Tattoo Atlas

by Tim Floreen

  I nodded and took a sip of tea. My heart had slowed a little. As usual, the inhaling and exhaling had helped. “But what caused his brain to be like that? Was he abused? Because that can affect brain development, right?”

  “It can,” Mom answered, “but in Franklin’s case, we haven’t turned up any evidence of abuse.”

  “What about his parents? Maybe they did something horrible to him before he moved in with his grandma.”

  Franklin had appeared on our block when we all were five or so, after his mom and dad died in a car crash. His grandmother seemed harmless enough—if a little reclusive and not all there—but I’d always wondered, especially after the shooting, if something had happened to him in those early years to make him the way he was.

  Mom was shaking her head, though. “By all accounts, Franklin’s parents were decent people. And our testing doesn’t lead us to suspect he was a victim of early trauma.”

  “So why is he like this?”

  She turned up her hands. “I don’t know, Rem. The wrong combination of genes, maybe. Or something could’ve gone awry in utero. There are dozens of possible causes.”

  “That doesn’t make what he did okay. Killing Pete.”

  “Of course it doesn’t.”

  “I mean, people who have less empathy or whatever can still use common sense, can’t they? Even if Franklin doesn’t feel bad about the Big Bang, at least he can still understand that what he did was wrong, right?”

  “Not necessarily. We humans like to think of ourselves as more rational than we are. We imagine we navigate through life using pure logic, but far more than we realize, we do things for illogical reasons and then bend our perception of reality to make our actions seem logical, at least to ourselves. It’s a trick of the brain, something we all do. With sociopaths like Franklin, this phenomenon’s often amplified. I’m sure he has it all worked out in his head why Pete deserved what happened to him.”

  I sipped my tea and looked out the window at the big black space where Lake Superior lay. “Okay, but if Franklin’s like he is because he just happens to have a brain that’s wired a certain way, then what about evil? Does evil just not exist?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe it does. But I don’t think that word’s particularly useful when it’s used to label individual people.”

  “So you don’t think Hitler was evil?”

  She smirked. I’d pulled the Hitler card on her before. “I think Hitler was a person who did reprehensible things, but I also think labeling him as evil, or a demon, or a monster, makes it too easy for us to think of him as belonging to a category apart from the rest of us, when the truth is, he was still just a person.”

  I clasped the mug with both hands and let the heat radiate into my palms. They still smarted from when I’d slammed them on the table. “What about the guy who killed Ethan?” I asked. “You don’t think he was evil either?”

  I heard Mom’s breath snag in her throat. I didn’t bring up Ethan often. “No,” she said. “Not even him. We don’t know anything about Ethan’s killer, except that he was in a war zone with a gun in his hand and a gun aimed straight at him. He did what any number of people would’ve done in that situation.”

  “That’s generous of you, Mom.”

  “Not really.” She brushed my cheek with the backs of her fingers. “It doesn’t mean I don’t wish every day that Ethan had pulled the trigger first and blown that other person’s head open instead.”

  I drove home with my mind still in overdrive. Thinking about Franklin. Thinking about Ethan.

  Maybe the real reason Franklin’s comments had set me off was because he’d been right about my brother: Ethan hadn’t been a killer. He’d always been too busy working on his Saab and reading poetry and running the crisis hotline at Duluth Central to play shoot-’em-up video games.

  Not that he’d been some kind of wimp. Far from it. Ethan had exuded a quiet strength, so his gentleness had never come off as weakness. The younger kids on Boreal Street had all looked up to him, Tor and Pete included, which probably explains how I ever got to be friends with those two. Under other circumstances, as an arty, skinny, nonathletic proto-homosexual, I’d have been a natural target for a couple big, rough boys like Tor and Pete. I’d have been . . . someone like Franklin, maybe. Not a sociopath—at least I hope not—but an outcast. Ethan didn’t let that happen. He set a tone for the block by being kind and friendly with everyone, and other kids naturally followed his lead. (Except maybe when it came to Franklin himself, although . . . I could just be making excuses, but Franklin didn’t seem much interested in our friendship anyway.)

