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  Ink

  Sabrina Vourvoulias

  Crossed Genres Publications

  Somerville, MA

  “In Ink, Vourvoulias masterfully weaves an increasingly complex parallel universe at once fantastical and eerily familiar: a not-so-farfetched future world where myth and legend cohabit with population control schemes, media cover-ups, and subcutaneous GPS trackers. She takes us on a whirlwind, goose-bump-inducing exploration of the dualities of life and death, the light and darkness of the human spirit, the indelibility of ink as both marker and recorder of our lives and the shape-shifting, vile nature of colonialism and bigotry. By the time you reach the novel’s bittersweet ending, you will know: this story is as immortal as the souls of the nahuales of our ancestors’ lore, and perhaps just as powerful.”

  ~Elianne Ramos, vice-chair of Latinos in Social Media (LATISM)

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  INK

  Copyright © 2012 by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  ISBN-13: 978-0615657813

  ISBN-10: 0615657818

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Crossed Genres.

  Edited by Bart R. Leib

  FIRST EDITION: October 2012

  Cover design by Bart R. Leib

  Visit Crossed Genres Publications online at http://crossedgenres.com

  In memory of my mother, who gave me Guatemala,.

  and my father, who gave me the United States;

  and for Bryan and Morgan, who have given me the rest.

  Mi manda, Morenita

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Finn: Lead, lede, led

  Mari: Once upon a time

  Del: Words written on wind

  Abbie: If u cn rd ths

  Part Two

  Mari: Intercession

  Finn: Burying the lede

  Abbie: OMGWTF

  Del: Sgraffitto

  Part Three

  Finn: Redaction

  Abbie: Mile marker 324

  Del: Cold press

  Mari: Fairy tales

  Acknowledgements

  Author Biography

  Prologue

  The source texts me.

  All my sources text me these days. Or send me pictures and videos they’ve taken with their cell phones. The rich ones have smartphones; those with just a little money use pay-as-you-go phones. Doesn’t matter to me, as long as the message gets through and the image is clear.

  Most journalists have a sixth sense. So even though the message I’m looking at is bare of story, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It’s going to change everything.

  “Tats. Color-coded.”

  My source is an ex-girlfriend. Long legs, even longer memory – which works to my advantage in this case. Political dreams as bright as her copper hair.

  Not that our dreams have gotten us very far yet. I’m at a small daily in a market that hardly registers a blip in the national news cycle; she’s on the communications team of a first term congressman who’s greener than mint chocolate chip.

  But luck is better than dreams any day. And both she and I have always been lucky. Lucky to fall in with each other at college, lucky to fall out in a way that kept our friendship intact. Lucky that Rep. Anspach ended up part of the subcommittee reviewing the identity bill.

  She doesn’t text me from her official phone but from an untraceable throwaway.

  “When?” I text back.

  “Vote is Thursday.”

  “And?”

  “It sails. Only 3 nays. Prez is :D.”

  I wend my way to Melinda’s desk after I get the specifics. The Hastings Gazette newsroom is huge – proof of days when even regional newspapers were flush with advertising dollars – and the managing editor’s desk is smack in the middle.

  She tears her gaze from the twitterfall she monitors for stories.

  Melinda’s eyes are the same shade as her steel wool hair, and about as soft. “I’m busy, Finn.”

  I sit on the edge of her desk. “Anything interesting?”

  She snorts. “Like you haven’t been trolling all morning.”

  “Actually, I haven’t.”

  “Are we going to break a story?” It comes out growly. Which means she’s already feeling the bite of adrenaline. See? Sixth sense.

  “I don’t know. You see anything there about the identity law?”

  Her eyes flit back to twitterfall.

  “The usual. Rehash. Opinion. Speculation. How long before you can post?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Which means you’ve got less than fifteen minutes before the rumors hit the fall. Sources?”

  “One. Unnamed, but inside.”

  She expels a breath. “Shit. Every time we run a single-source story I die a little.”

  “Confirmation or jump on the competition. You can’t have both.”

  It’s hard to believe Melinda’s eyes can get steelier, but they do. “So what’s your fat butt still doing on my desk?”

  I’m grinning all the way back to my desk. She knows I’ll file the story in less than ten minutes – in plenty of time for our web dweebs to work their sleight of hand so not even the most aggressive aggregators can steal it without driving our web traffic into the stratosphere.

  And by the way, my ass isn’t fat.

  I should have played football. People expect six-foot-eight, 280-pound men to do that. Nobody expects them to spend all their time tackling stories.

  I majored in creative writing at college. Cassie says it’s our mother’s fault: if you’re named after mythological characters you’re bound to live in fantasyland. But I graduated into a world of facts. There’s no mythic journalism, at least not in the hinterlands where word counts hover around 500 and city council is the top beat. Still, it’s steady work with words and a regular paycheck, no matter how laughable.

