Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  I pocket the flash drive. “What made you decide to give this to the Gazette? Aren’t they going to know you leaked it?”

  “Maybe I don’t care.” She meets my gaze.

  I go home rather than back to work and hand the flash drive over to Abbie.

  “What’s on this?”

  “Don’t know really. Media.”

  She pushes it into the USB port of the laptop, but soon yanks it out and goes over to the bigger computer where John’s playing a game.

  “Off,” she says, then gives him a shove.

  As soon as he vacates the spot she sits down. “Go away,” she says to me. “I’ll call you when I have something.”

  I walk out to Meche’s deck.

  Spring is all about the smell of damp dirt with tender green fighting its way through it. The smell of hope. When I look out past the quiet Bardstown houses to the cindered center of Hastings I think how every story worth telling has at its heart a season of sacrifice that leads to renewal. I hope our story is one of those.

  When Abbie calls me back into the house nearly everyone has gathered around the computer table in the living room.

  She clicks on a shortcut she’s created. “I’m opening the media files in an open source video editor I downloaded so we can stop them and watch them in 1/16 of a second increments if we want. When I save them I’ll save them as Quicktime movies anybody can view. Ready?”

  When I nod, she opens the first of about 20 media files. There’s a lot of jiggling – and the aural equivalent – until the camera ends up on a stable surface.

  The establishing shots are of something like a doctor’s examination room with little to distinguish it. A 50ish man with salt-and-pepper hair fills the frame temporarily. His mouth moves, but the sound is so low I can’t really hear what he’s saying.

  “Hold on,” Abbie says. She pauses the video, then cranks both the monitor and computer sound settings. It’s much more audible when she hits play again, but still not good.

  “Where did he say they are?” Meche asks.

  Abbie rewinds, slows down playback, but the name of the inkatorium is still garbled.

  “Deliman,” Mari says. “Up in the Algonquin Lake area.”

  We all turn to look at her.

  “I recognize him,” she says.

  A sharp lancet pricks my heart.

  “Look, he’s got his inkatorium badge on,” Abbie says, advancing the video by fractions.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be readable, do you?” Meche says, leaning in.

  “Wait,” Abbie clicks a few dozen seconds in, then pauses it. “Here. I can read it now. Langdon, chief administrator, Deliman Health Center.”

  “I don’t know,” Father Tom says. “Is it on screen long enough for any but the youngest eyes to see? It looks like a blur to me.”

  “I can cut in a zoomed still image,” Abbie offers.

  “Later,” I say.

  She hits play again.

  Langdon stands in the middle of the frame next to a nasty-looking chair. A 30-something ink woman is led to the chair by a “handler” wearing a badge, only this one truly is unreadable. The procedure, Abbie says, is identical to the one for tracker insertion, but here the incision goes between the spine and shoulder blade and five slender tubes are inserted instead of the GPS unit.

  “Well, that’s completely innocuous,” I say after the stitches are set. “Not even much blood.”

  “Shhh,” Meche shushes me. As the camera dials back to wide-angle, a group of observers come into view. They raise their hands and ask questions. What do the tubes contain? How long until the tubing disintegrates completely and the time release is complete? Any side effects? More questions and more answers until it’s impossible not to understand what the procedure is, and what its desired effect.

  The next video is much the same, as is the one after that, though the inks in the chair and the handlers change. And the subjects get younger and younger. The last girl we see undergo the procedure is no more than six.

  The penultimate video shows the procedure performed on an ink man. The ubiquitous Langdon drones on about the same process, different chemical sterilizing agent. Again he mumbles, and we have to turn to Meche for an educated guess about what it might be.

  As the last video starts to run, I turn my thoughts to the possibilities. Send the raws to Melinda to post as is? Ask her to have one of the techs see if the sound quality can be improved? Or edit it into a more polished report? I’m about to punch Melinda’s number into the cell when I notice everyone has gone silent.

  I glance at the monitor.

  On screen, a young boy – maybe eight? – is having the tubes inserted. Same as the other videos. I’m not entirely sure why a number of the faces looking at the computer monitor look so miserable.

  “What?” I ask the first person who meets my eyes. Mari. Her eyes are shiny and suspiciously full and she just shakes her head.

  “His name is Pete Nguyen,” Abbie answers, voice flat, as she pauses the vid. “He arrived at the Smithville inkatorium in the same shipment as Meche.”

  “So that gives us a timetable, right?” I say. “This most likely was done to him shortly before he was shipped there.”

  Abbie closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them to look up at me they are filled with the kind of anguish teenagers aren’t yet adept at disguising.

  “I did his walk-through,” she says. “He said he was picked up while he was at school and brought to Smithville directly.” She hits the play button and lets the video run nearly all the way through, slowing it only when the child’s handler comes on screen to retrieve the child at the end of the procedure. There is a moment, a split second really, when the handler’s face turns to the camera.

  Abbie hits pause. “That,” she says, “is my mother.”

  Nobody says anything.

