Wake Up Call
She came out of it like a deep-sea diver rising toward the surface.
The crushing blackness of unconsciousness gave way to an awareness that she was asleep, and then to a sort of vague knowledge that there was something out there besides the darkness. Light seeped through her eyelids and, though she wasn't quite awake, she could feel that she had a body, and that her body lived in the real world.
The real world of pain.
It was everywhere. She could feel it gnawing at her; vicious and biting in some places, dull and aching in others. It was a regular banquet, a cornucopia, a table set with pains large and small. She could press her mind into any part of her self and find that the pain there had aspects and texture. Her muscles ached with the thick heaviness of exertion. Her joints throbbed with the shock of repeated impact. And the different pains somehow multiplied together to create a new kind of meta-pain, a blurring of her entire insides into a centerless, boundless throbbing plasma of hurt.
But mostly it was her skin, which burned with a kind of heat and electricity, and a strange sort of difference, not pain exactly, but not anything nice either, that covered her entire body and made her reluctant to open her eyes to see what was going on.
"Her."
The word echoed in her head. Her. She. Me.
I'm a her, she thought. And then, uncertain, she moved her hand under the sheet to take inventory.
Her hand wouldn't move. She strained and could feel thick cuffs around her wrists. She tried to lift a leg but her ankles were cuffed as well.
"She moved."
"I saw."
The floorboards creaked and a shadow passed across her face.
"Can you hear us? Can you speak? You're safe. You're with friends."
Some friends. She tried the edges of the cuffs to find out what they were made of, but she couldn't curl her fingers that far under. The voices—a man and a woman—sounded concerned.
She swallowed hard and licked her lips.
"Water," said the woman's voice, "Get water."
And then there was a cool hand under her neck, a straw in her mouth and a soothing, glacially cold pencil of water down her throat. The water eased the burning like a narcotic injection. She sucked the glass dry and heard a gurgle as the straw caught air.
Slowly, she opened her eyes.
A worried face hovered over hers. The woman was in her 50s, handsome more than beautiful, dark-skinned and intense. The man behind her was out of focus, but the woman radiated a kind of beatific, no-nonsense calm.
"I'm Dr. Simone. Katharine. This is my son, Peyton. He found you two days ago," said the woman. "You've had a terrible fever, but I think you're pulling out of it. Can you speak?"
She cleared her throat, but no words would come out. The doctor put another straw in her mouth and she sucked down another cup of water. She cleared her throat again.
"If you're friends, why am I tied down?"
Her voice came out croaky and hoarse from disuse, strange to her own ear.
The young man stepped forward. He was darker than his mother, tall and thin, his tight-cropped hair almost at the ceiling.
"This is The Harlem People's Clinic and my mother runs it. I found you, and this is where I brought you."
Dr. Simone leaned over and laid a cool palm on her forehead. "Your signs are almost normal. How do you feel?"
The girl ignored the pain coursing through her body and tried again to feel the wrist cuffs. No good; she could barely move. The strain of pulling at the cuffs was too much. She un-tensed her muscles and let the bone-deep ache and the burning of her skin pull her back down.
"I feel like I'm tied to a bed."
The doctor stiffened at the tone. "That was to keep you from hurting yourself or pulling out the IV. Now that you're awake, we'll unlock you. Peyton, wait here; I'll be right back."
The doctor left and the skinny guy sat down.
"So, not just cuffs, but locks too?"
The guy—Peyton?—shrugged. "That's so nobody takes off the cuffs without permission."
She flexed her toes one at a time then did the same with her fingers. They ached but they all moved. Were they really going to unlock her? Or was it some kind of ruse? What were her options? She looked around at the table by the head of her bed. The lamp might work as a club.
"You were pretty violent last night. Throwing yourself around and shouting."
She took a closer look at the boy. He was tall but skinny. She figured she could take him if it came to it.
"So, you found me?"
"That's right."
"And then you sat here last night watching me?"
Dark as he was, she was sure she saw him blush.
"I didn't hang. I stopped in once to check on you."
"Do I know you?"
"You're not very friendly, are you?"
"Not when I'm tied down."
