Vigil

It looks just like him. Jimmy Stewart. The drawing captures the actor’s troubled charisma as he walks down a snowy sidewalk in Bedford Falls. His shadow scales across the street in perfect perspective. His details are intact, every wrinkle in his suit. His face reveals a melancholy sense of purpose. The only other clue to Jimmy Stewart’s interior life is a thought bubble, connected to his head by a series of expanding white dots, which contains a pair of disembodied tits, dramatically shaded as if they’d committed a horrible crime.

Wexler is nestled in a pile of macramé blankets on the couch, where he has been watching game shows and Christmas specials for the past three days. His sketchbook is propped open in his lap, a mechanical pencil resting in the crease. The area is flecked with popcorn and surrounded by empties. The credits roll on television. The strings swell. The movie is over but it will be on again soon.

In the kitchen, Wexler drinks hot chocolate and counts up the numbers of girls he has in his phone. There are thirteen. He has accumulated these numbers from group assignments, bathroom walls, and occasionally, direct interrogative. These phone numbers have always represented potential to Wexler, a potential untapped until this moment. Wexler texts all but one of them. Emma says: “It’s Christmas Eve.” And he says: “yup,” and she ignores him. Becca asks: “did we have Theater together?” which is a class Wexler never took. He says “yup,” and she ignores him. He waits there in a wooden chair wearing long johns and an oversize grey flannel shirt. From the window over the sink he can see the winter sun, muted by banks of low clouds. He gives it a half an hour but his phone doesn’t vibrate again. He gives it another half an hour. Nothing happens. Wexler eats a sleeve of saltine crackers. He texts the thirteenth girl, Karen, the same text as the others.

- come over

- what are you doing, she immediately responds

- im thinking about having a party, he says.

- where are your parents?

- christmas cruise, he says.

- my step dad says I can’t come, Karen says

- You should have gone on that cruise, Karen says, that sounds like it would have been fun. Wexler puts his forehead on the kitchen table.

Wexler pulls some ripped jeans on over his long johns and walks through the woods to a strip mall. He wonders how people ever get together. In movies, there are only two main characters, so it makes sense when they hook up because they are the most important and they both know it and it’s obvious. It’s fate that shows its work. When real people get together it’s arbitrary. Every girl his older brother ever brought home seemed like a small miracle. Each girl seemed to come from nothing. His brother would never talk about her in advance, never telegraph a crush, never reveal his methods. He just kept doing it, turning up with a brunette after school like “this is Heather.” A series of magician’s assistants walking out of a closet to wave and bow.

All the stores at the strip mall are closed. No surprise. Unfortunately, so is the Citgo, where Wexler was hoping to pick up a pack of cigarettes and maybe score a case of beer from a cashier in a gesture of seasonal good will. Mostly, he was hoping to speak to another human being face to face. Wexler cups his hands to the gas station window between the certificates for scratch off lottery winners. Inside, one fluorescent glows behind the counter. Everything is where it should be. Two taquitos spin on rollers under a red light. Wexler smokes his last cigarette on the curb and walks back into the woods past a dumpster overflowing with pale bags of trash.

When Wexler gets home he sees there is the box to the side of the porch. It must have been there for a couple days. It’s only visible from this one angle so he never saw it when he came out to get the newspapers or smoke a cigarette. His name is written on it in Sharpie. The return address is his brother’s apartment in Columbia.

On the kitchen table, Wexler opens the box with a butter knife. As far as he knows, his brother has never given a Christmas or birthday present to anyone. There is no precedent for this gift at all. Inside is a bundle, on top of which is a sheet of notebook paper. It says: “Merry Christmas, my dude, Wallace was just going to toss this. Thought you might find a use.” Underneath is what looks like a Christmas sweater. It’s green and dotted with tiny white reindeer. What use is he going to find for a Christmas sweater? It must be a joke. But when he lifts the sweater, something falls out. Some tubes and metal. Wexler sees the coils. It’s a tattoo machine.

