I knelt down at the watermark as the boys cast Philip adrift. When his coffin reached open sea, it spun northward and joined the flotilla of dead.
The women began scratching at their necks with their fingernails until they broke skin. You could see how the pain was giving them comfort, how the blood quieted even the most crazed of them. I would have done anything for that comfort. I dug my nail into my chest—six times, six vertical bars. Tried to gouge myself. I’m a nail biter. I had to finish up with a thorn.
Blood pooled at the base of each bar. I wiped it away with my fingertip. I could see how transient the lines were underneath. In a minute, they would seal closed; in a day, they would only be red marks; in a week, pink shadows; in a month, there wouldn’t even be a trace of my Philip.
I rose to my feet, walked over to the charred ruins of our house, knelt, and scoured the cold ashes until I felt something sharp, a shell point or a bone point, I didn’t care. I filled a coconut bowl with ash and seawater.
Somebody had to mix the ink.
Somebody had to pick up the needle.
PART THREE
BODY OF WORK
t’s one thing to have torn my flesh in the throes of grief, then blackened in the wounds as a reminder, and it’s quite another to have spent the next thirty years methodically refashioning myself into a piece of living tapestry. I have inhabited my art for so long with nothing to reflect it back at me. But standing before the vanity mirror in my suite at the Waldorf, naked and alone under the electric lights, I see myself whole for the first time, and only now do I begin to grasp what I had been composing all along.
The effect isn’t nearly as grand as I would have liked. The composition lacks a certain spontaneity, the elbows and knees are too symmetrical, and the colors aren’t retaining their initial vibrancy. Or maybe they were too subtle to begin with? I should have added more red to that shoulder, and underpainted that foot, the one with my coffin on the bottom of it, in raw umber. And some of the imagery now strikes me as clichéd. The American flag on my right biceps. I wanted it to exude the spirit of a sailor’s tattoo. It was meant to be an homage, yet now it looks so cheap and common. It’s for the three young marines who came ashore not long after the massacre. They smelled of spearmint gum and American cigarettes. They shared their C rations and chocolate bars with us. Their faces looked so blank to me. When I finally spoke up, my East Side accent coming out of my tattooed lips, their smiles froze. I asked them to tell me everything that had happened since I’d become marooned. They said we were at war, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was. I begged them to take me with them. They said it was too dangerous. They promised to send help back for me as soon as the war allowed. A fisherman later told me that he’d heard from another fisherman, who in turn had heard it from a copra trader, that they’d been killed on the island of Tarawa, that all the whites were dead.
Or here on my left elbow is a skull and crossbones, not quite as crudely rendered as a pirate’s skull and crossbones, but still. It’s for the half-drowned Japanese soldier who washed up on the beach a few months after the marines. We beat him to death with rocks and sticks, then let the birds peck at his flesh until he was only bones. We let the surviving pigs chew on them.
Or here on my right knee, taking up far too much room, are two crosses for the two missionaries from Utah, Jeremiah and Ester, who sailed into the cove a few years after the war. I was so tattooed by that time, they didn’t recognize me as one of their own even when I spoke with my unmistakable accent. They had come to Ta’un’uu to preach to the islanders, whom they called the children of Cain, that there wasn’t going to be a place for them at heaven’s table unless they gave up tattooing. They said good Christians had won the war because they had had God on their side. The islanders asked me to punish them for their lies by engraving their faces. As native as I’d gone by then, I couldn’t make myself do it. I let them out of the pig-pen that night and pointed them to the beach. I could have asked them to take me with them. They were sailing to New Guinea to proselytize the Papuans. How would I have gotten home from there? I didn’t even know where New Guinea was. And how could I have run away in the night without saying goodbye to my friends and neighbors—they’d shared every meal with me for seven years—
and
leave in the company of missionaries? Crosses? Couldn’t I have thought of something more original?
