Tattoo Atlas

by Tim Floreen

  “Take them away,” he repeated, more loudly this time. He clutched at his headboard the same way the mice were clawing at the Plexiglas. His chains clanged against the bed’s metal frame, which only made the mice more frantic. “GET THEM THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”

  “All right, Franklin.” Mom picked up the cage and passed it back to Gertie. “We’ll leave you alone for a while.”

  His panting slowed little by little, but he stayed in a tight ball jammed against the headboard. He grabbed the earbuds and started to nestle them back into his ears one by one.

  “We’ll need to take the music player too,” Mom said.

  “Please don’t,” Franklin whispered between pants. “The music helps.”

  “It’s not connected to the network,” Gertie put in. “I don’t see what harm it can do.”

  Mom nodded. “We’ll be back in a while, Franklin. I apologize for upsetting you.”

  Gertie started to follow her, but then she lifted the iPod from Franklin’s hands and gave the screen a few taps. “Listen to that one,” she said in a gentle voice. “It’s my favorite.”

  By lunchtime I still hadn’t received an update from Mom, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the procedure, wondering how it had gone. I ducked out of the cafeteria and into the hall to call her. I figured she probably wouldn’t answer, so it surprised me when she picked up on the first ring.

  “Did it work?” I said. “Can you tell yet?”

  “It’s looking promising.”

  I knew enough scientist-speak to understand “promising” meant we’re pretty sure we totally nailed it but still want to sound scientific and professional. “Mom, that’s fantastic.”

  “I was just going to text you, actually. Can you come to the lab after school tomorrow?” She sounded keyed up, like she’d had even more coffee than usual.

  A few guys in snow boots clomped down the hall. I turned into a corner and clapped a hand over my other ear so I could hear better. “Why?”

  “I’d like you to interact with Franklin again. He was asking about you, and I think another encounter between you two might—”

  “Yield valuable data. I know.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mom said, “it won’t be like last time. I promise you.”

  My fingers tensed like they wanted an armrest or a steering wheel to clamp onto. How can you promise something like that? a voice in my brain asked. But I gave my head a shake to silence it. “Sure, Mom. I can do that.”

  “Four o’clock tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  When I got back to our table, Lydia said, “Where’d you disappear to? Out for a cigarette?”

  “No, I just wanted to call Mom to see how the procedure went.”

  “And?” Callie asked. “Did it work?”

  “Promising. That’s what she said. But it’s too early to really tell.”

  “I don’t know.” Tor grabbed a fistful of fries from his tray. “No matter what your mom does to him, he’ll still always be the motherfucker who killed Pete.”

  “Tor.” Lydia put a hand on his arm. I half-expected her to say something sweet and naive about how we needed to show forgiveness, but she changed the subject instead. “So you didn’t go out to smoke, Rem? I haven’t seen either of you doing that lately. What’s going on?”

  My eyes skipped to Tor. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Usually when we slipped off together during lunch I’d let him do the lying.

  “We quit,” Tor said, managing to flash Lydia a dazzling grin despite the french fries jamming his mouth. He finished chewing and swallowed. “We finally realized what we were doing was dirty and disgusting, so we made an agreement to stop. Isn’t that right, Nice Guy?”

  His grin hardened a little as he turned it toward me. I nodded, while in my head I was picturing myself dissolving into a puddle again.

  Lydia gave Tor’s forearm a squeeze. “I had a feeling. Callie, isn’t that great?”

  “Peachy,” Callie muttered, stealing a fry from my tray and nibbling the end.

  “Congratulations. I’m very proud of you guys.”

  “I did it for you,” Tor said.

  He gave her a kiss. So I wouldn’t have to watch, I grabbed a fry and used it to dab the ketchup on my white styrofoam tray until it resembled the splattering of blood in my latest Tattoo Atlas drawing.

