Tattoo Atlas

by Tim Floreen

  A grimace smeared across his face. His head dropped forward again. His hands went back to his skull. His shoulders shook. I shifted in my chair, wondering if I should say something, or pat him on the back maybe. But that probably wasn’t allowed, and even if it was, the thought of giving the person responsible for the Big Bang comforting pats didn’t exactly appeal to me.

  Then, when he looked up again, I could see it.

  He was laughing.

  “By Ms. Utter,” he cackled, barely able to get out the words. “She tackled me. Tiny Ms. Utter.”

  I eased back in my chair. My hands caught each other and squeezed. Christ, what had Mom done to him?

  “The lady comes up to my armpit,” Franklin panted, “she has half a century on me, and she took me down. End of mission. Maybe she’d been playing Son of War.”

  He buried his face in his palms, and his shoulders rocked some more. He didn’t say anything else for a while. He just went right on laughing. For a second, a chuckle started to rise in my throat too, because it was sort of funny, Franklin getting taken down by our child-sized middle-aged history teacher. But then I realized this was the guy who’d killed my friend Pete and now I was about to laugh with him about it. How fucked up was that?

  Franklin kept on, though. His face, still clutched in his hands, slid to the table. A weird sound seeped from him, something between a groan and a hiccup. Then he turned his head to the side, his face contorted, his cheeks wet. He opened his lips wide, and the sound coming out of his mouth changed into a scream.

  I grabbed the armrests and looked at the guards. They both put fingers to their ears as they listened to their earpieces, and then they didn’t make a move. One raised his hand, telling me I should wait. Mom wanted to see how this would play out. By now I knew five minutes must’ve come and gone long ago. Jesus, Mom, what the hell?

  Franklin stopped screaming and went still, his head on the table, his face twisted up like a wet rag. I cleared my throat but still couldn’t think of anything to say. He wiped his cheeks with the heels of his palms and, with a jingle of chains, sat up in his chair. His face, though still red and puffy and damp, had melted back into expressionlessness.

  “I’ve been having nightmares,” he said. “Since the operation.”

  I forced myself to let go of the armrests and once again try to act like this was a regular conversation. “About what?”

  “You know. That day. The Big Bang. That’s what you all call it at school, right?”

  I gave a small nod.

  “Nil told me. She came to visit at the detention center a few times.” He sniffed. “In my nightmares, I’m back in the classroom, just about to put on the mask, except I’m also outside myself watching it happen. All the anger’s there, but it feels like somebody else’s anger.” He reached up to scratch his crooked mountain-range nose. “Do you remember that time in Ms. Utter’s class when I had to give a talk in front of everybody and Pete messed with the projector?”

  “Yeah.”

  Like I could ever forget. Last year Ms. Utter had made all of us give PowerPoint presentations. In September she’d assigned everybody a subject and a date, and Franklin’s presentation had come months before Pete’s, close to the beginning of the year. I could still picture Franklin standing in front of the class in his tattered black jean jacket, his blue-black hair screening his face as he stared down at the crinkled papers in his hands. He mumbled something about how the subject of his speech, Napoleon, was known for being “a small man but a masterful military leader.” Then he nodded at Ms. Utter to turn off the classroom lights and punched the projector remote to start the slide show.

  But instead of an image of Napoleon, a short video playing on a loop appeared on the whiteboard next to Franklin. Over and over, the video showed Franklin standing in the boys’ locker room wearing nothing but a towel around his hips and a seething expression on his usually expressionless face as he stared at something or someone outside the frame. A circle of boys surrounded him, all of them laughing. A kid named Eric snatched off the towel. Franklin hurried to cover himself, his anger replaced by surprise. Then the video started again.

  Gasps filled the classroom, followed by a rush of laughter.

  “Wait, is that him?” Pete said. “I didn’t know Napoleon was that small.” He lifted up his pinky finger. “He’s, like, tiny.” Really, though, everything happened so fast in the video you couldn’t see a thing.

