Your child would have died no matter wh
at. You saved yourself, that’s all you could do under the circumstances.”

  “Is that how you would have felt, if you were me?”

  “No,” Nathan said, and a sad smile appeared for an instant, an inappropriate response, yet somehow telling.

  Mrs. Stramm stopped talking and had closed her eyes. It was as if she and Nathan were praying together. I could feel that, and I sensed that something else was happening between them. Something seemed to be passing out of her, a dark, palpable spirit. I could feel its presence in the room. And Nathan looked somehow different, more defined. It was the light from the lamp, no doubt, but some kind of exchange seemed to be taking place. Stolid, solid Mrs. Stramm looked softer, as if lighter, while Nathan looked as ravaged as an internee. It was as if he were becoming defined by this woman’s past.

  When Nathan was finished, he put his instrument down on the cabinet, and taped some gauze over his own bleeding wrist. Then he just stared at his work on Mrs. Stramm. I couldn’t see the tattoo from where I was sitting, so I stood up and walked over. “Is it all right if I take a look?” I asked, but neither one answered me … neither one seemed to notice me.

  The tattoo was beautiful, lifelike in a way I had not thought possible for a marking on the flesh. It was the cherubic face of an angel with thin, curly hair. One of the numbers had now become the shading for the angel’s fine, straight nose. Surrounding the face were dark feathered wings that crossed each other; an impossible figure, but a hauntingly sad and beautiful one. The eyes seemed to be looking upward and out, as if contemplating a high station of paradise. The numbers were lost in the blue-blackness of lifting wings. This figure looked familiar, which was not surprising, as Nathan had studied the work of the masters. I remembered a Madonna, which was attributed to the Renaissance artist Lorenzo di Credi, that had two angels with wings such as those on the tattoo. But the tattooed wings were so dark they reminded me of death; and they were bleeding, an incongruous testament to life.

  I thought about Nathan’s bleeding wrist, and wondered.…

  “It’s beautiful,” Mrs. Stramm said, staring at her tattoo. “It’s the right face, it’s the way his face would have looked … had he lived.” Then she stood up abruptly. Nathan sat where he was; he looked exhausted, which was how I suddenly felt.

  “I must put a gauze wrap over it,” Nathan said.

  “No, I wish to look at him.”

  “Can you see the old numbers?” Nathan asked.

  “No,” she said at first, then, “Yes, I can see them.”

  “Good,” Nathan said.

  She stood before Nathan, and I could now see that she had once been beautiful: big-boned, proud, full-bodied, with a strong chin and regal face. Her fine gray hair had probably been blond, as her eyebrows were light. And she looked relieved, released. I couldn’t help but think that she seemed now like a woman who had just given birth. The strain was gone. She no longer seemed gravid with the burden of sorrow. But the heaviness had not disappeared from the room, for I could feel the psychic closeness of grief like stale, humid air. Nathan looked wasted in the sharp, cleansing, focused light.

  “Would you mind if I looked at your tattoo?” Mrs. Stramm asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Nathan said.

  Mrs. Stramm nodded, then picked up her handbag and took out her checkbook. She moved toward the light and began to scribble out a check. “Will you accept three hundred dollars?”

  “No, I cannot. Consider it paid.”

  She started to argue, but Nathan turned away from her. “Thank you,” she said, and walked to the door.

  Nathan didn’t answer.

  * * *

  Nathan turned on the overhead light; the sudden change from darkness to light unnerved me.

  “Tell me what the hell’s going on,” I said. “Why did your wrist start bleeding when you were tattooing that woman?”

  “It’s part of the process,” Nathan said vaguely. “Do you want coffee?” he asked, changing the subject—Nathan had a way of talking around any subject, peeling away layers as if conversation were an onion; he eschewed directness. Perhaps it was his rabbinical heritage. At any rate, he wasn’t going to tell me anything until he was ready. I nodded, and he took a bag of ground coffee out of his freezer, and dripped a pot in the Melitta. Someone knocked at the door and demanded a tattoo, and Nathan told him that he would have to wait until tomorrow.

  We sat at the table and sipped coffee. I felt an overwhelming lassitude come over me. My shoulder began to ache … to throb. I worried that this might be the onset of another heart attack (I try not to pay attention to my hypochondria, but those thoughts still flash through my mind, no matter how rational I try to be). Surely it was muscular, I told myself: I had been wrestling with my son last night. I needed to start swimming again at the “Y”. I was out of shape, and right now I felt more like sixty-two than forty-two. After a while, the coffee cleared my head a bit—it was a very, very strong blend, Pico, I think—but the atmosphere inside the trailer was still oppressive, even with the overhead light turned on. It was as if I could feel the shadows.

