by Jill Ciment
Bare-breasted now, in my shredded linen pants, I worked on the lettering with a shell blade, while Philip, in the kerchief-sized remnant of his sarong, crushed a mix of berry juice and tree gum to dye the missives red so that they might catch the eye of the mate with the binoculars on the watch of a passing ship.
We were so depleted and dazed that we actually put stock in this plan.
Soon as a coconut was finished, Philip carried it along the slippery base of the cliff and hurled it over the reef into the racing current. If he missed, though, the coconut got trapped in the surge for days, tossed up by the waves, slammed against the rocks. From my vantage point on the beach, it looked like a tiny red ball of hope being batted against a wall by a bored giant.
Nights, of course, I’d set sail in my dreams. Sometimes Philip was with me, sometimes he wasn’t. The island would suddenly break free of its mooring on the ocean floor and drift east, float home. By next morning, it pulled right up to the Hudson piers, where a taxi awaited me. If Philip was along, we’d saunter down the bamboo gangplank arm in arm, miraculously dressed to the nines. Either our tattoos would have washed away in the salt air, or we could peel them off, like dead skin after a sunburn.
By Day Twenty-nine, awakening to find myself in the same dank cave, beside the same face that never failed momentarily to paralyze me, my only hope of rescue to carve my whereabouts on another coconut, I went berserk and bolted into the ocean, shouting for this to end, wanting to drown.
The tide was low. I ran for the exposed skyline of the reef. But when the first surge knocked me down and rolled over my head, I panicked and begged to live. The old woman appeared out of nowhere, grasped my flailing arms, and led me back to the beach.
I didn’t even thank her, merely sank down on the wet sand. By the time Philip reached me, I was looking through him, as a catatonic looks through a wall. When he urged me to come back to the cave, to rest, at least to get out of the sun, his beseeching logic sounded, to my ringing ears, like Surrealist poetry. Finally, he left a bowl of water by my side and set off to collect wood for the insatiable appetite of our signal fire.
The sand turned from damp to warm to scalding. By midmorning, I was burned back to my senses. I rose up on bandy legs and turned around. My savior had multiplied into a half-dozen old ladies watching me from behind a fence of jungle. I could just make out their tattooed faces amid the veiny leaves.
When Philip trudged back under a stack of wood, I jerked my chin in their direction. He squinted at the exact spot where I’d pointed. “I don’t see anyone,” he said.
I regained the power of speech. “Are you blind?”
A frond shimmered and a cone of hair stuck out. A dozen more villagers materialized in between the palms to our left. Even Philip saw them.
“What do they want from us now?” I whispered. “Haven’t they done enough to us already?”
“Maybe they’re just curious? Maybe they’ve been watching us all along.”
“Are we going to die here?”
“If they wanted us dead, Sara, they wouldn’t have saved you.”
“Maybe we are dead. Maybe this is hell.”
For the next hour or so, we ignored them, hoping against hope that by pretending not to see them they might grow bored with us and go away, keep their distance as before without forgoing our daily ration of food—yams mostly, but now and then a breadfruit, or a bunch of sweet bananas, or a smoked silverfish that tasted, to me at least, like sablefish.
Philip fed the fire while I scratched away at another missive. But I couldn’t concentrate. Now and again, a tattooed face peered at me from behind a fern and caught me unaware. It was as if I’d just glimpsed my own tattooed reflection in a flash of window glass.
By high noon, I couldn’t stand it another second. I strode into the jungle and approached the old woman. She was standing in front of the others now, a general before her troops. I thrust my face in front of hers and stared back.
But you can’t focus on a tattooed face for more than a second or two. The designs won’t allow it. They swim apart, then bleed together. They ripple like wind on still water, then freeze like cracks of air through ice. Only when my vision blurred and I surrendered myself to the deep blue fissures under her flesh did I finally grasp that tattoos aren’t written on the skin, they are written inside the skin. I wasn’t looking at her tattoos, I was falling into them.
