Текст книги "Mud Vein"

Автор книги: Tarryn Fisher

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Depression

I stink. Not the way you smell on a hot day when the sun toasts your skin and you smell like bologna. I wish I smelled like that. It would mean there was sun. I smell musty, like an old doll that has been locked up in a closet for years. I smell like unwashed body and depression. Yes. I slowly consider my stink and the awful way my grey streak hangs lank in my face. I don’t bother to push it off my eyes. I stay curled under the blanket like a fetus. I don’t even know how long I’ve been like this—days? Weeks? Or maybe it just feels like weeks. I’m composed of weeks, and days of weeks, and hours of weeks and days and minutes and seconds and…

I’m not even in the attic bed. It’s warmer in the attic, but a few nights ago I took too many shots of whiskey and stumbled into the carousel room, only half conscious and holding in my sick. I was too dizzy to light a fire, so I lay trembling under the feather blanket, trying not to look at the horses. Waking up there was like having a night of drinking and then finding yourself in your bed with your best friend’s boyfriend.

At first I was too shocked to move, so I just lay there paralyzed by shame and nausea. Not sure who exactly I felt like I was betraying by being in there, but felt it nevertheless. Isaac never came to find me, but considering that we were passing the bottle back and forth all night, he was probably just as sick as I was. That’s what we do lately; we congregate in the living room after dinner to sip from a bottle that fits neatly in our hands. After dinner drinks. Except dinners are getting sparse: a handful of rice, a small pile of canned carrots. There is always more liquor in our bellies than food these days. I groan at the thought of food. I need to pee and maybe be sick. I run the tip of my finger back and forth, back and forth over the cotton sheets. Back and forth, back and forth until I fall asleep. Landscape is playing. It’s always playing. The zookeeper is cruel.

Back and forth, back and forth. There is wallpaper to the left of the bed, of tiny carousel horses floating untethered through a creamy backdrop. Except they aren’t angry like the horses attached to the bed. There are no flared nostrils and you cannot see the whites of their eyes. They have furling ribbons tied to their forelocks and cranberry colored jewels decorating their saddles. To the right of the bed is a baby blue wall and centered in the middle of it, a brick fireplace. Sometimes I look at the blue wall, other times I like to count the little carousel horses on the wallpaper. And then there are times I squeeze my eyes shut so tight and pretend I’m at home in my own bed. My sheets are different, and the weight of the blanket, but if I lie very still…

That’s when things get a little crazy. I’m not even sure I want to be in my own bed. It was figuratively just as cold as this one. There is nowhere I want to be. I should embrace the cold and the snow and the prison. I should be like Corrie Ten Boom and try to find purpose in suffering. I get catatonic at that point. My thoughts, having run in circles for most of the day, shut down. I just stare until Isaac eventually carries in a plate of food and sets it on the table next to the bed. I don’t touch anything. Not for days, until he pleads with me to eat. To move. To talk to him. I stare at one of the two walls and see how long I can go without feeling. I pee in the bed. The first time it’s an accident; my bladder, stretched like a water balloon, reaches its limit. There’s another time. In my sleep I roll away from it, find a new spot. I wake up closer to the fireplace, my clothes barely damp. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finally in the place where nothing bothers me.

Spalsh

I squirm under hot water, writhing in shock. I come up gasping, trying to claw my way out of the tub. He dropped me in like a human bath bead. Water sloshes over the side of the tub and soaks into his pant legs and socks. I fight for a few more seconds, his hands holding me in the water. I don’t have the energy to fight. I let myself sink. The bath is so full that I can submerge myself completely. I sink, sink, sink into the ocean.

