I looked at Nathan. His life was draining away. He was turning into a ghost, or a shadow. Not even his tattoos had color.
My whole arm was aching. I couldn’t ignore it any longer. And it was so close in the trailer that I couldn’t breathe. “I’ve got to get some air,” I said as I forced myself to get up. I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days. Then I felt a burning in my neck and a stabbing pain in my chest. I tried to shout to Nathan, who was standing up, who looked shocked, who was coming toward me.
But I couldn’t move; I was as leaden as a statue.
I could only see Nathan, and it was as if he were lit by a tensor lamp. The pigments of living tattoos glowed under his shirt, and resolved themselves like paintings under a stage scrim. He was a living, radiant landscape of scenes and figures, terrestrial and heavenly and demonic. I could see a grotesque caricature of Mrs. Stramm’s tattoo on Nathan’s wrist. It was a howling, tortured, winged child. Most of the other tattoos expressed the ugly, minor sins of people Nathan had tattooed, but there were also figures of Nathan and Ruth. All of Ruth’s faces were Madonna-like, but Nathan was rendered perfectly, and terribly; he was a monster portrayed in entirely human terms, a visage of greed and cowardice and hardness. But there was a central tattoo on Nathan’s chest that looked like a Dürer engraving—such was the sureness and delicacy of the work. Ruth lay upon the ground, amid grasses and plants and flowers, which seemed surreal in their juxtaposition. She had opened her arms, as if begging for Nathan, who was depicted also, to return. Her chest and stomach and neck were bleeding, and one could look into the cavities of the open wounds. And marching away, descending under the nipple of Nathan’s chest, was the figure of Nathan. He was followed by cherubs riding fabulous beasts, some of which were the skeletons of horses and dogs and goats with feathery wings … wings such as Nathan had tattooed on Mrs. Stramm. But the figure of Nathan was running away. His face, which had always seemed askew—a large nose, deep-set, engaging eyes, tousled hair, the combination of features that made him look like a seedy Puck, the very embodiment of generous friendliness—was rendered formally. His nose was straight and long, rather than crooked, as it was in real life, and his eyes were narrow and tilted, rather than wide and roundish; and his mouth, which in real life, even now, was full, was drawn as a mere line. In his hands, Nathan was carrying Ruth’s heart and other organs, while a child riding a skeleton Pegasus was waving a thighbone.
The colors were like an explosion, and the tattoos filled my entire field of vision; and then the pain took me, wrapped like a snake around my chest. My heart was pounding. It seemed to be echoing in a huge hall. It was all I could hear. The burning in my chest increased and I felt myself screaming, even if it might be soundless. I felt my entire being straining in fright, and then the colors dimmed. Fainting, falling, I caught one last glimpse of the walls and ceiling, all pulsing, glowing, all coalescing into one grand tattoo, which was all around me, and I followed those inky pigment paths into grayness and then darkness. I thought of Laura and Ben, and I felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow for Nathan.
For once, I didn’t seem to matter, and my sense of rushing sadness became a universe in which I was suspended.
I thought I was dying, but it seemed that it would take an eternity, an eternity to think, to worry back over my life, to relive it once more, but from a higher perspective, from an aerial view. But then I felt a pressure, as if I were under water and a faraway explosion had fomented a strong current. I was being pulled away, jostled, and I felt the tearing of pain and saw bright light and heard an electrical sparking, a sawing. And I saw Nathan’s face, as large as a continent gazing down upon me.
* * *
I woke up on his couch. My head was pounding, but I was breathing naturally, evenly. My arm and shoulder and chest no longer ached, although I felt a needlelike burning over my heart. Reflexively, I touched the spot where I had felt the tearing pain, and found it had been bandaged. “What the hell’s this?” I asked Nathan, who was sitting beside me. Although I could make out the scars on his neck, I could no longer find the outlines of the tattoos I had seen, nor could I make out the brilliant pigments that I had imagined or hallucinated. “Why do I have a bandage on?” I felt panic.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked. Nathan looked ill. Even more wasted. His face was shiny with sweat. But it wasn’t warm in here now; it was comfortable. Yet when Mrs. Stramm was sitting for her tattoo, it was stifling. I had felt the closeness of dead air like claustrophobia.
