The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (27 page)

“Well, thank God for that.”

“He was scared of getting busted.”

“But why? You're the one who pulled a knife on him.”

“Yeah, but my record's clean.”

“Do you know the guy?”

“I know his type.” Blue sits motionless for a moment, and then goes to the fridge to get another beer. He opens the fridge door and stares at the cans distractedly. He begins to rearrange them into the shape of a pyramid. A precarious balancing act.

“Is he okay?” Emma whispers to Amy.

“He's up and down,” she says. “But it's been better since we came back here. Blue's really doing well with this tattoo thing,” she enthuses. “Right, hon?”

The next time Emma sees Blue he looks about a thousand times happier. She, on the other hand, is feeling like shit. She grits her teeth through work. Her job seems so pointless she thinks about quitting at four-thirty every day, but point or no point, she knows she has to continue.

Amy is making pasta in the kitchen and Blue passes Emma a beer and starts talking about his plans. “I really want to establish a reputation with my shop—you know, for quality work. Billy's done a lot. He's got himself a reputation, but he's more like a mechanic than an artist, if you know what I mean. So anyway, what I'd like to do is maybe open up a bunch of other shops, and maybe one day I'll even have a chain of stores across the country,” he beams.

His plans are so big they sound familiar to Emma, not the details, but the sheer magnitude of them. He's got it too, she thinks. He's got Oliver's vision, but she can see there is a critical difference. Blue's dreams seem to be coming true.

Elaine had said that there were similarities between Emma and Oliver, confirming her worst suspicions. But when she said it, she had tried to give it a positive spin—she'd fallen in love with Oliver
because
he was a dreamer. When Emma looks at Blue, luminescent as he describes his big plans, she can see how attractive it is. He's found a space to rent and he's going and picking up equipment from dental supply stores, and he has a business card of a naked woman on her stomach with a snake crawling out of her ass. Not quite pornographic, but not exactly something Elaine is going to want to carry around in her purse.

He's among the first of a new tribe of tattoo artists in Niagara Falls. His work appeals to the newlyweds from small Canadian towns who come to honeymoon and cement their union with snapshots of falling water and his-and-hers tattoos. He does cops and cocaine dealers in adjacent chairs. He pierces the nipples, clits, and labia of all the strippers in town, and then at night, the cops and cocaine dealers sit in strip clubs and admire Blue's work on their own bodies and the bodies of women dancing for them.

Blue seems to have found some sort of salvation through punching needles full of ink into skin. He's not at all New Age about it—he doesn't use words like
healing
or
spirit
, but rather, speaks in tough monosyllables which pop out of his mouth like cherry pits onto hot pavement.

“Show Emma that piece of work on your arm,” Amy encourages, peeling a wet string of pasta off the wall.

Blue pulls up his sleeve and Emma moves in, searching for the initials that once branded him; close enough to brush her lips against the hair on his arm and catch the scent of his patchouli-and-tobacco-infused skin. The initials are obscured now, lost in a sea of overlapping blues and greens. That doesn't seem to matter to the boy disguised as a biker daddy who is Emma's baby brother. He pulls up his other sleeve to reveal an airbrushed Jesus—all blood and thorns. The tattoo begins just below his elbow and swims laps around a fleshy, undefined bicep.

“He's reading a porno,” Blue tells her proudly.

“Charming,” snorts Emma. Although she finds the tattoo tacky, even offensive, she's nevertheless impressed by the large boy in front of her. The ability to dream is apparently a talent or a curse, it all depends on what you do with it.

Blue just thinks he's being resourceful, and he sees Emma as someone who is much less sure of her own resources, and always has been. She's had more success disguising herself in the lives of others than creating a life of her own—a pattern Blue has noticed, but has never fully understood. He just knows that whenever she's eventually expelled from whatever universe she's been trampling through, she lands belly up on his doorstep in the tattered remnants of some costume that never suited her. He sees her that way now. Wasted and spent from a summer digging in vain and standing here wearing a tacky uniform, looking like a fish out of water.

