The Tattooed Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ll ever be able to speak that word lightly again. When you see it, in reality, right there in front of you, actual murder , you want to cry and tear your hair and claw at your own face and fall down on the ground and demand to know why such a filthy thing could happen.
    Why would you shoot a fleeing child in the back?
    What could possibly justify that?
    What kind of god could ever sanction such a thing?
    The murderers were two older men and one younger, so young he might be no older than me. What poison had been poured into that young man’s soul that he could do such a thing?
    â€œAre we here for him?” I asked.
    â€œNo,” Messenger said. “A different justice awaits them. No, we have business elsewhere.”
    He was looking at me with something very like concern.
    â€œIf you’re going to tell me it gets easier, please don’t,” I said.
    â€œI don’t know if it gets easier over time,” he said.“But whatever time has passed for me, it has not been enough to make it less terrible.”
    He let time flow again, and now I watched as the killers drove away. And I watched as the stunned and shattered survivors lifted themselves up off the ground and rushed to the dead. They cried. They wailed. They sobbed that God is great, and maybe he is, but he wasn’t there on that day.
    Something happened to me then, a spinning feeling, a feeling of being sucked down into the earth. But I suppose it was nothing that supernatural. In fact, I just fainted.
    I woke with a start.
    My first feeling was confusion. Just where was I?
    I was no longer at the blood-soaked school yard.
    I was lying on cold stone. Beside me on my left was a large rectangular pool with greenish water. On my right was an outdoor café with umbrellas shielding round wooden tables and canvas director’s chairs. Many of those chairs were occupied by people dressed for tropical weather drinking cups of espresso or mineral water or tiny bottles of unfamiliar sodas.
    I sat up, self-conscious at being passed out in astrange place with people chatting not five feet away. The language being spoken was not one I recognized. The people were a mix of white and black and a few who were Asian, like me.
    Of course they could not see me. At least I hoped they couldn’t as I wiped away a trickle of sleep drool. Then I raised my eyes above the tables that had preoccupied me and was stunned to find myself in the courtyard of what looked like a white limestone palace. There were pillars and arches all around me. And at one end of the courtyard a sort of open tower rose. Beyond that moldering tower, great trees pressed close all around, almost menacing in their insistence. And farther still, above the immediate foliage, rose vivid green mountains that soared up into mist.
    Not the sinister yellow mist that so often appeared in the demimonde I now occupied, but a genuine mist, the steam of low-flying clouds.
    â€œI’ve been here before,” I said, searching for Messenger. But no, that wasn’t quite true, was it? There was familiarity to the location, but it was not a memory of my own experience, rather it was a memory of . . . of a video.
    It took me a few minutes to clear my confused thoughts and put my finger on it. A music video. An old one. Something I’d come across on YouTube. Snoop! That was it, Snoop and Pharrell.
    And the song was . . . “Beautiful.”
    I was probably more proud of myself than I should have been for a simple feat of memory, but this world I now inhabited is strange at the best of times, and it is very easy to lose your way when not only space but time can be rearranged according to Messenger’s whim.
    I did not know what the place was called. But I knew it was in Brazil.
    I closed my eyes and saw the school yard. I saw, as if it was on a loop, the bullets tear into helpless children. I wanted to be sick but fought the urge. My feelings were unimportant, my emotions