  Ms. Utter got the class back under control fast. She stormed across the room, yanked out the projector’s plug, yelled at us all to quiet down. It turned out Pete, sitting at the desk next to the one where Ms. Utter had set up the projector, had unplugged the classroom laptop and plugged in his phone instead.

  In the end, he got a week’s detention for that prank.

  “Pete wasn’t a bad guy,” I said now. “He only did stuff like that when Tor got him going. I’m pretty sure Tor gave him the idea.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Franklin said, his quiet voice sharpening a fraction. Then he shrugged. “So maybe I do still feel angry. In my nightmares, though, my presentation and Pete’s get all mixed up. I’m at the back of the classroom, but I’m also at the front.” He grimaced again. “And when I raise the gun, I’m aiming at myself.”

  He put his hands to his skull and released another yell, as if from physical pain, though not as loud this time. His fingers curled back toward the hole in his head and clawed at it.

  “Sometimes I wish I could dig it out.”

  My eyes darted to the guards and then to Franklin again. Would he actually try it? Right here? “You can’t. They put it in too deep.”

  “I know.” His fingers relaxed.

  Without realizing it, I’d inched all the way to the edge of my seat. My body felt like a compressed spring. “You think that’s why you’re having the nightmares? Because of the capsule? You think it’s working?”

  He studied his palms. “I do feel different. Like I want to cry all the time. Yesterday I agreed to start doing the scientists’ stupid tests. And you know why? Because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. That’s crazy, isn’t it? They put a hole in my head, and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  “What are they making you do?” I asked.

  “Mostly just watch old episodes of Friends.”

  “Are you serious? So in other words they’re torturing you.”

  He let out a soft snort. “Pretty much. They keep stopping the video at random points and asking me questions. ‘What do you think this character is feeling?’ ‘What would you say to that character?’ Stuff like that. The worst part is, the show’s been making me cry too. So I sit there blubbering while I answer their questions. ‘Phoebe is confused.’ ‘Joey is jealous.’ ”

  Empathy. Just like Mom had talked about. So did that mean he had it now? Or was he faking?

  “Then, when I finish the test,” Franklin continued, “I look around at the scientists and the guards and I keep playing the game in my head. This person is happy. That person is bored. As soon as I came in here today, I thought, Rem is sad.”

  “Me?” My face heated up. I wondered how he’d even noticed my expression without ever seeming to look directly at me. “You thought I looked sad?”

  He nodded. “Are you, Rem?”

  My eyes darted to one of the cameras. There was no way in hell I was discussing my joke of a love life in front of Franklin and Mom and all her colleagues. Not even in the name of science. I shook my head. “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

  He studied his chained hands some more. I waited, wondering if he’d press the issue.

  “Philip Glass,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Philip Glass. He’s one of my interests too.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A composer. He makes music that’s really simple. Repetitive, but in a good way. Mathematical. Sometimes you hear music, and there’s just too much going on. Drums and guitars and keyboards all banging away at o
nce. Even when I played Son of War I had to turn the music off, because it made me too tense. But Philip Glass’s stuff isn’t like that. Not that it’s relaxing, some of it’s pretty dramatic, but it’s all simple. One of his songs is basically just people counting numbers. Can you believe that?”

  “Huh.”

  All the zigs and zags our conversation had taken today had made me dizzy, but at least it seemed like we’d gone back to more mundane subject matter for a while.

  “One of the lab techs here, Gertie, she likes that type of music too,” he said. “Yesterday she told me this one piano piece of his was her favorite. I already had it on my iPod, but I’d never listened to it much. When I heard it yesterday, for some reason it sounded completely different from how I remembered it. It did something to me. Made me cry. Made me think about things I didn’t want to think about. And I didn’t understand why.”

  “Sometimes music does the same thing to me.”

  His eyes settled on my paint-spattered shirt. “I’ll play it for you sometime, if you want to hear it.”

  “Sure.”

