Incompatible

by Mauricio R B Campos

  When the bottle met in the air, he exclaimed:

  “A toast for the future!”

  Jean used the beer to take her small green drug.

  The rocker sat down:

  “Let’s smoke a joint while the little candy doesn’t beat up”, and by saying so, he screamed to the worker who kept looking at distance, attentive and solicitous, “Bring the Box”.

  “This Israel stuff there is kind of sweet?”, Cesar asked.

  “It’s a new stuff. A kind of super candy that mixes key with meph. I got it with a DJ at the fifteen years party of my daughter in London”. “I hope I have had the luck to have taken this one, they say it’s good for creativity”, Cesar sat down too.

  “Mr. Jodorowky[8] speaking!”, he joked.

  When said box arrived, he removed a brick of marijuana from it and started to roll it up in thick cigarette silk papers. When he finished four, he distributed and lit one by one.

  The American woman had been to the toiled and, when she came back, she praised the work done in her skin. She wanted to know how the tattooist managed to reach that level of technique.

  “I’m not from here”, she answered. “I’m from São Carlos[9], countryside of the state. When I was fifteen, I started to date with a guy secretly because his family wasn’t well seen. Do you know what I mean? A country city doesn’t tolerate a tattooist family. This boyfriend was learning it then, so I learnt with him; actually, I was quite better than him, which began to generate a foolish jealousy. So foolish that one day the guy finished the relationship without a reason”.

  Tony Perry translated this answer to his girlfriend cutting half of what was said. She thought it interesting and wanted to know how it is to learn how to tattoo.

  “Well, I don’t know whether everybody does so, but we used to tattoo pieces of pig: ears, head, feet, kind of stuff. When we thought we were more or less, we began to tattoo our friends”.

  “Hehe, these tattoos there will reach Bad Ink”, he joked. “And how did you end up with Ronny? It wasn’t tattooing pig’s ears” he asked while he prepared another round of grass.

  “I began tattooing in a studio near the apartment I share with Cesar. I worked there for one year. I studied during the day and tattooed at night. Isabela, the owner of the studio, seems to have had something with Ronny, so one day he appeared there and saw my work, he liked it and invited me to work in his team for this more delicate works at home. Actually, I needed to train with him before, what helped me learn the techniques I use today. I thank Ronny a lot for all he taught me, and also Isabela, because were not for her, I’d never find this nice job”.

  Tony didn’t translate this time, he handed a new cigarette to each one, instead.

  CHAPTER 3

  While she smoked her cigarette, the red-haired girl wondered if it would have been safe to accept something from that individual. The guy seemed so crazy that he could even have given strychnine to all of them. She imagined the domestic worker, who watched all of that, getting around from the scene when the four of them tumbled each to one side.

  She imagined Cesar with a snot thick like powder soap foam for a beard.

  He would be found like a Santa Claus.

  “The suicide Santa Claus!”, she exclaimed, laughing. She heard someone say something about her being already gone, but she could only think of Santa Claus and of how it was funny. The police coming the next day and finding four bearded dead people. She laughed more and more, without control.

  So, she felt somebody was observing behind her head and a strange fear raised on her. She found it better to sit down and sink on the big wicker piece backrest to prevent intruding and dangerous looks. She remained there introverted for some time, observing the other three who seemed to be too much interested in her, but it was like looking through a crystal tunnel to see each of them, their voices were muffled as if they spoke under a carpet. They seemed to say something, but the tattooist could not distinguish it, it was as though they were somewhere else, speaking from another dimension, the sound of their mouths trying to cross that tunnel of invisible walls, dying in the way, only soft remains of the sound of voices could get through her ears. She closed her eyes for some time, trying to recover the domain of her faculties, but when she closed her eyes, she did not see darkness behind her eyelids, but a golden shade. With her eyes wide open, she contemplated the sky:

  “My God, what a beautiful sky!”, She exclaimed before the colors of the sky, which from a great degrade ranged from bright blue sky up to royal blue.

  Then she saw herself going up through that endless blue, moving faster than the speed of light, at the speed of darkness, she achieved the sky without getting out of the place. Up from the firmament, all she contemplated were endless shades of blue. Feeling the wind in her red hair, she opened her arms and slid through the infinite heading to the stars.

  “How delicious!”

  She plunged into the deep space abandoning the Earth, feeling the cosmic wind cherishing her clothes, skin and hair; she headed to the heart of the Universe, along with the enormous clouds of interstellar matter. She found a golden nebula, the bright-yellow spindles of iridescent aspect, surrounded by golden powder, in which she slid as if she crossed a glitter mist, spinning through the center of that golden mist structure. So, she saw a white spot lost in that golden fog. Curious as she was, she headed to that spot that started increasing as she approached it and gained shape and depth. It was a white circle, apparently plain and thin like a mirror. She looked inside that white mirror and felt unreasonably like touching it. When she put her hand into the mirror, it disappeared within the white circle. Fearfully she removed her hand and when she saw she was intact, she realized it was a portal! How come she could know that? She had no idea, but she knew it.