  Reporting hinges on quick decisions, so I make one.

  “Here’s what I need you to do. Edit this stuff into one strong 5-minute piece. I’m going to go sit down and write a voice-over lede, nut graf and conclusion, but we’ll let the rest speak for itself, especially the Q & A. Then we’ll upload it from here. You’re completely in charge of the visual component, you understand?”

  She turns back to the computer screen. “When do you want it?” Her voice is a little wobbly.

  “Two hours ago.” Melinda’s standard response.

  “Mind if I borrow the laptop?” I ask Meche. When she shakes her head, I pick it up and walk it over to the dining room table. None of the chairs are comfortable, but that’s okay. I don’t need comfort when I write. Just music. I dig my iPod out of my pocket. When I look up, Meche is there.

  “That was a good thing you did,” she says.

  “We’ll see. Edited footage is much easier to discredit.” After a second I grin at her. “Eh. What’s journalistic integrity got to do with anything anyway?”

  I put my earbuds in, hit play, and sit down to write.

  For some reason everyone is still awake at midnight when Abbie and I finish producing the piece. The girl’s got a future in editing for broadcast: the pace is perfect, much more riveting than the originals. Her mother’s face is out, but not her back and arms as she guides the boy into the chair. I know the piece is solid when we post it.

  In the morning, my cell phone rings Talking Heads until I pick it up.

  “You asshat,” Melinda says instead of hello. “Couldn’t you have posted it on the Gazette’s web site?”

  “Couldn’t risk the powers-that-be nixing it. Or cutting the guts out of it.”

  “What do you think I’m here for?” she spits out, then sighs. “It’s gone viral, by the way.”

  When I go downstairs, Abbie’s already sitting at the computer. She turns the screen to me without a word. We’re the top vid on YouTube. Digg. Yahoo. There are links and embeds all over Google+ and Twitter and Facebook, and on at least a dozen of the highest-traffic aggregator sites. When I meet her eyes I s
ee something stirring in them.

  I think I’ll call it destiny.

  3.

  When the room is filled to capacity, Rep. Anspach’s senior communications person gives his security people a heads up. The cameras start jockeying for position, even before there’s anyone at the podium.

  The rest of Anspach’s communications team stands at the side of the room, my college friend included. Every so often she says something into her headpiece. In the harsh lights set up for television cameras her hair shines like a new penny.

  She shoots me a glance, adjusts the earphone of her headpiece and starts over.

  “How’s tricks, Red?” I say when she’s within earshot.

  “Finn.” She gives me a baleful look as her hello. She’s back to Beatrice these days and probably isn’t fond of the reminder that at one time she preferred to be called just about anything else. “What are you doing here?”

  “You call a press conference and the press shows, isn’t that the way it works?”

  “Thought Belsen was covering for the Gazette.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “I had Horowitz’s assurance that’s who she’d send.”

  “Never believe an editor. Especially not Melinda.”

  She grimaces. “Well, then, I’ve got some markers to call in.”

  “I’m not lobbing Anspach softballs, no matter our history.”

  “He won’t call on you. Not without some assurance from me that you’ll behave.”

  “Which means?”

  “You know what it means.”

  “If you think I’m the only reporter here with hard questions about the scope of the sterilization program you’re completely deluded.”

  “Don’t force my hand.”

  “Wow. That sounded an awful lot like a threat, Red.”

  “No. If I wanted to threaten you I’d trot out the fact we know you’ve trafficked with gangs. That you’ve purchased some highly suspect materials and are probably the middleman in an ink enterprise that breaks all manner of state and federal law, as well as untold local ordinances. If I wanted to threaten you I’d probably tell you we have enough to get you charged with endangerment of minors, maybe even kidnapping. Shall I continue?”

  “Who’s feeding you this tripe?” I ask, schooling my features to immobility.

  “And if I really wanted to threaten you,” she continues as if she hasn’t heard me, “I’d post the unedited video from which you edited your viral version.”

  “You’d just screw yourselves if you did.”

  “You think? The one that shows your ink friends setting the whole thing up as a hoax?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got inkatoriums full of people to put in my recasting. Who’d know? One ink looks much like the other to most of us. By the time I’m done, you wouldn’t have a career left. Probably not much of a life either. So, think. Is it worth it?”

  “What happened to you, Red? What turned you into this?”

  She laughs. “Aw, Finn. You were a great fuck, and that earns you lifelong points in my book. But it doesn’t earn you a pass. And this is, after all, what I’m great at.”

  She flips her hair behind her shoulder. “So, we’re agreed, yes?”

  When I nod, she stoops down and kisses me before returning to her place along the wall of shame. I even get some tongue.

  I get up and slip out the door.

  My first call is to Meche. She twigs on fast, and I don’t have to stay on long.

  Next, Melinda.

  There’s dead silence after I explain. Then I lay out my plan. Tentatively. It is Melinda we’re talking about, after all.

  “You got a notebook on you?” she asks finally.

