The Bar Code Tattoo (2 page)

“You’ve got to come with me right now!” Her friend Amber Thorn wrapped her fingers around Kayla’s wrist and began to pull her toward the girls’ room across the hall. “I have something amazing to show you.”

“Can it wait?” Kayla asked.

“Hey! What’s wrong?” Amber didn’t miss a thing. “You’ve been crying. Come on.” Kayla stared into Amber’s vivid blue black-rimmed eyes and let a resigned sigh escape. Nothing would stop her, so there was no sense in trying.

Inside the girls’ room, they sat on the metal bench against the tiled wall and Kayla told Amber her bad news. “It would have been nice if someone had let me know all these computer requirements would be important,” she complained. “I could have worked a little harder on my computer grades. I mean, you’d think one of my art teachers or a guidance counselor would have mentioned it.”

“This is
not
fair!” Amber cried, tossing back her metallic-silver curls indignantly. “You’re the most talented artist I know. You can actually draw. How many other kids can do that? With them it’s all computer imagery.”

Amber was the most loyal friend imaginable and Kayla loved her for it. She knew that even if she could draw only a stick figure, Amber would say that stick-figure drawing was the truest kind of art and that Kayla was an artistic genius who drew the best stick figures.

“Thanks, Amber,” she said. “But nobody cares anymore if you can draw or paint. And anyway, it doesn’t matter because without a scholarship I’m blown up. Dad hasn’t worked in over a month and I don’t know when he’s going back. My mother thinks he might already have been fired and doesn’t want to tell us. If that’s true, I don’t know what kind of money they can give me for college. Tuitions are astronomical. God, you have to be a zillionaire’s kid just to go to college.”

“Really,” Amber seconded. “My dad keeps yelling about scholarships but I’m never getting one. You have to be a brain or at least talented for that.”

“You’re talented,” Kayla insisted.

“At what?” Amber demanded to know.

“Well … you’re a great friend. And you’re pretty.”

“I don’t think they give scholarships for those things,” Amber reminded her. “The Beauty Scholarship has been discontinued for decades.”

“Then there’s two of us without a scholarship,” Kayla said.

“But speaking of the bar code,” Amber began.

“We weren’t,” Kayla pointed out.

“Oh, then say we were,” she replied. She lifted her stretchy pink sleeve, pushing it above her elbow to reveal a curved reddish-brown line snaking up her arm. It coiled off in winding branches festooned with exotic flower designs. Every few inches, the garlands split, curling off in ever more winding, complex designs, continuing up her forearm.

Elaborately beautiful as it was, Kayla could only stare at one particular part of Amber’s mehndi body art — the rigid, parallel black lines by her wrist, partly hidden within the design.

“When did you get it?” she asked, stunned.

“You mean the ’too?”

Kayla nodded.

“This morning, first thing. I went straight to the post office before the line got too long.”

“Did it hurt?” Kayla asked.

“The bar code? No, they do it with laser beams. It only hurts when they jab your finger to draw blood.” She examined her left thumb. “The needle didn’t even leave a mark, though.”

“Why do they need your blood?” Kayla couldn’t see what blood had to do with a tattoo.

Amber shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe they do it so they can list your blood type on your medical records. Afterward, I went right across the street to the body-art guy and had this done. Everyone’s doing it. Look how he worked the bar code into the
design. The scanner only picks up the code, so it doesn’t matter if something is drawn over it. The design lasts at least three months. Isn’t it final level?”

“It
is
,” Kayla had to agree. “The art is really final level. He’s a guy who’s found a way to make money by drawing.”

“You could do something like that,” Amber suggested. “Be a body artist.”

“I had something better in mind than living in the back of a crummy little store or in a tent going from fair to fair,” Kayla said.

The tone for next class sounded and took their attention from Amber’s mesmerizing arm. “Happy birthday, by the way,” Kayla said as they stood up from the bench. “I’ll give you your gift tonight at your party.”

“Tell me. What is it?”

Kayla grinned. “You’ll see. Don’t worry. You’ll love it.”

Amber studied her arm again as they left the bathroom. “You don’t really like the tattoo, do you?”

“I like the body art. But the bar code creeps me.”

