by Andy Cox
BONE DEEP
S.L. NICKERSON
The world inside of Manaia’s Tattoory is dim. I smell paint, the old-fashioned kind that can still be smelt. Framed watercolours drape from nails driven into the brick walls. I stare longest at the painting of a woman; above her hips she is whole, but her skin blows away from the bones of her legs like dandelion fluff. It makes me glad for my own skin. My skeleton is laced with knobs and scarred by surgeons’ saws, a thing best hidden beneath flesh.
The tattooist sits alone in the lamplight. She paints a triceratops reaching for the branches of a willow on an otherwise empty canvas, bringing out the scales from quick flicks of her wrist. A menagerie of barrettes and tufts studs her skull. Through the quietness I hear my uneven gait all too loudly as I approach her. I cannot walk anywhere without the reminder of my deformed toes. She pulls her glasses over her eyes and swirls her brush in the water of an old jam jar. “What do you have for me, pumpkin?” She gives me a smile and a looking-over.
I slip my sponsorship page onto her desk and it brightens the room. Her smile falls as the glasses rise again over her hair. “Silver Steed Screens. They are sponsoring like mad, I did another for them last week. And you are Dalisay. It’s a complete pleasure. I’m Manaia, that’s my name over the shop. Make yourself comfortable while I find the cartridge.”
There are some wall hooks, hand-painted fish tails, onto which I hang my shirt. I lay myself on the inclined bench and reach back to part my bra, exposing my back and its many scars and brands. I rest my chin on my knuckles.
“You’ve done this before.” She snatches up a cartridge from her drawer and returns to me. I stare at her stockings with envy, blue lace curled into geometric shapes. I could not slip into those without boring holes. “Too many times before. I won’t ask what you have, if it makes you uncomfortable. Some of my clients tell me a lot, even about the exhibitions, but you don’t strike me as up for chatter. That’s okay.” Her hand is cool between my shoulder blades. “It’s a pity.”
“All that matters is if you’ve done this before,” I say.
“Of course, of course.” Her finger rests on the brand beneath my left shoulder blade. “What is Saturn Enterprises?”
“Silicone manufacturers.”
Her hand withdraws, leaving my back longing. She shows me the cartridge’s design: two entwined stallions. There is no slogan or company name. The most successful ones like Silver Steed Screens are only logo.
“Is the cartridge okay, pumpkin?” Manaia asks.
“I wish my answer mattered.” I realise her stockings are tattoos.
“You and me both! It’s an artless abomination, turning tattoos into stamps.”
I hear her hauling the apparatus along the ceiling tracks above me, squeaking like rusted gears. I don’t need to turn around to know what it is: one long, shiny gun points at my back. Manaia clicks it on and it hums. She slides in the cartridge.
“I am sorry if this stings you,” she says.
“It’ll hurt less than the webbed bone between my ribs does right now.”
The gun’s beam punches me in the back, its lasers penetrating my flesh, imprinting the stallions just above my surgeon’s dotted line. The beam bathes the room in a blue glow. It seals the ink on the bottom of my skin and cauterises my wounds. There is no bruising, only a new pigment showing through my skin.
She slides the gun away. As I snatch my shirt, I bump my elbow on a lower hook. I curse.
“Sorry, almost everybody does that,” she says, looking only a little concerned. “I’ve been meaning to move it.”
I free a syringe-jet from my waist pack, and shoot it into my elbow. “I don’t have everyone’s body.”
My body is my battlefield, and my mind its captive.
***
“Vodka, straight,” I say. Neon light flares off the glass as the bartender slides it towards me. I down it in one gulp.
A man pretends to read in a booth near the back, beneath a cluster of lights bent into a flickering beach ball. His hair is sculpted for maximum waviness, and his free fingers circle the rim of his glass. The rum that fills it is as dark as his hand. For the past half hour he’s been stealing looks my way and has not moved a page. The words wyld vitamins are scrawled into the back of my neck, and that does not seem to turn him off. I drop my shoulder, and my strap slides off it, passing a scancode. He approaches.
