John Irving - Until I Find You

“If you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to Ingrid Moe,” Alice told him, but Jack had shut his eyes—in sympathy with the student, perhaps—and whenever the boy’s eyes were closed, he didn’t hear very well. There were too many distracting things happening in the dark.

“Ingrid has a speech impediment,” the student was saying. “She doesn’t like to talk.”

“Not a choirgirl, I guess,” Alice said. Both Jack and the young man opened their eyes.

“No, certainly not,” the teenager answered. “She’s an organ student, like me.”

“What’s your name?” Alice asked.

“Andreas Breivik,” the young man said.

“Do you have a tattoo, Andreas?” He appeared too stunned by the question to answer her; it was not a question he’d expected. “Do you want one?” Alice whispered to him. “It doesn’t hurt, and—if you talk to me—I’ll give you one for free.”

One Sunday morning, before church, Jack sat in the breakfast room at the Bristol, stuffing his face even more than usual. His mom had told him that if he stayed in the breakfast room while she gave Andreas his free tattoo, Jack could eat as much as he wanted. (She wouldn’t be there to stop him.) He’d been back to the buffet table twice before he began to doubt the wisdom of his second serving of sausages, and by then it was too late; the sausages were running right through him.

Although his mother had instructed him to wait for her in the breakfast room—she would join him for breakfast when she had finished with Andreas, she’d said—it was clear to Jack that he was in immediate need of a toilet. There must have been a men’s room on the ground floor of the Bristol, but the boy didn’t know where it was; rather than risk not finding it in time, he ran upstairs and along the carpeted hall to their hotel room, where he pounded on the door for his mother to let him in.

“Just a minute!” she kept calling.

“It’s the sausages !” Jack cried. He was bent over double when Alice finally opened the door.

Jack raced into the bathroom and closed the door behind him, so quickly that he hardly noticed the unmade bed or his mom’s bare feet—or that Andreas Breivik was zipping up his jeans. The student’s shirt was untucked and unbuttoned, but Jack hadn’t spotted the tattoo. Andreas’s face looked puffy, as if he’d been rubbing it—especially in the area of his lips.

Maybe he’d been crying, Jack thought. “It doesn’t hurt,” Alice had promised, but Jack knew it did. (Some tattoos more than others, depending on where you were tattooed and the pigments that were used—certain colors were more toxic to the skin.)

When Jack came out of the bathroom, both his mother and Andreas were fully dressed and the bed was made. The tattoo machines, the paper towels, the Vaseline, the pigments, the alcohol, the witch hazel, the glycerine, the power pack, the foot switch—even the little paper cups—had all been put away. In fact, Jack didn’t remember seeing any of that stuff when he raced through the bedroom on his way to the bathroom.

“Did it hurt?” Jack asked Andreas.

Either the young organ student hadn’t heard the boy or he was in a state of shock, recovering from the pain of his first tattoo; he stared at Jack, dumbfounded. Alice smiled at her son and rumpled his hair. “It didn’t hurt, did it?” she asked Andreas.

“No!” he cried, too loudly. Probably he was in denial. Not another Rose of Jericho on the rib cage, Jack guessed; there hadn’t been time. Something small in the kidney area, maybe.

“Where did you tattoo him?” Jack asked his mom.

“Where he’ll never forget it,” she whispered, smiling at Andreas. Possibly the sternum, Jack imagined; that would explain why the teenager trembled at Alice’s touch. She was pushing him, albeit gently, toward the door; it looked as though it hurt him to walk.

“Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack told Andreas. “It will feel like a sunburn. Better put some moisturizer on it.”

Andreas Breivik stood stupefied in the hall, as if even these simple instructions were bewildering. Alice waved good-bye to him as she closed the door.

By the way Jack’s mother sat down on the bed, Jack knew she was tired. She lay back, with her hands behind her head, and began to laugh in a way her son recognized; it was the kind of laughter that quickly turned to tears, for no apparent reason. When she started to cry, Jack asked her—as he often did—what was the matter.

“Andreas didn’t know anything,” Alice sobbed. When she got control of herself, she added: “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

They would be late for church if Alice paused now for breakfast; besides, she said, Jack had eaten enough breakfast for both of them.

Whenever they had their laundry done at the Bristol, it was returned with shirt cardboards; their clothes were folded among the shirt cardboards like sandwiches. Jack watched his mom take one of these stiff white pieces of cardboard and write on it in capital letters with the kind of felt-tipped pen she used to mark her tubes of pigment. The black lettering read: INGRID MOE.

Alice put the shirt cardboard under her coat and they walked uphill to the Domkirke. The Sunday service had already begun when they arrived. The organ was playing; the choir was singing the opening hymn. If there’d been a procession, they’d missed it. Jack was thinking that the great (or at least big ) Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ, because the organ sounded especially good.

The church was nearly full; they sat in the back pew on the center aisle. The minister who gave the sermon was the lightbulb man. He must have said something about Jack and Alice, because in the middle of his sermon a few anxious faces turned their way with expressions that were both pained and kind.

There was nothing for Jack to do but stare at the ceiling of the cathedral, where he saw a painting that frightened him. A dead man was stepping out of a grave. Jack was sure that Jesus was holding the dead man’s hand, but that made the boy no less afraid of the walking corpse.

Suddenly the minister pointed to the ceiling and read aloud from the Bible in Norwegian. It was strangely comforting to Jack that the parishioners were all staring at the frightening painting with him. (It would be years before Jack understood the illustration or saw the English translation, which was of that moment in John 11, verses 43 and 44, when Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.)

Now when He said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!”

And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

When the minister cried, “Lazarus,” Jack jumped. Lazarus and Jesus were the only words he’d understood, but at least he knew the dead man’s name; this was strangely comforting, too.

When the service was over, Alice stood in the center aisle beside their pew with the shirt cardboard held to her chest. Upon leaving the church, everyone had to walk by her and the sign saying INGRID MOE. A boy about Jack’s age was the acolyte; he led the congregation out, carrying the cross. He passed Alice in the aisle, his eyes cast down. The minister, whom Jack thought of as the lightbulb man, was the last to come up the aisle; normally, he was the first to follow the acolyte, but he had purposely lingered behind.

He stopped beside Alice with a sigh. The lightbulb man’s voice was gentle when he spoke. “Please go home, Mrs. Burns,” the minister said.

If she’d noticed the Mrs. Burns, Alice made no attempt to correct him; maybe, on his part, it was not a misunderstanding but another kindness.