The Tattoo Artist: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jill Ciment

  Philip and I slept in our new house that night though it wasn’t quite finished. It had no door and only half a roof. It smelled of sawdust and hay. A high-borne breeze wafted through the reed walls and kept the mosquitoes away. We hardly had anything to pack and move—a driftwood walking stick, a shell knife, three shell spoons, two coconut canteens, two coconut bowls, Philip’s shred of sarong and my linen pants, the one sandal we still had between us, and the four stone pots trembling with liquid pigment and the tattoo needles.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On a typical day, the old woman would wake us at first light, shouting up from the beach below for me to follow her to the dripping tiered gardens, Philip to accompany the fishermen in their canoes. She had us call her “great-aunt,” as all the villagers did, but when I made a mangle out of the Ta’un’uuan words, she let me call her by her Christian name, Laadah. Under her strict tutelage, I was taught the skill of planting taro shoots (the trick is to feed them bat guano), while Philip was instructed by the fishermen in the art of net throwing. He even learned how to hurl a three-pronged spear into a jackfish.

  When the heat of the day spiked and the soil began steaming, Laadah would set down her hoe, and I’d follow her to a sunken limestone spring garlanded with hanging orchids. Usually, a dozen other ladies would already be soaking in the cool water, gossiping, the bawdier the incident the louder the laughter. I might not have spoken their language yet, but their lascivious pantomimes made their punch lines abundantly clear. When the water finally chilled us, we’d dry off in the sun, then perfume ourselves with orchid petals (the white ones smelled like vanilla) and rendezvous with the men back at the village to eat the midday meal in one noisy congregation.

  Philip and I usually dined on the fringes of Laadah’s extended family, a pandemonium of nieces and nephews and second cousins and poorer relations that seemed to include, at one time or another, practically everyone in the village.

  For the most part, the Ta’un’uuans’ culinary skills consist of dropping tubers into a fire, though once in a while Laadah and the women outdid themselves and prepared a collective feast of tapioca pudding and honeyed pork that rivaled any one-star restaurant. They had me work as a prep chef.

  A half hour or so after we ate, a mass drowsiness overtook the village. Stupefied families hauled themselves up to their tree houses and sank into communal hammocks. Even the pigs fell to snoring.

  A mile away, in the shade of our own straw roof, Philip would lie facedown or supine, depending upon which side of him I was tattooing, while I lined up my needles and inks, all the while appraising his abdomen or chest or buttocks anxiously.

  I don’t mean to suggest that I was tattooing Philip from head to toe. Quite the contrary. In those first few months, whole afternoons passed and we’d barely advance an inch.

  It took me three full sessions just to master the insertion of the needle without spilling any color beforehand. It took me another six to learn the art of the comb and mallet: how to forcefully tap the comb’s back so that all six needles entered the skin simultaneously. And it’s taken me almost thirty years to finally grasp the true complexity of the Ta’un’uuan palette. Mixing color on a canvas is one thing, mixing color under the skin is quite another. I had to master both the chemistry of the body and the absorbency of the flesh.

  I finished the ship first, made it as watertight as my fledgling skills allowed, then proceeded to engrave the erratic graph of Manhattan’s skyline across his lower abdomen. I wasn’t yet confident enough to try anything unplanned.

  When the pain became too much for Philip, he’d grab hold of my drawing hand and not let go. Sometimes he’d kiss it afterward; sometimes we’d make love. In any case, sex or no sex, we’d both lie back, spent.

  Invariably, the day’s end would find us on the beach. Philip’s beard had grown voluminous; his hair reached well below his shoulders. My tattoos now covered his right biceps, his right buttock, and a large patch of chest. He wore a penis gourd and a string belt the fisherman had given him. They even performed a little ceremony to show us how to tie the foot-long gourd in place: the testes are left to dangle. All that remained of my linen pants were three wooden buttons. I traded them for a grass skirt.