“Who are you?” He claims the stool next to mine.
“I was a sales clerk until two hours ago, then I got fired. My boss wanted me to lift inventory. Couldn’t do it. Who are you?”
“You can call me Mr Roy.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Vish Roy. And yours didn’t answer mine.”
“Dalisay Dumalahay. Why the formality?”
“We’ve just met.”
He suggests his place; I insist on mine. I lock my door behind us, and ignite the candle I keep beside it. In the darkness I know my home, but I still move carefully. Candle-by-candle I light my apartment to unveil its curiosities before him. He makes no comment and I am grateful. Cushions are nailed to the corners of my table and bookshelves, and for chairs I have only beanbags and blowups. My mattress lies on the floor, frameless. This is a play that I have acted many times before, and I know already his role. I go on top and not a single pretty strand of his hair shifts. I, who control so little of my life, can control this.
Our bodies press parallel valleys into my mattress. His fingers circle my hip and his eyes take in the scars and brands that I have tried to mask in candlelight.
“No one bothers to run marathons or wear bracelets for what I’ve got,” I say. “I wish I had a trendy disease.”
“I see that it has made you not so much a bubble-child, more a pillow-child.” His thumb sweeps the logo of the bankrupt automotive company, just beside my belly button. “They won’t miss that brand.”
“The sponsors own this square of skin for my life, not theirs.”
He holds my hand in his, and places my palm over his heart. I pet the scar over it, white and taut over his warm chest. “I needed an emergency heart grow when I was a teen,” he says.
“Your family was wealthy enough to get you that surgery tattoo-free? You’re carrying a whole mansion in your chest.”
He chuckles. “No, my father was left with a bill he could never pay. This heart was brought to you by Orso’s Authentic Oils.”
“How do you get by the exhibitions? They will notice that you erased your tattoo.”
“I recreate it with henna. They never look closely enough to tell the difference. I might feel the cold air of the auditorium on my bare bum, but the knowledge that I have tricked them keeps me warm through the whole exhibition.”
I make us tea while he admires my bookshelves, and I lean out of the kitchen to admire his bare bum. He chooses Headhunting in War, and takes it back to my bed to flip through. I only attempt to form relationships with the men who notice my books.
***
My doctor’s office is eighty storeys up and the windows are double glazed to silence the city. I have a view of Trinity Square and the Public Labyrinth. It has no walls or hedges and is merely made of two colours of stone. When you are on it all you can do is follow the path ahead of you and never turn back.
The paintings on her office walls glow in shades of gauzy crocuses and trembling grass hills, but not so brightly as to overtake the sunlight from the skylight. The only painting that does not glow is of some trees and rocks, most likely an original Group of Seven though I could never tell them apart. Every pearl around Dr Li’s neck glistens in unison with her teeth as she smiles for me. Her lips are stained red.
Across from this stately being I hunch over in my seat, a crunched up creature.
“I need a new prescription for the serum,” I tell her.
She touches her prescription pad, and then stops. My heart tows dread through my chest.
“Dalisay, I am so, so sorry. About the s
urgery.”
“I secured my sponsorship, it will be funded.” I show her the stallions.
Dr Li’s perfectly lined eyes fill with a terrible sadness and I cannot look into them, I must not look into them. When doctors look like this they are as helpless as I am. “It isn’t a problem with funding, not directly. I got the results of your blood tests from the lab this morning. You are not cleared for surgery. The ink from the tattoos has run into your bloodstream.”
“How is this possible?”
“I messaged the lab to ask them if they were sure. This wasn’t a problem with old-fashioned ink tattoos that only partially breached your epidermis. It is these laser tattoos. I am sorry. They were deemed safe for people with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, but the trials only lasted one year. The research is coming out now that after many years it enters your bloodstream with unintended consequences.”
“Consequences?”
“The serum that you inject after accidents and prior to surgery interacts with the laser tattoos, and with every injection you increase the probability of blood clots.”