  We’re all living in fantasyland anyway. My sister thinking she’ll keep her small town library open. Melinda believing newspapers are still vital. Me imagining there’s always a story or two lurking behind the facts. And then there’s the inks, hoping the identity bill will never come up for a vote. Magical thinking, all of it.

  I can’t remember when we started calling them inks. After all, it isn’t until now it’s certain they’ll be tattooed when they enter the country. Actually, unless I’m misreading the soon-to-be-law even the permanent resident and citizen inks will end up with tattoos, with a color scheme to indicate terminal status.

  I lean back a moment and stare across the newsroom while I consider how to best shape the lede. There isn’t a single ink in the Gazette’s newsroom, never was. Even at the big papers there hadn’t been a glut of them. Melinda catches me looking around and glares at me. They must teach that look in journalism school because all my cohorts go silent and lean into their monitors as if to convince her they haven’t been goofing off.

  Me, well, I keep smiling. I’m her favorite reporter even though I haven’t seen a day of j-school. I file the story a full five minutes before she expects it. She edits it in two. A minute after the new media dude gives us the thumbs up, we watch as my lede floods the fall.

  Part One

  “We are tied together by opaque, indelible pigments and something more. Even those of us without tattoos know that the ink has seeped through so many layers of skin it’ll never wash away.�
��

  Quoted in Melinda Horowitz, Pages from a Reporter’s Notebooks: The Last Hurrah of the Hastings Gazette (Marshallton, N.Y.: Blandon University Press), 128.

  Finn: Lead, lede, led

  1.

  Ledes are opening words, leading is the space between lines, and leads are the embryonic matter of stories. Newspaper jargon is gleefully perverse. That line of text on the front page that serves as a teaser for a story inside is a refer – which would seem straight enough if it weren’t pronounced reefer. Double trucks have nothing whatever to do with vehicles and a slug isn’t a bullet. Maybe it’s this habit that gets us into trouble outside the newsroom.

  I’m at church.

  I don’t go, but I know every inch of Holy Innocents. I used to be an altar boy here. When the neighborhood was Irish. When my mother had hope we’d end up in some glorious Catholic heaven together.

  The same priest’s still here. Father Tom has become a friend, even if we more often meet at pubs than in any hallowed structure. Though, come to think of it, some pubs should be considered hallowed.

  The pews around me are full of inks. It’s been a year since my story about the national identity tattoos gave me a brief but honeyed taste of journalistic notoriety, and by now pre-ink days seem as remote and fantastic as a fairy tale.

  There aren’t many churches where inks can go to hear Mass celebrated in their languages since the English-only ordinances passed. Father Tom is fortunate enough to have a congregant with one of the rare authorized exemptions, so he taps her to do the readings in Spanish at the seven p.m. daily and the noon Sundays when most of the Latino inks make a point of attending. I wonder if she’s the iron-haired older woman sitting close to the altar or the tiny, younger one sitting closer to the door to the sacristy.

  After Mass Father Tom stands on the front steps greeting the inks trailing out of his church. Next to him stands his translator – the younger of the two women that had lectored – as well as another twenty-something woman.

  The priest’s translator may be full ink or part ink, but she’s assimilated ink. The other woman likes aping our stereotype of fresher ink. Her hair is peeled back tight and high, her shirt is unrepentantly snug, and she’s wearing the biggest hoop earrings I’ve ever seen.

  As I walk by her to go talk to Father Tom, I hear her whispering to the translator in Spanish. I glance down at her wrist. Black tattoo: temporary worker. They never get language exemptions. Between the illicit talk and her not-quite-church-wear, I like her already.

  I try to listen in on the whispered alternate conversation. I don’t get to practice speaking but I’ve never lost my ear for the language.

  “Let’s go find Peña Morena,” says the flashy one.

  “I don’t do illegal,” the translator says.

  The other snorts. “Not illegal. Say unauthorized instead.”

  They both start laughing

  Pre-ink – in fairy tale days – peñas had been coffeehouses that served up unrefined but decent food and music. Since then the peñas have become something else altogether. Reputedly run by gangs and rife with illegal activity. They move from one unused space to another week to week. No one knows how many there are. No one I know has ever been to one.

  “It’s good to see you here,” Father Tom says to me.

  I grin at him. “I’ll go anywhere for a story. There is a story, right? This better not be some lame evangelization ploy because, you know, I’m beyond redemption.”

  The priest gives me a rueful smile, then turns to interrupt the women. “Mari, Nely, I want you to meet Finn.”

  The translator, Mari, gives me a cautious smile; Nely, something altogether bolder.

  “Finn’s a reporter with the Hastings Gazette,” Father Tom says. “I told him you’d tell him about the rumors you’ve been hearing at work. And about your theory that people are being dumped across the border.”

  Mari’s inhale is audible.

  “I’m one of the last inks left at Hipco, Father,” she says, dropping her eyes. “I have to be careful about disclosing anything.”

  HPCO. Hastings Population Control Office. She’d be a local inside source. Nice.