  “It’s a portal!”, and by saying so, she threw herself through the orifice in space and time and reached a large mass of white mists that she crossed with a smile in her face. She slid through that white immensity for an indefinite time until, suddenly, she saw herself flying over the sea. She looked behind to know where she had come from and she sighted a fog track getting out of a giant cloud.

  The weather was nice; she felt the sun warming her after having penetrated the cold confines of the Universe. She kept on flying like the Phoenix of the X-Men, with low flights over the sea that waved underneath her.

  She overflew that ocean for some time, observing that endless sea that connected the sky at the spot where the sight got lost, until she saw something different — an island. As she approached it, she distinguished the details of that heavenly island. From the direction by which she approached, it was possible to see the beach of almost white sands, surrounded by rugged and portentous rocks at its ends. The water that bathed the bay was calm like a lake and its dark blue shade became beautiful cyan and turquoise shades, where the light crossed its transparent mass.

  A figure she had not realized at distance was waiting at that beach. As the distance diminished, it was possible to distinguish the figure of a woman, who looked at her in warm expectation.

  The red-haired girl went down by floating to the sand. She felt pleasure to realize the touch of the sand under her feet, and she thought of how long she had not been to the beach. Who would that woman be? She wondered. She was wearing only diaphanous cotton clothes, like those Greek statues; one white torch covered her black and curly hair, which laid to her shoulders in shiny curls. In her right hand, there as an arc that seemed to be made of silver, forged by divine hands. Artemis, the goddess of hunt. She doesn’t look like Gisele Bünchen, but there’s something about her face that hypnotizes, an over-human seriousness and an ancestral beauty that does not walk on Earth anymore. What does she want from me? I’m only a mortal woman, a tattooist and a student of architecture, what may the gods want from someone like me? She conjectured. Her penetrating look seemed to track her soul; she felt she was naked; all of her failures and mistakes were wide open before that divinity.

&nb
sp; “Artemis, please, be kind to me”, she supplicated faced with the severity of the goddess of hunt, who only observed her indifferently.

  Feeling in a way that she could not explain, that moment was the most important of her entire life, the young mortal fell on her knees on the warm sand, she wanted to see the white face of her interlocutor, but the shame of her smallness prevented her. How long did she spend at that beach? Ten minutes? One century? At that timeless world she felt the eternity dragging through her spirit, until the silence was interrupted, and when Artemis spoke, her voice was velvety, soft, clear and enjoyable as if she spoke directly in her consciousness:

  “Embrace the art of detachment. Break the ego”.

  And after having said that, she began to walk to the water of the sea, leaving the tattooist in a fetal position behind her, snuggled in the sand of the unknown beach. The words echoed in her mind, and she tried to extract the meaning of all that. Embrace the art of detachment. Break the ego.

  She had already heard something about this, in her readings of Chaos Magic in the www.bibleofchaos.com website, which she visited frequently to learn more about Chaoism. Breaking the ego was one of the most radical magic actions to which a magist could submit. She turned her eyes to the water, she needed to talk more with Artemis, apprehend the real meaning of her words, find what was the reason of that suggestion (or would that be an order?) for her. It was possible to see the Greek deity with her back turned to her, the transparent waters at the height of her thighs, the tissue of her clothes wet and glued to her muscular body.

  “Artemis!”, she called.

  The goddess kept on her journey heading to the depths, the water was at her waist, some more steps and she disappeared in the calm waters of the sea. The tattooist needed responses, she raised, the sand that adhered to her clothes was taken by the soft breeze. She ran after the goddess, who had the water already at her neck, penetrated into the warm water and headed to the sea, her speedy steps spreading water, making foam and darkening the peace of that surface.

  “Artemis!”, she claimed again, but she had already dived and disappeared at the bay.

  In despair, the student dived in the transparent waters and went through the bottom of the sea, by passing above benches of sand and heading to a luminosity at the bottom, she thought to be the silver arc of the goddess of hunt. Yet her lungs burnt as if two blazes were set up in her chest. She needed to breathe, she went up to the surface, she sighted two men with their arms stretched to remove her from the water, they were two pirates. Each of them caught one her arms and pulled her into a boat. They said something she did not understand, something in a foreign language. She spat water and tried to report what happened, but her tongue seemed to have rolled up. She stared at the pirates, full of earrings, piercings, with their dirty faces and shaggy beards, but there was something in those eyes that looked familiar; where did she know those men? She felt an enormous torpor to dominate her motor functions, her conscience was getting lost in views of that lost island in some distant planet.

  Embrace the art of detachment. Break the ego. It was what she remembered and said before losing her consciousness.

  * * *

  The red-haired girl started confusing her talk, and the three young friends kept on drinking and smoking the marijuana from Tony Perry’s stock.

  “Man, this stuff is very good, for sure, she seems to be traveling in another planet”, Cesar noted.

  Sitting in the cordyline chair, the tattooist, with glazed eyes, was smiling, sometimes shaking her head and other times opening her arms.

  “My dealer always brings me novelties”, Tony answered.