  I never fully understood why Ethan enlisted, but I always suspected he did it because he thought he could somehow stop the fighting there.

  But Afghanistan wasn’t Boreal Street.

  Mom and I found out Ethan had died at the beginning of my sophomore year, on the same day Tor took me down to the steam tunnels for the first time. During lunch that day, my phone buzzed with a Skype call from Ethan, but Tor grabbed it out of my hand. I tried to explain that Ethan and I had made a plan beforehand, that it was hard for us to get our schedules to sync up because of the time difference, but in the end Tor convinced me to blow Ethan off and go with him instead.

  At that point I’d come out of the closet a year earlier, but I still hadn’t touched another boy in a PG-13 kind of way. It surprised the hell out of me when Tor, a guy I’d always thought of as the pinnacle of heterosexual guyness, grabbed me in the dark of the tunnels and put his mouth on my neck. I arrived home that evening feeling excited and ashamed and incredibly flattered all at once. Mom was in the kitchen making dinner, and I hoped my cheeks didn’t look as flushed as they felt. She glanced up from the cutting board to say hello, and her face turned as white as the streak in her gray hair. I thought for sure she could tell exactly what had happened just from the expression on my face, but it turned out she wasn’t looking at me at all.

  A black sedan bearing a military license plate had pulled up in the driveway. The car was shiny in spite of the winter weather, like someone had just washed it five minutes ago. A guy in formal military dress stepped out.

  Mom let out a scream and I probably jumped three feet. I’d never heard a sound like that come out of her mouth before. She was usually so controlled, so pulled together. When I turned again, the tip of her left thumb lay in the center of her white plastic cutting board, along with a spattering of blood. The soldier ended up taking us to the hospital so she could have her thumb tip sewn back on.

  I never found out all the details of Ethan’s death and didn’t want to, but I heard enough. Ethan and a few other troops had been clearing a house. He’d entered a room, and an enemy combatant had jumped up from behind a couch with a gun in his hand. “Get back!” Ethan had yelled to the soldier behind him. Always thinking about others, right up to the end.

  But that meant he should’ve had enough time to fire. He didn’t. The other guy did. And that was it.

  Game over.

  After I got home from the lab, I microwaved a pizza for dinner but couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I went to my room to do my homework but just ended up staring at the same page in my biology textbook. So I spent the rest of the evening inking in the knife picture I’d drawn that morning. By the time I finished, it was late, but I still didn’t feel sleepy, so I turned to a fresh page in my Tattoo Atlas and started reworking an image I’d played with before.

  First I penciled in a simple rectangle that could’ve been a classroom whiteboard or could’ve been a white kitchen cutting board. In the center, I drew a big severed thumb tip spattered with blood. Below that, near the bottom of the rectangle, a headless body slumped, wearing Pete Lund’s letterman jacket. Above the rectangle hung a banner, held aloft by two imps, that read, in neat cursive, History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. Another banner underneath the image bore the words, in all capitals, THE BIG BANG.

&nb
sp; The Big Bang. Tor had thought of the name, of course, although he hadn’t had the usual mischievous spark in his eye when he first said it. Pretty soon that was what all the students at Duluth Central called it. Teachers and parents and news reporters used other designations, like the Tragic Shooting, or the Appalling Incident, or the Senseless Murder, but we preferred the Big Bang. We needed a code name, a way to talk about what had happened, but not too directly. Anyway, that particular code name fit well. Like the actual Big Bang scientists always went on and on about, our Big Bang had been an explosion and also a beginning. It had created the universe we lived in now.

  Although for me personally, the Big Bang had really come a year before that. By the time Pete Lund died, I already knew the people you cared about could get taken from you in horrible ways. I’d just never seen it happen firsthand.

  Mom sometimes said I’d seen too much death for someone so young, and maybe she was right. (She was probably thinking not just of Ethan and Pete, but of Dad, too. He died of a brain tumor when I was a toddler.) While Abigail Lansing bawled and wailed and wondered how a tragedy like the Big Bang could possibly happen, I just wanted to know how long we had until the next one.

