The Tattoo Artist: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jill Ciment

  For the next fifteen minutes or so, I watched as the tiny cloud changed from a smokestack into a waterspout, a rain curtain, an armada, a guano-stained rock islet, until the white shimmer finally stabilized as the prow of an ocean liner. Gulls were wheeling above it.

  I got to my feet and started batting my arms above my head.

  The ship was still miles away. No one on board, of course, could see me. At most, the beach was now only visible in the mate’s binoculars.

  I eased myself off the boulder, picked up the largest palm frond I could find, then hurried to the place on the beach where I figured I could best be spotted, on the highest, bone-white dune.

  I didn’t need to turn around. I knew the islanders were right behind me, watching my every move from within the forest. They’d probably spotted the ship long before I had.

  I didn’t make a sound or tense a muscle, lest I provoke them before someone on board had a chance to see me.

  Only when the ship reached the outer reef, a mile at most offshore, only when the skiff was lowered into the water and the two sailors clambered aboard, only then did I wave my frond above my head like a football pennant and shriek.

  The islanders didn’t try to stop me. Quite the contrary. They ran onto the beach beside me, a hundred to my left, a hundred to my right. They were dressed in their full “welcome” regalia—foot-long penis gourds and straw skirts. A half dozen of the young men wore Philip’s red-striped boxer shorts and my lace brassieres: they wore them as headdresses. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the dune’s crest, they formed their great tapestry again, of which I was now evidently a panel. I was woven into the living cloth between the old woman and a warrior.

  Everyone who could find a palm frond picked one up and shook it at the sailors in mimicry of me.

  I threw down my frond and raised my arms to alert the sailors that I was the white woman for whom they were looking, and the islanders threw down their fronds and pointed to themselves. When I jumped up and down, shouting for the sailors to hurry up and rescue me, the islanders jumped up and down and shouted for the sailors to hurry up and rescue them. When I finally broke ranks and plunged into the surf, screaming for the sailors to save me, the islanders ran into the waves, screaming for the sailors to save them.

  From a hundred yards out, I doubt the sailors could distinguish one of us from another. My face, after all, was tattooed. I was practically naked. My hair, though red, was every bit as kinky as a Ta’un’uuan’s.

  All the sailors must have seen were screaming, gesticulating natives, of which I was merely the loudest and most hysterical.

  They did not venture closer. They stopped and idled the skiff just outside the fringing reef. One scanned the shore with a pair of binoculars while the other wielded an oar, like a club, threatening the warriors not to swim toward them.

  I was kneeling in the draining tide—sand-crusted, waterlogged, hoarse from shouting. I still thought I was distinguishable from the islanders, that all I needed to do to be rescued was to get the sailors to really look at me.

  I rose up, streaming sea grass and salt water, and screamed till my throat went raw, and the Ta’un’uuans stood up and screamed, too.

  The sailors shot off a flare. It corkscrewed across the low sky.

  I suddenly remembered that Philip and I had been given a box of flares to signal back when the time came. I ran to the dune where I thought our camp had been and started clawing through the sand for flares. Without breaking ranks, the islanders ran with me, dropped to their knees, and searched, too.

  To those on deck about to have their second afternoon cocktail, we probably looked like a flock of sandpipers hunting for crabs.

  The sailors gunned the skiff, then slowly paralleled the shore, careful not to veer any closer. They both scoured the jungle with binoculars, stopping now and again to shoot off a flare.

  The Ta’un’uuans and I watched as the flaming white tracers looped overhead.

  When the sailors had practically circumnavigated the island, when they’d used up all their flares and still gotten no response, not even so much as a plume of signal smoke or a flash of mirror, they headed back to the ship and were hoisted aboard.

  The ship blasted its horn and fired off a dozen more flares.

  I stood atop my dune, waving my arms like a semaphore.

  The islanders didn’t try to mimic me any longer. They assembled on either side of me and watched intently as the ship let loose one last rocket before beginning its turn to the north. Only when it became clear to them that their audience was sailing away did they abandon their posts, and the great tapestry tore apart around me.

  I sank down on the sand unable to take my eyes off the ship until it dissipated once again into vapor.

  I found Philip just before dusk. It wasn’t especially difficult. In my struggle to keep up with the old woman the night before, I had practically razed a one-lane highway across the island.

  He was sitting where I’d left him under the vaulted hull. As soon as I stepped on the plank floor, he turned his head in my direction. I couldn’t tell if he actually saw me or if he was merely following my footfalls.

  I sat down across from him and placed my hand over his. His thumb was torn and bleeding from picking at a splintery board while he’d waited. His left eye, the least swollen of the two, opened, just a notch.

  “Where are the sailors?” he asked.

  “You can see me, can’t you?”

  “Where are the ship and the sailors?”

  “They wouldn’t come ashore.”

  “What do you mean, they wouldn’t come ashore?”

  “When they didn’t see us or our camp, they wouldn’t come ashore.”

  “That makes no sense. How could they not see you, Sara?” I tried to gauge, from the sliver of blue awareness behind the black bar, just how much he could see.

  “Where are the sailors now?” he asked.

  “They left.”

