Mud Vein

by Tarryn Fisher

  I know. I see it all—what I saw last night in my delirium. The table from my book. I wrote about it metaphorically; the concept that all great things are made around a table: relationships, plans for war, the meals that keep our bodies alive. A table is an image that represents life and choices. We see it in Camelot when King Arthur’s knights gathered around the Round Table, and in the paintings of The Last Supper. We see it in commercials where families eat dinner, laughing and passing a basket of bread. I wrote about a table that was a well. I was at the bottom end of my relationship with Nick and I was trying to illustrate where we had gone wrong. We needed to come back to the table, draw life into our dying relationship. It was melodramatic and stupid, but the zookeeper brought it to life. Built it in our kitchen, and I refused to see it.

  I roll onto my knees and crawl … to the hole. I make it halfway down before I fall. I don’t know if the cold has numbed me or if my lack of air is consuming my senses, but I feel nothing when I crack against the wood. I crawl some more toward the stairs … toward the table. I … can’t … breathe…

  I am there. My scribbles in the wood are there. I can feel them with the tips of my fingers, but it’s so dark. I go to the cabinet, under the sink, and find the industrial flashlight that Isaac won’t let us use unless it’s an emergency. I flip the switch and place it on top of the counter, pointing it toward the object of my interest. I stagger forward. I know what I need to do, but I don’t have the energy to do it. Three steps feel like twenty. I stand sideways and place my hip just below the lip of the table. Planting one foot against the wall, and the other on the floor, I push. With all and everything.

  At first there is nothing, then I hear the grating. It is louder than the hissing, rattling noise that is coming from between my lips. It is confirmation. It’s enough to make me push harder. I push until the heavy wooden slab has moved off center and is wobbling and ready to fall. I stand back to watch. There is an impressive thud as it angles sideways and then tips over, landing upright between the base and the wall. I stumble forward and peer down. I am looking into a dark hole. It’s a well. Or, sort of, because there is no water. There is something down the table/well. But I still can’t breathe, and Isaac is dying. I have nothing to lose. I climb onto the bench and swing my legs over the side. Then I jump.

  The fall isn’t a long one. But when I land I hear a crack. There is no pain, but I know I’ve broken a part of my body, and in a minute, when the shock passes and I try to stand up, I’m going to know what part that is. There is light filtering in from the flashlight I left in the kitchen; it stabs gently at the darkness around me, but it’s not enough. Why didn’t I bring it with me? I feel around with my hands, above my head, to my left. The zookeeper is precise. If he gave me a dark hole, he will provide a light with which to see it. The floor is uneven—dirt. I am on my back. I reach lower. My fingers touch a metal cylinder the width of my forearm. I lift it, bring it to my face. A flashlight.

  Neither of my arms is broken. That’s so good, I tell myself. So, so good. But it means something else is broken. I am breathing again. Not normally, but better. The fall must have knocked the breath back into me, given my body some perspective. I grimace and mess with the flashlight until my fingers find the switch. It powers on with bold, white light. I direct the beam at my body, and my fear is confirmed. There is a bone sticking out of my shin, pink and white. As soon as I see it, the pain hits me. It envelops, folding me over, stretching me out. I writhe. I open my mouth to cry out, but there is no sound for this kind of pain. I have nothing in my stomach to vomit. So I retch instead.

  I don’t have time to waste, so while I retch I direct the beam around. My eyes water but I can make out piles of wood, bags of rice, cans and cans and cans of food, shelves of food. I pull off my shirt, it’s just one of three I’m wearing. I make a tourniquet, tying it above my knee. I gasp as I pull myself up. You’re going to faint, I think. And there isn’t time for that. Breathe!

  I drag myself to the wood. I have to make him warm. I have to bring him back. I’m not a doctor; I studied art history, for God’s sake, but I know that Isaac has one foot in this goddamn cabin and one foot in the fog beyond. There is a bag of rice that has split open. I rip at the hole and quickly turn the bag over, emptying the rice onto the floor. Then leaning against the wall, I drop one, two, three logs into the sack. I grab a can of creamed corn off a shelf—it’s the nearest thing to me—and toss that in, too. There is a steel ladder in the corner of room, propped against a wall. Despite the cold, I am sweating; sweating and shivering. The zookeeper left us everything we needed to survive another…what? Six months? Eight? It was sitting here all along while we starved, and we didn’t know. I pass a metal box with a big, red medical cross on it. I rip open the door. Inside there are bottles, so many bottles. I grab for the aspirin, popping off the lid, I tilt my head back and let half a dozen pills slide into my mouth. There is a roll of gauze. I rip the package open with my teeth until the material unravels in my fingers. I bend down and wrap it around the bone, flinching, feeling hot blood on my fingers. I want to look at the bottles, see what he left us. Isaac first.

