The Tattoo Artist (13 page)

Early the next morning, Philip’s other eye opened at last. With both eyes working, he could measure distance, distinguish tint from shadow. If he squinted, he said, he could even make out some of the leaves on the trees. He insisted on standing first watch.

I retreated to the cool, dark shadows of the cave while he mounted the dunes, clad only in his sarong. It hung from his hip bones in tatters. A blond shadow had begun to bloom on his chin and cheeks, like moss on a black rock. Watching him train his swollen eyes with anticipation on the vapory distance only brought me despair and the breathless panic that goes with it. Not only was he about to see what I’d known all along—that our smoke signaled only the birds—but he was also able to see me plainly now.

By late afternoon, he was standing outside the cave. “They aren’t coming back,” he said softly.

I was against the wall where the sun never reached, where the sand was almost chilly. “I already know.”

“What do you want from me, Sara? I was wrong.”

He beckoned me to step outside, and when I wouldn’t, led me out by my hand into the merciless sunlight. Picking up a stick, he sliced an X in the sand and said, “We’re here.” He then drew an outline of what I assumed was our island and made a dozen little pokes above it. “There are islets to the north. Maybe they thought we went there?”

“Why would they think that?”

“We’ll die if we stay here.”

“That’s not true. They leave us food every night. There’s plenty of water.”

“We can’t live on yams and water. Even if the
Pearl
left us here, they’ve sent out word. Every ship in the area must be looking for us by now. We’re not that far from the shipping lanes. If we could just get past the reef, someone might spot us.” The blue ellipses shifted in the black bars, then fixed on one of the fisherman’s canoes, a hollowed-out log left on the beach.

“You know I can’t swim,” I said.

“We have no choice.”

“Why not wait a little longer?”

“How much longer? Until they stop looking for us altogether?”

Just before dawn, we dragged the canoe down to the shore and pushed off at first light, paddling toward the milky blue channel in the reef. I must have back-paddled when he shouted “Fore,” or stopped when he shouted “Go,” because my half of the canoe entered the passageway sideways. When the first set of rollers broke over us, we tipped over. When the second set struck, I was shot down to the sandy bottom and sent tumbling into the reef. I opened my eyes to a blizzard of effervescence. I inhaled a lungful of water and tore my legs on the fiery coral. I lost all sense of up and down, solid or liquid, struggle or surrender. And just when numb serenity began to take hold, and I was certain I was home, the towering reef Manhattan’s skyline, Philip grabbed hold of my hair and yanked me up into the shocking air. He half-dragged, half-carried me to the shore and laid me down on the wet sand, pummeling my back until I retched up seawater. He was shaking more than I was. He then lay down by my side in the draining tide and held me.

The sun had just cleared the mountaintops, and the water around us turned from red to tin to turquoise. Three fisherboys came out of the jungle and retrieved the canoe. It had washed up near the mangroves. They ferried it back to the shallows, then hauled it onto the beach.

My shins were gouged, my blouse was gone, my ankles scraped raw.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“I got into the canoe as willingly as you did.”

“For bringing you here.”

After that, the only thing we cast into the waves was a daily missive, a coconut on which we’d carved our names and whereabouts, the date, September 1939, and the fact we were Americans and stranded. We were only five hundred miles east of British New Guinea, eight hundred northeast of Australia. The coconuts had to wash up somewhere, eventually.

Bare-breasted now, in my shredded linen pants, I worked on the lettering with a shell blade, while Philip, in the kerchief-sized remnant of his sarong, crushed a mix of berry juice and tree gum to dye the missives red so that they might catch the eye of the mate with the binoculars on the watch of a passing ship.

We were so depleted and dazed that we actually put stock in this plan.

Soon as a coconut was finished, Philip carried it along the slippery base of the cliff and hurled it over the reef into the racing current. If he missed, though, the coconut got trapped in the surge for days, tossed up by the waves, slammed against the rocks. From my vantage point on the beach, it looked like a tiny red ball of hope being batted against a wall by a bored giant.

