Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

  Some of the time he drew his own characters alongside the copied characters. He drew Smooshie Smith interviewing aliens on the set of his time-machine talk show. He thought of nice things for Smooshie and his guests to say to the card’s recipients, words of encouragement, You’re very good at sports, or, You always have the right math answer. He could picture Razz reading his You tell some funny jokes card and maybe thinking differently about The Kid, thinking that maybe The Kid wasn’t so bad after all. In Rhonda Sizemore’s card he drew Smooshie Smith trying on sneakers in a shoe store, a little joke that only she would get, something that would maybe make what had happened in the mall seem not so bad, make it seem kind of funny and stupid instead.

  He sat looking at the blank paper he was going to use for Arizona’s card. Almost afraid to start. If he started drawing and didn’t like what he drew, he’d be short a piece of paper. But he didn’t want to start and then draw something stupid. This was the first time she would see one of his drawings, and he wanted to get it right.

  His dad was standing over his shoulder, sipping a cup of coffee he’d made in the kitchen.

  “What are you up to, Kid?”

  Halloween Cards.

  “Can I take a look?”

  The Kid shrugged. His dad sat down next to him, unclipped his pager from his belt, set it on the table. He opened the first card on the pile, read it, nodded. Opened the next card.

  “These are really good, Kid. You’re becoming a really good artist.”

  I’m out of ideas.

  His dad got up from the table, took a sip of coffee, swished it in his mouth, spat into the darkness of the yard. Cleared his throat, sat back down. His dad still seemed upset about what had happened at the mall. The Kid wanted to get him out of that feeling. He looked at his dad’s arms, the sleeves of tattoos.

  Can I draw some of those?

  His dad looked down at the tattoos, turned his arms back and forth, nodded. Held his arms out flat against the table. The Kid started drawing again. In one card, he drew the woodcut waves and the pirate ship and the rowboat. In another, he drew the Cadillac and the scorpion and the sand falling from the sky. He started to draw the red-haired woman with the big boobs, but his dad told him to move on to the next idea.

  After a while, they had a system. The Kid would draw something from one of his dad’s arms, write a message to whatever classmate the drawing was for, and start on the next card. His dad would take that last card with his free hand and add in background details with another magic marker: birds in the sky, leaves on the trees, woodcut splashes in the waves. His dad was a good artist. They were a team. The Kid worked his way up and down both of his dad’s arms. He kept returning to the pirate ship, drawing different sections in different cards, cannons firing, the jolly roger flag flapping in the breeze. For Matthew’s card, he drew the black crow with X’s for eyes. He drew a word balloon coming from the crow’s open mouth that said, I’m glad you’re my friend. Finally, in Arizona’s card, he drew Smooshie Smith standing in front of his applauding studio audience, his arms open wide, a big smile on his face, a word balloon above him that said, Welcome to Los Angeles!

  The Kid tapped his dad’s knuckles. A letter in black script on each of the first three.

  What’s that one mean?

  “You know what that one means.”

  I forgot.

  “You forgot. You think I was born last night?”

  I forgot.

  “They’re your initials, Kid. Whitley Earl Darby.”

  Tell the story.

  “You’ve heard the story a million times.”

  No I haven’t.

  “A billion times.”

  Tell it just once more. I forgot.

  His dad smiled, his regular lopsided smile. It seemed like maybe he was coming out of being angry from the mall. He got up from the table, stretched his arms over his head, pushed his hands into the bottom of his back. Cleared his throat, spat out into the yard. Finally sat back down next to The Kid.

  “Your mom told me to get it. The night you were born.”

  Start from the beginning.

  “What’s the beginning?”

  She didn’t like the tattoos at first.

  “She didn’t like the tattoos at first. She wasn’t thrilled with the tattoos. She put up with them.”

  But she liked you.

  “She didn’t like the tattoos, but she liked me. So she made me promise not to get any more.”

  So you promised.

  “So I promised. I had enough anyway. But then one night you were born.”

  In the hospital.

  “In the hospital. Sixth floor, maternity ward. You were born and we couldn’t believe it. We’d never seen anything like you. A little kid who looked just like us, crying and peeing all over the place.”

  The Kid felt his face get red, his ears get hot. He always got embarrassed at that part of the story. His dad never left it out.

  “That night we were in the hospital room. The doctor was gone, the nurses were gone. It was just your mom and you and me. I was sitting in the chair next to the bed, holding you. You were asleep on my shoulder. Your mom was looking at me in this funny way. She reached over and touched my hand, the hand that was holding your head. She touched these three knuckles, one at a time. Get one here, she said.”

  You weren’t supposed to get any more tattoos.

  “She changed her mind. She made an exception. She understood why they were important, what function they served.”

  What function do they serve?

  “They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.”

  So you don’t forget?

  “As a reminder. This is what happened. This is something that happened.”

  It was almost fully dark in the backyard. His dad turned on the porch light, sat back down at the table. The Kid could hear crickets chirping in the bushes, a cat crying off down the street.

  “When she fell asleep, I drove up to the tattoo parlor,” his dad said. “They were closing up. It was really late—really early, actually. I reached through the security gate, knocked on the window because the guy who’d done a lot of my work was in there, sweeping the place out for the night.”

