“Can I have one?” he asked.
“What? A tattoo?” said Rose.
“Yeah.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to go to jail. Tattooing kids is still illegal in this city.”
“Oh go on,” said the newly tattooed customer.
“Are you trying to get me into trouble?”
“Always,” the woman said, “but you could just do something really small, something nobody would ever see.”
“Like in my armpit,” the kid suggested.
“I don’t think so.”
“Go on, Rose,” said the woman.
It seemed that Rose had a hard time saying no to her.
“Okay, but not the armpit. Kid, gimme your hand.”
Eagerly, he extended his right hand, balled into a fist. He was already picturing a Viking or a fireball or a winged serpent emblazoned across his knuckles, but Rose grabbed the hand, rolled it over, and opened it up, and as quickly and as perfunctorily as possible, she tattooed a cluster of small, blue-black ink marks on his palm: a circle, and a pair of crossed lines, one of them an arrow marked with an N for north.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“That’s a compass rose,” she said. “And if anybody asks, you did it to yourself.”
“Okay,” he said. But nobody did ask. He went home, went back to his mother, didn’t say anything about the chase, or about Rose or the tattoo, and neither his mother nor anybody else ever said to him, “What’s that on your palm?” No doubt there were other kids whose lives included the inspecting of hands, for cleanliness, honesty, maybe even punishment, but he had none of that. He kept his hand to himself. He looked at it only when he was alone, when he was sure nobody else was looking. Still, that was often enough to realize, all too soon, after just a couple of weeks, that the tattooed marks were fading.
At first he felt disappointed, then cheated. Rose must have known this would happen, that the marks would disappear. Later, he learned that’s what always happens to tattoos on the palm of the hand: they won’t stick, they just fade away. Rose had tricked him, treated him like a child. That really pissed him off. But then he started to feel differently about it. Maybe Rose had been pretty smart. She’d done the job, done what he and her friend had asked of her, and yet she’d also allowed for a reversal, for a kid’s change of heart, and, of course, she was protecting herself too.
He needed to talk to her about this, and off he went, threading his way into the city to find her again, attempting to retrace the route that had taken him to her studio that day. Naturally, he’d had other things on his mind at the time, but even so, he was amazed how unfamiliar the whole area now looked, how hard it was to find a landmark that told him he was anywhere near the right place. He was pretty sure he’d found the bus stop where he first encountered his pursuers, and he had a sense of the direction he’d gone from there, so he headed that way now, but immediately he started to think he must be mistaken. The shapes of the buildings looked wrong, the streets weren’t this narrow, he didn’t remember that church or that convenience store. Perhaps he hadn’t come this way at all. The kid who never got lost suddenly felt adrift and a very, very long way from home. He spent a whole afternoon covering the district, back and forth, pacing the grid, looking for clues, even buying a map from a corner gas station. And he also kept a lookout for five tall black kids who were good at running and might be eager for revenge. But he found nothing. He was both sadder and angrier than he could understand.
* * *
The endorphin rush from the tattoo on Marilyn’s foot was small scale by most standards, and her eagerness to question Rose, to know what the story meant, cleared away both pain and pleasure. She pushed herself up on the daybed, just about managed to stay, or at least appear to be, calm.
“What was his name, Rose?” she asked. “What was the kid’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“Oh come on,” said Rose. “It was a long, long time ago. A lot of brain cells have died since then.”
“It must be in there somewhere. Maybe we can jog your memory. Was the name Wrobleski?”
“I don’t think so, but I never knew his surname anyway.”
“So you did know his first name.”
“Yes, I did. Once. But I don’t anymore. It’s gone, I’m old. I barely remember what happened yesterday. I’m all used up.”
Unexpectedly, two thin streams of tears ran down from the old woman’s eyes, making their way into the creases on her cheeks and around her mouth, tributaries heading for an inert inland sea.
32. TECTONICS
“How’s your foot?” Zak asked as he guided Marilyn down the stairs of the Villa Nova.
