"How'd you do it, Jimmy?" I asked as the muscles in my lower back tightened at his touching. That must be low tide.
"Do what?"
"Disappear," I said, "against The Bulgarian."
"I didn't."
"Yeah, you did."
"When did you get this tattoo?" he asked in a whisper. His fingers kept gliding over my ink in circles, real persuasive in changing the subject, Like he was creating twin whirlpools on either side of my spine: each going in opposite directions. The right went left. The left went right and he shifted to the palms of his hands, to rubbing.
"I got it last summer, it's still kind of new," I said.
I was glad that I wasn't facing him because I was flushed and getting worse, I could feel it more than I could see it in the darkness of the living room. "Took like sixteen or seventeen hours total, had four different visits, one for each shoulder and then one above each hip but he did the boat and the fisherman all at once at the end."
"Did it hurt?"
That was by far the most common question of all. I knew it was coming eventually. The good news was I didn't have to answer it all that often. Nobody really knew I had a tattoo because foot. it always stayed covered. Then again, most of the people I hung out with didn't really think to ask if it hurt or not. They just knew it did. Seems to me that tattoos are entrancing like scars are entrancing, being real visible reminders of pain. Certainly Jimmy was mesmerized.
"About as much as getting stitched, but by a sewing machine and not by hand."
Since Jimmy didn't say anything, just kept rubbing, I kept talking, blabbing, I guess. Like we used to do in the barn: him asking questions and me answering.
"It hurt worse when I didn't look though. When I put my head down on the table, it was just an anonymous pain, something I was going through that didn't seem to have any purpose, so I just looked into this double mirror that was set up for me to look into, one that reflected another one that I could see my back in. Cue was there the whole time. He always adjusted the second mirror so that I could see the needle going into my skin, sewing that ink in, you know, see the purpose of it." I stopped talking because Jimmy was poking me like his fingers were needles and he was making the lines that were already there. I tried to imagine where he was touching me: the crest of a wave rising above my kidney and guiding the other waves to the boat. But I couldn't be sure. When I couldn't see the art, like a map in the mirror, it just felt like skin.
"Over the spine though, that hurt. It rattled the bone underneath and all the other bones near it. It feels a little like getting shocked but not too bad. A little bit of breath control and endurance and it's no big deal, blood and needles never bothered me though."
I kind of trailed off when the thought occurred to me that I'd have to check Dad for bedsores in the morning. He'd been in bed for almost two days by then. And it was getting colder too. I'd have to get the gas back up and running, call the company, arrange a payment. Still, it could take a week or more. I was hoping the weather would get warmer or the oven wouldn't give out when Jimmy spoke into the air that still smelled like casserole.
"I like changing the shape of the waves, distorting 'em and then watching 'em go right back to where they were before."
"Why's that?"
"I don't know. I guess because it's comforting," he said, and he hadn't stopped rubbing. It was a full massage now and my neck was getting the treatment from his warm, strong hands.
"Comforting because there's a pattern to it? Just sitting there underneath what you can touch, keeping things in order on the surface," I said, and I knew as soon as it left my mouth that Cue would've laughed at me, but Jimmy didn't.
"Yeah, like fate or karma or whatever, just pulling things back to where they need to be."
"And the skin can die and flake off but the pattern stays there as a map, right?"
"Yeah," he said, working his knuckles into my lower back but with his other arm around me, in front of me, wrapped around my collarbone and in front of my neck and over to my other shoulder that he held in his palm. He was holding me up. It felt natural.
"Don't laugh," I said, but even before saying it I knew he wouldn't. That he wouldn't even reassure me, he'd just sit there and listen, waiting for me to say whatever I was going to say. "I used to think that everything was destined but then I thought that we all had free will but then I thought that something big and god-ish had to account for all possibilities, ya know? So I guess I just figured that there was such a thing as fate with a little f, and Fate with a big F, a capital letter."
I hoped he was following me, because I just kept going. "So there's fate with a little f that we can change, right, like free will, right? But then Fate with a bigger F actually takes that into account, because it's so huge that every single decision you could ever, ever make with the little f fits into the big F. All possibilities are accounted for. And because of that, big F was still in control over the little f, like it was a big abacus in the sky that never had to adjust because it knew of and kept track of, every single choice from the beginning, like even before you were born. Even decisions that led to my parents getting together and having me."
I was seriously full of shit. I couldn't help it. It was dark and safe to talk and my brother was gone and I was trying to understand something, anything, so long as it was giant.
"The truth is I don't know how I did it, Jenny."
"What? How you did what?"
He stopped rubbing.
"I don't know how I disappeared, I just did." He was talking real slow. "Really, I didn't believe it, I thought I just moved around him, I mean, I focused on where I wanted to be and then I moved my body and I was just there behind him."
He got quiet. I could hear the cranking of the rusty oven fan in the kitchen. One of its propellers was probably crooked. I tried to focus on that sound, instead of how near Jimmy's skin was to mine.
"I talked to everyone who was at the match after, the judges and masters from the other schools, and I saw the television footage and I didn't even know I'd done it. It freaked me out bad. Real bad. For a little while I believed what those priests said about me. That I was a reincarnated evil spirit, the devil, all that stuff."
I listened, feeling his every little shift in the lumpy busted couch.
"I don't know. It's like everybody makes such a big deal out of the promise, that it's all legendary now, me giving up on fighting, like I'm some great guy who saw the light. But really, I'm just scared. I don't know how I did it, vanished." The way he said the V-word put a new flock of goose bumps on my neck. "I just did. I guess I was happy to promise my mom that I wouldn't fight anymore. What if I disappeared for good next time?"
The logical, realistic, Mom part of me wanted to reassure him that it would never happen, that it wasn't possible. But the guy had already disappeared once. There was photographic evidence. What could I say to that?
"You know my mom made me promise not to get involved with you? That was a condition of my coming." Jimmy changed gears and I was fine with that.
"Serious?" I thought it was kind of funny, really. Then again, I was pretty surprised to see him when he showed up. No one in my family ever talked about it. I never told Cue but he knew somehow. They all kind of looked at me strange after that, especially Mom. Like I had something following me, or hanging above my head. I was forever trying to make up for it, 'til Mom was gone anyway.
"Yeah. I guess she figured she was on a roll with the promises thing." He leaned close to me but the hands I expected never came. Instead, I felt the tip of his nose track up the base of my neck as he breathed out, up to my hairline before brushing east/west across it like the skin beneath my hair was a mountain path that needed exploring. He smelled me, bumping his forehead into the base of my skull like a playful dog.
"So you promised." I hoped he didn't hear me breathing any heavier.
"Yeah."
"That's good, because this isn't right anyway, right?" I had the heels of my hands on my hips and I was just pushing down, reminding myself of my body boundaries. I let go of my shirt to do it.
"Right," he said, and he moved his nose, replaced it with his lips, softer than I remembered.
"So why's it not right again?" I was afraid my voice was cracking.
"Because it's taboo." He stopped kissing my shoulder clouds to say it.
"Oh, right, yeah. Taboo." I had to close my eyes. "Because why?"
"Because we're related and people who're related aren't meant to be together, you know, for the gene pool." He pulled away for just a moment and when he pushed back against me his chest was bare and I could feel his heart beat against my back.
"Right. Inbreeding bad," I said. And it was, very bad. Webbed toes and pale skin, weak constitutions, Poe stuff.
"So what's left for us then?" It was his turn to ask a question.
"I don't know," I said, and I really, honestly, 100% didn't.