  “They left, or the ship left?”

  “The ship.”

  “That’s not possible. We’re first-class passengers, for God’s sake. Richter paid for our tickets. He’s too important a man for them to just leave us here.”

  “They left us,” I said.

  “Of course they left us. They left to get help.” He shook his head stiffly, but his voice reached a register he only hit when frightened. And, of course, I could no longer read his expression. It was like trying to decipher meaning in, say, a pattern of sunlight or the design on an insect wing.

  “Someone has to come for us,” he said.

  He angled his head back the way a middle-aged man does when trying to focus on the fine print. His left eyelid drew almost completely open, then quickly shut.

  “Did you see me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Or you don’t want to know?”

  The lid slowly ascended. He looked straight at me.

  “You see me, Philip. What do you think the sailors saw?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Permanence is what gives the tattoo its power. A tattoo can’t be torn up in a fit of artistic frustration, or undersold at auction, or tossed into a bonfire to make a point. It can’t be dismissed by saying, “I’ll do it better next time.” Once written on the skin, a tattoo can never be undone, except, of course, by death.

  Philip closed his one good eye and didn’t open it again for the rest of the afternoon—whether to nurse it or to not look at me, I wasn’t sure. He sat on the stone steps making frenzied, hopeless plans for our rescue, as if he could succeed where I had failed. First light, we’d walk back to the beach and he’d find the missing flares. Next, he’d build two tower-high signal fires on each end of the cove and one up on the cliff. After that, we’d circumnavigate the whole island and build a hundred more. “That’s what you should have done, Sara, built a signal fire the second you reached the beach.”

  “With what?” I finally asked. “You have any matches? Becaus
e I sure as hell didn’t.”

  He fell silent, then slowly turned around until he faced me. He opened his eye once again. “Do I look like a monster?” he asked.

  I shook my head no, but so tentatively, it felt more like an admission than a denial.

  “I need to know, Sara.”

  “There are just a few thin lines.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “Six. Stripes. Running down your face.”

  “Over my eyelids?”

  “Yes.”

  “What color are they?”

  “Black.”

  “Where do they begin?”

  “At your hairline.”

  “End?”

  “Your jaw.”

  “Are they thick?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said six?”

  “Six.”

  He gingerly touched his face as if he was trying to count them.

  “What do I look like?” I finally asked.

  He let his hands fall away. “They’ll come off, Sara. Surely if they can build a skyscraper, they can remove our tattoos.”

  “What do I look like?” I asked again.

  His good eye suddenly filled with tears. He tried to blink them back, but they spilled over onto his striped face. “Not so bad, really. You look like you’re wearing a veil over your mouth.”

  “I didn’t lie to you.”

  “Your lips are black. There are half circles on your chin and—”

  “Stop looking at me!” I said.

  I tried to cover my face, but he took hold of my wrists, then gently drew me against him until I stopped sobbing. By the time I quieted down, all that remained of the day were flashes of heat lightning in the twilight and a streak of molten sea where the sun had set.

  We sat down side by side and waited for darkness to arrive as one would wait for a sedative to take effect.

  Sometime during the night, I heard Philip stirring. I’d been too frightened to fall asleep myself. I groped for his hand, but I couldn’t find it in the dark. There was no moon. The only hint of luminosity was the disks of stars visible through the hull’s portholes.

  “Sara, can you take me to the beach?”

  “I can’t even find your hand.”

  “We have to get back there as soon as we can and start a signal fire. We can use flint or bang together two sharp stones. A spark is all we need. If that doesn’t work, we can always steal fire from the villagers. Captain Hirata wouldn’t have just left us here. By now, he’s radioed someone, somewhere, for help. We need to be on the beach first light so they can find us. Maybe he just moved the ship away from the reef for the night, anchored it up the coast, and you just didn’t see him go there.”

  “I don’t think he’s anchored up the coast,” I said.

  “In any case, he’ll never find us if we stay here.” For a moment, his disembodied voice sounded so young and confident, so like my old Philip, that I almost gave in to it. Then I envisioned the black bars, and the bewildered wet blue eye looking out.

  “I’m not sure I want to be found,” I said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “How can we go home, Philip? Do you think we’ll just resume our old life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dinner with Richter at 21? Drinks in the Village afterward? How will we get there? Subway? Bus? Hail a cab?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who will stop for us?”

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  First light, I guided Philip back to the beach. He still shuffled like a blind man, his good eye watering shut whenever the sun struck it. In the forest’s shadows, however, I noticed that same eye managed surreptitiously to take in my profile.

  I knew what he was looking for because whenever he rested his eye, I searched his face for it, too—the childhood scar, a flash of pink lip, anything familiar, anything to assure me that he was still inside.

  About a hundred yards from where our camp had been, a fisherman stood knee-deep in the shallows, hauling in a net of undulating silver. He stopped to watch as Philip and I began dragging branches and logs out of the jungle and onto the dunes. He didn’t seem at all alarmed that we were trying to build a signal fire. Matter of fact, when Philip and I couldn’t incite so much as a hint of a spark by banging together two stones, he took pity on us, waded ashore and offered us a single match from a red and gold box he carried in his headband.