Nights, of course, I’d set sail in my dreams. Sometimes Philip was with me, sometimes he wasn’t. The island would suddenly break free of its mooring on the ocean floor and drift east, float home. By next morning, it pulled right up to the Hudson piers, where a taxi awaited me. If Philip was along, we’d saunter down the bamboo gangplank arm in arm, miraculously dressed to the nines. Either our tattoos would have washed away in the salt air, or we could peel them off, like dead skin after a sunburn.

By Day Twenty-nine, awakening to find myself in the same dank cave, beside the same face that never failed momentarily to paralyze me, my only hope of rescue to carve my whereabouts on another coconut, I went berserk and bolted into the ocean, shouting for this to end, wanting to drown.

The tide was low. I ran for the exposed skyline of the reef. But when the first surge knocked me down and rolled over my head, I panicked and begged to live. The old woman appeared out of nowhere, grasped my flailing arms, and led me back to the beach.

I didn’t even thank her, merely sank down on the wet sand. By the time Philip reached me, I was looking through him, as a catatonic looks through a wall. When he urged me to come back to the cave, to rest, at least to get out of the sun, his beseeching logic sounded, to my ringing ears, like Surrealist poetry. Finally, he left a bowl of water by my side and set off to collect wood for the insatiable appetite of our signal fire.

The sand turned from damp to warm to scalding. By midmorning, I was burned back to my senses. I rose up on bandy legs and turned around. My savior had multiplied into a half-dozen old ladies watching me from behind a fence of jungle. I could just make out their tattooed faces amid the veiny leaves.

When Philip trudged back under a stack of wood, I jerked my chin in their direction. He squinted at the exact spot where I’d pointed. “I don’t see anyone,” he said.

I regained the power of speech. “Are you blind?”

A frond shimmered and a cone of hair stuck out. A dozen more villagers materialized in between the palms to our left. Even Philip saw them.

“What do they want from us now?” I whispered. “Haven’t they done enough to us already?”

“Maybe they’re just curious? Maybe they’ve been watching us all along.”

“Are we going to die here?”

“If they wanted us dead, Sara, they wouldn’t have saved you.”

“Maybe we are dead. Maybe this is hell.”

For the next hour or so, we ignored them, hoping against hope that by pretending not to see them they might grow bored with us and go away, keep their distance as before without forgoing our daily ration of food—yams mostly, but now and then a breadfruit, or a bunch of sweet bananas, or a smoked silverfish that tasted, to me at least, like sablefish.

Philip fed the fire while I scratched away at another missive. But I couldn’t concentrate. Now and again, a tattooed face peered at me from behind a fern and caught me unaware. It was as if I’d just glimpsed my own tattooed reflection in a flash of window glass.

By high noon, I couldn’t stand it another second. I strode into the jungle and approached the old woman. She was standing in front of the others now, a general before her troops. I thrust my face in front of hers and stared back.

But you can’t focus on a tattooed face for more than a second or two. The designs won’t allow it. They swim apart, then bleed together. They ripple like wind on still water, then freeze like cracks of air through ice. Only when my vision blurred and I surrendered myself to the deep blue fissures under her flesh did I finally grasp that tattoos aren’t written on the skin, they are written inside the skin. I wasn’t looking at her tattoos, I was falling into them.

I finally had to shut my eyes.

When I opened them again, Philip was standing beside me. “She won’t hurt you,” he said. He was staring at her face, too. “I’m not sure if we’re her prisoners or her pets, Sara, but I’m fairly certain she’s the one who’s been feeding us all along, the one who’s been keeping us alive.”

She motioned for Philip and me to follow her back to the village, but I couldn’t move.

“Stay with me,” I pleaded, but he had already started down the path behind her. I hurried after them.

The old woman had already climbed up onto the twelve-foot-high veranda of a stilted straw house by the time I reached the outskirts of the village. Philip was standing on the top notch of its trunk ladder. This house stood apart from the neat rows of other tree-high abodes, away from the pigs and the steaming earth mounds and the curious onlookers, at the base of a mountain. I hobbled over in my bare feet and Philip helped me up.

Through the low doorway, in the center of the smoky room, a man knelt over a woman, his back to us. He had been painted all over with white clay. Even the soles of his tattooed feet had been painted out with clay. The woman beneath him, a bag of bones, lay supine. Her head had been shaved.

