by Cat Rambo
“This is the world we live in now,” he heard one woman say.
When he got home, Emily was working. He looked at the new campaigns lined up on her drawing board.
“Don’t Let Your Breath Become Bullets. Get Your Lungs Enlivened.” This was accompanied by another waifish woman—not Netta, but cut from the same cardboard—whose ribs were inked to look like wings.
Another said, “Color Your Cranium With Kevlar.” This one showed a woman whose hair had been sheared and a helmet tattooed on her head. Her cheeks were protected by the chinstrap.
The last one said, “Make Your Mind Bulletproof—Your Brain Will Breathe Easier.” The ad showed only an unattached brain on white canvas, and below it the particular details of bulletproof tattooing—locations, prices, a few samples that others had inked on themselves: a football helmet (Dallas Cowboys), a portrait of a child (possibly Anne Frank), a spaceship (Millennium Falcon.)
“What do you think?” She had no shirt on, and the koi fish seemed ready to take flight, fins like wings spread just above her breasts.
“Your new ad is already up,” he said.
“I called it in last night, while you were in the shower.” She stood and came over to him. “They gave me enough that we can afford your neck piece.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I thought the air was all bullets anyway?”
She kissed him. Her mouth tasted of pot and the gelatin coating of pills. “If it makes you feel better,” she said, “I’ll get it for you.” She paused. Her eyes were half-lidded, and he could just make out the idyllic islands inked on them. “I heard about the shooting today,” she said.
Her voice was so small it hurt him. “I saw it on the screens,” he said.
She nodded. “The company wants more copy. Sales always go up after. ‘Time to hit them hard’ my boss told me.”
She looked away, as if turning from the idea toward something more pleasant but not quite making it.
The lines were still long when he went back for his appointment a few days later. The final count at the school—somewhere in Connecticut—was 26, 20 of them children, and the fear that resurfaced after every sensational shooting still hung around. For three days Emily had written copy. She worked late at night, after he got home, which was later and later as more and more orders for bulletproof doors came in. She would start off with a joint, then pop a Klonopin or Percocet, but Allen did not have the heart to stop her. Most people he knew were doing whatever they could to get through the day.
Her bosses had thrown out “Guns May Kill People, But Ink Never Does,” but they had liked “Think Ink” and “You Can’t Buy Happiness, But You Can Get Ink.” They had loved “Ink Is The Answer,” and had promised her another bonus for it, full coverage on her lungs and back.
He asked her if she was going to get it.
She shrugged. “It’s free,” she said. “Can’t hurt. Besides, I like the ink. It makes me feel different.”
“Bulletproof?” he said.
She rolled her eyes, though they were slow in response. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Just different.” She stretched out an inked arm. “Like I’m wearing new skin.”
In the morning he went downstairs and out the lobby, past the small shops that sold increasing numbers of home security or personal safety items—mace, blackjacks, helmets, stun guns, .22s and .357s, M-4s and M-16s and AR-15s.
On 20th, he slipped past the long lines and went into the shop. At the desk a young girl with her head shaved and ram’s horns inked on her skull looked up as he approached.
“We don’t have any open—”
“I have an appointment,” Allen said, handing her the card she had given him a few days before. She looked at him, checked the computer screen, then nodded.
“Brandy will be with you in a moment,” she said.
He sat on a couch in the corner, looking out through the glass walls at the people waiting outside. The shop was like a long hallway, and he could see small stalls where the artists were working, heads bent over prone bodies, their guns buzzing. At the higher end shops the artists would use lasers that made no noise, but here the buzzing soothed him. He had stolen a Xanax from Emily’s stash, but wished he had taken two. Or one of the Dilaudid drops. Most doctors would prescribe anything from Xanax to Demerol for anxiety, the simple fear of walking the fucking streets. They had begun to prescribe tattoos as well, though the health insurance companies would not cover the cost unless the person was a cop or a fireman or a school teacher.
When he looked up, Brandy was standing before him. She wore only a bikini. A great red dragon wrapped around her body. The background was all green forest, an ancient land long forgotten. Above her breasts little birds flitted through the forest. Mossy streams ran down her cheeks. Her eyelids were yellow lanterns.
“So what are we doing today?” she said, leading him back to her small stall. Hung on the walls were pictures of tattoos she had done: swallows and stars and dragons and teardrops.
He pulled out a picture of Emily and handed it to her.
“Portraits are becoming more and more popular,” she said, looking at the picture. “She’s beautiful. When did she die?”
He could not see the lanterns of her eyelids now, but where her eyebrows should have been were small swirls of storm clouds. Behind the clouds, lightning lingered—he was sure of that, faint as the suggestion of the ink was.
“She’s not dead,” he said. “I just wanted to. . .”
Brandy was already turning from him, though he did not know if it was because she was embarrassed or because she needed to get started. She was laying out her instruments and measuring ink.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that people usually get portraits of loved ones after they are lost.” She pressed a button with her foot and the tattoo gun buzzed. “Now get ready,” she said. “This is going to hurt.”