  On the way back to Boreal Street in the Saab, we passed Nil Bergstrom trudging through the snow, bent nearly double under her massive, mysterious load. The sun would go down soon. Indigo and purple seeped across the sky like watercolors. Nil’s words in Ms. Utter’s class earlier that day still echoed in my head. Had Franklin wanted the procedure done? I had no idea. And the crazy thing was, it had never even occurred to me to ask myself that question. But on the other hand, maybe Lydia was right. Maybe his thoughts on the procedure didn’t even matter, because his thoughts were the very problem the procedure was meant to fix.

  Anyway, as far as I knew, the explanation I’d given in class for why Mom had chosen Franklin was true. Apparently it had all started with Franklin’s grandmother. Before the Big Bang, a little while after Mom’s sleek new lab had gone up, Mrs. Kettle had read an article about the Mother Ship in the local paper. Franklin’s strange behavior had been troubling her, and the shrinks she’d sent him to hadn’t helped, so late one evening she’d made one of her rare excursions out of her house, crept down the street to our front door, and begged Mom to take a look at him. I’d eavesdropped on the encounter from the hall and heard her say in her small, fragile-sounding voice, “I just don’t know what to do with him anymore.” Mom had agreed to help.

  I parked the Saab in the garage, said a quick good-bye to the others, and went into the house. Feeling restless, I grabbed a water from the fridge and prowled around for a while, searching for a place to settle. I finally dropped into a rolling desk chair in a corner of the living area, where we kept a big-screen computer for random Internet browsing. My water bottle jostled the mouse as I set it on the table, and the desktop sprang up on the computer screen. In the lower left-hand corner, the Son of War mask, in icon form, scowled at me. Mom had downloaded the game a few weeks ago in preparation for Franklin’s arrival. Research, she’d called it, so she could understand him better, although as far as I could tell she’d only played the game once and then walked away in disgust. The icon had sat there on the desktop ever since, unclicked.

  I clicked it now.

  The screen went black while the game loaded. Then SON OF WAR appeared in big red letters. I slid forward in the chair and gripped the mouse.

  The game started with a cinematic opening sequence showing the backstory of the main character, a US Marine named Jim Colby. In the first few seconds, as propulsive orchestral music played and lots of stuff exploded, Colby lost his leg in an IED strike. He then had it replaced, Six Million Dollar Man style, with a bionic limb that made him even stronger. The montage that followed showed Colby repeatedly going back into battle and performing feats of bravery and skill, only to lose another limb and have another mechanical version attached in its place. As the coup de grâce, a piece of shrapnel from an exploding Humvee sheared off his face and the front of his skull, missing his brain by millimeters. This was shown in graphic detail, of course. His special team of doctor-engineers now had to come up with a replacement for that. The last shot of the opener showed, in close-up, the iconic Son of War mask sliding into place over what remained of Colby’s head, which meant it wasn’t a mask at all, but the guy’s actual face.

  The scene shifted to a shadowy briefing room, where a general with a white crew cut and ice-blue eyes gave Colby a rundown of his next mission. A helicopter would air-drop him into a small occupied town in Afghanistan. He’d have to infiltrate a terrorist stronghold, steal important documents containing information about the terrorists’ next target, and blow the place up. “But no one can know the US military is involved in this operation,” the general growled, speaking straight through the screen at me
. “Which means you’ll be on your own in there. You must take any measure necessary. Kill anyone who gets in your way. Anyone. Is that understood?”

  My stomach twisted. The nerves in my fingers as I clutched the mouse had started to tingle.

  The music swelled again while the helicopter flew Colby into Afghanistan. Panoramic views of the landscape stretched across the screen. Dusty yellow mountains baking under a sinking red sun. A river cutting toward the horizon, with a narrow border of grass and trees on either side. The hot colors burned into our chilly living room, a jolting contrast to the unbroken white outside the window.

  Colby jumped from the chopper. His black parachute deployed, and for a second the red sun, just now touching the mountains, framed him as he descended. I had to say, the game’s imagery impressed me. The compositions of the shots. The radiant color palette. And it all looked so real. I wondered if Ethan had seen something similar when he’d flown into Afghanistan. I thought back to the conversations we’d had over Skype but couldn’t remember anything specific he’d said about the place. Had he found it beautiful?