“What am I supposed to fucking do then? I got fired last month, Dr Li. I have a fucking plate of bone welding my ribs together.”
“I know, I know.” Her eyes are so, so sad and she is so, so sorry. “If it is any comfort, there is a precedent for situations when you secure the sponsorship in good faith, and then the surgery falls through. I will make sure you get paid for the last tattoo without any strings.”
“I suppose I should be grateful that my visits to you are still covered by taxes. Or will this change too? Can’t you just remove my laser tattoos then?”
“Without the laser tattoos eventually your blood will clear, but I will not risk breaking the funding protocols to do this. However, if you do have a good reason to suspect that your blood clears spontaneously, I’ll test it again. Then I’ll get you into surgery immediately. In the meantime, I know a great psychologist. She can help you cope with growing a second skeleton.”
I know what happens to people with FOP without the serum. Bones fill bruises to entomb our bodies in a single, twisted pose. We become statues that breathe, and any surgery to remove the extra bones will only create more bones. “I don’t want to cope,” I say. “I want to be cured.”
“We both know that is impossible.”
***
I stare at my eyes in the mirror, brown and deep. Those will always move no matter how much the rest of my body locks in place. There is a nugget of sleep in my eye’s corner. I lean in for a better look. My arm does not bend. I press my elbow, and find a bone that was not there before. Sometimes the serum works, and sometimes it does not. I aim my syringe-jet at it, finger on the ejector, to stop any others from growing there, and then I remember.
Syringe-jet clatters to the floor. And I scream. I do not care if the whole world hears. I thought that I could have the sort of normal life that so many others drift through without a thought, but that is an illusion. My deformities are secrets sealed beneath my flesh, scored bones with caviar-sized protrusions. The sponsors on my skin will not prize me when my neck and shoulders slowly immobilise and my hips fix my trunk obliquely.
Vish finds me crumpled on the bathroom floor, wedged between toilet and shower cube.
“Your neighbours phoned me.” He joins me on the floor and pulls me into his arms. “They heard screams. Did you fall down? Are you hurt? Let me see if you bruised yourself.” His hands slide under my shirt and lift it to inspect me.
“Don’t fret for me, Mr Roy. I sat gently. Screaming is the only violence I allow myself.” I take his hands in mine and kiss them. I need them here more than checking my back. “What do you do when life holds no more choices?”
“Then you look life in the eye and punch it in the face.”
***
The street we walk down is fenced in by townhouses, right-angular constructions of glass and bricks and wood from the turn of the millennium. This area could be a heritage site if not for the cracking pavements and piles of trash bags. We go up the stairs of one house. Vish raps on the door three times and we wait.
Footsteps sound from within, and pause as the light from the peephole darkens. Locks rattle and the door opens to show a woman’s face sliced in two by a chain lock. Shadows deepen in the creases of her forehead and cheeks. Her smallness gives the impression of frailty, but the set of her mouth, the focal point of the wrinkles, tell me differently. She shuts the door.
“Wait,” Vish says. “She’s in need as I was in need.”
The door opens fully. “Here there are no true names and no shoes,” says the woman. She leads us within. “Call me Dr Kritikos. I call him Heart Patient. What do I call you?”
“Bone Patient. Are you really a doctor?”
“Not medically.”
We leave our shoes on hardwood flooring so polished I can see my reflection. The walls are whitewashed. There are no stains; it is as if they were painted over yesterday. A couch, as white as the walls and still covered in plastic, is the foyer’s only furniture. I can’t smell a thing, neither chemicals nor rotting body parts. I would not have thought that an illegal medical clinic could be so sterile.
“Where is the bone to be operated on?” she asks.
“Everywhere.”
Vish gives me a swift kiss and takes a seat on the couch. I follow Dr Kritikos to the next room.
I undress behind a screen and it feels as if I am undressing my soul. I peel off layers of cloth and they flutter to the wood, soundlessly. There is no sleeve to hide the knob in my elbow. Naked, I cannot pretend.
