Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

THE TATTOO Bonnie Jo Campbell

At the county fair, MacGregor bought a long strip of tickets from a man with one arm, and he and Silvie Ross climbed aboard the Tilt-A-Whirl and then the Zipper, the Starship 2000 and then the double Ferris wheel. They swooped, circled, and spun so wildly that they all but set themselves free from gravity. As they perched momentarily at the top of the Ferris wheel, MacGregor kissed both of Silvie’s flushed cheeks, then her lips. Beyond her pretty bare shoulder he saw the whole world stretching out, full of possibility. Then the huge contraption heaved them toward the earth, and MacGregor, caught up in the excitement of falling, shouted, “Marry me!” He didn’t even consider that they’d only been dating a few months or that he had no ring to offer her. Apparently Silvie didn’t think of these things either, because at the bottom, she said yes. The embrace that ensued on the way back up nearly knocked off MacGregor’s glasses.

As they reached the top again, MacGregor glimpsed his home to the east, a quarter mile from the fairgrounds, the house he’d just inherited from his parents, may they rest in peace. He held Silvie close and pointed out the visible bit of gray-green roof not shaded by the big sycamore tree; they couldn’t see the white clapboards or the dark-green trim, but recognizing that familiar place just now, just after the woman he loved had agreed to be his wife, brought tears to his eyes. His parents had lived in that house until seven months earlier, when they were killed in a car crash in Nevada, their first vacation since visiting the Wisconsin Dells on their honeymoon. MacGregor had never meant to be president of MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc., where he had worked every position from delivery boy to engineer, but he knew that fifty-three employees, including Silvie, the head of accounting, were depending on him to keep the company going.

MacGregor and Silvie returned to the ground and took their time moving along the midway, seeing each other in a new way as they strolled through the balmy evening, holding hands so as not to lose each other in the throng of teenagers and families. They stopped at the shooting gallery, and MacGregor went first. He picked up the BB gun and aimed. The tin bird cutouts seemed to slip around even while he had them in his sights. Then it was Silvie’s turn. When she aimed, MacGregor marveled at her solid stance, her heavy mane of nearly black hair, and her slim figure that felt strong and sweet in his arms. Her first, second, and third shots hit home, and she chose a polka-dot snake and wrapped it around her neck.

“I’ll put this behind the door to stop drafts in winter,” she said.

She was the practical one between the two of them. People said MacGregor was a daydreamer, not suited to run a company, but with Silvie at his side, he thought he just might be able to do it.

At the coin toss, it cost MacGregor four dollars to win a shell-shaped ashtray.

“I can help you quit smoking, you know,” Silvie said, dropping the ashtray into her purse. “And if you do, it’ll take down the company’s insurance rates.” She had wanted him to quit smoking since he’d met her, but it meant something different to him now that they were going to be married. For the first time, he felt as though he could really kick the habit.

They entered a tent with a sign advertising WORLD OF NATURAL WONDERS in which they saw a tiny pony, too small to be ridden even by a child. While they stood there a young carnival worker came in and put a striped kitten on the pony’s rump, and the kitten lay down and curled up sweetly there. There was a goat with five legs, a calf with two heads, and a pig so fat it couldn’t stand, but MacGregor felt uneasy looking at the animals’ deformities and their drooping eyes. Just past the mirror maze they found another tent with a sign whose peeling paint read THE ILLUMINATED WOMAN.

“I’m not sure,” MacGregor said when Silvie pulled him into the line. He felt shy at the notion of ogling a tattooed lady in front of his bride-to-be.

“Oh, don’t be a prude,” Silvie said. Silvie, his future wife! Her face was incandescent in the fading light. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off the ground. He’d long known her mind to be sharp as an axe—though she was only thirty, just three years older than him, his father had made her head of the accounting department—but until they’d started dating, he hadn’t known how kind she was, and how much fun. His mother used to accuse him of living with his head in the clouds, but this was the closest he’d ever come to feeling that buoyant.

He doled out a few more tickets, and they entered the twelve-by-twenty-foot tent. MacGregor expected to see a big woman posing in a bathing suit, her skin covered entirely with tattoos, but the woman seemed of average height and size, and she wore glasses. It was hard to tell her shape precisely, because she was sitting on a cushioned stool facing away from them. She seemed young, or certainly no older than MacGregor. She was paying no attention to the half dozen carnival patrons in the tent, who were mumbling and pointing at her, but was instead engaged in writing something in a notebook. Her hair was pulled into a sensible bun, and she wore a backless black evening gown that revealed the brilliant colors stretching from her tailbone up to her hairline. MacGregor noticed that the images on her skin appeared to be moving.

“They must be playing a film on her back!” Silvie said, moving closer to the burgundy velvet rope, of the type found at old-fashioned movie houses. It was the most elegant piece of equipment at the fair, MacGregor thought, but it kept him eight feet away when he wanted to move in and get a closer look. The sign dangling by a gold chain warned that patrons stepping over or under the rope would be violated. He stood behind the woman and waved his hand around, trying to locate the beam of light from the projector he thought must be directed at her.