When he got home, Emily had pulled the couch close to the balcony door and was looking out at the city. She did not look up when he came in. For a moment he thought she was dead. Her eyes were glazed over. The koi fish on her chest barely rose and fell.
When he got closer, he saw that she had been crying. In the streets below them the lights were just coming on. He had soundproofed the sliding door so they would not have to hear the gunshots, but he could see the sporadic flashes below. Downtown, in the windows of the Gloch building, the office lights were going out at the end of the day. It made him wonder what the world was coming to, how small humans were, so shallow-sighted and angry, inconsolable and aggrieved.
“What is it?” he said, sitting beside her.
She laid her head on his chest and for a long time he just held her. His neck hurt where the tattoo of her was. When Brandy had finished, he had looked at it for a long time, unable to find the right words. It looked more like Emily than he could have imagined. She seemed to smile at him. Brandy had drawn it over his jugular, and each pulse of his blood moved through her.
Emily shook into him as she cried. He could feel her heart beating too hard against his. When her breathing slowed, he raised her chin up. He saw her eyes flicker to her face tattooed on his neck, but either she was too tired or too deep in grief to take it in.
“Netta killed herself,” she said. Her voice was full of painkillers. “The model I work with, the one we use in all the ads. She swan-dived from the Gloch building this afternoon.”
Her voice broke on the last word. Allen saw again the advertisement with her on it, the great red heron poised in mid-flight on her chest, and he wondered, in the way such thoughts strike in times of tragedy, if she had thought she might fly. He knew why she didn’t use a gun.
“Why?” he said, knowing it was not the right thing to say but needing to say something.
Emily’s voice came across some chasm he couldn’t comprehend. “I don’t know. I knew she was sad. She was takin
g ten Tramadol a day.” A muscle twitched in her neck. “I guess it wasn’t enough.”
He waited, knowing there was more, that she didn’t swan-dive off the roof of a building because she was addicted.
“She just couldn’t live any longer,” Emily said. “She left a note. It said ‘No one is bulletproof.’”
The first snow was falling when they went to the funeral. In the early afternoon, the lights were already on in the city. The few cars on the street honked and swerved angrily. He heard a gunshot or a backfire several streets over.
Emily had been too distraught to notice the new tattoo. He had held her until very late, both of them looking out at the city, the distant lights winking like the collapse of stars. His neck hurt but he did not move. Brandy had told him to take care of the tattoo, that without proper treatment the lines could blur and he could lose her likeness, but she had fallen asleep against him and he did not wish to wake her.
She woke up once, very late. “I knew she was taking a lot of pills,” Emily had said, “but everyone who works there takes pills. Everyone is sad.”
When she went back to sleep, he slipped a hand into her pockets and found a bottle of Vicodin. He took two, hesitated, took two more. In fifteen minutes the lights of the city seemed washed, faded. Her advertisements were hung all around the walls of the apartment—he saw Netta’s face again and again.
When he woke in the morning, Emily was working. When he asked her why, she said she had to do something to take her mind off Netta.
Her new ad featured a woman with a blank face—Allen realized she couldn’t draw Netta again. “No One Is Bulletproof,” the copy read, “But You Can Come Close.”
“They won’t like it,” Allen said, wrapping his arms around her from behind.
She put her hands on his, leaned back into him. “I know. But I had to start somewhere.”
When they got to the cemetery the snow was swirling around. The church service had been short, and now they stood in the snow while the minister’s words were torn away by the wind. A dozen or more models, all with the same stark figure as Netta, stood like storks at the graveside. The company men were all covered, faces as dark and blank as the long coats they wore.
Netta’s mother wailed as the casket was lowered. Her father stared at the spot where the sun should have been. Both of them had small black swallows beneath their eyes, the only visible ink on them. Allen imagined them at cocktail parties, telling anyone who would listen that their daughter was the bulletproof girl. The bare trees bent in the wind and little birds were blown off course.
They had just thrown the first dirt on the lowered casket when the gunman entered the cemetery. Allen saw him first, but in the wind and the grey light, he felt as if he were underwater, as if he were a stranger standing in someone else’s skin. He watched as the bullets blew from the barrel, little bits of orange flames, and those standing near the grave began to fall. In the wind, he could hardly hear, even when the screaming started. The company men drew their own guns from their long overcoats and began firing back. More bullets broke from the man’s machinegun and Netta’s mother fell into the grave. Her father clutched his heart.
Allen turned then, remembering all the ads Emily had hung up around the apartment, thinking that the air was full of bullets, that ink was the only answer. The ground was cold and hard as he began running. He vaulted a gravestone and kicked over a few flowers but kept going. He might have heard Emily behind him, but he could not stop.
He was almost to the gun when the man saw him. His face was hidden behind a mask. His eyes were white. He aimed the machine gun at Allen—the barrel seemed smaller than the first swallows that men got to cover their own small hearts—and pulled the trigger.