  “I saw Mrs. Stramm here yesterday afternoon,” I said, trying to lead Nathan. “She seems Jewish; strange that she should be getting a tattoo. Although maybe not so strange, since she came to a Jewish tattooist.” I forced a laugh and tried not to stare at the thin webbing of scars on his neck.

  “She’s not Jewish,” Nathan said. “Catholic. She was interred in the camp for political reasons. Her family was caught hiding Jews.”

  “It seems odd that she’d come to you for a tattoo to cover up her numbers,” I said. “She could have had surgery. You would hardly be able to tell they’d ever been there.”

  “That’s not why she came.”

  “Nathan.…”

  “Most of the people just want tattoos,” Nathan said. He seemed slightly defensive, and then he sighed and said, “But sometimes I get people like Mrs. Stramm. Word gets around, word-of-mouth. Sometimes I can sense things, see things about people when I’m tattooing. It’s something like automatic writing, maybe. Then the tattoo takes on a life of its own, and sometimes it changes the person I tattoo.”

  “This whole thing … it seems completely crazy,” I said, remembering his paintings, the large canvases of circus people, carny people. He had made his reputation with those melancholy, poignant oil paintings. He had traveled, followed the carnies. Ruth didn’t seem to mind. She was independent, and used to travel quite a bit by herself also; she was fond of taking grueling, long day-trips. Like Nathan, she was full of energy. I remember that Nathan had been drawn to tattooing through circus people. He visited tattoo studios, and used them for his settings. The paintings he produced then were haunted, and he became interested in the idea of living art, the relationship of art to society, the numinal, symbolic quality of primitive art. It was only natural that he’d want to try tattooing, which he did. He had even tattooed himself: a tiny raven that seemed to be forever nestled in his palm. But that had been a phase, and once he had had his big New York show, he went on to paint ordinary people in parks and shopping malls and in movie houses, and his paintings were selling at over five thousand dollars a piece. I remembered ribbing him for tattooing himself. I had told him he couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. He had said that he had already bought his plot. Money talks.

  “How’s Ruth?” I asked, afraid of what he would tell me. He would never be here, he would never look like this, if everything was all right between them.

  “She’s dead,” he whispered, and he took a sip of his coffee.

  “What?” I asked, shocked. “How?”

  “Cancer, as she was always afraid of.”

  The pain in my shoulder became worse, and I started to sweat. It seemed to be getting warmer; he must have turned the heat up.

  “How could all this happen without Laura or me knowing about it?” I asked. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “Ruth went back to Connecticut to stay with her parents.”


  “Why?”

  “David,” Nathan said, “I knew she had cancer, even when she went in for tests and they all turned out negative. I kept dreaming about it, and I could see it burning inside her. I thought I was going crazy … I probably was. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t be near her. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t do anything. So I started traveling, got back into the tattoo culture. The paintings were selling, especially the tattoo stuff—I did a lot of close-up work, you wouldn’t even know it was tattoos I was painting, I got into some beautiful Oriental stuff—so I stayed away.”

  “And she died without you?” I asked, incredulous.

  “In Stamford. The dreams got worse. It got so I couldn’t even talk to her over the phone. I could see what was happening inside her and I was helpless. And I was a coward. I’m paying for it now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Goddammit, it was hot.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Tell me about the scars on your neck and your arms.”

  “And my chest, everywhere,” Nathan confessed. “They’re tattoos. It started when I ran away, when I left Ruth, I started tattooing myself. I used the tattoo gun, but no ink.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “At first, I guess I did it as practice, but then it became a sort of punishment. It was painful. I was painting without pigments. I was inflicting my own punishment. Sometimes I can see the tattoos, as if they were paintings. I’m a map of what I’ve done to my wife, to my family; and then around that time I discovered I could see into other people, and sort of draw their lives differently. Most people I’d just give a tattoo, good work, sometimes even great work, maybe, but every once in a while I’d see something when I was working. I could see if someone was sick, I could see what was wrong with him. I was going the carny route, and living with some gypsy people. A woman, a friend of mine, saw my ‘talent’”—he laughed when he said that—“and helped me develop it. That’s when I started bleeding when I worked. As my friend used to tell me, ‘Everything has a price.’”