It wasn’t the first time Patty Cakes woke up on the floor.
Not even the first on a bathroom floor, hers or someone else’s.
It wasn’t the first time she’d fallen down the mouth of a bottle and tried to drink herself to the bottom. Life was like that sometimes. Maybe more than just sometimes.
At least it was her own bathroom this time.
The puddle in which she lay was her own spilled booze.
Her own blood.
She lay there, her cheek and hair in the wet. Her body was twisted into a boneless sprawl as if she’d been cut down from a scarecrow post and simply allowed to drop. No vomit this time. No piss. That was something. When you were that far out on the edge for this long, you took your comforts where you could find them. However small and cold.
Sound was the only thing that seemed to be alive, to have movement. A faucet dripped stubbornly, punching into the metal ring of the drain as if determined to erode it to nothingness, no matter how long it would take. Outside the window the crows of night gave reluctant ground to the morning pigeons. A cricket, who had no damn business being in a yard in this part of the city, whistled for attention, and got none. There was wind, too, but it was subtle and secretive, as if its sound belonged to someone else’s experience and not hers.
Patty did not make any sound. She couldn’t even hear her own breath. Nor did she move. She didn’t want to move. Not yet. She’d learned the hard way that moving too quickly summoned the migraine demons and invoked the storms of nausea. No thanks.
The smart play was to try and assess the damage from where she was. It meant listening inside her body for damage, for misuse; separating new pain from old. Allowing wrongness to make its case. That process took time, whatever time it needed. She was in no hurry. Her tattoo parlor could not open without her, and there was nobody in town who needed to be inked this early. If it was early. Everybody could wait.
Awareness came creeping like a timid nun, whispering to her, tugging on the fabric of her consciousness.
She could see that this was her bathroom. The flowers and tigers and dragons painted on the wall. The soaps and shampoo bottles huddled together on the edge of the tub. She could see that without turning her head. The bunched-up blue bath mat pushed hard against the base of the toilet. All the beer bottles she could see were her favorite brand. Fat Pauly’s, a craft lager from Iligan City in the Philippines. The bathroom smelled familiar. All bathrooms had their own smell. This one smelled of her and her habits and her stuff and her life.
Her iPad in the other room was playing its way through every song she’d ever downloaded, one album at a time. Last she remembered it had been somewhere in the G’s but had clearly made its way to the N’s. Right now it was grinding its way through Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Murder Ballads.
Well, she thought, that’s a bit on the nose.
She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them the light had changed. Just a little. Enough, maybe, for the sun to have moved an hour’s worth across the sky. Hard to tell, though—the bathroom window was tiny and it looked out to a shared alley. Across the way was the dirty brick wall of the back of Hucksters, one of those fashion places that sold upscale clothes no one would be caught dead in.
Patty’s face was turned away from her hands. One hand was tucked under her, the other stretched behind. Awkward. Starting to hurt a little as the muscles woke up to these stresses of angle and reach.
Then, like a switch being flipped, her body told her it was time to move. Maybe it was the pain, maybe it was shame for finding herself like this again. Whatever. She had to move, and so she moved.
Sitting up was awkward. Her muscles were stupid and didn’t know how to work. Her body had too many disconnected parts, and her brain had no blueprint for reassembly.
But she managed it.
After three or four hundred years, she managed it. Cursing was involved. No, it was integral to the process. In Vietnamese, because that was the language she spoke when she first learned about pain. In English, too, because the Americans—particularly the New Yorkers—were better at it than anyone.
Then she was up, sitting naked against the cold edge of the tub. Gasping, as if she’d run up ten flights of stairs. Sweating, despite the chill. She blinked away the fireflies that suddenly swarmed around her. She dragged the back of her hand across her forehead and cheeks.
Which is when she saw her hand and understood why there was blood in the puddles of spilled beer. She’d assumed she’d cut herself somewhere on broken glass. No. A cut, even a bad one, would be better than what she saw.
Blood leaked from the back of her left hand. Tiny beads, seeping through the crust of a heavier flow that had mostly dried. She looked around for the tattoo needle and saw it on the floor, over by the toilet. Not the big professional she used. This was something crude. A disposable syringe filled with black ink. The kind of makeshift tool street kids and squatters used because they couldn’t afford to visit a pro. She’d inked over those kinds of tattoos a hundred times over the years.
Now it was the opposite. She’d inked a crude image onto her own skin.
It was a face, but there was no artistry to it. No skill. No trace of talent, of control. It wasn’t much better than a monotone stick figure’s empty features. Eyes, a dot for a nose, a smiley mouth. Heavy, wavering lines. Too much ink.
That was bad enough. If it had been on her leg or arm or anywhere else it would have been no big thing. A fuck-up done during an alcoholic blackout. She had fifty friends in the trade who could have fixed it and turned crudity into beauty.
No, the poor quality wasn’t the thing that punched a cold hand through her breastbone and began beating the shit out of her heart.
The tattoo was on the back of her left hand. Thick lines cutting through the delicate features of a face Patty had inked onto her own skin. A smiling, beautiful face. Drawn years ago, not from a photograph but from a mother’s own broken heart.
But … whose face? Patty was positive she should know the name. That she should know everything about the little Vietnamese child staring up at her. But there was no name in her head.
Or … there was … but it was so far out of reach.
On her skin the awkward, clumsy lines of new tattoo ink tried to block those memories. Or trap them? The bars of a cage prevent passage either way.
“Don’t go,” she whispered to the face on her hand. To the place in her mind where the memory should have been. She looked at the original ink, and then at the stupid smiley face that covered it now. That little girl. Obliterated by her own hand. A crime, a sin committed in the emptiness of a drunken night.
Patty Cakes threw back her head and screamed.