“You’ve never liked new things. You’ve always been that way. You’ll get used to it, though. It’s really great. My junior license is in here. If I get stopped I just have to show the cop my wrist. He runs his little handheld scanner over it, and off I go.”

“But why does it have to be tattooed on?” Kayla insisted. “Why can’t you just carry a card?”

“Oh, come on,” Amber scoffed. “Cards always get lost or stolen. Terrorists and thieves are constantly stealing your identity or some stupid thing like that. Nobody likes identity chips, either. They’ve been pushing those practically since we were born but they have to be buried under your skin. Ew! This is so much better. There’s nothing hard stuck in your arm. It’s perfect. I can never lose it — and you know how bad I am about losing stuff.”

Kayla smiled. That was for sure.

“Do you have to change the tattoo when your final license comes through?” Kayla asked.

“No, of course not. The
file
changes, not the bar code.”

That meant that somewhere — who knew where? — there was a big data entry on everyone who had the bar code. A file that constantly changed as your life changed.

Kayla imagined banks and banks of dronelike workers at computers — tracking people, checking their records, and sending the information back to some central data bank, constantly updating and revising. Did they ever leave their computer screens? Could there ever be a moment when they were changing shifts, when some piece of information could slip by them? What if people
weren’t even involved? Maybe computers just zapped information back and forth across a vast network of circuitry, reporting your life as if it were just data.

“Everyone has a file,” Amber said. “There’s been a file on everyone for years.”

“But people haven’t always
worn
their files,” Kayla argued.

Amber shrugged, unconcerned. “What’s the difference? Walk me to class.”

“I’m going home,” Kayla told her.

“Why?”

“School feels like a cage today. I can’t sit still.”

“You’d better not get caught.”

“I never do.”

The moving walkway carried Kayla along the length of the huge shopping mall. She was there to get the holographic audio chip by Amber’s favorite group, Lunar Tick. Its release date coincided with Amber’s birthday, so Kayla had to wait until this afternoon to buy it.

The frigid piped-in air made her shiver. The rain had soaked her as she ran from the bulletbus station into the mall. She imagined ice crystallizing in her sopping-wet hair.

She began walking faster than the walkway. The urgent need to get home was still with her, but this had to be done first.

Was this urge an intuition or just anxiety about her awful day, a need to get home and hide away? Kayla couldn’t always tell. All her life she’d had little warnings, premonitions about what was to come. Sometimes the premonitions really came true. But other times, they didn’t. So, she’d learned not to pay too much attention to them.

As she went along, she gazed absently into the glass fronts of the stores she passed. In every one, she saw people presenting their wrists to cashiers in payment for their purchases. Occasionally, one or two paid with e-cards. The cashiers looked annoyed when this happened.

At the media store Harmonic Spheres — as in most other stores — they took special minors’ debit e-cards. The money she spent would be taken from an account her parents had set up for her. This was necessary since paper money and coins had been replaced with e-cards over the last five years.

Finally, she stepped off the walkway. The Lunar Tick display was right there in front of Harmonic Spheres. The postage-stamp-sized chip plugged into a holographic laser player that was as thin as an e-card.

Kayla stood at the front of the store to watch the twelve-inch musicians gyrate on top of the laser player as they performed their new release,
Home to Mars
. Amber would flip.

The chip came in a case with cover art that showed the band members hurtling through space, headed toward Mars. Kayla could easily figure out how it was accomplished. An image of Mars electronically clipped from a website, cleverly overlaid with digital images of the band members, and then placed on a digital space background. Swirl around some neon paint effects, select a font for the titles, and there you were — instant art. Simple to do, but the idea was clever. Maybe that’s what art was now, coming up with amusing visual concepts. If so, she could do that. Her mind was full of images.

At the counter, she presented her minors’ debit e-card. The young salesclerk glanced at the birth date. “You won’t be using this much longer,” he noted. He pushed up his sleeve and presented his bar code tattoo. “Pretty soon you’ll have one of these.”

“Yeah. Sure,” Kayla mumbled as he handed her the bagged chip.

