Mildly insulted, she told him that she wasn’t a fainter.
“I suspect that’s right, but I still have to insist.”
She made the mistake of putting all the peanut butter in her mouth at once and then had to work through it, finally washing it down with the sour juice in one go.
“You have a new look,” she called from behind the screen as she changed from her shirt into the smock he’d given her.
“Every time you move somewhere, you evolve into something, right? But it seems this is a place where you get to be yourself. More yourself.”
She stepped around the screen and looked at him again. “So this is you?”
“Maybe,” he said, palming his clean-shaven face. “Time will tell.”
He chose the back of her shoulder blade as the beginning location, and she lay on her stomach, the smock open.
She’d told him her pain threshold was high and believed this to be true. A week earlier she’d typed “what does getting a tattoo feel like” into a search engine. The answers ranged from “annoying” to “like the corner of a hot razor blade cutting through your skin.” One thread she’d read quickly deteriorated into false bragging: the fifteen-year-old girl who claimed her first tattoo, on her neck, hurt not at all, while the second, her daughter’s name on her arm, hurt like hell; the nineteen-year-old who warned potential military recruits that the navy wouldn’t admit him because he had tats the uniform wouldn’t cover, including one that said. “Fuck the navy”; the guy who said he was addicted to the feeling but out of skin to mark. “Poor, poor pitiful you,” Marion had typed into a comment box, meaning it for all of them.
“The long cut lines come first and hurt the most. Then it’s just fun for kids. You know, coloring, which should barely even bother you. Just in case, though, we’re going to go short. Even if the pain is not bad for you, it’s still trauma to the body’s energy. Stamina is something you build.”
“Don’t leave me half finished.”
He pressed his hand into her lower back, a technique she recognized as intended to calm and create a connection between worker and client, noting also that it worked. “I’m going to give you a complete image but something we can build on if you want more later.”
“No cartoons,” she said.
“You already know me better than that.” He turned on music. The high volume didn’t surprise her; the Mozart did. “Now I need you to be quiet and to relax.”
The sound bothered her more than the anticipation. Then came the scratching, as though on sunburn, but just one thin drag at a time. It was fine at first, but the pain accumulated. It was different than the kind of pain Clay gave her: smaller but closer to the bone, bizarre in its localness, completely nonsexual.
Several times she thought she might not be able to continue. She exhaled and concentrated on breathing air back into her lungs, pressing it out again, something she’d picked up somewhere along the way to her massage certification. And then she felt good — not sexually charged like with the other kind of pain but the ordinary elation that comes with the release of endorphins. And then the long lines were done. Eddie changed tools and worked on small pieces of skin. Nothing worse than patches of chafing. The coloring, she assumed.
Several hours later, she looked at the back of her shoulder in the mirror while Eddie gave her instructions for caring for the tattoo as she healed. He’d worked perfectly with the lines of her shoulder blade to create an elaborately colored hybrid of fin and wing. At some angles the red and purple and blue and green ovals looked like feathers, but when she squinted they looked like scales. She was beautiful.
“I changed my mind about the tree.” Eddie’s voice was deep and felt soft around her. “I thought that living here, it’s a good idea to be able to swim and to fly.”
Clay
Clay forced himself to work on sketches for what he now thought of as the wolf-boy book for a full hour before fortifying himself with strong coffee and turning to his new project.
Clay’s campaign of indirect investigation began with information gathering, and he was surprised by just how easy his father’s computer was to access. He could never be an ambassador now, not in any country with more American concerns at stake than Belgium. Clay could have accessed his father’s email accounts without the password, but he started there and found it to be a variation on the third theme he’d tried: the name of his father’s last favorite mistress. He’d started with the first, pegging his father as a closet sentimentalist, and then tried GeauxSaints, given that his father had an economic as well as a municipal interest in the local football team.
Making Clay’s work even easier, most of his father’s accounts (three email accounts and an invitation-only social media site calling itself Un Petit Monde) used either the same password or a close variation, and his father seemingly never cleared his browsing history. He was embarrassed by his father’s idiocy, incongruent as it was with the man’s passion for wielding power. Clay knew that power is given as well as claimed, and soon enough he would have full access to his inheritance, depriving his father of his final strong weapon against his son. Without the power of money over him, his father would have no power left.
The email was boring on initial inspection, though Clay planned a more thorough scouring later, when he would look for obscure financial irregularities and the like — situations hard to measure at first glance. People are often taken down by the most boring parts of their lives, by money rather than sex, by the illegal rather than the salacious.
The social site was at least entertaining, more or less a Facebook for people who thought of themselves as rich, well connected, and culturally elite. An old guy in Cannes whom Clay had never heard of but who had to be connected to the film festival given the number of photographs of himself with women who looked like models and who were too young to give him the time of day if he couldn’t help them in fairly astounding ways. A few guys posing in front of their helicopters or private jets, a Turkish woman who’d had herself photographed in a red living room wearing lots of real or fake diamonds and holding an absurdly long-haired cat. And so on. The boards on the site ranged from a forum to arrange travel-assisted hookups to a discussion of high-end watches, which explained his father’s recent upgrade to a timepiece that cost more than any one of his cars alone.
He traced his father’s history of recent posts and found one short, peculiar entry titled “exotic leather.” Some man teetering past middle age had asked what the finest leather on earth was, a question mostly ignored by the otherwise eagerly materialistic site users, though one or two had dropped a comment on snakeskin shoes that don’t look like snakeskin. His father, though, had written simply, “Human leather,” followed by a sourcing query, which someone had answered with a URL for a site based in the United Kingdom.
Clay clicked and was taken to what he first assumed was a parody site advertising products made from human leather for a discerning clientele. Clients were assured that the families of “providers” were handsomely rewarded and that, yes, only high-quality stomach leather from attractively hided providers was used. Costs were available by serious inquiry only. Due to the special nature of the product and the scarcity of supply, there was a long waiting list. Though skinny friendship bracelets made from scrap leather could be procured more or less immediately, special-order belts and wallets were another matter. Indeed, all orders were temporarily on hold.
Clay read through each page of the site, including one describing the tanning process and one assuring the acquisitively minded of the fully legal nature of the fine goods being offered. The deeper he read, the more he was unsure whether the site was a parody or the commercial presence of a purveyor of leather goods made from the skin of human beings.