“It hurts,” said Marilyn. “It’s going to hurt for two or three weeks if Rose Scarlatti is to be believed.”
“You think she is?”
“About the foot, sure.”
“And about the rest?”
“I don’t even know what the rest is,” said Marilyn. “Some time in the distant past, some random, nameless, traumatized kid went to Rose Scarlatti’s studio. She gave him a tattoo she knew would disappear. And that gave him a taste for renegade tattooing? So now he’s wandering the streets picking up women and tattooing coded maps on their backs, along with Rose Scarlatti’s trademark, because … because he just likes it? Because it’s a sexual fetish? Because he’s fucking nuts? Sure. Who wouldn’t believe a thing like that?”
“You think the kid was Wrobleski?”
“Even if it was, it doesn’t explain everything else. Maybe I should just go and ask him,” said Marilyn.
“Yeah, right.”
“You think I’m not serious?”
“I don’t know what you are right now, Marilyn. I don’t know why you care so much. I don’t know why you care at all.”
They were at the ground floor. She looked at him with both sympathy and regret.
“I’ll explain,” she said. “But not here.”
“Where?”
“Your place,” said Marilyn. “After we’ve fucked.”
* * *
Zak had taken twenty or so illuminated globes from Ray’s unwanted stock and arranged them strategically around his bedroom, in various places, at different heights, to disguise the exact shape, size, and dreariness of the space. The globes glowed rather than shone, with a pale consistent blue from the expanses of water, quiet browns, greens, and yellows from the landmasses: the poles were plain white. The effect was like being in space, surrounded by a solar system of identical, unmoving planets.
“Quite the bachelor pad,” said Marilyn.
“I do what I can.”
“Oh, I think we can do better than that.”
She took hold of him, tenderly, but with purpose and determination. Her hands moved rapidly down his clothed body, accelerating, a lightning raid, opening buttons, a belt, a zipper, then pulling fabric aside, not stripping him naked, but exposing only the areas she needed. She lay on her back on the dense, grubby blue carpet, and he did for her what she’d done for him: a series of strictly functional openings and unfoldings, all that was needed, just the moving parts. It felt good not to have to think about Marilyn’s house rules.
Afterward Zak rolled onto his back beside her, sweating, breathing hard, pleased with himself. Who needed a road map? He put his arm around her and they stared up at the dark, distant ceiling above the globes. The world felt satisfyingly far away. He knew it wouldn’t stay there.
“Tell me about your grandfather,” he said.
He felt Marilyn’s body clench and slip away. “What?”
“I’ve been doing some research. Karl Driscoll was your grandfather, wasn’t he? And he was the architect who designed the Telstar. Is that why you live there?”
“You’re quite the little gumshoe, aren’t you?”
“I never left my desk. And I still don’t k
now the half of it. I know he got kicked off the project before it was finished. I know he never built anything ever again. I know he’s not around anymore.”
“That’s way too much already.”
She started to get up, to fasten her clothes, ready to make her escape. Zak put his hand on her, hoping it didn’t seem like a grab. And he hoped it didn’t sound either too insistent or too whiny when he protested, “You said you’d explain. So explain.”
Marilyn moved away across the floor, sat with her back to the wall, wrapped her clothes and her arms tightly around her body.
“My grandfather was a good man,” she said. “He raised me after my parents died. Car crash. Drunk driving. Unheroic stuff. He did his best. His big thing was walking through the city with me, pointing out buildings, architectural styles and features. I was the only eight-year-old in my school who knew what a piloti was.
“He always carried a walking stick with a globe for a handle, so that he had the whole world in his hand. I knew he’d been an architect, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with what he was showing me. I didn’t really know what architects did, partly because the way he talked, it sounded like that phase of his life had been a million years ago. I knew he was bitter about it. And then one day he got a call from the mayor’s office: Meg Gunderson was a fan. They wanted to make the Telstar part of the city regeneration project, thought it would help to have the original architect on board. He was thrilled. It was a dream come true, to feel wanted again. He gave a few talks, addressed a bunch of committees, did some interviews, and then he disappeared.”
