Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  He must sense it because he walks out without waiting for me to respond.

  The hours drag on. Around two I wake from a brief nap to a room filled with a buzzing that isn’t generated by machines. For a moment I don’t say anything. Meche’s perfectly visible in the dim room as if she radiates her own light. And in the circle of what she sheds, my compas.

  They’re the ones who move to the side of my bed when they notice I’m awake.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” I say. “The land will stop barring the way to outsiders as soon as it forgets my voice.”

  Chema nods. “We’re working on it.”

  “The land’s not going to forget you, Boss,” Chato interrupts. “You’re just going missing for a while.”

  I close my eyes. “I don’t think I’m coming back.”

  “You don’t know that, Boss,” he says. “Haga la lucha.”

  When I open my eyes again only Meche’s still in the room.

  “You’ll stay up on the hill? So there are three elements at work protecting the place?” I ask.

  She leans over me and puts her hand to my face in a way eerily reminiscent of Cassie when I first woke, then moves her hand to clasp one of mine.

  “Catalysts only work when there’s a specific in the formulation already. My specific’s not going to be up there on the hill.”

  “Meche…”

  “Of course I’ll stay. When have I ever said no to you?” she asks.

  “I’ve been a fool,” I say after a long silence. “I squandered all the time we were given.”

  She grins at me. “Ah, but we made beautiful skin together.”

  When she hears me laugh, she ducks her head and kisses me.

  Time stops for me during those moments when her lips are on mine and our eyes are closed to the same dark. The memory’s going to have to last me a lifetime, I know it as she draws away and my eyes stay closed, refusing the goodbye.

  I feel her slip something over my head, and its weight comes to rest against my chest. She moves our clasped hands over it, then leaves mine there alone.

  “What is it?”

  “You, too, have someone to speak for you.”

  I feel her step away and know, without need of eyes, when she’s gone.

  A nurse bustles in minutes later to check the monitors and take my blood pressure. With her skin tone and hair color she could easily be an ink, but when she opens her mouth the accent is pure South.

  “You’re doing good, hon,” she says to me. “You’ll have no trouble going home tomorrow.”

  She glances at my chest, then smiles at me. “Pretty,” she says. “You be sure to keep that right there where it is ’cause it’s just the kind of thing people like to claim for themselves. You know what I mean?” She leaves without waiting for me to answer.

  I look down. A long, leather bootlace is around my neck, and strung on it, a beautifully crafted little bee. It’s bright and heavy – probably 24-karat gold – and though the delicate wings don’t move, when I put my hand to it, I hear it buzz as if it were alive.

  I let go of it eventually, but it rests against my heart all night and it never stops resonating.

  3.

  I spend the next year doing what I imagine the inks have had to do every time a new restriction is placed: adapting to a radically different life.

  The worst of the injuries I sustained was to the thalamus, the relay center of the brain. Usually when the motor part is involved in a closed head trauma like mine, people end up with uncontrollable, involuntary movement in the limbs. Dr. Daley likes to say that it’s proof of how contrary I really am that my body decided to do the opposite.

  The wheelchair is, in some ways, both the toughest part of my new normal and the easiest. My upper body strength has always been pretty decent, so the parts of my routines that rely on maneuvering, hauling myself in and out, or finessing movement don’t prove difficult, just exhausting at first.

  It’s the planning that really gets to me. The city can be a tough place to navigate in a wheelchair: busted up sidewalks, impossible curbs, construction projects that pop up to obstruct even fastidiously charted courses. And then there’s the drivers. I’m convinced there is a special circle in Hell reserved for bicyclists. They blithely ignore traffic rules and nearly wing you in the crosswalk as they blow through red lights. No solidarity at all.

  Other adjustments have nothing to do with what my body can or can’t do.

  I paint fulltime because, strangely, the abstract work that continues to pour out of me sells well enough to provide a regular and decent income. Sarai has turned into my unofficial, and unpaid, artist’s agent. She finds the gallery that represents me, pushes my work into commission competion and finds ingenious ways to get me the type of publicity that was once the purview of perfoming, not visual, artists. I like to think she does this from belief in what she calls my “modern illuminated manuscript leafs,” not because she feels sorry for me.

  If I was a prickly cuss before, I’ve turned more so now, especially about that.

  Cassie and I don’t fight much except when I suspect a decision she’s made hinges on pity or over-protective instinct. I know she loves me – why else would she have stuck the really awful part out? – and I love her too, though it’s mostly a quiet type of feeling that rarely achieves incandescence.

  Once a month or so, she climbs on top of me and brings us both – skillfully and efficiently – to climax. And when she comes up pregnant, the love changes again.

  I hide my continuing obsession with upstate from her. The texts and messages I get aren’t from Meche anyway. She’s never answered any of my calls or texts or tweets – so as much as I try I can’t figure what she meant by saying I’d have someone to speak for me. But Chema is a devoted social media informant and from him I know the community’s still there, stable and safely outside of time for all that they’ve started interacting more closely with one of the ink gangs. The decisions they make aren’t the decisions I’d make but, since outside of paying taxes on the land I can do little to help them, I keep my opinions to myself.

