Tattoo Atlas

by Tim Floreen

  I bundled myself up, and when I stepped into the gazebo, I found Tor, Pete, Lydia, and Callie waiting for me. The five of us hung out there until late, telling stories about Ethan and drinking Fat Tire, Ethan’s favorite beer.

  That night was the Boreal Five at its best. At one point, because somebody had to, Pete jumped up and danced around the ice palace singing “Let It Go.” Considering he weighed two hundred plus and danced like, well, a straight jock with zero rhythm, it was quite a sight. Under pressure from Tor, Lydia tried her very first sip of beer. “But only in honor of Ethan,” she said. Callie, in an uncharacteristically sentimental outburst, declared, “Guys, I fucking love us,” and right then I knew everyone else felt the exact same way.

  At one point, after we’d spent an hour in the gazebo and our fingers had started going numb, I left to get some blankets from the house, and Tor ducked out after me. He grabbed my hand and drew me back behind the gazebo. “When we lose people we care about,” he said in that gentle voice he only used every once in a while, “we have to hold even tighter to the ones who are still with us.” Then, with the ice wall pulsating next to us, he gave me a hug—a long, tender one, not the kind of insistent tackle he’d surprised me with in the steam tunnels a few weeks earlier.

  No kiss, but at least a real hug.

  Part of me had thought he might also apologize for making me miss my chance to talk to Ethan one last time, but maybe that had been too much to expect. Maybe he hadn’t even put it together that Ethan had died on the same day he’d shown me the tunnels. Still, sometimes I’d spin out fantasies in my head, imagining that if Tor hadn’t yanked my phone away from me, I would’ve kept Ethan on the line long enough for things to play out differently. I knew it was a stretch. I knew any reasonable person would say Ethan’s death couldn’t have been Tor’s fault. But sometimes, like a cockroach you couldn’t get rid of, the thought would scuttle through my brain anyway.

  As we stood there behind the gazebo, though, the way Tor was holding me and looking into my eyes, I would’ve forgiven him anything.

  At that point we’d only gone down to the tunnels that one time. A few weeks later, once I’d returned to school and started trying to go through life like a normal person, I was the one who suggested, in my most casual voice, that we “check out those tunnels again.” I felt especially crappy that day. I hoped if we went back down there, Tor might give me something that would make me feel better. Maybe a repeat of the hug. Maybe even a kiss.

  No such luck. But at least the robotic fumbling took my mind off other stuff.

  The rehearsal didn’t finish until the end of first period, so the four of us went straight to Ms. Utter’s second-period history class. We had her again this year, although she’d moved to a different classroom. The one where the shooting had taken place, down on the first floor, had been permanently locked.

  Ms. Utter stopped me on the way to my desk and drew me into a corner. “I have a question for you, Rem.”

  The alcohol on her breath wafted toward me as she spoke. Ever since the Big Bang, she’d carried the scent of liquor around with her the same way I did turpentine and Tor did chlorine. I understood: like Mom with her work, like me with my art, she needed something to help her deal with all the messed-up thoughts death left behind. It made me sad, though, and worried, too. Ms. Utter was one of my favorite teachers. So far her drinking hadn’t gotten in the way of her teaching, but I dreaded the day it did.

  “I know your mom’s performing her procedure on Franklin Kettle today,” she said, “and I’m betting the other kids in class do too. It was all over the news last night. I think people might like to talk about it, but I wanted to check with you first to make sure it wouldn’t make you uncomfortable. If it would, we can skip it, or I can send you to the library for a few minutes.”

  “No, it’s okay. It doesn’t bother me.”

  I got why she wanted to take some time during class to talk. Like me, most of the other kids in this class had taken Ms. Utter’s first-period history class last year. They’d witnessed the shooting firsthand. More than any other students at Duluth Central, they had a personal interest in what was happening to Franklin today.

  “People may want to ask you questions,” she said.

  “That’s fine. I mean, I’m not really a science person, so I probably won’t be able to explain what my mom’s doing very well, but I can try.”

  She nodded. “Thanks, Rem.”

  I dropped into my regular spot in front of Callie. Ms. Utter called the class to order and, with her small hands folded on her massive desk, explained that she wanted to take a few minutes to discuss the news coverage concerning Franklin Kettle and “any feelings it may have brought up in you.” A few students gave weary nods. Since the Big Bang, it sometimes felt like all we did was talk about feelings.

  A girl named Anna raised her hand. She’d been sitting in the front row the day Pete had gotten shot. I could still picture the blood speckling her pale, frizzy hair. Now she always sat near the back of the class. Outside the Splash Zone, I guess.

  “I want to know what’s supposed to happen to him after,” Anna said. “They stick some gizmo in his brain, and then what? He’s cured? They just release him?”

  “I don’t believe that’s the plan,” Ms. Utter said. “The way I understand it, the treatment’s experimental, so it won’t have any effect on Franklin’s sentence. Is that right, Rem?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Rem, maybe you’d like to explain to the others exactly what your mother and her team are doing with Franklin.”