The doctor bustled back in with a small ring of keys. "They weren't where I usually leave them. We'll have you out of these in no time." Her son got up and moved back. The doctor turned and waved her hand dismissively. "Peyton, I think you'd better leave." The doctor looked down at her, "You don't have much on under that sheet you know."
She waited for the click of the closing door and then the doctor leaned over. Two quick turns and some tugging on the buckles and the cuffs were off. The doctor dropped the keys on the side table. "Hold still one more second and I'll take out the IV."
She took out tape and a cotton ball, and fiddled under the edge of the sheet. The girl didn't look down, but felt a tickling, then a cotton ball being taped to her inner arm.
"Don't nurses usually do this?"
"Honey," said the doctor. "We're the Harlem clinic, not the Mayo Clinic."
The doctor stood up. "All set."
The girl pushed herself up onto her elbows, the sheet still tucked under her chin. Her arms ached as they bent, and the burning pain where her back had been pressed against the mattress now shifted to her elbows. Katharine leaned back, waiting to see if she could sit upright. The girl blinked and stared hard at the woman standing over her.
"Do I know you?"
"No."
"Do you know me?"
"No. In fact, we've been wondering what your name is. You had no ID on you."
Leaning upward was better than lying down. Her head cleared, but the strange, burning tightness all over her skin remained. She bent her head back and forth. Her neck muscles ached as much as the rest of her.
"Dear? Can you tell me your name?"
The girl thought hard. Her head was full of concepts and ideas, images, creatures, a canopy of ancient trees, buildings, a beautiful, dark-haired woman with an intent stare. Odd images of bamboo and rice paper walls, dark rooms and cold, percussive waves smashing on a rocky shore; all these pictures drifted before her mind's eye, random objects through a narrow porthole. A blade and some needles. An island surrounded by icy ocean. Her head was a bowl of image salad, with no central construct holding any of it together and, she realized, the missing element that would have glued them together and turned them from a phantasmagoria into a body of knowledge was a self. When she tried to think of herself, a strange, gray blot stood in the way, a kind of mental smudge where her self-image should be.
"I don't know my name." She lowered her head, confused and a little ashamed. She must have a name, but it seemed to be just out of reach, somewhere at the back of her mind.
"You're still in shock. I think," Katharine hesitated, "if you see yourself in the mirror you might remember something."
There was an odd tone to her voice. The doctor leaned over and took her arm.
"Can you stand? My goodness, you're still very hot. But I think the fever has broken. I had a good look at you over the past couple days, and I think you're going to be okay."
The doctor tucked the sheet around her, gripped her arm and helped ease her up.
As weak as she felt, under the throbbing she could sense her strength, and her muscles responded. She commanded her legs to ignore the aches and pains, and move, and they moved. Or at least they locked in place and stood. She swayed a little and she felt Katharine tighten her grip. She looked over at the doctor. They were about the same height. What had she been thinking a moment ago? Clubbing this woman with a lamp? Why was she so paranoid? The girl's mind went down a mental path looking for her name, but the path went nowhere.
"Why didn't you bring me to the hospital?"
The doctor sighed. "Because that boy out there, my son Peyton? He's an idiot. It's complicated. But the truth is, you really didn't need anything more than some liquids in you. See if you can walk. Just take a step."
A wave of dizziness hit her and she held still to make sure she wouldn't fall. It passed. Clutching the sheet, she surveyed the room. It was a basic hospital room, a sterile bed with a sanitized sheet, some monitors, a couple doors.
"Just a step," repeated Katharine, "If you're too weak we'll try again tomorrow."
Her joints and muscles throbbed, but she forced her knees to lock and her legs to tighten. She took one tentative step and then another.
Katharine guided her, shuffling, to the bathroom, opened the door and turned on a light. Hanging on the inside of the door was a mirror and for the first time, the girl saw herself.
Her knees gave out.
Katharine caught her. "Oh dear. Bad idea."
The girl leaned heavily on the woman and stared. Still clutching the sheet around her, her body was hidden, but the face that looked back at her was thin and Asian. Her hair was shaved off, and her entire bald head, her neck and even the part of her hand that held the sheet, were covered in hundreds of intricate and interlocking tattoos that glowed and shimmered in the harsh florescent light.