“Disappeared how?”
She’d been talking quickly, but now she stopped to take a deep breath, then another.
“I don’t know. He just went. One day he wasn’t there anymore. I did the whole missing-person thing with the cops, they went through the motions, but they didn’t do anything about finding him. And they were probably right. Why waste their time. We all assume he’s dead. Somehow I know he’s dead. And that’s what I was doing that first night when I met you, walking through the city, trying to see it through his eyes, maybe looking for his ghost or something. I’ve done a lot of that, probably too much.”
“That’s terrible,” he said, and he meant it. “Really terrible.”
“It is,” she said. “It’s not the worst part.”
She stood up now, took up a place at the center of the room, and a strange relaxation came over her. She let her arms and her body loosen, and she undressed completely. The clothes came off quickly and effortlessly. It wasn’t an act of display, wasn’t a striptease, but it was still quite a show. Before long she stood naked in front of him, her body smooth and delicate in the dim light of the globes, looking self-possessed yet defenseless. Then she turned around. There it was, the damage, a diagram of former pain.
Zak would never be sure whether he was surprised or not. The moment he saw the tattoo on her back, it seemed as though he’d always been expecting it, a kind of explanation but one that simply demanded other, more complex explanations.
“Take a good long look,” Marilyn said. “You’re the map expert.”
He started at the top. High on her lean shoulder blades there was the beginning of the disorder, an ineptly drawn web of straight and curved lines, laid over the contours of her body. Some were reckless, some shaky, and yes, as he’d seen before elsewhere on other bodies, it was possible that they might be roads or rivers or railroad lines, but really they might be many other things too: cables, water mains, power lines. They paid no attention, no respect, to the flesh beneath. Then there was an overlay of misshapen squares and circles, buildings perhaps, and scattered among them things that could possibly be interpreted as bridges or underpasses, but some of the marks looked more like mere doodles, blots, and gouges, like the simple, cruel defilement of the soft skin. There were loose crosses, empty semicircles, and arrows that must be marking something or other, but their meanings remained utterly obscure. You wouldn’t have wanted to read too much into any of that chaos.
Zak wondered for a moment if, possibly, there was really nothing to be read there at all, no code to be deciphered, no reference to any “real” world, if it was simply an attempt to obliterate the female body, to overlay it with mayhem and abuse. Maybe any reading of the map would be mere projection, seeing what you wanted to see, a futile exercise, like trying to use a set of Rorschach blots as a street plan.
As he’d already seen, things got worse as the tattoos descended the body. Below the taut nip of Marilyn’s waist the scrawl became even more hurried, abstract, and bewildering as it careened across the curves of her buttocks, overlapping circles, swirls, scribbles, as if the tattooist was getting frantic, perhaps bored, wanting to get the task over and done with. It was a familiar incoherence, again incorporating, right on the tailbone, in the smooth softness at the top of the cheeks, an infinitely crude but quite unmistakable compass rose. Well, now Marilyn had two of the fucking things.
There was something else that he saw now, on the tight musculature of her lower back, something obscured by a welter of lines, as though the tattooist had made a design and then decided to cross it out with more tattooing. Under those lines of attempted concealment or erasure was a blob-like shape with a circle at one corner, like an amoeba and its nucleus, or perhaps like a fried egg. In the general illustrative mayhem it was impossible to be certain, but Zak thought it was neither an overactive imagination nor simple obsession that made him see those lines as the Telstar Hotel.
Marilyn began her story. She looked vulnerable but tough, and inured rather than tearful. Slowly and with difficulty she told Zak as much as she could bear to remember—the night, the walk, the attack, the smell of the leather hood, the ride in the back of the van, the basement ordeal, the various species of pain she experienced, then the relief of a strictly limited kind, and the damage that would never be wholly repaired. She talked until the point came when she couldn’t tell him anymore, when she had nothing left in her.
