“To find the right tattoo you have to know who you are.”
“I don’t know who I am, Star. Maybe the tattoo will tell me.”
“Sometimes it works that way. Mostly not.”
“I just feel like I don’t know anything — that I’m empty, like a cup. Just waiting to be filled up. It’s like when I look out at the stars at night I’m weightless, and I could be sucked right up to them. But maybe they’re empty, too. Do you ever think about that, Star?”
“Yeah, sure,” Star said, Brooklyn still in his voice like marbles rumbling. “You know, astronomers and physicists wonder the same thing. Now they think that maybe ninety percent of the universe we look up at is missing.”
“Who took it?”
“God knows. They call it dark matter. It’s these strange, invisible particles that haven’t ever been observed before, but now, because of the Hubble Telescope, they can. It’s obvious. Nobody really knows shit. The universe is incomprehensible — and empty.”
“It’s like it says in the beginning of Genesis: it’s chaos. ‘Tohubohu’ is the Hebrew word for it: the formless chaos of the primordial universe.”
“How’d you know that?”
“My father talked about it. He says the end is coming, when it all returns to tohubohu....”
L’heure bleue. They have been working all afternoon, with breaks for herbal tea and cigarettes. The studio is warm and the musk of her body hangs in the air.
Star the skin artist bends to his work with the fine concentration of a painter in love with his work and his canvas. His lips press together and he frowns. There is a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He massages Robin’s back with sharp steel and sometimes she hums low in her throat because of the pleasure this pain gives her. It is utterly sexual but diffuse, without object, so that the tension slowly tightens as Star works.
Robin sits upright on a wooden chair, turned so she can straddle it, her arms resting on its back. She stares out at the street before Star’s storefront studio through a window that is a one-way mirror. She can look out, but no one can see her watching. When someone stops to admire himself in the mirror, to adjust his tie or comb his hair, he seems to be staring straight at her. Then she reflexively hides the puffy dark tips of her breasts, pressing them against the wooden chair back. Her nipple piercings make a soft sound against the wood.
This afternoon with Star is the fourth and final sitting before the canvas of her back is completely filled in. From her shoulder blades to her waist, the image is taking its final shape with each tiny stab of the outline needle, fifty stabs per minute. It is a vibrant, luxuriant garden with elaborate vine work in which danger lurks: serpents and dragons rise from the base of her spine and curve over the tops of her buttocks.
When it is finished her lovers can watch her sleep and study the intricate painting on her slender back, looking in it for clues to their fates with her. The great scar would be covered and her disfigurement transformed into art.
Star’s warm left hand holds his epidermal canvas stretched as he makes the next line, and the next. Each line flows from the gods into his hand, she hopes. The painting must be perfect. Star’s voice is reassuring, insinuatingly intimate. His rumbled words assume a lover’s intimacy, in fact. While he works Robin stares out the window at the street scene. It is 16th Street, in the Mission, not far from her apartment. The sign outside reads:
By Appointment Only
“I’m sliding a little now, baby. Let me wipe you.”
Robin shivers when he stops, turns off the needle, and reaches for a sponge. He washes her back tenderly, his touch a caress magnified by the heightened sensitivity of her punctured skin.
“You comfortable?” he asks. She turns to smile at him.
His over-large dark eyes are intensified by shaggy eyebrows and there is a five-pointed star low on his forehead over his third eye. His body is bull-like, heavy, and covered with tattoos from his neck to his toes. He has been tattooed by the world’s masters.
She is open to him as she would not be with a lover, as if in creating the jungle on her back he has gained access to her insides beneath the skin. As if he could reach in and touch her heart if he chose to.
The needle whirs as he starts up again.
“This tigress will be your secret totem animal — I mean, it’s a lady tiger, a tigress — and where it is you’ll never know, but it will be there to protect you from the dragons and serpents. I believe in balance.”
