Fort Lauderdale
“These are so you don’t end up seeing stars the rest of the day,” the electrologist says.
The wraparound sunglasses the technician offers Jessica are the functional kind favored by seniors. Their tint turns everything into shades of black and the tattoos on her arms become less visible, as if in anticipation of what she is having done.
“Wow!” the technician says. “Your phoenix here has a lot of ink.”
“It’s a sphinx,” Jessica says to the woman, who is cleaning Jessica’s shoulder with something cool and astringent.
“So the sphinx is a cover-up?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s underneath?”
“Is it important?”
“No, not really. Sorry,” says the technician. “I guess that’s why you had it covered up in the first place. So you could forget it. Or him.”
“It used to be an eagle,” Jessica says, hoping to close the matter.
“Oh,” says the technician. “You had an ex in the service or something?”
“Or something,” Jessica says.
“I hear ya,” says the tech emphatically, commiserating with Jessica over the nonexistent military lover of Jessica that she’s imagining.
At first the pulsing laser feels merely interesting, like a rubber band snapping her scapula really quickly. Then the sensation gets warmer and the heat congeals into a burning. The odor, of Jessica’s own flesh roasting, is sickly sweet. She licks sweat from her upper lip.
The electrologist pauses her zapping. “Shall we keep going?”
“I’m fine.”
“Holler if you’re not.”
The laser pulses are so rapid they sound like clacking plastic teeth. About an hour of Jessica’s time passes, though it turns out to be only thirty minutes on the clock, before the plastic teeth go quiet.
“You did good,” says the technician as she helps Jessica up from the table. With her lab coat, green-tinted goggles and cabled laser gun, the woman could be playing a nuclear physicist in an old sci-fi movie. “If you’re up for it, I have time to do an arm today.”
After twenty, forty and then sixty actual minutes pass, the plastic teeth have nibbled up and down Jessica’s right biceps and forearm. She hears a final clackety-clack and then silence. “That does it for now,” her tormentor says.
Jessica removes the protective glasses and studies the blasted arm. A crusty blister of dying skin covers the Maori spirals.
“It’ll be seven more sessions or so to finish this one. The ink is deep,” says the electrologist sympathetically. “We can do the next treatment after you heal. Eight weeks say.”
“And what about this arm?” Jessica asks, offering up her uncooked limb, the one with the fantastic green and purple foliage. She has saved it for last.
“Maybe you should rest a day or two. This whole process will take about a year, so there’s no hurry.”
“I need to get it all started now,” Jessica says.
It’s not the anticipated pain that Jessica fears will change her mind but remorse: at betraying Miss Shelly, and even herself. Her tats are part of her. But the temptation to be anonymous and plain and safe pulls her on.
“Put on your glasses,” says the electrologist, who lowers her own sci-fi goggles and then raises her laser. Swallowing, Jessica watches darkly as the device bites at Shelly’s canvas.