Or here on my left clavicle, a lipstick kiss sewn closed with a needle and thread. It now strikes me as one of those high concepts that seems so clever at the time but wears out as fast as chalk. It’s to mark the third time I might have asked to go home, but didn’t. A tiny sloop anchored in our lagoon around my fourteenth or fifteenth year. I’d long ago stopped counting the years. We assembled into our Great Tapestry to welcome the blond man who swam ashore. From a distance, he looked just like a young Philip. He spoke no English and we spoke no Swedish. From what he conveyed with gestures and sand drawings, we managed to deduce that he was sailing around the globe, solo. The Ta’un’uuans walked away in disgust. Why would a young man voluntarily sail away from home and leave his parents to grow old alone, then sail right back for no reason whatsoever? The poor Swede didn’t know what was going on and started running for his boat. I thought about shouting after him to take me with him, but I wasn’t sure any longer where, exactly, home was.
But there are other images, entire friezes of tattoos, where I seem to have outdone myself. The whole left half of my rib cage. If I squint, then block out the right half with my outstretched hand, it’s rather brilliant. My fearless use of black has resolved the problem of composing on an aging form. From certain angles, you don’t even notice the changes. The lines look like X-rays. Or here on my tongue, my latest tattoo, the firmament. I wanted it to seem like the heavens moved when I spoke. Or here at the base of my throat, the etching for my union boy, a needle engraving a needle, and next to it, a harpoon for my Ta’un’uuan lovers. I took one or two over the years. And here on my lower thigh, the marble arch in Washington Square. I employed a varicose vein to marble in the marble. I wanted the symbol of my youth to age as I aged. Or here on my right earlobe, like a piece of family jewelry, my father’s bewildered and terrified face, and on my right, hard as a diamond, my mother’s arrogant and terrified face, and in the middle, life-sized, their daughter’s ravaged one.
I can now see the differences between Ishmael’s art and my own. Where he composed spontaneously, letting his spirit dictate the line, I designed my imagery beforehand and commissioned a helper to engrave it on me. My lines, though competent, can never compare with his virtuosity. But there is something to be said for my process over his. I had to calculate into the design of each tattoo not only the skill level of my helper but also my own ability to withstand the pain of every additional layer of color, of every extraneous detail, of every act of unnecessary bravado. The greatness of the tattoo artist lies in her ability to gauge the degree to which she can push her art before the art kills the canvas.
There were many days, especially during those first years, when I’d brace myself for the prick of the needle, wondering if I’d gone mad on this piece of rock. Why did I keep inflicting my art on myself? What did it matter? But, invariably, the questions would segue into . . . Is this line too thick? Is that one too thin? Does this image say what I want it to say? Is that one too common? And who will let me know if it is? Who will be my critic? Who will be my audience? Who will be my champion? Who will love me?
Philip’s loss in those moments was so chilling that I’d start to shiver under the equatorial sun. Then I would stop working, stop sleeping, stop eating.
One by one they came to me while I was in these trances of grief, imploring me to tattoo them. Whether it was because they so admired my work or because they were willing to sacrifice themselves to pull me back to life, I didn’t know. My first commission came from Ishmael’s widow. She wanted me to engrave a death mask of her husband on her left breast, as I had engraved a death mask of Philip on mine. Her skin, particularly near the neck, was so scarred from grieving, so crosshatched with inked reminders, that I wasn’t sure if my line would be visible. I mixed an opaque white with palm sap and pulverized seashells, mother-of-pearl, so that the pigment would refract sunlight. It took me three weeks of experimentation to find just the right thickness. It took me another month to etch the death mask with all its tattoos. When I finally finished, and the salves were peeled off, she looked down at the portrait on her breast, a photographic negative of Ishmael’s face, and pressed her forehead against mine. She said she didn’t know tattoos could be made out of light.
My next commission was for a fisherboy. He wanted an iron nail engraved on his body so that he might have better luck finding a real one. He said if he had an iron nail of his own, he could make an iron hook to catch enough fish to get married. I mixed a pale neutral gray, a shade that is only visible in bright daylight, and tattooed a penny nail on his palm. I wanted the nail to appear anew every morning, like the miracle of stigmata. If my tattoo wasn’t really magic, at least it would remind him to keep looking for that nail.