Playing across the young woman’s back was a scene of a man and a boy paddling a canoe on a pristine river. Aspens quaked in a light breeze, and weeping willow tendrils dragged in the water. MacGregor leaned over the rope and saw fish moving beneath the surface, dozens of speckled trout and whiskered catfish. It’d been years since he’d been fishing or canoeing, though he and his father had gone most weekends in the summer when he was a boy. His father had loved being outdoors, and it pained him whenever they found trash caught in a snag or saw the remnants of a dirty campsite on a sandbar. Now, in the scene on the young woman’s back, a blue-eyed dark-haired boy in the front seat turned, and MacGregor started at the sight of the familiar face. Could it be him? Could that man in the back of the canoe with the round face and salt-and-pepper hair be his father? Oh, how he missed his father! Was that his mother, waving from the riverbank? Was there some alternate universe in which his parents were still alive to advise him?

Silvie elbowed him and pointed out a pair of mallards landing on the river, and MacGregor shook away the crazy idea that his own life would intersect with a carnival illusion. In a matter of months, the momentum of his decisions would carry him down a road he’d never anticipated traveling. He was the president of his father’s company! About to marry a bright, beautiful, accomplished woman! When he was the age of that boy in the canoe, he’d dreamt of being an astronaut, of exploring other planets and maybe even alternate universes. But it had been a foolish desire, considering how poor his vision had been since third grade; astronauts, like all pilots, needed excellent eyesight.

“This is just marvelous!” Silvie said, her face aglow.

MacGregor loved seeing Silvie enthralled—so often he feared he was boring her with his melancholy talk about his parents and his musing about the properties of ball bearings. Just today as they’d driven to the fair, he’d been explaining to Silvie how radically they could reduce friction and extend equipment life through the use of enhanced surface finishes and special coatings.

“Look, it’s changing,” Silvie said. The young woman’s back seemed to waver, and then they could make out an old-fashioned steam train coming around a curve. It passed through a stand of woods, beyond which a herd of deer grazed on the side of a hill.

As the train chugged over a river, MacGregor pointed to the tattooed woman’s shoulder blade, upon which a couple sat eating drumsticks and potato salad.

“Maybe that’s you and me,” MacGregor said.

“We look very happy and handsome,” Silvie said jokingly.

MacGregor could tell from the way that she put her hand on his arm and sighed that she was ready to leave the tent. But he wanted to stay in order to understand how the pictures were forming and reforming. To him it didn’t seem like a movie. For starters, the movement was slow, and the scenes were perfect in every detail, and when the scene had changed, it hadn’t done so abruptly. For a moment it had seemed that each cell on the surface of the woman’s skin contained both the previous image of the river and the new image of the train, before becoming fully the train and its landscape. MacGregor couldn’t help thinking the scene was moving by some power of the young woman’s body. As he watched, the man and woman on the picnic blanket moved away from each other. Their faces had gone serious. The man’s eyebrows were drawn down, and the woman seemed to be saying something angrily. What might they be arguing about? He took Silvie’s hand and pulled it to his heart. What could they possibly argue about in such a beautifully illustrated world?

As MacGregor and Silvie watched the scenes move across her back, the tattooed woman remained engaged by whatever she was writing. MacGregor tried repeatedly to get a glimpse of her notebook, but each time he adjusted his position to see over her shoulder or past her arm, she would shift slightly (deliberately?) and block his view. He was moving along the velvet rope, his eyes on her curved profile, when, without warning, tears began streaming down her cheeks. The hand holding the pen continued to move across the paper as she quietly cried.

MacGregor stepped back a few feet from the rope.

“Poor girl,” he said to Silvie. “It must be exhausting to be in a sideshow.”

“Well, at least she’s got a job,” Silvie said. “I worked with girls like this in Scouts.”

“Girls like what?”

“Girls without a solid upbringing,” Silvie whispered. “A job helps them make sense of their lives, helps ground them.”

MacGregor nodded. After being a Girl Scout herself for years, Silvie had volunteered as a troop leader, and she now sat on the local board of directors. She was a woman who cared about the people around her as much as she cared about the figures in the red and black columns at MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc.

“Let’s go look in the 4-H animal barns,” Silvie said, and moved toward the exit. “I love seeing which chickens and rabbits won the blue ribbons.”

MacGregor looked over his shoulder at the Illuminated Woman one last time and saw the father and son in the canoe again, except that now the canoe was plunging over a waterfall, and the fiberglass canoe was crashing onto the rocks. Half of the canoe bobbed in the frothy water where the limp bodies of the father and son floated. MacGregor didn’t turn away until Silvie took his hand and led him out of the tent.