She stepped closer to the mirror, speechless. Katharine held her arm, clucking and berating herself.
"I shouldn't have done this. All those tattoos are fresh. When we found you, you were still bleeding, and your skin was raw. Someone did all this at once."
The girl reached out to touch the mirror, then stopped herself and ran her fingers along her own cheek.
Her skin responded with an odd sensation, as if it both was and was not part of her. She felt her fingers, and she also felt something feeling her fingers. That explained the burning; her skin had been pierced millions of times.
The tattoos on her face were nearly symmetrical and yet the two sides were made up of entirely different images. Across her forehead was a creature like a phoenix or a dragon; its glowing red and yellow wings spread across her forehead and around her eyes, dominating the other images. The dragon emanated power. It was hard to draw her eyes away from the eyes of the creature that stared out from above her own.
In the scales of the wings were countless smaller tattoos, amulets, kanji characters, minuscule figures of women, fish, spiders and butterflies, all richly colored and shaded, and carefully tiled into an uninterrupted carpet across the surface of her face. Her hand—the one she could see—was a maze of smaller tattoos; cats, beetles, birds, lizards and more tiny strings of Kanji. She turned her hand over, marveling at the complexity and the strangeness of it. Her neck showed a fantasy creature that looked like a fire-breathing fox, and her mind spoke to her;
Kanchikotsuritsu. On the other side of her neck she saw a fish and again her mind whispered, Sotoki Sosei.
And then a thought struck her, and she looked in the mirror again and loosened her grip on the sheet. Katharine stiffened, and as the girl let the sheet drop she already knew what she would see.
Naked, she stared at the mirror. She was horrified and amazed and filled with a kind of out-of-body fascination: Somebody had used her as a canvas, and no part of her had been left un-inked.
Tears formed in her eyes. "Who…?"
"I don't know, honey," said the doctor. "We thought you might remember." The doctor picked up the sheet and wrapped it back around the girl's shoulders.
"I need to lay down." Her stomach had knotted and she felt like she might be sick. She leaned heavily on the doctor as she led her back to the bed, where she turned and sat heavily. Her mind couldn't form the questions she wanted to ask. Who was she? What was she? Why this?
She lay down and the doctor spread the sheet gently back over her. The girl stared at the ceiling. She reached her hand back up and ran it across her shaved head and down her ruined cheek. She felt her neck and for just a moment, another thought filled her mind; she was missing something. Something important.
Something had been taken from her.
© Alan Brooks 2018
She came out of it like a deep-sea diver rising toward the surface.
The crushing blackness of unconsciousness gave way to an awareness that she was asleep, and then to a sort of vague knowledge that there was something out there besides the darkness. Light seeped through her eyelids and, though she wasn't quite awake, she could feel that she had a body, and that her body lived in the real world.
The real world of pain.
It was everywhere. She could feel it gnawing at her; vicious and biting in some places, dull and aching in others. It was a regular banquet, a cornucopia, a table set with pains large and small. She could press her mind into any part of her self and find that the pain there had aspects and texture. Her muscles ached with the thick heaviness of exertion. Her joints throbbed with the shock of repeated impact. And the different pains somehow multiplied together to create a new kind of meta-pain, a blurring of her entire insides into a centerless, boundless throbbing plasma of hurt.
But mostly it was her skin, which burned with a kind of heat and electricity, and a strange sort of difference, not pain exactly, but not anything nice either, that covered her entire body and made her reluctant to open her eyes to see what was going on.
"Her."
The word echoed in her head. Her. She. Me.
I'm a her, she thought. And then, uncertain, she moved her hand under the sheet to take inventory.
Her hand wouldn't move. She strained and could feel thick cuffs around her wrists. She tried to lift a leg but her ankles were cuffed as well.
"She moved."
"I saw."
The floorboards creaked and a shadow passed across her face.
"Can you hear us? Can you speak? You're safe. You're with friends."
Some friends. She tried the edges of the cuffs to find out what they were made of, but she couldn't curl her fingers that far under. The voices—a man and a woman—sounded concerned.
She swallowed hard and licked her lips.
"Water," said the woman's voice, "Get water."
