Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (6 page)

She picked her phone up off the coffee table and snapped a picture. “It doesn’t say ‘Dragon,’ ” she said, holding up a side-by-side comparison of my inflamed skin and a kanji on a white background. “It says
Demon.
”

“Still cool,” I snorted. “Maybe cooler. It could say ‘General Tso’s Goes Here,’ across my abs.”

“More like your gut,” she said. “And anyways, General Tso’s is Chinese.”

I scowled. “I was making a joke,” I said. But she still wasn’t laughing. “It really shouldn’t be that inflamed,” she insisted. “If the guy can’t even do the right kanji, he probably wasn’t exactly sanitary with the needle. You may have to get on the cocktail.”

“Unless it’s a goddamn screwdriver, I’m not interested in a cocktail.” But I knew she was right, and that’s what scared me the most.

She flipped around on her phone and got up to find a piece of paper. “There’s a clinic that’s open on the Upper West Side,” she said. “Ask for Christeen, she’s a friend of mine, she can get you what you need, and if you give her the address of the place where you got inked, she can send in the health inspector. You got insurance?”

“Thanks, Obamacare.”

“Get showered and dressed,” she said. “It’s only open until three; I’ll call ahead and let them know you’re coming. She’ll hold a spot for you. I tutored her idiot kid last year, she kinda owes me.”

I took the slip of paper she held out. “Thanks Luce,” I said. “When I get back, lunch is on me.”

“I’d insist,” she said, grinning.

Fuck, the subway was hot. I forgot the 6 wasn’t air-conditioned and the crowds only made it worse. The train lurched into 42
nd
Street and a fat guy in a fedora and a
Family Guy
T-shirt lurched against me. My arm hurt so bad it was all I could do not to scream. I thought about Luce and my dick got hard with rage and hate. After all this, she had better fucking sleep with me. There was no fucking reason not to except that she, like most women, got off on watching me sweat while she pranced around the apartment in those little boyshorts with her big ass hanging out. I got a tattoo for her, a tattoo that hurt like hell, and she sent me to the doctor like I was too stupid to do it myself.

The train started up again and I stumbled against a rail-thin blonde. My arm was crawling like scrambled porn and anxiety wound barbed wire around my chest as I thought about my audition. Why was I going through this, I wasn’t going to get in. Wait, what? I don’t take fucking ballet; it takes three drinks just to get me on the dance floor and you couldn’t exactly call what I do there dancing. There were too many people on this train, all brushing against my arm. Somewhere I wondered if my little brother was ever coming home, if all the numbers of the universe made sense, how beautiful my girlfriend was going to look when I handed her the ring in my pocket. …

When the train screeched to a halt at 77
th
I shoved and stumbled through the crowd to get out. A homeless dude with a cart full of beer cans knocked into me and I vomited canned tuna and Mad Dog onto the empty downtown rail. An MTA officer tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I gasped. “I just need some air.” The whole universe felt like it was crashing in on me; I couldn’t get my brain straight, I just needed a moment to clear it all out and start again. I swore that if I made it out of this alive, I was never, ever, letting some shot girl—no matter how fucking cute she was—spike my drink.

I huddled against a grimy metal girder until the path was clear enough to go through. Passing through the turnstile, I brushed against a Moby-looking douche with a Steely Dan T-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, making a mental note to swing over to Bleeker Street Records and see if they’d managed to find me a copy of
Kamakiriad.

I stumbled across the street, taxi horns snarling at me, and flopped onto a park bench. I fumbled for my phone, exerting all my last effort to find Luce’s number. “You have to come get me,” I said. “I think I’m losing my fucking mind.”

“Where are you?”

“Meet me at Pretzel Logic,” I said.

“What?”

“Pretzel Logic!” I insisted. In my head it made perfect sense. How was she not getting this?

And then she got it. “Fifth Avenue and 79
th
,” she said. “Miner’s Gate. Why didn’t you just say that?”

“I don’t know,” I moaned. I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything, nothing made any fucking sense. “Just please come get me before I wind up naked screaming about the cyborg invasion.”

“Too late for that,” she said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Luce arrived after 40 long minutes, armed with a cold bottle of water. She let me have a sip before she pressed it to my sweaty forehead. By now, the chatter in my head had ceased and I felt almost normal again.

“Your tattoo looks different,” she said.

I glanced down. “How the hell would you know?”

She took another picture with her phone and held it up. “Because now it says
Sound.
”

That explained the Steely Dan reference but it didn’t explain anything else. “What the fuck?” I said. “Why the fuck would I get a sound tattoo?”

