"So, why with the tattooing, all over you like that? What you do that for? That any way for a girl to look?" Mr. Beniamino had asked her one time too many, and before Gwynn realized that she'd even answered him, she'd said in reply, "So why you want to stay canvas? All blank and vanilla? Nothing you wanted to say about yourself, on yourself?"

"I got nothing to say that I can't say for myself. So, there on your arm, what's that you're sayin'? You say … what? That you got a line of little pictures running along your forearm? And none of them bigger than a sneeze? What's that say, huh? Buncha little thoughts?"

Moving deliberately, while a feeling of biting down hard on a mouthful of dry, shifting hair passed through her body, Gwynn placed the breakfast tray on the short-legged bed table before Mr. Beniamino, and said evenly as she lifted one cover after another off the individual shallow bowls, "No, 'buncha' deliveries. Every flash-scrap I bring to the subtropolis, I get a new tattoo. Based on what flash-scrap I've brought down. 'Course, if it's a full Irezumi, all I do is get one detail from it. From the back, that's where all Irezumi designs grow from. But I don't do it traditional-style. Electric all the way. None of that pounding the ink in—"

"You kids, you're all sick. Full body tattoos, coloring in your faces, for what. I hear what them nurses call youse kids. Know what they call this here ward?" She waited until he'd slid his spoon into a gelatinous mound of poached eggs, the rounded silvery bowl of the utensil cleaving the rancid yellow center like a surgical scalpel removing a cataract from an aged eye, before saying simply, "'Pigment ghettoes.' And 'this here ward' isn't the only p.g. to be had. But the way I figure it is, I'm one of the lucky ones. I get the privilege of witnessing my own inevitable physical deterioration first-hand. One sagging tattooed wrinkle at a time. 'Cept for you. You're so … canvas."

He'd slid the bowlfull of soft egg into his dry-lipped mouth, and swallowed with a phlegmy gurgle, before saying to her, his watery eyes trained, unblinking, on her pigment flushed face, "I ain't 'canvas' … you think I don't know your lingo. There ain't a lot of me, but it ain't all canvas—"

She'd been riding this bus for too long; the constant rocking motion of the seat as it compensated for each rise and dip in the road was starting to give her a headache. Under the dark folds of her abaya, she pressed her foil-wrapped flash-scrap against her bare midriff. A learned response to fatigue or a break in her concentration; while it wasn't exactly illegal to transport medically harvested flash-scrap, there were a lot of people who didn't want to know about it, never mind see it.

Three seats ahead of her, a couple of real Muslim ladies were seated side by side, neither of them looking out the side windows, their black-draped heads unmoving as the bus continued to roll further and further from Pittsburgh, moving deeper and deeper into the hills of yellow ocher, vermilion, and bronze-orange clustered trees.

No chance of the driver seeing a blaze-orange suited hunter before he shot out the tires, she found herself thinking; when she was tired, her mind tended to fuzz off, go random and surreal. The way it did when ever she'd get a tattoo. Concentrate on nothing, just let anything filter up, as long as thoughts of pain were repelled. Scratching her right forearm beneath the shielding yards of black fabric, while staring at the draped heads of the Muslim women ahead of her, Gwynn was briefly grateful for the large Muslim enclaves common to virtually every city across America—she could avoid the stares and barely-whispered comments from all the canvas who found her markings offensive, and, albeit fleetingly, physically lose herself in a different human tribe, merely by donning that heavy tent of black cotton. Looking at the canvas walking past her on the street wasn't as … vanilla when she had to look at them through the abaya's screen-like eye-hole mesh.

This time of the year was the best time to wear the abaya, Gwynn realized—while the autumn sun was bright, bottled-water clear, it was also weak, the rays barely penetrating the confines of her robe. Ironic, how summer—the time her tattoos most needed protection—was also the worst time to wear the thing. Black cotton absorbed the sunlight; how the real Muslim women could stand it was beyond Gwynn's ability to comprehend. Although it sort of gave her insight into some of the taunts passing canvas spat out at her—"Why dontcha just dunk your head in a paint-can?" "If you don't watch out, your face will stay that way." "Masochist bimbo!" "Freak-face!"—semi-articulate screes which only hid the speaker's fear and awe, allowed them to hide behind jibes, rather than simply ask about her tattoos.

