“What's your favorite thing about tattoos?” It's such an amateur question, something a third-grader might ask while interviewing him for some school project, although I don't know what school would assign a project on tattoo artists. Maybe a charter school, or a Montessori.
"Their permanence," Kal says.
"But now there's laser removal."
Kal shrug. "It still leaves a scar. Like a ghost." He looks deeper into me than anyone has in a long time.
"But eventually we die, and the flesh rots away."
Kal smiles at me with unwavering eye contact. It's unnerving, or at least I am unnerved.
“Let me guess, people leave ghosts, too.”
“You're scared. That's normal for first timers."
I don't recall mentioning that this is my first time, and I'm fully clothed, and so he can't possibly see that I am unmarked, but he knows. “I'm scared. But not about the needles or the pain or regret."
"About what, then?"
"About memorializing someone who isn't gone. That I'm giving up the battle. That I'm surrendering in war.” I can hear Jenny tell me to say what I really mean. I carry my thesis further. “Afraid of death, I guess. And, maybe for the first time, of my own mortality."
"Death is a unique opponent, in that death always wins." Kal offers a small hiccup of a shrug, as if this is of little significance. "There's no shame in surrender when it's time to stop fighting."
... ...
Lily and the Octopus, P179-180
Steven Rowley
ISBN 978-1-5011-2622-2
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