  His mouth had creased into a tiny smile. In the same way his eyes had changed, his smile had changed too. It wasn’t that same creepy smile from before, or at least I didn’t think it was. But it still seemed to hold a secret.

  “I think you might like Philip Glass’s music,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be another interest we have in common.”

  You could’ve heard a pin drop back in the main lab. The scientists, about a dozen of them, had all rolled their chairs close to the big monitor. They stared at it, their faces stunned into slackness, even though the screen now just showed the empty meeting room. Dr. Hult stood a little behind the others, arms crossed, a wide grin on his face.

  Mom had just brought me in from next door.

  “That was way longer than five minutes,” I told her.

  She turned to me and gripped my shoulders. “I know that must’ve been intense, Rem, but the feelings he expressed, the things he told you about the shooting . . . they were astonishing.”

  So she’d already gone from “promising” to “astonishing.” Red blotches of exhilaration colored her cheeks, and her wide-open eyes seemed to look not so much at me as through me.

  “He got pretty worked up,” Dr. Hult said. “Maybe we should send a couple electrodes to his median forebrain bundle to offset the depression brought on by his feelings of remorse.”

  Mom nodded. “That’s a good thought. Not yet, though. We should do more testing first.”

  “But what about what I said before I went in there?” I protested. “He could be faking, couldn’t he? I mean, the stuff he said about the Big Bang, it sounded like real remorse, but how do you know for sure?”

  “That’s true,” Mom answered. “We don’t. But the fact that he spoke about the shooting at all was highly significant.”

  Franklin’s quiet voice sounded in the background. The scientists had already started replaying the session on the monitor. Gertie flashed a glance at me, biting her lip. She didn’t look as thrilled as the others.

  “I know he didn’t testify at the trial,” I said.

  “No, Rem.” The white streak in Mom’s hair seemed to blaze with her excitement. “He’s never spoken about the shooting. Not a word. Until today. With you.”

  Before I left, Mom took me aside. “Are you, Rem?” she asked, keeping her voice down so her colleagues couldn’t hear. “Sad?”

  “Maybe a little,” I answered, turning away to grab my coat and scarf so she couldn’t see my face. “I guess I’ve been thinking about Pete a lot lately, with the anniversary coming up and everything. I didn’t think I should say that to Franklin, though.”

  “Of course. You thought right. I suppose we’ve had a lot to be sad about, you and I, but you know if you ever need to talk, you can always—”

  Her eyes cut away as a tortured cry filled the room. On the opposite side of the lab, the other scientists traded handshakes and murmurs of congratulations as, on the monitor, Franklin had his meltdown one more time.

  The temperature outside had plunged during my time in the Mother Ship. When I stepped through the sliding front doors, the cold wind whipped back the long tail of my blue scarf and snatched the oxygen out of my mouth. I wound the scarf around my neck a few more times, dug my hands into my pockets, and cut through the dark parking lot toward the Saab.

  “Ethan Braithwaite?” someone said.

  I spun around. A figure loomed up from between a couple cars like a ghost. I stumbled, my boots slipping on the icy pavement, and went flying backward, banging against the side of an SUV. I leaned against it, my heart jackhammering.

  “I’m so sorry, Ethan. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The figure stepped into the light, and I instantly felt like a total idiot. It was Franklin’s grandmother, Mrs. Kettle. I recognized her right away, though I’d only seen her a handful of times on Boreal Street even before the Big Bang—the rumor on the block had always been that she was a shut-in and possibly a hoarder—and since then I didn’t think I’d seen her once. I couldn’t blame her for that, though. For weeks following the shooting, swarms of reporters had hovered on the sidewalk at the end of Boreal Street, using her little blue house as a backdrop while they’d shouted into their microphones, leaving squashed coffee cups strewn across her snowy yard at the end of the day. It came as a surprise to see her here now. A thin spray of white, almost translucent hair pushed out from under the hood of her worn coat, and the wrinkles covering her pale dry skin went every which way, giving her face a shattered appearance.

