My eyes are closed and moving very quickly as if in REM sleep.
What has REM sleep to do with it?
I can’t open them.
Open your eyes you idiot! They’ll burst through that door any second and slaughter you right in the middle of your sweet REM!
Stay in the still. It’ll be clear soon.
◊
Light is in the room or more precisely light is coming through a slightly open window and a moving, pale curtain I think. Moon reflection.
I’m alone which is strange because I know I went to bed not alone.
Get the hell up before it’s too late!
I can’t move my arms. I don’t want to move my arms.
My skin feels like thousands of tiny moths are giggling and fluttering around just under the surface.
The image of a standing iron cask with hundreds of glistening nails piercing my skin as its doors close on me. I want to move but I can’t. If I do I’ll tear my flesh to shreds. The blood soaks into the bed around me.
I can’t remember anything.
It’s all inside.
It’s all blank, a white blank; an abyss. I’ll fall forward into it and go mad.
Wait for the moment to catch up.
◊
My eyes open but I can’t see much—a dim room; the window; the shadow of tree branches…or something…moving outside.
You can see now; get the fuck up! Don’t you understand? You broke the law, probably more than one and Society City will hunt you down. You won’t die, you’ll just disappear.
Stay in the stillness. Listen. It’ll all come clear.
◊
I hear nothing but warring voices exploding inside my head. Is this what madness feels like?
I listen around them and hear the slight breeze coming through the small opening in the window, and a door open and close.
Now it will be over. They’ve come. I feel the torturer’s nails piercing deeper into my skin and my head burning with the sound of war. My eyes are open, but all I see is red.
◊
It’s dark again. If I could just remember my name I could start from there and maybe work up to now—the moment of my death.
Listen.
◊
“Tryna?”
◊
My eyes’ lids snap open; a lamp has been turned on but the room is still too dim.
Now I am no longer alone.
◊
“Tryna, you can speak now.”
“I can’t.”
“You just did.”
I hear a voice croaking in my head. Was that supposed to be me?
◊
Nelson towers over the bed looking down at her.
I stare up at a large, brown-skinned man whose bulk is mostly hidden by a dark velvet cloak. Was his weapon concealed beneath it? Could I finally raise my arm and protect my life?
Listen.
“You’re close to the end now; the beginning really.”
What kind of riddle is that? I race through the shadow of memory looking for a clue. Nothing.
◊
“I’ve been watching just to be certain all is going well…on the western front, so to speak.” Nelson gives the spurt of a giggle then cuts it off as he sees she doesn’t understand him.
“Listen, I had no idea exactly how this would work. I mean I read all I could and consulted…well consulted where I could, and we knew there were risks. I got worried working with such strong…. So I came over as soon as it was safe. I wanted to be sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”
“Why?”
“The tattoo worked, but there’s a battle going on inside your head. You need more time, Tryna…”
“Tryna?”
“…to heal; and you will. But there’s so little time!”
“Heal? You wounded me?”
“Not exactly. You don’t remember anything?”
“Danger…”
“…Will Robinson!”
“Are you Will Robinson?”
“No! That’s an old children’s story. I’m Nelson, your friend. Your tattooist.”
“Tattoo is illegal.”
“So you do remember that.”
“You’re a criminal.”
“So are you, my dear. We’re outlaws in Society City, which is why you’ve got to get a grip, sisterlove.”
“I can’t move my arms.”
“Yes you can.”
◊
I raise my left hand and I can almost see the moths fluttering under the skin. I want to vomit.
Listen.
Nelson watches me too closely as if he’s a doctor…or a killer. I look around the room and see the remains of a loaf of bread, with an open jar of jam, a half-carved apple, the paring knife abandoned beside it.
Why didn’t he kill me as I slept paralyzed?
◊
“You don’t have much in the way of nourishment here and you know I have to keep my weight up,” he said with a laugh that implies I should know what he means.
“Are you going to kill me?”
Now Nelson’s laugh burst from him like a cannonball made of porridge.
Listen.
“We don’t have a lot of time because there are, of course, those who may kill you if they can find you. But I’m not one of them, Tryna.”
◊
His words sound solid and real when I listen inside of them. His pulse rate is steady, his breathing natural, and more importantly, the heat of his body says he’s not lying.
◊
“Right now you need to remember only a few things to get to safety. The rest will return later.”
Listen.
What the hell does this fat boy’s body temp have to do with lying or not lying? I…
Listen!
I try again to look at my hand. This time it seems still. Beautiful really, with a depth and dimension I know can’t be real. I look at both hands, which now glow as if painted with a luminous substance. I look around the room: a duffle bag, clean clothes atop it, collapsible bow and new arrows, a paperbook, a device unplugged. Normal, but everything seems slightly off-kilter; more than three-dimensional.
“You probably want to make a pit stop. Alley Oop!” He waves his large arms like a conductor raising the dead. He says to my departing back: “I made some lemonade for you.”
