MB Valente
Her tattoo parlor is the only thing like it still open, at least on this side of the lake. A pink neon sign in the window shares its glow with the sidewalk; a sawed-out square in the door provides passage for a soundless traffic of cats. With knitted brows and a listening look, she maneuvers the needle with terrifying clumsiness right up to the point it touches skin. Then—tremors. Hot, stinging clarity. Aches buried deep surge to the body’s surface. Inside the parlor are: blue plastic swivel chairs, sun-bleached movie posters, plywood shelves bowing under the weight of real paper books, a tomato-red rug, no mirrors.
I went there many years ago now—the first time, I think, was the last day the buses ran. I remember because I hate endings and so walked the whole way in a thudding rain. First through downtown, past the empty-eyed office towers and mournful flapping of tents, then through the maze of short streets with long names in that old, mostly abandoned part of town where visitors once stopped dead in their tracks to gape, making those behind them stumble and curse. It’s hard to say because of the rain, but I think that was also the last time I saw someone cry. It was a woman waiting for the bus. She held her face in her hands like it might break, water striping her cheeks as she leaned against a bus stop pole that tomorrow would signify nothing. She stood there and cried, right on the sidewalk where anyone could see.
I didn’t go to get tattooed because the buses were about to stop running, or because the last train tracks had recently been ripped out, or because—like everyone else—I’d been told to stay inside if I could. I went because I am such a tiny weight against the skin of the world. I am not much more than a mote of dust, really. Who can even say for sure that I exist? But I had just asked my girlfriend to marry me.
It was a co-worker who told me about it, back when I used to leave my apartment to go to work, back when “co-worker” meant stale coffee breath, glances at the clock, a warm hand left for just a moment on your shoulder. “She does it for people who need it. Not the way they used to, not just anything for anyone willing to pay. You do have to pay. Not very much. But if you need your skin to say something, she’ll make sure it comes out smooth and clean.”
When I pushed open the door with a hand painted pink by the light of the sign, I was somehow surprised without knowing what to expect. I was surprised by the books, the snub noses of the cats, her schoolgirl braids and glasses. She was bent over the nape of a woman whose scattering of gray hairs were also glowing pink, and whose voice I could barely hear over the buzz of the needle:
“…I need more eyes just a couple more eyes if I only had more eyes to see…”
I sank onto a chair next to a teenage boy who was sitting with his head tipped back against the wall and jingling the zipper of his backpack between two slender fingers. The woman being tattooed had a bag as well: an engorged, leathery pouch she’d left under the bed. Everyone in the room was still in the habit of carrying things around.
I spent hours in that chair, watching the cats come and go. Once the woman had risen and left, the boy uncrossed his legs and pulled off his shirt to reveal an explosion of butterflies—bare lines ready to be filled. I didn’t mind the wait. I sat breathing in the room’s industrial tang and the exhaust from the last buses that seeped through the hole in the door. Once the boy had left, the tattoo artist turned her listening look on me.
I told her there were four words I wanted to keep. I wanted them safe and close, ideally under the dermis. What words were those? I explained the girlfriend, the question, the answer, the flood of joy and terror, the silence that settled in after. She nodded and started by marking
SURE over my heart.
Tremors. I’d been prepared for pain but not the probing. A charge beginning at the needle’s point that shot down my spine along a web of nerves that—I so often forget—lace all the way through me. A strange pricking in my eyes: I ran a finger under my lashes and was shocked to feel chill, wet. I asked how much longer and it came out a gasp. In her soft voice, she suggested I get only one word at a time.
The sun had gone down by the time she had blacked in the final serif, wound plastic around my chest, cautioned me against hot baths and acidic soaps. She told me to come back for my second word as soon as I was ready. My chest stung with freshly inked certainty and the hope that I would. But these are hard times, as they say, and no one knows what turn things will take.
These are hard times, yes, and those of us with the good fortune to have homes find it easiest to stay there. The world is changing. For example: it never seems to stop raining here, but I’ve heard in some places it never rains anymore. They say the only brick and mortar we’ll need is the roof over our heads. That apart from microbes, particulate matter and sights you’ll wish you hadn’t seen, there’s nothing to be gained by going out. I used to meet my girlfriend in low smoky rooms where we’d sip sour beer amid a merry jostling of elbows, in neighborhoods since gone dark and still. Now anything I drink is delivered to my door. My apartment has: white walls, off-white carpet, lightweight furniture that the dust just slides off. The rent is market-rate, and the neighbors are quiet. Our eyes widen with surprise when we pass each other in the halls—we wave and exchange surprised smiles. It’s easy to get work done here. The windows and walls are well insulated, practically soundproof. You can’t even hear the crying of birds.
I do sometimes look up from my screen and watch a silent cloud of crows float by. The world I grew up in had more animals than you could know or name. There are cats in the tattoo shop, rats in the street, crows that blacken the skies, roaches that blacken the floors. Otherwise, the only animals I see now are the ones that I eat. I can’t remember the last time I saw a live pig or chicken, though there must be billions of them somewhere. They live behind heavy doors that open and close so quickly that their lives must flash by like a moment of sun-blindness.
Every so often, memories—of the staggering, unremarkable explosion of life that used to be—leave me breathless, staring inward as if the shuddering mass were somewhere behind my eyelids, hidden.