That night, MacGregor lay alone in his bed, unable to sleep after the excitement of the day. He had tried to persuade Silvie to stay with him, but she’d wanted to go home and call her mother to tell her the good news. When MacGregor closed his eyes, he saw a brief image of Silvie’s face, but then that image wavered and he saw again the colorful visions on the Illuminated Woman’s back, the water flowing more dramatically, more realistically than real water had ever flowed. The sun shone on the river to make it sparkle, to reveal the gleaming fishes below, and the man and boy in the canoe sparkled too as they paddled. He saw once again their broken bodies at the bottom of the falls and felt again the sorrow he had experienced that afternoon, but he had never been afraid of sadness in a story. The last image, the ruined canoe bobbing alongside those bodies, made him think and worry and reflect. He didn’t know why the story of the canoe trip had been interrupted by the story of the train, unless someone from the train was going to see the tragic scene and make a wise observation.

He wondered what stories would play across his body if he had such a tattoo. Maybe the images would play out the history of ball bearings, culminating in his future successful development of new hybrid ceramic ball bearings that operated so smoothly they would last a thousand years without lubrication or replacement. Maybe an image would appear of his crowning achievement: a machine the size of a three-story building that purified polluted air using almost no energy—he and his father had invented the bubbling, humming antipollution machine during one of their jaunts on the river. He imagined cars that flew along the ground and then rose up into the sky effortlessly. He imagined a rocket ship taking off, its destination another galaxy. Then he saw Silvie shimmering in her wedding dress. He saw his mother’s wedding ring gleaming on her finger. He hoped he and Silvie would be as happy as his parents had been, growing closer and more affectionate over the years. He wanted Silvie to gaze upon him with pure delight, as his mother had gazed upon his father, as his father had gazed upon his mother in return.

The following afternoon, Silvie was tied up with an audit and had to stay late at work. MacGregor kissed her goodbye and started to go home but then decided to return to the fair. He walked along the midway with his hands in his pockets. He bought a short string of tickets and handed them over at the entrance to the tent of the Illuminated Woman. There was no one else inside. He approached her with his eyes focused on the grass so as not to get distracted.

“How are you doing that?” he asked from behind the velvet rope, but he got no response. “Pssst. Hey, miss? Please. Is there anything you can tell me?”

“Why are you interrupting me?” the young woman said, and her simple clear voice charmed MacGregor. She spoke with an unfamiliar accent, and he wondered where she was from. This afternoon she was reading a big book called Greek Mythology.

“How are you making your tattoo move?” he asked. “What’s the trick?”

“Can’t you see I’m working?” She barely glanced at him before shaking her head and going back to her reading. MacGregor saw that there was a light shining on the pages of the book. He realized that the light was coming from a tiny bulb she wore on her necklace. He admired it because he liked to read in bed, and something like that would come in handy. Silvie read too, but only for fifteen minutes each night, which was exactly how long it took her to read a chapter of one of her romance novels.

“Do you spend all day in this tent?”

“My aunt and I trade off. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Don’t you get bored?”

“How could I be bored?” She nodded toward a stack of books and a smaller stack of spiral notebooks on the table next to her. MacGregor kept looking at her, and she finally put down her book, turned to him, and pushed her glasses up along the bridge of her nose. “What do you want?”

“A tattoo like yours. Just a small one.” He saw that her glasses were as thick as his own. His mother had told him he’d ruined his vision by reading in the dark.

“Do you want to be in a sideshow?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Heck, no. I’m a company president.”

“You’re too young to be any kind of president.” She glanced over at the entrance, as if to assure herself that nobody else was looking in.

He blushed. “I know. My father died, and I inherited the company. I shouldn’t admit it, but it doesn’t really play to my strengths.” It felt strange to say it out loud. “But I’m trying, because I know he’d want me to.”

“What about what you want?” she asked. “What would you be doing, you know, if you could do anything you wanted?”

“I’d be in space. On my way to Mars.”

“You’d better write to your senator, then. The human space program is in the toilet.” She softened her words with a smile, and he saw she had a blemish, maybe a pimple, on her chin. She unpinned her hair, which was almost as dark as Silvie’s but uneven, with stringy bangs. She combed her fingers through it, pulled it up again, and repinned it with her barrette. After all that, it looked the same as before.

“I have written my senator,” he said. “And my congressman. And the president.”

She continued to smile at him. “Your shirt is buttoned up wrong,” she said.

“Oh.” He unbuttoned and rebuttoned.

“Usually when men undress in my tent, I call security.”

“Oh.” MacGregor realized he should have turned away from her.

“So you think you want a tattoo like mine,” the young woman said. “Well, you’ll have to talk to Madame Needles in the fortune-telling tent. She’s my mom. Tell her you’re a company president. But don’t let her see your socks, because they don’t match.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Madame Needles takes things very seriously. She won’t even pay me unless I take all my vitamins every day. She’s obsessed with vitamins, which means I get to burp up fish oil for the first two hours of every shift.”