And then there was a cool hand under her neck, a straw in her mouth and a soothing, glacially cold pencil of water down her throat. The water eased the burning like a narcotic injection. She sucked the glass dry and heard a gurgle as the straw caught air.
Slowly, she opened her eyes.
A worried face hovered over hers. The woman was in her 50s, handsome more than beautiful, dark-skinned and intense. The man behind her was out of focus, but the woman radiated a kind of beatific, no-nonsense calm.
"I'm Dr. Simone. Katharine. This is my son, Peyton. He found you two days ago," said the woman. "You've had a terrible fever, but I think you're pulling out of it. Can you speak?"
She cleared her throat, but no words would come out. The doctor put another straw in her mouth and she sucked down another cup of water. She cleared her throat again.
"If you're friends, why am I tied down?"
Her voice came out croaky and hoarse from disuse, strange to her own ear.
The young man stepped forward. He was darker than his mother, tall and thin, his tight-cropped hair almost at the ceiling.
"This is The Harlem People's Clinic and my mother runs it. I found you, and this is where I brought you."
Dr. Simone leaned over and laid a cool palm on her forehead. "Your signs are almost normal. How do you feel?"
The girl ignored the pain coursing through her body and tried again to feel the wrist cuffs. No good; she could barely move. The strain of pulling at the cuffs was too much. She un-tensed her muscles and let the bone-deep ache and the burning of her skin pull her back down.
"I feel like I'm tied to a bed."
The doctor stiffened at the tone. "That was to keep you from hurting yourself or pulling out the IV. Now that you're awake, we'll unlock you. Peyton, wait here; I'll be right back."
The doctor left and the skinny guy sat down.
"So, not just cuffs, but locks too?"
The guy—Peyton?—shrugged. "That's so nobody takes off the cuffs without permission."
She flexed her toes one at a time then did the same with her fingers. They ached but they all moved. Were they really going to unlock her? Or was it some kind of ruse? What were her options? She looked around at the table by the head of her bed. The lamp might work as a club.
"You were pretty violent last night. Throwing yourself around and shouting."
She took a closer look at the boy. He was tall but skinny. She figured she could take him if it came to it.
"So, you found me?"
"That's right."
"And then you sat here last night watching me?"
Dark as he was, she was sure she saw him blush.
"I didn't hang. I stopped in once to check on you."
"Do I know you?"
"You're not very friendly, are you?"
"Not when I'm tied down."
The doctor bustled back in with a small ring of keys.
"They weren't where I usually leave them. We'll have you out of these in no time." Her son got up and moved back. The doctor turned and waved her hand dismissively.
"Peyton, I think you'd better leave." The doctor looked down at her, "You don't have much on under that sheet you know."
She waited for the click of the closing door and then the doctor leaned over. Two quick turns and some tugging on the buckles and the cuffs were off. The doctor dropped the keys on the side table. "Hold still one more second and I'll take out the IV."
She took out tape and a cotton ball, and fiddled under the edge of the sheet. The girl didn't look down, but felt a tickling, then a cotton ball being taped to her inner arm.
"Don't nurses usually do this?"
"Honey," said the doctor. "We're the Harlem clinic, not the Mayo Clinic."
The doctor stood up. "All set."
The girl pushed herself up onto her elbows, the sheet still tucked under her chin. Her arms ached as they bent, and the burning pain where her back had been pressed against the mattress now shifted to her elbows. Katharine leaned back, waiting to see if she could sit upright. The girl blinked and stared hard at the woman standing over her.
"Do I know you?"
"No."
"Do you know me?"
"No. In fact, we've been wondering what your name is. You had no ID on you."
Leaning upward was better than lying down. Her head cleared, but the strange, burning tightness all over her skin remained. She bent her head back and forth. Her neck muscles ached as much as the rest of her.
"Dear? Can you tell me your name?"