But there is no rest, because he grabs me under my arms and pulls me up to a sitting position. I gasp and grab the sides of the tub. I’m naked except for a sports bra and panties. He pours shampoo on my head; I bat at his hands like a child until his fingers find my scalp. Then I let him. My body, rigid a second ago, slouches as he rubs the fight out of my head. He washes me, using his hands and a sponge that looks like it came straight from a coral reef. Surgeon’s hands rub across my muscles and my skin until I’m so relaxed I can barely move. I close my eyes when he rinses my hair. Both of his hands are holding my head up, cradling it so I don’t sink beneath the water’s surface. When they suddenly stop moving I open my eyes. Isaac is staring at me from above. His eyebrows are almost touching, so deep is his consternation. I reach up without thinking and cradle his cheek with my hand. I would be worried that he could see through my thin, white sports bra, but there is nothing to see. I’m practically a boy. I take my hand away and then I start to chortle. It sounds like a burst of madness. Why do I even wear a sports bra? It’s so stupid. I should just walk around topless. I laugh harder, swallowing a mouthful of water as my body rolls to the side. I am choking—choking and laughing. Isaac pulls me up. Then all at once the sound and the choking are gone. I am Senna again. I stare at the wall behind the tap, feeling tired. Isaac grabs my shoulders and shakes me.

“Please,” he says. “Just try to live.”

My eyes are so tired. He picks me up out of the bath. I close my eyes as he kneels on the floor to dry me, then wraps me up in a towel that smells of him. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries me to the ladder. I squeeze his neck a little, just so he knows I’ll try.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I come back to life a little bit. I have the hot and horrible thought that the carousel room tried to kill me. No. It’s just a room. I tried to kill me. When my dark days recede, they come for Isaac. We take turns giving up, it seems. He locks himself in his room with the only bathroom, and I have to pee in a bucket and empty it around the back of the house. I leave him be, taking food to his room and picking up the empty plate. I keep the door to the carousel room closed. It stinks in there now. I washed the sheets in the bathtub the week before, and scrubbed at the mattress with soap and water, but the piss smell pervades. Isaac eventually comes out of his room and starts making our meals again. He doesn’t speak very much. His eyes are always red and puffy. Sow sadness, reap tears, my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come?

Days, then a week, then two. Isaac gives me the silent treatment. And when there are only two people in the universe, silence is very, very loud. I lurk in his places: the kitchen, the carousel room where he sits against the wall and stares at the horses. I don’t sleep in the attic room anymore; I curl up downstairs on the sofa and wait. Wait for him to wake up, wait for him to look at me, wait for emotions to implode.

One night I am sitting at the table … waiting … while he stands at the stove stirring something in a huge cast iron pot. We are running out of food. The freezer has seven plastic bags of indeterminate meat and about four pounds of frozen vegetables. All lima beans, which Isaac hates. The pantry is no less barren looking. We have one sack of potatoes and a two-pound bag of rice. There are some cans of ravioli, but I keep telling myself we will be out of here before I have to eat those. When he hands me my plate a few minutes later I try to catch his eyes, but they run from me. I push my plate away. The rim of my plate bumps against his. He looks up.

“Why are you treating me like this? You can barely look at me.”

I don’t expect him to answer. Maybe.

“Do you remember how we met?” he asks. I get a chill.

“How could I not?”

He runs his tongue across his teeth before leaning away from his food. He’s certainly looking at me this time.

“Do you want the story?”

“I want to know why you can’t look at me,” I say.

He rubs the tips of his fingers together as if to rub away grease. But there is no grease. We are eating dry rice with a little potato and ground beef mashed into it.

“I had a flight booked, Senna. On Christmas Day. I was supposed to leave that morning and go home to see my family. I was on my way to the airport when I turned my car around and went home. I don’t fucking know why I did it. I just felt like I needed to stay. I went for a jog to clear my head and there you were, running out of the trees.”

I stare at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me?”

“Believed what? That you went for a jog instead of hopping on a plane?”

He leans forward. “No. Don’t make me feel stupid for thinking that there is purpose. We aren’t animals. Life isn’t random. I was supposed to be there.”

“And I was supposed to get raped? So that we could meet? Because that’s what you’re saying. If life isn’t random then it was in someone’s plan for that bastard to do what he did to me!” I am out of breath, my chest heaving. Isaac licks his lips.