“Christ, I thought I was having a heart attack. I blacked out. I fell.”
“I caught you. You did have a heart attack.”
“Then why the hell am I here instead of in a hospital?” I asked, remembering how it felt to be completely helpless in the emergency room, machines whirring and making ticking and just audible beeping noises as they monitored vital signs.
“It could have been very bad,” Nathan said, ignoring my question.
“Then what am I doing here?” I asked again. I sat up. This was all wrong. Goddammit, it was wrong. I felt a rush in my head, and the headache became sharp and then withdrew back into dull pain.
“I took care of it,” he said.
“How?”
“How do you feel?”
“I have a headache, that’s all,” I said, “and I want to know what you did on my chest.”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t use pigment. They’ll let you into a Jewish cemetery.” Nathan smiled.
“I want to know what you did.” I started to pull off the gauze, but he stopped me.
“Let it heal for a few days. Change the bandage. That’s all.”
“And what the hell am I supposed to tell Laura?” I asked.
“That you’re alive.”
I felt weak, yet it was as if I had sloughed something off, something heavy and deadening.
And I just walked out the door.
After I was outside, shivering, for the weather had turned unseasonably cold, I realized that I had not said good-bye. I had left as if in a daze. Yet I could not turn around and go back. This whole night was crazy, I told myself. I’d come back tomorrow and apologize … and try to find out what had really happened.
I drove home, and it began to snow, a freakish, wet, heavy snow that turned everything bluish-white, luminescent.
My chest began to itch under the bandage.
* * *
I didn’t get home until after twelve. Understandably, Laura was worried and anxious. We both sat down to talk in the upholstered chairs in front of the fireplace in the living room, facing each other; that was where we always sat when we were arguing or working out problems. Normally, we’d sit on the sofa and chat and watch the fire. Laura had a fire crackling in the fireplace; and, as there were only a few small lamps on downstairs, the ruddy light from the fire flickered in our large white carpeted living room. Laura wore a robe with large cuffs on the sleeves and her thick black hair was long and shiny, still damp from a shower. Her small face was tight, as she was upset, and she wore her glasses, another giveaway that she was going to get to the bottom of this. She almost never wore her glasses, and the lenses were scratched from being tossed here and there and being banged about in various drawers; she only used them when she had to “focus her thoughts.”
I looked a sight: my once starched white shirt was wrinkled and grimy, and I smelled rancid, the particular odor of nervous sweat. My trousers were dirty, especially at the knees, where I had fallen to the floor, and I had somehow torn out the hem of my right pantleg.
I told Laura the whole story, what had happened from the time I had seen Nathan Sunday until tonight. At first she seemed relieved that I had been with Nathan—she had never been entirely sure of me, and I’m certain she thought I’d had a rendezvous with some twenty-two-year-old receptionist or perhaps the woman who played the French horn in the orchestra—I had once made a remark about her to Laura. But she was more upset than I had expected when I told her that Ruth had died. We were
friends, certainly, although I was much closer to Nathan than she was to Ruth.
We moved over to the couch and I held her until she stopped crying. I got up, fixed us both a drink, and finished the story.
“How could you let him tattoo your skin?” Laura asked; and then, exposing what she was really thinking about, she said in a whisper, “I can’t believe Ruth’s gone. We were good friends, you didn’t know that, did you?”
“I guess I didn’t.” After a pause, I said, “I didn’t let Nathan tattoo me. I told you, I was unconscious. I’d had an attack or something.” I don’t know if Laura really believed that. She had been a nurse for fifteen years.
“Well, let me take a look at what’s under the gauze.”
