So I landed this gig and I started taking my little dog out to Rancho Mirage for the weekend, for some quality-time weekends, just him and me. And I lavished one-on-one attention on him with food and treats and playing and cuddling in a nice, clean, cool hotel room, and it was his little spa weekend because he deserved it.
*
I obsessed about the tattoo that I couldn’t bring myself to get. Finally I had the wherewithal to be picky, ask around, interview, look at samples, listen to suggestions, interview and second round of interviews. Possibly I could be coaxed into a refinement of the basic idea which by now seemed both adolescent and essential, dating from the era when I coveted a certain Mesa Engineering product and would go out of my way to walk my dog past the Mesa Engineering storefront. And bring my little dog inside and ask tons of questions.
*
I let myself be talked into watching the clip—that was my first mistake. I let myself be talked into volunteering to feed the habitat—that was my second mistake.
*
The basic idea was a portrait on each bicep, Duane on one, Berry on the other, each in the foreground, their rides in the background, Duane’s Sportster, Berry’s Triumph. When I let my arm be guided into the habitat, I at first watched the happy little community go to work, then I reclined and shut my eyes and listened to what I listened to then, long after my obsession with Mesa Engineering.
*
I wanted to get to know the woman and so I said yes and started having nightmares, not actual nightmares but the kind of vivid waking recollection of a disturbing image or a thought that may as well be a nightmare and you may as well be asleep for all the power you have to ward off the thought or image which actually slows you down as you’re strolling along, with your little dog, with the woman, shopping and being asked by every third person if they can take a photo of your little dog.
*
The clip played up the flexibility of the mouthparts, the mouthparts, how even a specialist in mouthparts wouldn’t necessarily think of them as flexible, but then how flexible they are when you see them at high magnification and slow motion and inside the skin, probing beneath the flesh: not just the insect’s needle probing, but the mouthparts themselves inserted beneath the flesh and probing, flexing.
*
The woman took me out for lunch to a restaurant that her mother owned. We sat at a table in the corner while the mother presided over the lunch crowd from a seat in the opposite corner, a seat all by herself. The tables had the kind of bright white tablecloths that have been washed a thousand times. An enormous cockroach climbed up the side of the tablecloth and onto the table. I was impressed by the size of the cockroach. The woman folded her napkin, and the cockroach made an unsuccessful attempt to bolt. The woman folded her napkin and placed it off to the side. I looked over at the mother, but I couldn’t tell if she was smiling at us or the lunch crowd in general.
*
And not just the flexibility but all the parts of the mouthparts: the needle that pierces your flesh, so I discovered, isn’t just one needle, but a bundle of needles, flexible needles that go rooting around seeking out a blood vessel, mobile searching needles that pump white gunk under your skin (you can see it in the clip) with such force that the blood vessel ruptures, blood settles into a pool, and the needles dip into the pool and more white gunk gets pumped in while one by one, little red corpuscles are drawn up into the needles—that was an image that kept coming back to me.
*
Meanwhile the woman would bring vials into a side room, and do whatever with them that she was paid to do. Another woman came and went, watching so that I didn’t shortchange the habitat. Those two women were the only human beings I ever saw in the place, the woman who cut my check and the woman who kept me honest.
*
I’d signed on for a paid stint beyond my volunteering—it was just pocket money, but it put me in close proximity to the woman every other afternoon. I left my little dog with Johan when he wasn’t proofreading for a law office.
*
We went for long walks out beyond the nondescript building into the high-end shopping neighborhoods, the woman and I and my little dog, out past the building with its habitat, through the high-end residential neighborhoods and into the crowded streets with shoppers from all around the world, the tour buses rolling by and announcing how not a single one of the boutiques along those renowned streets made a profit or ever would, and I bought a shirt that circled my biceps tightly, showed off my biceps in anticipation of the tattoo that I couldn’t bring myself to get.
*
The clip kept haunting me with the same vividness that had once attached itself to the mirage of that Mesa Engineering product that I coveted so intensely back when I’d taken liberties with my little dog’s name, started hailing him as Leo Kotke.
*
I had a new idea, just two numbers, “10” for Duane, “11” for Berry. It would have meaning for me (or anyone who knew) and I wouldn’t be saddled with two portraits whose significance had faded at the same time as the concept of a tattoo, any tattoo, had become so fraught with meaning. I heard good things about a studio that had just moved up from Long Beach, and I began to imagine what it would be like to walk in the door and how the very first thing I would need to do is explain about my arm.
Fortunato Salazar‘s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, SmokeLong, Hobart, Spork, Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. Other stuff is in McSweeney’s, Nerve, Vice, Guernica and elsewhere.