She looks at me, then turns away. “I wish I had as much confidence in John as you do. But okay, if you want to drop him before the puncture, that’s fine. I know how you hate blood.”
Hate is too mild a word. Phobia might fit.
“You all right?” I ask as I take Pete’s hand in my gloved one and lead him out of the room.
He nods.
I take him to Nate, who seats him in the barber chair. In five passes he’s shaved off all of the kid’s hair. The shavings are incinerated at the end of the day to ensure the site remains louse and nit free.
“Here you go, young man,” Nate says, handing him a lollipop he buys himself so he can give them to the kids. “Don’t eat it until after your shower or it’ll be a hairy pop.”
I take Pete to the mandatory shower, and wait for him outside. One of the attendants throws his clothing into the “incinerate” bin, and after the final disinfecting spray, Pete emerges dressed in a black jumpsuit. He looks smaller than he did and I wonder if it is just that the jumpsuit is oversized and pools around him, or if the walk-through has diminished him as it does the adults.
Before I open the door to the puncture room – where his blood will be drawn to be tested for Chagas, Hansen’s, tuberculosis and the New Delhi superbug – I squat down and give him a quick hug.
When I get back to the tracking room, there’s an ink seated in the surgical chair, but my mom’s just leaning back on the counter playing with a new pair of gloves instead of putting them on.
“You know, of course,” the ink is saying, “that Hansen’s isn’t even particularly contagious. And of the 100 or so cases reported in the U.S. every year, about a third of them can be traced to contact with armadillos – not inks.”
The speaker has long blond hair, long legs and the look of a model. I hate her immediately.
“You a doctor?” my mom asks.
I wish I didn’t hear the want in her words. Want to have had the money and opportunity to become a doctor. Want for the second chance life never gave her. She’s certified as an inkatorium practitioner – so she can prescribe – but it’s not the same as a regular nurse-practitioner, and nothing like a doctor.
“Chemist,” the woman answers, then swivels in the surgical chair to give my mother a challenging look. “Before. When I wasn’t marked.”
I think it’s instinct that drives me to step in front of my mom to shield her.
“This must be your daughter,” the ink says. “She looks like you.”
The comment cements the hatred. My mother carries an extra twenty-five pounds, dyes her hair an ugly shade of red and has a face seamed with worry lines. There’s nothing resembling a resemblance between us.
“Thanks,” I hear my mother say.
Shit, what a betrayal that agreement is.
“Darker, though,” the ink says.
“Her father is mostly Mohawk.” I hear my mother finally snap on the gloves.
“I didn’t mean looks,” the ink says.
It startles me into really looking at her.
She’s got bruises up and down her arms and neck. That fact doesn’t awaken any pity in me. Beauty isn’t power. Or protection. So there.
“Abbie, braid the lady’s hair so it’s off her neck.”
“Meche,” the ink says. “My name is Meche.”
My mother studies the ink in the chair before her. “You know why you’re here?”
Meche nods. “But, the vast majority of us aren’t public health risks or carrying the diseases people are panicked about. It’s really a way to make it more palatable to see so many people locked up.”
“My mom knows. She’s always saying that. Well, something like that.”
“Get me the betadine swabs, Abs.” I hear warning in my mom’s voice.
“If you know how can you be part of it?” There’s no outrage in the ink’s voice, just a tired sort of curiosity.
My mom doesn’t answer.
When I hand her the swab, she’s taking a closer look at the bruising on Meche’s neck. “Any of these hurt?”
“No.”
“Boyfriend hit you?”
Her laugh is short, humorless. “A guy riding a bike ran me down in front of the grocery store. Everyone’s so scared by the damned health alerts that when they saw me on the ground and noticed the tattoo they thought I was having a seizure. Kicking appears to be the preferred remedy.”
“Hmmm.”
I’m familiar with that response. It’s my mother’s way of saying “I’ll reserve judgment until I hear the policeman/guidance counselor/principal’s version of the story.”
My mom swabs the area she’s determined would be a good GPS insertion spot then injects the topical anaesthetic.
“You know why I don’t wear a wedding ring?” she asks as she grabs a sterile scalpel from the autoclave. 180s in the conversation are my mother’s specialty.
“Two winters ago I had to sell all the gold I had to be able to pay our heating bill. What’s sentiment when your kid’s freezing in a cold house?” My mom puts pressure on the incision while she reaches for the suture gun. “You do what you have to do.”
“That’s why I’m here even knowing that most of you aren’t sick,” my mom adds as the stitch punches through skin. She inspects her handiwork, swipes the area with more betadine.
“You’re done,” she says.
“I know,” Meche says, and this time I understand exactly what she means.
* * *
You can learn a lot lunching at the inkatorium. Like, people inside are pretty much the same as people outside. We’ve got somewhere around 1,000 inks of all kinds here now and if you walk into the lunchroom you’ll see them sitting clustered into ethnic groupings. And within each group, they sit pretty much by color of tat. Unspoken hierarchy, a lot like high school. The only ones who seem to cross the boundaries are kids too little to recognize distinctions other than size.