  I scream when I open the ladder … it’s stiff with cold and time, and it jars my lower body, shooting pain everywhere. I climb backwards, keeping my leg extended and using my arms and good leg to lift myself up each rung. My arms burn, dragging the sack with me. When I reach the top of the ladder I have to lift my leg over the side of the well. There is no way to get to the floor gracefully and without pain. Your leg is already broken. What more can happen? I glance at the bone: nerve damage, tissue damage, I could bleed to death, die of an infection. A lot more, Senna. And then I drop my good leg to the floor with my sack clutched against my chest and my eyes closed. I stand there for a second, shivering and wanting to die. Another flight of stairs, another ladder, then I’ll be there. First, the can opener. This is nothing, I tell myself. There is a bone sticking out of your leg. It can’t kill you. But it can. Who knows what type of infection I might get after this? My pep talk doesn’t bring me comfort. If Isaac dies, his death will kill me. My leg is preventing me from getting to Isaac. Ignore the leg. Get to Isaac.

  It’s easier to sit on the stairs and lift myself backward, sticking my injured leg straight out while I use my arms and good leg to lift myself. I toss my sack up ahead of me. I feel every bump, every movement. The pain is so intense I am beyond screaming. It is taking concentration not to pass out. I’m sweating. I can feel fat rivulets rolling down the sides of my face and the back of my neck. I use the railing to lift myself up on the top step, then I hop to the ladder. This is going to be the hard part. Unlike the ladder in the well, this one angles straight up. There is nothing to lean on and the rungs are narrow and slippery. I sob with my face pressed against the wall. Then I pull myself together and drag myself up Mt. Everest.

  I lay the logs. I light them. Just one at first, then I add a second. I put his head in my lap and rub his chest. I’ve done so much research as a writer; I know that when someone has hypothermia you’re supposed to focus on building heat in the chest, head and neck. Rubbing their limbs will push cold blood back toward the heart, lungs and brain, making things worse. I know I’m supposed to give him the heat from my body, but I can’t get my pants off, and even if I could I wouldn’t know how and where to put my body with a bone sticking out of it. I feel so much guilt. So much. Isaac was right. I knew the zookeeper was playing a game with me. I knew it when I saw the lighters and the carousel room. But I shut down and refused to help him figure things out. I shut down. Why? God. If I’d put two and two together, we could have found that well weeks ago. If he dies it’s my fault. He’s here and it’s my fault. I don’t even know why. But I want to. This is a game, and if I want to get out, I have to find the truth.

  The Carousel

  There is a carousel in Mukilteo. It sits in a copse of evergreens at the bottom of a hill called The Devil’s Backbone. The animals impaled on that ride are angry, their eyes ro
lling, heads kicked back like something has spooked them. It’s what you would expect from a ride that sits on the devil’s tailbone. Isaac took me there for my thirtieth birthday, on the last day of winter.

  I remember being surprised that he knew it was my birthday, and that he knew where to take me. Not to a pretentious dinner, but to a clearing in the woods where a little bit of dark magic still lived.

  “As your doctor, I have access to your medical records,” he reminded me, when I asked how he knew. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He loaded me into his car and played a rap song. Six months ago my music was wordless, now I was listening to rap. Isaac was a virus.

  The Devil’s Backbone is curved like a serpent; it’s a steep rock path you half walk, half skid down. Isaac held my hand as walked, dodging boulders that jutted out of the ground like knobs on a spine. When we stepped into the circle of the trees, the moon was already hanging over the carousel. My breath caught. Right away, I knew there wasn’t something right. The colors were wrong, the animals were wrong, the sentiment was wrong.

  Isaac handed five dollars to an old man sitting at the controls. He was eating sardines out of a can with his fingers. He stuck the five dollars in the front pocket of his shirt, and stood to open the gate.

  “Choose wisely,” Isaac whispered as we crossed the threshold. I went left; he went right.

  There was a ram and a dragon and an ostrich. I passed them by. This felt important, as if what I chose to ride on my thirtieth birthday said something. I stopped beside a horse that looked more angry than scared. Black with an arrow piercing its heart. Its head was bowed like it was ready for the fight, arrow or not. I chose that one, glancing over at Isaac as I swung my leg over the saddle. He was a few rows up, already on a white horse. It had a medical cross on its saddle and blood on its hooves.

  Perfect, I thought.