Kayla got off the GlobalTrac bulletbus on a residential street of narrow, attached row houses. The downpour had subsided to a drizzle. On the sidewalk, puddles reflected the orange glow of sunset, spinning it around in their oily pools.

Heading toward her house, she saw that people had gathered in a group ahead of her, so she quickened her pace, going even faster as she realized
that they were standing in front of her yard. A siren blared and an ambulance sped past, its red light spinning.

It stopped abruptly at the bottom of her driveway. She ran toward it, splashing through puddles. The crowd by her house was thick, forming a wall between her and her front walk. Frantic, she pushed through the barrier of people.

She was nearly to the front when a strong hand gripped her shoulder. A face became distinct, emerging from the blur of faces. It was Gene. In his late twenties, Gene lived with two roommates in the house next door. “I heard your mother screaming and ran over,” he told her, his eyes wild with the urgency of his story. “But your front door was locked. Then the ambulance pulled up. I think it has to do with your father.”

Kayla broke free of Gene’s grasp and pushed her way to the front. Then she stopped short. Paramedics bent over her father, who lay on the ground on a stretcher, his eyes shut. A sheet lay on top of him.

Terror punched the breath from her chest. He was so white! She stood, staring, paralyzed by a terrible feeling of unreality.

His eyes darted right to left beneath closed lids. Realizing he wasn’t dead, she lunged to his side. “Dad,” she cried. A paramedic tucked the sheet tightly around him and she saw there was blood on it. “Dad! It’s me!”

His lids lifted a fraction, then relaxed. “We have to take him.” The paramedic spoke to her as he gripped one end of the stretcher and his partner took the other.

Her mother raced out of the house, her face wet with tears, her dark hair tangled.

“Ashley,” called their neighbor, Mrs. Fern. “What happened?”

Ashley Reed’s mouth opened to answer, but she spotted her daughter and seemed to forget what she was about to say. “Come on, Kayla,” she said, wrapping her arm around Kayla’s shoulder and guiding her toward the ambulance.

“What happened, Mom?” Kayla asked.

Her mother’s hands covered her face and she suddenly shook violently. “The bar code …” she gasped through her tears. “The bar code did this to him.”

Kayla stared down at the red splotches in the tub. No cleanser or formula she’d attempted in the last ten days had been able to erase them. And her mother was in no shape to do anything about it.

Kayla didn’t particularly want to clean her father’s blood from the tub, either. It felt disloyal, somehow, like wiping away the last bit of him. But how could she use the tub or shower again with such a hideous reminder in front of her? She couldn’t shower at Amber’s house forever. This was their only bathroom.

The stains had collected around the drain, probably pooling there when the bloodstained water had been drained out. The faucet dripped and her eyes locked onto the falling quicksilver drops. Counting the drips, one by one, one after the other, she drifted farther away …

The people continue to move toward the city. The person behind her puts his hand on her shoulder. He speaks to her and she hears his words in her head. His words are louder and clearer than the
rumble of conversation she hears from the other people. “Let’s go,” he says.

Mrs. Reed stepped into the bathroom and Kayla startled back to the present. Why was she having these waking visions? What did they mean?

Though normally she would have already left for work, Mrs. Reed still wore her bathrobe, and her eyes were smudged with the old eye makeup she hadn’t removed since yesterday. “Aren’t you late?” Kayla asked.

“They’ll get by without me for a little while longer,” she answered, staring in the mirror, seeming mesmerized by her own disheveled reflection. In Kayla’s opinion, the maternity unit where her mother worked as a nurse would probably function
better
without her — at least lately.

Mrs. Reed turned on the faucet and began washing her hands, but the washing motions soon climbed up to her wrist. Her movements quickened and her entire body grew tense and agitated. Grabbing a nailbrush from the sink, she scrubbed the bar code tattoo on her wrist, each stroke becoming increasingly violent.

Kayla pushed in front of her and shut the tap. “That’s
not
going to get the tattoo off,” she yelled. This crazy washing ritual had become a daily event. It unnerved Kayla. She needed her mother
to stay strong for her, not to turn into the twisted bundle of nerves she’d become.

“That bar code killed your father,” her mother said dully. “I want it off of me.”

