From her spot on the front step, she could see down the road, toward South Street Cemetery. A car rolled slowly through the graveyard, along one of the narrow gravel lanes, trundling ahead the way a person will when trying to find an open space in a crowded parking lot. But the passenger-side window was down, and fire was gushing out. The interior was so filled with flames, Harper could not see the person who must’ve been sitting behind the wheel.
Harper watched the car roll off the road and into the grass, until it thunked gently to a stop against a headstone. Then she remembered she had come out to watch Jakob ride away. She looked around for him, but he was already gone.
SEPTEMBER
8
Two days later her left arm was sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what looked like golden notes scattered across them. She found herself pulling her sleeve back to look at it every few minutes. By the end of the following week, she was sketched in Dragonscale from wrist to shoulder.
One day she pulled her shirt off and glanced at herself in the mirror on the back of her armoire and saw a belt riding just above her hips, a tattoo in gold and black. When she got over feeling winded and sick, she had to admit to herself that it was curiously beautiful.
Sometimes she took off all her clothes except her underwear and examined her new illustrated skin by candlelight. She wasn’t sleeping much, and these inspections usually took place a little after midnight. Much as it was possible to imagine a visage in a flickering fire, or a figure in the grain of a wooden surface, she thought she saw half-finished images scrawled in the ’scale.
That was usually when Jakob called, from the dead man’s trailer. He wasn’t sleeping, either.
“Thought I ought to check in,” he said. “See what you did with yourself today.”
“Puttered around the house. Ate the last of the pasta. Made an effort not to turn into a heap of coals. How are you?”
“Hot. It’s hot here. It’s always hot.”
“Open a window. It’s cool out. I’ve got them all open and I’m fine.”
“I’ve got them all open, too, and I’m roasting. It’s like trying to sleep in an oven.”
She didn’t like the angry way he talked about not being able to cool off or the way he fixated on it, like the heat was a personal affront.
Harper distracted him by talking about her condition in a languid, almost breezy tone. “I’ve got a swirl of ’scale on the inside of my left arm that looks like an open umbrella. An umbrella sailing away on the wind. Do you think the spore has an artistic impulse? Do you think it reacts to the stuff you’ve got in your subconscious and tries to ink your skin with pictures you might like?”
“I don’t want to talk about the shit you’ve got on you. I get shaky thinking about it, about that disgusting shit all over you.”
“That makes me feel nice. Thank you.”
He let out a harsh, angry breath. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m not unsympathetic.”
She laughed—surprising not just him, but herself. Good old Jakob used such smart, picky words sometimes. Unsympathetic. Before he dropped out of college he had been a philosophy major, and he still had the habit of hunting through his vocabulary for exactly the right term, which, somehow, inexplicably, always made it the wrong term. He corrected her spelling sometimes, too.
Harper wondered, idly, why it took getting contaminated to notice the marriage itself was sick.
He tried again. “I’m sorry. I am. I’m boiling. It’s hard to be—thoughtful.”
A cross-breeze fanned through the room, cool on her bare tummy. She didn’t know how he could possibly be hot, wherever he was.
“I was wondering if the Dragonscale started doodling Mary Poppins’s umbrella on my arm. You know how many times I’ve seen Mary Poppins?”
“The Dragonscale isn’t reacting to your subconscious. You are. You’re seeing the kinds of things you’re already primed to see.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “But you know what? There was a gardener in the hospital who had swirls of this stuff up his legs that looked just like tattoos of crawling vines. You could see delicate individual leaves and everything. Everyone agreed it looked like ivy. Like the Dragonscale was making an artistic commentary on his life’s work.”
“That’s just how it looks. Like strands of thorns. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I guess it couldn’t be in my brain yet, so it couldn’t really know anything about me. It takes weeks to pass up the sinuses to the brain. We’re still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the relationship.”
“Christ,” he said. “I’m burning alive over here.”
“Boy, did you call the wrong person for sympathy,” she said.
9
A couple of nights later she poured herself a glass of red wine and read the first page of Jakob’s book. She told herself if his novel was any good at all, the next time she talked to him she would admit she had looked at some of it and tell him how much she loved it. He couldn’t be angry at her for breaking her promise never to look at the manuscript without permission. She had a fatal illness. That had to change the rules.
But after one page she knew it wasn’t going to be any good and she left it, feeling bad again, as if she had wronged him somehow.
A while later, after a second glass of wine—two weren’t going to do any harm to the baby—she read thirty pages. She had to quit there. She couldn’t go any further and still be in love with him. In truth, maybe thirty pages had been three too many.
The novel was about a former philosophy student, J., who has an unfulfilling job at the Department of Public Works and an unfulfilling marriage with a cheerfully shallow blonde who can’t spell, reads YA novels because she lacks the mental rigor for mature fiction, and has no sense whatsoever of her husband’s tortured inner life. To assuage his existential disappointment, J. engages in a series of casual affairs with women Harper had no trouble identifying: friends from college, teachers from the elementary, a former personal trainer. Harper decided these affairs were inventions . . . although the lies J. told his wife, about where he was and what he was doing when he was really with someone else, corresponded almost word for word with conversations Harper remembered having.
Somehow, though, the clinical reports of his affairs were not the worst of it. What she detested even more was the protagonist’s contempt.
He hated the men who drove the trucks for Public Works. He hated their fat faces and their fat wives and their fat children. He hated the way they saved all year to buy tickets in nosebleed territory for a pro-football game. He hated how happy they were in the weeks after the game, and hated the way they would tell the story of the game over and over as if recounting the battle of Thermopylae.
He hated all of his wife’s girlfriends—J. had no friends of his own—for not knowing Latin, drinking mass-produced beer instead of microbrews, and raising the next generation of overfed, overentertained human place-fillers. This did not stop him from fucking them, however.