  I wonder, sometimes, what my life would be if I hadn’t stepped in front of that car. But I don’t do that often because it’s a straight shot from that to despair and I don’t want to go there.

  Not now.

  Not since I looked into my son’s eyes.

  * * *

  Finn meets me at the Lebanon, one of the few truly wheelchair-accessible bars in the city. I’ve already parked myself at one of the booths when he comes in.

  “Good God, you look exhausted,” he says as he sits. “Is Satchel still keeping you guys up at night?”

  “No,” I say. “He’s good. Sleeps straight through since he hit six months. And not a minute too soon.”

  Finn makes eye contact with the barmaid and motions for a duplicate of the drink sitting in front of me on the table. He’s going to hate it when he realizes the tawny liquid is añejo rum, not the whiskey he thinks it is, and some perversity keeps me from enlightening him.

  “Cassie and Mom locking horns again over you?” he asks when he’s returned his eyes to me.

  “I guess that’s what you’d call it,” I say. “Makes me feel a bit like Satchel when they each want to dress him to go out.”

  He looks a little embarrassed. “It’s not that bad ….” His voice peters out.

  “Hell, maybe it is,” he says ruefully. “I never liked them trying to make my decisions for me. But they can’t help themselves.”

  “Mari rescued you from them,” I say.

  “Yeah, now she makes my decisions for me.” He grins at me. “Face it, women always do that.”

  His grin fades when he sees my hand go to the lump under my shirt that is the bee pendant.

  The barmaid sets the drink down in front of him.

  I watch while he takes a sip.

  “Funny,” he says. “But not.” He flags the barmaid again, orders a Jamesons and slides the glass with añejo my way.


  “Have you heard anything from Meche?” I ask. It’s no use dancing around it, he’s already seen me reach for her token.

  “Not much and not from her. I understand she’s generating most of the eastern seaboard’s supply of skin, but I’m not sure from where.” He pauses for the barmaid to slide the new drink in front of him. “I should make Del pay for this one,” he grouses as he hands her the money. She smiles at him.

  “One week I’m convinced she’s upstate, the next on the eastern shore, the week after that, somewhere in the western end of the state. I think she’s picking up habits from the gangs. You know there’s this whole genre of songs that’s grown out of the stuff the gangs do up here – a mix of corrido, reggaeton and n’dombolo – and Havana Barbie figures in a couple of them.”

  The añejo is supposed to go down smooth, but it doesn’t. It catches on every jagged shard in my throat.

  Finn doesn’t give me more than that. He looks around the bar, as if he’s looking for anything to change the conversation.

  “How’s Gus doing?” I ask.

  “Wants to come over and spend another painting day with you and Satchel. Never thought I’d be raising a budding artist.”

  “Every kid’s an artist given half a chance.”

  “Yeah, except his isn’t aptitude but hero-worship. I’m trying not to be jealous.”

  I want to tell him, but Mari doesn’t want Finn to know Gus is fully twinned already and mindspeaking anyone with magic enough to hear him. The jealousy comment has a grain of truth in it, and the five-year-old’s adoration of me is hard enough for Finn without adding another layer to it.

  When Gus comes over for a visit we do make art – with Satchel strapped into the harness I’ve designed so I can carry him securely while keeping my hands free to paint – but mostly the three of us wander the streets of Hastings together.

  Meche was right. My magic isn’t restricted to the upstate acreage, though it takes me a while to notice it. The first time it happens I’m stalled, kept from getting to Second Ave Art Supply by the confluence of a streets project, anticipated demolition of a building, and an impromptu street market set up by art students selling their drawings. I’m out of burnt sienna and the piece I’m working on will take nothing else, so I plot possibilities, outlining them in my head. As I work them out mentally the street around me shifts to better accommodate my plan. Mostly its fractional, the ground beneath curbing sinks just enough to make it a passable jog rather than something to hang up my wheels; the chunks of busted up asphalt on the street flatten into traversable, if still choppy and uncomfortable.

  But my walks with the boys aren’t about making the way easier for me, though that’s a pleasant side benefit. We hit every street within an hour of the apartment, and on each block I stop to create an in-between place. Alley, doorway, underpass – it doesn’t matter as long as it has at least one component that still remembers the language it spoke when it was part of the earth. And since I can’t be there to vouch for those allowed through the boundaries as I was upstate, I ask for tattoos to be the voucher.

  When the kids are around, I hear the bee pendant buzz. Satchel’s fascinated by it. If I’m not wearing it outside my shirt, he goes looking for it. Often, when we get home from our forays he’s asleep against my chest with the small, resonant thing tucked in his mouth.

  “Perhaps it’ll give him the gift of a golden tongue,” Mari teases when she sees it as she picks Gus up.

  You know that’s not what it means. Gus’s twin mindspeaks us both, indignant as only the very young can be when they catch their elders softening the truth.

  It doesn’t matter what it means, I project it as gently as I can, so the childlike creature hidden behind my nephew’s eyes doesn’t hear it as a rebuke. I’m not taking it away from him.