Kayla wanted to shake her mother. How many times was she going to repeat that awful statement without explaining? “Why do you keep saying that?” she asked. “Tell me what you mean.”

“It’s better if you don’t know,” her mother answered.

“How can it be better?”

“It is. Believe me, it is.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Kayla shouted. The overload of frustration was suddenly unbearable. She couldn’t even bear to stand next to her mother. How had she become so pathetic?

Kayla banged the door back as she stormed into the hallway. At the stair landing, she stood, breathing heavily with anger and frustration.

It was just the two of them now. Her father had always been the parent she could talk to. But he’d abandoned them. For some inconceivable reason of his own, he’d just decided to go. For good. Now it felt as if her mother were abandoning her, too.

Air. She needed air. It was as if her father had breathed it all up with his last dying breaths.

She raced down the stairs and directly out the front door. She didn’t stop until she reached the titanium wall that separated all the front yards from the sidewalk. She leaned heavily on it as
she watched life go by — people walking, cars passing.

Next door, Gene sat on his steps in a T-shirt and cutoff shorts. He tossed a small ball to his brown-and-white terrier, then turned to Kayla and waved. As his dog raced after the ball, Gene got up and joined Kayla by the gate, staying on his side of the front yard.

“Everything okay?” he asked with his eye on the dog.

“I guess,” she said, dismayed that her voice shook. She didn’t really know him, not well enough to tell him her problems. He shared the house with two other guys about his age. They all worked down at the post office, which was now actually a Global-1 office.

The United States Postal Service had gone bankrupt about ten years ago. People agreed that its financial collapse was mostly due to the Internet. No one needed stamps anymore and people usually used a faster private carrier to get the items they ordered off the net. It was no help that terrorist groups occasionally sent poisons, disease bacteria, and explosives through the mail.

That was when Global-1, the international affiliation of corporations and individual billionaires, came to the rescue. They offered the government the funding to convert all postal buildings into government offices, with the provision that Global-1 would operate them. Many of the employees still
felt loyal to Global-1 for saving their jobs, though the younger employees, like Gene and his friends, complained that Global-1 worked them hard and kept cutting their vacation time, health benefits, and overtime pay.

“How’s your job?” she asked, mostly to fill the awkward silence that had arisen between them. Something about him always made her a little uncomfortable. It might have been the way he blinked his eyes just a little too often.

“I’m training for the ’too machine,” he replied. His tone implied that this wasn’t necessarily good news.

One of the most recent duties of postal workers was to administer the bar code tattoo. Certain employees received special training on how to work the small laser machine that imprinted the tattoo.

“How do you like it?”

He leaned closer to her and she detected cigarettes on his breath. The smell repelled her. Almost no one smoked anymore, not in America. Ever since tobacco had been banned, the big tobacco companies had moved to Asia, where people continued to die of lung cancer by the millions.

“I hate it,” he said. “That tattoo is evil.”

Her heart raced. Did he know something?

“Why?” she asked, trying not to sound as eager for the answer as she was. If he knew something,
she didn’t want to make him uneasy about revealing it.

His eyes darted up and down the block and he waved her closer. “A few years ago, right after I got out of the army, I used to do tattoos, the regular ones, before they were outlawed. This was back a few years, when bar codes were big in Europe but were just starting up here. Guys from Europe were always coming in wanting their bar codes removed; women, too. They said regular dermatologists wouldn’t do it because the laser lines went too deep into the layers of skin. My boss took them in back and I think he at least managed to mess the bar codes up. Naturally, I started to wonder why all these people wanted them off so bad.”

“Did they ever say why?”

“Most of the time, no. One French guy, though, told me his life had gone downhill fast once he got his.
Undesirable
was the word he used. He said, ‘It’s like I turned into an
undesirable
overnight.’” Gene shrugged, as if the subject had begun to hurt his head and he wanted to get rid of it. “I don’t know what’s up with the bar codes, but I don’t like being the guy who gives them out.”

“Do you know what information they have stored in them?” Kayla asked quickly. She could see he was tiring of the topic and she didn’t want to let him go before she learned something. “During your training, did they tell you?” Her heart picked up speed. They had to have told him
that
, at least.

