The Tattooed Heart

  Motionless tears hung on the cheeks of a man I took to be Aimal’s father. But as if he had read my mind—and he may well have—Messenger said, “That is not the father, that is Aimal’s uncle. The father is in America. As are those we must deal with.”

  “The ones who killed Aimal?”

  Messenger shook his head. “The men who killed Aimal are not our concern.”

  “Then why are we here?” I asked. Was this soul-searing display unnecessary? Had I been burdened with yet another gruesome memory for no good reason?

  “The wickedness we pursue is not murder, but murder’s source,” Messenger said. “It is hatred we pursue. Hatred.”

  2

  WE DID NOT BID THE FEMALE MESSENGER GOOD-BYE. One second she was there and the next she was gone. And a second after that, we, too, were gone.

  There was a brick marker that read Theodore Roosevelt on a limestone banner and beneath it the words High School. I somehow knew we were in Iowa.

  The same combination of red brick and limestone comprised the school itself. The central portion was three stories tall, three generous stories, so that the structure was taller and more impressive than the simple number of floors might indicate. The wings extended to left and right and were of just two floors each. There were architectural details rendered in stone—window framing, a stone railing across the roofline—that gave the school a slightly ornate look, an almost Old World look. It very nearly evoked Downton Abbey.

  Just before the front door was a tall flagpole. The Stars and Stripes snapped in a breeze stiff enough to ruffle the mature hardwood and fir trees that flanked the entrance and which were dotted haphazardly across the lawn.

  It looked like the very model of a high school—what a traditional high school ought to be.

  As usual, I had questions. As usual, I didn’t ask. It’s not that Messenger will never answer a question, but he prefers not to, and for whatever reason, I don’t want to nag at him. He’s the master, I’m the apprentice. I’ve accepted that. More or less. And as the teacher he gets to choose how and when to tell me things.

  Frustrating? Extremely.

  We walked at a normal pace across the lawn. Kids were pouring from buses that had pulled up in the parking lot. At the same time freshmen and sophomores and juniors were piling from their parents’ cars, and the luckier seniors were pulling up in cars of their own.

  The familiar morning rush. And we joined it, invisible to the crowd as it filled the main hallway. How did we squeeze through dense-packed bodies without touching anyone around us? I don’t know. It’s something I’ve now seen happen many times, and even when I pay the closest attention it’s hard to explain. It’s as if reality bends to get out of our way. Like we’re a force field that no one feels. Limbs and heads and torsos all seem to warp, like some kind photo booth effect.

  Testing it, I deliberately passed my arm through a girl. Her body appeared to split in two at the waist, upper half and lower half seemingly completely disconnected, yet she chatted glumly to a friend all the while and her legs kept moving her forward.

  Messenger noticed my experiment, raised one eyebrow slightly and said nothing.

  We walked in this way until we arrived at a narrower hallway leading into one of the wings. There Messenger’s focus seemed to settle on one particular group of three boys walking together in that bouncy, playfully shoving way that boys sometimes have. There was nothing particularly noteworthy, just three boys, probably sophomores or juniors, all three of them white, all three dressed in jeans and T-shirts with logos of bands or defiant slogans.

  Here the crowd had thinned a bit and I took notice of a particular girl moving in the opposite direction from the boys. She was wearing a hijab of sky blue over her head and neck. Other than that she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse. I liked her shoes.

  It was the hijab that one of the boys grabbed as she went by. Grabbed it from behind and yanked it back off her head.

  “Hey!” the girl yelled, and tried to put the scarf back in place.

  “See, she does have hair under there!” This from the smallest of the three boys, a short, cute kid with longish brown hair.

  “Drop dead,” the girl snapped.

  “Just playin’ with your towel, towel-head.” This was not said in a playful tone, and it came from the boy in the middle. He was tall, powerfully built, with short blond hair. He was wearing sunglasses so I could not see the color of his eyes.

  A second girl, just arriving on the scene, saw what was going on and said, “It’s called an abaya, moron. And leave her alone, Trent.”

  This second girl was not in Muslim dress. She was in the navy blue and white uniform of a cheerleader.

  “Wasn’t me,” Trent said, faux innocent. “It was Pete. Wasn’t it, Pete? See, Pete thought maybe she had horns under there and that’s why she’s always wearing that towel.”

  “Idiot,” the cheerleader said, and rolled her eyes.

  The bell rang and everyone went hurrying away.

  The Muslim girl looked shaken and angry, but she said nothing more and the incident appeared to be over.

  Messenger and I now stood in an empty hallway, ringing with the muted sounds of lessons filtering through a long row of closed doors.

  “This is connected to the dead boy, Aimal,” I said, careful not to give it a questioning inflection. But Messenger was not enticed into answering my non-question question.

  I did not know where we were, exactly, nor where Aimal had been, but I was pretty sure there were thousands of miles separating the two locations. However, in Messenger’s world, space and time are a bit . . . different.

  I did not believe we were there because one jerk kid had harassed one girl in one school. The penalties Messenger imposes can be . . . Well, they are the fuel of my nightmares.

  “Where should we follow the story next?” Messenger asked.