  Sitting side by side on the warm sand, our shoulders brushing, we’d watch the sunset. Even the islanders quit whatever they were doing to show respect for the end of the day.

  At the precise moment the sun goes down, color becomes its richest. For less than an eye blink, the white disk of the sun turns copper green and pulls all the light down with it. You could be sitting on an open beach or in your darkening living room: all edges disappear. The maroon sky and the maroon sea are one. And every object floating against that emptiness—the blue-violet clouds, the cinnabar lichen on the wet rocks, the blond canoe on the sand—becomes the brightest object on earth.

  It’s these final seconds of twilight that have inspired the Ta’un’uuan palette.

  The tattoo on the small of my back was etched during those afternoons. It’s the only tattoo that Philip ever gave me, though I offered him my body countless times. He chose the one spot for it where he knew I wouldn’t be able to see it, or judge it.

  I saw it for the first time in a Saks Fifth Avenue changing room. Life had practically whisked me there straight off the airplane to photograph me in my first new dress in three decades.

  Seeing myself in a three-way mirror, the full display on my back obscured only by the brassiere strap that a salesgirl had helped me fasten, left me speechless. When she and the Life reporter poked through the curtains to hand me an armful of dresses and suggest that the hyacinth-pink one might be the most flattering shade with my complexion, I merely nodded.

  Several inches below the strap, encircled by my own later designs, Philip’s tattoo seemed wholly artless in its intent. It’s a simple self-portrait, without the bars.

  Just when it seemed that there was no other reality but this one, no other world beyond the horizon—that Philip and I must have dreamed up New York, electric lights, the art world, ironed sheets, iced martinis—just when it occurred to me that we hadn’t discussed plans for our rescue in weeks, months, and that we might actually be happy here, we awoke to find our beach from the mangroves to the cliffs awash with what looked like East River refuse: tin cans, glass bottles, twisted sheet metal, tangles of black wires, bloated wood chunks, a piece of rubber raft, a quarter moon of life preserver.

  “Are we hallucinating?” I asked.

  “Why would we hallucinate garbage?”

  He slid down the ladder and sprinted over to the nearest pile. It was scattered along the high tide mark, fifty feet from our door. He picked up what looked like a canteen and turned it over in his hands. It was definitely aluminum. It blinded him momentarily with a flash of mirrored sunlight. Shielding his eyes, he stared out at the horizon, then up at the sky.

  I automatically looked, too. There was nothing out there. I was still on our balcony, the windward side, trying to get an overview of the cove. Legions of gulls were wheeling above the refuse.

  Behind me, from the forest, I could hear voices, branches snapping, the whoosh of grass skirts. The whole village was coming through the trees, the children first. A night fisherman must have alerted them about the refuse, or perhaps the Ta’un’uuans have a sixth sense and the cargo had washed up in their dreams.

  Philip began picking his way along the water’s edge—a dented can, an iron rod, a piece of rubber tarp. The children caught up to him, grabbing what they could, whipping each other with phone lines and laughing.

  The adults were hurrying beneath me now, wide-eyed babies jiggling in their mother’s arms. Laadah and the other old women were a few yards behind. Ishmael and a warrior stepped through the ferns choking the coral path. The man’s arm was still bleeding where Ishmael had tattooed it.

  Down the shore, a night fisherman beached his canoe and began wading into the mangroves.

  I climbed down the ladder and joined
a knot of women tightening around a gunnysack of rice. We knew it was rice because it bore a picture of rice. It also bore Japanese calligraphy and a red sun. A woman and I reached for the sack simultaneously. We actually got into a tug-of-war. A few feet to my left, three warriors almost came to blows over a khaki knapsack, and to my right, a pubescent girl coveted what looked like a lipstick tube in her tiny fist, while her two friends tried to pry open her clenched fingers. Beyond them, bounding across the sand, the village stragglers had just arrived. They pressed against us, staring at our treasures, their faces wet and shiny from running. Butterflies had followed them and now landed on their cheeks and brows, drinking their fill of human sweat.