“Oh shit,” Wexler says aloud.

- how is the party going?

This is the problem with texting Karen one time.

Wexler is in his macramé nest with a YouTube video up about how to assemble a tattoo machine. It turns out he got a little cold so he’s also wearing the reindeer sweater and he has traded out his contacts for a pair of thick glasses, which help more with his astigmatism. The tiny parts of the apparatus are clear and he can match them with the parts in the video. The kit is old. the copper finish has worn black on the frame and the coils. He gets the housing put together and finds two needles sealed in a clear plastic pouch. They aren’t really needles like he’d thought, but long bars with clusters of small needles on the end. There are some numbers on the plastic which probably mean something. The video doesn’t say. He gently guides the bar through the tip and wraps a rubber band from the morning newspaper around it for stability. He flips a switch on the cord. The machine buzzes like one lost wasp.

He can’t help sending Karen a picture of the tattoo machine on the coffee table. It looks like it belongs there, its cord curling off to the same power strip that serves the lamp and the television.

- oh shit, Karen says.

His brother hasn’t included ink in the box, but there is a printer in Wexler’s dad’s home office. Wexler pops the ink cartridge out and uses a cordless drill to make a small hole in the side. He drains the ink into a shot glass. It doesn’t look the right color. It’s too black. Wexler cuts the tops off two blue ball point pens and squeezes that ink into the black for a blue sheen. He takes a deep breath. The hard part is done. The next part is easy.

He flips through his sketchbook. It contains the drawings he’s done this semester and as he inspects his work, several distinct periods emerge. First, there is the Dragonball Z period. Wexler was watching a lot of Dragonball Z during the summer so the first thirty pages are mostly images of huge anime dudes staring at each other and ominously flexing. Then the subject matter shifts. He remembers how it happened. He’d found some pornography that captivated him. It was called “Shelly Gets What She Came For” and it was eight minutes long. It was the only porn he watched for several months. He became so familiar with this video that he began to draw Shelly’s body from memory while he sat in the back of class through the fall. The only time he ever had detention was from starting a small bidding war over one of these pictures in the corner of the gym. By the time he was caught, he had Trey offering 65 dollars. People had paid less for blow jobs. The image was that sensual. After the porn, he’d just drawn Shelly’s face, then the faces of others, his teachers, movie stars, strangers. Finally, over Christmas break, he evolved into his series on Jimmy Stewart considering aspects of the female anatomy. He has five of those now. One for each time he saw It’s a Wonderful Life on basic cable.

He flips to an empty page. He runs his open hand over the paper and starts to draw. He tries to think of tattoos he’s seen before. He starts small with some pentagrams and yin-yang signs. He draws some flaming pentagrams. He draws daggers and 8 balls. He draws an ankh. He draws a lightning bolt. He draws a heart wrapped in barbed wire bleeding.

- I got some shoes. Karen sends him a picture of purple asics.

- my family does one present on Christmas eve, she adds.

- what’s your tradition?

Wexler ignores her. He draws a rattlesnake curled around a skeletal hand. He draws a ribcage with a rattlesnake inside. He draws a skull with a rattlesnake coming out the eye and into the other eye. He draws the coolest bones in the human body with and without rattlesnakes on them. He draws the head of a stag, the head of a lion, and the head of Jimmy Stewart, humble and magnanimous. All these drawings are sick, no question, and they’re all good enough to be his second tattoo, but not the first. The first needs inspiration. Wexler isn’t too worried about it. The important thing is to be vigilant, to stay awake and wait for a sign.