I let her unbutton my shirt; with one quick motion, she tore the gauze away. Looking down, I just saw the crisscrossings and curlicues and random lines that were thin raised welts over my heart.
“What the hell did he do to you? This whole area could get infected. Who knows if his needle was even clean. You could get hepatitis, or AIDS, considering the kinds of people who go in for tattoos.”
“No, he kept everything clean,” I said.
“Did he have an autoclave?” she asked.
“Yes, I think he did.”
Laura went to the downstairs bathroom and came back with Betadine and a clean bandage. Her fuzzy blue bathrobe was slightly open, and I felt myself becoming excited. She was a tiny woman, small boned and delicate-featured, yet big-busted, which I liked. When we first lived together, before we married, she was extremely shy in bed, even though she’d already been married before; yet she soon became aggressive, open, and frank, and to my astonishment I found that I had grown more conservative.
I touched her breasts as she cleaned the tattoo, or more precisely, the welts, for he used no pigment. The Betadine and the touch of her hands felt cool on my chest.
“Can you make anything out of this?” she asked, meaning the marks Nathan had made.
I looked down, but couldn’t make anything more out of them than she could. I wanted to look at the marks closely in the mirror, but Laura had become excited, as I was, and we started making love on the couch. She was on top of me, we still had our clothes on, and we were kissing each other so hard that we ground our teeth. I pressed myself inside her. Our lovemaking was urgent and cleansing. It was as if we had recovered something, and I felt my heart beating, clear and strong. After we came and lay locked together, still intimate, she whispered, “Poor Nathan.”
* * *
I dreamed about him that night. I dreamed of the tattoo I had seen on his chest, the parade of demons and fabulous creatures. I was inside his tattoo, watching him walking off with Ruth’s heart. I could hear the demon angels shouting and snarling and waving pieces of bone as they rode atop unicorns and skeleton dragons flapping canvas-skinned pterodactyl wings. Then Nathan saw me, and he stopped. He looked as skeletal as the creatures around him, as if his life and musculature and fat had been worn away, leaving nothing but bones to be buried.
He smiled at me and gave me Ruth’s heart.
It was warm and still beating. I could feel the blood clotting in my hand.
I woke up with a jolt. I was shaking and sweating. Although I had turned up the thermostat before going to bed, it was cold in the bedroom. Laura was turned away from me, moving restlessly, her legs raised toward her chest in a semi-fetal position. All the lights were off, and as it was a moonlit night, the snow reflected a wan light; everything in the room looked shadowy blue. And I felt my heart pumping fast.
I got up and went into the bathroom. Two large dormer windows over the tub to my left let in the dim light of a streetlamp near the southern corner of the house. I looked in the mirror at my chest and could see my tattoo. The lines were etched in blue, as if my body were snow reflecting moonlight. I could see a heart; it was luminescent. I saw an angel wrapped in deathly wings, an angel such as the one Nathan had put on Mrs. Stramm’s wrist to heal her; but this angel, who seemed to have some of Nathan’s features—his crooked nose and full mouth, had spread his wings, and his perfect infant hands held out Ruth’s heart to me.
Staring, I leaned on the white porcelain sink. I felt a surging of life, as if I were being given a gift, and then the living image of the tattoo died. I shivered naked in the cold bathroom. I could feel the chill passing through the ill-fitting storms of the dormer windows. It was as if the chill were passing right through me, as if I had been opened up wide.
And I knew that Nathan was in trouble. The thought came to me like a shock of cold water. But I could feel Nathan’s presence, and I suddenly felt pain shoot through my chest, concentrated in the tattoo, and then I felt a great sadness, an oceanic grief.
I dressed quickly and drove back to Trout Creek. The fairgrounds were well-lit, but deserted. It had stopped snowing. The lights were on in Nathan’s trailer. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, as I had left it, and I walked in.
