by Unknown
“I don’t even remember,” I admitted, lowering my battered corpse onto the couch. “Couple pills, a handful of electro-shots, a pre-game round of sake bombs—nothing too unusual, I don’t think. Jesus, did I really speak French?”
“Told me to go fuck myself,” she said. “Your tense was fantastic. Nearly native.”
I rubbed my head, trying to squeeze the headache out through my temples. “I failed French,” I said. “Switched to Spanish in my senior year and barely got a C.”
“At least you remembered what was useful,” she joked. “And the tattoo?”
“Steve suggested it,” I said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Thinking not so much now.”
She kinda smiled. “And what did you think was so important that you needed to get it permanently inked on your body?”
I examined it with a kind of scrutiny that would matter if I could read Japanese. “I think it says Dragon,” I said. “Dragons are cool, I guess. The lettering looks neat, and trust me, it could have been way worse.”
She picked her phone up off the coffee table and snapped a picture. “It doesn’t say ‘Dragon,’ ” she said, holding up a side-by-side comparison of my inflamed skin and a kanji on a white background. “It says Demon.”
“Still cool,” I snorted. “Maybe cooler. It could say ‘General Tso’s Goes Here,’ across my abs.”
“More like your gut,” she said. “And anyways, General Tso’s is Chinese.”
I scowled. “I was making a joke,” I said. But she still wasn’t laughing. “It really shouldn’t be that inflamed,” she insisted. “If the guy can’t even do the right kanji, he probably wasn’t exactly sanitary with the needle. You may have to get on the cocktail.”
“Unless it’s a goddamn screwdriver, I’m not interested in a cocktail.” But I knew she was right, and that’s what scared me the most.
She flipped around on her phone and got up to find a piece of paper. “There’s a clinic that’s open on the Upper West Side,” she said. “Ask for Christeen, she’s a friend of mine, she can get you what you need, and if you give her the address of the place where you got inked, she can send in the health inspector. You got insurance?”
“Thanks, Obamacare.”
“Get showered and dressed,” she said. “It’s only open until three; I’ll call ahead and let them know you’re coming. She’ll hold a spot for you. I tutored her idiot kid last year, she kinda owes me.”
I took the slip of paper she held out. “Thanks Luce,” I said. “When I get back, lunch is on me.”
“I’d insist,” she said, grinning.
Fuck, the subway was hot. I forgot the 6 wasn’t air-conditioned and the crowds only made it worse. The train lurched into 42nd Street and a fat guy in a fedora and a Family Guy T-shirt lurched against me. My arm hurt so bad it was all I could do not to scream. I thought about Luce and my dick got hard with rage and hate. After all this, she had better fucking sleep with me. There was no fucking reason not to except that she, like most women, got off on watching me sweat while she pranced around the apartment in those little boyshorts with her big ass hanging out. I got a tattoo for her, a tattoo that hurt like hell, and she sent me to the doctor like I was too stupid to do it myself.
The train started up again and I stumbled against a rail-thin blonde. My arm was crawling like scrambled porn and anxiety wound barbed wire around my chest as I thought about my audition. Why was I going through this, I wasn’t going to get in. Wait, what? I don’t take fucking ballet; it takes three drinks just to get me on the dance floor and you couldn’t exactly call what I do there dancing. There were too many people on this train, all brushing against my arm. Somewhere I wondered if my little brother was ever coming home, if all the numbers of the universe made sense, how beautiful my girlfriend was going to look when I handed her the ring in my pocket. …
When the train screeched to a halt at 77th I shoved and stumbled through the crowd to get out. A homeless dude with a cart full of beer cans knocked into me and I vomited canned tuna and Mad Dog onto the empty downtown rail. An MTA officer tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I gasped. “I just need some air.” The whole universe felt like it was crashing in on me; I couldn’t get my brain straight, I just needed a moment to clear it all out and start again. I swore that if I made it out of this alive, I was never, ever, letting some shot girl—no matter how fucking cute she was—spike my drink.