“Maybe it was in someone’s plan for me to be there for you…”

“To keep me alive,” I finish.

“No. I didn’t say—”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you’re saying. My savior, sent to keep the pathetic, sniveling, Senna from killing herself.”

“Senna!” he slams his fist on the table, and I jump.

“When we found each other we were both pretty dead and defeated. Something grew despite that.” He shakes his head. “You breathed life back into me. It was instinct for me to be there with you. I didn’t want to save you, I just didn’t know how to leave you.”

There is a long pause.

Not even Nick did that. Because Nick didn’t love me unconditionally. He loved me so long as I was his muse. So long as I gave him something to believe in.

“Isaac…” his name falls flat. There is something I want to say but I don’t know what it is. There is no real point in saying anything at all. Isaac is married and our situation leaves little room for anything but survival.

“I need to go get some wood,” I announce.

He smiles sadly, shakes his head.

I cook dinner that night. Red meat; I don’t know what kind it is until I smell it in the skillet and know it’s some type of game. Who took the time to hunt these animals for us? Bag them? Freeze them?

Isaac doesn’t come down from his room. I put his plate of food in the oven to keep it warm and climb onto the kitchen table. It’s big enough for two people to lie side by side. I curl up in the middle, my face turned toward the window. I can see the window above the sink, and in it the reflection of the doorway. The kitchen is his go-to place. I’ll wait for him here. It feels good to be somewhere I’m not supposed to be. The zookeeper wouldn’t care that I’m lying on his table, but in general, tables aren’t for lying on. So, I feel mildly rebellious. And that helps. No it doesn’t. Who am I kidding? I unroll myself from the ball I’m curled into and jump down from the table. Walking to the silverware drawer, I pull it back forcefully until the silver clatters. I eye its contents, examining the selection: long, short, curved, serrated. I reach for the knife Isaac uses to peel potatoes. I run the tip across my palm, back and forth, back and forth. If I press a little harder I can draw blood. I watch my skin dent underneath the tip as I wait for the puncture, the inevitable sharp pain, the red, red release.

“Stop it.”

I jump. The knife clatters to the floor. I place my palm over the blood that is beading on my skin. It wells, then flows down my arm. Isaac is standing in the doorway in pajama bottoms and nothing else. I glance at the stove, wondering if he’s come down because he’s hungry. He walks briskly over to where I’m still standing and bends to pick up the knife. Then he does something that makes my brow furrow. He puts it back in my hand. My mouth twitches as he wraps my fingers around the hilt. I watch, numb and wordless, as he points the sharp end at the skin just above his heart. My hand is locked underneath his, gripping the hilt with trepidation. I can’t move my fingers—not even a little bit. He uses his strength against me when I try to pull away, yanking my arm and the blade toward him. I see blood where the knife is pressing into his skin, and I cry out. He’s forcing me to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to see his blood. He pushes harder.

“No!” I struggle to break free, pulling my body backwards. “Isaac, no!” He lets go. The knife drops to the floor between us. I stand, riveted, and watch as the red gathers and then trickles down his chest. The cut is no longer than an inch, but it’s deeper than one I would have made on myself.

“Why would you do that?” I cry. That was so cruel. I grab the only thing I see—a dishtowel—and I hold it against the cut that we made together. He has blood running down his chest, I have it running down my arm. It’s morbid and confusing.

When I look up for his answer he is looking at me intently.

“What did you feel?” he asks.

I shake my head. I don’t know what he’s asking me. Does he need stitches? There must be a needle somewhere around here … thread.

“What did you feel when that happened?” He’s trying to catch my eyes, but I can’t take my eyes from his blood. I don’t want the life to bleed out of Isaac.

“You need stitches,” I say. “At least two…”

“Senna, what did you feel?”

It takes me a minute to focus. He really wants me to answer that? I open and close my mouth.

“Hurt. I don’t want you to hurt. Why would you do that?”

I am so angry. Confused.

“Because that’s what I feel when you hurt yourself.”

