Tattoo Atlas

by Tim Floreen

  Franklin’s grandmother stopped talking. She rubbed her gloved hands together and watched me, an expectant look on her fractured face. Only at that moment did it dawn on me why she’d called out to me in the first place, and why she’d steered our conversation down this particular path.

  I glanced at the hulking glass structure behind me. Mom wouldn’t want me to say anything. And I still had doubts about Franklin myself, didn’t I? But maybe that didn’t matter. She just wanted a bit of hope. What would it cost to give her that?

  “He does seem different,” I told her. “I had a rough day and wasn’t feeling so good, and he was the only one who noticed.”

  My brain wouldn’t settle down after I got home. I paced around and around the house, until finally I pulled on my heavy-duty cold-weather running gear and charged down Boreal Street. I didn’t normally run after dark, or in weather this cold and windy, but tonight I felt a weird craving for the sensation of the wind scouring my face. Once I got down by the lake, the wind grew even wilder, but at least it tired me out and gave me something specific to struggle against, because the thoughts blowing around in my head felt a lot harder to grapple with.

  What did it mean if Mom did lie about those nanodrones she put in Franklin’s head? If they went in way back before the Big Bang, did that mean they had something to do with what happened? The idea of it made my insides churn.

  Or was it all just a misunderstanding? That had to be it.

  Didn’t it?

  I managed to push those thoughts out of my mind eventually, but the empty space only filled up with thoughts of Tor, and whether things between us would ever get back to where they’d been a few weeks ago, and whether they even should. And then there was Lydia. Was I betraying her, like Callie kept saying? Tor had never really been hers to begin with, had he? Sure he kissed her in public, but I was the one he wanted to be with when no one was looking.

  I stopped on the running path that followed along the Lake Superior shoreline and looked out at the frozen-over lake, what little I could see of it in the darkness. Years ago Mom had sometimes taken me and Ethan down to the shore in winter and told us about how the lake never froze all the way to the bottom. “There’s water under the ice,” she’d said, “and fish still living in it.”

  The image came back to me now: all those fish down there weaving their slow way through the cold depths.

  Inside my jacket my phone vibrated. I yanked it out and checked the screen. My heart seemed to stutter and lose its rhythm for a second: I’d received another picture from that same unknown phone number. I bit into the fingertips of my glove and dragged it off with my teeth, not even minding the freezing wind. I touched the screen to pull up the image.

  A second digital painting of me. Similar to the first one, just my head again, but this time I had a different expression on my face.

  Sad. I looked sad.

  I stared at the image until my fingers turned numb and started to throb, at which point I thrust my phone into my pocket, pulled my glove on again, and raced back the way I’d come.

  Mom needed to know about this. Right away. First thing when I got home, I’d ask her about what Mrs. Kettle had told me, find out if she’d lied (but she couldn’t have, right?), and tell her about the pictures.

  Because my wild hunch had been right: Franklin Kettle must have sent them. There was no way Mom or anyone else at the lab would’ve allowed him access to the Internet, so he must’ve done it on his own. Somehow he’d breached security, just like everybody had feared he would.

  Other questions still nagged at me, though. Why would he put so much effort into making pictures of me? And why would he send them to me, when doing that would put him at serious risk? Had he meant them as some kind of threat? That didn’t seem right, especially after the weird conversation we’d had today. It felt more like he wanted me to know he’d seen me. Seen my sadness. Further evidence of his developing empathy maybe?

  All the more reason to tell Mom.

  But then, what if we were all wrong? What if he was just faking his transformation? That would make him a dangerous sociopath with unobstructed access to the outside world.

  I put on speed, the wind blowing me forward now. When I turned onto Boreal Street, I could see it straight ahead of me: the Kettles’ little blue house, its windows dark, its wind chimes clanging like an alarm in the crazy wind.