  “What?” The question was so out of the blue I wasn’t sure how to answer. Since when did Messenger consult me? And, anyway, didn’t he already know all the answers? Didn’t he know exactly how this story—whatever it was really about—would end up?

  But he was still waiting for an answer so I had no real choice but to attempt one. “We either follow Trent—he’s the ringleader—or the girl.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Well . . . which one?”

  “Both.”

  And then something extraordinary happened. Extraordinary even by the standards of the extraordinary reality into which I have entered. The world around me split in two.

  We stood, Messenger and I, in a void, blackness ahead and behind and above, and far more disturbing, black emptiness below as well. I saw no floor or ground beneath my feet, but I was not weightless, either.

  But this void was as narrow as a footpath, and to either side of this void was the world. Two worlds. Or two iterations of the same world. The effect was as if we had been standing in a darkened room and two enormous movie screens had been set up, one to our left, the other to our right, each infinitely tall and long and wide.

  Two real worlds. I had only to turn my head or even just move my eyes to see one then the other. Both at once if I stared straight ahead.

  But, as hard as it is to imagine, and despite my suggestion, you must not think these were movie screens. They each were real, each happening, each completely three-dimensional. I knew that I could step into either, so that they were less like screens than like living dioramas.

  To our left, the girl. To our right, Trent. We could hear both. I could smell the lamb stew the girl was heating in the microwave of her kitchen.

  The girl’s phone dinged an incoming text. Without thinking I stepped into her world, hoping to read it over her shoulder. Instantly a wall closed between me and Messenger. I saw neither him, nor Trent.

  Frightened, I stepped back into the newly appeared wall, passed through it, and was with Messenger again.

  This made me feel foolish. Obviously Messenger underst
ood all this better than I, but that didn’t mean I wanted to seem like some kind of newbie.

  That in itself struck me as absurd and I laughed.

  Messenger shot me an inquiring look.

  “Just . . . takes getting used to,” I explained lamely and stepped back into the girl’s world. Her name was Samira. I saw it on her text. The person she was texting was named Zarqa.

  Zarqa: Heard u were hassled. RU OK?

  Samira: It was nothing. Just jerks.

  Zarqa: What happened?

  Samira: They pulled off my abaya. NBD.

  Zarqa: It is a big deal. U shd tell sum1. Bullying.

  Samira: No.

  Zarqa: Grl we have to stand together.

  The microwave rang and Samira cut the conversation off with a quick GTG and a heart emoticon.

  Samira set her phone aside and removed her meal.

  I stepped back to Messenger. “Her name is Samira. I think that was another Muslim girl texting her.”

  “All right, I admit it: I’m mystified.”

  The words were what I was feeling, but they did not come from me.

  Oriax had appeared.

  Oriax is a female. She’s a female in much the same way that a billion is a number, or a Porsche is a car, or a twenty megaton nuclear bomb going off is fireworks.

  Age? Whatever age she wants you to see. She may be eighteen. She may be older than human civilization.

  I knew enough of her to know that she is sadistic, cruel, evil, not really human, and incredibly beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes, an outfit of scraps of leather melded seamlessly to form a dominatrix look that fit her like it was painted on—and might well be. Her boots were extreme high heels but minus the heel, a look only possible when you have hooves.

  “Well, hello there, mini-Messenger. What was your name again? Pawn? Puppet?”

  She had a throaty purr that sounded like an intimate whisper. The illusion is so real that when she punctuates the p sound in puppet I swear I can feel her breath on my ear, and it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  “Mara,” I said. “My name is Mara.”

  She moved like a tiger—sinuous, precise, dangerous. She was beside me and though I’m straight I felt my throat tighten and my breathing become labored, such is her animal appeal.

  “You know, Mara, you don’t have to dress like a schoolgirl. I could arrange for something a bit more . . . well, let’s just say something that would make it harder for Messenger.” She laughed wickedly at that, then with a wink, added, “I mean harder for Messenger to ignore you so completely. As a young woman.”

  “I’m not . . . ,” I began, and then realized there was no safe way for me to conclude that sentence. Instead I blushed and fell silent.

  “I don’t think he’s even really noticed the way you look at him sometimes, or the way your heart speeds up when he comes close or—”

  “What is it you want, Oriax?” Messenger asked wearily.

  “Oh, you, Messenger. Always. You’re just so very delicious. I could eat you up.” She licked her lips, which today were glowing mauve, and leered, but for a chilling moment it occurred to me to wonder if she might not mean that literally.

  I had stood by helplessly while she had tricked a boy into accepting a punishment that left him shattered as a human being. She had laughed and sung a grim little song as he was made to experience being burned alive. Was there anything too foul for her? Was there any sort of limit? I doubted it.

  “I’m fine,” I said, responding way too late to her offer to improve my appearance.

  “Why this girl?” Oriax gestured at Samira, who had gone on eating, disregarding the three of us. “Because someone pulled her silly scarf?”

  “Don’t pretend to be blind to the connection, Oriax,” Messenger said. “Hatred grows like a cancer, spreading ever outward from its source. It’s a poison in the human bloodstream that spreads far beyond its origin. ‘If you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn say not that you are innocent when the heart dies.’ Isthil teaches that no one who does evil can ever be blameless for the consequences.”