Wexler looks at his face in the bathroom mirror and assess the various components. Nose is good. It’s a big nose, and kind of crooked, but in a good way, like a boxer. His eyes are small and sharp, black. He has a mouth that his mother once described as “Cajun,” which Wexler finds impossible to forget though he doesn’t know what it means. His skin is greasy now, because he hasn’t showered in a few days, but on a normal day his skin is pretty decent. He never breaks out; he never flakes dry skin like Ben. His body is tall and broad and he’s got some chest and arm hair coming in pretty good by now. He is, unfortunately, relatively handsome. Which means girls find something else about him repellent, something internal, which could be a big problem.

Wexler drinks some of the whiskey he’d hoped to share. One semester left of high school and he’s accomplished nothing. Nothing really, though he did make out with some chick named Kim outside of a Baptist church. She clearly regretted it and when he sent out his thirteen messages earlier, she was one of those to totally ignore him. As he reminisces on this distant moment of human contact, Wexler realizes he’s been staring at a flicker of gold from the bookshelf across the room. He stands up, walks across the shag carpet, and finds the gold belongs to the filigreed spine of a photo album.

The cover is unmarked, a dark marbled red. Inside are small square images of his father and mother as young people. There’s an image of his mother, in her teenage years, posing for a blurred, sun eaten school photo. In the next, his father is smiling, shirtless in summer, holding a bolt action rifle, behind him a row of silver cans. The corner of the photo, the words John Wexler 1979, are written in sharpie. In the first picture of them together, his mother is stooped in grass by a lake Wexler has never seen with her arm extended. His father is watching her with a cigarette in his mouth, holding a bag of white bread. They are surrounded by ducks. He doesn’t know exactly how they met. They said in college. In the pictures before they were separate. And here they are together. There are no clues, just the fact of their intersection. The next page is nine pictures of his mother. She’s driving a car along the Carolina coast. In each frame her hair is in a different position, whipping around her sunglasses as she focuses on the task at hand. In the next picture, she looks ten years older. She’s wearing a wedding dress that’s totally overexposed, a white shape that obscures her. If he hadn’t found this in his house, he would never have known it was her. There are several pictures of his father with a moustache, building what look like the bookshelves in the den. In one he’s holding a yellow bubble level against a shelf. There are pictures of Wexler and his brother as babies, first his brother, then Wexler on the next page like a carbon copy. The last picture shows of one of his parents standing by the sweet bay magnolia at the edge of their backyard. It’s taken from the upstairs window, from the master bedroom, and the figure is at such a distance that it’s impossible to say which of his parents it is standing there. The light meant for the figure is caught in veils of dust and pollen and so the figure itself is dark.

By this time, it’s after 3 AM. He hasn’t seen another human being in close to four days.

- are you up? he texts Karen.

- yeah, she says.

- want to video chat?

- let me see. Karen says. Wexler pours another warm measure of bourbon into a ceramic mug.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Karen whispers, leaning forward so that the screen of the laptop appears in her eyes, a luminous white rectangle. Behind her is a pyramid of stuffed animals.

“I can’t hear you,” Wexler says.

“My parents are sleeping and they don’t like me using the laptop after they go to bed,” Karen says in a slightly louder whisper. It must be an old laptop because there’s a lot of grain. Karen is a plain chick in the sunlight but in this distorted image, with some of her details withheld, she is reduced to a kind of beauty. “Is the party over?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Wexler says. “Never really got going.”

“I can’t sleep,” she says.

“Are you excited for Christmas?” Wexler smirks at her.

“I know pretty much what I’m going to get. But when I was younger, I’d get really excited on Christmas Eve and stay up all night. Now it’s just a habit, I guess, to stay awake.”

“My family always goes on the cruise. We never even get a tree.”

“How do you get presents?”

“My mom takes me to the mall and buys me clothes when they get home. When everything is on sale.”

“I don’t think angels get their wings when you get your presents after Christmas.”

“Angels don’t get wings when you get a present,” Wexler says after a short pause.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it’s bells,” he says. “And the cruise is the present. Last year me and my brother had a cabin of our own and we went around the ship at night. They had karaoke in the lounge on Christmas eve.”

“Why did you miss it?” Karen asks.