Then there was the commission for Laadah, my dear Laadah—now dead twenty years—who marched us to the taro fields during those first months of despair, and made us plant for the future. On her I drew a garden that never needed tending.
And there were so many others. Shy girls who would whisper to me the names of their secret lovers so that I might encode them on their flesh; and the very old, with so little virgin skin left, and so much still to say. It was endless. Someone would die, then a baby would be born, then a fisherman lost his arm to a shark, and his tattoos had to be moved onto his brother’s arm before any fishing could resume. And there were always the carefree young men and women, born after the massacre, who thought every one of their exploits deserved a tattoo. They had no idea how finite the body is. One day, as I was about to initiate a bride-to-be, her first tattoo, her whole life yet to be written, I happened to glance down at my drawing hand. It was poised above her pristine abdomen, needle at the ready. My hand looked so frail, the skin so thin, the tattoos so faded. My fingers weren’t exactly shaking, but I noticed a tremor in the needle’s shaft. I’d become an old woman here.
One of my duties as a tattoo artist is to sing as I insert the needle and ease the suffering with melody. The prayer the Ta’un’uuans traditionally sing tells the story of the first tattoo artist, a young chief who had boundless strength, great talent as a carver, enough wooden matches to light enough fires to warm himself and his people for a thousand years, an enormous penis, one hundred beautiful
and
appreciative wives, and many healthy children, but no wisdom. One day, he left his life of bounty and paddled his canoe to where this world met the next. There he asked his ancestors to reward him for the journey by revealing all their secrets to him. His ancestors didn’t respond. So he cut off the tip of his finger and used the spurting blood to paint animals and plants and suns and stars on his flesh, then insisted his ancestors reward him for his ingenuity and talent. The dead sent rain to wash away his offering. Using the fishhook he’d brought along to feed himself, he carved all the animals and plants and sun and stars right into his flesh, then implored his ancestors to reward him for his suffering. The dead only stopped the bleeding, and the wounds sealed shut, and the scars disappeared, and still he possessed no wisdom. So he burned his canoe, then mixed the ash with seawater to make ink, and opened up all his wounds again, and tattooed himself. The dead weren’t impressed. Finally, he was a very old man without a canoe, treading water in the middle of the ocean. He asked the dead to take pity on him and let him onto their shore so he might rest. No shore appeared. So he peeled off his skin and threw it into the sea and as he sank, as the dead finally pulled him into their world, he saw the fishes and squids and gulls tear apart his art, all his hard work, and eat the pieces of skin, and that’s when he gleaned what the dead had to teach him.
To sing the Ta’un’uuan tattoo prayer as it should be sung, in its entirety, every verse a week-long chant, I would have had to have started memorizing it in childhood.
Instead, each time I inserted the needle, I sang the only songs I remembered, the ones my father had sung to me about the storybook
yeshiva
on the windy Russian steppes, or the little union girl who takes on the bosses. When even those simple lyrics escaped me, I chanted the Hebrew prayers I’d committed to memory under the threat of the rabbi’s rod in the dank
cheders
of the Lower East Side. I sang about a people lost in a desert searching for home for forty years. If the Ta’un’uuans didn’t know what a desert was, surely they knew what it was to be alone in the middle of an unbroken horizon.
About four months ago, a seaplane landed in our lagoon. We’d seen planes before, certainly during the war, or nowadays the high white streaks of jets crossing the Pacific, or the twin-engine Pipers of the missionaries who proselytize to the north of here. We hurried to the beach to assemble into the Great Tapestry. My place is now on the far left, third from the end, among the elders. The right half is made up of fisherboys and young marrieds, their tattooed bodies so bright and taut, whereas we on our end look like the fraying fringe of an old flag.
A white man, necklaced with cameras, and a white woman, sporting what looked like an old-fashioned bathing costume (capris, I later learned), stepped onto the wing and waved to us. They wore the same expressions of astonishment, I imagine, that Philip and I had worn when we first saw the Great Tapestry.