New Wave Fabulists

by Bradford Morrow

  The other bedroom became my studio. I set up a drafting table and autoclave and lightbox, a shelf with my ultrasonic cleaner and driclave. On the floor was an additional power unit just for my machine and equipment; a tool bench holding soldering guns, needle bars, and jigs; a tall stainless steel medicine cabinet with enough disinfectant and bandages and gloves and hemostats to outfit a small clinic; an overhead cabinet with my inks and pencils and acetates. Empty plastic caps await the colored inks that fill the machine’s reservoir. A small sink drains into a special tank that I bring to the Rockland dump once a month, when everyone else brings in their empty paint cans. A bookshelf holds albums filled with pictures of my own work and some art books—Tibetan stuff, pictures from Chauvet Cavern, Japanese woodblock prints.

  But no flash sheets; no framed flash art; no fake books. If customers want flash, they can go to Rockland or Bangor. I do only my own designs. I’ll work with a customer, if she has a particular image in mind, or come up with something original if she doesn’t. But if somebody has her heart set on a prancing unicorn, or Harley flames, or Mister Natural, or a Grateful Dead logo, I send her elsewhere.

  This doesn’t happen much. I don’t advertise. All my business is word of mouth, through friends or established customers, a few people here on Aranbega. But mostly, if someone wants me to do her body work, she really has to want me, enough to fork out sixty-five bucks for the round-trip ferry and at least a couple hundred for the tattoo, and three hundred more for the Aranbega Inn if she misses the last ferry, or if her work takes more than a single day. Not to mention the cost of a thick steak dinner afterward, and getting someone else to drive her home. I don’t let people stay at the Lonely House, unless it’s someone I’ve known for a long time, which usually means someone I was involved with at some point, which usually means she wouldn’t want to stay with me in any case. Sue is an exception, but Sue is seeing someone else now, one of the other occupational therapists from Penobscot Fields, so she doesn’t come over as much as she used to.

  That suits me fine. My customers are all women. Most of them are getting a tattoo to celebrate some milestone, usually something like finally breaking with an abusive boyfriend, leaving a bad marriage, coming to grips with the aftermath of a rape. Breast cancer survivors—I do a lot of breast work—or tattoos to celebrate coming out, or giving birth. Sometimes anniversaries. I get a lot of emotional baggage dumped in my studio, for hours or days at a time; it always leaves when the customers do, but it pretty much fulfills my need for any kind of emotional connection, which is pretty minimal anyway.

  And, truth to tell, it fulfills most of my sexual needs too; at least any baseline desire I have for physical contact. My life is spent with skin: cupping a breast in my hand, pulling the skin taut between my fingers while the needle etches threadlike lines around the aureole, tracing yellow above violet veins, turning zippered scars into coiled serpents, an explosion of butterfly wings, flames or phoenixes rising from a puckered blue-white mound of flesh; or drawing secret maps, a hidden cartography of grottoes and ravines, rivulets and waves lapping at beaches no bigger than the ball of my thumb; the ball of my thumb pressed there, index finger there, tissue film of latex between my flesh and hers, the hushed drone of the machine as it chokes down when the needle first touches skin and the involuntary flinch that comes, no matter how well she’s prepared herself for this, no matter how many times she’s lain just like this, paper towels blotting the film of blood that wells, nearly invisible, beneath the moving needle bar’s tip, music never loud enough to drown out the hum of the machine. Hospital smells of disinfectant, blood, antibacterial ointment, latex.

  And sweat. A stink like scorched metal: fear. It wells up the way blood does, her eyes dilate and I can smell it, even if she doesn’t move, even if she’s done this enough times to be as controlled as I am when I draw the needle across my own flesh: she’s afraid, and I know it, needle-flick, soft white skin pulled taut, again, again, between my fingers.

  I don’t want a lot of company, after a day’s work.

  I knew something was going to happen the night before I found the Trumps. Sue teases me, but it’s true, I can tell when something is going to happen. A feeling starts to swell inside me, as though I’m being blown up like a balloon, my head feels light and somehow cold, there are glittering things at the edges of my eyes. And sure enough, within a day or two someone turns up out of the blue, or I get a letter or e-mail from someone I haven’t thought of in ten years, or I see something—a mink, a yearling moose, migrating elvers—and I just know.