MacGregor thanked her, and the young woman went back to reading, and finally MacGregor let himself look at her tattoo. Today she was wearing a purple evening gown, and on her skin there appeared a woman with snakes for hair, and MacGregor watched, mesmerized, as they twisted out from her scalp. One of the snakes lunged out suddenly and snapped at him, and he jumped back with a yelp.

A big man came into the tent and told MacGregor his time was up.

“We don’t allow screamers in here,” the big man said.

When MacGregor didn’t move away from the velvet rope quickly enough, the man grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the tent. As the man dragged him along, MacGregor saw that he had a tattoo on his biceps and that the tattoo was an image of the man himself. In the image, the man was flexing his biceps. MacGregor was pretty sure those tiny biceps also featured an even tinier image of the man, and so on.

“Did Madame Needles give you that tattoo?” MacGregor asked.

“Get lost.”

MacGregor found the tent with the sign MADAME NEEDLES: TAROT, FORTUNES, AND BODY ART, and when he stepped inside, he found a small, plump woman whose skin shone with a strange golden hue. Her hair too, which at first had seemed gray, was gold. Or maybe it was the angle of the sun as it pitched toward the horizon that made it seem so.

He introduced himself and said that the Illuminated Woman had sent him.

“And what can I do for you?” Madame Needles asked, a bright curiosity in her eyes. MacGregor didn’t believe in future telling, but he felt a bit disappointed that she didn’t already know. He explained that he wanted a tattoo.

“I’m looking for a husband for my daughter, Mr. McGregor,” she said. She grinned and her teeth were pure shining gold. “And for that reason I’ll give you a beautiful tattoo. You are the first man she’s ever sent to me.”

“Well, I, ah, I want the tattoo. Very much,” MacGregor said. “But I’m already engaged to be married.”

“I don’t see a ring.” She sounded like her daughter, but it wasn’t a strange accent; it was more that both women made each sentence seem like the line of a song they happened to be singing.

“But men don’t usually wear engagement rings,” he said. Or did Madame Needles somehow know that he hadn’t bought Silvie a ring yet? “And it’s true. We’ll be married next May. She’s a wonderful woman, my fiancée.”

“You seem very single to me, Mr. MacGregor, and May is nine months away.”

“Your daughter seems nice. I’m sure she could date if she wanted to.”

“Nice? Ha!” The woman stood and shook her head. “She’s an impossible child! She’s twenty-five and she just reads and writes all day.” Madame Needles’s scowl marred her exotic demeanor.

“She’s mesmerizing,” MacGregor said. He hadn’t found anything pitiable about her. “Girls don’t have to get married these days if they don’t want to.”

“If you have ideas about despoiling my daughter out of wedlock, forget it.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” he said. It was just that she seemed content with her reading and writing, although MacGregor did wonder what she’d been crying about the previous day. Had she known how the story was going to end, that the father and son would go over the falls and drown? Did she make the story end that way?

“Soon she’ll be an old maid,” Madame Needles said, “and I’ll never have any grandchildren. I’ll die miserable and alone in the poorhouse while she’s writing her magnum opus. Better if she were like her aunt. I tattooed my sister, and those tattoos sit still and behave. None of her colors creep around and excite the marks—I mean customers.”

“I want a tattoo that moves.”

“You want. You want. Everybody wants.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “But how badly do you want it?”

“I want it very much,” he said. “Please. Can you really do it?”

She shrugged her golden shoulders. “I’ll do what I do, but there’s no telling how it’ll turn out. The rest is up to you.” She opened the drawer in her desk and took out several sheets of paper. “First, I’ll need you to sign some forms.”

There was a liability release in case he got blood poisoning from the needles and a nondisclosure form, saying he would not to give away Madame Needles’s tattooing techniques, and it contained a noncompete clause forbidding him from joining a sideshow. He read through the forms and reached for the pen in his pocket, but Madame stopped him with a hand on his wrist. She lifted his hand and pricked his finger with a needle and then smeared his blood across each of the signature lines in turn.

She named the fee, and MacGregor fought to keep from gasping. It was ten times the outrageous amount he’d anticipated, but he paid it. He described the tattoo he wanted, the size of a playing card, of a red bird perched on a branch above a blue stream, against the golden sun. It was an image he’d seen in dreams.

She pulled a wooden bowl off the table and shoved it into his hands. “This is going to hurt,” she said. “You can bite down on the edge of the bowl.” She slipped a black satin sleep mask over his eyes and had him lie back in the chair. When the first needle penetrated the center of his chest, he howled. It sank deeper, seemed to enter his heart.

He felt Madame Needles pull back and heard the rustle of the tent flap.

“Does the screamer need an escort off the premises?”

MacGregor recognized the voice. It was the man with the tattoo on his biceps.

“I’ll let you know,” Madame Needles said. She leaned in close to MacGregor’s ear. “Do you want this badly enough?”

