by Martha Ronk
After a few weeks passed in which she had stayed away on purpose, she found herself thinking of black and white cones, of sand and stone and shapes, and it was all she could think of. Had he learned, she wondered, to fire a gun, and had he really been in the army? Why would the world come to an end just now and why would he think so? She thought about how easily things passed away. If she didn’t see him, perhaps these thoughts would go away; she thought maybe if she just didn’t see him or if she stopped putting her thumb into the slight indentation on the way up the stairs. I’ve stopped, she told herself. I’ll never do it again. It’s the same thing, however, she knew, it was the same always to do something or always not to do it. She didn’t go back. Sometimes she’d ask a casual question of someone, but no one ever responded in a way particular enough to let her know.
She decided to paint her living room and moved all the furniture into the middle and covered it all with old sheets so that the room was transformed into a figure of sorts, one draped chair positioned against another. She bought paint and looked at everything rearranged. In the corner the original paint was still bright, and from the wall emerged a shape she was startled to recognize.
The Tattoo
First he had faces done in the crook of his elbow, small elegant faces with hooked noses and flat cheekbones. Then, overlaid across the top of the faces, came zigzag designs as if the faces were peering out from behind ornate screens or trying to escape the foliage of interlocking vines, the loopy arrangement of what looked to be organic, intestinal. Each time he went back the faces were more obscured, and yet perhaps because they were so hard to make out, they took on a kind of salience so that although at first it had been possible to take them, if not for granted, but just to take them, afterwards they seemed to announce something. Why didn’t he take on some other area of his body she wondered, why did he keep returning to the same right arm, fingers even, like a person who knows it’s time to move, but keeps on in the same apartment piling up books and knowing it is time to move someplace bigger where the neighbors don’t scream that they’ll pull their kids’ arms out of their sockets. She counted the layers of tattoos across his right arm, like a filmy layer that could be lifted off like Chinese paper cutouts in a shop she’d found, flimsy, delicate, concise. He wore only long-sleeved button-down shirts, blue, the left sleeve rolled down and buttoned at the wrist, always a bit short on his long arm, the other rolled up high exposing the tattoos, the whole thing extremely and properly contrived.
He wrote letters in longhand, precise cursive script, the sort practiced in elementary school. He left notes around, each one done in that perfect hard pressed ballpoint script that went through to layers beneath, leaving a message pressed into the yellow pad after the top layer had been torn off and crumpled. He left a note on the box of coffee filters: Use two. And on the coffee cup: Soak in bleach. And on the front table: I’ve gone for a few days. She studied the curves of the letters for clues, but was unable to detect anything definitive and when he returned she didn’t ask. She didn’t know why; it simply seemed intrusive and against some set of rules she thought might be in place, so she opted for the elegance of silence. He asked if she had soaked the cups.
You go on for such a long time when nothing happens, nothing out of the ordinary, so you assume it will go on for quite a long time, not forever, no one thinks forever, but for quite a long time. And then things clump together freakishly: your dog dies, you have an accident coming out of the car wash and your wrist doesn’t heal, your friend turns spidery thin, thinner than you could have imagined and her hair falls out like your mother’s before she died, and you’re caught in a pocket of turbulence you can’t seem to get out of. You know it won’t go on forever, but you can’t get it out of your voice on the phone, that edge is there even when you try to relax and breathe and everyone has long since stopped noting it. It becomes a usual hitch, a usual way people think of you.
You are startled that ordinary ventures that once seemed so ordinary even in the days when you were trying to be hypersensitive, turn out to be trials for you. Now you have to be pushed onto the road to go where you’d planned to go in the first place and talk to your heart to keep it from pounding in your mouth. You breathe into a paper bag. Someone tells you to try acupuncture—it made her want to rush right out and eat a steak she says—and so you try it and drive to the corner afterwards and can’t remember whether to turn right or left, and although you have the directions written out, you can’t seem to reverse left and right in order to get back on track and you feel limp, unable to get a breath, and you can’t imagine, although she had insisted it was true, that she’d been positively ravenous.
