The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel and Other Colorful Tales of Transformation and Tattoos. A. R. Morlan

Calvino to hoof it.

      She and Moreen had both crawled into separate seats, so they could wave buh-bye to him as the bus lurched away down the highway....

      * * * *

      “—but it ain’t all canvas...‘canvas.’ What kind of a name is that, for a human being? What’s with this name bit? Huh?” Mr. B. grabbed her forearm with a sticks-and-knobs talon-like hand, all the while continuing to spoon up quivering blobs of poached egg, shoving them greedily into his mouth between words.

      Trying to shake his hand loose, Gwynn said, “It’s an extension of the whole body art notion...the human body as canvas, waiting to be filled with art. You do realize that some people can’t stand the sight of an unadorned body. It’s like a waste of potential. It’s like...just putting up with the way you were born, without trying to do something about it. Like never cutting your hair or fingernails, just because you’re born that way. It’s ignoring your potential. So...we call people without tattoos ‘canvas.’ Like the way...like, how initiated people have names for non-initiates.”

      “Oh...like black people calling us ‘honky’ or ‘cracker’? Or us calling them—”

      “Now, people have moved past those words. Anyone, any color, can be canvas. It’s not a race, it’s a decision.”

      He’d let go of her arm, then, and slurped up the rest of his eggs, before adding, just as she was getting ready to quit his room, “So what this is, is a decision. Answer me this, girlie—”

      “My name is Gwynn...Ms. Gannon if you prefer—”

      “Girlie-Gwynn-Gannon, you answer me this...whose decision?”

      She was about to answer when she thought about it a bit more; while most tattoo artists did follow a customer’s request when it came to flash, some did specialize in carting designs directly on the skin, with no pre-inked outlines rubbed on the skin first, no guidelines at all save their own imagination, and their instinct as to what would look best on that particular person—

      “Usually the person getting the tattoo done. In most cases. And even if the artist does do the deciding, the person getting it has to choose to have one done in the first place—”

      “So you people, you choose?” He’d moved on to his limp butter-substitute-slathered toast, but those moist, glassy eyes were still aimed in her direction.

      “Of course we choose to have this done—”

      “Your choice, your decision?”

      It didn’t seem like it should be a question—

      “Of course...tattoo artists don’t roam the streets, grabbing jinny canvas at random—”

      “‘Jinny’?”

      “Novices. Never-been-touched by the needle—”

      “More names...you were saying?”

      “They don’t do guerilla tattoos...what’s the sense in that? Why do it to someone who doesn’t want it?”

      * * * *

      Only fifteen minutes or so until she reached the archives. Around her, the other passengers began stirring, looking in purses, checking tickets, gathering up carry-ons in knapsacks or paper shopping bags.

      The bus wouldn’t bring Gwynn directly to the gates, of course; she’d have to hire a cab to take her there. Not an unexpected expense, but this time around, this whole trip was on her dollar. The fee for depositing the flash-scrap was coming out of her credit card. It hadn’t been paid in advance—just as the small rectangle of flash hadn’t been harvested in the usual way. Hence, the foil shroud, and the need for her to wear the abaya...rather than the choice to wear it.

      Wishing she’d invested in her own cooler, Gwynn checked to make sure that the two vertical bands of duct tape she’d used to secure the flash-scrap to her midriff were still sticking to her bare skin. It wouldn’t do for the foil packet to fall off as she walked to the steel gates, and talked to the guards standing there. They might think it a thin slab of explosives, possibly destroy it. Which would never, never do. Not with this flash-scrap.

      * * * *

      “‘Why do it to someone who doesn’t want it?’” Mr. Beniamino’s voice was a parchment 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