Sliding her free hand along her torso and neck under the abaya, hoping that her movement wasn't visible through the fabric, Gwynn stroked her right cheek, the one with the ombré flow of deepest azure down to water-color-delicate sunrise-sky-blue. Her "plain" cheek, compared to the Celtic knots which adorned her chin, left cheek and part of her forehead.

This side of my face is for my father's people … somewhere back ages ago, my great-great-to-I-don't-know-what-power grandfather fought with William Wallace. The guy Mel Gibson played in that movie decades ago, she imagined herself saying to any canvas brave enough to actually ask her why she'd done what she did to her face. They painted themselves blue to scare their enemies. For strength. For unity. The other half of my face, that's for my mother's people. For the Irish. Them and the Scots, they were both screwed over by the British. Tried to take away their right to dance, to play bagpipes, to speak their languages. I say, let them try to take this off of me. Let them try. My face sings. My face dances. It speaks.

Another sudden rise, followed by the corresponding elevator-like descent. The abayas of the two women ahead of her puffed up around them, then settled down in predetermined folds on their shoulders.

Gwynn felt as if the trees flanking the road were spreading, ready to engulf the bus as it moved northeast of the city they'd left behind over half an hour ago. One of the guys who'd done some of the work on her back, the huge Celtic cross whose base rested just above the cleft in her behind, used to say basically the same thing about tattoos.

"I think they spread, y'know, under the epidermis. Color goes migrating away from the lines, meets up with the colors from the other side, and next thing you know, you got less canvas. Just does it in places you can't look at too easy. So's you can't stop it."

She'd wondered if the bees-trapped-in-a-jar drone of the tattoo needle had begun to shake the guy's brain cells loose. Too much repetitive motion—hold the needle, let it secrete color under the flesh, wipe away the excess ink and blood with the other hand, then do it over again.

But now, as she rode, nearly motionless, on the rising and falling bus, the press of trees surrounding the highway did resemble loose pigment migrating under unsuspecting unpigmented canvas. Overhanging branches thick with freshly-ground-bright pigment spread closer and closer to the highway's shoulders, as if seeking that thin tire-stained ribbon of flat chrome yellow in the center of the road. Pigment calling to pigment.

Definitely like the way tattooed people sought each other out, not merely for company, but for empathy. In remembrance of that shared bond of temporary pain, as the canvas became artwork; partly for the fellowship, perhaps more so for the individuality within the flesh-tribe.

Those women up front, swaying slightly under their abayas as the bus rounded a slight curve in the highway, their tribe depended more on adherence, on uniformity, of sameness of purpose and faith. The more you looked like your brethren, the closer you'd come to your life's goal. Everyone pray at the same time, while facing the same direction. All women smothered in black robes, or head-wrapped in a hijab. The men, mostly bearded. Not all that different, really, than the Amish and the Mennonites originally more common to the state.

When she was younger, Gwynn would ask the women in the Amish and Mennonite communities why they wore those filmy white hats on their bunned hair. The answer was usually the same, a reference to Corinthians, about women covering their heads in prayer. But for some reason, none of them ever asked Gwynn about her facial art. As if they didn't want to know, or simply wanted to forget they'd seen her.

Once, during a flash-scrap run she'd taken to the Records Center of Kansas City (the previous wearer of the flash-scrap she was carrying had specifically willed his body art to that city, why she'd had no earthly idea), the place where all the original episodes of M*A*S*H and some show she'd never heard of before called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea were stored—as the travel brochure for the city had proudly noted—she'd been sharing her bus seat with a Muslim woman, who wore the more common hijab rather than an abaya. Gwynn wasn't wearing much more than a tee shirt with holes cut out over her best bits of tattooing and a pair of shorts—it was early August, and almost too hot to wear her skin. For a second, she'd felt ashamed of herself; she knew her seatmate instinctively frowned not only on skimpy clothes, but on tattoos. But the woman was actually nice about it.

"Those must have been rather painful," was all she'd said, and politely at that, as she tacitly pointed at Gwynn's face.

"Not too bad … not worse than the rest of my body. It doesn't last, though—"

"So these are temporary, like henna ones?"

"Oh no, no … they're on for good. Really, I should wear more clothing, 'cause the sun can fade these, but sunblock works, too."

