Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  “Thanks,” I say after a moment.

  “For what?”

  “For this.”

  She shrugs, then turns back to me. “I like the idea of having a bunch of people living here. It’s like having family again.”

  “How long can you keep this going?”

  “For years and years, probably.” She raises an imaginary glass to the sky, “Thank you, Grandpa O’Gorman.”

  “I have enough money to have bought my way out of a tattoo way back when,” she says. “Not that I considered it. What’s the point of having principles if they aren’t going to make your life difficult, right?”

  She flashes me a sardonic grin, but soon goes serious again. “And now I find there are reasons to be glad for life’s difficulties.” After laying her hand fleetingly on my arm she goes back inside the house.

  * * *

  Showers. Decent food. Conversation that jumps freely between Spanish and English. Every so often a person knocks at the door and gives Silvio the password he, Finn and Father Tom have agreed will identify those sent to seek refuge or a meal on their way to some ill-defined elsewhere.

  After eating, Silvio and John end up on separate couches, both leafing through books they’ve picked off Meche’s bookshelves. The West African family retires to the basement apartment, and snatches of the song the mother sings to her children as she puts them to bed waft twistily up to the first floor. It isn’t in any language I understand, and I’ve never heard it before, but the melody is sweet and I find myself repeating the words as if they were a prayer.

  Later, Meche gets on the computer tucked into a corner of living room to – who knows? – manage investments or rabble rouse or galvanize her virtual network. I’m pretty much convinced she can do anything she sets her mind to do. A few times, when she’s particularly intent on whatever is happening on screen, I think I see something moving just above her head. Like her thoughts take shape and swarm around her.

  Abbie stands behind Meche, watching over her shoulder. The girl peppers her with technical questions about the custom software she’s got installed. After a while Meche goes upstairs and comes back down with a sleek laptop.

  “Here, play with this,” she says to Abbie. The look that comes over Abbie’s face is the visual equivalent of a squeal.

  “Jeez, this is sick.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Meche says with a smile, then goes back to whatever she was doing.

  Father Tom drags in just after nine.

  His eyes register his surprise at the scene. He looks from Meche to me and back again.

  “Woe to him who underestimates women,” he says finally.

  “Or teenagers. Meet our rescuers,” Meche says, introducing him to Abbie and John.

  I see tears in the priest’s eyes when he hugs me, but he dashes them away quick and talks to me as if we had stood together on the steps of his church just yesterday. Silvio gets up, ducks behind the bar along the far wall of the room and pulls out a couple of bottles.

  “I’m in despair that among your peña stock there is nary a bottle of Jamesons,” the priest says to Meche as soon as Silvio hands him a glass with dark rum.

  She rolls her eyes. “Explain to me why anyone would pick a mouthful of peat over a mouthful of sugar?”

  There’s some back and forth about the drinks from their respective islands until they run out of jibes. Or pretense that these are normal times.

  “How are things out there?” I ask.

  Father Tom’s eyes slide away and he takes his time answering. “Half my parishioners can’t be found. And most of the ones I’ve located are hurt. Remember Elvira Pérez? I just barely managed to perform the anointing of the sick before she passed on. The emergency rooms are overwhelmed. And there are lines of vans waiting outside for the inks to be stable enough to take to the inkatoriums.”

  “Finn has been tweeting reports, filing stories, and taking photos and videos with his phone,” he says. “The people at the Gazette are scared there’ll be a news blackout pretty quick, so everything’s going up as soon as it comes in. The state of emergency declaration has us all thinking like conspiracy theorists.”

  He glances at his watch. “I hope he’s on his way.”

  “Is he going to be anywhere near a street called Callowhill?” Abbie asks without looking up from the laptop.

  We all stare at the girl.

  “Very likely,” the priest says.

  “I’m seeing tons of stuff on twitterfall about a flash mobbing there. Like, now.”

  Father Tom pulls out his cell phone, starts punching in numbers.

  “Is there anyone left to form a flash mob?” Meche says.

  I don’t think it’s supposed to be a question, but Abbie answers.

  “From the way the call’s multiplying on the fall, I’d say plenty.”

  “I’m not getting through to him,” Father Tom says.

  “Here we go,” Abbie says, then moves the laptop off her lap to the coffee table where we can see the screen.

  All of us cluster around jerky, pixilated footage of hundreds, maybe thousands of people running down Callowhill, past the charred skeleton of Holy Innocents. Soon the recording device ends up clipped to a belt, and the image shifts to a view of asphalt and the lower half of bodies and feet of the mob in motion. We can hear several languages being shouted out in proximity to the camera.

  “Bloody hell, pick up the camera again so we can see where you are,” Meche says to the anonymous auteur filling the screen with images.

  “Won’t happen,” Silvio says. “They need to keep their hands clear.”

  “For what?” I say.

  “For that.”

  Boots appear among the civilian footwear. Nightsticks hop in and out of view, and the sound is punctuated by the thud of wood on flesh. Gunfire starts peppering the audio.

  “It was like that in Cuba,” Silvio says. “Didn’t matter which side you were on.”

  “Mother of God,” Father Tom says.