  The day after my visit to the Mother Ship, Lydia, Callie, Tor, and I got to skip first period to attend rehearsal for the memorial assembly. Abigail Lansing had insisted we come, even though it seemed like she’d already planned everything out herself. In fairness, she had asked if one of us would like to give a speech—and to everyone’s surprise, Callie had raised her hand first. She’d admitted she didn’t normally go in for “fucking sentimental shit like that,” but she’d wanted to make an exception for Pete.

  When we arrived at the gym, the school choir members, all of them dressed in white robes, had assembled on the basketball court. Abigail stood off to the side, conferring with Mrs. Chen, the principal, and Mr. Larsen, the choral director. When she noticed us, she waved and jogged over.

  “I’m so happy you guys could make it,” she said, furrowing her forehead in the earnest way she always did whenever she talked about anything even slightly related to Pete’s death. Mascara clung to her eyelashes in clumps. I was pretty certain she put it on so thick specifically so it would make dramatic track marks when she cried, which seemed to happen on an hourly basis since the Big Bang. “It would’ve made Pete so happy to see all of us here together honoring him. Why don’t you have a seat on the bleachers? I can’t wait to hear what you think.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Callie muttered as she teetered up the bleacher steps in her wedges.

  “Shouldn’t we sit closer?” I asked.

  She shook her head, already at the top. “I need a buffer zone.”

  My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out as I sat down next to Callie. A message had just come through from Mom. Heading into OR. We’ll begin procedure soon. Keep your fingers crossed.

  You’ll do great! I texted back. No empty superstitious gestures like crossing fingers necessary! But I’ll keep them crossed anyway just in case!!!

  I hadn’t wished Mom good luck that morning. She’d had to leave early, and she’d probably figured I hadn’t gotten up yet, but I had. After waking from the usual nightmare in the usual cold sweat, I’d spent the hours before dawn inking my latest Tattoo Atlas drawing. I heard her moving around in the kitchen and knew I should go out there and say a few words of support and encouragement. Maybe it had something to do with the nightmare, though, or my doubts about the procedure, or the way she’d left me in that room with Franklin so long yesterday, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt bad about it after. Even though I tried to be a good son, and most of the time succeeded, sometimes I suspected it didn’t come naturally to me the way I knew it had to Ethan.

  I hoped my liberal use of exclamation points now would make up for it.

  Lydia and Tor were sitting in the row just below mine and Callie’s. “Abigail told me yesterday how the assembly’s supposed to go,” Lydia said. “They’re going to sing one song at the beginning. Then come the speeches. Then they sing again. The whole thing will be pretty short.”

  “Thank God,” Callie said, readjusting the chopsticks that held her black hair in place.

  The overhead lights went down, and a couple spotlights bathed the chorus in an angelic glow. Mr. Larsen put up his hands. The chorus started to sing.

  “I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you. And I think to myself, What a wonderful world.”

  “Oh Christ,” Callie said much too loudly.

  Lydia spun around and put her finger to her lips imploringly.

  Lowering her voice a fraction of a decibel, Callie said, “I get that the song’s supposed to be sweetly hopeful in spite of all the horror in the world that the Big Bang represents, but I mean, come on. It just comes off as deluded and pathetic.”

  “I see friends shaking hands, sayin’, ‘How do you do?’ They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.’ ”

  “Take it down a notch,” I whispered into Callie’s ear. “Abigail’s going to hear you.”

  “Well, she should know!” she hissed back.

  Lydia put her face in her hands, mortified.

  “Strawberry,” Tor said, tapping her shoulder. “Don’t mind her. I got something for you.”

  He kissed her. On the mouth.

  Just seeing it made me want to hurl myself off the bleachers that very second, but Mom texted again just in time. Thanks, honey.

  No prob!!!!! I texted back.

  The chorus scooped into their final “Oh yeah.” Abigail trotted up the bleacher steps, a stack of brightly colored index cards in her fist. “What did you think?”

  “Very moving,” Lydia blurted before anyone else had a chance to speak.

