The Tattoo

by Chris Mckinney

  I followed her and grabbed her arm. She turned around shivering. It was funny, I didn’t know what to tell her. It seemed like I had nothing good to say. I mean, I really believed she was being stupid about the whole thing. Sure, she had every right to be scared out of her fucking mind, but to hold me accountable? It seemed ridiculous. Besides, at the time, the way she was acting, it was pissing me off. But I didn’t want to tell her that. I stopped myself from saying anything. When she turned around, I just kind of looked at her in silence. When she tried to pull her arm away my grip tightened.

  “I never would have left,” she said.

  “You’re leaving now.”

  She tried to twist her arm away but I wouldn’t let go. “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Deep down inside you want me to leave.”

  “Deep down inside I want you to stay.”

  When she laughed, I let go of her arm. My eyes were adjusting better to the night and I saw her smile. “We gotta put this out here right now,” she said. “What are we doing?”

  My thoughts flashed to my mother and father and I wondered if they went through a moment like this. I thought about how it might have been better if I let her go. I wanted to let her go. I wanted never to see her again. But I didn’t. I had made her stay when I grabbed her arm. I made her stay and I didn’t know what to say to her. It was like I was forcing a moment, a situation that I did not want to be in. I felt like she threw a net over me. The more I struggled against it, the more I was entangled. I looked at her car. I looked at the tinted driver’s side window. I tried to force my vision through the night, through the dark glass. I couldn’t see inside. In a moment, I decided to tell her the truth. “Fuck it,” I told myself, “she wants it out. I’ll tell her.”

  I looked at her. She was waiting for me to say something. So finally I said, “I feel like you own me. Like you control me. Like I’m bad for you, but you got me, anyway. It’s fucked up. When I’m with you, I’m happy. When I’m not with you, I feel like I should never see you again. What are we doing? I don’t know. Not thinking, I guess.”

  I looked away, back at her car. I was getting angry because I couldn’t see through the tint. I heard her voice. At first I didn’t want to listen, I just wanted to look at the window. I didn’t want to listen and this not wanting to listen felt familiar. Suddenly I remembered my mother and how I didn’t listen to her as she was dying. I remembered regretting it. I forced my eyes off the car and looked at Claude. Her lips were moving. I forced myself to listen for the sounds. To break them down and distinguish the words. Finally, I started to hear the words. She was saying something about love, how she loved me, and something about how we can’t let our pasts control the present. I started to hear more and more. I heard, “...and you make me happy, too.”

  Then I heard myself say, “I don’t love.”

  She looked at me. “But you love me.”

  I turned my head away from her. “You’ll hate me in a year.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  I looked back at her and smiled. “You’re going to want to leave.”

  “But I won’t.”

  I’d run out of things to say. I guess I didn’t really want to say anymore, anyway. I opened my arms. She walked to them and I hugged her. I leaned my mouth to her ear. I listened to the wind and waited for a strong gust. When one came whistling through the air, shaking the leaves and branches of trees, I whispered, “I love you.”

  And so I started my residence in Schmaltz City.

  And happily ever after. Suddenly it seemed we had no obstacles. We were together and happy to be so. It was the first time I fell in love, so I figured that was that. But that wasn’t that. It should’ve been, but it wasn’t. It should’ve been, I mean she didn’t try to change me, she accepted me, and I accepted her. We were happy with each other. But the world wasn’t happy with us. It didn’t seem to like us very much, and it seemed to hate us being together. It was like that treacherous run down the mountains while being chased by the ranchers. Instead of Koa, this time it was Claudia who led me down the mountain, down into momentary safety and bliss, but down to something else too. Except Claudia and I didn’t run down completely blind, like with Koa. Claudia and I shared a dive light and jumped into the water. Sometimes I think darkness is better than partial light.

