"I'm not saying good-bye to you, Jack. Don't you dare say good-bye to me," she said, still scuffing her feet.
"Okay," he said.
With the Plexiglas barrier between them, Jack could still see her as he started walking toward his gate. He kept turning to look at her; Jack stopped walking away from her when he saw she was finally looking at him. Heather was pointing to her heart, and her lips were moving--slowly, without uttering a word.
"I have a brother, and I love him," Jack's sister was saying, although he couldn't hear a syllable.
"I have a sister, and I love her," he said back to her, not making a sound.
Other people were getting between them. Jack had momentarily lost sight of Heather when two young women stepped up close to him, and the black girl with the diamond nose-stud said, "You aren't Jack Burns, are you? You simply can't be, right?"
"I'll bet you anything he isn't," her companion said. She was a white girl with sunburned shoulders in a tank top; her nose was peeling a little.
They were Americans, college kids on their way home from a summer trip to Europe--or so Jack guessed. When he looked for his sister, she was gone.
"Yes, I'm Jack Burns," he said to the girls. (Jack couldn't have explained it, but he felt that--for the first time in his life--he really was Jack Burns!) "You're right--it's me. I actually am Jack Burns."
For some reason, he was delighted that they'd recognized him. But the young women's expressions radiated disbelief; they were as suddenly indifferent to Jack as they had at first seemed curious about him.
"Good try," the white girl told him sarcastically. "You're not going to fool anyone into thinking you're Jack Burns--not that way."
"Not what way?" he asked her.
"Not by being so normal," the young white woman said.
"Not by looking like you're happy or something," the young black woman said.
"But I am Jack Burns," he told them unconvincingly.
"Let me tell you--you're awful at this," the white girl said. "And you're too old to get away with it."
"Since when was Jack Burns so sincere or something?" the black girl asked him.
"Let me hear you do noir," the white girl said.
"Let me hear you say one thing Jack Burns ever said," the black girl challenged him.
Where was Heather when he needed her? Jack was thinking. Where was his dad, who allegedly had Jack Burns down pat?
The girls were walking away. Jack untucked his T-shirt and held the bottom hem up to his chest, as if he were holding up a dress on a hanger. "Boy, I'll bet this looks great on you," he said, in no way resembling the thief whom Jessica Lee caught messing around in her closet.
"Give it up!" the young white woman called to him.
"You know what?" the black girl asked Jack, her diamond nose-stud winking in the bright airport light. "If the real Jack Burns ever saw you, he wouldn't look twice!"
"It's a good job to lose!" Jack called after them, but they kept walking. He was so bad as Melody, even Wild Bill Vanvleck would have made him repeat the line.
The point was--he wasn't acting. It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character. He had a sister, and he loved her; she'd said she loved him, too. Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns--the real Jack Burns at last.
38
Zurich
When that last unmarked area of skin has been tattooed and their bodies become a completed notebook, full-body types don't all react the same way.
Alice had maintained that some full-bodies simply started tattooing over their old tattoos. But if you keep doing that, the skin eventually turns as dark as night--the designs become indiscernible. Jack once saw a client of his mother's whose arms, from his wrists to his armpits, were an unvarying black; it was as if he'd been burned. In less radical instances, twice-tattooed skin appears to be covered with curved, abstract figures--the body wrapped in a skin-tight paisley shawl.
But for other full-bodies, the completed notebook amounts to a sacred text; it is unthinkable to tattoo over a single tattoo, or even part of one. Most of William's tattoos had been done by accomplished tattoo artists, but even his bad or clumsy tattoos were of music that mattered to him. Both