Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (18 page)

For one last moment I stood, gazing at The Ledges. Then I turned and walked back to where my dory waited, clambered in and rowed myself home.

—

The tattoo took me till dawn to finish. Once inside the Lonely House I opened the bottle of Toquai, poured myself a glassful and drank it. Then I went to retrieve the card, stuck inside that decrepit New Directions paperback in my bag
.
The book was the only thing of Julia’s I had retained. She’d made a point of going through every single box of clothes and books I’d packed, through every sagging carton of dishware, and removed anything that had been hers. Anything we’d purchased together, anything that it had been her idea to buy. So that by the time she was done, it wasn’t just like I’d never happened. It was like she’d never happened, either.

Except for this book. I found it a few months after the breakup. It had gotten stuck under the driver’s seat of my old Volvo, wedged between a broken spring and the floor. In all the years I’d been with Julia, I’d never read it, or seen her reading it. But just a few weeks earlier I started flipping through the pages, casually, more to get the poet’s smell than to actually understand him. Now I opened the book to the page where the card was stuck, and noticed several lines that had been highlighted with yellow marker.

—

The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style—of blood, in other words; of creation made act.

—

A struggle not a concept. I smiled, and dropped the book on the couch; took the card and went into my studio to work.

I spent over an hour just getting a feel for the design, trying to copy it freehand onto paper before giving up. I’m a good draftsman, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the simpler a good drawing appears to be, the more difficult it is to copy. Try copying one of Picasso’s late minotaur drawings and you’ll see what I mean. Whoever did the design on this particular card probably wasn’t Picasso; but the image still defeated me. There was a mystery to it, a sense of waiting that was charged with power; like that D. H. Lawrence poem,
those who have not exploded
. I finally traced it on my light board, the final stencil image exactly the same size as that on the card, outlined in black hectograph ink.

Then I prepped myself. My studio is as sterile as I can make it. There’s no carpet on the bare wood floor, which I scrub every day. Beneath a blue plastic cover, the worktable is white Formica, so blood or dirt shows, or spilled ink. I don’t bother with an apron or gloves when I’m doing myself, and between the lack of protection and a couple of glasses of Toquai, I always get a slightly illicit-feeling buzz. I feel like I’m pulling something over, even though there’s never anyone around but myself. I swabbed the top of my thigh with 70 percent alcohol, used a new, disposable razor to shave it, swabbed it again, dried it with sterile gauze soaked in more alcohol. Then I coated the shaved skin with betadine, tossing the used gauze into a small metal biohazard bin.

I’d already set up my inks in their plastic presterilized caps—black; yellow and red to get the effect of gold leaf; white. I got ready to apply the stencil, rubbing a little bit of stick deodorant onto my
skin, so that the ink would adhere, then pressing the square of sten
ciled paper and rubbing it for thirty seconds. Then I pulled the paper off. Sometimes I have to do this more than once, if the customer’s skin is rough, or the ink too thick. This time, though, the design transferred perfectly.

I sat for a while, admiring it. From my angle, the figure was upside down—I’d thought about that, whether I should just say the hell with it and do it so I’d be the only one who’d ever see it properly. But I decided to go with convention, so that now I’d be drawing a reverse of what everyone else would see. I’m a bleeder, so I had a good supply of vaseline and paper towels at hand. I went into the living room and knocked back one last glass of Toquai, returned to the studio, switched on my machine, and went at it.

I did the outlines first. There’s always this
frisson
when the needles first touch my own skin, sterilized metal skimming along the surface so that it burns, as though I’m running a flame-tipped spike along my flesh. Before Julia did my first tattoo I’d always imagined the process would be like pricking myself with a needle, a series of fine precise jabs of pain.

It’s not like that at all. It’s more like carving your own skin with the slanted nib of a razor-sharp calligraphy pen, or writing on flesh with a soldering iron. The pain is excruciating, but contained: I look down at the vibrating tattoo gun, its tip like a wasp’s sting, and see beneath the needle a flowing line of black ink, red weeping from the black: my own blood. My left hand holds the skin taut—this also hurts like hell—while my right fingers manipulate the machine and the wad of paper towel that soaks up blood as the needle moves on, its tip moving in tiny circles, being careful not to press too hard, so it won’t scab. I trace a man’s shoulders, a crescent that becomes a neck, a skull’s crown above a single thick line that signals a cascade of hair. Then down and up to outline his knees, his arms.

