Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

Terry came into the kitchen and ran water into the rice steamer. “He give you any trouble? Hey, go easy on that cheese. Don’t want to spoil your appetite.”

“Nah. I broke it to him gently that true artists are unmoved by the lure of filthy lucre.”

“What’d he do?” Terry had added salt to the water and was adjusting the flame of the gas burner.

Claren paused, then downed the rest of her juice. “It was funny, I got the impression he was pleased. He said that was why he wanted me to do it—because I’m a real artist. Then somebody else came into the shop and he left.”

“Did he at least leave you a tip?”

“Ha,” Claren said. “Gonna grab a shower.”

“Ten minutes till showtime,” Terry warned.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She gave him a wink and whipped open the snaps on her shirt. Then she treated him to a little bump-and-grind as she backed across the living room toward the hall.

He followed her, whistling and clapping, until she tossed her bra onto the sofa. Then he said, “The hell with dinner,” and came after her.

The big man returned to the shop two days later.

Claren was by herself again, which wasn’t all that common—she had a robust clientele and lots of walk-in business. But she had blocked off some time that afternoon to work on new designs for an upcoming convention. Having the man turn up just then made her uneasy; she wondered if he had kept watch and waited until she was alone. But he held his big body so awkwardly as he came toward her—his head hunched forward and his big hands fidgeting with a manila folder—that he seemed more deferential than threatening.

She looked up and waited. No point in encouraging him.

This time, he didn’t speak. He opened the folder and laid it in front of her on the drafting table.

Claren glanced down, expecting a nude picture of him. The folder did contain a stack of photographs, but they were cut from a magazine. Probably Skin Art. The one on top was of a woman’s legs in fishnet stockings—a back view, showing garters and seams. Claren recognized those legs—and the stockings—instantly. The tattoo had taken four months to complete, and was precise in every detail. Most people probably never realized that Lindy’s trademark fishnets weren’t real.

The man turned the picture over, revealing the one underneath. This one was of a man’s upper arm, twined with four strands of barbed wire. The top three strands had broken, their barbs scattering and transforming into crows that rose in a spiral toward the top of his shoulder.

Even after six years, she was still proud of the design. Some of her first custom work. For Manuelito, who had escaped from a Salvadoran prison camp and come north to establish a relocation center for other refugees. Claren was pleased to see that the tat remained dark, its lines still distinct against Manny’s gorgeous bronze skin.

The man turned to the next clipped-out photograph. This was of the chiropractor who had asked her to tattoo his back with the bones and muscles of the spine. Claren examined the work critically. It could have come straight from Gray’s, the illusion so powerful, the trompe l’oeil effect so real, that it looked as if the man had been expertly flayed.

Which, in a sense, he had been. One of the reasons Claren preferred this medium was that her work went beneath the surface. Most visual artists worked flat, but her canvases were impregnated with the images she created.

The man began to turn the picture over. She tapped him lightly on the wrist and moved away.

“You’ve made the point,” she said. “You know my work.” She propped her butt on the sill of the window next to the drafting table and crossed her arms.

“Your work,” he said, then paused.

Though he spoke with no discernible accent, Claren had the impression that he was translating his words into English.

“Is special,” he said.

“Thank you.”

His oversize hands rose from the folder for the first time and grappled with the air, as if they would wrestle words from it. “You twist the real, Missus. Make us see what is not. Give the person a mask that instead of concealing… reveals him.”

“Yes,” she said. A hot spot was forming in her chest. Nothing felt better than having someone grasp the point of her work. Nothing.

“I have need of your skill,” he said. “Will you look, please?” He brushed through the pictures in the folder and offered the last one to her.

This one was a Polaroid snapshot. She took it, knowing before she saw it that it would be of his prick.

At first, she thought the photo was overexposed, but then she realized that his prick actually was that pallid and featureless. He had almost no pubic hair, and his balls looked pale too.

His prick was normal size, maybe even a little bigger than average. But the shape was undifferentiated—no mushroom shape to the head, no foreskin, no visible glans—not so much as a vein showing. And the skin had no texture at all. It looked like one of those plastic vibrators that pretend to be for something other than masturbation. No, it looked… embryonic.

“Inside, I am human, Missus,” he said. “I am like other men. Will you give me a mask that shows this?”

Claren hadn’t smoked in eight years, but she had a sudden longing for a cigarette—a sense-memory that blurred her vision: the hot-sulfur snap of the match, that first sharp curl of smoke reaching her lungs as the tobacco caught. Reflexively, she groped for the pack that always used to lie handy on the corner of her table. Nothing there, of course.

She inhaled sharply. Could she? Her heart was racing. It had been a while since she’d had a real challenge. A real test of her mastery of trompe l’oeil technique.

But was it safe? She looked him over slowly, then relaxed. He had come to her for her skill, not because he was kinky.

“It will take a long time,” she told him, “probably at least twelve weeks. Four sessions, three weeks apart.” She did not insult him by mentioning the pain. She could tell he understood that. “And it will cost… a lot.”

He nodded, a humble quality to the gesture. She stared at the skin on his face and arms, but it seemed normal—faintly tanned, without much hair.

Claren was suddenly ashamed, for no reason she could have named. “Come back tomorrow at six,” she said.

She fidgeted at the dinner table, needing to talk about the new commission, but reluctant to bring it up. Terry would be irritated with her for taking on an evening client, especially one who might be a pervert.

He was always annoyed when she worked late, because it cut into their time together.

“What’s on your mind, darlin’?” he said. “You seem jittery.”

“Took on a long-term job today. After-hours gig. Twelve weeks, off and on.”

Terry’s mouth compressed. “Why nights?”

She shrugged. “Not enough time free in my day schedule.” Taking the easy way out — you should be ashamed of yourself.

He was shaping his mashed potatoes with the tines of his fork, making furrows down the sides. The gravy spilled onto his plate like hot wax from a guttering candle. “Which nights? How late do you think you’ll be?”

“Tomorrow night’s the first session. After that, I’ll have a better idea of how long it’ll take. We’ll probably do Fridays three weeks apart to let the skin heal.” She noticed how careful she had been not to say “his skin,” much less, “his prick,” and that added to her uneasiness. She didn’t usually keep things from Terry. “So how was your day?”

“Same old, same old. Tests on that new ceramic stuff. No big bangs for a while.”

Terry was an engineering assistant at one of the university’s research facilities. They did a lot of defense work, developing materials and weapons with high-energy electrical pulses. He loved the huge daisy wheel generator they used for their gigavolt experiments, the “big bangs.”