MacGregor took a breath. He recalled watching the girl’s tattoo, feeling it move his senses, his thoughts, and his emotions. He remembered how it had thrilled Silvie. But it was more than that. He didn’t just want the tattoo; he needed it. There was something primal bubbling inside him that needed a way out, and he was sure this was the way, through his skin. He bit down again on the edge of the bowl, nodded for Madame to continue. As she drove the needles in again and again, the pain became surreal, moving beyond any pain he’d ever known. He squeezed his eyes shut, but his tears seeped out anyway and soaked the mask over his eyes. His teeth cut into the rim of the wooden bowl. He did not open his eyes until she was finished. He thought that about a half hour had passed, but when he walked shakily to the door of the tent to look out, the sky was dark, and even the midway lights and music were off for the night. The rattle of cicadas was almost deafening.

MacGregor kept the tattoo a secret until the following weekend, when he and Silvie took a three-day vacation to Sanibel Island in Florida. Their suite overlooked the Gulf of Mexico, and on their first day there they saw pileated woodpeckers, roseate spoonbills, and alligators from their balcony. When Silvie picked up her novel that night in bed, MacGregor took off his shirt, pulled the gauze from the tattoo, and sat before her.

“You got a tattoo!” she said, her expression one of mild alarm. She reached up and touched it. MacGregor had avoided looking at the tattoo himself, even when he cleaned it and applied new bandages. He had wanted to share the experience of first seeing it with Silvie. As he had hoped, it began to move under her fingers, at first slowly. The wind rustled the bird’s feathers; the wings opened and closed. They watched as the bird on his breastbone lifted and flew through air. It soared above a boat, which sailed from a port into a blue-green ocean. Waves gently slapped the sides of the boat. MacGregor saw upside down what Silvie saw and marveled at how the tattoo swelled and changed to show every detail.

“It’s real,” she said. Her smile showed pure delight. “It’s marvelous!”

He nodded, but Silvie was less happy a while later when a storm blew in, and the boat capsized, and all the tiny people were pitched into the merciless, shark-filled sea.

“Sorry,” MacGregor said, and Silvie opened her book and read a chapter.

The following night MacGregor posed in front of the mirror, and together they watched a silver airplane take off and soar out of the atmosphere. It made its way around the moon. MacGregor allowed himself to feel a little proud. Madame Needles had seemed unsure whether the tattoo would move the way he wanted it to, but it was working. The ship soared with the sun glinting off its wings until it exploded without warning. A dozen bodies were strewn across space.

“I don’t like this story,” Silvie said, and turned away.

MacGregor did not want to stop watching. He wanted to see how the story really ended, what might give meaning to the tragic demise of the astronauts who had died during their mission. The tattoo seemed to have doubled in area since the story began, and MacGregor wondered if the Illuminated Woman had started out with a small tattoo as well. While Silvie got ready for bed, MacGregor watched the last remaining astronaut plunge toward Earth. When he hit the atmosphere, he became a bright stream of light, a falling star.

Across his skin, MacGregor felt the movement of the explosion and of the man’s falling, but that wasn’t the extent of it. The pictures showing on his chest were like the mushrooms growing atop the soil, connected by tendrils to the greater body under the surface. If this were a projection of images, they came from inside, not out.

“I know you wonder why I read romance novels,” Silvie said, turning to him later in bed. “You think they’re written for foolish girls.”

“No,” he said, though he did wonder. He had tried to read one of her novels, but he’d fallen asleep in the middle of the first chapter.

“It’s because all day long I have to make critical decisions. There’s money, livelihoods, resources at stake. I act with confidence, but I can only hope my decisions are the right ones. When I come home, I don’t want to worry. I want to know that everything will turn out well and that everyone will be happy and that justice will be served.”

“Thank you, Silvie,” MacGregor said. “Now I do understand.”

She needed life outside of work to be worry-free, and he would make it that way for her as best he could. She already did so much for him. When he was at a business meeting or a cocktail party and veered off onto the wrong track, Silvie would guide him back. He wanted to do the same for her.

One Saturday morning in March, MacGregor woke breathless from a dream of flight, still feeling the joyful energy of soaring above his house, moving at the speed of cars over the street below. He listened to the purr of Silvie’s snoring. He smelled her perfume from the day before and slowly turned his head on the pillow to gaze at her smooth face in the gray predawn light. She stayed over every Friday night, and in two months she would be there beside him every night, forever. Beyond her, on the nightstand, lay her current novel, silhouetted against the window. The pages were fluffed out prettily, suggesting that her book was part of her decorating scheme, which included the handsome off-white window dressings, the ribbed bedspread, and the new, slightly luminescent paint on the walls. She said remodeling made the room belong to them. This had been his parents’ bedroom, and MacGregor didn’t care what it looked like. He had grown up an only child, and the most important thing to him was having another soul lying beside him, sharing his life. He would go along with any remodeling Silvie wanted.