Watching him, she thought to say, you duck your head as if you’re being cuffed, and wondered why she thought of cuffed and the kids who’d lived next door whose father said, do that again and I’ll pull your arms out of your sockets. From the top floor of the apartment she could look down into their back bit of yard by the garage. Four or five children, hair wispy and thin, were there playing with sticks, a small matchbox truck, a broom. One rode around and around on the broom shouting something she couldn’t hear. One nursed a doll, its hair brushed back from its forehead again and again in meaningless repetition, hay-like stuff. It refused to lie flat. She looked across the room at him. His head jerked to the side when he was concentrating on something or when he sat to write. He wants someone to hit him, she thought.
It’s the overlap that gets you, that you can’t stop thinking about. You are in one place but you know that in a few days or even, and this happens quite often, a few hours, you will be standing someplace else and you can smell the airport or the pissy metallic air of the train and although you try to hang onto where you are and look at the tree outside the window, anchored there, or you fold up napkins in smaller and smaller squares, you can’t help being in one of those dislocations that is so ordinary, not preposterous at all, and therefore eminently dismissible, and you find yourself queasy. You keep saying: knock against something, push over a chair, crack your knuckles on the door. But you see yourself going under the arch at the airport security where sometimes someone sets it off, and you are there looking at their keys in the tray or at the camera. Someone keeps asking will the film be OK, and someone has always bought something at Macy’s, a large red towel stuffed into a paper shopping bag that is already tearing at the edges, although he has just started his trip home, and you wonder why he bought a towel on his vacation when you can get a towel anywhere, and it gets caught against another suitcase on the ramp and he is tying it up with a small rope he has in his left pocket, and you wonder how he knew to bring a small rope for tying up a bag that hadn’t ripped when he started out.
He’s gone back for more tattoos. He keeps getting them on the same arm and hand and perhaps, although she can’t quite see underneath the roll of his oxford cloth shirt, the designs go up and up even to his shoulder and over the crest of his shoulder and onto his back. She can’t help wondering where they go and when they will stop. He has a friend who does them at cut rate so it doesn’t cost him so much and he can discuss what sorts at great length and so they spend hours at it. Most are of pre-Columbian design. He wants to have a collection of precious and previously owned pottery, but he settles for making himself a sort of collectable, a piece of what he would wish to own. He’s got all sorts of books to authenticate the designs and he keeps adding to his collection of books and to the lines in color across his arm that don’t, as tattoos often do, announce anything, but rather keep the message hidden in abstraction. No ”mother” or “J” or even rippling snakes. His are rare, overlapped, elaborate. She keeps thinking it must be excruciating to have a needle go in and out, in and out, stitching the skin of one’s own body, but he doesn’t let her go with him and watch. When he catches her staring at his arm, he turns on the TV and sits against the chair at an angle to blot her out and she washes dishes more carefully then and uses bleach with an old toothbrush on the tile.
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nbsp; One day when she returned she found the set of steak knives someone had given her as a birthday present missing, the entire set unused and resting side by side like Egyptian mummies, missing. It was the only thing she couldn’t locate; she checked around and although she didn’t have much of value, there were things a thief might have taken and her jewelry, easily accessible in a wooden box on top of the dresser, was still there. Only later in the week when she happened to look down on the lot next door did she see the kids carving x’s and o’s in the caked dirt with the knives, making elaborate roadways for the truck, printing out letters sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards as children do. The girl was sitting apart with the doll, sawing on an arm. They didn’t seem to be after each other as one might have anticipated, but moved in a hungry slow sort of motion, focused only on that small ring of a world they lived in.
