“Comforting.” I say it sarcastically, but I’m not sure sarcasm is a language Kal speaks.
“Isn’t it?” Kal asks. I don’t think he’s without a sense of humor, but he’s completely serious here. I laugh, but in that nervous way you do when you can’t think of something to say. Kal opens a drawer and pulls out a Polaroid and hands it to me.
“What’s this?”
“The last tattoo I did. I don’t like to do quotes. Not much challenge in them for me as an artist. But I like this one, and we were able to do it in an interesting way.”
I look at the photograph. Across a guy’s rib cage are scrawled the words “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”
I recognize it immediately. “Peter Pan.”
“J. M. Barrie,” Kal corrects. “Peter Pan isn’t real.”
“Isn’t he? I always thought Peter Pan was death. An angel of death who came to collect children.”
Kal raises an eyebrow. “You’re darker than I thought.”
“I didn’t used to be.” I am transforming.
“What is death? Is it the end of photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, homeostasis?” Kal has the rhythm of a poet. “The last heartbeat? The last cell generation? The last breath of air?”
“Maybe all those things.”
He has a real philosophical approach.
“We don’t know, do we? It could be the tipping point, the point in life when extinction is assured.”
“If that’s the case, isn’t death the moment of birth?”
“Or conception, even.”
“Your favorite thing about tattoos doesn’t really exist.” I look down at my feet. I’m almost embarrassed to have to point this out.
“Permanence?”
“Not really. Not if we’re all past the tipping point.”
“Permanence is a relative idea.”
I smile. “What, really, is permanence anyway?”
Kal smiles, too. He gets that I’m being cheeky. “Let’s not go too far down that rabbit hole.”
“It’s hard not to.” But he’s right, we could be here all day and all night. I look at Kal. Not that that would be so bad.
“If you spend your entire life trying to cheat death, there’s no time left over to embrace life.” He puts his hand on my shoulder and it is warm. “Don’t be afraid. That’s all I’m saying.”
Kal’s right. I’m done being afraid. Having ink, like the octopus, is the final step in my metamorphosis.
“Besides,” Kal says. “I have a better idea.”
“What’s that?”
Kal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal, and sets them down on a drafting table. “Let’s draw.”
I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of sixty-four Crayola crayons—unabashedly, showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don’t do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words. But when I see Kal’s pad and charcoal, I’m overwhelmed with the feeling that it’s not the same.
I use my words, my artist’s charcoal, to describe to Kal what I’m thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb, or brush the paper with the back of his hand.
He listens and nods and doesn’t interrupt, and when I’m done speaking he looks at the drawing and his eyes get really big. Slowly he turns his pad around for me to see.
My heart stops. And then starts.
“Yes,” I say.
It’s perfect, alive with added detail and beautiful Inuit soulfulness I couldn’t have even imagined sitting outside in my car. My fear is gone. There’s a tingling in my skin, like I can feel the thousand needle pricks to come.
I am alive.
Kal picks up an ink gun and raises it to eye level. He’s as excited as I am. His eyes sparkle, then squint as he prepares to do what he does. “Shall we begin?”
7.
My fingers hovered over the call button for so long I can’t remember pushing the damned thing, and now that the phone is ringing, I’m having second thoughts about dialing. Dial. Why do we still say that? When was the last time anyone used a phone with a dial? It’s midnight and I’m exhausted, and maybe a little delirious, I don’t know. Dial. I associate that word more with soap than with telephones. Or maybe something more sinister. Die-all. And yet the phone is ringing, and the ring itself is mildly comforting. There should be some sort of number that you can call late at night just to hear a phone ring. No one would ever answer, but there would be the promise that someone was out there who would listen to you and all you had to say. Ring. Now, even that word is weird. How can it mean both the circles in a tree stump and the noise a telephone makes? Dial, ring. Dial, ring. Dial, ring. Just as I hear “Hello?” I hang up.
Well, damn. Now I’ve probably woken him up for the pleasure of having someone unceremoniously hang up on him, so I feel committed to calling him back. He answers on the first ring.
“Hey.” It’s Trent.
“Hey.”
Long silence.
“What time is it?” He was asleep. He’s trying to orient himself.
I think about how to phrase what I want to say. “Am I crazy?”