  I heard a woman shriek, or maybe it was a gull. They were dive-bombing around us, wings batting, picking up spilled rice. Pigs were rooting by our feet.

  Philip, thronged by the laughing, dervish children, looked for the source of the scream.

  Laadah and the old women were walking toward him, parting the melee of grabbing hands. Laadah let out an even more shrill shriek. Everyone fell still and set down what they were clutching. Having gotten the villagers’ attention, she mounted a dune, threw back her head, opened her mouth, unfurled her blue-black tongue, and broke into song. She held her raspy notes as long as her lungs allowed.

  Finally, one of the warriors picked up the knapsack and offered it to her. She held it up to her eyes, twisted it, pulled it, smelled it, then passed it to the other old women crowding around her. The girl brought her the lipstick tube. Weighing it in her ancient palm, she took counsel with the others: you had only to look at their faces to see the alarm.

  I pressed my way toward Philip. He was now on his knees, examining a second lipstick tube. I grabbed it out of his hands. It was a bullet. Even I, who had never seen one up close before, knew what it was.

  The boy beside me held up a handful of weightless pure white plastic foam, the innards of a life jacket. We all gaped at it as if it were snow. It looked so beautiful.

  The children started shrieking again, even louder than the gulls. We all looked in their direction. A truck tire had just washed ashore. The man beside me went slack-jawed. It wasn’t like seeing an inner tube float onto the beach with the beer bottles at Coney Island. This tire had come to a shore where the wheel had yet to be invented. The awe on my neighbors’ faces wasn’t goggle-eyed primitivism; it was reverence.

  The islanders surrounded it. They had to touch it for themselves. When Philip and my turn came, we examined the raised lettering on the sidewall, the same Japanese calligraphy as on the gunnysack.

  It took no time for the children to master the art of tire rolling. They pushed it back and forth, over the dunes, in between the adults, until the elders took it away and had two warriors roll it to the village. Everyone followed, picking up as much as they could carry—copper wires, fistfuls of rice, hunks of flapping sheet metal, a jackboot, a glass bottle, another bullet. What the first vanguard couldn’t manage was picked over by their cousins. What their cousins couldn’t haul was seized by the village stragglers. What they abandoned was rooted through by the pigs. What the pigs couldn’t find was pecked over by the gulls. What the gulls didn’t see was savored by the sandpipers.

  To any ship that might be searching for the sailor who had worn the life jacket, our cove now looked as primeval as ever.

  Philip and I had grabbed what we could, too—the now empty rice sack, the bullet, a piece of rubber raft, a knotted white bandanna, what looked like the broken-off end of a machete blade—and laid them out on our balcony.

  “I don’t think they’ve been in the water long,” Philip said, examining the bullet. He used his thumbnail to scrape off any flecks of corrosion on the casing. “It’s barely begun to rust.”

  “How long does it take something to rust?” I asked.

  “In salt water? Not very long.”

  “A day? A week? A month?”

  “Not long enough that they would have called off a search for survivors.”

  I picked up the broken blade. It was longer than my forearm. “Survivors of what?”

  “I think that’s a bayonet,” he said.

  He untied the sopping bandanna. He had to use his teeth. It was double-knotted and looped to fit around a forehead. When he opened it at last, I saw a Rising Sun.

  “A Japanese ship must have gone down near here,” he said.

  “Maybe the tire came from a plane?”

  “It has to be a ship. We’re hundreds of miles from any air route.”

  “What kind of ship? They didn’t have bayonets on board the Pearl, Philip.”

  “Maybe it was a navy ship.”

  “Why would it come here?”

  “Maneuvers. Exploration. They have colonies in the Gilberts. Maybe it was a merchant ship and the bayonet was just cargo?”

  “Who would they send bayonets to, in the middle of the ocean? They’re fighting in China.”

  “Maybe the ship was lost, Sara. Does it matter? Ships travel in convoys. There might be others out there. We have to get the fires started again.”