  I shouldn’t even tell Sue when it happens. She says it’s just a manifestation of my disorder, like a migraine aura.

  “Take your fucking medicine, Ivy. It’s an early warning system: take your Xanax!”

  Rationally I can understand that, rationally I know she’s right. That’s all it is, a chain of neurons going off inside my head, like a string of firecrackers with a too-short fuse. But I can never explain to her the way the world looks when it happens, that green glow in the sky not just at twilight but all day long, the way I can see the stars sometimes at noon, sparks in the sky.

  I was outside the Lonely House, cutting some flowers to take to Blakie. Pink and white cosmos; early asters, powder blue and mauve; white sweet-smelling phlox, their stems slightly sticky, green aphids like minute beads of dew beneath the flower heads. From the other shore a chipmunk gave its warning cheeet. I looked up, and there on the bank a dozen yards away sat a red fox. It was grinning at me; I could see the thin black rind of its gums, its yellow eyes shining as though lit from within by candles. It sat bolt upright and watched me, its white-tipped brush twitching like a cat’s.

  I stared back, my arms full of asters. After a moment I said, “Hello there. Hello. What are you looking for?”

  I thought it would lope off then, the way foxes do, but it just sat and continued to watch me. I went back to gathering flowers, putting them into a wooden trug and straightening to gaze back at the shore. The fox was still there, yellow eyes glinting in the late-summer light. Abruptly it jumped to its feet. It looked right at me, cocking its head like a dog waiting to be walked.

  It barked—a shrill, bone-freezing sound, like a child screaming. I felt my back prickle; it was still watching me, but there was something distracted about its gaze, and I saw its ears flatten against its narrow skull. A minute passed. Then, from away across Cameron Mountain there came an answer, another sharp yelp, higher-pitched and ending in a sort of yodeling wail. The fox turned so quickly it seemed to somersault through the low grass, and arrowed up the hillside toward the birch grove. In a moment it was gone. There was only the frantic chatter of red squirrels in the woods and, when I drew the dory up on the far shore a quarter-hour later, a musky sharp smell like crushed grapes.

  I got the last ferry over to Port Symes, me and a handful of late-season people from away, sunburned and loud, waving their cell phones over the rail as they tried to pick up a signal from one of the towers on the mainland.

  “We’ll never get a reservation,” a woman said accusingly to her husband. “I told you to have Marisa do it before she left—”

  At Port Symes I hopped off before any of them, heading for where I’d left Katherine’s car parked by an overgrown bank of dog roses. The roses were all crimson hips and thorns by now, the dark green leaves already burning to yellow; there were yellow beech leaves across the car’s windshield, and as I drove out onto the main road I saw acorns like thousands of green-and-bronze marbles scattered across the gravel road. Summer lingers for weeks on the islands, trapped by pockets of warmer air, soft currents and gray fog holding it fast till mid-October some years. Here on the mainland it was already autumn.

  The air had a keen winey scent that reminded me of the fox. As I headed down the peninsula toward Rockland I caught the smell of burning leaves, the dank odor of smoke snaking through a chimney that had been cold since spring. The maples were starting to turn, pale gold and pinkish red. There had
been a lot of rain in the last few weeks; one good frost would set the leaves ablaze. On the seat beside me Blakie’s flowers sat in their mason jar, wrapped in a heavy towel; one good frost and they might be the last ones I’d pick this year.

  I got all the way to the main road before the first temblors of panic hit. I deliberately hadn’t taken my medication—it made me too sleepy, I couldn’t drive, and Sue would have had to meet me at the ferry, I would be asleep before we got to her place. The secondary road ended; there was a large green sign with arrows pointing east and west.

  THOMASTON

  OWL’S HEAD

  ROCKLAND

  I turned right, toward Rockland. In the distance I could see the slate-covered reach of Penobscot Bay, a pine-pointed tip of land protruding into the waters, harsh white lights from Rockland Harbor; miles and miles off, a tiny smudge like a thumbprint upon the darkening sky.