“Come down to the Artful Dodger on Saturday,” he says to her when she leaves with a belly full of beer and pasta. “Let me do some ink on you.”

She hears:
That'll fix you. Pin you down. Make you my sister again
. She's been serving ice cream, reading mysteries, and dreading going back to school in the fall. She needs to belong somewhere. She needs to be a sister again.

Emma goes down like she's promised, and does her utmost to look cool in the presence of her brother's command. The shop is full of guys loitering, smoking, hanging out in the loud, tight space thick with stale sweat. The tall, lanky one who looks like he has hamburger for brains is Billy, the shop owner. Blue's usurping him now, and Billy's getting less and less friendly. He knows he is only a technician;
Blue, on the other hand, is an artist, and he is rapidly outgrowing the place.

Emma still calls her brother Blue, although he finds it a little embarrassing. He winces when she says it in front of the guys in the shop who otherwise know him as Big Lou. They're not his friends, he doesn't have any friends, never has really, except Amy, and if you can count your sister, Emma. It's kind of a family tradition. These guys are admirers—people who mill around the shop because it's cool to have a buddy who's a tattoo artist, although they're all a little bit scared of him and he knows it. That means “respect,” he tells Emma, pronouncing it without the
t
and punching a clenched fist against his chest.

He's pierced his tongue and he sticks it out to provoke her. She recoils because it looks to her like a hook caught in some prehistoric fish. He flicks the silver ball against his teeth then and says it gives Amy enormous pleasure. He knows that will get a reaction out of her. He wiggles his tongue, licks the air.

Blue likes to be crude and provocative here because it fits and fuels his tough-guy image. He obviously aspires to be white trash, and he does a fairly convincing impression. His tattoos have started to creep up his neck, past the collar of his black T-shirt, threatening to strangle his face like jungle vines wrapped tight around a tree. But somewhere in that dense mess of colour Emma can still picture Blue as small and tender; treated badly and misunderstood. She can still see them crouched beside the furnace, or holding hands at school; catching rain on their pink and vulnerable tongues stretched out under an ominous, brooding sky.

She can picture them when they were little, but she's the one who feels smaller now. She imagines herself a barnacle stuck to his leg; a fly on the brown back of a wildebeest. She imagines Blue carrying her
around like that, around and around the shop where he is posturing and tattooing and piercing and avoiding paying government sales tax and doing the occasional drug deal on the side. Emma watches him operate. She marvels at the way he talks savvy and lucrative street talk and uses just the right combination of charm and intimidation to develop a reputation for being the maker of cool in their sleazy summer town.

“Dude, that's my sis,” Blue yells at the greasy-haired biker standing at the counter. “She's doin' her fuckin' B.A., asshole, so treat her with a little respect,” he says protectively.

Emma's happy to let him play the big tough guy because the whole place scares her. She's sitting in a purple plastic dental chair, fiddling with the lever and clasping a Diet Coke between her thighs. “Do you think I'm making a mistake pursuing archaeology?” she asks him. She's obviously having her doubts. She just doesn't feel the sense of hope or motivation she felt a year ago. She feels disillusioned, almost betrayed. She still doesn't know that there's a compromise to be made between a dream and a reality, a distance to be navigated and negotiated; that it really is those petty day-to-day details, the good, the bad, and the ugly, that add up to make the dream. She cannot see the failure of the earlier summer as a china doll that simply needs its arm gluing back on: she sees it as a Ming vase that's been thrown onto concrete and shattered irreparably into a thousand tiny pieces. The end of a dynasty.

“That's not for me to say.” He's not going down this road with her. She seems depressed, and this is usually a sign that she's going to run off and do something totally unpredictable. “You'll get it back,” he tries to reassure her.

“Whatever
it
is,” she drones.

“Well, if it's what you really want, then maybe it will come back to you.”

But she's not sure how much she cares any more. All she cares about at this moment is the fact that Blue's going to give her a tattoo. She's relieved he's here, and she wonders if all that has happened has happened for this reason: to bring them back together.