I drop the dishtowel. Nothing dramatic—it’s just become too heavy to hold along with my understanding. I look down at where it lies between my feet. There is a bright red stain on one side of it. Isaac bends to pick it up. He also picks up the knife and places it back in my hand. Grabbing my wrist, he leads me back to the table and firmly plants me in front of it.

“Write,” he says, gesturing to the wood.

“What?”

He grabs the hand that’s holding the knife. I try to pull away again, but his eyes still me.

“Trust me.”

I stop fighting.

He presses the tip into the wood this time. Carves a straight line. “Write here,” he says.

I know what he’s telling me, but it’s not the same.

“I don’t write on my body. I cut it.”

“You write your pain on your skin. With a knife. Straight lines, deep lines, jagged lines. It’s just a different kind of word.”

I get it. All at once. I feel grief for everything that I am. Landscape is playing in the background, a strange soundtrack, a constant soundtrack.

I look down at the smooth wood tabletop. Pressing down, I carve the line we made deeper. I wriggle the blade around a little bit. It feels good. I do it some more. I add more lines, more curves. My movement becomes more frantic each time the knife meets the table. He must think I’ve gone mad. But even if he does, he doesn’t move. He stands behind my shoulder as if he’s there to supervise my assault. When I’m done I toss the knife away from me. Both hands are pressed against my carvings as I lean over the table. I’m breathing hard, like I’ve just run six miles. I have, emotionally. Isaac reaches down and touches the word I’ve made. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even know what it said until I watched his fingers trace it. Surgeon’s fingers. Drummer’s fingers.

HATE

“Who do you hate?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

I do a short spin into his chest, forgetting that he’s right behind me. He grabs the tops of my arms and clutches me against him. Then he wraps his arm around my head, forcing my face against his chest. The other is circling my back. He holds me and I shake. And I swear … I swear he’s just healed me a little bit.

“I still see you, Senna,” he says into my hair. “You can’t ever stop seeing what you recognize as part of yourself.”

A week later, Landscape stops playing. I am stepping out of my shallow, lukewarm bath when her voice cuts off in the middle of the chorus. I wrap a towel around myself and dart out of the bathroom to find Isaac. He’s in the kitchen when I come careening around the corner still clutching the towel to my dripping body. We stare at each other for a good two minutes, waiting for it to start up again, thinking there is a kink in the system. But it never comes back. It feels like a relief until the silence kicks in. True, deafening silence. We are so used to the noise, it takes a few days to acclimate to the loss of it. That’s what it’s like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it, then you feel bare without your chains. I wonder if we ever get out of here, will we feel the loss? It sounds like a joke, but I know how the human mind works.

Two days later the power goes. We are in darkness. Not just in the house. November has come. The sun will not rise on Alaska for two months. It’s the ultimate darkness. There is nowhere to find light, except crouched in front of the fire as our logs dwindle. That’s when I know we’re going to die.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We eat the last potato sometime in late November. Isaac’s face is so drawn I would syphon out my own body fat to give him if I had any.

“Something is always trying to kill me,” I say one day as we sit watching the fire. The floor is our perpetual hangout, in the attic room—as close to the fire as we can get. Light and heat. Light and heat. The barrels of diesel in the shack are empty, the cans of ravioli in the pantry are empty, the generator is empty. We’ve chopped down the trees on our side of the fence. There are no more trees. I watched Isaac hack at them from the attic window whispering “Hurry, hurry…” until he cut them down and hauled the logs inside to burn. But there is snow, plenty of snow. We can eat the snow, bathe in the snow, drink the snow.

“It seems that way, yes. But so far nothing has been able to.”

“What?”

“Kill you,” he says.

Oh yeah. How easily the brain flits about when there is no food to hold it in place.

Lucky me.