I finally had to shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, Philip was standing beside me. “She won’t hurt you,” he said. He was staring at her face, too. “I’m not sure if we’re her prisoners or her pets, Sara, but I’m fairly certain she’s the one who’s been feeding us all along, the one who’s been keeping us alive.”
She motioned for Philip and me to follow her back to the village, but I couldn’t move.
“Stay with me,” I pleaded, but he had already started down the path behind her. I hurried after them.
The old woman had already climbed up onto the twelve-foot-high veranda of a stilted straw house by the time I reached the outskirts of the village. Philip was standing on the top notch of its trunk ladder. This house stood apart from the neat rows of other tree-high abodes, away from the pigs and the steaming earth mounds and the curious onlookers, at the base of a mountain. I hobbled over in my bare feet and Philip helped me up.
Through the low doorway, in the center of the smoky room, a man knelt over a woman, his back to us. He had been painted all over with white clay. Even the soles of his tattooed feet had been painted out with clay. The woman beneath him, a bag of bones, lay supine. Her head had been shaved.
The ladder creaked and the clay man spun around. Despite his white mask, I recognized Ishmael.
The woman on the floor also turned her head to stare, but I doubt she saw us. Her eyes looked as dead as marbles. I recognized her, too. She was the woman who had quietly wept in the corner while Ishmael and the old woman had worked on my face. She closed her eyes. Without the obscuring marbles, she looked just like her dead granddaughter.
Turning his attention back to his wife, Ishmael pressed his brow against hers and began singing, as if to woo her back to life with his voice. Bowls of ink surrounded them, a needle was in his hand. Exhaling one long note, he dipped the needle into the pot of indigo and brought it dripping to her throat, but he didn’t incise her. He simply painted in the gouges she’d already made with her own fingernails. You could see she’d been tearing at her skin for weeks. Raw lines ran down her neck. Under the barely healed scars, strings of indigo and turquoise, yellow and viridian were visible. In places, her scarred neck was so covered in bright, festive threads that it looked as if Ishmael had been trying to stitch her grief closed with pure color.
“We should leave,” I whispered. “Leave them alone.”
I tried to take Philip’s hand, but he wouldn’t come with me. When I stumbled down the ladder, he didn’t even turn around. I left him transfixed on the top rung and made my way back to the cave alone.
Philip returned just as dusk fell and lay down beside me, he and I face-to-face for the first time since we’d been given our new countenances. We hadn’t so much as kissed once in all those weeks. The sun was gone, but there was still more than enough light to see by.
He took my hand and pressed it against his face. “Touch me, Sara. I won’t survive if you don’t touch me,” he said.
I ran my hand lightly over the black bars.
I could feel him tremble.
I caressed his throat and chest, but he took hold of my wrist and stopped me. “I need you to mark me.”
“Don’t say that, Philip. That scares me.”
He guided my hand over to the cold ashes left by our cooking fire and dipped my fingers into the soot. “Do this for me,” he said.
I made a few timid smudges on his shoulders to appease him, then tried to get him to make love to me, but he wouldn’t let go of my wrist.
With his hand guiding mine, I ran my blackened nails lightly
down his front, over his stomach and groin. When his grip finally slackened in surrender, I tugged myself free and covered his entire lower abdomen with ash, gray wavelets of empty ocean. Next, I ran my finger around his thin waist and drew a horizon, thick as a belt, to cinch my ash sea to the sky and keep the waters from falling away. Beneath the horizon, I drew the skyline of Manhattan. I then dusted my own face with soot and pressed my cheek and chin and lips against his, imprinting my profile on his face. I poured a fistful of ash into the coconut shell we used as a drinking cup and stirred it around until my fingers were black. I then began brushing it across his chest in the tiny silhouette of a ship. Nothing elegant, nothing at all like the Pearl. Just the hull of the proverbial ship on the horizon, the one every castaway waits for, the one we’re all waiting for.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ll that remained of my drawings the next morning was a dusting of ash on Philip’s skin, except for two remarkably intact images—the black ship on his chest and the pale stigmata of Manhattan’s skyline rising out of his lower abdomen. On my own flesh, there were faint traces of those images in reverse from when he had finally held me against him during the night, made love to me, then wouldn’t let go.