  I rubbed my palms together, the skin dry and probably smelling of turpentine. I tried to remember how Mom had explained it to me. “Basically, she’s using energy to change the way Franklin’s brain works. Which is nothing new—shock therapy would probably be the earliest example—except over time scientists have made better and better maps of the brain and learned how to target more and more specific areas. The technology my mom’s developed is the most advanced yet. Before now, nobody’s been able to treat anything nearly as complicated as—”

  “Being a psycho killer,” Callie supplied.

  A few desks squeaked as kids shifted in their chairs. Uncomfortable looks bounced around the room.

  “Franklin Kettle’s a sociopath,” I said. “My mom and her team figured that was a brain disorder, just like any other. They created an implant—this super-high-tech capsule thingy—that’s supposed to send targeted pulses of energy to malfunctioning neurons located in different parts of Franklin’s brain to make them work like they should. Today they’re opening a hole in the back of his head, and . . .”

  I spaced out for a second, wondering if Mom was bent over Franklin’s exposed brain at that very moment. An image jumped into my mind of the whole team standing in a tight huddle around Franklin, who lay facedown on an operating table, the back of his head open, the rest of his body hidden under blue paper, the scientists digging into his red, jiggling brain with their flashing tools like a bunch of fork-wielding diners chowing down on a shared bowl of spaghetti.

  “Rem?” Ms. Utter said.

  I blinked a few times to pull my mind back into the classroom. Iiiiinhale. Eeeeexhale. “So they’re opening a hole in Franklin’s skull and inserting the capsule. It’s supposed to be a pretty simple procedure actually. The capsule does the rest on its own.”

  “And then when he wakes up he’s suddenly going to be a model citizen?” Callie said.

  “I guess that’s the idea.”

  She crossed her arms and shook her head. “It’s just so goddamn weird. The idea that you can change who a person is just by sticking some gadget in his brain.”

  “Language, Callie,” Ms. Utter said.

  “What about security at the lab?” a guy called Mike asked. He’d sat all the way on the far side of the room on the day of the Big Bang and later said he’d found a piece of bone lodged in his ear. “That lab wasn’t built to contain prisoners, was it? What if he
tries to escape?”

  I’d heard others making similar arguments on the news lately. After Franklin’s arrest journalists had turned up comments he’d left on a Son of War subreddit. In them he seemed to talk, in a sort of coded way, about the shooting he was planning. He claimed if he got arrested no prison on earth could hold him, and he referenced his hacking expertise and all the experience playing the game had given him. A lot of people probably had those boasts on their minds right now, and I couldn’t blame them.

  “The detention center sent six guards to watch Franklin,” I told Mike. “He’ll have constant supervision. And my mom had a special high-security room built for him. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

  “If this is the first time they’re trying a procedure like this, why would they do it on a kid?” blurted a girl named Denise who almost never talked in class. A half hour after the Big Bang, once we’d all evacuated the school, no one had been able to find her. Then the police had stumbled across her back in the classroom passed out cold underneath her desk.

  “I guess it just sort of happened that way,” I said. “Franklin had actually gone to my mom’s lab to have some tests done way back before the Big Bang, so after everything happened, her team had all this data about his brain and realized he’d be a perfect candidate for the procedure. I think they were also hoping the capsule might work better with Franklin because teenage brains are more malleable than adult ones.”

  In the very back row a hand went up.

  “You have a question, Nell?” Ms. Utter said.

  The room went quiet. A few people glanced over their shoulders.

  “That’s not what I heard,” Nil Bergstrom said.

  I sometimes thought of Nil as a girl version of Franklin. She wore tattered black T-shirts with the names of obscure punk bands on them. She had chaotic hair that fell over her eyes, though she dyed hers acid green instead of blue-black. And of course she carried around a gigantic backpack with a Son of War patch on it. The police had never determined she’d had any involvement in or prior knowledge of the Big Bang, but people had treated her like she had a disease ever since anyway—steering clear of her in hallways, talking to her only when necessary, and then only in clipped, careful sentences. Of course, they’d treated her a lot like that before the Big Bang too. They’d started calling her Nil all the way back in sixth grade. By eighth grade she’d started calling herself the same thing. The other kids’ increased wariness of her after the Big Bang didn’t seem to bother her any more than her nickname did.

  Anyway, judging from how Nil had looked the second after Franklin’s gunshot had jolted the room, I was pretty sure he hadn’t told her a thing. She’d been the first to break the silence: “Holy shit, Kettle, what the hell did you do?”

  “I heard the reason they chose him,” Nil continued now, “was because they couldn’t find an adult sociopath who would give consent. But since he’s a minor, they could get consent from his grandmother, who’s basically senile and clueless.”

  My stomach did a flip-flop. That rumor I hadn’t heard before. “No way. My mom would never agree to something like that.”

  “So you’re saying he wants the procedure done?” Nil said.

  “Nell, I don’t think this discussion’s going in an appropriate direction,” Ms. Utter said.

  Lydia spun around in her desk. “But if Franklin isn’t in his right mind anyway, how meaningful would his consent be? How can he know what’s best for him?”