MacGregor’s chest prickled. Silvie had recently suggested he keep the tattoo covered all the time. She had walked in on him watching a story at work more than once, and she was concerned about the hold the tattoo had on him, how it was distracting him from more important things. He couldn’t argue with the truth of the matter, that the work of being president was tiresome to him, and he had taken to hiding out in his bathroom to revive himself. He had managed to resist looking in the mirror for more than a week now, until this morning, when a vision of flying without aid of any machine had invaded his dreams. If he hadn’t felt the urgent prickling, he would have remained in bed, absorbing the pleasures of lying with Silvie, would have wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. Instead, he slipped out of bed, tiptoed to the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light. Silvie had helped him to quit smoking, but giving up cigarettes had been easy compared with resisting his compulsion to look at the tattoo. He turned the lock on the door and stuffed a bit of tissue into the oversized keyhole. His heart was pounding as he looked around the small tiled room, at the modest claw-footed tub, at the old-fashioned light fixture covered with a frosted seashell glass shade. The old bathroom mirror had a funhouse quality; he and Silvie had stood beside each other in front of it and laughed at their distorted reflections.

MacGregor pressed his ear against the painted wood of the door. Silvie’s snore was one of his favorite household sounds, along with the toaster popping up and the dryer spinning. In the world outside, he loved the sounds of jets and rockets taking off, though he’d only heard the latter on television. MacGregor unbuttoned his pajama shirt. He slid his arms from the sleeves, and when he looked in the mirror, the color in the playing-card-sized tattoo dazzled him. He took a deep breath and let the tattoo expand and rush to fill the smooth skin of his chest. The first mysterious effect of the tattooing process had been that he had lost the modest amount of hair he’d had there, and it had never grown back. He took a deep breath and inhaled the colors, which smelled of air so rich and oxygenated that it filled not only his lungs but his whole being. When he exhaled, all the stress of the week fell away at once, and the picture of the bird and the branch and the stream and the sun began to change.

A rocket sat on a launchpad surrounded by complicated machines. The machines were operated by white-coated scientists whose faces glowed with intelligence and focus. MacGregor took another deep breath, and the men and women began to move, to tap their fingers on their whisper-thin handheld computers, to point out and discuss objects of interest around them, to compare calculations. As MacGregor’s focus returned to the rocket ship, he saw it increase in proportion to the scene, and the scientists disappeared from view. Somehow, as MacGregor’s heart pumped blood out through his arteries and back through his veins, the point of view moved so he could see inside the capsule atop the boosters, where two women and three men in silver suits were making final preparations and buckling themselves into their seats. To MacGregor they seemed perfect human specimens, strong-bodied and healthy, and their eyes showed a love of adventure. Or was there a shadow of something sinister crossing one man’s face? Did the fifth astronaut have an ungenerous spirit, a tendency toward cruelty or sullenness? Was his desire for space less pure than the others’? MacGregor’s concern faded as he felt the collective excitement of the other astronauts. He also felt their fear and sadness and understood that they were leaving behind their loved ones in order to journey into the unknown.

One of the men in the capsule resembled MacGregor, with blue eyes and thick eyebrows and dark, unruly hair. So much so that MacGregor was almost sure it was him. Neither of the women resembled Silvie, however. He knew Silvie wouldn’t venture into space, not even with him at her side, reassuring her. She didn’t like not knowing what was coming next. She was most content when she was following her routine of work and relaxation, having coffee on the patio in the morning or taking a brisk walk in the early evening. She was continually opening windows to let in breezes and wouldn’t like the cramped quarters of the space capsule, in which everything was designed for efficiency and maximum function.

MacGregor, too, would miss many things about Earth, especially the familiar objects from his house and his desk at work, the way his tools felt in his hands, but he knew that for him the memories of the objects could suffice in their absence. MacGregor would miss Silvie most of all, but he could take comfort in the memories of her that he would carry into space. Behind and beyond the rocket, there stretched the vision of MacGregor’s own planet’s beauty: a glittering silver desert and purple mountains. Beyond that, somehow, defying the laws of perspective, he could see the vast and shining ocean. From a high cliff, a giant bird launched itself, flew across the water on golden wings, and on the bird’s back was a young woman. Her arms were wrapped around the creature’s neck. Her hair whipped around in the wind, and she was laughing. At first he thought it was Silvie, hoped it was Silvie, but when she shook her head to get her hair out of her eyes, he saw that she was wearing glasses and that they were held fast to her head with an elastic strap, like the one he’d worn as a kid. MacGregor laughed with delight, realizing as he did so that he hadn’t felt delighted in quite a while. He fell backward against the door, and it rattled.

“Gerald?” Silvie called from the bedroom, and MacGregor’s heart seized.

“I’ll be right out,” he said just loudly enough to be heard, trying to not interrupt the flow of the story. The golden bird vanished behind a hill.

“I’m worried about you, Gerald. Please come out and talk to me,” Silvie said. She jiggled the doorknob, and the tissue fell out of the keyhole and onto the floor.