Your hands grow dry from the Clorox and cleaning. You buy rubber gloves but forget to put them on. You were warned your skin would grow dry and scaly and you always try to remember, but you are in the middle of something before you remember, sprinting into it before you think of where you are going and by then it is too late. You are soaking the cups, you are scrubbing in between kitchen tiles, tiles too old and stained ever to come clean no matter how much time is spent scrubbing late into the night but when you can’t sleep that’s when it’s good to get up and do something, to change things, if only the smell of things. It’s like being asleep anyhow, over and over, and afterwards you sleep, if you’re lucky, the sleep of the blessed, quiet, still, wrapped up tight in a summer sheet. It’s only later you begin to worry at your cuticles, tearing at the dry bits of skin for the ache of relief.
He’d bought one small rug and it too had zigzags across it, like his arm, his favorite sweater, his guinea hen, stuffed and dusty and on the shelf she wasn’t supposed to notice; who’d given him such a thing and why had he carried it about, this child’s toy, for so many years. When the yarn unraveled at the cuff of the sweater, it took on that same zigzag pattern, that repetition she locked on to. She saw the sweater hanging on a hook in the front hall where she’d painted the floorboards white, deck white; the salesman at the hardware warned her but she wanted to bring in light and order, to remake the dirty and scuffed floor in the image of a deck beneath a deck chair that would look out over the sea and away. Now it was, as the salesman had said it would be, smudged and dirty, though surreptitiously and late at night she wet it down with the corner of a rag, hooked over a forefinger, the small sections in front of the coat rack, clean and slippery, pale as an egg.
The face on his arm was contorted either with pleasure or pain, something occurring somewhere deep in its anatomy, off-screen, off the arm, out of the frame. The teeth of St. Sebastian, the pearly white drops of Mantegna’s Sebastian, eyes raised and arrows through the skin and into the groin, those unexpected doll-like teeth between slightly parted lips. They looked fake like bits of tile, painted and varnished and polished. This was not a smile, clearly not. Some piece of anatomy was out of range, was being pulled or stretched or pierced and she sometimes wished the entire face would disappear in a tangle of lines and bloody dots so she wouldn’t have to think anymore.
She wondered when it would all end. The Thai restaurant she used to go to had been turned into a tattoo parlor; the woman who sold pliers and screws at the hardware store had butterflies all over her arm; the man at the video store pulled up his shirt to show her. She knew it would all heal soon, she’d seen it before. She’d read a story about a Japanese tattooer who fell madly in love with the ankle of a woman who passed in a flash past the door of his shop and for years he waited for her to return and when she did he drugged her and tattooed an enormous spider across her smooth white back.
She felt evaporated like a line of paper dolls, not just one body flattened and about to go up in smoke, but a whole line of them. She had made such dolls as a child and had always begged her mother to burn them at the end of the day. She’d sit in front of the fire and watch them curl up and turn brown at the edges of their skirts and then disappear. Her mother wanted her to keep them in a box or wait to show them off, but she wasn’t interested in anything but the making and unmaking, the pleasure of a long line of intricate and identical dolls, gone. She began with the sorts of scissors made for children, clumsy and with rubberized handles, graduated to her mother’s sewing scissors, and one Christmas was given a small pair of scissors in the shape of a bird. Finally, however, she had to use nail scissors, the tiniest of nail scissors to get the proper angles and proportions. The best cutouts had hair that stuck in peaks and looked thin and frayed; they lay there across the log tranquil and white, waiting for the match. It was and remained the most exquisite of moments, finally calm.
He began to write more notes for her than before, many more notes, but then they were mysteriously missing. He wrote and wrote late into the night, but then, for reasons she didn’t understand, he took them away with him when he left in the morning, both shirt sleeves down and buttoned. On the paper pads left scattered through the apartment were, however, the pressings and indentations of his ballpoint, the short ones she could fairly easily make out—soak the coffee cups or remember to buy coffee—but longer ones about some book he’d been reading, notes on the conquest of America or the practices of the Mayans, in which she could almost make out quotations. The impress was so strong and the pads so obviously placed for her to find, she knew she was supposed to know some version of a pleasure. If I match the markings with the books, she thought, if I find the quotation in a book, I’ll be able to read it there, if I can only match the swirls and curves, which she couldn’t.
