All This Life (25 page)

“Do you need anything? Have any questions about the city?”

“No.”

“Have you had any trouble commuting to UCSF?”

“I haven't had to go yet. My colleague has been delayed. But his arrival is imminent. Then we get to work.”

Okay, now that makes sense. Much more sense than why Kathleen let this unnecessary tension build up. His schedule has been delayed some, which is out of his control, something innocuous. She immediately feels better. Between this revelation and the idea for her portrait tattoo, Kat hopes she might be snapping out of this funk.

“I was going to watch a movie soon,” Kathleen says. “Would you like to join me? You can save me from eating all the ice cream myself.”

“I'm under a deadline,” he says.

“You are?”

“Our research is reaching its climax. We are about to change the world.”

Kathleen knows she's supposed to ask
how
, tell me all about it, but she's getting tired of fishing. If he wants to hole away in his hamster's cage the whole time, so be it. She'll air it out before her roommate returns.

“Let me know if you need anything,” she says.

Wes closes the door and not three seconds later the muttering starts again.

•
  
•
  
•

KATHLEEN GETS DRESSED
, grabs the picture of Rodney for the portrait, and heads out. The neighborhood feels particularly congested. It's a weekday, and people hurry home. She heads down 18th Street to Valencia, turns toward the shop. Valencia has a bike lane flanking the traffic on both sides, which was supposed to ease the friction between the warring factions, but it's only made things worse: Bikers yell at cars, sometimes kicking bumpers, spitting on windows, while the autos trundle down the road, drivers too dumb or distracted to check blind spots before making turns, opening doors, almost breaking the bikers' necks with every action. Kathleen has seen fistfights about the rules of the road. All of it makes her happy to be a serial pedestrian. She's never had a car in San Francisco, and she's too clumsy to hop on a bicycle.

She walks down Valencia, sees phalanxes of diners starting to line up outside the posh places, sighing and checking the time on their phones every ten seconds; she sees a mother wearing a Baby Björn, her hands massaging the baby's head; she sees hipsters smoking outside the bars, which makes her miss being young—back then she could have a drink and it was fun, a cocktail or two, nothing that would ruin her life; she sees a cop tucking a ticket under a parked car's windshield wiper and sees a woman with tarot cards laid out on the sidewalk, sitting Indian-style, her iPhone playing a gypsy jig, a note on a typed piece of paper with an outstanding font saying K
NOW
Y
OUR
F
UTURE
.

She sees all this and wonders what happened to the homeless in the Mission, the caravan of stolen shopping carts, the currency of empty bottles and cans, the bodies huddled in doorways after the close of business, the handwritten signs—not typed with pompous fonts—that asked for help, any help, any human grace? They used to be everywhere, and she assumes the police were ordered to kick them out. Obviously, San Francisco is trying to clean up
the Mission; they're doing it to the whole city and she's heard the project being called “a reboot,” which makes it so much worse, using the parlance of the industry that's taking over.

She sees the construction cranes downtown, looming across the skyline like huge prehistoric birds. The development is driving out all the character, and sometimes Kathleen imagines these cranes scooping up artists and plopping down tech employees in their place. She knows it's only a matter of time until she's ladled up, too, replaced by a twentysomething making six figures for speaking computer code, the only foreign language that matters. What happens, she wonders, to a city—especially one like San Francisco, a place that has always been composed of immigrants and outcasts and transients and artists, a whole surrogate family of people who weren't wanted other places—what happens when it becomes as homogenous as a suburb?

She doesn't want to leave this town, even though she doesn't like what's happening. But she likes even less the prospect of being forced out. This is her home, and she'll do all she can to stay.

She enters the tattoo shop, and Deb is there listening to an old Cramps record. She looks up at Kathleen, but doesn't turn off the tattoo gun, only holds it a couple inches off her client's skin.

“Permission to come aboard the bridge, captain,” Kathleen calls.

“Permission granted,” says Deb.

Her client is a young white man, one of the enemy. Kathleen's eyes dart to his laptop bag, his hilarious T-shirt that says
CTRL+ALT+DELETE
. He's even wearing those douchey shoes that have individual toes, making his feet look webbed. His oversized, probably cosmetic black eyeglasses are the perfect way to tie all his trying-too-hard together.

“We'll be done in fifteen minutes,” Deb says to her.

“Pretty sweet, huh?” the man says to Kathleen, nodding at the tattoo on his bicep. “It's an Irish cross.”

“Celtic,” Deb says.

“Same thing,” he says, wiggling his webbed toes.

“It's not,” she says. “This is on your body. You're going to wear it forever; you should know what it means.”

“It means that it looks cool,” he says and alerts Deb that their conversation is over by picking up and fiddling with his phone.

Deb purses her lips and nods at Kathleen. “And how are you?”

“I have incredible news.”

“What?”

“This.”

Kathleen shows the picture of Rodney. “This is how I'm going to contact him.”

“I could get the phone.”

“I'll mail him a letter once you tattoo this picture on me.”

Deb takes her foot of the tattoo gun's pedal, shop going silent, the guy still mesmerized by his phone. “The pony express went belly up. It's a post-mail world.”

“I'll mail him a letter
and
a picture of my tattoo.” Kathleen hands Deb the portrait. “Would you put this on my back?”

Deb takes and studies it. “This will make a good tattoo.”

“Let's do it once you're done with him.”