“What have they done to you, my poor girl? I have never seen anyone with this many laser tattoos.” Dr Kritikos is holding a device. It looks like a camera, but there is no screen at the back. “I’m not a pornographer,” she says with an amicable laugh. I can tell that she has made this joke to the others before me. “These photos are for your records only, so that you will remember how to re-create them for the exhibitions. However you do that is your choice.”
“Have they caught any of your clients before?”
“I don’t know what happens to them. It is better for everyone that way. How many tattoos in total do you have?”
I tell her. She nods. “I can only remove three a session, for your safety,” she says. “You’ll come back.” She names the price. I nod. It is a quarter of the sponsorship I got for my surgery. “Acid, abrasion, or the peel?”
“Since these tattoos are made by laser, can’t you also erase them by laser?”
“Are you able to get one of these machines on the black market without a trace? Acid, abrasion, or the peel.” She puts her eye to a tube on the camera.
I think on it through our photography session. Every time she takes a photo it prints itself out of the front of this camera. It is very old technology, nothing to leave a digital trace.
Dr Kritikos explains the different procedures to me. My tattoos penetrate my skin, and run deep as the fat that separates it from flesh. She can part my skin by scalpel, then peel it off layer by layer until the muscles beneath are unwrapped. With salt and a brush of crystals, she could wear down my skin and chaff it into flakes. I warn her of my condition, and she chooses the acid for me. The abrasion or the peel could leave bruises deep within me and harden into more bone.
She takes me to the next room. It is as bare as the others: a massage table that she encases in fresh plastic, and a series of white cupboards unlabelled. It hurts my eyes, and I gladly close them after I press my face into the headrest.
“Let’s rid you of your stigmata.” And so she begins. She holds the sponge in her gloved palm. Her touch is gentle, masked by the agony of the acid. After each press she waits. I hear her whispers. One two three. Through the pain I feel her eyes watch. The acid annihilates my skin and my skin annihilates the acid. She adds a little bit and never too much. This also is a form of surgery. Her hand controls the acid minutely and she has my trust. She must stop the moment s
he uncovers muscle.
I don’t scream.
***
Chimes tinker against the glass door of Manaia’s Tattoory. She is alone again, painting a watercolour of swallows soaring free from a rabbit hole. I wonder if she ever gets any customers other than the branded. I slide a glowing page onto her desk. It is the contract for my newest sponsorship.
She puts on her glasses and looks at the page before she looks at me. “I dislike seeing my clients again so soon, and I mean this in the nicest way possible.”
“Now you can see your pumpkin the way Cinderella does. I’ll give you a cut of this,” I say. “Can you do my sponsorship in ink?”
Manaia washes her paintbrush in the jam jar, clouding the water. She wipes one hand on her apron, and then the other. A smile pulls her lips wide, the smile of a conspirator. “And they will never find out? You will never tell them that I used needles instead of a laser?”
I pull the photos from my sack, the ones that Dr Kritikos took of my tattoos before the acid.
“Triple vintage. I approve.” She seems more interested in the photos’ format than their content.
“There’s more. I also need for you to reproduce my old laser tattoos, just as you see them in these photos, in ink.”
“I won’t ask you where they all went, pumpkin.”
“And I want a little ink of my own. You’re more than a laser technician. I will be a canvas and not a billboard.”
She yanks open a drawer that is crammed with papers. Swirls of stars and entwining roses, calligraphy sweeps and music notes flutter. The sketches tumble over the sides. “In one colour or fifty? Words or photos or cartoons? Impressionism, Realism, Surrealism?”
A sheet sways towards the ground and I rest my hand beneath to catch it. This tattoo is mine, a helix of willow catkins to weave spine and scars and brands across my back.
Manaia flicks on a switch, and the world inside her Tattoory is no longer dim.
***
S.L. Nickerson’s writing has appeared in Analog, Kaleidatrope, Pulp Lit, The Colored Lens, and The Prairie Journal, with an upcoming short story in Tesseracts 18. Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis in astrophysics at the University of Zürich. Her job involves playing with galaxies like toys, and real life unfolds for her like a science fiction story.