“We are running out of food, Senna.” He looks at me like he really needs me to understand. Like I haven’t seen the goddamn pantry and fridge. We’ve both lost so much weight I don’t know how I could ignore it. I know what we’re running out of: food … wood … hope…

Isaac set the traps we found in the shed, but with an electric fence we’re not sure how many animals can get to our side without frying themselves first. Our power is out, but the fence remains on. The hum of the electricity feels like a slap in the face.

“If our generator ran out of power, there must be another power source on the property.”

Isaac puts another log on the fire. It bites gingerly at the wood, and I close my eyes and say, hotter, hotter, hotter…

“It’s all been planned out, Senna,” he says. “The zookeeper meant for us to run out of generator fuel the same week that we were plunged into permanent darkness. Everything that is happening has been planned.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.

“We have enough for another week, maybe, if we’re careful,” he tells me.

The same question as always ricochets through my brain. Why would someone go through all the trouble to get us here, only to let us starve and freeze? I ask my question out loud.

Isaac answers with less enthusiasm than I asked. “Whoever did this is crazy. Trying to make sense of crazy makes you just as crazy.”

I suppose he’s right. But I’m already crazy.

Three days later we run out of food. Our last meal is a handful of rice cooked over the fire in a pot that Isaac rigs with metal poles he found in the shed. It is barely soft enough to chew. Isaac gives me the larger portion, but I leave most of it on my plate. I don’t care if I die hungry. The only truth is that I’m going to die. When they finally find my body I don’t want them cutting me open and seeing half digested rice in my stomach. It feels insulting. Prisoners always get their choice of a last meal. Where is mine? I think of the potato skins I ate over the sink. It feels good now, to know that I didn’t waste them. We ate coffee grounds last week for breakfast. It was almost funny at first, like something out of a horror, survival story, but when they clogged up my throat with their bitterness I wanted to cry.

I roll myself tighter into my blanket. It’s so cold, but we only burn two logs a day. If we can just get past that fence we can hack at the trees to our hearts’ content. Sometimes I see Isaac outside staring at it, his hands in his pockets and his head dipped back. He walks up and down with a screwdriver he found in the shed, holding it against the posts to see how far the spark jumps. I think he’s hoping for a day the zookeeper forgets. We’ve already chopped down anything that can burn, including the shed itself. The doors in the house are made of fiberglass or we would have used those too. We’ve burned furniture. Isaac sawed and hacked at the beds until only the metal frames were left. We’ve burned books. God—books! We burned the puzzles, we even pulled down the Oleg Shuplya prints, first for their wooden frames, and eventually we’d tossed in the paper as well. I could call this situation my own personal Hell, but Hell is warm. I’d love to be in Hell right now.

Isaac comes into my room. I hear him near the fireplace. He’s lighting my log. My one, precious log. We were saving it. I guess the time for saving has come to an end. Usually he leaves when he’s done, goes to his own room, but the attic room is the warmest in the house and the only one left with a burning log. I feel the mattress shift under his weight as he sits next to my cocoon.

“Do you have any of that chapstick left?”

“Yes,” I say softly. “In the closet.”

I hear him walk to the wooden armoire and move things around. We have one pink Zippo left. It’s on its last few drops of lighter fluid. We’ve been so careful, but no matter how careful you are, things eventually run out.

“Chapstick will keep the fire burning longer,” he says. “It’ll make it hotter, too.”

Some part of my brain wants to know how he knows this; I have a snarky question on the tip of my tongue: Did you learn that in medical survival school? But I can’t formulate the words to ask him.

“I’m going to sleep in here with you,” he says, sitting on the bed. I open my eyes and stare into the whiteness of the comforter. The color white is so prevalent here. I was growing sick of it when everything went dark. Now I long for it. His weight lifts from the bed as he unrolls me. The minute the last of the blanket falls away, I begin shivering uncontrollably. I stare up at him from my back. He looks ragged. He’s lost so much weight it scares me. Wait. Did I already have that thought? I haven’t looked at myself in weeks. But my clothes—the ones the zookeeper left me—they hang and wilt over me like I’m a child wearing my mother’s things. Isaac leans down and scoops me up. I don’t know where he’s getting his strength. I can barely hold my head up anymore. The blanket is still underneath me. He lays me on the ground in front of the fire and spreads the blanket out around me. I don’t understand what he’s doing. Then my heart starts to pound. Isaac stands over me. I’m between his legs. Our eyes lock as he lowers himself over me; first to his knees, then his elbows. I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I close my eyes and feel his weight, a little at first, then all at once. His body is warm. I moan from the shock of it. I want to wrap myself around him, absorb his heat, but I hold still. He pulls me up just enough to wrap his arms around my back. My eyes are still closed, but I can feel his breath on my face.