  “What does that even mean? ‘In his right mind.’ It’s the mind he was born with, isn’t it?” Nil tossed her green hair out of her face so she could glare at Lydia better. “What gives us the right to change who he is just because he doesn’t fit in? Locking him up because he broke the law, fine, that’s one thing, but this is something else. And where do we draw the line? All of us have some crazy in us, don’t we?” She swiveled her head toward me, and her fierce, direct gaze felt like a snowball in the face. “What’s your mom’s plan, Rem? Make everyone perfectly empathic and compliant? Except for the people in charge, because you can bet your ass they won’t be doing the surgery on themselves. And while they’re at it, they can fix people’s other mental deviances too. Maybe you should watch your back. The gays might be next.”

  Ms. Utter stood up, furious. “Nell. Quiet.”

  Nil gripped the sides of her desk like she still had a lot more to say, but her eyes sagged away from mine. Little by little she sank back in her chair. Ms. Utter may have been small, and probably under the influence most of the time, but we generally did what she said. I think we were all a little in awe of her, especially since the Big Bang.

  That day, after the gunshot, after the silence, after Nil’s murmured “Holy shit, Kettle,” not one of us had done a thing. Not Tor, the captain of the swim team, the biggest guy in the room now that Pete was dead. Not Lydia, the junior class president. Not me. Franklin had just started to wheel his Beretta around, and for a long second, I felt certain I’d be the next one to have the back of his head blasted open.

  Then he slammed to the floor.

  I couldn’t tell what had happened at first. The back row of desks blocked my view. I lurched to my feet, apparently more curious than terrified, to find Franklin subdued by our over-fifty-years-old, under-five-feet-tall history teacher. She’d made it all the way across the room before the rest of us had even thought to move.

  Only then did Tor and I and a few others rush forward to help. We held Franklin down, leaving the mask on because none of us wanted to look at his face, and waited for the cops to come. The matte black Beretta lay a few feet away. Nobody touched it. I pulled his right arm behind his back and held it there, watching his fingers writhe and twitch.

  I later found out I’d been right to think Franklin had planned to take out more targets that day. Those comments he’d left on the Son of War subreddit also seemed to refer to multiple intended victims. “Those assholes will pay,” one of them said. “A bullet for each one.” Which left all of us in that class with one question lodged in our brains like a splinter, though nobody’d had the courage to ask it out loud in any of our sharing sessions so far: had Franklin Kettle meant one of his bullets for me, too?

  At the lab, a couple hours after the procedure, Mom gave a nod to the guard standing outside Franklin Kettle’s door, touched her badge to the reader, and pushed the door open. Franklin lay on his bed, listening to music on an old iPod touch. His dark brown hair had disappeared. Mom had told him they’d need to shave it off in back for the procedure, and he’d said they might as well take the rest of it too. Gertie was perched on the edge of the mattress next to him, talking and pointing at the iPod’s screen. She stood when Mom came in.

  “Sorry, we were just discussing music, Dr. Braithwaite.”

  Mom motioned Gertie over. She spoke in a lower voice, so Franklin couldn’t hear, but I could still make her words out later, when I watched the surveillance footage. “What’s he doing with an iPod?”

  “His grandma brought it in for him. I checked it out myself. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

  Mom pursed her lips and turned to her patient. “How do you feel, Franklin? Still groggy?”

  Franklin drew out his earbuds and gave a small shrug. If Mom had expected a big dramatic change in him after the operation, there wasn’t one. His face appeared as lifeless as before. Or maybe that just had to do with the way the lights drained his skin of color. He had one of the few rooms in the Mother Ship without a wall made of glass—for security reasons, of course—so no natural illumination softened the blaze of the fluorescents.

  “Does your head hurt?”

  He nodded. “A little.” His voice sounded thick and dry.

  “We can give you more painkillers, if you’d like.”

  “No more. I don’t like the way they make me feel. All floaty.” He blinked, and his eyelids moved lazily, the two just slightly out of sync.

  Mom sat down on the chair next to his bed and made a note on h
er clipboard. “And how do you feel otherwise?”

  “What do you mean, Madame Doctor? Am I still a psycho?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Because I don’t feel any different. So I guess I must still be a psycho.” Behind his glasses, his eyes had regained a little of their alertness. He gazed at the ceiling—apparently the capsule hadn’t cured him of his indifference to eye contact, either—and that private smile of his appeared at the corners of his mouth. Even on the footage from the lab cameras, you could see it.

  Mom sat back and smoothed the iron-gray hair on either side of her face. “I have something for you, Franklin.”

  She nodded to Gertie, who went to the door, lifted something from the floor just outside, and passed it to her. Franklin’s smile faded. Mom set it on his nightstand: the Plexiglas cage, with only five mice in it now. They all pressed to the side of the cage farthest away from him, climbing over each other and scratching at the walls, like they remembered what he’d done to their friend.

  Something shifted in Franklin’s face. His cheeks filled with color. His chin started to shake. “Take them away,” he whispered. The heart rate monitor next to him had started beeping faster. He edged sideways in his bed, away from the mice. “This isn’t cool, Dr. Braithwaite.”

  “I don’t think they’re—”