The girl thought hard. Her head was full of concepts and ideas, images, creatures, a canopy of ancient trees, buildings, a beautiful, dark-haired woman with an intent stare. Odd images of bamboo and rice paper walls, dark rooms and cold, percussive waves smashing on a rocky shore; all these pictures drifted before her mind's eye, random objects through a narrow porthole. A blade and some needles. An island surrounded by icy ocean. Her head was a bowl of image salad, with no central construct holding any of it together and, she realized, the missing element that would have glued them together and turned them from a phantasmagoria into a body of knowledge was a self. When she tried to think of herself, a strange, gray blot stood in the way, a kind of mental smudge where her self-image should be.
"I don't know my name." She lowered her head, confused and a little ashamed. She must have a name, but it seemed to be just out of reach, somewhere at the back of her mind.
"You're still in shock. I think," Katharine hesitated, "if you see yourself in the mirror you might remember something."
There was an odd tone to her voice. The doctor leaned over and took her arm.
"Can you stand? My goodness, you're still very hot. But I think the fever has broken. I had a good look at you over the past couple days, and I think you're going to be okay."
The doctor tucked the sheet around her, gripped her arm and helped ease her up.
As weak as she felt, under the throbbing she could sense her strength, and her muscles responded. She commanded her legs to ignore the aches and pains, and move, and they moved. Or at least they locked in place and stood. She swayed a little and she felt Katharine tighten her grip. She looked over at the doctor. They were about the same height. What had she been thinking a moment ago? Clubbing this woman with a lamp? Why was she so paranoid? The girl's mind went down a mental path looking for her name, but the path went nowhere.
"Why didn't you bring me to the hospital?"
The doctor sighed. "Because that boy out there, my son Peyton? He's an idiot. It's complicated. But the truth is, you really didn't need anything more than some liquids in you. See if you can walk. Just take a step."
A wave of dizziness hit her and she held still to make sure she wouldn't fall. It passed. Clutching the sheet, she surveyed the room. It was a basic hospital room, a sterile bed with a sanitized sheet, some monitors, a couple doors.
"Just a step," repeated Katharine, "If you're too weak we'll try again tomorrow."
Her joints and muscles throbbed, but she forced her knees to lock and her legs to tighten. She took one tentative step and then another.
Katharine guided her, shuffling, to the bathroom, opened the door and turned on a light. Hanging on the inside of the door was a mirror and for the first time, the girl saw herself.
Her knees gave out.
Katharine caught her. "Oh dear. Bad idea."
The girl leaned heavily on the woman and stared. Still clutching the sheet around her, her body was hidden, but the face that looked back at her was thin and Asian. Her hair was shaved off, and her entire bald head, her neck and even the part of her hand that held the sheet, were covered in hundreds of intricate and interlocking tattoos that glowed and shimmered in the harsh florescent light.
She stepped closer to the mirror, speechless. Katharine held her arm, clucking and berating herself.
"I shouldn't have done this. All those tattoos are fresh. When we found you, you were still bleeding, and your skin was raw. Someone did all this at once."
The girl reached out to touch the mirror, then stopped herself and ran her fingers along her own cheek.
Her skin responded with an odd sensation, as if it both was and was not part of her. She felt her fingers, and she also felt something feeling her fingers. That explained the burning; her skin had been pierced millions of times.
The tattoos on her face were nearly symmetrical and yet the two sides were made up of entirely different images. Across her forehead was a creature like a phoenix or a dragon; its glowing red and yellow wings spread across her forehead and around her eyes, dominating the other images. The dragon emanated power. It was hard to draw her eyes away from the eyes of the creature that stared out from above her own.
In the scales of the wings were countless smaller tattoos, amulets, kanji characters, minuscule figures of women, fish, spiders and butterflies, all richly colored and shaded, and carefully tiled into an uninterrupted carpet across the surface of her face. Her hand—the one she could see—was a maze of smaller tattoos; cats, beetles, birds, lizards and more tiny strings of Kanji. She turned her hand over, marveling at the complexity and the strangeness of it. Her neck showed a fantasy creature that looked like a fire-breathing fox, and her mind spoke to her; Kanchikotsuritsu. On the other side of her neck she saw a fish and again her mind whispered, Sotoki Sosei.
And then a thought struck her, and she looked in the mirror again and loosened her grip on the sheet. Katharine stiffened, and as the girl let the sheet drop she already knew what she would see.