“My brother is staying in Columbia this winter, so it would just be me and my rents,” Wexler said. “And I wanted the house to myself. So, I could have people over.” He wants to say something else because he’s embarrassed himself but he can’t think of anything. He’s grateful when Karen changes the subject.

“Hey Wexler, what’s your first tattoo going to be?”

“I don’t know,” Wexler says. “But I’m going to do it soon.”

“You should get my name,” Karen says. She’s sitting up straight in her folding computer chair like the queen of a distant land.

“I’ve never heard an idea so bad.”

“It means purity,” Karen says.

“Pfft,” Wexler says. “Karen doesn’t mean shit.”

“It means pure,” Karen insists.

“Where should I put it?” he asks her.

“On your leg,” Karen says, “No, on your wrist.”

“People would see it on my wrist,” Wexler says thoughtfully.

“Maybe higher up your arm.”

“What will you do for me if I put it on my leg?” Wexler says.

“I don’t know,” Karen says. “What do you want?”

“I’ll think of something, will you do it?”

“I can’t come over,” Karen says.

“I can pick you up.”

“No. I can’t.”

“If you don’t have to leave your bedroom, will you do it?” Wexler asks. Karen nods. So, Wexler takes off his long johns and hangs them over the back of the couch. Wearing only the sweater now, he pulls the foot pedal closer, taps it, and feels the apparatus vibrate in response.

He dips the needle into ink, the blue-black pulp at the bottom of the shot glass. Karen doesn’t say anything. It’s as if her feed has frozen, she’s so still. Wexler puts her name just above his left knee. The pain is so slight, like running a pin across a sunburn. He wants it to hurt more. He goes over the letters again, and then a third time, until it feels like he expected it to. He dabs the tattoo with a paper towel and holds the blood and ink up to the webcam.

“Does it hurt?” Karen asks.

“No,” Wexler shakes his head and looks down at the name, “not really.” He moves the webcam so she can see.

“Wow, your penmanship,” she says.

“Yeah, it’s called lettering,” Wexler says, looking down at it. He runs his fingertip over the new ink again. It’s sore like a bruise and he can feel the raised flesh. The black is shiny and wet. It’s done. He has his first tattoo. All the rest will follow this one. Finally, he looks back into the laptop, where Karen is waiting. “So you’ll do whatever?”

“What do you want?” Karen asks.

“Take off your shirt,” Wexler says. It’s not that she does it in a sexy way. She just takes her hoodie and shirt off at the same time and sits there topless. But it’s sexy anyway because Wexler told her to do it. He tells her to move to the bed, and she does. He thinks of other things for her to do and she does everything as quietly as possible. Eventually, he doesn’t have to say anything and she keeps going. She lays back into the pyramid of stuffed animals and continues on her own momentum. The only sign she gives of finishing is by arcing her hips slightly upward. The grain at the edge of the frame moves like carbonation in water. Wexler comes into his hand.

Karen says: “Let me see it,” and Wexler rotates his hand in front of his laptop like he’s slowly waving to a large crowd.

“It’s a lot,” Karen says. “It’s a good bit.”

When he comes back from the bathroom Karen is at her window. He watches her there for a time, in just her over-sized Greenville Drive hoodie. The feed is grainier now than before, the farther from the webcam she gets the more static mixes in.

“What are you looking at?” He asks. She comes back to the laptop, leans down, and whispers:

“It’s snowing.”

Wexler pulls the vertical blinds on the sliding door and the whole back yard appears. The birdbath, the trampoline, and the sweet bay magnolia beyond. And it is snowing, but barely. The snow that only falls once a year and vanishes on contact with the earth.

Joseph Worthen is a writer from South Carolina whose fiction has appeared in The Masters Review, Hobart, Wag's Revue, Bodega, and more. He is currently working on a novel called Approaching Perfect Bliss about depression and the internet. His website is www.mezacht.com.