  “Oh, well then,” Oriax said, dripping sarcasm, “if Isthil said it—”

  And just like that, without a word from Messenger, without any sort of warning, we were back in that void between two realities.

  On our left, still within Samira’s reality, an irritated Oriax realized we’d given her the slip. She seemed not quite able to find us, though we could still see her.

  On the other side of the void, Trent was with Pete. The third boy was no longer with them and in fact I never saw him again. I hoped he’d seen the malice in his friends and chosen a better path for himself.

  Trent and Pete were sitting on swings at a park playground. Trent glared and frightened off the younger children who approached.

  “Have you heard from your dad?” Pete asked.

  Trent shook his head angrily. “He’s gone. Up in North Dakota, looking for work.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Hey. Douche nozzle. You think I want to talk about my dad? He’s gone. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe not. Okay? We done?”

  Pete swung a little, a short arc, with his feet dragging the ground. “Okay, man.”

  “Probably just drinking,” Trent muttered. “Up there drinking and not giving a damn about anything.”

  “He used to be kind of cool before he lost his job,” Pete observed.

  “Yeah, well, he did lose it. So that’s that, right? They gave it to some Mexican.” At that point his talk turned scatological and racist and I won’t attempt to repeat it.

  There was a depth of barely contained anger in Trent. His friend, Pete, seemed like a more balanced person but one who was under the sway of his larger companion.

  “My dad’s okay,” Pete said. “He still—”

  “Do I give a damn?” Trent asked with weary mockery.

  Pete was taken aback but forced a sickly smile and said, “No, man, even I’m not really interested in my dad.”

  “He’s got a job anyway.”

  “Yeah, but he kind of hates it because—”

  “But he’s got a job. Right? So he’s not off somewhere all messed up from being out of work. Right? So shut up.”

  Pete shut up.

  I’ve often wondered about people like Pete. I have never understood why angry thugs like Trent seem able to attract more normal followers.

  But then I winced, remembering. I had been a bad person. I had done a terrible thing. And yes, I’d had friends and acolytes the whole time.

  Self-righteousness rises in me sometimes, and then I remind myself that I do not have the right to look down my nose at others. I am the apprentice to the Messenger of Fear, and as such I deliver a measure of justice. But it had begun when I accepted the truth of my own weakness. My position as apprentice was not an entitlement, it was a punishment.

  “Oriax can’t see us?” I asked, mostly just to distract myself from painful memories.

  “Eventually, but not immediately. Her powers are different. Very great, but different. But she will find us in time.”

  “Then let’s use the time to figure this out,” I said.

  “The time?” He cocked his head, waiting.

  It took me a few seconds to grasp the hint. “Yes, the time. But I don’t think I want to see more of Trent. I want to understand the connections. I want to see what led to the death of that poor boy with his face blown away.”

  Just like that, one-half of this split-screen reality replaced Trent and Pete with the solemn scene of the far-distant funeral.

  Messenger seemed accepting of my initiative, even approving. “Proceed.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be timid, Mara,” he chided. “You’ve seen that we can travel through time. So do it.”

  I glanced back along the void. Would going backward take us backward in time? This was not how we’d previously done it. Messenger had always just made it happen.

  But of cours
e this was the simple version. This was Time Travel 101, an introduction before greater secrets and techniques could be learned.

  I turned and walked with far more confidence than I felt, back along the narrow black bridge between facing realities. And yes, to my satisfaction, time went into reverse.

  On her side Samira spit her food into her bowl, placed the stew in the microwave, took it out and put it in the freezer, walked backward from the kitchen.

  Far more disturbing, the shrouded body of Aimal once again leaped from its grave and landed on the stretcher, which was then borne away.

  I walked faster, faster, and time reeled backward at a geometrically quicker rate. Now Samira was back at school being harassed, and Aimal’s body was being ritually washed by his male relatives, and Samira was in class, and Aimal was quite suddenly alive. I noticed that the time lines were not synchronized, not matched up. I sensed that Aimal’s was the more recent event.

  Distracted by that realization, I saw that I had moved too quickly. I reversed my direction and slowed my pace.

  Aimal now was in the dirt yard of a bare, one-room cinderblock schoolhouse. There was a single tree providing scant shade from a blistering sun. There were other kids, younger, older, many kicking a soccer ball. Others read. Others just sat in small groups, chatting.

  If you ignored the opium poppy fields and the distant but intimidatingly sharp-edged mountains, and the poverty of the school, it could be any school.

  A pickup truck came barreling down the semi-paved road, kicking up a plume of dust. There were two men in the cabin, one more in the back.

  The kids in the yard didn’t notice. But Aimal did. He rose slowly to his feet, the biggest of the boys. He shaded his eyes and watched the truck and peered closely at something particular.

  Without even realizing what I was doing I stepped into his frame and peered as though through his eyes. I saw the thing he focused on.

  It was the upraised barrel of an assault rifle.

  3

  AIMAL BEGAN YELLING. IT WAS NOT ENGLISH, OF course, but I understood it nevertheless.