John and I are watching the new batch of inks. Meche is an oddball. She sits the first place she notices a spot, and then, doesn’t eat. She just stares out the small, high windows at the steely patches of sky visible through them. Later I see her pick up her tray, still full of food, and carry it over to the table where all the little kids band to eat together. She sets her tray down and lets them claim her roll, juice box and jello cup. None of them will touch the tuna casserole. Smart kids.
I have to admit, I have sort of a sick fascination with her. I swear it has nothing to do with wanting to look like her. When it starts growing back in, her hair is almost as mousy as mine and that does a number on her golden aura. No, it has more to do with how she carries herself. She’s arrogant. And in this world of subdued humans, it makes her seem like an immortal down from Olympus on a day pass.
I keep track of other inks too. Pete, for example. He and a bunch of other boys his age improvise baseball games in the cafeteria, using crushed pint milk cartons for balls and their arms held out stiff for bats. We’re not supposed to bring anything in for the inks but the very next week stuff appears: scuffed aluminum bats; balls roughly the size of real baseballs but made of soft rubber so they won’t break windows; battered leather gloves with old names scrawled on the thumbs. My mother, who administers the place by an exhaustive set of regulations for the adults, turns a blind eye when it comes to the kids. So long as a ball doesn’t land smack in her lap she won’t confiscate the contraband.
I don’t see Meche interact much with the other inks, though to my annoyance, she likes talking with John whenever his volunteer work puts him in contact with her.
“She says the phone cards they sell to residents at the inkatorium are only good for a week after they’re activated, no matter how much talk time you pay for,” John says some three weeks after Meche’s arrival at the inkatorium.
“Did she buy one?” I ask.
“No. She only had about $15 dollars on her when the van brought her in. But she’s really smart about this stuff.”
“Hmph.”
�
��She says the same company that issues the cards pays big time to be the phone carrier for inkatorium, and then sets it up so you can’t make collect calls and so each call you can make costs three times as much as it would on the outside. That’s why the inkatorium has that rule about no cell phones for the residents. So both parties continue to make a shitload of money off the phone arrangement.”
“Sounds far-fetched. And how would she know?”
“I think she’d actually done some research on inkatoriums before being hauled in, not sure why. But, anyway, she has nothing to gain from lying about it.”
Except your sympathy, I think.
“It’d be easy enough for you to find out if she’s telling the truth,” he says. “Just ask your mom.”
As if. My mother might be a bitch-on-wheels, but she’s mostly a fair bitch-on-wheels and she’d never institute a system that nefarious. But I do ask her. And she confirms it.
“I don’t do it to fleece the inks,” she says when she notices my expression. “Most of them aren’t picked up with a lot of money on them and, since we’re required to keep the resident list private, they mostly don’t get visitors to buy the cards for them either. But the carrier-contract income really counts come review time. As for the cell phones, they’re just too easy to jigger so they’ll explode.”
I smuggle a throwaway cell phone into the inkatorium the next weekend. At lunch I find my way to the end of the table where Meche’s doing her pining for sunlight thing and sit on the bench next to her. Her eyes come down from the rafters and settle on my face.
“Abbie, the administrator’s daughter.”
“Abigail to you. Abigail Adams.”
“Patriotic,” she says.
I’m pretty sure she’s making fun of me, but I can’t say I blame her. “My mother’s idea of cute.”
“So what can I do for you, Abigail Adams?”
“Here,” I say, then drop the cell phone in her lap. “Now, stop filling John’s ear with garbage.”
She moves one of her hands to the phone to cover it.
“I don’t know what you think you’ll gain from it, but don’t play him. Got it? Otherwise I’ll inform my mother you’re in possession of contraband.”
The honey eyes stay on my face for a while. “I will do whatever I have to do to get out of here. Even if it means playing your young man. As I believe you will do whatever you need to do to protect him. Even if it means running to your mother. We are two of a kind, Abigail, and the good in that is that we understand one another perfectly.”
She gets up, empty-handed.
I have no idea where the cell phone’s gone.
“Thank you,” she says. Then she walks away.
Of course I don’t tell my mother.
Next weekend there’s a shipment from the first inkatorium built instate. It’s already at double its capacity, so 300 of its residents are being transferred to Smithville. It is a mix of black and green tats, with just a few blues. There is one particularly sad group of inks among them: mothers who gave birth while at the inkatorium. None of them have their children with them. My mom won’t tell me what happened to the babies, no matter how hard I press her for an answer.
The group sits together heedless of ethnicity or tat color, and everyone else steers clear of them, as if their especially horrible luck might rub off on contact. Most of the group has mental health issues, my mother tells me, though mainly they just seem depressed. One of them is visibly crazy, though. She doesn’t sit. She paces the stretch of the wall under the windows. Back and forth. Every so often she’ll stop and raise her eyes to those same patches of sky that Meche stares at, then starts pacing again.
She doesn’t break this routine until Pete and the boys get up to play. One of them cracks a ball that sails far above the woman’s head. She jumps, sinuous and higher than would seem possible, and catches the ball. Then, a little tentative, throws it back to the boys. After that they hit ball after ball in her direction, and she catches each as effortlessly as the first.