I huddled against a grimy metal girder until the path was clear enough to go through. Passing through the turnstile, I brushed against a Moby-looking douche with a Steely Dan T-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, making a mental note to swing over to Bleeker Street Records and see if they’d managed to find me a copy of Kamakiriad.
I stumbled across the street, taxi horns snarling at me, and flopped onto a park bench. I fumbled for my phone, exerting all my last effort to find Luce’s number. “You have to come get me,” I said. “I think I’m losing my fucking mind.”
“Where are you?”
“Meet me at Pretzel Logic,” I said.
“What?”
“Pretzel Logic!” I insisted. In my head it made perfect sense. How was she not getting this?
And then she got it. “Fifth Avenue and 79th,” she said. “Miner’s Gate. Why didn’t you just say that?”
“I don’t know,” I moaned. I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything, nothing made any fucking sense. “Just please come get me before I wind up naked screaming about the cyborg invasion.”
“Too late for that,” she said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Luce arrived after 40 long minutes, armed with a cold bottle of water. She let me have a sip before she pressed it to my sweaty forehead. By now, the chatter in my head had ceased and I felt almost normal again.
“Your tattoo looks different,” she said.
I glanced down. “How the hell would you know?”
She took another picture with her phone and held it up. “Because now it says Sound.”
That explained the Steely Dan reference but it didn’t explain anything else. “What the fuck?” I said. “Why the fuck would I get a sound tattoo?”
She touched my arm and I swore my teeth were going to break from how hard I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming. She took another picture. “Now it says Rabbit.”
“They are cute little buggers,” I hissed, holding back tears of pain. “We should get one for the apartment.” Fuck, what the hell was I saying?
“Drink,” she said, passing me the water bottle again. “When you get steady, we’re going to go find this tattoo shop and find out what the hell is going on.”
“What about the doctor’s?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You’ve got much bigger problems than a doctor is going to be able to solve.”
We took a cab down to Little Toke, and by the time we arrived I wasn’t bugging out as much and my tattoo—as well as my affection for rabbits—had returned to normal, even if normal was “Demon” and not “Dragon” like I’d fucking asked for. I reached into my pocket for my wallet to pay for the cab and my hand wrapped around a small package. “Here,” I said, passing it to her. “I bought this for you, thought you would think it was cute. Forgot I had it.”
She unwrapped it and smiled in a way I’d never seen her smile before. “Aww, thank you.” She hung it around her neck and it nestled perfectly between her tits. “Where did you find this?”
“Drunk purchase,” I admitted. “Think I got it about a block from where I got the tattoo.”
“If we can find that store, then we should be able to find the tattoo parlor,” she said. “Guess we’ll just have to retrace your steps.”
Little Toke was like a broken-down carnival in the daytime. Without the night sky, the neon signs looked like construction paper. Decker’s was closed down and dingy
; gone were the shot girls with their lollipop hair and white panties and in their place were girls with panda backpacks and enormous striped knee socks who might have been fuckably cute under cover of darkness. Now they all looked like molly-fueled nightmares.
We found the trinket shop with all the Gucci knockoffs and stolen iPhones, but I noticed they didn’t have another rabbit necklace in place of the one I bought Luce. She asked about a tattoo shop. The owner just shook his head, but I wasn’t exactly surprised. Probably thought she was a cop. No one answered questions in Little Toke.
We trolled down every street with no luck. We even ventured back out into the outer blocks, where life went back to the normal New York pace. We found every other landmark of the night, but not even an empty storefront or a set of metal shutters where the shop should have been. Now I was fully convinced I was losing my mind, and only the tattoo itself proved that I was still sane.
We went to Bento Friday even though I wasn’t hungry. I sipped on some miso while Luce ate dumplings and thought out loud. “And you’re sure you got it here?” she said. “Not Chinatown?”
“Steve and I ate here and then I walked home,” I said. “It was in Little Toke, I’m sure.”
She slurped her tea in a way that sounded like thunder. “The phantom tattoo shop,” she joked. “Sounds like a bad movie.”
“It’s not funny,” I said. “What the hell am I going to do, Luce? I’m probably possessed.”
