Only time would tell for Grace’s recovery, the doctor went on, and though he could say she should live, she was borderline damage percentage and that made things unduly complicated. Then the man cleared his throat confidently and looked at Cy as if waiting for a reply. Cy’s head was effervescing with information like seltzer powder dumped into a glass of water.
— I didn’t know skin was classed as an organ. I didn’t know that.
— Yes, it is. You do understand, then?
— Yes.
And so it was that in a hospital in southern Brooklyn Cyril Parks learned his final lesson about the medium of his profession. It was the body’s largest organ. He knew so much about skin, how it was essentially imperfect, but that was its very nature, how it told stories where the mouth did not, how it flexed, how it folded and faded, its shades and shapes, the provinces of geographic elasticity and density, how it aged, how it bled, how it housed his ink. But he did not know that it was an organ, like the liver or kidneys or the spleen. An organ, vital to life as the loving, brackish human heart.
The sister of the women’s ward told him to go home. They did not know how long Grace would be there, she was very sick. Each day was as unpredictable as the last as far as her injuries were concerned. She told him to get back to work at the factory. He’d been courteous to stay so long but he should concern himself with the security of his job, she said, mistaking the ink staining the rims of his fingernails for perpetual conveyor-belt grime. When his lady friend got better, if she got well enough to leave, she would come and find him no doubt. Sister’s eyes were dense and shining dully like cannon shot, they said she understood he loved this poor, broken woman, but it was time to pull his life together now. She opened and closed the situation for him, and he was grateful to her for that. Sister was a tall woman that finally reminded him of his mother, thin-haired, possessed of abilities to comprehend and ignore bodily excretions beyond the capacity of her peers — she had in her hand a jar of something pale blue-grey and intestinal suspended in liquid and resting on her papers as if it were an ordinary glass of drinking water. There was a watch pinned upside-down on her uniform so she could time health as she took pulses.
Cy had known that one day he would meet someone in the image of Reeda Parks, he’d suspected all along there were others of her kind, and Reeda had been following him around in his memory for hours, weeks, years it seemed, vying for precedence with Riley. Now she stood before him, resurrected, with a page of notes about her patients and the exact quantities of their medication pencilled darkly in a column, the essential anatomical waste in her hand, and her sufferable maternal dogma. And he knew if he really wanted this woman here before him now to be the ghost of his dead mother, this indulgent and purgatorial country would oblige him and endorse that wish, making the apparition real, come to him to shore up his soul in its time of distress. So he kissed her cheek quickly because he missed Reeda, he did, and though Sister was perhaps a little intrigued by the gesture she nodded, glad as all matriarchs are that her advice had been acknowledged, and he left her to her duties.
He might have tattooed five hundred people that summer or he might only have tattooed five. The rest of the season was passed in a blur, with him stewing, brooding, festering, gathering all communication up in a tight knot at the back of his mind and putting the fear of God into anyone who sat in the chair for work. Nobody cared to guess at the despair behind the frown and the complete lack of verbal engagement did wonders for his reputation. Perversely he thrilled the customers with his convincing portrayal of one of the most authentic, stony bruisers in the profession, for silence is the most threatening proposition of them all, a vacuum that will hold all the fears and treachery of those it confronts and still have room for more. Rumours even went around that he had cut out his own tongue for a dare before force-feeding it to a rival. His hands cooperated, they were reliable that way, and there was more trade than ever, but the rest of him was retired. On the lathe of his rage he reduced to sawdust all the pleasantries and banter he had once laid down. He had always been inclined towards a quiet disposition, Eliot Riley had disliked it of him, and it seemed he had been forcing talk all his adult life, for one reason or another. Now he had not the will nor the encouragement to produce one single unwarranted word. His mind felt alien and hectored at Coney, the whiz-bang-boom and hurly-burly of the place harassed him, made him dizzy. There were bizarre conversations that he simply could not comprehend.
— Hey buddy. Know where I can buy a pogo stick?
— What?
— A pogo stick. Where can I get me one? Pogo-pogo, everybody wants a go!
— I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you are saying to me.
At night he drank his fill and it wasn’t enough. He began to take a drink before work, which he had never done previously, not for pleasure or vice or venom, not even for the sake of his master who had done the very same thing to counter or further blackness of his spirit — not in Riley’s name, Amen — but just for that first reassuring sting of liquor on the tip of his tongue.
And Coney Island looked sick to him. Overnight it seemed as if the fairground had morphed from a potentially ugly thing into a hideous creature, a full-blown monster, like a wyvern wriggling from a rotten egg. He looked around the place and it was skewed with disparagement, whole screens of groaning amusement arcades seemed to be lit now by an eerie, holocaustic Brooklyn light, or seemed reflected in distorting funhouse mirrors. It was all wrong. Occasionally, on afternoons that were less hectic or when he became fed up with work and with the rumpus of the parks, he slipped back into the animal pit of the Luna circus to see Grace’s horse. Claudia had been paying for his stabling since the incident, she would not hear of him being sold on and she paid extra to the zoo hands to exercise him daily and treat him well. There were amazing animals behind the tents and domes, many of which seemed lessened in their tame proximity to each other, their relegation to part of a collection, as if they were only suited to independence within broad khaki expanses of native land. Tigers rolled lazily about in their cages, yawning like house cats. The pair of giraffes had thick scabs on their knees as if from endlessly practising their curtseys. None of the beasts seemed real. They were fading under their old paint and needed sparkle. Maximus always seemed very still in his stall. After Grace’s complaints Cy expected him to be feisty. It would take the animal a second or two to come over to him and then he would rest his head on the gate while Cy rubbed his nose.
— Hello, boy. Got some peppermints for you, don’t tell the missus. She hasn’t forgotten about you. You’re still her favourite boy. She’ll be back for you soon. Then she’ll ride you up to Canarsie and back, I promise.
The horse’s eyes were inordinately sage and sorrowful. They always had been, it was the mark of the species, but now, in this place, and with all that had happened, the animal seemed more human to him than beast, and its eyes acted like a tripwire on his softer emotions. It was difficult to leave Maximus; Cy would spend an hour just petting him and interpreting the evolutionary sadness of the creature. There was a gentle therapy to the visits. The inner stillness of him that Cy had first seen pictured on the brick wall of the building where he lived was present at all times and acted like a salve. So often since the attack Cy had felt on edge, or angry, storing malignancy within himself instead of venting it outwardly. And Maximus calmed him, helped him to relax. So that when he left the tusk-light of the circus stalls he would, for a while, feel better, until the hoary, rakish atmosphere of the exceptional present began to rub his nerves raw again. And the biggest amusement parade on earth sucked him back into its frenetic supernova, collapsing his energy and his sanity along with it.