By now the whole lunchroom – staff included – is focused on the display.
“That’s so freaky,” I hear John’s voice at my ear. He’s come to stand beside me to watch. “You’d never guess she’d be that good.”
“It’s desperation,” I say.
He gives me a strange look.
“Check out her face. It’s like if she doesn’t move to jump and catch she’s going to die,” I say.
After a few moments, he says “What does that to a person?”
“This,” I say. “Us.”
I’m surprised when I feel John’s hand wrap itself around mine.
Next week, the crazy woman and Meche start sitting together. Well, really, they sit alone side-by-side. When they do, the crazy one grows less antsy. Sometimes, from where I sit, I see her lips moving and I wonder if she is praying.
“She recounts fairy tales,” John tells me one day when he slides his tray next to mine at the table. We’re in the staff area of the lunchroom which is like the upper tier at an amphitheater looking down on the level where the inks eat. “At least that’s what Meche figures they are.”
We look down at the pair of them, openly spying. The crazy one’s lips are moving and Meche sits next to her, as aloof as usual. Then I see Meche’s shoulders hitch as if she’s clenched them against a blow. She reaches over and lays her hand on top of the crazy woman’s. Now it’s Meche’s lips we see moving.
Moments later a yowl tears out of crazy woman’s throat. I’ve never heard anything like it. It stands all my hairs on end.
Renfro moves with a speed that belies his size. Not even a minute after the display starts, a hypodermic slips into the crazy woman’s arm and she slumps over on the table. The big guy scoops her up easily, carries her out.
In the ringing silence I hear what must be Meche sobbing. Like the other, it is a raw sound, but somehow it’s so much worse because it’s issuing from her. My mother’s got a hypodermic in her hand as well, but when she sits on the bench next to the ink and says something, Meche shakes her head. She walks out of the lunchroom on her own.
It takes a week for Meche to reappear.
She sits as she normally does, at any old table in the lunchroom. But she doesn’t get a tray to fill, she just sits. I don’t remember when I do it but I’m up and walking to the stairway that leads down to the amphitheater’s bowl.
She looks up at me when I come to stand across the table from her.
“You have to eat,” I say. “My mom will order a feeding tube put in you if you don’t. She did that once when a group of inks went on hunger strike.”
When she doesn’t say anything, I move to the lunchline and fill a tray, then I bring it back and set it down in front of her. “At least pretend, okay?”
Slowly, as if it costs her, she lifts her arm and starts to move the food around.
I sit across from her. I want to ask her what happened, but I don’t, I just watch as she plays with her unappetizing meal.
“You know the worst part of being here?” she says. “You start forgetting who you were before.”
“You were a chemist, and from the look of the clothes we swapped for the jumpsuit, a frigging successful one,” I say, a little freaked out by her tone.
She looks down at her food. “When I first got here I’d give people element names based on whether their proper names started with with same letters as the atomic symbol for the element. Now I’m not sure I can even remember the whole periodic table.”
“Did you assign me an element? Or John?”
“I could never settle on which of the A’s yours should be, and there are no atomic symbols that start with J. But I gave your mom one.”
“There’s a K?”
“Two, actually. Potassium and Krypton. Which do you think?”
I start laughing as I get up.
“Seriously, eat,” I say before I leave. “Even Superman needs food.”
“His Achilles’ heel was
Kryptonite, not Krypton, I believe.”
“Same dif.”
She shakes her head, but she’s smiling and I think I see her take a bite as I walk away.
The crazy woman doesn’t return to the lunchroom until another week goes by. She makes a beeline for Meche and sits on the bench with hardly any space between them. For a second I think they are holding hands but then I realize that what I’m seeing is an exchange. Meche places the cell phone I smuggled in for her in the smaller woman’s hand. It disappears up the sleeve of the jumpsuit. I find myself hoping nobody but me sees it.
Renfro tells me what happens a few days later.
First, my mother confiscates the phone. Second, she has Renfro take the crazy one to the visitor’s room. It doesn’t get used much, only family and spouses are permitted to visit the residents but first they have to know the residents are here. The man who stands on the other side of the glass is even bigger than Renfro, dark-haired and pale-skinned. He is neither spouse nor family but he is, Renfro tells me, how my mother found out about the contraband phone.
The crazy one doesn’t have any money and never bought a phone card, but she leaves him a message and he moves a mountain to come see her. Namely, the mountain that is my mother.
Renfro stands on the woman’s side of the glass; my mother on the visitor’s side for the full half-hour she’s allotted them. Like all visitors, Renfro tells me, the first thing the man does after he sits in the hard plastic seat is put his hand flat to the glass. The crazy one matches him, then rests her cheek on her hand, as if it were his. She tells him about the baby without looking at him.
And then, just like that, their half-hour is done.
“Did Renfro and your mom hear all of their conversation?” John asks. “Because that’s really sort of creepy.”
“I know, right?”
We’re at the top of the chute of the cement factory not far from the trailer park. It is one of the places I’ve promised my mother I’ll never get caught in again, and I intend to keep my promise.
“You think they’re still in love with each other?” He flips pebble-size chunks of cement block off the chute.
“I want to think so,” I say.
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