  At the corner of the screen we can see a girl, not much older than Abbie, go down under a volley of hard blows. She covers her head with her hands as she hits the pavement, but blood seeps through her fingers and she stops moving. A couple of people drop to their knees next to her, then begin to uluate their grief. The camera moves out of visual range but the audio picks up the keening for a while longer.

  We peel away, one by one, each of us turning away from the reality unfolding virtually.

  “I think I miss the inkatorium,” I say.

  She swats me hard enough that I stumble on my way to the sofa.

  Walls saved my life once, I answer.

  It wasn’t the walls, she manages before I push her away.

  But the thing is, she is right. The walls of the tabernacle had been a blind that hid my infant body, but if I had remained there I would have died. What had really saved me was the hand that opened the tabernacle’s door. The one that reached in and carried me out. The one that held me as it ran.

  Only, what if your brother’s hand is raised against you? Or cuffed and held back? Or oblivious? What breaches the walls to save you then?

  I don’t know how long I sit on the sofa letting the conversations fold around me. I don’t keep track of time any longer, it’s a meaningless construct that runs in circles. Once upon a time? No way.

  I fall asleep on the sofa as I’m changing the fairy-tale beginning. Ever upon a time? Or, never upon it? One or the other, that’s the real opening.

  * * *

  I smell the char. She doesn’t. Her nose is a poor instrument for such things.

  Because she does not open her eyes, I spring away from her slumbering body and stand beside her. If there is danger I’ll fight for her, as my kind always have, on my layer of the world. A layer her kind almost never credits with bringing about change. But it does. It does.

  He stands at the entrance to the room, paralyzed.

  If it were the girl standing in his stead, she’d see an eno
rmous wolf bristled and alert beside the prone figure; if it were the old man, he’d see a creature of wing and celestial light wielding a sword.

  This one sees me as Mari knows me. A jaguar, dappled light and dark.

  I open my mouth and curl my long tongue. He has nothing to fear from me, her loves are mine.

  I cannot speak to many minds other than hers, but I try him anyway.

  Come close, I say.

  When I don’t sense a response, I draw back.

  I understand. Fear immobilizes. It gives predators the taste of what it is to be prey; it reminds prey that they were created to feed something other than themselves.

  But I have no fear. And I do not keep immobile. I unsheath my claws a second before I rake Mari’s leg.

  She jerks up to clutch the muscle twisted by a cramp on her layer of existence.

  When I am sure she is awake, I jump back inside her. I find my way to what birthed this guise and splash in the ancestral river of her blood.

  “Am I dreaming?” he asks.

  “No.” I say.

  He looks exhausted, smudged and marked by the dark, ashy disappearance of people’s lives.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “We were worried about your getting caught in the mob.” I look around. It’s just two of us. Everyone else must have gone to bed. “What time is it anyway?”

  “One,” he says. “It took me a long time to get back here. And I was only ever on the fringe of things. But I’m thinking it’s no story compared to yours.”

  He’s as I remember him and yet he’s not who he was before I left. The fact I’m not already in his arms is proof of that.

  “Why care so long as both stories end in the same place?” I choose his words from long ago as a prompt.

  But he doesn’t meet my eyes and stays where he is.

  I’m a fool. Never upon a time it is.

  I pull myself up from the sofa.

  “Mari….”

  “I know,” I say. I pat his arm on my way to the staircase. “Everything’s changed.”

  I’ve picked a smallish room on the third floor. I can’t remember who’s in the rooms flanking mine but I hope I’m far enough away that they don’t hear the sounds I make while I cry.

  She surfaces partway. I feel her wrap her velvet around my heart, as she does at every real loss. The bed is soft and the linens smooth. They’re scented with something much nicer than the antibacterial they used at the inkatorium. I drift to sleep focused on these small joys.

  I wake a couple of hours later. The moonlight sneaks some silver through the blinds, and the room looks like a shell lit from within.

  Look. How beautiful it is, I think at her.

  She flicks me away and moves deeper into her catnap.

  When I turn on my other side I see Finn stretched out beside me. His eyes are closed, his breathing even. It is the deep sleep of exhaustion. His arms are flung – one almost obscuring his eyes, the other crosswise over his torso – as if he’s fending off what assails him simultaneously from without and within.

  I don’t think. I move into the nimbus of warmth he emanates when he sleeps and let my eyes rake over him. There isn’t a centimeter of him I’ve forgotten. I want to touch him, but I don’t. My love and desire aren’t his obligation.

  I hear the intake of breath and when I look up at his face, his eyes are open.

  “You’re in my bed. Still not one to ask for permission?” My voice is teasing, but I move away.

  His arms go around me and pull me in tight.

  “Marry me so I don’t have to ask permission,” he says, his voice rough.

  I laugh, but it is a hurt sound. It’s not me he wants, but a woman who lives now only in his memory.

  He shifts onto his elbow and leans over me.

  “Marry me,” he says again.

  “Even…” I start.

  “Even,” he cuts me off.

  There is a smear of ash on his forehead and the smell of smoke in his pores. And something so complicated beneath I can’t begin to identify its component parts, but I think love is part of it.