  What was his name?

  “Gilbert. Beto, we called him. He let me in and I told him what had happened, told him about you, about what your mom had said. He stopped sweeping and sat me down in the chair and went to work. The only two people in the shop, the only two people awake on that whole street, probably. Middle of the night, just the buzz of the needle and the neon sign in the window.”

  How much did he charge you?

  “A million dollars.”

  How much did he really charge you?

  “He didn’t charge me a thing. He said it was on the house.”

  The Kid touched his dad’s knuckles, one at a time. Tried to imagine the buzzing of the needle, of the neon sign.

  What did mom say when you got back to the hospital?

  “She was still asleep. You were back in the nursery, asleep too. Rows of cribs, all the babies that had been born that day. I wanted to show you the tattoo. I stood outside the window of the nursery and held up my hand so you could see the bandage. I held my hand there and waited for you to open your eyes.”

  Did I?

  “You did, Kid. You opened your eyes and looked right at me.”

  What did I do?

  “Wet yourself, probably.”

  What did mom say when she saw the tattoo?

  “She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. I sat next to her bed and when she woke up the next morning I took off the bandage and she held my hand. And we sat like that until the nurse came in with breakfast.”

  His dad got up from the picnic table, swished some coffee around in his mouth, spat out into the yard. The Kid didn’t know why his dad was spitting so much. Pieces of rice stuck in his teeth, maybe. Maybe he hadn’t liked the dinner.


  “How’s that story hold up?” his dad said.

  Pretty good. It’s a pretty good story.

  His dad sat down again and they went back to work on the cards. They were almost finished with number twenty-three when his dad’s pager began to buzz, vibrating loudly, turning itself in circles on the table.

  Darby opened the door into the darkness of the hotel room. The crew was suited up, masked and gloved, buckets in hand. Bob held the camera at his hip. Darby felt along the wall for a light switch. No luck. He moved inside slowly, carefully, his boots making a strange noise with each step, a crinkling sound out of place in what should have been a plushly carpeted room.

  He found and flipped the switch, throwing light into the small suite, two connecting rooms facing the ocean. He looked down at his boots. A layer of black plastic covered the floor, covered the floors of both rooms, garbage bags that had been sliced into long sheets and duct taped together. The plastic was covered in fluid that had leaked from the bed, collecting in pools where the bags bunched, running in syrupy streams to the outermost edges, spilling off to soak the thick carpeting beneath.

  “Wonderful,” Bob said. “Just fucking wonderful.”

  This happened a few times a year. They stepped into a job site and onto plastic or rubber or cardboard, jury-rigged surfaces whoever was about to create the mess thought would make the cleanup easier, would prevent damage to the surroundings. It never worked out that way.

  Bob took the Before photo and they moved into the bedroom, settling their gear.

  There were greeting cards on top of nearly every flat surface, the bedside table, the dresser, the coffee table by the sliding glass doors that opened onto the balcony. Maybe forty or fifty cards in all. The cards said Get Well Soon. The cards said Our Thoughts Are With You. There were small stuffed animals, teddy bears and rabbits and puppies. Helium-filled balloons hovered at the ceiling with messages similar to the cards. There were pictures everywhere, small framed photographs and blurry color computer printouts, members of a family, multiple generations, the recurring face that of a smiling, heavyset woman. The pictures followed her from her twenties to what looked like her late forties, her soft face getting bloated with sickness as the pictures became more recent, the skin around her eyes puffing and sagging, her curly brown hair disappearing, replaced by a flower-print bandana wrapped around her head.

  Darby slid open the balcony doors, letting in some ocean air. The cards in the hotel room looked like the cards he and The Kid had received a year ago, the cards that had shown up in the mail or had been left on the front porch. Our Condolences and Our Thoughts Are With You During This Trying Time. Signed by other teachers from Lucy’s high school, students, parents of students. The cards arrived for a week, two weeks, and then the books started arriving, paperback bereavement manuals on how to cope, how to get through. Some with religious overtones; some written for children, colorfully illustrated, intended for The Kid. Darby would find them in the morning on the front porch or in the bed of the pickup, covers damp and curling with dew. He’d had no idea who was leaving them. When Someone You Love has Passed and You’re Never Alone. Two or three a week, waiting for him in the first flat light of morning.

  He’d sit in the pickup at night, waiting for the pager to buzz, reading the paperbacks by the dome light. He looked through them all, even the children’s books. He looked for a sentence, a combination of words that would make sense, a line that would shake him with the force of understanding. Some clue, some secret. What to do now. He found nothing. In all the books, nothing. He boxed them up, put them away in the garage.

  Lucy’s friend Amanda came with dinner in Tupperware containers. She’d ask how Darby was doing, how The Kid was doing. He could see her struggling to find the words, to ask the right questions, but there was nothing to say. He knew this. He’d read every one of those books. The Kid was right. His silence was the correct response. But Amanda talked and Darby listened and nodded and told her that he and The Kid were doing okay. She’d touch him on the shoulder sometimes, as she was leaving. She’d put a hand on his shoulder and stand like that for a minute, unsure what to do next. She was Lucy’s friend. She didn’t know what to do, how to act now that Lucy was gone.