The text of the altar, carved on top around the edge, is eroded. It has been impossible to restore the carved stela to its original condition, as many fragments are missing. It is suspected that Postclassic peoples tampered with the shattered stela, or may even have broken it themselves. Although it is clear that the figure turned to the frontal position, naked but for loincloth and ornate slippers, is human, and that the profile is that of a jaguar, it is impossible to know whether it is a human dressed to be the jaguar, or the jaguar taking on human guise.
Something else changed. He adopted a new and, she found, quite disconcerting habit. Instead of hiding when she stared at his arm, he made himself available. He draped his arm across the arm of a chair, unbuttoned his blue shirts, so that his chest showed, hollow, white, his arm open to full view. Instead of having to work to see the new designs, she found them put on display: curlicues and more bands with red and black flecks, faces caught in the filigree of leaves, hair that snaked across foreheads and lines that broke and joined and broke again. She could hardly stand to walk into the room where he sat, could hardly stand the blare of his arm. Animals she couldn’t recognize bared their teeth, beaks clamped, headdresses coiled and feathered into the air. You look as if you want someone to burn you up, throw you out. You look as if you want to be thrown against the wall.
She sat down to read the newspaper. When she couldn’t look any longer at the jumble of e’s and o’s and m’s in front of her, a story she thought about a recent plane crash, although she couldn’t be sure, and thought, you have to have your eyes checked, yes, that’s what you ought to do and she thought to write it down so she wouldn’t forget, but felt herself drawn into the other room where he sat, moving his arm out along the chair, and as she watched it seemed to get longer, seemed to extend beyond the wooden knob at the end of the overstuffed chair and out into the room. It was almost black with design, almost completely filled in as if his purpose had been almost fulfilled, and he were finally content. And she too felt a sort of heavy contentment like a mantel of feathers come over her shoulders and down her back. It could have been a tangled mat of black hair coating his arm, so thick the lines had become and would feel fuzzy like hair, the skin broken and healed over, lines turned to hair. She felt for the raw edge of her thumb, the broken and raw cuticle, moving forefinger over thumb again and again.
She felt her face burn and was sure that without moving and without lifting his hand into the air which was so smoky and thick to burn her eyes and make her blink back the watering, making it more and more difficult to keep the healing lines in any semblance of focus, he would hit her flat across the left side of her face, a clear ancient profile against the white of the wall.
Her Subject/His Subject
When I raise my arm I do not usually try to raise it (Wenn ich meinen Arm hebe, versuche ich meistens nichts, ihn zu heben).
—Wittgenstein
Her subject is people in landscapes of estrangement; his subject is the landscape. You are never looking out the window, he says to her. Here you are driving through the most beautiful section of the California coast, and you are talking to me about a novel you are reading, the words on the pages, the characters’ clothes. I am in the scotch broom, he says, and yes, he seems to be as far as I can tell, and he is right I am not. It is everywhere on the side of the hill wherever the redwoods take a break and one ought to smell its sweet smell but all I can smell is eucalyptus and that’s what grows by my bedroom window at home.
We drive for hours. He thinks about the fog blowing in off the ocean. It drifts over the fields and over the road. One moment we can’t see the road, the next it is clear. Sometimes he is talking about his subject and sometimes not, but it is always what’s there. When we stop at a rest stop and look out over the view he knows how the gullies were formed, what the weather patterns will be, which ridges connect north and south.
To me the foggy blur over the tops of trees is a mental affair. You hold in your mind another time and live there in that other imagined time while the present time, new and raw in some way, presses for attention. But the other time is held like a fragile glass, transparent but up close in front of one’s face. This is a practice from childhood. It serves no purpose except to counter the insistence of present time and to block it a bit. I can’t remember when I haven’t done this. Being in two places at one time. This is my definition of a person, I say, as if I were saying something definitive and true. He thinks I’m trying to be clever.