He did not remember walking to Way of the Flesh Tattoos and Piercings. All he knew for certain was that he had failed to find his lover last night at the club where she danced for a lounge full of other men. And now he had a very bad headache. Niall kept feeding him water, lecturing about personal responsibility, and cutting Bill’s back open with what he said was essentially Grandma’s doorbell.
 
Bill peeled his face from Naugahyde and stared out the open doorway. Soggy air. The sun had finally risen above the skyline—glare on the puddles. Sun illuminating all the inked flesh tacked to these walls. A galaxy of Polaroids. In the center, one eight-by-ten photo, Niall’s masterpiece, Adam and Eve standing beneath the Tree of Knowledge, its branches flared like a peacock’s spreading fan, bursting into flame. Bill lifted his head better to study the flames. Just seeing her skin, her slender back covered in ink, even this simulacrum of her skin, eased the hurt that gnawed away inside, replaced it with something sweet.
 
“You seen her?” Bill asked. “Have you talked to her?” He wanted to say more, how she wouldn’t return his calls, how he was certain she was using again, how he had spent two nights this week parked outside her apartment, waiting, but Bill had never been sure about her past with the artist. Niall always claimed that an intense intimacy developed between tattooist and client, and he had inked a lot of her flesh.
 
“If she’s not committed to helping herself,” Niall said, “there’s not much I can do for her.” He ran the needles along the edge of Bill’s scapula. Bill could feel the wing searing into his skin, cutting toward bone.
 
Niall claimed to be a shaman. Every tattoo had the capacity to change one’s life, for good or ill. He said he was extremely careful while “casting a mojo,” as he called it. And, nevertheless, he had accidentally ruined lives. And sometimes not accidentally. Niall’s constant talk always helped distract Bill from the pain. This morning Niall was busy explaining his conspiracy theory concerning NationsBank’s plans for demolition of the old Independence Building. Sometime later today. Charlotte’s historical preservation society had protested. Declaring the old twelve-story Greek Revival structure the city’s first skyscraper, they had tried to have the date postponed, but NationsBank owned the property. And the bank wielded political power the historical society could only dream of.
 
“Will we be able to see it from here?” Bill asked.
 
“Oh, most definitely.” Niall pointed toward the door with the buzzing tattoo gun. Bill followed the hand. Above the crepe myrtles, soaring overtop the storefront across the street, granite columns rose to support a filigreed cornice. What a shame. Compared to surrounding glass-and-steel, the Independence Building felt like part of the earth itself. The old tower and surrounding park had been cordoned off with chain-link fencing.
 
When she got the blues, Lucy would talk to him about leaving the city, getting back to the country, but she and Bill had both lived in Charlotte too long to leave, both of them afraid of the selves they might discover if they did dare go back home. Maybe that’s what had drawn them to each other, two hillbillies hiding out in the shadows of skyscrapers.
 
Niall said the bank had flown in experts who planted explosives all over the structure. According to the news, it would come down in seconds. “It’s what the city fathers call progress,” Niall said.
 
Bill lifted his head, squinting at the pain of movement. “How much longer?” he asked through clenched teeth. The sting burned hotter by the minute.
 
“I’m almost there,” Niall said. “Just a little more shading under these wings.”
 
Bill felt the wet sponge across his filleted back. The tattoo’s size announced itself with the pain. How much pain had his father felt after his colon was removed, after they stitched him back up? He’d never said, and Bill hadn’t asked. This was as close to surgery as Bill had ever come, and, yeah, it did feel like something had been taken out and something else put in.
 
When Lucy walked in the door, Bill looked up into her surprised eyes. She paused at the counter, nervously flipping through pages in Niall’s portfolio, like some first time customer, rather than a woman who had spent well over a hundred hours in this chair. She wore a backless halter, and when she turned to stretch her arms above her head, he studied the ink that covered her back from shoulders to loin, the damned couple standing beneath the tree, reaching together for forbidden fruit.
 
Where to start? After the arguments, the silence that followed, how to save what was left of their love?
 
“I looked for you last night,” he said, the chair tugging at his jaw. “I waited at the club.”
 
She sat down on the sofa, grabbed the black vinyl at the top of her boot and began peeling. “I ain’t getting on the schedule much lately,” she said. “The boss is trying to teach me a lesson about missing work and coming in late. That’s what he says. He can kiss my ass. I’m giving up dancing, anyway.”
 
“Do you mean that?”
 
She shrugged.
 
“You’ve said that before.”
 
“Don’t you start.”
 
“Sorry,” he said. So many things they had both promised to quit.
 
She pulled off both boots then walked barefooted and stood behind Niall. Clearly annoyed, the artist switched off the power supply and let the tattoo machine rest idle in his lap.
 
“Holy shit, Niall,” she said.
 
Bill raised his head to gauge the artist’s response, but Niall had turned away, staring out the open door.
 
“Look at Count Tequila.” Lucy laughed. “I guess I never knew how much you had it in for ol’ Bill.”
 
“He was the one who requested bones and bat wings,” Niall said.
 