We dressed, he in his tatter of sarong, me in my shredded boy’s pants, and stepped out of the cave just as dawn broke. The old woman and her cronies were already waiting for us by the trees, though they no longer bothered to conceal themselves. They walked up to Philip and surrounded him. I could see how intrigued they were by my drawings. Their general, our keeper, stepped front and center to examine my work in close-up. She scrutinized the ship and the skyline. Then, stepping back, she turned around and faced me, glancing down at the smudge of ship between my breasts, then at my blackened hands. Her tattooed brows rose up. She turned back to Philip and rubbed her fingertip lightly across my ship; the hull smeared in two. She ran it over the skyline: the tops of the buildings were wiped away. She examined her blackened fingertip, then held it up for the other ladies to inspect. They gaped at it as if it had been dipped in blood.
I couldn’t tell how much of her act was theatrics and how much was genuine shock at the primitiveness of our methods, but when she finally looked back at Philip and me, I swear I saw something that resembled pity for us beneath the maze on her tattooed face, inside her skin.
She walked back to the village, trailed by the others.
That afternoon, our daily allotment of food was left on a flat rock by the cave’s mouth. She must have put it there while we were napping. In addition to our regulation yams, she’d included a red hairy fruit that tasted like perfumed apples, two green bananas, one fish, a dollop of ambrosial honey wrapped in a banana leaf, and a set of tattoo needles—turtle shell, shark tooth, and bone.
I couldn’t make myself touch the needles.
On the next rock over, four stone pots of ink had been set in a circle. One contained the exact metallic blue-green shade an ancient copper dome turns when the sun strikes it. Another held what looked like purple squid ink. A third seemed to be filled with pulverized red orchids. And the fourth, black: it wasn’t mixed from an absence of color, it was mixed from the bounty of colors.
Kneeling, his long uncombed hair looking like the blond batting used to stuff sofas, his thin torso adorned with nothing more than smudges now, Philip gaped at the pots of liquid radiance. The inks were that beautiful.
He picked up the needle made of bone. It was a little longer than his finger.
“Put it back,” I said.
He ignored me.
“I don’t want it in my house,” I said.
He turned it over in his hand. All up and down the narrow shaft were minute carvings of copulating figures.
“What house, Sara? We have no house. No clothes. No shoes. No matches. No faces. No one is coming for us.” He shook his head from side to side: the moving bars gave me vertigo. “We’ll lose our minds if we keep staring at the horizon.”
“It hasn’t even been two months. You have to give the coconuts a chance.”
He spun me around until I faced the ocean—emptiness to the north, emptiness to the south, water to the left, water to the right. A red coconut was being pummeled against the reef.
He turned me back again, then drew me against him. “We were happy last night.” He pressed my hand against his chest.
My fingers were still sooty enough to leave a faint mark. I drew a lightbulb on his shoulder, a beacon for the ship to steer toward. When I finished, though, the lines were so light that even I could hardly see them.
He took hold of my hand again and guided it over to the closest pot, dipping my fingertips into the ink. They came out copper-blue. I started painting over the breaches the old woman had rent in my ship’s hull: the blue ink only made it look as if the hull was taking on water.
Philip lightly supported my drawing wrist in one hand, while his other dipped the bone needle into the blue pot and carried it dripping back to me.
But I wouldn’t take it. “Please don’t go mad on me, Philip. Don’t leave me here alone.”
He wouldn’t release my wrist.
“I could hurt you. I could disfigure you,” I said.
“You can’t disfigure me any more than I already am.”
He sat back on his heels and pulled me down, too. It was just before sunset. The sun’s rays were horizontal. They pierced the cave’s wide mouth and irradiated the limestone walls. The cave was as bright as an operating theater.
“It’ll never come off,” I said. “You may come to hate it. You may come to hate me for it.”
“I could never hate anything you drew.”