  Mama-san wasn’t happy about our relationship. She didn’t really know how serious we were, in fact we tried to keep it from her, but she knew something was going on. She didn’t do anything too drastic at first, though. She cut me out of some work, but I didn’t mind. I had enough money in my books to last me a long time. Besides, she didn’t cut me completely out, I still ran around town collecting for her, I just didn’t pull any hours at Mirage anymore, which was fine with Claude. No, at first Mama-san was not happy, but she wasn’t unhappy enough to really do anything. Claude finished school and I didn’t seem to be ruining her life. I wasn’t the doctor or lawyer Mama-san wanted to see with Claude, but I wasn’t ruining her life.

  It was funny how me and Claude were. Most people when they hook up, it’s like the future suddenly becomes overly important to them, it’s like a weight a couple decides to lift and bear together. Claude and I didn’t care. We looked at this boulder called “the future,” and let it lie. We liked the present too much. We’d eat out constantly. Surf, dive. It was funny, she was less hesitant to get back in the water than I was. Sometimes we’d just stay at my apartment. She’d do her homework in the living room while I’d read in bed. She’d join me when she was done, tease me about the print of Miyamoto Musashi hanging in my living room. She’d say, “That’s not art, this is art,” and point to some page in one of her texts, some painting or sculpture made by some dead white guy. I’d always welcome her return, though, it was like we could barely stand being away from each other even if it was only one room away. We’d even work out together. We were one of those couples that make others who see us sick. With each other all day, every day. We were totally wrapped up in each other, oblivious to the outside world.

  We’d be in bed naked and share our pasts. I’d tell her about my mother and father, about Koa, I even told her about what I did for her mother. She cringed at this one. I told her that her mother, despite her flaws, was a great, tough lady. She was someone I respected. She told me about her mother, things I didn’t know, like how her mother’s mother was forced into the role of comfort woman for the Japanese soldiers during the occupation before the end of WWII. Raped by hundreds of soldiers. Though she never said it, Mama-san was probably half-Japanese. Claude told me how as this woman’s daughter, her mother kind of became the same thing. Except Americans replaced the Japanese. After her youth was swallowed by the appetites of young men, she’d fled from Korea poor, pregnant, and disgraced. She was raped by an American soldier when she lived in a brothel by the thirty-eighth parallel. Though most called her “whore,” she, like her mother, was more of a slave.

  Claude told me that she, too, respected her mother greatly, how sometimes when she thought about her mother’s past, she was in awe. But then she told me how she thought her mother let the ugliness of her past rule her. How money became her god, how she’d do anything to get it. She couldn’t believe that after all her mother had seen, knowing where she came from, she exploited women whose situations were similar to hers when she was young.

  When we were lying together in bed one night, Claude spoke over the hum of the air conditioner. “These women from Korea and Vietnam, these women who my mother employs as hostesses, masseuses, and strippers, they need the money and will get it any way possible, even whore themselves. My mother knows the lifestyle sucks, and yet she perpetuates it for her own profit. I don’t get it.”

  “Hey,” I said, “another thing I don’t get is why is it that it’s mostly Koreans and Vietnamese who are in these businesses?”

  “You don’t know? What were the last two major wars the U.S. fought in?”

&n
bsp; “Korea and Vietnam?”

  “The natives were trained. These were the businesses they ran for the soldiers during the war. So some of them, when they came here afterwards, knew it was a money-maker and just continued doing it.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “I guess Koreans get a bad rap for it. You know, peddling sin and all.”

  “I know, it pisses me off. Koreans get a bad rap for a bunch of stuff. You notice every bad driver in Hawai‘i is a Korean lady? Every little grocery store, the ones that sell pornos behind the counter, is owned by a Korean.A bar on Keeaumoku or Kapiolani isn’t called a ‘bar,’ it’s called a ‘Korean bar.’ All of us aren’t bad-driving bar and grocery store owners. But people like my mother perpetuate it.”

  I sighed. “But like you said, maybe it’s all she knows.”

  “I totally respect my mother and I understand why she is how she is, but sometimes I hate her for trying to push her obsessions on me. For her, life is all status. Mercedes and Gucci. Shit, I was almost named Mercedes. She wanted me to go to a ‘name’ school, get a ‘name’ job, and marry a ‘name’ kind of guy. When I was a kid, she was an absolute tyrant. Watched over me, like a hawk or something, making sure I was doing all my homework. Sending me to Punahou with the rich kids. Didn’t let me go out on weekends. She saw no present for me, she just wanted me to see the future. What is the future, anyway? It’s just something that’s going to happen no matter what we do.”