Later, in the aftermath, the darkness and despair that came down, he would wonder how he was not hit. He saw the barrel belch and heard the bullets fly. One came close enough to his neck that he could feel the air of its passing. Another snagged the arm of his overcoat. Then he tackled the gunman and his hands were around the man’s neck, and then the gunman was gasping and then he was no longer doing anything except being dead.
Allen did not hear the screams as he walked back to the gravesite. Only the wind, loud as the last days of the earth. Netta’s mother had been hit in the forehead. The sound her husband made as he knelt beside her was like the wind. Of the models, a half-dozen were down, most not moving, eyes staring unseeing at the hidden sun. One of the company men was holding another’s throat, applying pressure while blood slipped between his fingers and the man’s mouth worked and the sounds of sirens came from far away.
He found Emily lying beside the open grave. He pushed through the crowd and knelt beside her. The ground around her had been churned to mud. The company men were caring for the models. A few of them still had their guns out. One walked over and put six bullets in the gunman, his body bouncing with each shot. Allen wondered if he was bulletproof.
He could not tell, in the confusion, if she had been hit. He did not know if the blood at her throat, in the soft empty place her tattoos did not cover, was hers. How could he, he would think later, when there was so much of it everywhere? You can’t cover enough to stop every contingency, he thought. He would have to tell her that one, get her to draw it, though he knew, as soon as he said it, that her bosses wouldn’t like it.
“Are you all right?” he said, cradling her head in his lap.
She nodded, but it could have meant anything. Her hand was cold on his cheek. She blinked back the tears the wind had torn from her. For once she wasn’t stoned, and he could see in her eyes the realization of how awful everything was.
“How stupid we were,” she said. Her voice came as slow as her shallow breath. She looked up at the grey clouds. “So stupid to believe something as simple as ink could protect us.” In her eyes, he could see the stars. “How ignorant to think it could be that easy.”
About the Author
Paul Crenshaw’s essay collection This One Will Hurt You will be published by The Ohio State University Press in spring 2019. His second collection of essays is scheduled for publication by the University of North Carolina Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review and Brevity, among others.
Editor’s Note
This exploration of a particularly wrong-headed approach to gun safety has a murderous sheen to it, complete with the glossy shine of advertising provided by Emily’s efforts. This is a world where going outside becomes a terrifying act, venturing into the place where, as she says, “The air is all bullets,” and the night is “all cordite and fear.” Here, as with many of the other stories, the rich are protected from the world they’ve created, and we see grotesqueries like her campaign slogan, “Bullets bounce off black babies.”
America’s efforts at gun safety have seen some impetus lately, mainly thanks to the activity and energy of the Parkland shooters. Here’s hoping this story seems hopelessly dated within the next decade, but it seems unlikely.
Call and Answer
Langley Hyde
Dear Tobias,
I miss how Eleanor used to answer the door with her solemn ‘Hello, Mama.’ I’d fold myself down into a hug, bringing her two-year-old body tight into mine as if that could make up for being away. It couldn’t. I miss how you’d hand me the baby, how he’d nuzzle his milk-damp face against me and try to chew on my jaw, because if he thought it was beautiful, into his mouth it went, and he thought I was beautiful.
I miss bitching at you.
I miss complaining about my building’s defunct heaters, about stupid phone calls from parents advocating for their twenty-year-old, embarrassed adult children, about being blamed for misplaced purchase orders. I miss hearing you whine about your students whining. I miss a
rguing about who’d do the dishes. I miss telling you off for doing a sloppy job at cleaning the cat box. How you’d interrupt me three pages before the end of every book. Every book, Tobias. For ten years. How did you do it? I even miss the bad, perfunctory sex we had when we were too exhausted to have good sex.
I miss reaching over in the night, touching you, finding you there.
Sorry. This is so self-indulgent. Writing a letter on paper, right? We call via videochat every Sunday, email more often. I see our babies each week, growing larger like a series of snapshots. What can I tell you about my day?
What could I possibly be doing that the NSA wouldn’t approve of?
I should burn this.
Dear Tobias,
Today a young woman peeked into my office. My first tip-off? Older than the average college student, closer to thirty. She sidled in. I couldn’t untangle her nervousness. Social anxiety? Fear? Was it because I was an authority figure? Was it because she was about to contact someone (me) regarding a certain illicit activity?
I offered a warm, disinterested smile, though my heart clamored. “What can I help you with?”
“I’m a prospective student,” she said. “I’m curious about the coursework for English Literature?”
The script. “What classes in particular?”
“Oh. Um. English 338? Women’s Lit?”
Check. “That’s no longer offered at this institution.”
I pushed a slip of paper toward her. A time and a place. If caught, I’ll deny I ever wrote it.
Every single time, Tobias, one of them comes to me I think she’s a Fundamentalist plant.
Dear Tobias,
Do you remember when we bought a car together and you had to run out to the old Subaru POS we’d driven into the dealership to grab the checkbook? It took you twenty minutes because we’d parked so far away. We hadn’t wanted to park near the dealership and its new cars because our POS with its battered front end embarrassed us. The entire time you were gone the car salesman talked about fetuses. How even at nine weeks old they can touch, they can hear, they can react to pain?