"And it is cooler," the woman had smiled, before noticing the small cooler perched on Gwynn's knees. "At least your knees are cool—"

The flash-scrap was inside the cooler, loosely folded, packed in sterile ice and protected with some sort of surgical gauze the person who'd removed it from the donor had layered between the folds. She didn't know if a doctor had done it, or one of those nurses trained to extract donor eyes for cornea transplants. Some of them had learned to diversify, once flash-scrap donations became the norm. But Gwynn couldn't bring herself to tell this stranger about the contents of the cooler, even as she feared that the woman might think something edible was inside, and hope that Gwynn might offer her whatever it was—

"Yeah, real cool. Glacial. Is this the first time you've been to Kansas City?"

Gwynn couldn't really recall what the woman had said to her after that; she did remember being grateful that the hijab-swathed stranger hadn't lectured her on her tattoos, or her lack of clothing.

She hadn't seen the woman again once they got off the bus, and Gwynn made her way to the Record Center, but in ways, she wished that the woman had been headed that way, too. Having her for a traveling companion would have been good. Gwynn could have told herself that the canvas was making remarks about the woman, instead of her.

On the road an hour now, half an hour to go before they reached the Iron Mountain National Underground Storage facility. Where the guards stood before those steel gates, ready to request that all visitors surrender their weapons, drugs and explosives, despite the inherent inanity of their assumption that anyone bearing such items would first admit that they had them on their person in the first place. As if carrying a gun, a needle and a stick of dynamite was as commonplace as toting a pocket comb, a pager and a half-empty box of breath mints.

There was a rectangle of hot flesh on her midriff—the flash-scrap stored in that folded-over square of heavy-duty cooking foil was pressing uncomfortably into her skin. Gwynn imagined how her flesh must look—all alligator-wrinkled over one of her favorite tattoos, the blackwork dragon with the pearl in its mouth. The one that could be easily seen through her uniform—

"A dragon. Blackwork … no shading, all black ink. And yes, it was very painful," she went, anticipating his inevitable next question.

Aside from his advanced age, Mr. Beniamino had so little in common with the rest of the people in the nursing home; not only was he canvas, from the liver-spotted top of his balding head to his oddly shinny thick-nailed toes, but he even lacked the basics of pierced ears. Gwynn's grandparents had told her that one of the correspondents on the first real newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, had worn an earring. And that was long before full body tattoos and multiple piercings were relatively common among the generation just reaching adulthood. Every day, as she worked her regular job among the remains of that embellished generation, washing and feeding those once proudly adorned bodies, Gwynn felt the inner pangs of helplessness at having been born a generation too late. Growing up, she'd seen people with head-to-toe patterns walking unattacked and uninsulted down the street, the sunlight glinting off their facial piercings, their body jewelry making soft metallic clacking noises as they walked. That generation had role models like the British Leopard Man, or The Enigma—that blue-jigsaw-puzzle covered man. (The one who ate live crickets on that old show The X-Files.) Plus they respected the original master of Irezumi, the ancient Japanese art of whole-body tattooing, done the old way, with pounded needles wielded by hand. But her parents and their whole generation should have studied the origins of Irezumi … those not of the aristocracy were forbidden to wear patterned kimonos, and so created bodily kimonos of the most fantastic and intricate patterns—images that could be hidden under clothing of the plainest sort. Eventually, it was mostly criminals who sported Irezumi … just as Gwynn and those of her new tribe were considered to be flesh felons, the non-conformists, the throwbacks to that hedonistic, gaudy, decorated generation whose children rebelled against their parents excesses of the epidermis. Gwynn supposed that the rise of the Muslim faith in the United States might also have had something to do with it. Once their numbers surpassed the Southern Baptists, a certain mindset began to permeate the country, even if the actual tenets of that faith didn't.

Which is such a shame, Gwynn decided. Aside from the mutawa in the most fundamentalist neighborhoods in the largest cities, the whole concept of a religious police wasn't supported by the majority of American Muslims. They may not like how we look, but they don't attack us out loud. Or if they ask a question, it's not a pointless one—

"If it's so painful, why you do it?" Gwynn let her patient roll himself back onto the changed side of the bed, before tackling the corners of the fresh sheet on the other side.

"'Why'? Because I want to. Because I know they drive you crazy."

"You're the crazy … without them, would you be here? Changing shitpans? Spooning gelatin past toothless gums?" He flopped back onto his fresh sheet, sending up a stale scent of dry skin, old pajamas and age Gwynn's way.

"I'd be changing bedpans somewhere, if not here. I am a nursing assistant. Diploma and everything."

"That diploma, it tattooed somewhere on your body, too? You gots everything else all over you—"

"On my behind, Mr. B. Right on my cheeks. Wanna see?"