When the pain becomes too much I stop for a bit, breathing deeply. Then I smooth vaseline over the image on my thigh, take a bit of gauze and clean the needle tip of blood and ink. After twenty minutes or so of being scarred with a vibrating needle your endorphins kick in, but they don’t block the pain; they merely blur it, so that it diffuses over your entire body, not just a few square inches of stretched skin burning like a fresh brand. It’s perversely like the aftermath of a great massage, or great sex: exhausting, unbearable, exhilarating. I finished the outline and took a break, turning on the radio to see if WERU had gone off the air. Two or three nights a week they sign off at midnight, but Saturdays sometimes the DJ stays on.

This was my lucky night. I turned the music up and settled back into my chair. My entire leg felt sore, but the outline looked good. I changed the needle tip and began to do the shading, the process that would give the figure depth and color. The tip of the needle tube is flush against my skin, but only for an instant; then I flick it up and away. This way the ink is dispersed beneath the epidermis, deepest black feathering up to create grey.

It takes days and days of practice before you get this technique down, but I had it. When I was done edging the figure’s hair, I cleaned and changed the needle tube again, mixing gamboge yellow and crimson until I got just the hue I wanted, a brilliant tigerlily orange. I sprayed the tattoo with disinfectant, gave it another swipe of vaseline, then went to work with the orange. I did some shading around the man’s figure, until it looked even better than the original, with a numinous glow that made it stand out from the other designs around it.

It was almost two more hours before I was done. At the very last I put in a bit of white, a few lines here and there, ambient color, really, the eye didn’t register it as white but it charged the image with a strange, almost eerie brilliance. White ink pigment is paler than human skin; it changes color the way skin does, darkening when exposed to the sun until it’s almost indistinguishable from ordinary flesh tone.

But I don’t spend a lot of time outside: inks don’t fade much on my skin. When I finally put down the machine, my hand and entire right arm ached. Outside, rain spattered the pond. The wind rose, and moments later I heard droplets lashing the side of the house. A barred owl called its four querulous notes. From my radio came a low steady hum of static. I hadn’t even noticed when the station went off the air. Soon it would be five
a.m.
, and the morning DJ would be in. I cleaned my machine and work area quickly, automatically; washed my tattoo, dried it and covered the raw skin with antibacterial ointment, and finally taped on a Telfa bandage. In a few hours, after I woke, I’d shower and let the warm water soften the bandage until it slid off. Now I went into the kitchen, stumbling with fatigue and the post-orgasmic glow I get from working on myself.

I’d remembered to leave out a small porterhouse steak to defrost. I heated a cast-iron skillet, tossed the steak in and seared it, two minutes on one side, one on the other. I ate it standing over the sink, tearing off meat still cool and bloody in the center. There’s some good things about living alone. I knocked back a quart of
skim milk, took a couple of ibuprofen and a high-iron formula vitamin,
went to bed, and passed out.

—

The central conceit of
Five Windows One Door
is that the same story is told and retold, with constantly shifting points of view, abrupt changes of narrator, of setting, of a character’s moral or political beliefs. Even the city itself changed, so that the bistro frequented by Nola’s elderly lover Hans Liep was sometimes at the end of Tufnell Street; other times it could be glimpsed in a cul-de-sac near the Boulevard El-Baz. There were madcap scenes in which Shakespearean plot reversals were enacted—the violent reconciliation between Mabel and her father; Nola Flynn’s decision to enter a Carmelite convent after her discovery of the blind child Kelson; Roberto Metropole’s return from the dead; even the reformation of the incomparably wicked Elwell, who, according to the notes discovered after Fox’s death, was to have married Mabel and fathered her six children, the eldest of whom grew up to become Amantine, Popess of Tuckahoe and the first saint to be canonized in the Reformed Catholic Church.