Naked, she stared at the mirror. She was horrified and amazed and filled with a kind of out-of-body fascination: Somebody had used her as a canvas, and no part of her had been left un-inked.
Tears formed in her eyes. "Who…?"
"I don't know, honey," said the doctor. "We thought you might remember." The doctor picked up the sheet and wrapped it back around the girl's shoulders.
"I need to lay down." Her stomach had knotted and she felt like she might be sick. She leaned heavily on the doctor as she led her back to the bed, where she turned and sat heavily. Her mind couldn't form the questions she wanted to ask. Who was she? What was she? Why this?
She lay down and the doctor spread the sheet gently back over her. The girl stared at the ceiling. She reached her hand back up and ran it across her shaved head and down her ruined cheek. She felt her neck and for just a moment, another thought filled her mind; she was missing something. Something important.
Something had been taken from her.
© Alan Brooks 2018
Narrated by Lachlan Brooks.
Wake Up Call is the first chapter of Indigo: Ink to Blood, a novel by Alan Brooks.
Narrated by Lachlan Brooks.
Wake Up Call is the first chapter of Indigo: Ink to Blood, a novel by Alan Brooks.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hi Alan, it’s great to have you on The Strange Recital!
AB: Hi Brent, hi Tom. Thank you for having me.
TN: One thing we like to ask our guests is, given that this is a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality, why in your opinion did we select this particular piece of your work?
LB: I don’t know my name. (laughter)
AB: Tattoos are transformative. The book is all about ink and people getting inked, and at a most basic level I think people get inked to take something that’s inside their mind and put it on their body, to make it more of a public statement. So things that were private, were just thoughts, were part of somebody’s self image -- they turned it into a statement. So it’s transformative at the most basic physical level, and then because we evolve into what we want to be, I think we, you, start to become more of the thing you’re saying you are. And of course a tattoo never ceases to speak about who you are. It keeps putting the message out into the world. So I think it’s even stronger than walking around saying, I’m as strong as a dragon, I’m as fierce as a tiger -- you have this image on your body that’s constantly making that statement for you. So I think there’s this kind of cycle of transformation that tattoos represent.
BR: The reading we just heard is the first chapter of your novel, Indigo: Ink to Blood. Tell us a little about the book.
AB: The book started out just due to my fascination with tattoos -- it’s a huge phenomenon, as we all know, in the culture today -- people love tattoos, more and more people are getting them, and they’re becoming more and more acceptable. If you become interested in tattoos, you naturally gravitate toward Japanese culture, which is one of the original cultures from which tattoos spring. The book is about a young woman who finds herself covered with tattoos, not of her own choice, and she wakes up very much like in a kind of Jason Bourne fugue state, not knowing who she is and with all this ink on her body -- which she begins to discover is not ordinary ink, it gives her certain kinds of powers. So the ink is even more transformational than ink would be in our normal world. Yeah, so it’s a voyage of self-discovery for our hero who adopts the name Indigo because she doesn’t know who she is. And beyond self-discovery she finds she’s being chased down, for reasons that it takes her a long time to figure out -- why she’s being chased down.
BR: I imagine you can’t escape the occasional reference to the Ray Bradbury classic, The Illustrated Man -- which was actually a short story collection that used the framing device that each of the stories was depicted by a tattoo on a carnival worker’s skin. One of my favorite books as a kid.
AB: Yeah, mine too. Actually, it’s surprising how few people have ever referenced The Illustrated Man to me. I don’t know if it’s fallen out of culture a little bit, if it’s sort of fallen out of the awareness, or the canon as it’s being taught. But I was so in love with the stories of The Illustrated Man, as a child, as a very young man, that I in fact remember some of those stories very very very well -- I would quote them to people, without ever knowing that I was talking about the stories of The Illustrated Man. Because as you know the illustrated man himself is the framing device for stories that aren’t really connected to each other. I loved The Veldt -- I remember reading that story of the children who are in a kind of virtual reality room surrounded by an African plain with lions and gazelles, and as the parents try to remove them from that space, the lions eat the parents. Fantastic story. And I just remember being absolutely outraged when I was maybe ten years old, when I was first exposed to it, just thinking, this is impossible, they’re describing an impossible situation. I was completely hooked, that somebody could write such an outrageous thing. And make me believe it.