  The soldier landed on the outskirts of a blasted, smoking town. Now I had control of him. I was seeing the town from his perspective. The edges of the screen had darkened to suggest I was peering through the Son of War mask. A bunch of numbers appeared along the screen’s bottom edge, indicating my score, my time, how much ammo I had, other things I didn’t understand.

  The game started off slowly. Hints popped up explaining how to make Colby move, pick up objects, remove tools and weapons from his pack. Even with their help, I had a hard time at first. As I steered him into the town, I kept making him walk into walls and fall off ledges, and it took me forever to figure out how to get him to open doors.

  The screen flickered red, and another hint materialized. DANGER: ENEMY NEARBY. READY YOUR WEAPON.

  Colby seemed to have several, but I managed to make him pull out some kind of automatic rifle. A guy in a ragged green T-shirt sprang out from behind an oil drum, a gun in each of his hands. I gave a shout, jumped up from my chair, and started hammering at the keyboard with one hand and madly clicking the mouse with the other. I must’ve done something right, because Colby ducked to the side and fired. The guy’s chest opened up. He went flying against a wall, his arms spread wide, the blood spattering the graffiti-covered concrete rendered in photorealistic detail. The little box on the screen marked SCORE ticked up from 0 to 732. I wondered what had gone into the calculation of that score. How did the game figure out the worth of each life in points? Or did it have something to do with the way I’d killed him? Or had the game just randomly generated the number?

  Colby kept going, killing more enemy soldiers under my direction. He hadn’t run across any civilians yet, or at least I didn’t think he had. It was confusing: everyone he encountered had a gun, but no one wore a uniform that clearly identified him as a soldier.

  The town sank into twilight. The bright colors faded, replaced by sinister blues and blacks. The music grew more ominous too. The bad guys got harder to bring down. Colby took a few hits himself. But we pushed on.

  I’d never played this kind of game before. The thought of shooting things up had never appealed to me, and my lack of hand-eye coordination whenever I was forced to play sports during gym class had made me think I’d probably suck at video games too. I hadn’t realized they felt this good. My body buzzed, like the electricity traveling from the computer to the mouse and keyboard was continuing into my hands and up my arms. Like I had cybernetic appendages too.

  And I didn’t suck. As I pounded on the keys, a monologue started in my head. See? the monologue went. I can totally do this. Not bad for an arty, uncoordinated gay kid.

  I barely even noticed when I started speaking the monologue out loud.

  “See? Bam! You’re dead, asshole!”

  Colby blasted a bad guy through the heart. Then he rounded a corner, where a whole gang waited for him. I didn’t hesitate, I just charged Colby forward. The electricity coursing through me felt stronger. More aggressive.

  “This isn’t hard.”

  He mowed down a couple more thugs.

  “You just have to pull the trigger. What’s so hard about that?”

  Colby’s bullets ripped apart the crowd, slathering the concrete walls in red. It was like a whole new approach to painting.

  “Like this, Ethan, see?” I shouted. “Why couldn’t you just fucking do it? Why couldn’t you just pull the goddamn trigger? Like this!”

  The garage door rumbled open. I stopped, breathing hard. Outside, night had fallen, just like it had in the game. The lights had come on in the city below, and the lake had turned into a big black hole, the same way it did every evening. The house was dark too. I glanced at the clock. Three hours had gone by. My fingers ached. So did my legs. Only now did I realize I’d never even sat back down after jumping to my feet that first time. Through the whole game, I’d hunched over the desk while dancing back and forth in my socks, leaving a puddle of footprints on the rug around me, like some kind of deadly altercation had taken place right here in this room.

  I quit the game and put the computer to sleep, for some reason moving at a frantic pace. I didn’t even know why. It wasn’t like Mom had ever told me she didn’t want me playing Son of War.

  By the time she came in, I’d flicked on some lights and started pulling stuff out of the fridge for dinner. “I didn’t think you’d be home so early.”

