As quickly as I could, I pulled off the tie, then my suit jacket, my shoes and my pants. But when I unbuttoned my shirt, something stopped me.

Taped to my left breast was a wide piece of gauze. The pain in my chest was apparently not just metaphysical. And, to my horror, I noticed that leaking through the gauze was blood.

My blood.

I ripped off the tape and slowly peeled away the gauze bandage. There was blood and an oily ointment, as if I had suffered through some sort of medical operation, and, beneath that, something strange seemingly pasted onto a patch of my skin just above the nipple.

I started wiping away the ooze, but it hurt too much, my skin was for some reason too raw. With a little bit of water and soap, I gently washed away the ointment and blood. Gradually, bit by bit, the thing underneath became clear.

A heart, bright red, with two small flowers peeking out from behind either side and a fluttering banner across it all, a banner with a name inscribed that I had to read backward in the mirror: Chantal Adair.

I just stared at it for a moment, unable to process what it was. When it came to me, I started rubbing at it, I started scrubbing it, as hard as the pain would allow. But nothing happened. It wasn’t pasted on at all. There it was, and there it would stay. For the rest of my life.

Damn. I had gotten myself tattooed.

AFTER I showered and shaved, I put on a pair of jeans but no shirt. I sat on my ruined couch, with a lamp on and a mirror in my hand. Through the mirror I stared at the tattoo on my chest.

Chantal Adair.

I struggled to remember who she was and why I thought her important enough to inscribe her name atop my left breast for all eternity. I struggled to remember her and I failed. The entire night, after I stumbled out the door of Chaucer’s, was a total blank. Anything could have happened. Was she the motorcycle blonde who had started my engine to running that evening? Most likely. But maybe she was someone else, some mysterious woman I met in the course of a long, bleary tour through the darkness. And was my attempt to immortalize her on the skin above my heart a terrible drunken mistake, or was it something else?