  Once I got close to home, though, I noticed something that made me slow down. It looked like Mom had returned and switched on the lights while I was out, and a car I didn’t recognize stood parked in our driveway. The license plate bore a US flag and, across the bottom, the words PROUD TO BE A VETERAN. The muscles surrounding my rib cage tightened, squeezing my thudding heart and heaving lungs, while I thought of the car with the military plate that had pulled into our driveway two years ago. The cry Mom had let out when she’d seen it. Her severed thumb on the white cutting board. But that car had been black and freshly washed. This one was a silver compact crusted in dirty snow. Still, part of me wanted to turn and race back the way I’d come, into the scouring wind once again.

  I clicked the garage door remote on my key chain and entered that way, thinking I’d slip straight through the kitchen to my room, but I walked in to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table with a stranger. He looked young, maybe in his early twenties. He didn’t have on a crisp military uniform like the man who’d come to tell us about Ethan had. Just a button-down and jeans. He stood when I came in.

  Mom got up too. “Rem, this is Sergeant Sam Durham. He was in Ethan’s unit.”

  “Not sergeant anymore,” the guy said. “I’m a civilian now. ‘Sam’ is fine.” He put out his hand for me to shake. Sam had a stringy body, with a long neck jutting at an angle from stooped shoulders. “I was at Ethan’s funeral. You probably don’t remember me.”

  I didn’t. I could picture a pack of guys in military dress sitting near the back of the church, me having to shake their hands at one point, but their faces had become blurry in my mind, along with pretty much everything else connected with Ethan’s funeral. He gripped my hand now with military firmness.

  “He was in the area and decided to drop by.” Mom spoke in her usual smooth voice, a composed smile on her face. But she’d started prodding her thumb with her index fingernail.

  “I was out for a run,” I said. “I should go change.”

  Sam waved his hands. “Don’t trouble yourself, Rem. I need to head out anyway.” He turned to Mom. “Thanks for your hospitality, Dr. Braithwaite.” He nodded at the photo of Ethan on the wall. “I still miss your son. He was the heart of our unit.”

  A faint bell rang in my head. Now I remembered Sam. He’d said the same thing about Ethan when I’d shaken his hand at the funeral. Then, when we’d walked away, Mom had put her hand on my shoulder and told me who he was.

  “You were there,” I said now, without thinking. “You were right behind Ethan.”

  Now that the memory had come back to me, I imagined I could see Ethan’s death printed on him—in the way his long body hunched forward, in the shadow his deep-set eyes seemed to contain. I noticed how his Adam’s apple bulged from his jutting neck, like he had something permanently stuck in his throat.

  He gave a nod. “That’s correct. I’m the one who saw that child shoot your brother.”

  I blinked at him, not sure I’d heard right. “Child?”

  Mom picked up a bottle of wine from the table. “Sam, are you sure you wouldn’t like some—”

  “I never heard he was a child.” The floor seemed to slide sideways underneath me. “How old?”

  He cut an inquiring glance at Mom, but she had her eyes on the table. “Ten or eleven.”

  “And you . . .”

  He nodded again. “I shot the boy after he shot Ethan.”

  The curve of his spine, the shadow in his eyes—they made even more sense now. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Without looking at either of us, Mom poured herself more than half a glass
of wine.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked her.

  “You were heartbroken after we got the news, Rem. You didn’t need to hear details like that.”

  “Why not later then? We just talked about Ethan’s killer a couple days ago, and you said we didn’t know anything about him. You lied to me.”

  “What good would it have done to tell you the truth?”

  “Maybe it would’ve helped me understand.”

  She set down her glass, too hard. Some wine sloshed onto the table. “Understand what? That war is senseless and horrible?”

  “No. Why Ethan didn’t pull the trigger.”

  Sam looked miserable. His huge Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Braithwaite. I didn’t realize—”

  “Neither did I,” I said, my eyes still on Mom.

  She smoothed her gray hair and took a slow breath to calm herself. “Can we talk about this later, Rem?”

  “Why? Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  “Rem.”

  I turned away from the table. My running clothes felt cold and slimy against my skin. “I’m going to my room.” To Sam, I said, “Thanks for coming by.”