“Just a minute,” he whispered. When he was experiencing a story in this way, he knew how life could be extraordinary, how the simple four-chambered human heart and the primitive human brain could begin to understand the universe. And he thought that if Silvie would watch the story unfold with him—if she could shake her fears about how it might end—she would feel inspired as well. The rocket blasted off with a flame more brilliant than a lightning strike. MacGregor gripped the sink as the rocket tore free of the earth with a violence that seemed more than the rocket or the planet, or he himself, could endure—his heart felt nearly wrenched from his chest, and he was out of breath by the time the rocket was airborne. As he watched in the mirror, he could see magnificent Earth from space, its blue oceans and green lands still beautiful despite the pollution and all the other human folly that threatened to destroy it. As the planet shrank to the size of a marble, then a pale blue dot, the scene darkened, and then the rocket was swimming far from home, through the sea of stars. MacGregor kept hold of the sink to steady himself against the joyful energy of barreling through space.

“Are you looking at that tattoo?” Silvie asked. He could tell from her voice that her face was pressed up against the other side of the door.

Silvie had done so much for him. She had carried him through the grief of losing his parents. She had supported him as president of MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc., though she was better suited to run the company than he was. It was her ability to manage money, employees, and schedules that had allowed him to be anything more than an engineer.

“We need to get you some help, Gerald,” Silvie said thoughtfully.

MacGregor tore his eyes away from the mirror. He looked down at the tiny hexagonal tiles that made up the old floor, the same cool tile his bare feet had known when he was a kid. There was a slight rise near the radiator, where the floor had buckled, reminding him of a shoulder blade. As he studied the tiles, he began to see a vision move across the floor. The picture was not as vivid or colorful as his tattoo, but it played out in shadows that brought him feelings from a long time ago. Some boys filled a bottle with dry ice, shook it up, and shot a cork across a pond. They sent a model rocket two hundred feet into the air in the field behind his house. MacGregor both saw and felt himself riding his bike along the sidewalk and then gathering speed on the downslope, and though the adult MacGregor knew the poor boy was headed for a crash, he grinned at the wind in his face. MacGregor still felt like that kid, twenty-one years later.

“I saw a giant bird flying over the ocean, Silvie,” MacGregor said as he stepped into the bedroom. “Big enough that a girl was riding on its back.”

“Oh, Gerald,” Silvie said tiredly, “we both know what’s going to happen.” She was sitting on the bed with her back to him, and the bed was already made up. She wore the pearl-colored bathrobe she kept at his house.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The rocket always crashes. The volcano always explodes and kills the villagers. I don’t want to see a girl plunge into the icy depths.”

“This is a new story. Things might be different.”

“Gerald, we’ve been through this. The lions in the veldt tear apart the sweet little gazelle. Cold, empty space swallows the astronauts. Somebody is going to shoot that big bird out of the air. I’ve lived with your stories for more than six months, and my hope has run out.”

“The rocket doesn’t always crash,” MacGregor insisted. “And the gazelle is the lions’ natural prey—that can’t be helped.”

“If the rocket doesn’t crash, if the astronauts land safely, then in the next story they go on to kill the peaceful inhabitants of the new planet with their human stupidity.”

“Oh, honey,” MacGregor said. “So what if some of the stories don’t exactly end happily? I just wish we could watch together, to experience the adventures together, the good and the bad.”

The sun was rising outside their window, and Silvie’s shiny bathrobe exploded with color. Shapes began to form across her shoulders, and MacGregor began to see a vision of himself and Silvie in the future. Her hair was white, and his was gray, and they were holding hands in the garden in spring. He didn’t understand how this was happening, how the stories were stretching beyond his own body, appearing all around him. In the vision, MacGregor clung with his free hand to a walker. White-haired Silvie lifted both hands to her head, groaned, and then collapsed to the flagstone path to lie among the tulips and daffodils.

Silvie gave no indication that she was seeing the images on her robe.

“I need my stories to be happily ever after,” she said. She picked up the novel from her nightstand and held it in MacGregor’s direction until her bookmark fell out. He saw on the cover a muscular, shirtless man with long hair and a woman with soulful eyes and even longer hair. “Why can’t you create a happily ever after for me?” she asked, tears glistening in her eyes.

“But the stories exist on their own, Silvie. They come to me just as they are.” He felt as though he were mainly a conduit for the stories, but maybe he was, somehow, creating them. Maybe his very nature was creating them. And maybe there would be a way to control them by force of will, but that wasn’t what he wanted.

“Gerald, I don’t think I can’t live with you this way.”

“What can I do, Silvie?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, and stared out the window. “And I don’t think I can marry you unless you have the tattoo removed.”

MacGregor’s heart thudded and slowed. He stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and there he saw the color drained from his skin, saw the brilliant visions replaced by a web of scar tissue, the explosion of life replaced by an expanse of angry flesh that pinched and stretched like the residue of a life-threatening burn. He felt physically ill. He bent at the waist, crossed his arms over his chest. He knew what Silvie didn’t know, that the tattoo was more than ink on skin. The tattoo could not be removed without gouging out his heart.

