The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [48]
“You really don’t think I have a chance?” she sighed.
I don’t know who suggested the bet. It’s not impossible that it was my idea, but I think it more likely hers, more likely still that she slid the idea into my drunk head and waited for me to suggest it back to her as my notion.
A magic lantern turns, and sepia transparencies circle the room, glide over walls, color the picture frames and bookshelves and doorknobs: Dana, serene on a bar stool; me next to the Asian girl, no face on her at all, as if I could hardly focus by then and so could not transcribe any image into memory; my sister and the faceless Asian girl looking down at me from an impossibly high vantage, their faces together, almost blacked out, except for their Cheshire-feline amusement, by some bright light behind them; the neon word, vertically hung, TATTOOS, glowing against total darkness; Dana going over sheets of designs with a shockingly wrinkled lady with shaking hands while I with shaking eyelids watch the light flicker and fade; the wrinkly lady waking me up, taking me by the hand, walking me to a dentist chair set at an odd angle, proposing I do something very strange to her wrist.
I awoke in a great deal of pain. The hangover ordinaire was bad enough, but I could have slept through that. I was roused by the flames rising from my crotch, and I am not using that general term euphemistically. The pain was significant enough that its actual source was hidden like the sun behind sunny haze. I certainly yelled aloud. I heard laughter from the bedroom, and Dana called out, “Shut up. We’re sleeping.” I hobbled, crying, to the bathroom, where I threw up and then attempted to defuse the bomb that was my fly.
Apparently, the bet’s parameters agreed upon, I had said, “Do your worst” or something to that effect. The more the Asian girl looked at me from her red couch, the more I’d gloated. (She had actually been looking at Dana; I was having some trouble focusing. On those occasions when she was looking at me, it was only to discern my relationship to the beautiful girl she’d spotted as soon as we walked in.) “Are you sure you’re up for this?” I taunted Dana. “She’s totally into me. You sure you won’t chicken out or claim it’s not fair? No mercy for little girls. Or former mental patients.”
“I’ll try to be brave. Besides, I need some ink for lez cred.”
“It won’t hurt your auditions?” I asked.
“Not there it won’t.”
The next morning in the bathroom I found in my jeans pocket two neatly folded cocktail napkins. The first had a sketch of a female torso, T-shirt just high enough and jeans waist just low enough, and in the sub-navel space remaining, the ornate words NO ENTRANCE with an arrow pointing toward Dana’s groin.
This is obviously not funny, nor did it seem funny ever again after I had (I suppose) found it wonderfully witty at the bar. I don’t see any point to it at all, really. It’s not amusing, affectionate, profound. It was just a lame joke that I was ready to make permanent in my sister’s skin because I was drunk and angry at my father’s latest betrayal of my notions of what he owed me. I was owed, and my sister would pay me in flesh after the Asian girl paid me in flesh.
If I had not found the two napkins in my pocket as I was examining my wounds, I would have been entirely at a loss, because the fresh tattoo work on me, especially on that variable surface, was not yet legible.
“Well, in the unlikely event of my victory …” Dana had mused.
“In your dreams. Do your worst.”
“I think a tribute to the three most important men in my life would be nice.”
The brutal Act I, Scene iv of The Tragedy of Arthur depicts the English nobles viciously abusing a naïve messenger from the Pictish court. Holinshed’s Chronicles, the play’s source, refers only to an ambassador being mistreated. In the play, the messenger boy, trained to be provocative in order to incite a war at Mordred’s instruction, has insulted Prince Arthur and demanded English obedience to the northern king. Gloucester, the lord protector, fails to restrain his