I take a radical step the following day.
Huneefa spreads the skin at my left temple and holds it in place with adhesive tape. “Your skin is beautiful.”
“My skin is fifteen years younger than I am,” I say, truncating that figure by a good thirty years. “I want a promotion. I’m sick of getting carded.”
“You won’t be forever,” she says, inaccurately but with great feeling. “Okay, here comes the first swab.” She swabs my temple with something cool, and very shortly I feel a kind of peace there.
“I can see your point,” she says conversationally as she clanks around in her little tray of instruments. “You sure about this color?”
“I’m sure.”
I’m not sure, but I’ve checked the color against Jilly’s skin, not having any other person in my life with my gene base to compare with. Jilly’s wrinkles are a fine gray with tones of brown. Like a henna that has aged before it faded.
This is what I want. I want to look old enough to buy a beer. I want to date a man who is nice enough to say No to a teenager. I want a raise at work. Maybe if I have wrinkles, I’ll look scary when I give ’em the old Bela Lugosi glare. Come ... here. I want to be taken seriously by the world.
Especially, I want to be old enough to have sex with a nice man.
It remains to be seen if Agent Nick is really nice. He may have just had an isolated attack of conscience. If he’s as underfunded as he seems to be, maybe he is on the low end of the totem pole at his agency because of his conscience. Maybe he doesn’t send people to Hinky Guantanamo and they get mad at him for it. Maybe he has kid sisters.
Maybe I’m fantasizing too hard here.
I want to know all about him. My insides hurt with wanting it.
I feel a tug on the skin of my temple, far away, and a buzz begins in my ear.
“Close your eyes,” says Huneefa.
I close my eyes.
I chose Huneefa for two reasons. She has the finest line work of any tattoo artist in the city, and she has the best energy. She’s playing some kind of sitar music right now, which twangs around in my head while she draws extremely thin, faint lines from the corners of my eyes. Crow’s feet, she calls them. Cool. I drowse, listening to the sitar zing up and down the ladder of notes, defining a space inside my head made of yellow, glowing, zooming strings of light.
I think about how I got here.
How I became an energy vampire.
o0o
It was that night when I dipped into Jilly’s tip apron as usual, at 3:30 a.m. after she came home without a date for once and fell asleep. I’d been awake almost two days, watching Svengooli’s vampire film festival, and I was sick of my life. I was sick of taking care of carefree Jilly, sick of chasing men from the door who had maybe followed her home once but now she didn’t want to see them again, sick of her sudden disappearances and breezy explanations, sick of cleaning up after her and worrying about things she wouldn’t worry about. I had had no sense, forty-three years ago, that I would be in a blind panic today because I wouldn’t have her forever. When you’re seventeen, you know you’re going to live forever, and your mom is forever, but you don’t actually think about it.
The coin had whispered such promises to me. And I’d thought it all through very coldly and logically, standing sleep-deprived and wobbly-legged in the dark, furious with Jilly drunk and asleep in the next room, wishing I could be the taker for once.
I planned to be the perfect vampire. No blood, natch, I was vegan, I couldn’t have stood it. None of those dumb cartoony loopholes like vulnerability to sunshine and religious symbols and running water. I’d sleep in a bed. I’d have supersenses, and I’d be superstrong, and I’d turn into a mist and fly away if anyone bothered me. And if they messed with me? Sssssssuck! They’d just disappear in a puff of dust. That way I wouldn’t make new vampires. And I’d be forever young — I knew how carefully Jilly checked the mirror every day. I was no fool. I knew what the world was like.
But I was a fool after all.
o0o
I’m fixing that today.
The tattoo machine buzzes.
I try not to think about what if this fails. If my skin will reject the ink. If Huneefa will botch it, or if I won’t like the effect. If the lines are too thick. If the color looks glaringly wrong. If it gets infected — I haven’t had so much as a cold for forty-three years. If it bruises or sends blood or pigment under the skin and makes me look freaky, damaged, punched in the eye. Huneefa has told me I’ll have to wear bandages at first. How long will it be before I can see the “normal” look?