“Not yet, but I know there’s a database that tells you what’s in that file. A friend of mine knows the password for the Global-1 info files. We’re going to look into it when we’ve got the chance. I could get fired for hacking in. I start giving out bar codes on Monday. I’ve got to take a look, just for my own head, you know?”

“Sure. Would you tell me what you find out?”

Maybe she’d gone too far. Gene looked hesitant now. “I don’t know about that,” he said.

“It might help me to figure out why my father did … you know … what he did.”

Gene stretched out his arm and displayed his bar code. “I hope there’s nothing too awful in there, because I got one. Had to or be fired.”

Before he could say more, his terrier, ball in jaws, pawed at his pant leg. “Cut it out!” he scolded, shaking the dog loose. The dog dropped the ball at his feet. Gene threw it back to the stoop and the dog raced after it. “You crazy dog,” he shouted, following the dog back to his stoop without even saying good-bye to Kayla.

He’s definitely strange
, she thought, watching him stand by his front door and pull out a pack of cigarettes labeled in Chinese writing. But, strange or not, maybe he would learn something that could help her to figure out what was really contained in those formidable black strokes of the bar code.

Her mother appeared at the front door. She’d dressed in her white nurse’s jumpsuit. Her chin-
length hair was still unbrushed and knotty, and her eye makeup was still smudged. But at least she’d gotten out of her robe. “I’d like to talk to you,” she said.

Kayla joined her at the door and they walked in together. They sat side by side on the living room couch. “I know I haven’t really been there for you since your dad died,” her mother admitted.

Kayla’s hopes rose. Had her mother managed to grab hold of her emotions? Could she finally offer her daughter some support?

“You must understand,” her mother went on, “this is complicated. I was the one who convinced Dad to get the bar code, and I was so wrong.” She hung her head as tears welled. “I can’t cope with what I did to him, to us. I killed him. I let it kill —”

“Please — tell me,” Kayla pleaded. “Why do you think it killed him? How did it?”

Looking up again, her mother wiped her glistening eyes. “Just before he … died … I woke up in the middle of the night and he wasn’t in bed. I found him at the computer. He didn’t realize I was there at first but I watched him race through hundreds of bar codes and the files that went with them. He didn’t have clearance for those files. He researched facts on places and things, not people. But somehow he’d gotten in.”

“What was he looking for?” Kayla felt she had to find out.

“I don’t know, but he stopped at one particular code profile and began to read it. He only got to
read it for a few seconds before the screen went black. Some security blocker must have kicked in.”

“Did you ask what he was doing?”

Mrs. Reed nodded. “But he wouldn’t talk about it. We had a big fight over it. We were still angry and not speaking the day he cut … I need to lie down.” She stood up unsteadily. “If the hospital calls, tell them I’ll be there soon.”

Kayla trailed her to the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t walk away,” she begged as her mother went up. “Tell me! Why do you think the bar code killed him?”

No reply came, just the sound of the bedroom door closing.

Kayla stopped at her locker for books and found a piece of peppermint gum taped to it. She knew who had put it there and it amazed her that a person she hardly knew at all had seen her pain. She glanced around to see if Mfumbe was near, but he wasn’t.

Amber appeared at her side and smiled the too-bright smile she always wore lately. “How are you doing today?” she asked.

“Not bad.”

“Not bad is good, right?” As they walked down the hall, Amber pulled some papers from her oversized silver bag. “These are for you,” she said, handing them to Kayla.

Kayla peered down at them, not understanding. She shot Amber a quizzical look.

“They’re applications for your bar code,” Amber said. “I knew you wouldn’t get them on your own. Your birthday is in three weeks. You have to file now. You can thank me now or thank me later. Either way, you’ll thank me.”

Kayla thrust the papers back at Amber. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not getting it.”

“Not getting it?” Amber shouted incredulously. “You can be as paranoid and suspicious as you like about it, but you have to realize that there’s nothing you can do without a ’too! Nothing! For one thing, they don’t give out any other kind of license anymore. No ’too, no license.”

“That can’t be true. They
have
to give another form of license other than one that’s in a bar code,” Kayla argued. “There’s no law that says you have to get a bar code. Are you telling me that every single person who drives a car has a bar code tattoo?”