  She shrugged off her coat. “Franklin needs sleep, and the rest of the team’s tired too, so I gave everyone the evening off.”

  Mom looked exhausted herself, not that she’d ever have admitted it. She opened a cupboard to take down some plates, but I said, “Just have a seat, Mom. I’ll get dinner tonight.”

  Without protesting she lowered herself into a chair at the kitchen table, mopped back her hair, and glanced around the house frowning. “When I drove up all the lights were off. Were you sitting here in the dark?”

  “I just got sucked into watching a movie and lost track of time.”

  Maybe I sounded nervous, because she turned her frown toward me, like she didn’t quite believe me. But then she thought of something else and groaned. “The garage door opener’s making that funny sound. We should probably have it looked at before it goes kaput again.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Want a glass of wine?”

  “God yes.”

  I pulled an open bottle from the fridge. Mom had a nightly ritual of pouring herself exactly one half glass of red wine each evening before bed. She probably needed it just to come down from all the caffeine she ingested during the day. I set the glass in front of her.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Okay.” I opened a box of week-old Thai and sniffed. “We had rehearsal for the memorial assembly.”

  “And?”

  “It’s going to be a schmaltzfest. Abigail Lansing’s basically running the show.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe schmaltz is what the school needs right now. Callie gave a good speech, though. She told the story about the ice gazebo.”

  Mom’s eyes slipped to the backyard, where Ethan’s gazebo stood under a heap of snow. She took a sip from her glass. “Did anyone at school ask about the procedure? It’s been getting a lot of news coverage.”

  I shoved a couple boxes of the Thai food into the microwave. “Yeah. We talked about it in Ms. Utter’s class.”

  “Are people concerned?”

  “A few are.” I pushed some buttons. The microwave beeped and started to whir. I shot a glance over my shoulder. I could tell Mom was in no mood to answer hard questions, but I had to ask. “Someone said the reason you chose Franklin for the procedure was because you couldn’t find any adult convicts who’d give their consent. Since he’s a minor, you could get consent from his grandma instead. Is that true?”

  Mom took another long sip of red wine. She pulled herself up stra
ight in her chair and folded her hands together on the table, like she was getting ready to speak at a press conference. “You have to understand something, Rem. Making science happen is hard. Sometimes you have to get creative. We did try to find an adult subject, with no success. Then I thought of Franklin. We’d performed an exhaustive analysis of his brain, and when I went back and looked at the results of the tests we’d run, I realized he’d make a perfect candidate. And yes, the consent issue was easier to manage in his case.”

  She glanced up from her glass to check my reaction. Maybe she saw some lingering doubt there, because she added, “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t sincerely believe I was helping him, with minimal risk to his health. I know it’s not a perfect answer, Rem, but we don’t live in a perfect world.”

  Over the phone later that night I told Callie about my conversation with Mom. Callie’s house stood across the street, and her bedroom faced front, like mine did. I could see her pacing back and forth while she kneaded her pile of long black hair into its nighttime configuration.

  “Makes sense to me,” she said. “Franklin Kettle’s a minor, a murderer, and a fucking psycho. Why should they have to get his permission to fix his brain? I mean, doesn’t it make sense to you?”

  “I guess. To be honest, that isn’t even the part of this whole thing that really bothers me.”

  “Oh yeah? What is?”

  I sank into the chair in front of my desk. All the smudges of ink and paint covering the white surface had almost become a painting themselves. “I guess I’m not sure I believe in what my mom’s doing. Not whether it’s right, but whether it’ll even work. I know she believes, and I try to be supportive, but . . .”

  “But what? Spit it out, Remmy.”

  I propped an elbow on the desk and pressed my forehead into my palm. “Look, if I tell you something, do you promise you won’t repeat it?”

  “Come on, you know I can keep a secret.”

  I glanced at the door, even though Mom’s bedroom stood all the way on the other side of the house. “I visited Franklin at the lab yesterday. My mom asked me to do it, so she could observe how he interacted with me.”