After that first time, that first night, Owen Minor was convinced that he was insane. Given that he believed he’d somehow stolen someone’s tattoo, had that tattoo appear on his skin, and then had dreams so vivid that they were as real as memories—just not his own—there was a case to be made.
When it happened the second time—after brushing the tattoo on the forearm of someone on a crowded elevator—he thought he was losing his grip on reality.
It wasn’t until the fifth time that he wondered if he was a mutant, like in those X-Men movies. Someone born with extraordinary abilities that could only be explained away by weird science.
Those five times happened over a period of eleven months. Owen went to a therapist and tried to explain it. But when he showed the spots on his body where the tattoos appeared, the doctor started giving him the look. The skin was always bare, unmarked, without even the ghost of an image. He told the shrink that these borrowed tattoos always vanished completely after he’d dreamed his way through the equally borrowed memories. The result should have not surprised him—the doctor scheduled him for CT scans, blood work, and when all of that came back negative, the next step was a sheaf of prescriptions. More sessions and more drugs were to follow. Risperidone, Aripiprazole, Olanzapine, Ziprasidone, Quetiapine, Pimavanserin, and the old fan favorite, Clozapine. Xanax was also a hoot. He enjoyed the drugs at times, even some of the more uncomfortable side effects. Explosive diarrhea, for example, broke up a slow day.
But the most recent dose changes made him sick and sleepy, dried his mouth out, and gave him such awful constipation that he developed hemorrhoids. He threw the rest of the drugs away and stopped going to therapy sessions.
He was afraid, though. The thought of going mad was terrifying. His mind was the only thing he liked about himself. His body was a disappointment. He’d grown from a pallid child to a pallid man. Fleshy and sickly. Going to the gym made him hurt, and it was also like sweating to little effect while in a spotlight. The only way he got dates was through a deeply phony set of details and doctored pictures on Tinder, and he’d already been reported twice for deceptive profiles. The only sex he’d ever had was with hookers, and they never kissed him. Owen had never once been kissed on the lips. Well, maybe his mother had done that when he was a baby, but he didn’t remember.
Owen searched the Net for cases of any kind similar to his own. He found nothing on WebMD, nothing in articles or news stories. Lots about lost memories, but nothing about borrowing them.
Then he made a strange discovery.
One Tuesday night after working all day slicing deli meats at a Jersey Mike, he had the idea of looking backward to see if there were any clues. This all started with that big guy at the funeral of the soldier who’d committed suicide, so Owen pawed through the thick file folder of obituary and funeral announcements he’d kept. He found the obit, which listed the names of the deceased’s surviving family. No parents, but there were two sisters and one brother, Grant Buckley. Owen put that name into the search windows for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And he was there. Grant’s Twitter comments were mostly retweets of Breitbart and Sean Hannity. Nothing personal. The Instagram feed was mostly pictures of Grant and his buddies in various places where the military sent him. He was some kind of sergeant in the army. Owen knew next to nothing about the army, and less about the various wars going on around the globe. On Facebook, though, he struck gold.
Very strange gold.
There were a series of posts on Grant Buckley’s feed in the weeks following his brother’s funeral. Some talked about the dead man, but they were soon completely overtaken by posts about Grant’s tattoo.
Grant’s missing tattoo.
The big man’s first posts were of the “hey, guys, this is weird” kind, because the tattoo of vines and insects began disappearing over a period of days. There were tons of posts from friends and friends-of-friends who had thoughts, opinions, speculations, and solutions that solved nothing. Within a few days of his brother’s funeral, the tattoo had vanished completely. All that remained on the man’s wrist and hand were faint smudges, like a watercolor left out in the rain for too many days. Grant was amazed, pissed off, and, Owen sensed, scared.
He scrolled through the man’s feed until he came to a post five weeks later, in which Grant went on a diatribe to say what a rotten tattoo artist Malibu Mark was. Grant was threatening a lawsuit, and some of Malibu Mark’s other customers jumped onto the thread to tell Grant he had his head up his own ass and to basically fuck off and die.
Owen was puzzled, but there was a little tingle of excitement in his loins.
He could not find anything on the other four people whose tattoos he’d accidentally taken. They were random strangers. Owen thought long and hard about what to do next. How to research this.
The following morning he went looking for people with tattoos. There was a lot of skin art around, more than he thought, but he couldn’t exactly walk up to perfect strangers and ask to touch them. And if he did, how would he make the touch? Some of the people in the tattoo world scared the hell out of him. Men and women. Nor did he want cops called on him.
He knew that there was a way, but he had to think it through.
He needed new ink. He craved new memories. And he wanted to know how the whole process—weird as it was—worked.
From that moment on, Owen Minor was on the hunt. Always. Every day, every hour.