I’ve thought all these thoughts many times, for several years. I just never wanted it badly enough to put myself through this.
Now I want it.
I want it.
The machine buzzes.
I am in the zone, a place that rings with sweet and sour soaring electric sitar notes that skid across the darkness in my head like trippy fireflies, like Tinkerbell on acid. I am at peace.
The air fills with the smell of scorching skin, mixed with a weird burnt sugar smell. I work very hard at not thinking about it.
Four hours later I wake up in the recliner, which has a kind of curtain around it like the curtain they put around a hospital bed. I hear Huneefa working on someone else across the shop, talking softly to them. They don’t answer. I feel hung over. When I reach up and touch my face there is a big bandage on each temple. Oh, right.
Huneefa comes over to my chair.
“You’re awake! How do you feel?”
“Hung over. I liked that music. What is it?”
She listens. “Eddie Vedder on the uke.”
“No, the one you were playing for me.”
“Oh. Bill Laswell.” She gets me up out of the chair and I shake out the tingles in my legs and go up to the front desk to finish paying her and get the aftercare sheet, which she talks over with me maybe four times.
I repeat after her, “No soap. No abrasives. Let it peel if it wants to. I get it, I get it,” I say when she launches into it the fifth time.
“I want you to have a good experience,” she says.
“Thanks. I do, too.” I sign the credit card slip.
“Come back in two days and let me see it.”
What have I done, I think, as I stagger out into the dank afternoon. It hasn’t rained, but it might any minute. Bus exhaust is acrid and heavy in the air. Robin-song predicts rain before nightfall.
o0o
Next morning, my cell phone has four messages on it, all from Agent Nick. I call him back while I’m taking the garbage out.
“Where have you been?” He sounds tense.
“What’s on your mind?” I say. Some idiot has left the dumpster lid open. Makes my job easier. I have the garbage bag in my left hand and my poodle cane in my right, with my phone jammed between my ear and my shoulder. I take a good look around. There are shiny tooth marks in the metal edge of the dumpster lid.
“Don’t go out of contact. I’m responsible for your safety.”
“Really?” What a delightful idea. Nobody’s been responsible for my safety but me, for as long as I can remember.
“I’m coming over tomorrow to give you the tracer and the instruments. You’ll take them with you when Katterfelto sends you into the blue zone.”
Tomorrow? I’ll still have the bandages on. My fuzzy head starts to clear. “Drop them by my apartment. If you put them in a little envelope, you can stick ’em through the mail slot, and I’ll get them after work.”
This next part is tricky. As I hoist the garbage bag into the air and swing it over the edge into the dumpster, I touch the point of the poodle can to the metal and give it a zap.
Something yelps under the dumpster.
“Don’t lose them. They’re expensive. And another thing,” Agent Nick says. “I want you to take a leave of absence from work. We can get this Katterfelto thing cleared up much quicker if you have more time to spend over there.”
“This means you’re going to pay me something on account,” I say. “Because I only have so much paid leave coming to me, and I’m afraid I may need it later in the year.” If and when Ma gets any sicker. My tummy feels hard and cold at the thought.
Silence from Agent Nick. Then he says, “How much?”
I look under the dumpster. Little button eyes shine back at me.
I jab the poodle cane under there, a warning. Then I flip up the lid, let it slam, and hustle back indoors.
“Twenty-five thousand,” I say, shooting for the moon. There’s no guarantee I’ll get any of the money promised me, after all, and what could I do if he stiffs me?
“Okay. Give me your account number and I’ll have it wire transferred.”
“Your ass,” I say. “Bring it in cash when I see you. I’ll have my leave arranged for the following week.”
“Better get a safe deposit box,” he says.
“So you can confiscate it later?”
“Time for your cranky pills, Ms. Hel. Your bite is weakening.”
I smile, and I’m afraid he’ll hear the smile in my voice if I answer, so I hang up.
By then my bandages will be off. Also, I’ll have a chance to take a look at that power tower without any Feds or mad scientists hanging around. I have an idea.