“Let's wait. I never tattoo someone who's emotional. That's one of my rules. Like I don't tattoo drunk guys.”

“Why not?”

“Drunk guys bleed too much.”

“I mean why not me?” Kathleen asks.

“Don't push me, or when I finally do it I'll add a Chinese character that means ‘farter.'”

The man looks up from his phone. “Do you really think they have a character for that?”

“People fart all over,” Deb says. “I'm sure there's a Celtic word for it too. I can add it on your arm if you want.”

The guy smirks sarcastically, goes back to his phone. Deb hands the picture back to Kathleen and fires up the gun again.

“I need your help,” says Kathleen, the photo in her hand uselessly. “I want him to know how much I've been thinking of him.”

“What's wrong with email?” Deb says.

“Why can't you be more supportive?”

Deb starts laughing, looks at her client. “She says to her AA sponsor.”

The guy flashes that techie smirk again.

“Right now you're just my friend,” Kathleen says. “Not my sponsor.”

“I'm always your sponsor, sugar. If I wasn't, I'd be a shitty one.”

Kathleen has a plan to instigate contact with her son again, and it's a good one. She'd banked on Deb's eyes and ink and needles, banked on a portrait to show her son, his likeness forever on her flesh.
Look
, she'll be able to tell him through the tattoo,
I've always loved you and I'm sorry and let's start over.

That's impossible, she knows. There's no such thing as starting over. It's a ruse. Memories are time machines, zooming us through our experiences, and because of this, people are never clean of their yesterdays. There is no transcendence. One minute, we're forty, then six, and ten, and twenty, and twelve. We remember our shames and humiliations. We remember trauma. Rodney might not recall one thing about Kathleen except that she left. All the good she did throughout the first twelve years of his life might be erased, and if not outright expunged, at least painted over. Covered up. It's the opposite of Deb tattooing cancer survivors, making the damaged skin into art. Kathleen is a breathing scar, her whole life hardened over by that one mistake.

All of this whizzes through her head as she stands there holding the portrait.

Deb dips the gun into a glass of water, flushing out her needles, then plunges it into an ink cap full of black, goes back to work. “If you mail him a picture of the tattoo, so what?”

“So what?” Kathleen asks.

“Why would that make him feel better?”

“Because it shows I'm thinking about him.”

“The tattoo is for you,” Deb says. “Calling and starting the healing process—that would be for him.”

“I'm finally ready to try and you're not helping me.”

“You're making this harder than it has to be,” says Deb. “Call him.”

“I can't.”

“That brass band that jumped off the Golden Gate?” says Deb. “The one who survived is going to a mental hospital.”

“She needs help.”

“That's my point,” Deb says. “The doctors can help her. The program has helped you; I've tried to help you. But you have to face this fear. You have to face him. I'll be right with you. We're all survivors, but even we need help, Kat.” Deb takes her foot off the pedal and her gun goes silent. “How about a compromise? You call him now and I'll tattoo you after I'm done with this Irish cross.”

“Celtic,” the guy says.

“Now you're learning,” she says to him.

“That's bribery,” Kathleen says.

“Only if it works.”

“Fine,” she says to Deb, who gets the phone and asks, “What are you going to say?”

Kathleen dials her old number. If it's possible to get an adrenaline rush from a phone call, that's what's happening. Heart racing and sweating and all her saliva vanishes. And the crazy thing is how good this all feels. How freeing.

“Hello?” a man's voice says.

“Is Rodney there?”

One thing about mythological punishments: What if you simply stopped rolling that boulder up the hill? Refused to prop it up anymore? Moved out of the way and let it roll down to who knows where, not caring about the consequences?

“Who is this?” says the man's voice.

“Is this Larry?”

“Nah, this is Felix.”

“Hi, Felix. This is Kathleen. I'd like to talk to my son, please.”

There is a wonderful charge in her, an anticipation, a kinetic thump. Kathleen is about to hear her son's voice. She's about to communicate with him. They're about to talk. To begin, not from scratch but from a place that looks forward, not back. This is the first step toward healing, reconciliation.

“Cunt!” Felix screams.

The miserable syllable shoves through the phone and into her ear, worming around her body and kicking her in the heart.

Then the line goes dead.

That's all she gets.

And in a way, that's what she deserves.

She's earned someone calling “Cunt!”

It's stitched onto her.

Burned on the skin, its own scar.

Kathleen doesn't know what to do after hearing that fetid word. She's standing in the tattoo shop with the phone to her ear and Deb is looking at her and the guy with webbed feet is looking at her and she's been called that name, the noise of it still clanging, and she hands the phone back to Deb.

“What happened?”

Kathleen utters that wicked word and her sponsor sighs. Even the guy with webbed feet averts his eyes. The whole moment feels like a caricature Kat could draw. She could exaggerate the idiosyncrasies in such a perfect way: It would be easy to turn the guy's shoes into huge amphibian feet, the size of surfboards, and it would be easy to show Deb with tattoo guns for hands; it would be so easy to show Kathleen, stupid Kathleen, with a phone to her ear, her high hopes being speared by Felix's dismal syllable. The phone would have fangs. It would bite her ear, chew on her, chew her right up.

“Well, it's the start,” says Deb. “Congrats on making that first call.”

“I have to go.”

“No. You have to stay.”

Kathleen almost sprints to the front door: “I can't.”

“Don't isolate,” Deb says. “Be around people who care about you when—”