◊
I do need to use the bathroom, but the space seems so small with the large Nelson in it. I feel embarrassed. Fuck that!
When I’m done I don’t wash my hands. I’m afraid the water will wash me away.
Nelson, smiling as if he’s the sun itself, stands holding a large glass. Is it only lemonade?
Listen.
I ease past him to the table and finger the chunks of bread. Nelson turns to say, “Don’t eat yet.”
I grasp the paring knife with the glowing fingers that don’t quite belong to me; yet who else will claim them? I feel sluggish as if drugged, yet I know three things: the room is small, he is big and soft, and he is within my reach. I could strike out and through his vein before he speaks again. End it.
Nelson doesn’t smile any longer but his eyes are not fearful.
Listen.
My fingers open and the knife drops back to the table.
◊
“I’ll tell you what happened. Then you have to rest. But first—you’re not going to turn down my mamma’s special recipe lemonade, are you?”
“No.” I am so thirsty I could drink an entire orchard of lemons…if lemons were still grown in orchards. I seem to remember that.
“This will all come back to you, but you need to be ready as soon as the process is complete.”
I stare at him and realize, yes, I do know this man. He is my…my what? My lover? Brother? My betrayer?
“Are you my brother?”
“In a way.”
And he begins a digest of the story which tells me my name and leads me back to now; which is the hour of my death and my birth.
◊
“The art of tattoo is spiritual, inextricably linking the applied art with the individual.”
I want to speak
“Don’t interrupt! Two lovers, forbidden by Society City to bond do so, just as all lovers must be in the fairy tales. One an empath called Lynx; the other an information executive called Strand. Each seeks out in the other that which is missing in herself and finds they’re joyful for the first time in life. “Lynx is in servitude to Society City, which sometimes uses her empathic talents to heal and at other times to punish. Her sensitivity is so acute she can only survive these rigors with the use of deadening drugs. Are you still with me?”
◊
I stare at him unsure who is the lunatic: him or me.
◊
“Strand, on the other hand, seems to have been born with deadening drugs coursing through her veins. No one is immune to her cold wit; nothing breaks through her protective shell except me and then Lynx. But they are two valuable commodities in a culture that gets what it pays for and keeps it.”
Nelson avoids telling her of the cruelty that had become intrinsic to Strand’s survival and the raw pain that had almost killed Lynx. He knows their differing instincts are at war inside her; he needs her to recognize and embrace them both.
◊
“In the de-evolution of the culture outside that narrow window in this dark bedroom, Society City controls all things east of the Appalachians, and most things west of those mountains are forbidden. The tattoo was meant to bond Lynx and Strand together, forever, making it impossible for them to be separated by the power of Society City.” He repeats: “The art of tattoo is spiritual, linking the applied art with the individual inextricably.”
◊
“That’s impossible!”
“And yet here we are.”
◊
I look again at his large brown hands and note the tips of his fingers permanently dark with ink. Ignoring his presence I rip the loose fitting cotton garment up over my head, seeing the dried blood staining it. I rush back to the bathroom mirror. My breasts are familiar and strange at the same time. There’s a vague outline beneath the skin of…something else. My hair does not look familiar at all. When I blink I see a flash of a woman darker than my current skin and who has short, nappy hair. Then I see a smaller, freckled, stockier woman with cascading red and silver hair. The other one? Or am I the other one?
◊
I feel the tiny needle points prickling all over my body. I lean in close to the mirror as if I might still be able to see them on my skin.
The movement just below the surface no longer unnerves me.
◊
“You did this? Experimented?”
“We did. All of us.”
I look back to the mirror just as my dark hair loses all of its color.
“What’s happening!?”
“We agreed this was the only way. Lynx and Strand wanted it, so we worked for many months, sinew by strand by shadow to recreate one on the outside and the inside of the other.”
“But which am I?”
“Another.”
“The two have become one? Inside me?”
“No. That was my error. The two have become a third, who contains both. Three, but none gives way. Here,” Nelson pulls a fresh garment from the stack on top of the duffle.
I pull the soft cotton wrapper back over my head—not through modesty, because I finally understand this man: Nelson knows every inch of my body already.
◊
“And that’s the important thing you must remember.”
“I don’t care for your superior attitude, Mr. Nelson.”
Listen.
“Not mister. Just Nelson, as it has been for generations in my family. The women were all named after the famous…”
“…South African freedom fighter.” I remember that now.
“And then I came along,” Nelson says with an unguarded smile.
“And you collect miniatures of long gone historic monuments. I remember La Tour Eiffel…uh…the Ashanti Stool!”
“Good. We’ll continue down memory lane another time, sister love. I’ve got some tasks to do right now. We don’t have much time; you need to sleep again to finish the annealment.”
I listen.
◊
“There will always be two voices; I didn’t know that at first; I’m sorry. Your work will be to find the balance, to know when to follow which voice. One will be rash, angry, cold, dangerous; the other is sensitive, empathetic, innocent. Both are valid when in balance. But you cannot let go of one and follow only the other. You’ll…you won’t survive.”