“Let me ID you,” Blue's been saying. She's never outright refused, it's just that she hasn't put her mind to designing anything. “I haven't got a brain left to produce an image,” she tells Blue.

“Come on, Em, get a grip, okay? Just concentrate,” Blue says, his patience fading.

It has occurred to Emma that if she does this, she will be giving up the right to die anonymously. She will, with a tattoo, have an identifying mark on an otherwise unremarkable body. If she chooses to disappear or do herself in, she will thus be branded as herself rather than one of the more glamorous selves she invents in some of her most elaborate fantasies. A sacrificial virgin who has just escaped near death at the hands of her tribesmen. A minor movie star whose meteoric rise to fame and fortune is struck down with the prognosis of a fatal illness. With a tattoo, her death will never provoke a nationwide search, her death will never be an unsolved mystery. She will never be able to disguise herself again.

“Okay,” she finally says. “How about a cool Celtic band just above my bicep then.”

“Not cool,” Blue says, shaking his head. “Stupid cliché. And besides, it's gonna look
real stupid
when you're an old lady and your arm is all saggy. It's not going to look like a circle any more.”

It's never occurred to Emma before that she's going to be an old lady one day. She can't really imagine racking up enough birthdays to technically be considered old. But Blue is saying, “Remember the old lady next door? Remember the underneath bit flapping like chicken skin?”

“Okay, Blue. So do whatever. Okay? Whatever.”

And so Blue tells her about the band of thorns he's going to draw around her wrist. She doesn't care really. She doesn't care what he does. It's sort of not the point. The point is she is his sister and he's going to mark her in his particular way, he's going to give her a permanent identity, take away her anonymity and her transience, and pin her down in the world. He's going to carve his initials into her arm; give her a life where she is forever branded as the tribe of Blue.

She has her band of thorns, at least she has that, and that gives her guts enough to let Blue drive her back to Toronto in his pickup truck and help her move into her new single room in residence. They dump all the boxes in the middle of the floor. “You going to be all right?” Blue asks her as he's leaving.

Emma nods, but she doesn't want him to go. It has taken considerable effort to come back to the scene of humiliation, particularly this late into the start of the term. She hasn't dared to look anyone in the eye, she's heard only grunts in response to her attempts to say hello. She's avoiding strict archaeology this fall, focusing on related subjects taught by unrelated professors—physical anthropology, evolution, osteology, disease.

“You're depressed,” Ruthie tells her, ten minutes after being reunited. “You're a casebook classic. All the signs are there.”

“Depressed” sounds like an awfully bland description for what Emma is feeling. Like a hollow carcass. Like roadkill. Stuck somewhere between nightmares and daydreams. Like the world keeps dividing in two. Into discrete halves. Split like apples by a swift axe. Intimacy becoming repulsion. Lies becoming truths.

She feels as if she's lost any conviction that archaeology can provide answers, but she's still reaching out for ruins, not out of discipline, but out of fear.

“You've got to pull it together,” Ruthie tells her. “Fuck what anybody else thinks. It's your life.”

What precisely she is supposed to do with that precious pearl of wisdom escapes her. She tries her hardest to conjure up suicidal thoughts but she's not particularly good at it. She gets distracted. There are the remains of a chocolate cake in the fridge down the hall still to be eaten; there is the appointment to get her wisdom teeth out the following week.

In her room, she paces back and forth trying to memorize terminology. It seems to be the only way anything will stick these days. If she pounds out terms with her feet, or sets them to music, she has a rhythmic association, which is better than no association at all. But the terms exist in isolation. They don't seem to amount to anything. They don't contribute to a big picture, they don't even seem like parts of any whole.

She used to have a goal. She was going to be something. Now she can only dream of being a headless horseman or a pumpkin carved out for Hallowe'en. Somebody seems to have emptied out the contents of her head and either baked them in the oven, mashed them into a pie, or just thrown them, ever so unconsciously, into the garburator. Maybe she really is destined for a life of scooping ice cream. Maybe Oliver was right all along.