The Forbidden City
By Jeffrey Hantover
Today I drove my grandfather to the doctor to have his tattoo removed. He is eighty-five, wears two hearing aids, walks with a cane and his memory has grown fuzzy. Sometimes he mistakes me for my brother and asks how the son I don’t have is doing in school. When I tell him I’m Joe and not Adam, he looks pained and angry and mutters something in Polish that even if I heard clearly I wouldn’t understand. Sometimes though he surprises me by what he remembers, by what he notices.
Until this August I always wore long sleeve shirts, even on the hottest summer days. I had gone crazy with tattoos after I dropped out of college. Coiled snakes slithered from collar and cuffs. Unearned anger ran up and down my arms — daggers, the finger to the world on both biceps, and all kinds of crap that later embarrassed me. I was a walking signboard for a person that I stopped being and never really was. On Labor Day I was on our deck grilling burgers and wearing a short-sleeve shirt. My grandfather asked me where all my tattoos had gone. Laser technology, I told him. It took three visits to a doctor in the city, but they were all gone except for a faint shadow like a light bruise where some of the darker areas had been. With his bad eyesight and thick glasses my grandfather’s nose almost touched my arm. He smiled and didn’t say anything. Didn’t even ask if it hurt like everyone else did.
Last week he called to get the doctor’s name and number and a few days later I drove him into the city. I wanted to know why now after all these years, so close to the end, but I didn’t say anything. He had never talked about his tattoo, never talked about them. For him, life began the day the boat landed in New York. The numbers had faded to a soft blue blur that you had to strain to see.
He didn’t want me to go in with him so I waited outside in the reception area. When he came out he just shook his head yes when I asked if he was all right. He was quiet in the car and seemed far away in his own world. Just before the exit off the expressway, he started talking about this program he had seen on the History Channel about the last emperor of China. He kicked out all the eunuchs from the Forbidden City because they were stealing him blind, my grandfather said. And you know the only thing they took when they left? He pointed down to his crotch, their balls, he said. They kept them in a jar so when they died they could be buried with them. Buried whole, he said, they could go out of the world whole, the way they came in. Then he stopped talking and stared out the window as if he were seeing the street and the houses for the first time. He moved his head up and down like he was agreeing with someone, like he was praying. He stared out the window, tears rolling down his cheeks.
THE END
Author Bio: Jeffrey Hantover is the author of the novel, “The Jewel Trader of Pegu” and the forthcoming novels, “The Three Deaths of Giovanni Fumiani” (Cuidono Press, 2023), “The Forenoon Bride” (Severn House, 2023), and the novella, “Peace and Happiness to All” (Alternating Current Press 2023). His poetry and short fiction have appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Natural Bridge, Raven Review, October Hill, The Centifictionist, Blyden Square Review, among others.