counterpoint to her own, and she’d stood in the doorway, wanting desperately to leave this flesh fossil and go on to one of her own tribe members, the decorated, perhaps decadent elders who didn’t yammer the same questions about her tattoos, but yet...something in the tone of his voice, the phrasing of her own words, made her want to know what point he was obviously trying to make.
“You get the Internet? Use that mousie thing, go browsing?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“‘Who—’ Oh, you make me sad, so sad, Gwynn-girlie. Okay, you got your mouse. And your Internet. Where, I am told, because I am not on it, that you can find anything, about everything. Right?”
“Yes.”
“So, you ask, for information about a thing, and it will give it to you?” he asked around his soggy toast.
“If you use a search engine...and if the information you’re looking for is in the databases—”
“It is, it is...so, you do me a favor. Do you a favor. Start up that engine thing of yours, and ask it something. This engine, it has like an index? A Yellow Pages for what it does and doesn’t have?”
“Yes—” She was vaguely aware that she’d have to go to the bathroom soon, and shifted her legs accordingly.
“Good. Then, you ask it about this—”
* * * *
The cab driver treated her as if she was actually a Muslim woman, which was fine with Gwynn; she did have to consciously remember to pay him with her right hand, since she had a small tattoo on her left ring finger (a sun-faded memory of a long-ago boyfriend), but once he reached the gleaming steel gates fronting the storage facility, he did ask, “You a researcher, Ma’am?”
A beat, then, “Yes, I am. How much do I owe you, sir?”
Her abaya may have been something of a lie, but she didn’t feel guilty about saying she was a researcher. She’d copied down the words Mr. Beniamino had told her, words which sounded somewhat familiar, but which belonged to a distant past, close to a century ago. When he was only twenty-some months old, and said he, too, inhabited a ghetto...albeit of a different sort than the discrimination-by-design one she and her flesh-tribe members inhabited during working hours.
Using the words he’d provided, then adding some cross-references of her own, she’d spent an entire weekend before her monitor, her mouse slick-skinned from the sweat of her fingers as she’d navigated the Internet, taking a journey into a past where tattoos had a far different meaning—
The researcher line worked with the cabbie; as far as the guards were concerned, her black robes equaled seriousness of purpose, so she was waved through.
Despite all the times she’d taken flash-scraps to the climate-controlled vault here, that elevator ride down two hundred and twenty feet to the subtropolis below never failed to sicken her. Protectively, she wrapped her arms over her midriff, pressing the foil packet even deeper into her skin. Close to two hours of this, and she might be marked there for life.
Thinking of Mr. Beniamino, the phrase “marked for life” took on new shades of meaning; as the elevator slid downward, letting her stomach adhere to her diaphragm, she wished that he’d still been alive when she’d come back to his room the Monday after he’d spoken to her. He had to have passed on either late Sunday night, or early that morning; his urinal was partly full, and unchanged. None of the night crew was good for squat, and some of them were canvas. So much for the superiority of unmarked workers.
In the moments before the utter finality of his death really impacted on her, Gwynn had slid his pj sleeves up his arms, all the way to the saggy-fleshed elbows, and examined his forearms, searching among the irregular liver spots and slightly raised moles for his tattoo. Since he’d been a toddler when he’d gotten it, barely more than a baby, it might have faded, or spread out as he’d grown—
—that it was blue didn’t help much; most of his submerged veins were also a watery blue.
But she knew that it would be parallel to his forearm, running in a single line of numbers. The pictures on the Internet had shown her that much. Just as they’d shown her other tattoos, in other colors and patterns—
Those images she pushed from her mind, as she continued to search for his tattoo...the one he hadn’t asked for, given by people who’d forced him to get it. It seemed like they were routinely put on the left arm...there. Under a myriad of veins, liver spots, old scars, and crinkly darkish hair. A series of numbers, faint, spread, bleached to a delicate shade of baby-blue by decades of exposure to sunlight.
It would have been fairly easy to remove with a laser, even though blue (along with yellow) was a difficult color to obliterate entirely with laser light, since it was so old and faded to being with. That was what she wanted to ask him about, why he didn’t have it taken off. Or cut out of his skin, then stitch together the gaping ends. This was not the sort of tattoo one would want to keep...but, as she held his cooling arm in her hands, she remembered how she considered herself part of a tribe, and realized that she wouldn’t need to have that question answered, after all.
For a few brutally clear moments, she simply stood in Mr. B.’s room, taking in his world as he’d lived it for the last she didn’t know how many years: Nubby orange drapes, fronting a window whose panes were swirled with old dust and unknown fingerprints. Peachy-pale walls, decorated only with a freebie calendar from the local savings-and-loan and a pair of framed prints of enlarged gladiola blossoms. Bedside table in faux dark wood. Plastic-upholstered chair, with tapering round legs. Well-worn linoleum flooring. A small bathroom off the right side of the bed. Not a ghetto, but not a place for a human being, either.
In a place like that, one would need to hang onto anything which reminded one of his or her basic humanity. Even if it was a reminder of a less-than-human designation....
With a rubber-kneed jolt, she’d reached the subtropolis. As the elevator doors slid open, the silver-walled coolness inherent in the native limestone walls and ceiling cocooned her within her abaya. In the distance, she was only slightly aware of the people milling around outside the many units beyond the elevator, some huddled around tables like café patrons in France, smoking and talking over coffee, others driving those little golf-cart-like put-puts, all of them making noise, even as none of the sounds really reached her.
Within the twenty miles worth of tunnels and storage units before her was the huge unit (big-enough-to-have-its-own-ZIP-code-huge) which housed the flash-scraps for the eastern part of the United States. All hermetically-sealed within special glass plates, and stored within a climate-controlled environment. Rows upon rows of surgically-removed flash: Whole Irezumi body tattoos, spread out hunting-trophy style; individual sections of skin, embellished with greywork portraiture so finely rendered it resembled pen-and-ink work on parchment; examples of virtually every cartoon character ever inked on a body part—including licensed characters doing things their creators never intended them to do; celebrity tattoos; a few examples of medical tattoos (breast reconstructions, radiation-therapy dots)...and an entire block’s worth of wall-mounted flash defined as “Unclassified.” Things inked on bodies whose meaning was only known to the wearer...words, names, images indefinable.
Gwynn had personally carried dozens of pieces to the storage unit, and she had tiny renderings of each bit of flash done in miniature on her own forearm. “Buncha little thoughts” Mr. B. had called them.
She hadn’t had time to think before she’d harvested his tattoo; luckily, there