Robin watches the street as if watching a movie. A homeless woman pushes a shopping cart full of precious bundles, stopping to pick up a cigarette tossed by a black man in a leather jacket. Two Mexican labourers in straw hats cross her viewpoint. An Indian waiter in a white jacket comes next, and after him an old man walking a little dog. A sleek police car rolls by, the evening officers inside blinking in the glare of the evening sun hitting their windshield. Three pigeons land on the sidewalk and begin pecking at a plastic bag with a few potato chips in it.
This parade of life recalls her vision of the variety of people in the Spiral Dance the night before.
“Star, what about witchcraft? Paganism? Where does that fit in your scheme of things?”
Star has a theory, often expounded and elaborated upon in long sessions, that everything fits into patterns very much like his tattoos. His own version of chaos theory. All you had to do was to find the key that unlocks perception and the world would show itself to you as the painting it was. Tattoos help you to see it.
“It’s just people with their need to make sense of things. And from what I know and the people I’ve seen, witchcraft makes more sense than a lot of things do. It seems to me that anything that increases the amount of awe in the world is good.”
“Awe? What do you mean? Like in awful?” She knows the word, of course, but seeks to draw him out.
“Like in a recognition of the sacredness of things. Pagans respect nature. Witches know that underlying all the bullshit of a consumerised world there is magic. I like that.”
“What about Christians?”
“What about them?”
“Did I ever tell you about my father?”
“No. But I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.”
“He’s a Christian.”
“So’s my old man. Doesn’t make him a bad dad. He let me do a cross on his arm....”
“No, I mean he’s big time. A professional Christian.”
“Like one of those crazy evangelists?”
“Did you ever hear of Thomas Flood?”
“You’re kidding. That guy on television who asks people to send in donations? He must rake it in.”
“Half a million dollars on a good day.”
“Good Lord, what a racket. What’s a good day?”
“When there’s trouble. The stock market drops, there’s a war starting, hurricanes... people send more on those days.”
“Well, there’s always disasters. Just look at the past six months: Nevada declared off-limits because it glows in the dark with toxic radiation. Earthquakes everywhere. Floods. Two major riots. I’d say your old man has a guaranteed cash flow for the foreseeable future. Is he a good guy?”
There is no hesitation in her voice. It is flat and hard when she answers: “He burned me, Star. I’ll kill him someday.”
Star whistled long and low. He shut off his needle and ran his fingertips over the ridges of scar tissue he had covered with his inks. “All this?”
“All of it.”
Robin feels the familiar rage in her throat and swallows hard, willing herself to choke it down, like a snake forced back into its hole. When would she be rid of this terrible anger? She was afraid that she would never be free until she could breathe the fire or rage out of her, like the dragon on her back.
Anger now distorts her vision. Star resumes work without further comment. Now when she looks out the window the people who hurry past are guilty of every crime. The slightest imperfection is distorted. A man with a limp seems like the most grotesque of cripples, maimed by flaws in his character, not the traffic or the world. The buildings across the street are shabby ruins, covered with dried black blood. The sunlight now fading from the street is somehow ominous as shadows fall.
It is in this state of mind that she first sees Buddy Tate. He stands before the mirror, tall and pale, with red hair tied in a pony tail. It looks like he is searching for something in the mirror, perhaps some speck of self that he’s lost, but to Robin it is as if he is looking straight into her eyes, drilling into her unconscious where the monsters lurk.
He is not ordinary looking, but he is not handsome except in the way some outlaws are when defiance moulds their features into masks that don’t come off. His nostrils are large, like great holes in the lower half or his face. His mouth is a slash. He is probably a few years younger than she is, but he might have been much older. There is something primitive about him, something she cannot name.
Why does he stand there, staring at himself? Could he see through the special glass?
“Do you see him, Star? What is he looking at?”
“Not us, baby.”
Then the strange young man does an extraordinary thing: he takes a lipstick from his pocket and as they watch, he draws a large red ‘X’ across the window with it.
It is only when he moves that he reveals himself. He is an alien. Star could probably find a place for him to fit in the scheme of things, but most people wouldn’t — not ever. It is as if she recognises herself in him, and she is sad when he goes.
Then the buzzer rings.