  “Of course. And I am sorry.”

  “Shut up,” she says, then reads me a string of cell numbers and twitter addresses.

  “So we’re going to give the Bulletin a gift. And channels 29, 8, 5, 2, and those annoyingly earnest folks from Media Mobilizing while we’re at it,” she says when she’s done. “If anyone had ever told me I’d be feeding them all our inside information on a story just to save your fat ass, I’d have told them they’re whack.”

  “I’ll find a way to make it up to you,” I say.

  “I guess I’ll retweet anything they put out. Just don’t get caught texting, okay? I want you around so I can take it out of your hide.”

  Sandra Patten gets the specifics, and Meche’s best guesses, about the various chemical agents. I pass on Dr. Watson’s info about implementation timetables to Regan Waterson, and my research about the pharma company connections to Justin Coleman. Larissa Lebovitz gets the number and ages of children sterilized, and because she’s my favorite competing colleague, the name and contact info for my source. Risa Q, as strident and zealous as her media venue, gets the estimate of how many nonalien-slash-citizen inks have been sterilized.

  At one point, Beatrice looks directly at me.

  I can’t resist texting her, “You said it. I’m a great fucker.”

  By the time I get home from the press conference some of the inks have already taken off. Meche distributes the remaining instaskin patches to the stragglers. She’s as efficient as ever, but her eyes are sad.

  Abbie’s finishing dumping all the information from Meche’s multiple computers, except the laptop, which Meche slips into the girl’s duffle despite the teen’s embarrassed protests.

  I send Mari to stay with my mother; Silvio to Sarai and Allison’s apartment; Napoleón to my sister’s apartment. Father Tom makes frenzied calls to non-ink parishioners to house the other inks, and when the list dries up way before the need, has Meche call Toño to see what the gang leader can arrange.

  That is the worst of it, the way we have to set aside what we believe in order to survive. It’s the best of it, too. How those we imagine will laugh off our need come through instead. Mere minutes after the call, a virtual flotilla of limos with hawks painted on their driver-side doors idle in front of Meche’s house. The remaining inks get in by twos and threes.

  “Hawk’s Flight Limo Service,” Meche says as she comes to stand next to me while I watch. “Los Gavilanes.”

  I nod. When I had interviewed Toño I had learned the gang took its name from his surname – Gavilán. “Funny. If I hadn’t seen it tattooed on his stomach, I’d assume it was just a company logo.”

  “That’s the point,” she says. “It is a legit company, by the way. A front, and a pretty good source of income.”

  “Speaking of income,” I say. “How’re we paying Toño?”

  She glances back at the brownstone.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s just a house. And worth enough to guarantee his help for everyone we sheltered for the next number of weeks. I’ve programmed his direct line into most everyone’s cell phone. Even Father Tom’s.” She snickers.

  “But what are you going to do when you come back from Smithville?”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “Jesus. Have you told anyone other than me?”

  “Mari. By the way, you’ll find my wedding present for the two of you when you get your next bank statement.”

  “Meche….”

  “Shut up, Finn.”

  Soon enough it’s only Blue Belle parked in front of the brownstone. John and Abbie dump their bags in the back, wave at me, then climb inside.

  “Time to go,” Meche says, turning to me. She digs a scrap of paper out of her pocket. “This is where you need to drop the house keys. I don’t guess we’ll probably ever see each other again, but my number’s also programmed into your cell phone.”

  I hug her – a sharp-edged sword of a woman, washed with gold that’s no surface but a center vein that leads straight to her heart. After the SUV pulls away, I close up the house and pocket the keys, then sit on the stoop. The street is quiet, ordinary. Nothing to indicate what’s broken on the asphalt today.

  Father Tom’s knees creak as he sits
on the stoop next to me.

  “How long?” I ask him.

  “What?”

  “Before this stops. I’m tired of saying goodbye. I’m tired of people disappearing from my life because others won’t leave them even the dregs of an existence.”

  The priest looks down. “‘How long, O Lord? I cry for help but you do not listen. I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me: there is strife, and clamorous discord.’”

  When I don’t say anything, he looks up. “That’s from the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk. You want to hear the answer?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I’m already depressed.”

  “‘Then the Lord answered me and said: Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.’”

  “I wish I could believe it.”

  “Act as if you believe and the real thing follows.”

  “That easy?”

  “Who said anything about easy?” he says.

  “What are we going to do now that we’re homeless again?”

  “You’re going to write about this. And, for a while, you’ll do it from your mother’s house. While she studies the woman-slash-supernatural-being you’ve brought to live under her roof. Should prove quite interesting. For all of you.” He grins at me.

  “I never knew you had a cruel streak.” I sigh. “What about you?”

  “After I marry the two of you, you mean?”

  I grin. “Sure.”

  “I’ll be around.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah, son. I promise. I won’t disappear on you.” He slaps me on the knee, then gets up. “Think it’s too early to get a Jamesons at Con’s?”

  I get to my feet. “It’s never too early, Father.”