I wondered whether he had a place, like this one, a refuge where he went at the end of a hard day of torturing people in the cause of justice. I wanted to ask him, but at the same time I feared doing so, first because I thought it likely he would shut me down with his usual taciturn non-response. But also because part of me feared he might open up, tell me more than I wanted to know about him, and thus confuse even further my emotional reaction to him.
The odd thing, the thing that made me smile a bit wistfully to myself, was the realization that had he not been who and what he was, but just been a boy with that face and those eyes, sitting here drinking my coffee, I would probably still have been tongue-tied. I remembered so little about my own story, but I was certain that whoever I was, I had never been very good at making small talk with boys.
And then, as I spread butter onto a piece of toast, I saw it.
“What is this?” I stared aghast at the ink, blue and red, yellow and green, on my right arm, just above the end of my blouse sleeve.
I had caught only a hint of color peeking out, and now, without setting down the butter knife, I pushed my sleeve up to see it fully.
It was a tattoo. There was no swelling, no sense that this represented something applied by the usual methods within the last few hours. It was there, complete, healed, indelible.
It showed a boy, tied to a stake, with flames roaring around him.
“What . . . What is this? What is this? What have you done to me?”
I spun around, dropped the knife from numb fingers, held my sleeve up so that he could see it, pushed it toward him. I was torn between rage and a sadness at what felt like defilement.
I looked again at the tattoo. It was vivid, not quite real but still so detailed that it would never be mistaken for anything whimsical. It was the tattoo a sadist, a sick person, might have chosen and even then come to regret.
“What have you done to me?” I demanded as anger won out over sadness.
“It is not my doing,” Messenger said. There was sympathy there but not much, and no surprise at all.
“How did it . . . When . . . Why? Why?”
“All Messengers of Fear are marked in that way,” he said.
“It’s sickening!” I cried.
“It is meant to be.”
“But why? What is the purpose?”
He took a deep breath and a slow sip of coffee. He stood up and I thought at first he meant to walk away. Instead he shrugged off his long coat and laid it over the back of his stool. Then carefully, taking his time, he began unfastening the skull buttons of his storm-cloud gray shirt. When he had unfastened them all, he slid the shirt off.
He had a stronger chest than I expected. His stomach was flat and muscular. His arms were lean and if not gym-rat big, were nevertheless respectably powerful. But those were all observations I would make at a later time, for at this moment, when he stood naked from the waist up, I saw my own terrible fate.
He was covered in tattoos of pain and horror.
It was all the awful, shattering, mind-numbing scenes that touching him had sent flooding into my mind. Screaming faces with bulging eyes and mouths so distorted they looked scarcely human. Twisted limbs, some so attenuated that they seemed barely attached and maybe were not. Blood, in drops like sweat and in streams and in spouting fountains. Sharp objects, ropes, guns, drowning water and roasting flames, whips and chains and medieval instruments of arcane construction but manifestly foul purpose.
All of it inscribed on his body.
I stared and he allowed me to stare without comment, without explanation, without seeking to soften the blow. I knew this was what he had come to show me. He had known what would be done to me, and he had known that when I found that despicable art emblazoned on my own flesh, that I would be so destroyed by the vision of my future that I might not be capable of going on.
I was to be slowly, inexorably turned into a tapestry of retributive justice, if justice this was.
He slipped his shirt on, buttoning as carefully as he had unbuttoned minutes before.
“Why?” I asked, no longer capable of the energy required to shout.
He finished dressing, and then he said, “The world, Mara, the world you knew, that I knew, the world we saw as the only world, rests on the edge of a knife extended out over a sea of flame. Tilt to one direction, and fall into the flame. Tilt the other direction, and the same fate awaits. Lose our balance even a little, and slip onto the blade itself and be eviscerated.”
“What are you talking about? Balance? What . . .”
“There are forces that badly want us to lose our balance. And there are countervailing forces that would see us maintain our precarious stance and survive. We, you and I, are tools of that second force. The task we are given is one small part of maintaining that balance.”
He took a sip of coffee, finishing the cup.
“Those are just words,” I said.
“Balance is everything,” he said, almost in a whisper, though as always with Messenger, I heard his every word as if it were spoken by lips pressed against my ear. “The balance between good and evil, between true and false, between pain and pleasure, between love and loss, hatred and indifference. However you name them, these balances are all that keep the world spinning.”
He moved around the counter and came to me. For a moment I thought he might touch me, and such was the spell woven by his words and, yes, by the inexpressible feelings he evoked in me, that I wished him to. Instead he used one finger to gently lift the sleeve and reveal the terrible thing beneath. He looked at it, solemn, sad and solemn, and said, “We are given great powers, though we did not choose to have them. And with power comes hubris—overweening confidence, arrogance. These marks, these terrible artworks, are our humility. They provide our balance.”