  He extended his hand for another shake, but I was already cutting out of the kitchen and heading down the hall.

  After showering and changing into clean sweats, I sat down at my desk. My chest still felt tight. My heart banged inside it. I pulled out my Tattoo Atlas but couldn’t get myself to draw anything besides a few aimless lines. Outside, the wind was still blowing hard. Sam Durham’s car had disappeared from our driveway. Mom knocked on my door and asked what I wanted for dinner. Without opening, I told her I wasn’t hungry.

  I couldn’t say exactly why this new information about Ethan’s death bothered me so much. It should’ve even helped to know the reason Ethan hadn’t pulled the trigger. He hadn’t wanted to shoot a child. Who could blame him for that?

  Me. The truth was, I still wished Ethan had done it. Maybe that was what bothered me. For over two years I’d carried around a mental picture of Ethan’s killer. I hadn’t consciously tried to imagine what the guy looked like. The picture had just formed there all by itself. I’d even drawn it in my Tattoo Atlas a few times: a full-grown man with fierce eyes and, for some reason, a sweat-soaked black bandanna tied around his head. The picture was a total cliché based on a mishmosh of various action movie villains and zero actual information, but it gave me something to hate. Now the picture had changed. In one second, it had become a frightened ten-year-old kid.

  And with all my heart I still wished Ethan had blown his brains out.

  Probably not a very nice thought for Mr. Nice Guy to have. But then again, Mom had said pretty much the same thing the other day. She’d told me she wished Ethan had managed to fire his weapon first, and she’d known his killer was a child. Did that make my illustrious humanitarian mother totally fucked up too?

  Maybe. And it didn’t even come as much of a surprise after some of the other stuff I’d seen her do lately. Like putting her own son in a room with the sociopath who’d shot one of his best friends (which, Callie would be happy to know, I could finally admit was seriously fucked up). And then leaving him in there even longer than she’d said she would. And lying to him about how his brother died.

  Plus, there was still that other thing Mom might or might not have done.

  A little after eleven, she came to my door again. “Are we going to talk about this, Rem?”

  I dropped my pencil on my sketchbook and yanked open my door. “Actually, Mom, there’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

  Her eyes flared in surprise. “What?”

  “I ran into Mrs. Kettle when I was leaving the lab today.”

  She stiffened. At least I thought she did. “Really? What did she say?”

  “I knew Franklin went to your lab for testing before the Big Bang, but I never knew it was three days before.”

  “Was it? I don’t remember the exact timing.”

  “She also said you hadn’t finished the testing when the Big Bang happened. So what made you think he’d be such a perfect candidate for your procedure?”

  “It’s true,” she said smoothly, “we didn’t have all of it done, but we had enough data to make an assessment.”

  “That’s not how you made it sound when I asked you about it yesterday. You said you’d run an ‘exhaustive analysis’ of Franklin’s brain. And another thing: according to Mrs. Kettle, you put nanodrones in Franklin’s head during that first visit. Didn’t you say you just put them in a few days ago?”

  “We did. She must’ve been confused.” I saw it, though: her index finger had slid toward the pad of her thumb.

  “She told me you were using the nanodrones to monitor Franklin’s brain activity, and he was supposed to come back in a week so you could get the readings. That’s basically how the nanodrones work, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It doesn’t seem like she was confused to me.”

  Mom crossed her arms. “What are you getting at, Rem? Just say it.”

  I gripped the doorframe. My throat had gone dry. “Just for the sake of argument, say Mrs. Kettle wasn’t confused. If Franklin had those drone things floating around in his head when he shot Pete, it makes me wonder . . .” I closed my eyes and pushed out the rest of the words. “Does that mean they made him do it somehow?”

  “Of course not, Rem, that’s—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mom, stop lying. Just tell me.”

  She flinched at the sharpness in my voice. I never talked like that to her.

  “Was it Dr. Hult? Did he talk you into covering it up?” I’d always thought that guy seemed shifty. Maybe because of the comb-over. “Come on, Mom. Tell me the truth.”