He offered me the needle again and I took it this time. After all, I was just as curious as he was. He stretched out on the rock floor and shut his eyes: without his blue eyes, I had nothing with which to orient myself that this was Philip. The black bars gave way to the blond beard, which in turn gave way to the long thin sunburnt canvas below me. “Tell me what to draw,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Anything you put on me is already inside me. Draw what you see.”
I shut my eyes, but there was no Surrealist theater on the back side of my lids. There was nothing but emptiness. When I opened them again, all I saw was my sinking ship. I put the needle to his chest at the hull’s prow and pushed the ink inside. I felt him wince and stiffen.
“It doesn’t hurt me,” he said.
I moved the needle a millimeter down the keel and pushed again. A minuscule ruby of blood came out. I made the next pinprick with my eyes averted, and kept them averted each time I jabbed. Only when my fear subsided and I was able to look at the blood as I was drawing it was I able to glean what we were doing.
The Ta’un’uuans believe that to tattoo and to be tattooed is the deepest form of intimacy—the puncturing of the skin, the entry into another’s body, the flow of blood, the infliction of pleasure and pain, the closure and healing of the wound, and most of all, lest anyone forget, the indelible trace of the process.
Where we in the West believe that our true selves, our unsullied psyches, the secret cores of our being, are buried deep beneath our façades, hidden from others, hidden sometimes even from ourselves, the islanders believe that their true selves are written on their skin, on every point and place where one human being connects to another.
By the time the sun had set, all Philip and I had managed to accomplish was the barest outline of the hull. It wasn’t even watertight. He wanted me to continue by firelight, but I couldn’t see anything.
Next morning, his tattoo had hardened into a translucent scab, my blue engraving just visible under the crusted skin. Philip sat up. Head bowed, neck twisted, his blond beard scraping against his breastbone, he shut one eye to better focus on the tiny tattoo below. I wasn’t sure just how much of it he could see from that angle, but from where I lay, on the hard sand by his knees, I saw a rapt blue eye looking out of a birdcage at a toy ship.
When we finally stepped out of the cave, th
e old woman and her coterie sat waiting for us. Within seconds, they spotted the raw tattoo on Philip’s chest, noticed that my fingers were stained not just with ink, but with dried blood. We walked past them to squat in the high grass. They discreetly turned away and lowered their eyes. I think they finally grasped that the beleaguered, half-mad, helpless creatures living in a cave on their beach were human like them.
That afternoon, a couple of dozen men appeared in the tall grass on the sheltered end of our beach. They bore five full-length palm trunks on their shoulders and carried long, thick bamboo stalks in their hands. Here and there, a flash of sun would glance off an ax blade slung from the same string belt that held erect a penis gourd. They set the trunks down in the shape of a star, then unslung their axes and hacked away at the stubborn grass until they’d cleared a perfect circle. They made a human scaffold, three men tall, to stand the trunks up, while the skinniest boys clambered up the sweating bodies to pound on the top of the posts with skillet-sized flat rocks. As soon as four of the trunks were firmly planted in the ground, and a rudimentary platform erected, the men reconfigured themselves into a hive and began assembling the bamboo stalks into a bowed armature that looked, to me, like a giant’s rib cage. It was tall enough for me to stand up in. They then tied the curved trusses to the straight crossbeams with knots so complex they would have baffled sailors. Next, the strongest of the men hoisted the cage onto their shoulders while the skinny boys, biting the ends of long ropes, shimmied up the palm trunks. Hand over hand, they somehow managed to raise the rib cage atop the platform and anchor it to the wooden posts with iron nails. Finally, unstringing their axes once again, they chopped out footholds in the one remaining palm log and leaned it against the stilted structure, like a staircase. Only then did I realize that they were building Philip and me a house with the penny nails and steel axes we’d purchased only months before at a bargain outlet on the Lower East Side—I remember!— Goldberg & Sons Discount Hardware at the corner of Delancey and Essex. The next day, the women joined the work party, carrying bundled straw for the roof atop their heads, while the men, in slow relays, labored under a ten-foot-long sandalwood roof beam. Even Ishmael helped carry it.