  “Vale.”

  It’s just a small word in Spanish – battling against the thunder of my heart, the sirens howling through the city, the sound of lives reduced by element to elemental.

  It means okay. But also: it has worth.

  It’s barely out of my mouth when his hand tangles in my hair and he pulls me up to his mouth.

  I remember it being good between us.

  But not like this.

  2.

  While she sleeps, I hunt.

  I can wander hundreds of miles from her body if I believe she’ll be safe during my exodus. Tonight, his arms around her promise this. So I jump.

  The streets of this place she loves are dark, punctured by pockets of flame. I head to the fires. Her kind gather around light, even if it is the light of destruction. I nose around the smoking skeletons where embers still smolder.

  I find a child half buried under ash and beams crossed over each other in a loose thatch. He is a sensitive. As I skirt fire to get to him, he sees me almost fully enfleshed, even though I usually appear semi-solid only when I’m seen out of the corner of their eyes or in the near dark.

  He shrinks a little at my approach.

  I can smell his fire-kissed skin, but no sores running foul. No clear waters leak out either, as when the body has no more blood to spare.

  “Will you help me?” he calls out. He’s scared of my staying but even more scared of my vanishing.

  I cannot speak to his mind, but I can make myself understood. When he knows what I’m set to do, he sees me as a huge dog, shaggy brown and white, with a small keg strapped under my chin. The image of rescue from a story he heard before he was buried in his avalanche of cinder.

  I shovel him clear, each paw tossing fast and wide in syncopation, then nose beneath the remaining grayness to reach an arm. I take it in my mouth and pull. Some of his body is freed from its bank of ash, but not all. Not enough.

  It is his leg, pinioned under wood. that holds him down. It is not supposed to twist in that direction. The wood isn’t heavy, I shove it away with the flat over my nose, and flick my ears away from his cries.

  Even though I have hurt him by the freeing, when I drop into a crouch he throws an arm around my neck. Inch by inch I flatten and press against him. When nearly half his body leans on my back, I push fully under. He flings his other arm around my neck and buries his face in my fur.

  I rise slowly off my haunches, testing his hold. He hangs on, I leap.

  It is not hard to find the place where they take their wounded. It stinks of blood and burnt skin and the harsh stuff they use to clean both. I tip him off my back just outside the building under the strongest light. Where he will be seen best and I least.

  Then I go back to my work.

  I pass other spirits on the streets. Dreamwalkers. Scraps of being propelled by people sleeping restless in the city. The dreamwalkers are not like me. As they pass through the landscape they can change nothing. But they leave a trail. Most are luminous and their track smells of green and golden afternoon or silvered night. I notice only a few among them that leave the smell of carrion when they pass.

  If I have learned anything since I’ve come fully alive it is that, in waking, their dreamers cannot tell the one from the other.

  * * *

  I’m in the shower the first time they come through the door. They don’t need warrants during a state of emergency. At least they pound on the door instead of breaking it down. I step out and drip on the mat in my preferred bathroom on the second floor when I hear the commotion.

  Finn’s at the newspaper and Father Tom at the diocesan center trying to figure where he can celebrate Mass for his remaining parishioners now that the church is rubble. Silvio and Napoleón have roped Abbie into driving them to get groceries and more alcohol. The inks who still have jobs are at work.


  Abbie’s figured out how to get into the Hipco database, so she’s sanitized Meche’s and my tats back from non-alien status to citizen – as if we’d never been admitted to the inkatorium – but we’re the only two inks currently in the house whose tats won’t code to garbage.

  I crack open the bathroom door. I can hear the civil patrol downstairs with Meche. Every ink is a suspected flash mobber these days but it can’t hurt that she’s gorgeous and filthy rich and just a tad supercilious. Not that it’ll stop them from scanning her, but they’ll be nicer about it.

  I cross quietly to the stairway to the third floor. Inks come out of their rooms and follow me up. On the third floor, tucked between the smallest bedroom and the stairway is a small alcove with a folding, pull-down ladder for roof access. It is a metal contraption that looks much too corroded to support weight but in reality is solid enough. The joints unlock smoothly and the rail the ladder travels up to the roof is so well oiled it moves in complete silence.

  I watch as the inks start climbing. The first one is Loreta, a middle-aged Filipino nurse. She moves up the stairs without problem and opens the trap door. A current of cool air swirls down to raise goosebumps on my damp, exposed skin. The last one through closes the trap and I climb up to slide the deadbolt. When I’m back down, I fold the ladder and push it back up the rail. I’ve stranded them on the roof but there’s nothing that can be done about that until the house is clear.

  I run, poking my head briefly in each room to check for telltales of habitation. When I hit the second floor, I nearly bowl over John.

  “Where are they?” I ask.

  “Basement.”

  According to Meche’s plan for just this situation, the family living in the basement apartment was to leave out the back and through the three loose boards on the privacy fence that surrounds the garden. Supposing they had warning enough to do so, and supposing they weren’t sandwiched between patrol members coming down the stairs and through the gardenside entrance at once.

  “Anyone caught?”

  “I don’t think so. By the way, they really grilled me when I told them I was her nephew.”