She touched my arm and I swore my teeth were going to break from how hard I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming. She took another picture. “Now it says
Rabbit.
”

“They are cute little buggers,” I hissed, holding back tears of pain. “We should get one for the apartment.” Fuck, what the hell was I saying?

“Drink,” she said, passing me the water bottle again. “When you get steady, we’re going to go find this tattoo shop and find out what the hell is going on.”

“What about the doctor’s?” I asked.

She shook her head. “You’ve got much bigger problems than a doctor is going to be able to solve.”

We took a cab down to Little Toke, and by the time we arrived I wasn’t bugging out as much and my tattoo—as well as my affection for rabbits—had returned to normal, even if normal was “Demon” and not “Dragon” like I’d fucking asked for. I reached into my pocket for my wallet to pay for the cab and my hand wrapped around a small package. “Here,” I said, passing it to her. “I bought this for you, thought you would think it was cute. Forgot I had it.”

She unwrapped it and smiled in a way I’d never seen her smile before. “Aww, thank you.” She hung it around her neck and it nestled perfectly between her tits. “Where did you find this?”

“Drunk purchase,” I admitted. “Think I got it about a block from where I got the tattoo.”

“If we can find that store, then we should be able to find the tattoo parlor,” she said. “Guess we’ll just have to retrace your steps.”

Little Toke was like a broken-down carnival in the daytime. Without the night sky, the neon signs looked like construction paper. Decker’s was closed down and dingy; gone were the shot girls with their lollipop hair and white panties and in their place were girls with panda backpacks and enormous striped knee socks who might have been fuckably cute under cover of darkness. Now they all looked like molly-fueled nightmares.

We found the trinket shop with all the Gucci knockoffs and stolen iPhones, but I noticed they didn’t have another rabbit necklace in place of the one I bought Luce. She asked about a tattoo shop. The owner just shook his head, but I wasn’t exactly surprised. Probably thought she was a cop. No one answered questions in Little Toke.

We trolled down every street with no luck. We even ventured back out into the outer blocks, where life went back to the normal New York pace. We found every other landmark of the night, but not even an empty storefront or a set of metal shutters where the shop should have been. Now I was fully convinced I was losing my mind, and only the tattoo itself proved that I was still sane.

We went to Bento Friday even though I wasn’t hungry. I sipped on some miso while Luce ate dumplings and thought out loud. “And you’re sure you got it here?” she said. “Not Chinatown?”

“Steve and I ate here and then I walked home,” I said. “It was in Little Toke, I’m sure.”

She slurped her tea in a way that sounded like thunder. “The phantom tattoo shop,” she joked. “Sounds like a bad movie.”

“It’s not funny,” I said. “What the hell am I going to do, Luce? I’m probably possessed.”

She peeled off her cardigan and passed it to me across the table. “Try something for me,” she said. “Cover it up, see if that helps.”

I obeyed and she tapped my wrist. Nothing changed. I let out a sigh of relief that felt like it had been held in my chest for a decade. “Guess that solves that,” I said. “But there goes my summer wardrobe.”

Every few days Luce would come up with some new exorcism technique to try out on me. She smeared my arm with garlic paste and I spent an hour scrubbing the stink out of my pores, prattling on about how my best friend stole my tenth-grade boyfriend. Holy water and head-shop candles, lines of salt, packets of herbs. We humored each other, but at the end of the day, I still had that ugly ink scarring up my flesh, waiting to transform me.

Every time she touched me with her latest sure-fire remedy, I got another little glimpse into her, fragments of her life she’d never revealed to me, to anyone. I cried at the memory of the boyfriend who’d moved to Italy without saying goodbye, I got frustrated at the rich little pricks who wouldn’t practice their fucking past tense, and I got these awful, near-unbearable cravings for brie baked in pastry. And for each thing I learned by becoming her for a few hours, I offered up to her a little unspoken piece of myself—that I was fucking terrified of thunderstorms. That my dad died of cancer when I was eleven and is probably the reason that I always start bawling when James Cromwell says “That’ll do, pig” in
Babe,
that I’ve always wanted to sing the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” at karaoke but never had the guts.

And then, one night as we sat drinking whiskey and ginger in front of the TV, she kissed me. I kissed her back. And when she tugged me into her bedroom and undressed me, I tried to leave the silver-threaded cowboy shirt on and my tattoo covered. “Take it off,” she insisted. “There’s nothing it can tell you that you don’t already know about me.”

An hour later we were sweaty and happy and eating cold sesame noodles in bed. I’d never had sex that good and I made Luce come twice—not just because she left scratches down my shoulders, but I felt her orgasm just like I was feeling my own. “What does it say now?” I asked, turning over my wrist.