  But when she gets home from work, Cassie does.

  She handles the bee with the revulsion she might if it were a dead thing already in the first stages of decomposition.

  “Put that away,” she says to me as she disentangles my sleeping son from my arms. “Never let me see it again.”

  * * *

  The night of the meeting, Francine comes to get me. She’s bought one of those funky conversion vans just to fit the wheelchair.

  “Why do you think I’m bringing you with me?” she asks once I’ve hauled myself into the front seat and she’s tucked the wheelchair in the back.

  “Because your group’s in dire need of bodies, even disabled ones?”

  She shakes her head. The eyes that remind me so much of Finn light on me. They’re not looking kind. “You’re unappealing when you say such things,” she says.

  “God forbid I should be unappealing. So tell me.”

  “I have this feeling we’re going to need exactly you.”

  “Wow, that’s a first.”

  She looks away. “My daughter may not want to see it, but I’ve spent most of my adult life studying recurring motifs in the human story. The existence of magic, and people who can tap into it, is one of the universals. Maybe it’s no coincidence that I have a daughter-in-law, a son-in-law and a grandson with some ability.”

  “Two grandsons.”

  She looks over at me, sharp-eyed. “What did Satchel do?”

  “Nothing yet. But he will. Trust me.”

  She falls silent for a while.

  “Have you been reading Finn’s articles?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “So you know it’s likely they’ll finally shutter the inkatoriums.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “If people aren’t going to pay attention to myths, the least they could do is read some history,” she says, exasperated.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you think is going to happen,” I say to shorten the prologue.

  “Even with the disinformation wars going on,” she says, “people believe the stories their neighbors tell and what they piece together from witness. They trust what local bloggers and citizen journalists manage to dig up. Which is why the forcible sterilization story still has legs. Now, imagine if all the people who have experienced it were released and around to tell their stories…. The only way to make a story disappear is to erase the ink it’s written in.”

  I wince at her choice of words. “Francine, we’re not going to kill off the residents of the inkatoriums just to hide the fact we’ve sterilized them without consent, or that they never were sick with contagious diseases in the first place, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just not going to happen.”

  “No,” she agrees. “As a nation we might be willing to endure the moral hangover from xenophobia, but not genocide.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “We’ll deport them en masse. Disperse them to the four corners. Not only those who can confirm what happened at the inkatoriums, but all of them. Except the blue tats who haven’t been reclassified as non-aliens. Because they’re still citizens. Them we’ll get to collude with us in our erasure of the rest.”

  When I don’t say anything, she continues. “My group, we’re going to find sanctuary and safe houses for as many inks as we can. So no color of tat can be completely disappeared. Or bought. And we’re not the only ones. I hear hundreds of churches and synagogues and community centers across the nation have groups like ours.”

  “Even if there are thousands of other groups like yours, it won’t be enough. You know that, right?”

  “So, what? Do nothing?”

  “I didn’t say that. Just … don’t get your hopes up, okay?”

  We don’t say another word until we get to the meeting site.

  I recognize the priest when he opens the door; I remember being in a different rectory’s kitchen with him. There are only six people in the meeting room, including the priest, all of them Francine’s age. The aged face of the Catholic social justice movement.

  Because I’m the only representative of my generation in attendance, they look on
me with the devotion reserved for a deity. And it freaks me out. Which mythology allows for a god with a disability? I’ll have to remember to ask Francine if any does, and if so, whether any good comes of it.

  The underground railroad is their originating model, with a trail of planned safe houses leading to both northern and southern borders, they tell me.

  “One of the gangs, the gavilanes, has already started on it,” Father Tom says. “We’re more or less riding their coattails on this. They’ve got the tech to turn inks into non-inks. And unlimited access to instaskin. But their territory only extends about three-quarters of the way to the northern border.”

  “The proprietor of a go-kart track upstate says his acreage can be turned into a sanctuary,” the priest adds. “I think that makes three landowners we’ve got lined up so far. We’re going to need more, of course. And more safe houses than the gang’s secured.”

  “Well, it has promise at least,” I say. “What about the south?”

  “Tougher,” says Nell, whose SEIU union seal tattoo winks in and out of sight on her floppy upper arm. “The gangs that hold the southways out of Hastings want cash deposits before any agreement can be forged. And they aren’t big on installment plans. Plus, there’s more distance to plot out.”

  “Isn’t working with gangs beyond the pale for you anyway?” I say to the priest.

  “Was,” he admits. “But these days when I go to my knees and pray for help, I can’t despise the shape it comes in.”

  When I get home, Cassie’s upset at me.

  I leave the wheelchair open at the side of the bed, and haul myself in.

  “It’s a pitifully small effort,” I say. “They can use me.”

  “Whatever.”

  I reach for her across the gulf of our bed. She’s a beautiful woman, at my side every night. I can’t help wanting her even when she doesn’t want me.

  “I’m tired,” she says as she turns her back.

  I know she’s not lying, she is.

  Need exhausts, either way it cuts.

  Part Three