  Aranbega. I was off island.

  The horror comes down, no matter how I try to prepare myself for it, no matter how many times I’ve been through it: an incendiary blast of wind, the feeling that an iron helmet was tightening around my head. I began to gasp, my heart starting to pound and my entire upper body going cold. Outside was a cool September twilight, the lights of the strip malls around Rockland starting to prick through the gold-and-violet haze, but inside the car the air had grown black, my skin icy. There was a searing fire in my gut. My T-shirt was soaked through. I forced myself to breathe, to remember to exhale: to think You’re not dying, nobody dies of this, it will go, it will go. …

  “Fuck.” I clutched the steering wheel and crept past the Puffin Shop convenience store, past the Michelin tire place, the Dairy Queen; through one set of traffic lights, a second. You won’t die, nobody dies of this; don’t look at the harbor.

  I tried to focus on the trees—two huge red oaks, there, you could hardly see where the land had been cleared behind them to make way for a car wash. It’s just a symptom, you’re reacting to the symptoms, nobody dies of this, nobody. At a stop sign I grabbed my cell phone and called Sue.

  “I’m by the Rite-Aid.” Don’t look at the Rite-Aid. “I’ll be there, five minutes—”

  An SUV pulled up behind me. I dropped the phone, feeling like I was going to vomit; turned sharply onto the side street. My legs shook so I couldn’t feel the pedals under my feet. How can I drive if my legs are numb?

  The SUV turned in behind me. My body trembled, I hit the gas too hard and my car shot forward, bumping over the curb then down again. The SUV veered past, a great gray blur, its lights momentarily blinding me. My eyes teared and I forced my breath out in long hoots, and drove the last few hundred feet to Sue’s house.

  She was in the driveway, still holding the phone in one hand.

  “Don’t,” I said. I opened the car door and leaned out, head between my knees, waiting for the nausea to pass. When she came over I held my hand up and she stopped, but I heard her sigh. From the corner of my eye I could see the resigned set to her mouth, and that her other hand held a prescription bottle.

  Always before when I came over to visit my mother, I’d stay with Sue and we’d sleep together, comfortably, not so much for old time’s sake as to sustain some connection at once deeper and less enduring than talk. Words I feel obliged to remember, skin I can afford to forget. A woman’s body inevitably evokes my own, small wet mouths, my own breath, my own legs, breasts, arms, shoulders, back. Even after Sue started seeing someone else, we’d ease into her wide bed with its wicker headboard, cats sliding to the floor in a gray heap like discarded laundry, radio playing softly, Tea and oranges, So much more.

  “I think you’d better stay on the couch,” Sue said that night. “Lexie isn’t comfortable with this arrangement, and …”

  She sighed, glancing at my small leather bag, just big enough to hold a change of underwear, hairbrush, toothbrush, wallet, a battered paperback of Lorca in New York. “I guess I’m not either. Anymore.”

  I felt my mouth go tight, stared at the mason jar full of flowers on the coffee table.

  “Yup,” I said.

  I refused to look at her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing how I felt.

  But of course Sue wouldn’t be gleeful, or vindictive. She’d just be sad, maybe mildly annoyed. I was the one who froze and burned; I was the one who scarred people for a living.

  “It’s fine,” I said after a minute, and, looking at her, smiled wryly. “I have to get up early anyway.”

  She looked at me, not smiling, dark brown eyes creased with regret. What a waste, I could hear her thinking. What a lonely wasted life.

  I think the world is like this: beautiful, hard, cold, unmoving. Oh, it turns, things change—clouds, leaves, the ground beneath the beech trees grows thick with beechmast and slowly becomes black fragrant earth ripe with hellgrammites, millipedes, nematodes, deer mice. Small animals die, we die; a needle moves across honey-colored skin and the skin turns black, or red, or purple. A freckle or a mole becomes an eye; given enough time an eye becomes an earthworm.