"Smart mouth … stuck in the ghetto, is what you are. Put yourself there … if someone was to make you get them tattoos, then you wouldn't like'm so much. People'll put up with stupid, crazy stuff, long as they do it to themselves. But made to do it is a whole lot of different. I knows. Been there myself. Whole lot different."

That Mr. Beniamino had been right about her more or less being forced to work in a nursing home rather than a regular hospital pained Gwynn so much she'd barely listened to much else he'd said that afternoon; she hadn't intended to get stuck in such a depressing job. With patients who inevitably died, taking their personally-designed flash with them (those designs marked "SOLD" on their creator's tattoo studio walls). Patients who ultimately reminded Gwynn of her own inevitable mortality day after day … including the time when her own flash would be consigned either to the grave, or to the crematorium's flames.

Which is why she'd become a flash-scrap courier; one of her patients had stipulated in her will that the full-back tattoo she'd gotten decades earlier was to be surgically removed like a patch of leather, then transported to an underground storage unit in the Iron Mountain area. The will had been written so long before the woman passed on, that the person designated to transport the flash-scrap to the storage unit had also died. But the storage fee had been paid for in advance, much like a pre-arranged burial, so the only problem was how to get the preserved tattoo from here to there. Flash-scrap has to be carried by hand, and transported on the ground. Airplanes are out; drug sniffing dogs and pigs inevitably nosed out flash, and went berserk. Worse than someone trying to smuggle in meat from overseas. Flash-scrap wasn't exactly illegal, but it was deemed unsavory, and undesirable in Muslim enclaves. So … you either had to drive it, or ride with it, on the ground. Usually buses were used, why Gwynn didn't know. It was just something the other couriers did.

People like Roano from New Mexico, or Moreen Pinchos from Florida, the one who specialized in flash from Latino gang members, or that crazy Calvino Burrell, the guy who went to state penitentiaries, collecting flash from prisoners who had the time and patience to do the most fantastic blackwork on their bodies, as well as the bodies of their fellow prisoners. She and Moreen and Calvino had once found themselves on the same bus headed for Iron Mountain, each toting a red and white cooler of harvested flash. Some of their fellow passengers knew what they were carrying, and every time the bus stopped, they'd move around, playing musical bus seats, until the three of them were sitting in the middle of a ring of empty seats. So they'd actually had to talk to each other.

Which was the funny thing about scrap couriers; while they were all more or less part of the flesh tribe of extreme tattoo collectors, and all were in pigment ghetto jobs the rest of the time, none of them actually liked each other.

Moreen hated Roano for his facial piercings and turquoise lip plug (which she openly considered "primitive"); Roano despised that Indian courier, the one who dubbed himself Qochata because the name meant "white man" and Qochata was a full-blooded Hopi—which Roano felt was some sort of ethnic slap in somebody's face; Qochata thought Calvino was a nutjob because Calvino had had his entire head tattooed, then let his hair grow back over it, just so he'd have "something to look forward to once my hair starts to fall out" and Calvino didn't like Gwynn, because she insisted on wearing an abaya during most of her trips to the subtropolises … while Gwynn thought Moreen was pretentious for restricting all of her blackwork tattoos (a necessity on her dark brown skin) to what most canvas considered "safe" areas … her back, her upper arms, and her thighs, places easy to cover with clothes, to please canvas job service personnel.

On this trip, taken down this same highway, in what may have been the same damned tour bus, but definitely with a different driver, only six or so months earlier, Gwynn's seatmate was Moreen, whom she disliked less than Calvino, who—once he noticed the overt migration of their fellow travelers to seats south and north of theirs—began rubbing their mission into the other people's faces.

"Girls, what kind of flash you got in there? Mine's primo—filet of arsonist. (Guy in the next cell over tattooed him through the bars, all over his lower arms.) Never saw the face of the artist, but damn if he didn't do fine work."

"I'm sure there's some squirrel sitting in a tree miles away that didn't hear you," Moreen had sniffed, as she crossed her legs under the small cooler perched on her lap.

"I ain't loud … I'm proud. You want I should show you this flash? Once it goes underground, ain't nobody gonna see it … it's gonna be outasight, like all them archive pictures Bill Gates bought and hid down there—"

"If you're referring to the Bettman Archives, at least they're safe in that vault. They won't degrade, or be subject to mishandling. You did realize, didn't you, that people had been scribbling on them, bending the corners, letting them fade—"

"This here flash, it didn't get no chance to fade where this guy was … 'course you don't have to worry about yours fading,do you, Mo-Mo?"