“That’s all I’ve got,” she whispered.
She pulled on her clothes again, baggy pants, a T-shirt, a work shirt, a thick woolen jacket, putting on layers of protection.
“I have to leave,” she said.
“No you don’t,” said Zak, “there’s no reason in the world why you have to leave. I want you to stay the night. I want you to stay, period.”
“I can’t do that.”
And she didn’t. After she’d left, Zak was surprised to find that an ignoble part of him was relieved. There was already too much for him to take in. He felt hollow. He thought there must be some perfect words he was supposed to say, some magical action he should perform, that would make everything better: it might take him the rest of his life to work out what.
33. HUMAN
The city streets seemed abandoned. Marilyn Driscoll started to walk away from Zak, through the Arts and Crafts Zone, through the unraveling weft and warp of the city. She felt exposed but lightened. Zak would have found out sooner or later, why not now?
She was less than halfway home when she heard a car behind her, and she wasn’t in the least surprised when she turned her head just a little, just enough to see that it was a battered metallic-blue Cadillac. Well, of course. It drove slowly past her and stopped a short way ahead. She kept walking until she’d caught up with the car, and then she stopped and looked in through the open passenger window to see Billy Moore at the wheel, miserable, shame-faced. Before he could say or do anything, she opened the door and got in beside him, like a grateful hitchhiker.
“I’ve been expecting you, Billy,” Marilyn said. “What kept you so long?”
He had no answer, and neither of them said anything on the journey to Wrobleski’s compound. He didn’t even turn on the radio. As they were crossing the threshold, entering the courtyard through the metal gate, Billy Moore turned to Marilyn.
“I’m sorry. I’m really lost,” he said.
* * *
Wrobleski
was waiting for her in the courtyard. She had endlessly played and edited the scene in her mind, through all its possible fluffs, retakes, and alternate endings. And of course Wrobleski had always been the ogre in this scenario, the fiend. Now that she finally saw him, he appeared so much less monstrous than she expected, than she wanted him to be. Sure, he looked like a heavy, and was no doubt capable of any amount of malevolence, but he appeared, nevertheless, all too human. She found herself horribly disappointed. He gazed at her without much interest, then he turned, moved away, gestured to Akim that she was now his responsibility. She was having none of that.
“Wrobleski,” she called, “talk to me. You owe me an explanation.”
He gazed at her vacantly.
“You think?”
He said it quietly, with weariness but not with any great concern.
“Yes, I do.”
“I really don’t care what you think.”
“No,” Marilyn insisted. “That’s not right, that’s not good enough.”
He stared at her as though she were a laboratory experiment that had gone awry and produced unexpected though not especially fascinating results.
“It’ll have to do,” said Wrobleski. “You want your big drama, your big scene. But I’m not playing.”
She flew at him. He hardly moved, and did he really snap his fingers? In any case, before she was on him, Akim was standing between the two of them, and he was now thoroughly taking care of things. She felt a blow on the head, and then a jab from a needle. Akim’s hands were on her, in all kinds of places they didn’t need to be. And was she imagining it or did he say quietly in her ear, “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be over.”
Then there was a new reworking of a familiar nightmare. For a while she could still scream and struggle, but then ropes were tightened around her, two thick layers of duct tape were stickered across her mouth, and then she couldn’t see, though at least this time it wasn’t because of a leather hood. She was dragged away, across the courtyard, deep into the compound, down a set of stairs, into a new basement room, the size and extent of which she couldn’t fathom. It was hot and it smelled of weary bodies, and she thought she could hear voices, though it might only have been a TV. She would spend the rest of the short night on her back, on a mattress, bound, sightless, motionless, inert, and without feeling, but absolutely ready for whatever was coming next.
The City Under the Skin Page 17
