Now I understand why Manny is so excited. This is a big day for them.
I can see the narcotic effect the expectation is having on Manny; he’s smiling at what’s going to happen a short while from now, buzzing on the trajectory that leads from now to then.
“Have you decided which one yet?” he asks. Then he doesn’t give Marco any time to answer, saying, “No—wait ’til we get there. Surprise me.”
“That’s easy enough to do,” I tell him.
“Just DON’T WUSS OUT!” He punches me on the arm playfully. “I swear, the pain is going to be worth it. And I’ll be there the whole time. Whatever you do, stay in the chair, right?”
Is he saying this because he senses my own hesitation, or because of a history of hesitation on Marco’s part? I suspect it’s because of Marco, but I worry it’s because of me.
Manny talks some more about when Ric got his tattoo, and how he kept taking the bandage off to show it to everyone, and how it came so damn close to getting infected. In trying to get Marco to remember this, I see all kinds of other memories instead. Ric and Manny bringing me to the beach, Manny’s bathing suit a junior version of Ric’s. Me and Manny sitting on his front porch, waiting for his mom to get home, setting our Pokémon cards out, swapping the doubles. More recently: Manny kissing a girl at a party while another girl talked to me and tried to get my attention. Manny throwing chicken nuggets at me and me throwing them back, the same birthday lunch we’ve had for as long as Marco can remember. Whichever of us is the birthday boy always gets a Happy Meal.
I get caught up in the times they’ve had together, and Manny lets me get caught. I’m not sure how long we drive before we pull up to a house and Manny says, “This is it.”
I’ve never gotten a tattoo before. I was expecting the tattoo place to be a storefront in a strip mall, neon letters spelling out T-A-T-T-O-O. But this looks like a house where a family of five could live, complete with a side door, like one belonging to a dentist or a doctor with a home office. That’s where we’re headed.
“If anyone asks, you’re eighteen,” Manny tells me. “But no one’s going to ask.”
This only makes me more nervous. Manny knocks on the office door, and it’s opened by a guy who’s probably thirty and is covered by more than thirty tattoos—all these different people in weird poses being devoured by the landscape. He sees me staring at them and says, “Garden of Earthly Delights.”
“Heller, man, thanks for fitting us in,” Manny says, shaking his hand. “The wait list is, what, three months now?”
“Megan would know, not me,” Heller says.
He leads us from the waiting room into what was clearly once a dentist’s office. There are still a few advertisements for invisible braces and teeth whiteners up on the counters. But the rest of the office is covered by photographs of tattoos, each one so detailed that it looks like an illuminated manuscript has been taken from its spine and splayed across the walls. It’s a transcription of creatures we’ve never seen but still imagine or fear, kaleidoscopic castles and canyons brought to the size of a human heart. All on the same landscape of skin, though each body has its own tint, its own surface and shape.
I have always thought of the body as something that is written from the inside. I don’t need Rhiannon’s name on my skin, because it is already indelible in my thoughts. But looking at Heller’s conjurings, I suddenly understand the desire for such visible permanence, such open reminding. I, who have no body, can be sure that I take my life with me wherever I go, because it’s all I have. But I see that if you only have one body, there is an intimation to memorialize your life upon that body, to take something that could be decoration and turn it into commemoration, to choose something that’s beneath and let it rise to the top so it can become part of the way you are first seen.
The scary part, I think, is not the pain but the permanence. Heller operates beyond erasers, beyond delete keys. His art will only last as long as a life…but it will last as long as a life.
I want to fake sickness. I want to plead faintness. I want to back off, far away. I should not be inside a body when something irreversible is done to it.
But I can tell that Manny isn’t going to let me off the hook. Heller is handing him a piece of paper and Manny’s showing it to me—a dragon with wings unfurled, the serpentine grace of Ric’s tattoo with the added element of flight. It is not meant to be an icon or a symbol—no, it is meant to live and breathe on Manny’s skin, to be his own dragon spirit manifest, to captivate and compel in ways that a simple human form cannot.
“Now you,” Heller says. Instead of giving me a single piece of paper, he gives me three.
The first is a phoenix transcending the flames underneath it, clear-eyed and calm as it transforms.
The second is a kraken, its arms clovered into a web, its eyes darker and more distant than those of the phoenix, as if it knows its own majesty and doesn’t want the spell to break.
The third is a tree, its trunk as solid as time and its leaves as fleeting as time. It would not stand out in a forest of its peers, but on its own it possesses a simple magnificence, the consciousness of a creature that feeds on light.
So…phoenix, kraken, tree. Fire, water, earth. Each demonstrating its own artistry, each as real in its own logic as a vision is to an eye.
“So the moment of truth has arrived,” Manny says. “At long last, after all these years of us talking about it—what’s it going to be?”
This is an important decision. Marco should have some memory stored away of which choice he was planning to make. It should be something I’m able to find.
I focus. Even though I know it means a noticeable lapse inward, I look. I ask. But there isn’t any answer. Maybe when Marco went to sleep last night, he still hadn’t made up his mind.
But now’s the time for the answer. Whether he’s here or not.
Manny sees me wavering and gets instantly distressed. “This is it, man,” he says. “Don’t skip out on me now. They’re all amazing choices. Which is it going to be?”
The phoenix calls to me. It looks me in the eye and knows who I am. It knows that we each can be more than just one thing. It knows that we live in a perpetual state of beginning and a perpetual state of ending. I would wear that on my skin, were I ever given skin of my own. I would let it send its wordless message to everyone I meet, as a way for them to get to know me a little more, to understand my flight path a little better.
That is my choice.
But it’s my choice, not Marco’s.
“I’m right here with you,” Manny says. “Believe me, I wouldn’t let your dumbass self do anything you’d regret.”