  I looked at her and smiled. “It must be hard, though. To do what she doesn’t want you to do considering she’s done so much for you.”

  She pulled the covers closer to her neck. “That’s the worst part about it. Sometimes when she’s on me about something I can practically see the love and hope pouring out of her. She loves me so much sometimes I hate her for it. It makes me feel guilty and ungrateful.”

  I touched her face. “So what do you do?”

  “I used to fold all the time. When she was unhappy with something I was doing, I’d correct it, no questions asked. But then after a while I got worn down. I used to look in the mirror and not see much, you know. I’d see me, but I couldn’t see anything inside. I felt like this non-person, destined to be a doctor and to marry one, destined to have kids, destined to die a grandma. My future lacked imagination, it lacked substance. That’s when I found the ocean. I started to surf. I told her I was going to college here at U.H. It was a horrible scene. I told her the day she got my acceptance letter from Stanford. That’s another thing about her, she always used to open my mail. Sometimes I wanted to report her to the feds.”

  “What happened?”

  “She threw a fit. She even threatened to disown me, can you imagine that? But she calmed down after giving me the silent treatment for a few days. For me, for her too maybe, those were the most horrible few days. I felt so guilty. I’d lie up at night just imagining my mother working in that brothel in Korea, fucking G.I.’s left and right. About her crammed in some boat being shipped illegally to Hawai‘i. Can you imagine? She didn’t even come here by boat. Her uncle sent her money for a ticket, and she flew over. But there I was, imagining her pregnant in some barge, stuffed in a room with a hundred other Koreans, standing in puddles of piss, shit and vomit. When she finally talked to me, I think she asked if I was hungry or something, I just burst into tears. She hugged me and called me a silly girl. She’s still pissed that I didn’t go to Stanford, but she accepted that I stayed.”

  “So what about when you told her you were majoring in art history?”

  She laughed. “That one wasn’t as bad. She just called me ‘pabo,’ you know, stupid in Korean, and it kind of blew over. I think someone told her I could become a professor in the field and it cheered her up. It’s like she figured there was a chance for me to become a doctor yet. She told me intellectuals are greatly respected in South Korea and it would be just fine with her if I got my doctorate and became a professor. Can you imagine? A PhD was like the last thing on my mind.”

  “Pabo, ah. She was calling me stupid all these years and I didn’t even know it.”

  We laughed together.“So what about it?” I asked her. “Are you going for a PhD?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’d have to go to the mainland for it, though. I mean, if I wanted to teach here. U.H. doesn’t hire U.H. students.”

  Suddenly the discussion was dropped. She pulled the covers over both our heads, climbed on top of me, and began kissing me. I gladly gave up the conversation. I think we both knew that we were getting into a discussion about the future. Like she said, the future was going to happen no matter what we were going to do. But I think both of us wish now that we’d had that conversation. It might have opened our eyes, and we might have been able to see what was coming next.

  About eight months after we met, Claudia got pregnant. It was inevitable, really, we kind of always let safe sex stand waywardly on the side of the road while we raced past it. Maybe we both knew it was going to happen, but we just didn’t want to bring it up. But there she was one day, sitting on my leather sofa, waiting for me to return. I opened the door and as soon as I looked at her she told me. She wore this kind of blank look, not sad, not happy, maybe just waiting to see how I’d react. I tried to confront her with the same poker face while my mind raced.

  I thought about how I was when I was a teenager, how I was just a year before, how this would have never happened. I thought about how stupid I had become, how this love thing wasn’t so good after all. It was something that seemed to make your mind not work logically, it was charged with RPM’s, made you run hot, made you blow your engine.

  I looked at her and somehow knew she had ideas of keeping the baby. I felt the future hit me and it felt like I was jumping into an ocean of freezing water at night without a light. I started to shiver. Once again, I didn’t know what to say in her presence in a tough moment. I felt it would be imprudent to reveal my truest thoughts.