TN: It’s interesting that your daughter Lachlan, who read the story today, became, in a sense, your alter ego -- your narrative voice. Keeping it in the family! Tell me if I’m wrong, but I suspect she was quite aware of this novel during the years you were writing it when she was younger. Did she influence the story?
AB: Well, I talked about it obsessively. She was very aware of all the research I was making into tattoos. She egged me on about getting tattoos, knowing my very deep fear of needles. And on a practical level she did readings and had a lot to offer, especially as to my ability or inability to capture the voice and being of a young woman. So, yeah, I just can’t say enough about how fantastic Lachlan’s been in the whole process.
BR: That’s great. One thing that came up for Tom and me that we wanted to ask you about is… there are so many stories, books, movies that are about harm being done to women. It’s been theorized that this is an expression, either conscious or unconscious, of male-dominated culture keeping women down. What are your thoughts about this in relation to your book?
AB: Yeah, I think as a male writer you approach that very cautiously. I’m not sure that I’m the best voice to address the issue. But the main character of this book, Indigo, is moving from a culture that -- this gives away a little bit of the plot, but she’s moving from a culture that is fiercely patriarchal, into the American culture which is a little more amorphous, and then into a sort of other culture that’s… it’s not really completely run by women but it’s definitely a female-dominated meritocracy. So, yeah, I was aware of it, I was trying to address that, and of course the group that Indigo has escaped from is more than fiercely patriarchal, they’re very isolated and are patriarchal in a way that’s centuries and centuries old. So it’s funny to be very aware of that, and it’s the backdrop for the entire story rather than the point of the story.
TN: So, was it the female doctor that tattooed her? Don’t answer that. (laughter) Tell us about some of your other writing, both past and current projects.
AB: Well, I’m very busy right now. I have another science fiction book out. It’s much shorter and a little more grounded in just pure science, whereas Indigo moves into a world that’s more magical.
TN: Grounded in fiction.
AB: And then I’m writing a series of plays which I hope to get off the ground soon. They’re basically finished. And I’m involved in trying to get a movie done this year. So, a lot of different things.
TN: Well, thank you, Alan. It’s time for us to go -- I’ve got an appointment to get a tattoo this afternoon.
BR: That’s weird, so do I. I’m getting my whole novel tattooed on my chest.
TN: Really? I’m just getting a little flower on my lower back. You know, a tramp stamp, I think they call it.
BR: Oh, that’ll look good with your crop top and hip-hugger bell bottoms.
Yes, thank you, Alan!
AB: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure.
BR: Hi Alan, it’s great to have you on The Strange Recital!
AB: Hi Brent, hi Tom. Thank you for having me.
TN: One thing we like to ask our guests is, given that this is a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality, why in your opinion did we select this particular piece of your work?
LB: I don’t know my name. (laughter)
AB: Tattoos are transformative. The book is all about ink and people getting inked, and at a most basic level I think people get inked to take something that’s inside their mind and put it on their body, to make it more of a public statement. So things that were private, were just thoughts, were part of somebody’s self image -- they turned it into a statement. So it’s transformative at the most basic physical level, and then because we evolve into what we want to be, I think we, you, start to become more of the thing you’re saying you are. And of course a tattoo never ceases to speak about who you are. It keeps putting the message out into the world. So I think it’s even stronger than walking around saying, I’m as strong as a dragon, I’m as fierce as a tiger -- you have this image on your body that’s constantly making that statement for you. So I think there’s this kind of cycle of transformation that tattoos represent.
BR: The reading we just heard is the first chapter of your novel, Indigo: Ink to Blood. Tell us a little about the book.
AB: The book started out just due to my fascination with tattoos -- it’s a huge phenomenon, as we all know, in the culture today -- people love tattoos, more and more people are getting them, and they’re becoming more and more acceptable. If you become interested in tattoos, you naturally gravitate toward Japanese culture, which is one of the original cultures from which tattoos spring. The book is about a young woman who finds herself covered with tattoos, not of her own choice, and she wakes up very much like in a kind of Jason Bourne fugue state, not knowing who she is and with all this ink on her body -- which she begins to discover is not ordinary ink, it gives her certain kinds of powers. So the ink is even more transformational than ink would be in our normal world. Yeah, so it’s a voyage of self-discovery for our hero who adopts the name Indigo because she doesn’t know who she is. And beyond self-discovery she finds she’s being chased down, for reasons that it takes her a long time to figure out -- why she’s being chased down.