“While you’re at it,” she said, “why don’t you go ahead and etch the mark of the Beast across his forehead?”
 
Bill tried to laugh. “Is it really that bad?”
 
“Six six six.” Lucy laughed, and in her laughter, Bill wanted to believe he heard forgiveness, joy.
 
The colors on her pale skin pierced him with longing. Had she argued with her mother again? The old woman kept begging Lucy to visit her, out there in the sticks, but Lucy claimed that her mother only wanted to milk her for rent money. Lucy and Bill both had their issues with family, and Bill had stopped prying into hers.
 
He felt the needles trace a line down his spine, sending their vibrations echoing along his vertebrae. He looked up and waited for her to face him.
 
“How are you doing?” he asked. Why was the simplest thing so hard?
 
She shrugged. “I’m making it.”
 
Maybe later they could talk. Not here, while Niall was still at work. Bill didn’t want to fuck up the mojo.
 
Maybe there was a way to start over. But one look at her face and it was clear: how completely she did not want him. Because of his love for this woman, he had let his marriage fail, had covered himself with ink. He had walked out the front gate of his gated community, had left behind the chemically treated lawn and the new locks on the doors, the wife and her lover, their sober judgment.
 
The sun sent shafts of light into the parlor, and Lucy stepped into that light. On her back the ink shown clear: the fallen couple reaching for the piece of fruit, hanging heavy and low. Wasn’t it at least true that the only time anyone had a chance at magic, the opportunity to create, occurred at those nodal moments when two people chose the same thing?
 
She stepped around the autoclave, past the partition, toward the tiny lavatory in back, leaving Bill alone with the pain in his back and the deafening racket of that tattoo machine. But then abruptly the noise ceased. Niall sprayed cleanser across Bill’s back and wiped it down with a paper towel.
 
“I’m done here,” he said, his voice oozing resignation. He peeled off his gloves and slumped back against the wall. “I hope it’s scary enough for you,” he said. “It’s still going to weep, but go ahead and take a look before I cover it with salve.”
 
Bill sat up from the chair and went to the mirror on the far wall. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the reflection of his upper back. What he saw made him tremble: a pair of bat wings, tier upon tier of skulls, evolving from toad to human, to demon, to . . . robot?
 
If this was what life required to teach him he that he was not totally doomed, then so be it. He glanced back across the room at Niall, who sat slumped in his chair, as if drained of all energy.
 
“I am not my body,” Bill said to his reflection in the mirror, repeating the words Niall had taught him. “But I’ve got to learn to use my body. I can act. I am, in fact, free.”
 
Lucy stepped back in from the lavatory. Her eyes were red. Had she been crying? She held her nose pinched, and as she sat back in the sofa, Bill saw the trace of blood by her nostril. Was she high? She’d been sober for two weeks! She wasn’t wearing mascara this morning, and her beady eyes darted everywhere around the room so as not to return Bill’s stare. The only time he had been able to stop picturing his wife in bed with another man was when he stared at this other woman, but the more he had stared, the more he had come to see of her hurt. And the more he saw, the more fully he realized his impotence to alleviate any particle of her suffering.
 
He turned away, forced himself to gaze into the mirror. He worked his arms so that the black wings covering his shoulder blades appeared to flap beneath a film of blood. He pivoted so that she had a clear view. No solicitation. If she wanted to comment, then good. But either way, he would show her what he was capable of. Didn’t she understand how it was all for her that he had become the pale rider?
 
Outside, a cloud passed before the sun and the shop went dark. He felt the shadow fall over his head, across his shoulders, down the length of his body, a gray haze he could see in the mirror, a curtain of darkness separating him from everyone he had ever tried to love.
 
He was staring out the doorway, directly at it, when it blew. The Independence Building. For a fraction of a second before he heard a sound, he felt the tremor and saw the top floors shudder and crack. Then came the blast, unbelievably loud, and jagged lines forming along the white granite, the roar of stone grating against stone, columns buckling, the whole thing tumbling in upon itself.
 
Then it simply was not there.
 
Sirens wailed. The air itself seemed to split asunder and let in their scream. But maybe the ringing was only in his head. He took a step toward the bright rectangle of sunlight that filled the doorway. Without that tower, the horizon seemed farther away.
 
He turned back and beckoned for her to follow, but she was staring at the floor, holding a hand pressed to her temple. Was she in pain? Her back was bent, as if under a heavy burden, and the halter top drooped, revealing the Tree’s spreading branches, every green leaf a seeing eye, every orange leaf bursting into flame. The doomed couple reached for the fruit, but their feet already turned to exit the garden.
 
“Lucy,” he said. If she heard him, she gave no sign. “Sweetheart,” he said, “come look at this!” Without that tower blocking the sky, anything seemed possible, but he couldn’t see it without her. He stood with his hand held out, waiting. If she would only look up, the whole world lay open before them.
 
 
© George Hovis 2019
 
This story is an excerpt from the novel The Skin Artist by George Hovis, Southern Fried Karma 2019.