"Black people can get sunburned, too. It just takes a longer exposure," she'd sniffed, before uncrossing her legs and sitting with both feet flat on the floor of the bus.

"Rosa Parks is pissed … how 'bout you, Tent-Girl? You gonna roast under that thing? Broil off your tattoos?"

Under her breath, Moreen whispered, "Ignore the putz," but Gwynn was used to hearing far worse from canvas on the street, so she set her cooler on the floor, and lifted up her abaya with both hands, revealing her blue-and-black covered face, and fully-inked body, covered only by a sleeveless tube dress. She could hear the hissing exhalations behind and ahead of her, as the other passengers got a first look at her, but they were only canvas. Not worth her discomfort.

"I don't know, Calvino … do they look done to you yet?"

Calvino may have had his scalp tattooed but he was still a jinny (a skin virgin, in canvas-speak) when it came to facial tattoos.

Gwynn thought it was the blue side of her face that spooked him into a few minutes of silence, but like the British who kept on attacking the rebel Scotsmen centuries ago, Calvino soon re-armed himself and started in again. Humming softly at first, he soon broke into full-voice song, to the tune of "The Halls of Montezuma":

"From the walls of Irezumi/to the shelves of pickled knees—"

Moreen leaned close to Gwynn, and said succinctly, her voice ringing in Gwynn's ear, "If you ax me, that man's momma watched too much Tom Green while she was carrying him."

Gwynn had digested her words for the next mile or so, then had to ask—even though she did find Moreen to be too self-righteous for words—if Tom Green was the one who played Bevis or Butthead on that Jackass show on MTV. She vaguely remembered her parents talking about all the strange things they used to show on that channel, but after a while all the weirdness tended to merge together. Maybe this Green person was part of The Real World?

Moreen had to think about it for another couple of miles, before saying, "I'm not sure … I just know he married one of Charlie's Angels. Don't ax me if she was one of the TV ones, or from the movie. Been too much going on in entertainment for me to keep up with it."

And that had been all Moreen had had to say for the rest of the trip. Calvino's song had more verses, all of them increasingly disgusting and deranged, but only the first two lines stuck in Gwynn's brain.

From the walls of—

If she didn't think—consciously—of something, anything, else, she'd wind up singing the damned song out loud, and freak everyone out, the way Calvino had done back in May, when the other bus driver stopped the bus five miles from the converted limestone mine, and told Calvino to hoof it.

She and Moreen had both crawled into separate seats, so they could wave buh-bye to him as the bus lurched away down the highway …

Trying to shake his hand loose, Gwynn said, "It's an extension of the whole body art notion … the human body as canvas, waiting to be filled with art. You do realize that some people can't stand the sight of an unadorned body. It's like a waste of potential. It's like … just putting up with the way you were born, without trying to do something about it. Like never cutting your hair or fingernails, just because you're born that way. It's ignoring your potential. So … we call people without tattoos 'canvas'. Like the way … like, how initiated people have names for non-initiates."

"Oh … like black people calling us 'honky' or 'cracker'? Or us calling them—"

"Now, people have moved past those words. Anyone, any color, can be canvas. It's not a race, it's a decision."

He'd let go of her arm, then, and slurped up the rest of his eggs, before adding, just as she was getting ready to quit his room, "So what this is, is a decision. Answer me this, girlie—"

"My name is Gwynn … Ms. Gannon if you prefer—"

"Girlie-Gwynn-Gannon, you answer me this … whose decision?"

She was about to answer when she thought about it a bit more; while most tattoo artists did follow a customer's request when it came to flash, some did specialize in creating designs directly on the skin, with no pre-inked outlines rubbed on the skin first, no guidelines at all save their own imagination, and their instinct as to what would look best on that particular person—

"Usually the person getting the tattoo done. In most cases. And even if the artist does do the deciding, the person getting it has to choose to have one done in the first place—"

"So you people, you choose?" He'd moved on to his limp butter-substitute-slathered toast, but those moist, glassy eyes were still aimed in her direction.

"Of course we choose to have this done—"

"Your choice, your decision?"

It didn't seem like it should be a question—

"Of course … tattoo artists don't roam the streets, grabbing jinny canvas at random—"

"'Jinny'?"

"Novices. Never-been-touched by the needle—"

"More names … you were saying?"

"They don't do guerrilla tattoos … what's the sense in that? Why do it to someone who doesn't want it?"