  Mom stood there, her fingernail driving into her thumb. Outside, the wind chimes on the Kettle house, together with the howling of the wind, made a frantic, eerie music, like something Gertie might listen to. Mom’s eyes narrowed, as if she’d come to a decision. “All right then. You want the truth? Here it is. We did inject the nanodrones a year ago. They were an experimental technology, meant solely to monitor brain activity. We had no reason to believe they’d also alter it. But after the shooting, we did wonder if there was a connection, so we conducted more testing. The nanodrones measured the activity of neurons by sending out tiny targeted pulses of energy. It turned out those pulsations were somehow signaling the neurons to suppress their activity.”

  I tightened my grip on the doorframe. I thought I might topple over if I didn’t. “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  She wiped back her iron-gray hair with its stripe of white. Her voice stayed as steady as ever. “No, Rem, we didn’t tell. Our tests also showed if we modulated the frequency of those pulsations just slightly, they would stimulate the neurons instead of suppressing them. It was a breakthrough, Rem. We’d stumbled on a discovery that would let us influence brain activity in a far more precise and nuanced way than ever before.

  “We knew if we admitted our nanodrones had had anything to do with the shooting, our project would end right there. The media would go into an uproar. Our lab would get shut down. By keeping it a secret, we were able to build the capsule we believe will help Franklin, and potentially thousands of other people suffering from serious mental illness.”

  “Helping Franklin doesn’t exactly count, though, does it? Considering you’re the ones that made him that way.”

  “That’s not true,” she retorted. “Remember, he’d started leaving threatening comments on that Son of War subreddit months before we ever touched his brain. The whole reason his grandmother brought him to us in the first place was because she recognized he had serious problems.”

  “Are you saying he still would’ve killed Pete if you hadn’t injected him with the nanodrones?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You heard what he said today. He’d just liked imagining bringin
g a gun to school. Creating a revenge fantasy in his head, turning it into a game like Son of War, planning it all out—that was enough for him. But then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t anymore. After you put in those drones.” My chest felt hot, like a furnace. “Admit it, Mom. He was just a garden-variety angry messed-up kid, and you made him a killer.”

  “No,” she said, with a fierce shake of her head. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Maybe you don’t know for sure, but it seems pretty likely. And isn’t that enough? You must’ve realized there’d be a risk putting those nanodrones in his head. You said yourself they were still experimental.”

  “There’s always a risk. I told you before, we don’t live in a perfect world. And if my team did cause what happened, I believe we’re making up for it now.”

  “By lying.” I took a step back. I couldn’t even look at her anymore. “All you’ve been doing is lying, Mom. About Ethan’s death. About Pete’s. Is there anything you’re not lying about?” She opened her mouth to reply, but I said, “You know what? Don’t answer that. It’ll probably just be another lie.”

  I slammed the door shut and leaned my back against it, breathing hard.

  After a silence Mom said from the hall, “Listen, Rem. I’m not dismissing what Franklin did or our possible involvement in it. But do you realize what an important discovery the nanodrones led us to? We’ve quite possibly found a way to eradicate violent crime on our planet, and to offer redemption to the most seemingly irredeemable among us. Just imagine: if evil does exist, we’ve found the cure.”

  Across from me, on my angled desk, lay my vintage paperback edition of Frankenstein. I’d pulled it out that morning to look at the cover: a portrait, in lurid colors, of Dr. Frankenstein bent over the slab where his monster lay. He looked like the classic mad scientist. White lab coat. Eyes big and maniacal. The streak of white blazing through his dark hair looked just like Mom’s.

  Outside my window the wind had finally blown itself out. Boreal Street was still. I let a few minutes pass after Mom went back to her room at the other end of the house, and then I tucked my Tattoo Atlas under my arm and padded down the hall. I couldn’t handle staying inside the house another second. I needed to feel the cold air on my face one more time. I stepped into my sneakers, pulled on my coat, and wound my long blue scarf around my neck. From the couch I grabbed a folded-up blanket.