Nathan was dead on the floor. His shirt was open and his chest was bleeding—he had the same tattoo I did. But his face was calm, his demons finally exorcised. I picked him up, carried him to the couch, and kissed him good-bye.
As I left, I could feel his strength and sadness and love pumping inside me. The wind blew against my face, drying my tears … it was the cold fluttering of angel’s wings.
TIM POWERS
Night Moves
Here’s a rare short work—full of wonders and dark magic—from Tim Powers, who has made his considerable reputation almost entirely as a novelist. His brilliant and brilliantly eclectic novels include Dinner at Deviant’s Palace and The Anubis Gates, both winners of the Philip K. Dick Award; and The Drawing of the Dark. Upcoming is another novel, On Stranger Tides, from Ace. He is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Stress of Her Regard.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Powers now makes his home in Santa Ana, California, with his wife, Serena.
NIGHT MOVES
Tim Powers
When a warm midnight wind sails in over the mountains from the desert and puffs window shades inward, and then hesitates for a second so that the shades flap back and knock against the window frames, southern Californians wake up and know that the Santa Ana wind has come, and that tomorrow their potted plants will be strewn up and down the alleys and sidewalks; but it promises blue skies and clean air, and they prop themselves up in bed for a few moments and listen to the palm fronds rattling and creaking out in the darkness.
Litter flies west, papers and leaves and long veils of dust from lots where the tractors wait for morning, and tonight a dry scrap cartwheeled and skated through Santa Margarita’s nighttime streets; it clung briefly to high branches, skipped over the roofs of parked cars, and at one point did a slow jiggle-dance down the whole length of the north window sill at Guillermo’s Todo Noche Cantina. The only person who noticed it was the old man everybody called Cyclops, who had been drinking coffee at the counter for hours in exchange for a warm, lighted place to pass the night, and until the thing tumbled away at the west end of the window sill he stared at it, turning his head to give his good eye a clear look at it.
It looked, he thought, like one of those little desiccated devilfish they sell at swap-meets; they cut three slits in the fish’s body before they dry it, so after it dries it looks as if it has a primate body and stunted limbs and a disproportionately large head with huge, empty eye sockets. When you walk out of the swap-meet area in the late afternoon, out of the shadow of the big drive-in movie screen, you sometimes step on the stiff little bodies among the litter of cotton candy and cigarette butts and bits of tortilla.
Cyclops had noticed that it danced west, and when he listened he could hear the warm wind whispering through the parallel streets outside like a slow breath through the channels of a harmonica, seeming to be just a puff short of evoking an audible chord. Realizing that this was no longer a night he needed shelter from, Cyclops laid two quarters on the c
ounter, got to his feet and lumbered to the door.
Outside, he tilted back his devastated hat and sniffed the night. It was the old desert wind, all right, hinting of mesquite and sage, and he could feel the city shifting in its sleep—but tonight there was a taint on the wind, one that the old man smelled in his mind rather than in his nose, and he knew that something else had come into the city tonight too, something that stirred a different sort of thing than leaves and dust.
The night felt flexed, stressed, like a sheet of glass being bent. Alertly Cyclops shambled halfway across Main Street and then stopped and stared south.
After eleven o’clock the traffic lights stopped cycling and switched to a steady metronomic flashing, all the north-south lights flashing yellow for caution while the east-west ones, facing the smaller cross-streets, flashed red for stop. Standing halfway across the crosswalk Cyclops could see more than a mile’s worth of randomly flashing yellow lights receding away south down Main, and about once every minute the flashes sychronized into one relayed pulse that rushed up the long street and past him over his head, toward the traffic circle at Bailey, half a mile north of where he stood.
He’d stood there often late at night, coming to conclusions about things by watching the patterns of disorder and synchronization in the long street-tunnel of flashing yellow lights, and he quickly realized that tonight they were flashing in step more frequently than normal, and only in pulses that swept north, as if delineating a landing pattern for something.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 49