BR: I imagine you can’t escape the occasional reference to the Ray Bradbury classic, The Illustrated Man -- which was actually a short story collection that used the framing device that each of the stories was depicted by a tattoo on a carnival worker’s skin. One of my favorite books as a kid.
AB: Yeah, mine too. Actually, it’s surprising how few people have ever referenced The Illustrated Man to me. I don’t know if it’s fallen out of culture a little bit, if it’s sort of fallen out of the awareness, or the canon as it’s being taught. But I was so in love with the stories of The Illustrated Man, as a child, as a very young man, that I in fact remember some of those stories very very very well -- I would quote them to people, without ever knowing that I was talking about the stories of The Illustrated Man. Because as you know the illustrated man himself is the framing device for stories that aren’t really connected to each other. I loved The Veldt -- I remember reading that story of the children who are in a kind of virtual reality room surrounded by an African plain with lions and gazelles, and as the parents try to remove them from that space, the lions eat the parents. Fantastic story. And I just remember being absolutely outraged when I was maybe ten years old, when I was first exposed to it, just thinking, this is impossible, they’re describing an impossible situation. I was completely hooked, that somebody could write such an outrageous thing. And make me believe it.
TN: It’s interesting that your daughter Lachlan, who read the story today, became, in a sense, your alter ego -- your narrative voice. Keeping it in the family! Tell me if I’m wrong, but I suspect she was quite aware of this novel during the years you were writing it when she was younger. Did she influence the story?
AB: Well, I talked about it obsessively. She was very aware of all the research I was making into tattoos. She egged me on about getting tattoos, knowing my very deep fear of needles. And on a practical level she did readings and had a lot to offer, especially as to my ability or inability to capture the voice and being of a young woman. So, yeah, I just can’t say enough about how fantastic Lachlan’s been in the whole process.
BR: That’s great. One thing that came up for Tom and me that we wanted to ask you about is… there are so many stories, books, movies that are about harm being done to women. It’s been theorized that this is an expression, either conscious or unconscious, of male-dominated culture keeping women down. What are your thoughts about this in relation to your book?
AB: Yeah, I think as a male writer you approach that very cautiously. I’m not sure that I’m the best voice to address the issue. But the main character of this book, Indigo, is moving from a culture that -- this gives away a little bit of the plot, but she’s moving from a culture that is fiercely patriarchal, into the American culture which is a little more amorphous, and then into a sort of other culture that’s… it’s not really completely run by women but it’s definitely a female-dominated meritocracy. So, yeah, I was aware of it, I was trying to address that, and of course the group that Indigo has escaped from is more than fiercely patriarchal, they’re very isolated and are patriarchal in a way that’s centuries and centuries old. So it’s funny to be very aware of that, and it’s the backdrop for the entire story rather than the point of the story.
TN: So, was it the female doctor that tattooed her? Don’t answer that. (laughter) Tell us about some of your other writing, both past and current projects.
AB: Well, I’m very busy right now. I have another science fiction book out. It’s much shorter and a little more grounded in just pure science, whereas Indigo moves into a world that’s more magical.
TN: Grounded in fiction.
AB: And then I’m writing a series of plays which I hope to get off the ground soon. They’re basically finished. And I’m involved in trying to get a movie done this year. So, a lot of different things.
TN: Well, thank you, Alan. It’s time for us to go -- I’ve got an appointment to get a tattoo this afternoon.
BR: That’s weird, so do I. I’m getting my whole novel tattooed on my chest.
TN: Really? I’m just getting a little flower on my lower back. You know, a tramp stamp, I think they call it.
BR: Oh, that’ll look good with your crop top and hip-hugger bell bottoms.
Yes, thank you, Alan!
AB: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure.
Music on this episode:
The Spirit of Russian Love (excerpt) by Zinaida Trokai.
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