  But change, the kind of change Sue believes in—Positive Change, Emotional Change, Cultural Change—I don’t believe in that. When I was young, I thought the world was changing: there was a time, years-long, when the varicolored parade of visitors through the Lonely House made me believe that the world Outside must have changed its wardrobe as well, from sere black suits and floral house-dresses to velvet capes and scarlet morning coats, armies of children and teenagers girding themselves for skirmish in embroidered pants, feathered headdresses, bare feet, bare skin. I dressed myself as they did—actually, they dressed me, as Blakie smoked and sipped her whiskey sour, and Katherine made sure the bird feeders and wood-box were full. And one day I went out to see the world.

  It was only RISD—the Rhode Island School of Design—and it should have been a good place, it should have been a Great Place for me. David Byrne and a few other students were playing at someone’s house, other students were taking off for Boston and New York, squatting in Alphabet City in burned-out tenements with a toilet in the kitchen, getting strung out, but they were doing things, they were having adventures, hocking bass guitars for Hasselblad cameras, learning how to hold a tattoo machine in a back room on St. Mark’s Place, dressing up like housewives and shooting five hours of someone lying passed out in bed while a candle flickered down to a shiny red puddle and someone else laughed in the next room. It didn’t look like it at the time, but you can see it now, when you look at their movies and their photographs and their vinyl forty-fives and their installations: it didn’t seem so at the time, but they were having a life.

  I couldn’t do that. My problem, I know. I lasted a semester, went home for Christmas break and never went back. For a long time it didn’t matter—maybe it never mattered—because I still had friends, people came to see me even when Blakie and Katherine were off at the ranch, or bopping around France. Everyone’s happy to have a friend on an island in Maine. So in a way it was like Blakie had told me long ago: the world did come to me.

  Only of course I knew better.

  Saturday was Sue’s day off. She’d been at Penobscot Fields for eleven years now and had earned this, a normal weekend; I wasn’t going to spoil it for her. I got up early, before seven, fed the cats and made myself coffee, then went out.

  I walked downtown. Rockland used to be one of the worst-smelling places in the United States. There was a chicken-processing plant, fish factories, the everyday reek and spoils of a working harbor. That’s all changed, of course. Now there’s a well-known museum, and tourist boutiques have filled up the empty storefronts left when the factories shut down. Only the sardine-processing plant remains, down past the Coast Guard station on Tilson Avenue; when the wind is off the water you can smell it, a stale odor of fishbones and rotting bait that cuts through the scents of fresh-roasted coffee beans and car exhaust.

  Downtown was nearly empty. A few people sat in front of Second Read, drinking coffee. I went inside an
d got coffee and a croissant, walked back onto the sidewalk and wandered down to the waterfront. For some reason seeing the water when I’m on foot usually doesn’t bother me. There’s something about being in a car, or a bus, something about moving, the idea that there’s more out there, somewhere; the idea that Aranbega is floating in the blue pearly haze and I’m here, away: disembodied somehow, like an astronaut untethered from a capsule, floating slowly beyond that safe closed place, unable to breathe and everything gone to black, knowing it’s just a matter of time.

  But that day, standing on the dock with the creosote-soaked wooden pilings beneath my sneakers, looking at orange peels bobbing in the black water and gulls wheeling overhead—that day I didn’t feel bad at all. I drank my coffee and ate my croissant, tossed the last bit of crust into the air and watched the gulls veer and squabble over it. I looked at my watch. A little before eight, still too early to head to Blakie’s. She liked to sleep in, and Katherine enjoyed the peace and quiet of a morning.

  I headed back toward Main Street. There was some early-morning traffic now, people heading off to do their shopping at Shaw’s and Wal-Mart. On the corner I waited for the light to change, glanced at a storefront, and saw a sign taped to the window.

  ST. BRUNO’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH

  ANNUAL RUMMAGE SALE

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7

  8 A.M. - 3:00 P.M.

  LUNCH SERVED FROM 11:30

  Penobscot Fields had once been the lupine-strewn meadow behind St. Bruno’s; proximity to the church was one of the reasons Blakie and Katherine had first signed on to the retirement community. I wasn’t a churchgoer, but during the summer I was an avid hunter of yard sales in the Rockland area. You don’t get many of them after Labor Day, but the rummage sale at St. Bruno’s almost makes up for it. I made sure I had wallet and checkbook in my bag then hurried to get there before the doors opened.