  “We don’t have to,” I said.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Aren’t you happy here?”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not real.”

  That afternoon, he rebuilt the fires. He even climbed up to the crag on the cliff’s face to relight the woodpile we’d once kept burning there.

  I had no choice but to assist him. I trekked through the forest gathering wood. Each time I neared the village, I smelled roast pig, heard singing. Once I even heard flutes. Tens of them. I peeked through the trees. The men sat in a circle, chanting in their subterranean baritones. The women crouched in a separate circle, blowing on the rims of glass bottles, playing the strangest scales I’d ever heard. Some of the bottles had washed up this morning, but others looked very old: the glass had clouded. The children ran wild. Everyone had ornamented themselves with found objects—a bright metal pipe for a penis gourd, a bullet for a nosepiece. One young woman had wound a long piece of copper wire around her neck until it looked like the neck of a lightbulb. When she spotted me, she smiled and waved for me to come sit beside her.

  Tempted as I was, I lugged the wood back to Philip and told him about the invitation, the musical bottles, the roast pig, that we’d been asked to join the celebration, that it would be rude not to.

  “I want to go home, Sara.”

  He went off to start another fire, this one facing south. I couldn’t very well abandon him. I made myself useful by keeping a lookout for ships, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to be rescued. Yet each time a cloud changed shape on the horizon, I became as spellbound as he.

  We worked through the night, taking turns feeding the fires.

  On my watch, a couple appeared on our beach for a moonlit tryst amid the dunes. They saw our fires raging on both ends of the cove, another up on the cliff. I heard them whispering. I think they assumed that the fires were our way of paying homage for the cargo.

  The next morning, Laadah called us to work as usual. We feigned fevers, but she was hardly fooled. Half the village had played hooky to scour the shoreline for anything else that might have washed up during the night.

  Philip and I spent our day hauling wood.

  On the third morning, he wanted us to ferry burning torches across the murky mangrove swamp so that we might set a new ring of blazes on the windward shore.

  “I won’t do it,” I said.

  “Won’t what? Cross the swamp? Carry a torch? Save yourself?”

  “Hope.”

  For the next few days, I hauled my share of wood, stood my share of watch, but whenever I walked the shoreline alone, I kept my eyes fixed on the sand between my feet. I never wanted to see another chimerical cloud again.

  That’s when I found it, the soldier’s shaving kit, half-buried in the wet sand. It must have just washed up, or someone would have snatche
d it by now. A crab scuttled out. Then another. The kit was filled with sand. I poured it out and began sifting through its contents, blindly, wildly. Something cut me, a shard of mirror no bigger than a thumbnail. I set it on my palm, blew off the film of sand, then lifted it up to my face and looked just long enough to see that I didn’t want to look that closely, and flung it back into the sea.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  he whale appeared a week later, on the far side of the barrier reef, erupting out of the swells. The I was on the dunes, collecting turtle eggs for breakfast. The night fishermen had just paddled ashore. They spotted the colossal gray shape before I did, dispatched a fisherboy to alert the village, and then pushed off in their canoes again. The whale must have been sixty feet long.

  The blowhole opened and a man climbed out. I started shouting for Philip. The boy stopped in his tracks. Five more men climbed out of the hatch.

  Philip must have heard me because he was halfway down the ladder, staring at the submarine. He dropped to the ground, grabbed an armful of dried-up fronds and coconut husks, and ran past me toward the closest fire. He threw the husks on top, then lit a frond and began waving the flaming fan above his head, trying to shout over the hammering surf.

  The men on deck didn’t respond. The ship was a half mile out. The sun had just cleared the treetops. The entire sky was crimson. Our fire must have looked like a candle flame flickering before a floodlight.

  “They can’t see us,” Philip said. He threw down the frond. “We have to make them see us.”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “They’re from our world, Sara.” He was looking up and down the beach for something else to use as a signal.

  “Maybe we should wait for the others,” I said.