  I glance down at her wrist. Peeking out from under the long-sleeved shirt is the tip of a periwinkle blue tattoo. A citizen. Good. More credible.

  Her features are as petite as the rest of her. Her skin is a warm brown and her hair is a darker version of the same. It makes her a study in graded shades, easy for the eye to slide over. But when she picks her eyes off the floor and finally looks directly at me, I’m struck and pinned.

  Her eyes are dark amber but turn blacker the longer you look into them. Like looking into a well and seeing, so deep you disbelieve it, the movement of water. They are the eyes of a creature from myth, eons old and here on loan only.

  “I’m extremely careful with my sources,” I say after a moment. “Nobody would ever be able to trace a word back to you.”

  She looks from me to Father Tom and back again.

  Nely’s laugh catches us off guard. “Well, by all means, let’s talk about this on the church steps, where anyone can hear us,” she says in completely unaccented English. “I propose we remove this ve-e-e-ry interesting conversation somewhere more appropriate. A peña, say?”

  Father Tom winces. He’s lost many of the community’s young men to the so-called subterranean inks – the maras, brotherhoods and mafias – gangs big and small and in between. No way he’s going where he’ll pad their coffers.

  “Shame,” Nely says, grabbing Mari’s arm with both her own. “‘Cause that’s where we’re headed. See ya.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I say.

  She studies me. I don’t see a shred of respect in her very pretty, but perfectly ordinary, eyes. “¿De veras, güero? ¿Y cómo nos vas a entender cuando hablemos, eh? Porque allí nadie, pero nadie, habla inglés.”

  Mari stifles a laugh.

  Güero – blond – I’m not, but I am a white boy, which is what Nely means when she calls me that.

  “I’ll understand you just fine,” I answer in Spanish.

  A mix of expressions race across Nely’s face. Mostly surprise, but a bit of guilt too.

  I love it.

  After an hour of wandering the streets surrounding Holy Innocents, the three of us find an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe chalked on a sidewalk near the subway entrance. Nely gives a whoop, then sprints ahead of us down the steps.

  I’d forgotten that Morena is what the Mexicans call Guadalupe and so a peña under her guardianship, even a temporary one, would be signed by her visage. As soon as we see it, Mari slows down to a crawl.

  “I’ve never been to a peña,” she says.

  Father Tom has warned me about how controlled she is. How you can see her physically rein in any impulse that might lead to an infraction, or a regular mistake for that matter. He says it is undoubtedly why she has risen as high as she has in the Hipco hierarchy. It’s probably also why she’s still a Catholic in good standing. Though, of course, Father Tom would never agree with that particular assessment.

  “Me neither,” I say to assure her I’m a good guy.

  But then, because I’m mostly a truthful sort of guy, I add. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  She gives me a look I find completely puzzling. It’s those damn eyes that confuse me. And usually I’m so good at reading people. Women especially.

  “I’m not going to give you any insider stuff, you know,” she says, very matter-of-fact.

  “So, I’ll just drink, then. Soak up the atmosphere.”

  Another look.

  Nely is far down the right-hand corridor that, if followed to its end, would open to the subway station. Suddenly, she disappears, seemingly into the tiled wall, then pokes her head back out and motions us to follow.

  “We don’t have to go in there,” I say to Mari after our pace slows to within a hair of a standstill.

  It nearly kills me to say it. I’m curious about the peña a
nd don’t think I’ll get another chance to experience one. But news trumps feature, as Melinda says. And Mari, as a source, would be a pipeline to news.

  “You don’t know Nely. If I don’t go in, she’ll hunt me down and shave my head.” Even though she’s joking, mid-sentence her voice quavers.

  I’m going to tell you something: I have absolutely no fear. Never have. Cassie likes to tell people about my first skydive from 10,000 feet. I was ten. We were at the resort in the Dominican Republic where my father walked out on us and where we rode out the next two years of uncertainty with our mother. I harangued the skydiving instructor so frequently he finally strapped on the double harness and let me step off the plane. I jumped every weekend after that and never knew a second’s hesitation.

  But, I recognize fear in my sources.

  “What, you think I’m not going to look out for you?”

  It’s a risky tack. She might think I mean it personally, not professionally, and take all kinds of offense. But as I look down at her – I’ve got to have at least a foot and a half on her – I wonder whether I can make such a clear distinction. I pretty much feel protective of all people, not just my sources. Maybe it has to do with towering, or being solid among the wispy, I don’t know.

  “I’m not as you imagine me,” she says.

  The response draws me up short. But she doesn’t appear to be offended and starts walking down the corridor again.

  The shallow alcove where Nely stands ends in a fire door with a yellow light flashing above.

  “You sure this is it?” Mari asks.

  “No. But that’s the point of the shifting locations, isn’t it? Seems like what Toño described to me, though,” Nely says, distracted. “We just have to figure how to get in.” She tries the door, but it doesn’t budge. Then she looks around for some overlooked catch, lever, or keypad. Finally, she knocks on it.