  Staring down at the tiny matchbox stranded on his tattooed palm, I was so taken aback by the lettering—WASHINGTON SQUARE HOTEL: CONVENIENT TO EVERYTHING!—that I almost forgot how it got there.

  I would have given years to have kept that box.

  Philip and I squandered the match in a draft of wind. The fisherman had to light our signal fire for us. As soon as he left, we stoked it until a thick plume of black smoke rose. Then Philip sat down to nurse his eyes. Cupping his hands over them to shut out the sun and smoke, he asked me to try and find him the same type of leaves the old woman had used as bandages. I stepped back into the jungle. None of the leaves looked familiar. I brought back an armful and let him pick.

  I stood on the dune beside him and kept watch.

  The sun continued its arc across the cloudless sky, the sea turned as flat as an ironed sheet, the horizon was a leaden pencil line dividing emptiness from nothing.

  Around noon, thirsty, dizzy, desperate to spot something, I swore I saw the sky tear open and discharge a flying speck. I shrieked, “A plane! A plane!” But it turned out to be an albatross.

  Philip finally removed the leaf poultices and tried to help me with the search, but he still couldn’t focus on anything farther away than his outstretched hand.

  We spent the night on the sheltered end of the beach, in a shallow cave notched into the base of a limestone cliff, huddled together spoon-fashion despite our sand-crusted, sunburnt bodies. We didn’t dare lie face-to-face.

  Two baked yams awaited us in the embers of our signal fire the next morning. We ate them in hot, tasteless fistfuls. That afternoon brought only a flock of white terns and an enormous gray pelican. The pelican landed on our diminishing woodpile, fluffed up its oily feathers, and surveyed the horizon with us. I think it was looking for its own kind, too. It only flew away when I tried to catch it for dinner.

  Early the next morning, Philip’s other eye opened at last. With both eyes working, he could measure distance, distinguish tint from shadow. If he squinted, he said, he could even make out some of the leaves on the trees. He insisted on standing first watch.

  I retreated to the cool, dark shadows of the cave while he mounted the dunes, clad only in his sarong. It hung from his hip bones in tatters. A blond shadow had begun to bloom on his chin and cheeks, like moss on a black rock. Watching him train his swollen eyes with anticipation on the vapory distance only brought me despair and the breathless panic that goes with it. Not only was he about to see what I’d known all along—that our smoke signaled only the birds—but he was also able to see me plainly now.

  By late afternoon, he was standing outside the cave. “They aren’t coming back,” he said softly.

  I was against the wall where the sun never reached, where the sand was almost chilly. “I already know.”

  “What do you want from me, Sara? I was wrong.”

  He beckoned me to step outside, and when I wouldn’t, led me out by my hand into the merciless sunlight. Picking up a stick, he sliced an X in the sand and said, “We’re here.” He then drew an outline of what I assumed was our island and made a dozen little pokes above it. “There are islets to the north. Maybe they thought we went there?”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “We’ll die if we stay here.”

  “That’s not true. They leave us food every night. There’s plenty of water.”

  “We can’t live on yams and water. Even if the Pearl left us here, they’ve sent out word. E
very ship in the area must be looking for us by now. We’re not that far from the shipping lanes. If we could just get past the reef, someone might spot us.” The blue ellipses shifted in the black bars, then fixed on one of the fisherman’s canoes, a hollowed-out log left on the beach.

  “You know I can’t swim,” I said.

  “We have no choice.”

  “Why not wait a little longer?”

  “How much longer? Until they stop looking for us altogether?”

  Just before dawn, we dragged the canoe down to the shore and pushed off at first light, paddling toward the milky blue channel in the reef. I must have back-paddled when he shouted “Fore,” or stopped when he shouted “Go,” because my half of the canoe entered the passageway sideways. When the first set of rollers broke over us, we tipped over. When the second set struck, I was shot down to the sandy bottom and sent tumbling into the reef. I opened my eyes to a blizzard of effervescence. I inhaled a lungful of water and tore my legs on the fiery coral. I lost all sense of up and down, solid or liquid, struggle or surrender. And just when numb serenity began to take hold, and I was certain I was home, the towering reef Manhattan’s skyline, Philip grabbed hold of my hair and yanked me up into the shocking air. He half-dragged, half-carried me to the shore and laid me down on the wet sand, pummeling my back until I retched up seawater. He was shaking more than I was. He then lay down by my side in the draining tide and held me.

  The sun had just cleared the mountaintops, and the water around us turned from red to tin to turquoise. Three fisherboys came out of the jungle and retrieved the canoe. It had washed up near the mangroves. They ferried it back to the shallows, then hauled it onto the beach.

  My shins were gouged, my blouse was gone, my ankles scraped raw.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  “I got into the canoe as willingly as you did.”

  “For bringing you here.”

  After that, the only thing we cast into the waves was a daily missive, a coconut on which we’d carved our names and whereabouts, the date, September 1939, and the fact we were Americans and stranded. We were only five hundred miles east of British New Guinea, eight hundred northeast of Australia. The coconuts had to wash up somewhere, eventually.