She peeled off her cardigan and passed it to me across the table. “Try something for me,” she said. “Cover it up, see if that helps.”
I obeyed and she tapped my wrist. Nothing changed. I let out a sigh of relief that felt like it had been held in my chest for a decade. “Guess that solves that,” I said. “But there goes my summer wardrobe.”
Every few days Luce would come up with some new exorcism technique to try out on me. She smeared my arm with garlic paste and I spent an hour scrubbing the stink out of my pores, prattling on about how my best friend stole my tenth-grade boyfriend. Holy water and head-shop candles, lines of salt, packets of herbs. We humored each other, but at the end of the day, I still had that ugly ink scarring up my flesh, waiting to transform me.
Every time she touched me with her latest sure-fire remedy, I got another little glimpse into her, fragments of her life she’d never revealed to me, to anyone. I cried at the memory of the boyfriend who’d moved to Italy without saying goodbye, I got frustrated at the rich little pricks who wouldn’t practice their fucking past tense, and I got these awful, near-unbearable cravings for brie baked in pastry. And for each thing I learned by becoming her for a few hours, I offered up to her a little unspoken piece of myself—that I was fucking terrified of thunderstorms. That my dad died of cancer when I was eleven and is probably the reason that I always start bawling when James Cromwell says “That’ll do, pig” in Babe, that I’ve always wanted to sing the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” at karaoke but never had the guts.
And then, one night as we sat drinking whiskey and ginger in front of the TV, she kissed me. I kissed her back. And when she tugged me into her bedroom and undressed me, I tried to leave the silver-threaded cowboy shirt on and my tattoo covered. “Take it off,” she insisted. “There’s nothing it can tell you that you don’t already know about me.”
An hour later we were sweaty and happy and eating cold sesame noodles in bed. I’d never had sex that good and I made Luce come twice—not just because she left scratches down my shoulders, but I felt her orgasm just like I was feeling my own. “What does it say now?” I asked, turning over my wrist.
She grabbed her phone and took a photo. “Your little demon is cheeky,” she said, laughing. “It reads Lewd.”
Luce had stayed late after school to chaperone a dance, so I had the apartment to myself for the night. I thought the knock at the door was the Thai food I ordered, so when I answered it and found Steve, eyes glassy and mouth half-opened, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. “You’re not answering my calls, so I figured I’d just come over,” he said. “Been a while, man, let’s go out!”
“I’ve got takeout coming. …” It wasn’t an excuse I’d ever use, but the more I hung out with Luce, the less I wanted to see Steve. We hadn’t even left and I was already dreading the hangover, the inane conversations, the loud screeches of girls over the terrible DJ. I just wanted to eat my pad Thai, catch up on Netflix and wait for Luce to get home.
“Fuck takeout,” he said. “I know what you really want to eat, and I’ve got an idea of where we can find some pretty tasty girls.” He grinned. He had on a fat purple tie and a silver shirt and it didn’t look right. “Come on, we haven’t hung out in ages. I’ll look like a psychopath if I go out alone again.”
“So, I touch it, and you take on my personality?” said the girl with her legs draped over mine. I don’t even remember how we got on the conversation, but I found myself explaining all of it to Steve as we walked to Decker’s. After a couple drinks, he found us some girls and shared the whole story, embellishing it as only Steve could.
I drained my drink and set the empty glass down on the glowing table. “Yep,” I replied, rolling up my sleeve. “Go on, try it out.”
She tapped my arm and I felt a sinister euphoria. I pulled the girl in close and slid my hand between her legs. She let me even though we both knew that I wasn’t what she wanted. “You’re getting the next round, right Steve?” I asked. “And don’t be cheap, come on, we’re worth it. Hey! Waitress! Let’s get some Grey Goose over here!”
The severe blonde on Steve’s lap leaned over and tried next. Nauseous anxiety came in waves. “Excuse me,” I said, edging my way out of the booth. If I didn’t get to a bathroom soon, I was going to ruin everyone’s night. God damn it, why did I even roll up my sleeve? I stumbled into the men’s room and barely made it into the stall before I found my finger down my throat. I hadn’t eaten since lunch so nothing much came out, but I was overwhelmed with shame and an insatiable hunger like I’d never felt. I made a mental note not to let those two wheedle us into late-night sushi or I’d have to take out a bank loan to pay the bill.