Volume five,
Ardor ex Cathedra
, was unfinished at the time of Fox’s death. He had completed the first two chapters, and in his study was a box full of hand-drawn genealogical charts and plot outlines, character notes, a map of the city, even names for new characters—Billy Tyler, Gordon MacKenzie-Hart, Paulette Houdek, Ruben Kirstein. Fox’s editor at Griffin/Sage compiled these remnants into an unsatisfactory final volume that was published a year after Fox died. I bought a copy, but it was a sad relic, like the blackened lump of glass that is all that remains of a stained-glass window destroyed by fire. Still, I kept it with its brethren on a bookshelf in my bedroom, the five volumes in their uniform dust jackets, scarlet letters on a brilliant indigo field with the author’s name beneath in gold.

—

I dreamed I heard the fox barking, or maybe it really was the fox barking. I turned, groaning as my leg brushed against the bedsheet. The bandage had fallen off while I slept. I groped under the covers till I found it, a clump of sticky brown gauze and I tossed it on the floor, sat up and rubbed my eyes. It was morning. My bedroom window was blistered with silvery light, the glass flecked with rain. I looked down at my thigh. The tattoo had scabbed over, but not much. The figure of the kneeling man was stark and precise, its
orange nimbus glazed with clear fluid. I got up and limped into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub and laved my thigh tenderly, warm water washing away dead skin and dried blood. I patted it dry and applied another thin layer of antibiotic ointment, and headed for the kitchen to make coffee.

The noise came again—not barking at all but something tapping against a window. It took me a minute to figure out what it was: the basket the Lonely House used as a message system. Blakie had devised it forty years ago, a pulley and old-fashioned clothesline, strung between the Lonely House and a birch tree on the far shore. A small wicker basket hung from the line, with a plastic zip lock bag inside it, and inside the bag magic markers and a notepad. Someone could write a note on shore then send the basket over; it would bump against the front window, alerting us to a visitor. A bit more elegant than standing onshore and shouting, it also gave the Lonely House’s inhabitants the chance to hide, if we weren’t expecting anyone.

I couldn’t remember the last time someone had used it. I had a cell phone now, and customers made appointments months in advance. I’d almost forgotten the clothesline was there.

I went to the front window and peered out. Fog had settled in during the night; on the northern side of the island the foghorn moaned. No one would be leaving Aranbega today. I could barely discern the other shore, thick grey mist striated with white birch trees. I couldn’t see anyone.

But sure enough, there was the basket dangling between the window and the front door. I opened the window and stuck my hand out, brushing aside a mass of cobwebs strung with dead crane flies and mosquitoes to get at the basket. Inside was the zip lock bag and the notebook, the latter pleached with dark green threads. I grimaced as
I pulled it out, the pages damp and molded into a block of viridian pulp.

But stuck to the back of the notebook was a folded square of yellow legal paper. I unfolded it and read the message written in strong square letters.

—

Ivy—

Christopher Sa’adah here, I’m staying in Aran. Harbor, stopped by to say hi. You there? Call me @ 462-1117. Hope you’re okay.

—

C

—

I stared at the note for a full minute. Thinking, this is a mistake, this is a sick joke, someone trying to torment me about Julia. Christopher was dead. Nausea washed over me, that icy chill like a shroud, my skin clammy and the breath freezing in my lungs.

“Ivy? You there?”

I rested my hand atop the open window and inhaled deeply. “Christopher.” I shook my head, gave a gasping laugh. “Jesus—”

I leaned out the open window. “Christopher?” I shouted. “Is that really you?”

“It’s really me,” a booming voice yelled back.

“Hold on! I’ll get the dory and come right over—”

I ran into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of loose cutoffs and faded T-shirt, then hurried outside. The dory was where I’d left it, pulled up on shore just beyond the fringe of cattails and bayberries. I pushed it into the lake, a skein of dragonflies rising from the dark water to disappear in the mist. There was water in the boat, dead leaves that nudged at my bare feet; I grabbed the oars and rowed, twenty strong strokes that brought me to the other shore.