  They continued talking about life in the United States, the cultural differences between the two countries, and, finally, the girl who had taken the new drug stood up and ran to the swimming pool. She threw herself into the water and dived to the bottom.

  The other three went to the edge of the swimming pool to observe. She was motionless at the bottom of the pool. Tony Perry’s girlfriend screamed for them to throw themselves into the water before the bitch died.

  However, as if she had heard that, the red-haired girl moved at the bottom of the pool and went to the surface.

  She wasn’t a bitch, Cesar protested, in English, and kneeled down beside the pool and stretching his arms to Jean. The rocker kneeled down by her side. When she appeared, gasping, each one took one of her arms and pulled her off the pool.

  “She is a drenched crazy fuckin bitch”, Tony laughed, while he put her aside at the edge of the pool.

  She spat a little of water and tried to say something, but the words were rolled up in her tongue, and the sounds hardly articulated did not form words.

  “Holy shit, man, what kind of drug is it that she took?”, Cesar asked Tony Perry, irritated.

  “I don’t know, but it must make us fucking thirsty!”

  CHAPTER 4

  The tattooist opened her eyes, the sensation of a dry mouth was so strong that her tongue seemed to crack. Her head was heavy, she turned and stared at a track of puke that spread up to the pool, at two steps of distance. Her clothes were wet and the fact of having spent the night by the pool meant that probably she had thrown herself into the water at the night before, she thought. She did not remember anything. Some worker put the sunshade near her so that she had some shadow, but the heat went up through the stones. By the height of the sun, she guessed it was about midday.

  “Fuck...”, she exclaimed while she raised with the agility of a young woman aged ninety-nine years old.

  The worker that was always sneaking in the mansion appeared and asked her if she needed anything.

  “Water, please, water”.

  She sat down and waited for the worker to return with a tray with a glass and a bottle of Perrier. She took the bottle and drank it all in a single sip:

  “Do you have more of that?”

  “Yes, miss”.

  “So, bring me some more three, please”.

  When the men returned, she drank two bottles of water and kept on holding the third one that she was to drink in the way back home. One more day of classes was lost, she needed to settle that down, or she would take another course failure for absence. Yet she did not know what to do, there was always something unpredictable, and she worked at night.

  “Nobody woke up yet?”

  “Not yet, you’re the first one to wake up until now”.

  What a headache, she thought.

  “Tony always parties like this?”

  The butler looked at her from head to toe:

  “I mustn’t comment on what happens privately in this house. If you are looking for your things, I put them all in the next room. Along with the other guest, who’s sleeping in the coach”.

  She stood up and with her eyes closed, she crossed the distance that separated her from the room. There she woke Cesar up.

  “Let’s beat it, Cesar”.

  * * *

  The architecture student woke up with the loud music coming from the room, Cat Scratch Fever. She sat down in the bed with difficulty, her head was aching, and her mouth was so dry that her tongue seemed harsh and swollen in her mouth. She looked around in the semi-darkness of the bedroom looking for her mobile phone, the screen indicated 8h00 p.m., which meant she had slept the entire afternoon.

  The door opened and spread light in a spectrum over the room. A brown-haired woman with long and black straight hair, thin lips and almond eyes entered the room speaking cheerfully:

  “You need to tell me everything about this night out with Tony

  Perry! How is his house?”

  “Ah, Bia”, she moaned, “I took something strange there, I’m even fearful to get bad now”.

  “Cesar told me about your travel, that you twisted your arms as if you were flying, tell me”, she asked, and sat down in the bed.

  “Oh, I’ll tell you if you bring me water, bring the full bottle”.

  The brown-haired woman left and returned qu
ickly with the bottle of water.

  “Who’s there? I heard some voices”, the red-haired girl wanted to know, and took the bottle of water to drink a long sip.

  “Cesar invited the galley to tell them how it was at Tony Perry’s”.

  “So, you already know how it was...”

  “I don’t know anything, he’s making the biggest suspense and now he left, he went to bring the Wild catuaba”.

  “Dammit! After all he took yesterday”.

  “He said if Keith Richards is alive, it’s to give the example, our Jesus Christ”.

  “Keith Richards used a machine to change all the blood of his body, got rid of all the shit it had inside, is Cesar going to do the same? Shit, I feel like drinking orange juice, the ones of supermarket, pasteurized...”

  “Now, tell me how it was there. And something else: you have to bring me when it’s a stuff like that, asswholiness”.

  “Have you thought of that? Two women alone in the house of a figurehead, what do you think he would want? The guy kept on looking at me. If Cesar weren’t there, he would surely propose a ménage with his girlfriend, who looked like an extra of Baywatch”.

  “With Tony Perry I’d accept a ménage easily”, the brown-haired woman smiled wickedly.

  “Yes, but you know I don’t like this kind of stuff”.

  “Ah, come on, don’t tell me you never took part in a little party?”

  “Exactly, Bia, that’s why I can say I don’t like this!”

  “I think it very exciting, to be frank, I was invited for something like a swing, you know? But tell me, how was it? Is he cool? She asked anxiously, but her mobile rang, and she had to answer.