When I think about things like this, I try to remember what a tiny weight I am on the world, no more than a mote of dust, et cetera. As if the way things are has anything to do with me. I see my girlfriend’s sun-white smile, hear her say you don’t unmake something pretty just because you looked away. But I can never quite shake the certainty—as sure as the letters inked over my heart—that noticing loss makes me part of it. With my fists in my eyes, I witnessed loss. But when in the history of us and the other animals was there ever a story about anything else?
As I walked across town for my second word, a month after the first had shed its scabs, I concentrated on accepting the empty halls of my building, the flat face of the lake undisturbed by boats’ prows or fish leaping for flies, the gray mask of sky always on the verge of tears, the empty sidewalks and empty storefronts and empty expressions of the rare passersby. For her sake, I tried to accept the tents’ flapping, the lonely poles that signified nothing, the streets gone dark and still, the fists in my eyes.
This time all the chairs in the parlor were full. We were quiet, we were patient, we had nowhere else to be. We waited in silence because we’d lost the habit of putting words to our frustration, apprehension, want. But we were comfortable there together, hoped to say something still. We had come to let our skin do the talking. I reached for the haughty tail of a cat as it stalked past; it sped up slightly, silk slipping through my hand like water. Then it was my turn and I bared my belly, full of acceptance that everything was just
FINE: I felt it buzz in my ribs. This time I strove to feel the pain fully. Relished the hot clear burn as it flowed off my side in waves.
When my girlfriend and I met, we were both children. That word isn’t used very much anymore, and only by people my age or older. Young people today get phones and jobs and online lives so early that whether they are “children” hardly matters. They slip effortlessly between panes and windows; they’re identifiable by their agility in navigating a complex data sequence. For me, childhood meant sunburns and sharp cries and wind stinging my cheeks, my girlfriend’s dusty palm reaching for mine in the schoolyard, her face beaming in a crowd, her hand raised in class, loose curls, clapping footsteps. She was always chiding me to come out of the shade, to join some game, to take another step forwards.
Back then, I don’t remember asking a single question. All doubts were declawed by the warmth on my skin and the easy flexing of my limbs. It’s different now. I can’t seem to take one step without some misgiving. Is it a good idea to leave the building? Will I catch something, or get caught in a storm? Is my apartment really big enough for two? Will the flooding this winter be as bad as last year, or worse? Will my job be needed five years from now? Will I be able to have children?
I returned for my third word only a week after the second. This time there was a line out the door. I was fidgeting, tugging at my hair, almost considered asking the quivering old man in front of me, how long have you been waiting? I’d known I wanted to keep my four words close, but now I itched to have them visible, seen. They were an answer after all. By the time the tattoo artist caught my eye and waved me forward, there were so many questions jostling, yelping, pleading for release that they forced their way past my lips and I started asking her things. How did people find her? Where did the cats come from? Had she read all the books on the shelves? Where had she found books printed on paper? Her voice didn’t have the fluid confidence of the hand guiding the needle—her replies were half-lost in its hum. But one word, at least, came out smooth and clear as she etched
WHAT into the flesh below my navel, the lower serifs sinking into the first curling, apologetic roots of pubic hair.
“What the people who come here … a voice, to know these things are seen … say things they can’t say … they find me because … alone is so hard … holding a book and touching its paper is like … skin, what it says … books because I like lies, and marks that last … cats because they are unnecessary … touching a cat is like … touching a book is like … lying … I like lies … I draw them out. We need them, so badly.”
I told her I thought she was right. Then I told her about when I asked my girlfriend to marry me. My girlfriend works very hard. She accepts life for what it is now and doesn’t mind spending all day at home. Back then I rarely saw her except through the bluish halo of a screen. She was comfortable there. She laughed easily and loud, and in my speakers her voice had a shimmer to it: cold but bright. So I was surprised, one night, to hear a tapping somewhere in the apartment. Oddly magnified, as if coming from the walls. I put my ear to the window, checked the radiator and oven. Finally I opened the front door and found her there shedding rain. She’d walked all the way, even though this was when the buses still ran. She left a trail of drops as she stepped over the threshold. My throat closed tight. I wanted to tell her how scared I was that it would never again be tonight, that never again would I check the oven before the door because I’d forgotten what knuckles on coated plywood sound like. I didn’t give her a tour, since all apartments are more or less the same. I just offered her a t-shirt to dry her hair—my only towel wasn’t clean—and asked her to marry me.
The tattoo artist lifted her listening eyes to mine. She had finished filling in the letters that hung glowing and hot across my abdomen. I was panting from the pain, but she told me I seemed ready for my last word. Was I ready for it to be for
EVER, with me every step I took? I told her yes and unlaced my right shoe.
I limped home in the dark, keeping to my left foot and pushing myself along with the toes of the right. For days I walked only when necessary. If the scabs split open, she told me, the tattoo wouldn’t heal right or last as long as it could. Things only last as long as they can. And I wanted it to be healed by the twenty-first, when the validation process for our marriage license would be complete and my girlfriend, who would then be my wife, moved in.
When I stood in front of her naked on our wedding night, she stared at the tattoos in silence. I explained how I’d made my skin speak the four words she gave me, so that it would keep saying them forever. It took her a second to recognize her certainty, her acceptance, her question, her answer. She leaned in and kissed my cheek.
“Whatever is all one word,” she said. Then she took off her clothes, and we went to bed.
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MB Valente is a writer and translator based in Marseille, France. Her writing has appeared in JAKE and AntipodeanSF, and her translations of graphic novels have been nominated for Eisner Awards and the Sophie Castille Award for Comics in Translation.