She listens but doesn’t understand.
“You won’t survive unless you can carry all the realities! Without them the road will only lead to madness. I know that sounds melodramatic but believe me, please.”
I listen.
◊
“Remember when you first woke up and couldn’t remember anything? Imagine trying to live your life from that moment forward, having no memory at all of what went before. The threads of the past snipped free from the present, no link to the future…with no sense of the ground on which you stand. That old earthquake that ripped through the middle states last century; that cut the east off from the west? That would seem like a bump in the road. You’d always be off-balance.”
◊
“No tabula rasa, then?”
◊
“The weight of emptiness is still a weight. Keeping the balance between the voices—between who they were and who you are—will integrate you all. And remember they are lovers; they want to be in harmony, and you’re the one who does that.”
◊
Nelson unties his cloak, dropping it to a chair in the narrow room. I reach out tentatively to touch the soft edge of the fabric as if I’ve never felt anything like it before. I gaze at him with a look of puzzlement; then tears rise in my eyes.
◊
“Don’t worry, this here queen’s got all bases covered except one, and I’m about to fix that. Lie down one last time.”
◊
I do, because the words are so familiar. He raises the leg of my pants on the left side and I see one tattoo that remains distinct—an old-fashioned bicycle, a high-wheeled penny-farthing, on my calf.
◊
“The penny-farthing locks you all in place together as you travel out past the mountains to the places Society thinks are too wild to sustain life. Relax! The plan will come back to you when you wake again. But one last thing.”
◊
Nelson pulls a machine from one of the deep pockets of his cloak and a small pot of ink. “Can you lie on your side?”
I turn.
“This will hurt a bit.”
“You never said that before.”
“No. But this is different. I’m layering in a line of communication. We’re not using any relaxant because I don’t want any chemicals to interfere. When we’re done you’ll go back to sleep and wake on your own.
“Here’s a word for you to remember. Did I ever tell you about the time…?” Nelson begins the storytelling path he always travels when inking her body.
◊
“You know how I love to collect historical bits and pieces,” he continues. “So once I stumbled on this picture of the cutest man I ever saw: café au lait skin, dark eyes that were either trouble or were looking for trouble. And he had the most expressive mouth, like cherries I could have sucked through my teeth, pits and all! Turns out he was a queer colored man who wrote books in the 20th century. I tried reading some. Way too smart for me…that’s why Society tracked me into visual—not literary arts!”
Nelson’s laughter dispels any sense that he thinks himself stupid.
He clicks on the power and the buzz of the machine fills my ears. Facing the window, I concentrate on the curtains dancing in the breeze as Nelson moves carefully on the spokes of the penny-farthing’s big front wheel. I feel the needle as if I’m inside that ancient torture machine, its nails digging into me. But now my body opens to it.
◊
“I read an interview with him and he talked about the sensuality of words; I’d never thought about that before. And how he fell in love with a word when he was a kid: Wolverine! He thought it was the most beautiful word in the world. He loved to feel it in his mouth. When I close my eyes I can see his mouth tasting that word. He didn’t know what it meant when he first heard it, but it stuck with him. Later, when I found some pictures of him as an old man,that mouth—it was still tasting that word.
◊
“There, all done.”
“So quickly?”
“Just the single word concealed among the bicycle’s spokes and curves. It changed his life, it changed mine; now it changes yours.”
“How?”
“Magic. Let me finish. You will go west from Society City; maybe you’ll find some Partisans, set up housekeeping in a tree, learn to sew, become a surgeon or carpenter or revolutionary. Who knows.”
“Sounds either ghastly or delightful, depending on who I am at the moment.”
“Ah, finally your sense of humor! I’ll take that as a good sign.”
“All of this simply for two lovers?”
“Two lovers is no small thing. And for the others who’ll foment change.”
◊
“I’m afraid.”
“That’s smart. Society City will not take the disappearances sitting still. When you wake up you’ll remember how vicious it can be, you’ll remember those who’ve disappeared. So follow our plan and go. Quickly.”
◊
Through the curtain I see what was moving: not a tree branch, but a pair of athletic shoes tied together and thrown over a power line. For some reason they make me smile.
“Once you’re past the mountains, remember the word. It’s not one that pops up in common conversation, so it will help you find friends or protect you from danger.”
“Dare I ask how?”
Nelson doesn’t respond because he can see she’s already drowsy.
“‘Wolverine.’ It does taste delicious,” I say, but I can no longer lift my eyelids.
◊
Nelson gently turns her onto her back and drapes a soft cotton sheet over her. He thinks how much he already misses the two women who’ve become his sisters. He wonders how long before he’ll see this new one again. He wants his friends, but he hates to travel.
◊
“Move fast…you listening to me, Tryna West?” Nelson whispers urgently then grabs his cloak and turns to leave.
“Yes, we’re listening, brotherlove.”
We sleep.
Nelson double locks the door when he leaves.