  New bereavement books kept arriving, delivered in the hour or two when he slept. One night, long after The Kid was in bed, he sat out on the dark porch, waiting. After a couple of hours, a familiar black sedan crept down the street, headlights slowly approaching. The car stopped in front of the house. Darby could see Amanda’s face by the dashboard light. She left the car idling in the street and jogged to the front gate of the yard, sandals slapping against the balls of her feet. She was holding a paperback book. She opened the gate, took a few slower steps toward the pickup. She gasped when she saw Darby sitting in the dark, put a hand to her chest, startled. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange in the night, blunt and loud. It sounded like someone else’s voice. It drove her from the yard, still holding the book, back to her car, away down the street.

  We don’t need any more books, he’d said. That strange voice. Stop leaving them here. We don’t need any more books.

  She didn’t come back. The books stopped arriving, the Tupperware containers stopped arriving. From then on, Darby and The Kid spent every night at drive-thru windows, in fast food parking lots, sitting out on the back porch with pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons.

  Bob turned on the TV in the hotel room, found the all-night news. The Tehachapi group’s website had been discovered, excavated from deletion by state computer programmers temporarily pulled from working on the Millennium Bug. There were message board postings from the group’s members over the last year discussing the rejection of their regular lives and the friends and family who refused to listen, to prepare for the coming disaster. The group’s members had coordinated carpools, flight information, rides from the airport and train station, their migration to the compound, a town of their own that they would call Reality, California.

  The crew went to work on the room. The fluid slid in every direction when they tried to towel it up, spilled off the sides of the plastic when they attempted to roll and remove the sheeting. Bob cursed a steady stream, kept one eye on the TV. They were showing photographs of the citizens of Reality, men and women and children, mostly white, mostly smiling, vacation photos, school photos, photos taken in their cubicles at work. The newscaster read the name and age and occupation for the person in each photo, the city they were from, the place they’d left behind to come to the Tehachapis.

  They finally managed to soak up the fluid from the plastic and redbag the duct-taped sheets. Darby and Bob started on the mattress, cutting the wet padding into squares. Roistler knelt on the floor by the TV, doing the same to the soaked carpeting.

  “I spoke to her yesterday morning, when she checked in.”

  It was a woman’s voice, accented, eastern European maybe, a slight rounding and widening of the vowels. Darby turned to see a cleaning woman standing in the doorway between the two rooms of the suite, watching them work. She looked to be about thirty, compact, pale-skinned. A broad face and deep set eyes. She wore a starched blue dress and a white apron, the uniform of the hotel. Her nametag said Stella.

  “I was still cleaning the room from the last guest when she came in with her suitcase,” Stella said. “She told me to take my time, that she didn’t mind the company. She placed those pictures around the room while I changed the sheets on the bed.”

  “You should really go back outside,” Bob said.

  Stella didn’t reply, remained standing in the doorway, hands together at the tie of her apron, looking at the pictures arranged around the room.

  For some reason, Bob didn’t press the issue, just went back to cutting the mattress. Maybe it was because Stella seemed unfazed by the cleaning, by the things they cleaned. Maybe it was because of the sound in the hotel room, a woman’s voice, a calm voice, an unusual thing at a job site.

  “She asked me if I was
married and I told her that I was not,” Stella said. “She said it was nice to be married. She said she missed how nice it was.”

  Bob stood from the side of the mattress. Darby thought he was going to lead Stella out of the suite, but instead he walked to the TV, turned down the volume, knelt back by the bed and resumed cutting. When Roistler saw that Bob was going to let her stay, he pulled a pair of foam earplugs out of the pocket of his moonman suit, wedged them into his ears.

  “I saw her again yesterday afternoon,” Stella said. “I was having a cigarette in back of the hotel. She was walking across the parking lot, carrying shopping bags. She had been to the grocery down the street. She had bought boxes of garbage bags. I thought that was a strange thing to buy. She smiled when she saw me, smiled at my cigarette. She made the motion of smoking one herself, then she disappeared into the back doors of the hotel.”

  The effort it took to cut and tape and lay the plastic sheeting. Darby tried not to think of this, tried to shake the image out of his head, but he kept returning to it, the woman from the photos on her hands and knees, sick and tired from illness and treatment, spreading garbage bags across the hotel room floor.

  He could feel the speck in the back of his throat. When the feeling got to be too much, he walked out onto the balcony, pulled off his mask and spat into the salt air.

  The TV showed more photos of the people in the compound, one picture fading into the next, an unbroken stream of smiling faces.

  Stella looked to the corner of the room, the redbags filled with black plastic. “I will stay until you are finished working,” she said. “I feel that possibly some of this was done for me.”

  Darby stood alone in the room, holding the camera. The bed and carpeting had been removed, the walls scrubbed clean. Bob was down in the manager’s office completing the paperwork. Roistler was out packing the vans. Stella had disappeared sometime before, after they’d finished the job and hauled out the last of the redbags.