“Senna,” he says softly.

“Hmmm?”

“Roll with me.”

It takes me a minute to get it. The human brain works like a bad internet connection when it’s freezing. He wants to be wrapped in the cocoon with me. I think.

I barely nod. My neck is stiff. He tucks the edge of the blanket around us and I tense myself. I feel brittle, like my bones are made of ice. His weight might crack me. We roll ourselves in the blanket and end up on our sides. I can feel Isaac’s heat pressed against my front, and the fire’s heat licking at my back. I realize he positioned me here on purpose to place me closest to the fire.

My hands are on his chest, so I rest my cheek there too. He still smells like spices. I start listing them all in my head: cardamom, coriander, rosemary, cumin, basil… After a few minutes my shivering becomes less. He reaches for my wrist. I don’t know why. I don’t really care. His thumb presses into my skin. He’s taking my pulse, I realize.

“Am I dying, doctor?” I ask quietly. It takes energy to put those words together in the right order, and even while I say them my brain sees a pink spade lying on green, green grass.

“Yes,” he says. “We both are. We all are.”

“Comforting.”

He kisses my forehead. His lips are cold, but his warmth is bringing me back to life. A little bit at least.

“When was the last time you let yourself feel?” his words slur like he’s been drinking, but the alcohol is long gone, it’s the cold that makes it that way.

I shake my head. For someone like me feeling is dangerous. There is nothing left to fear when you’re already dying. I lift my face to relay my answer without words.

His hands find my face.

“Can I make you feel? One more time?”

I cling to him, my fists tightening on his shirt. My yes.

His mouth is so warm. We are shivering and kissing, our bodies firing off heat and desire. We are cold and we are weak. We are emotionally destroyed. We are desperate to feel each other, and to feel hope—to feel one last piece of living. There is nothing joyful or sweet in our mouths. Just frenzy and panic. I taste salt. I’m crying. A kiss unclogged my tear ducts, I think.

When we are done kissing we lie very still.

His lips move against my hair. “I’m sorry, Senna.”

I tremble. He’s sorry? Him? “For what?”

There is a million year pause.

“I couldn’t save you this time.”

I cry into his chest. Not because he couldn’t. Because he wanted to.

I think I doze off. When I wake Isaac’s breathing is steady. I think he’s still asleep, but when I shift to change positions, he lifts his hands from my lower back and lets me move around until I’m comfortable again. We lie like that for hours. Until the fire burns out its last flame and I know the night has curved into day, even though day no longer shows her face. Until I want to sob from relief and grief. Until I remember all of the ineffable hurt from years ago that he salved with the tender way he loves. We are going to die. But at least I’ll die with someone who loves me.

Isaac is touch. Why have I ever thought anything different? He held me once to soothe me from my nightmares, and now he is holding me to protect me from the cold. He touches right where it hurts, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t hurt. Yes, Isaac is touch. I see the pink spade again. I can feel the grit of coffee grounds as I work them between my teeth. Then I see The Great Wall of China, and I know my brain is short circuiting, passing along images of things that are in my subconscious. When I see the table flash in my mind—the carved up, heavy, wooden table from the kitchen downstairs—I feel something true. It’s like when I sleep and my brain tells me what to write. What is it about the table…? Then I see it, but I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open. Don’t forget, I tell myself. You have to remember the table…

The fire goes.

Our hearts are slowing. We are resolute.