  “I’m supposed to give my speech next.” Abigail flipped through her cards, frowning. “I wanted to have it memorized, but I’m not sure I do. Lydia, could you come down to the front and follow along on these cards and help me if I forget something?”

  Abigail thrust the cards at Lydia and hurried back down. Lydia squinted at Abigail’s loopy handwriting.

  “I’ll go with you,” Tor said, standing up behind her and giving her shoulders a squeeze. “Moral support.” He saluted Callie and me, and the two of them headed down the steps after Abigail.

  Callie noticed me watching them and patted my forearm. “Between their gooeyness and that gooey fucking song, I was about to spill my breakfast a second ago. How are you holding up?”

  “Oh, you know, just feeling like used toilet paper over here.”

  “Have you and Tor talked? About your new relationship status, I mean. ‘Friends without benefits,’ apparently.”

  “Not since the last time we went down to the steam tunnels.”

  Tor and I never talked about anything connected to the steam tunnels outside of the steam tunnels. Usually when he wanted to go down there with me, most often toward the end of lunch, he’d suggest we step outside for a smoke. Lydia and Callie both found smoking disgusting—Callie called it a “fucking filthy habit”—so we never had to worry about them wanting to join us. The funny thing was, Tor and I both found smoking disgusting too. The one time I tried it, it made me want to puke, and Tor would never in a million years jeopardize his swimming career that way. He’d used the same box of cigarettes as a prop for over a year now.

  He hadn’t suggested we go out for a smoke yesterday.

  “I’m starting to wonder if he was telling the truth all those times he claimed he wasn’t gay,” I said. “He always made such a big deal of not kissing me, but apparently he doesn’t have any problem kissing her.”

  Tor and Lydia had settled themselves on the bottom row of bleachers. She rested her head against his shoulder while she went through Abigail’s cards.

  “You have to admit, Callie, he’s being extra sweet with her. Maybe we’ve been wrong about him. Maybe he really does prefer girls. Maybe he just likes the convenience of . . .”

&nb
sp; “Your right hand?” Callie shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Rem. Whether he’s gay and just pretending he likes Lydia or an actual bisexual who’s dropped you now that he’s found someone else, either way, he’s a douche bag. He’s got to know how seeing him with her is making you feel, but he doesn’t care. I’m telling you, you’re better off without him.”

  “Maybe.” I sat forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and watched the two of them lean into each other. “I still say he’s just a jerk sometimes because he’s got a lot going on inside.”

  “That’s no excuse. We’re all fucking confused and terrified and miserable. Every single person on this goddamn planet, with the possible exception of Lydia. Does that mean we all get to act like assholes?”

  “Shh,” I said. “Abigail’s getting ready to speak.”

  “Oh joy.”

  I glanced at her. “What about you? Where are your index cards?”

  “I’ve got it all up here.” She tapped her temple. “Get ready, Remmy. I’m going to make you weep like a fucking baby.”

  She pretty much did. Unlike Abigail, Callie didn’t talk about how Pete had gone to a better place or read excerpts from Robert Frost poems or expertly make her chin quiver and summon pretty, sparkly tears to her eyes at the exact right moment. She just told stories about the Boreal Five. The one that really got me was from sophomore year, not long after my brother’s death.

  I’d barely set foot outside my room for three weeks. Mom knocked on the door one evening and said, “There’s something in the backyard I think you should see.” I followed her to the kitchen and peered out through the sliding glass doors.

  Just before he’d left to join the military, Ethan had spent a summer building a simple wood gazebo behind our house, so we could sit outside on summer afternoons and drink iced tea. During the winter it mostly just sat there under piles of snow. But that day the rest of the Boreal Five had turned it into a tiny palace of ice and light. Tor’s idea, naturally. They’d filled up all the open spaces in the walls with blocks of snow, making the walls solid. Then they’d poured bucketfuls of water down the outsides until a smooth shell of ice covered the structure. To light up the crystalline house they’d created, they’d carved niches into the insides of the walls in dozens of random spots and placed a votive candle in each one. The flickering candles made the gazebo pulse and glow like a living thing.