  Suddenly the words, “fuck it,” flashed into my mind in big, bright neon, Vegas-style letters. Those two wonderful words that many of us cling to. It’s like your mind, it can conjure up all sorts of rationalizations, arguments, and the debate can go on and on, but when you say,“fuck it,” it’s like the ace in the hole because there’s no real argument that can stand against it.“Fuck it” can mean you made a decision or you let life make the decision for you while you were totally uninterested in it anyway. “Fuck it” is absolute, it covers all bases. When I was a kid, I could say it on a whim and make my problems instantly evaporate. But as I got older it became a harder thing to say, and with Claude around it was almost impossible to say, but in my mind, for an instant, I said it anyway. I didn’t mean it, though. I couldn’t mean it. I looked at her and she looked like she needed cheering up. So I said, “Is it mine?”

  For an instant her face looked shocked. But she caught on, she always did, and she said in a quiet, over-dramatic voice,“Well, it’s between you and this other asshole I’ve been dating, this Japanese asshole who always seems to want to make jokes in serious situations.”

  “You slept with an asshole like that? Seems like you get what you deserve.”

  I sat next to her on the sofa. I put my hand on her leg and she put her hand on mine. My mind began racing again in the silence. I looked around my living room and saw no evidence indicating that this was a room created by a father. I looked at the big screen television, the Bose stereo. I saw all the wires sticking out from the back. I looked at the glass table and it made me feel nervous. I looked at the lamp on the side of the sofa and thought how easy it would be for someone small to touch it and burn themself. I looked at my bookcases and thought about how much inked paper there was there to eat. My eyes finally fell on the framed Otsuka print, on the eyes of Miyamoto Musashi, and I trembled. I didn’t want to look at it, but I did. I saw his angry slanty eyes stare at me. His swords were sheathed, but he was attacking with two wooden sticks. His purple and yellow kimono was decorated with Kabuki-like faces. The faces wore looks
of sorrow, pride, and rage. No, I wasn’t made to be a father, just as my father wasn’t made to be a father, but it seemed I was going to be a father, anyway. I was going to be a father with no war to run to.

  I looked at Claudia and noticed that she was looking at Musashi, too. “Jeez,” she said, “you gotta get rid of that thing, it’s kind of creepy.”

  “You crazy? Musashi’s my boy. He’s my friend.”

  “No,” she said, “he’s your idol.”

  “Well, we’re a package deal.”

  She laughed. “Well, so are we.”

  I thought for a second. Then I said, “Fair enough.”

  So for the first time, we began to plan our future. I told her I wasn’t really anxious to marry, not because I didn’t love her, but because none of the Mrs. Hideyoshis in my family ever faired too well, and I wanted to keep her around for a long time. She agreed to this. “Well maybe we should give the baby my last name then.”

  “That sounds like a great idea to me. In fact, if we ever do get married, I’d like to take your name too.”

  We laughed and lifted the boulder of the future together. It didn’t feel as heavy as we thought it would. But then, people didn’t start climbing on while we walked with it yet.

  Claudia’s mother did not take the news well and I lost my job. Claudia lost her apartment. Claude was pissed at Mama-san and decided that she would never speak to her again. I figure this pissed Mama-san off even more. But she didn’t blame Claude, the blame fell directly on me. I’m pretty sure she got the idea in her head that I had crossed the line, that I’d finally done something that had ruined her daughter’s life. And I finally got it through my thick skull that me being Japanese probably didn’t help much either. Well, in Hawai‘i, Koreans are known for their tempers. Mama-san took this to another level. She snapped so loud I should’ve heard it coming. Suddenly Honolulu wasn’t big enough for the both of us.

  After three weeks of not speaking with her mother, Claudia finally broke down and decided that she would meet Mama-san for lunch. The silent treatment was hard on her, too, I mean, she and her mother were really close despite their differences. I remember after about four days of not talking to her mother, Claude told me, “This is the longest I’ve gone without talking to my mother.”