I hung around the bathroom until I got human again. By the time I got back to the table, they had already started the vodka and both girls were so hammered they were falling all over Steve’s lap with wet, obnoxious laughter. I just wanted to go home. Maybe Luce would be back and we could hit the karaoke bar down the street while I was just drunk enough to consider a Spice Girls duet. Or stay in and watch TV. Or hop back into bed and go another round like we did the other night. Anything but hanging around here with these two skanks and Steve, who was getting more irritating by the goddamn minute.
Steve grabbed my arm with a hand like fire. He shoved a glass in my hand. “You gotta catch up,” he said, reaching over to jiggle the bulimic blonde’s left tit. “We got big plans for these two.”
“Hey.” Someone shook my shoulder. “Hey, Vance, you all right?”
It took all the energy I had left to peel open my eyes and see the blurry figure of Luce standing over me. It took another half-minute to realize I was slumped against the stove in our kitchen, and a fraction of a moment more for the headache and the nausea and the muscle strain to set in. “Luce …” I mumbled, using all the energy I had left. “Luce, I’m sorry.”
“What happened to you?” she asked.
In between speaking to her and her reply, I had fallen asleep again. I jolted back awake and she pressed a glass of water into my hands. The condensation turned to mud on my palms. I had some strange memory of being in the park. Had we gone there to fuck those girls? Must be. But my dick didn’t have that tingling, post-cum emptiness; I didn’t feel any remnants of orgasmic bliss. My arms hurt. My hands were blistered. And my tattoo felt more like a fresh brand, cracked and singed and still smoking around the edges.
“Think you can stand?” she asked.
I nodded and she
made sure to roll down my sleeve before she hauled me to my feet. She draped me over her shoulder and led me to the couch. “You’re a fucking mess,” she said. “But you can clean the apartment in the morning.”
I woke up knowing something bad had happened. It wasn’t just the hangover, crippling as it was. My back hurt. My shirt and pants were caked with dirt. And I had this terrible gnawing in the pit of my stomach that told me I’d done something unforgivable.
Luce made us a pot of coffee and didn’t say much. “All right,” I finally said, half a cup in. “Care to fill me in on last night?”
“You were passed out by the stove when I got in,” she said. “What the hell did you drink? You looked like you got dragged behind a tractor.”
“That’s about what I feel like,” I said. “Only had the usual, probably less than I normally drink when I’m out with Steve. Don’t know why I feel so shitty, though. Maybe the girls spiked it with something.” The girls. The gold digger and her bulimic friend. I could see them clearly in the club’s dim light, them and the ice in their empty glasses, the bathroom and my hand on one pilates-skinny thigh … and not much else.
She snorted. “Or maybe you drank from the wrong glass, got whatever Steve slipped them.”
And then it all made some sort of horrible sense. In the back of my mind I heard screams and sobs, girlish pleas to just let them go home. And there was Steve, with his zipper down and his dick out, his fat purple tie swinging from his dirty hands.
Then only one set of tears.
Then silence.
“Shit,” I gasped, rolling up my sleeve. “Shit, oh fuck, Luce, what does my tattoo say?”
She took a picture with her phone and held it up. “It says Kill.”
The bodies of the two girls Steve and I drank with—Shanna and Nikki—were found half-buried in Hudson River Park earlier that morning by a woman walking her dogs. Both had been strangled; only Shanna had been raped. Except it wasn’t rape, I wanted to tell the newscaster. That’s why we’d gone to Hudson River Park. She’d given it up willingly, or at least as willingly as a girl drunk out of her fucking skull can. Nikki had offered to suck me off, but I couldn’t get hard enough and she just laughed. I remember telling her to go fuck herself. I remember stumbling onto the path and slumping down on a bench. Then came the screams, the soft dirt under my hands, and then I was home.