  “No, it’s my fault,” I said between pants. “I guess I’m just jumpy. Hi, Mrs. Kettle. I’m not Ethan, though, I’m Jeremy, Ethan’s brother.”

  Her wrinkles shifted and deepened, her forehead furrowing, her mouth puckering, as she squinted at me. “I’m so sorry, of course you are. I got mixed up. How’s Ethan doing these days?”

  I blinked. A few days after Ethan’s death she’d left a mushroom casserole and a note of condolence on our doorstep. Maybe she wasn’t an actual shut-in, but apparently Nil had been right when she’d called Mrs. Kettle senile. “He’s fine,” I said.

  She smiled. “How nice. I have an appointment with your mother. She told me she had you come in and talk to Franklin. He asked for you specifically, she said, because you were kind to him at school. Or am I thinking of your brother again?”

  My face turned hot. “No,” I stammered. “That was me. I just saw him.” I stood there for a few seconds nodding and blushing and trying to figure out what to say next. “Are you going to see Franklin too?” I ventured.

  She shook her head and let out a thin laugh. “Just your mom. It seems Franklin’s saying he doesn’t want to see me right now, and your mom thinks it’s best if we respect his wishes, at least for the time being. I can understand that. He’s been through a lot, and I get on his nerves sometimes. Anyway, your mom has been giving me updates every day.”

  Franklin’s grandmother glanced up at the lab, and I thought I might’ve caught a tiny flutter of guilty relief pass across her face.

  “She’s a wonderful woman, your mother,” Mrs. Kettle added. “I’m so grateful to her for what she’s doing for Franklin now, and for what she did for him before, too. I was so worried about him. He never left his room, barely ate, played that awful video game at all hours. She was the only one who really seemed to care. I just wish I’d had him come here a little sooner, so your mother could’ve finished her tests. Maybe if we’d known then how serious his problems were, we could’ve prevented what happened.”

  I opened my mouth to reassure her, say something about how she’d surely done everything she could’ve and no one could’ve predicted what he’d do, but then I stopped. “I thought my mom had already finished her testing on Franklin. I thought that was how she knew he’d be a good candidate for her project.”

  Mrs. Kettle’s expression turned vague again. “I guess she must’ve finished some of it. A
ll that science stuff goes right over my head.” She kneaded her gloved hands together as she talked. “Your mother did her best to explain it all to me, the neurons and nanodrones and whatnot, but—”

  “Nanodrones?”

  “That’s right. I still remember that word because it’s so odd. She was using them to do some kind of test on Franklin’s brain, and we were supposed to come back in a week to get the results. But four days before that . . .” Her voice trailed off, and the fingertips of one hand worried a little hole in the thin knit glove that covered the other.

  Meanwhile, my stomach had clenched. The wind had kicked up, and it slanted through the gaps between my sleeves and my gloves, my collar and my scarf, biting into my skin. Mom had said she’d just put in the nanodrones a few days ago. Had she lied? Maybe Mom had discussed the nanodrones more recently and Mrs. Kettle was mixing things up.

  Except now that I thought about it, Mom had been talking a lot about nanodrones a year ago. They’d been one of her most promising projects, one of the main reasons she’d won the funding to have her new lab built. Then she’d gone quiet about them. I’d always assumed the project just hadn’t panned out, which was why it had surprised me earlier today when she said she’d used them on Franklin.

  Plus, I’d never known he’d gone to the lab only a few days before the shooting.

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Kettle said, “I’m just so grateful to your mother. Of course, she hasn’t gone into much detail about how Franklin’s doing right now and whether the procedure was successful, but I can understand why. She wants to do all her tests first. She’s a scientist. I know that’s how scientists are.”

  “She’s a scientist,” I repeated, barely listening. My brain was still turning, struggling to make sense of this new information.

  “She probably doesn’t want me to get my hopes up,” Mrs. Kettle babbled. She waved her hand and tried to make her voice sound light. “Not that I would, you understand. Get my hopes up. It’s just that I’d like to know how he’s doing. How he seems. If he’s changed.”