He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath, but when he breathed again, the sick feeling went away. His skin tingled as the spaceship hurtled through space, and he uncrossed his arms and saw the stars again. Inside the capsule, the five astronauts floated weightlessly and joked with one another. One woman was eating dried cherries, and she tossed one toward the open mouth of one of the men, but the cherry flew in impossibly slow motion, and the woman and the man both laughed and discussed their pea-plant experiment until the fruit finally reached the man, and he bit it out of the air. As a child, MacGregor had tried to eat like an astronaut—powdered drinks and vacuum-sealed protein bars. Now he tasted the sweet sourness of that dried cherry!

When MacGregor returned to the bedroom, he found Silvie dressed and packing her overnight bag with the few things she kept at his house.

“No, Silvie. I love you. You’re the most important person in my life.”

“I love you, too, Gerald. It’s your choice.” She finally looked at him.

“See, Silvie, the rocket landed safely on a new planet,” he said, and pointed to his chest. “It’s Mars. Look, four of the astronauts are getting out. Everything’s going to be okay this time.”

“They all have guns,” Silvie said anxiously.

“For protection, or in case of wild animals. Silvie, look at the planet. The sky is red! Can you smell it? The dust smells of flowers and vanilla. Everyone is safe.” To his joy, he found he really could smell the dust. He felt the hot breeze on his skin.

“They’re not safe, Gerald. They’re probably bringing germs that will infect everyone on the new planet. Or else they’ll try to take away the Martian riches, and a war will break out. I’ve seen these stories too many times. I can’t take any more.”

“But look. The astronauts have met a Martian family, a couple and two children. They’re all conversing. Everything is friendly. You can tell by their hand gestures.” MacGregor noted the hands of the Martians, their fingers long and elegant compared with the stubby mitts of the Earthlings. The sky behind them glowed the rich orange-red of campfire coals. MacGregor imagined the Martians and Earthlings sitting around a fire, and soon enough they were indeed sitting around a fire, conversing telepathically, cooking Martian fish and giant mushrooms they grew in their basements.

“What about that fifth astronaut lurking in the background?” Silvie said.

“He stayed at the rocket.”

“He’s right there now, drinking whiskey from a bottle. I can hear him cursing.”

“No,” MacGregor said, but he knew she was right. The man seemed unlike the others. He was suspicious and angry. And now he was drunk and armed.

“Somebody’s going to die,” Silvie said. She looked away from him and stuffed her slippers and bathrobe into her bag. “Eventually somebody’s going to die. Don’t deny it.”

“Eventually we all die, honey.”

“Well, I can’t face it.”

“Just look at the light reflecting off the Martian canals as evening falls. It reminds me of your eyes, Silvie.” He closed his eyes to imagine the story more vividly, and he heard the door shut. He wanted to run after her, but he needed to see the story through. As Silvie said, most of the stories ended with trouble, just as marriages ended in death or divorce. He thought he might work at keeping a story alive longer, putting off disaster, just as he might convince Silvie to give him one more chance. It occurred to him that he should run after her and beg for another chance. And yet, readers and watchers and listeners needed a story to end sometime.

MacGregor and Silvie’s separation was as amicable as MacGregor could have hoped. He arranged an emergency meeting of the board of directors, and they agreed with him that Silvie should become acting president, while MacGregor would retain his majority stake in the company but return to being an engineer. He felt relieved to move his things from his father’s office back to his old desk in the fabrication shop. At the beginning of August, Silvie drove to his house in a new electric car she’d bought, in order to pick up some winter clothes she’d stored in his attic. She stepped out into the gravel driveway, wearing a trim-fitting pants suit in charcoal gray. She wore high-heeled shoes that barely covered her pretty toes. Her heels sank through the gravel and into the earth.

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out for us,” Silvie said. “I guess we’re another one of your tragic stories.”

MacGregor put the last box of clothes into the trunk of her car and invited her to stay and have some coffee. When she declined, he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. When he put them back on, Silvie was shaking her head at him and smiling as she might at a child. When she backed into the street, MacGregor walked out to the end of his driveway to watch the silver electric car, as sleek as a rocket ship, head down the road, and that’s when he saw the billboard for the county fair, August 4–9. He was surprised to realize that the fair was opening that day. His skin began to tingle, and his heart began to flutter crazily. Was it possible that the Illuminated Woman would be there? He’d seen her in his stories and dreams, but he hadn’t considered seeking her out. He could hope that Madame Needles had failed in the last year to find her daughter a husband. Of course she had failed, for the girl knew her own mind! MacGregor wanted to see her, to lose himself in her brilliant visions, to listen to her voice sing, to look into the eyes behind her dark-rimmed glasses. He had been ashamed to think of her this way when he was engaged to Silvie, but now there was nothing to keep him from visiting her and trying to know her better. And maybe now that he had his own stories, she might want to see him, too.