The ladder creaked and the clay man spun around. Despite his white mask, I recognized Ishmael.

The woman on the floor also turned her head to stare, but I doubt she saw us. Her eyes looked as dead as marbles. I recognized her, too. She was the woman who had quietly wept in the corner while Ishmael and the old woman had worked on my face. She closed her eyes. Without the obscuring marbles, she looked just like her dead granddaughter.

Turning his attention back to his wife, Ishmael pressed his brow against hers and began singing, as if to woo her back to life with his voice. Bowls of ink surrounded them, a needle was in his hand. Exhaling one long note, he dipped the needle into the pot of indigo and brought it dripping to her throat, but he didn’t incise her. He simply painted in the gouges she’d already made with her own fingernails. You could see she’d been tearing at her skin for weeks. Raw lines ran down her neck. Under the barely healed scars, strings of indigo and turquoise, yellow and viridian were visible. In places, her scarred neck was so covered in bright, festive threads that it looked as if Ishmael had been trying to stitch her grief closed with pure color.

“We should leave,” I whispered. “Leave them alone.”

I tried to take Philip’s hand, but he wouldn’t come with me. When I stumbled down the ladder, he didn’t even turn around. I left him transfixed on the top rung and made my way back to the cave alone.

Philip returned just as dusk fell and lay down beside me, he and I face-to-face for the first time since we’d been given our new countenances. We hadn’t so much as kissed once in all those weeks. The sun was gone, but there was still more than enough light to see by.

He took my hand and pressed it against his face. “Touch me, Sara. I won’t survive if you don’t touch me,” he said.

I ran my hand lightly over the black bars.

I could feel him tremble.

I caressed his throat and chest, but he took hold of my wrist and stopped me. “I need you to mark me.”

“Don’t say that, Philip.
That
scares me.”

He guided my hand over to the cold ashes left by our cooking fire and dipped my fingers into the soot. “Do this for me,” he said.

I made a few timid smudges on his shoulders to appease him, then tried to get him to make love to me, but he wouldn’t let go of my wrist.

With his hand guiding mine, I ran my blackened nails lightly down his front, over his stomach and groin. When his grip finally slackened in surrender, I tugged myself free and covered his entire lower abdomen with ash, gray wavelets of empty ocean. Next, I ran my finger around his thin waist and drew a horizon, thick as a belt, to cinch my ash sea to the sky and keep the waters from falling away. Beneath the horizon, I drew the skyline of Manhattan. I then dusted my own face with soot and pressed my cheek and chin and lips against his, imprinting my profile on his face. I poured a fistful of ash into the coconut shell we used as a drinking cup and stirred it around until my fingers were black. I then began brushing it across his chest in the tiny silhouette of a ship. Nothing elegant, nothing at all like the
Pearl.
Just the hull of the proverbial ship on the horizon, the one every castaway waits for, the one we’re all waiting for.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ll that remained of my drawings the next morning was a dusting of ash on Philip’s skin, except for two remarkably intact images—the black ship on his chest and the pale stigmata of Manhattan’s skyline rising out of his lower abdomen. On my own flesh, there were faint traces of those images in reverse from when he had finally held me against him during the night, made love to me, then wouldn’t let go.

We dressed, he in his tatter of sarong, me in my shredded boy’s pants, and stepped out of the cave just as dawn broke. The old woman and her cronies were already waiting for us by the trees, though they no longer bothered to conceal themselves. They walked up to Philip and surrounded him. I could see how intrigued they were by my drawings. Their general, our keeper, stepped front and center to examine my work in close-up. She scrutinized the ship and the skyline. Then, stepping back, she turned around and faced me, glancing down at the smudge of ship between my breasts, then at my blackened hands. Her tattooed brows rose up. She turned back to Philip and rubbed her fingertip lightly across my ship; the hull smeared in two. She ran it over the skyline: the tops of the buildings were wiped away. She examined her blackened fingertip, then held it up for the other ladies to inspect. They gaped at it as if it had been dipped in blood.