  I liked that he didn’t feel the need to ride next to me. He took his decision as seriously as I took mine, and in the end we each rode alone.

  There was no music. Just the swish of the trees and the hum of machinery. The old man let us ride twice. When it was over Isaac came over to help me down. His finger stroked my pinkie, which was still wrapped around the cracked pole that speared my horse.

  “I’m in love with you,” he said.

  I looked for the old man. He wasn’t by his post. He wasn’t anywhere.

  “Senna…”

  Maybe he went to get more sardines.

  “Senna?”

  “I heard you.”

  I slid off my horse and stood facing Isaac. My hair was pulled up or I would have started messing with it. He wasn’t very far from me, maybe just the distance of a single step. We were wedged in between two gory, death-infatuated carousel horses.

  “How many times have you been in love, Doctor?”

  He pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and looked out at the trees behind my shoulder. I kept my eyes on his face so they wouldn’t wander to the ink on his arms. His tattoos confused me. They made me feel like I didn’t know him at all.

  “Twice. The love of my life, and now my soulmate.”

  I start. I was the writer; the worder of words—and I rarely used the beaten up idea of a soulmate. Love was sinned against too often for me to believe in that tired old concept. If someone loved you as much as they loved themselves, why did they cheat and break promises and lie? Wasn’t it in our nature to preserve ourselves? Shouldn’t we preserve our soul match with as much fervor?

  “You’re saying there is a difference between those two?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he said. He said it with so much conviction I almost believed him.

  “Who was she?”

  Isaac looked at me.

  “She was a bass player. An addict. Beautiful and dangerous.”

  The other Isaac, the one I don’t know, loved a woman who was very different from me. And now Doctor Isaac is saying he’s in love with me. As a rule, I try not to ask questions. It gives people a sense of friendship when you ask them things, and there is no getting rid of them. Since I can’t seem to get rid of Isaac anyway, I deem it safe to ask the most pressing question. The one that only he could answer.

  “Who were you?”

  It starts to rain. Not predictable Washington drizzle, but fast, fat bullets of water that explode when they hit the ground.

  Isaac grabs the bottom of his sweater and pulls it over his head. I stand very still even though I’m startled. He’s shirtless in front of me.

  “I was this,” he said.

  Most people marked themselves with scattered ideas: a heart, a word, a skull, a pirate woman with huge breasts—little parts that represented something. Isaac had one tattoo and it was continuous.

  A rope. It wound around his waist and chest, looped around his neck like a noose. It wrapped twice around each bicep before coming to an end right above the words I’ve seen poking out from underneath his sleeves. It was painful to look at. Uncomfortable.

  I understood. I knew what it was like to be bound.

  “I’m this now,” he said. He used two fingers to point to the words on his forearm.

  Die to Save

  My eyes go to his other arm.

  Save to Die

  “What does that mean?”

  Isaac looked at me closely, like he didn’t know if he should tell me.

  “A part of me had to die in order to save myself.” My eyes move to his left arm.

  Save to Die

  He saved lives to die to himself. To keep the bad part dead he had to be constantly reminded of the frailty of life. Being a doctor was Isaac’s only salvation.

  God.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?”

  “One is a choice, and one is not.”

  I’d never thought of love as a choice. Rather, it seemed like the un-choice. But if you stayed with someone who was self-destructing and chose to keep loving, I suppose it could be a choice.

  I waited for him to go on. To explain how I fit in.

  “There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye,” he said. “Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are these invisible strings.” As if to make his point, his finger traced a black ribbon that ran through my horse’s mane. “Maybe the chances that you’ll find each and every one of your soulmates is slim. But sometimes you’re lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it’s not so much a choice to love them through their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws.”

  He was talking about soulmate polygamy. How could you take something like that seriously?

  “You’re a fool,” I breathed. “You don’t make any sense.”

  I felt angry with him. I wanted to lash out and make him see how stupid he was for believing in such flimsy ideals.

  “I make too much sense for you,” he said.

  I shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it. The distance between us grew for just a second as his left foot took a step backward to keep his balance. Then I launched myself at him, throwing him against the painted horse at his back. Fury in fists. I pounded at his chest and slapped at his face while he stood and let me. How dare he. How dare he.

  Every blow I delivered set my anger to a lower simmer. I hit him until it was gone and I was mostly spent. Then I slid down, my hands touching the metal diamonds of the carousel floor as my back rested against the hooves of the horse I’d ridden.

  “You can’t fix me,” I said, looking at his knees.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I’m mangled,” I said. “On the inside and the outside.”

  “And yet I love you.”

  He leaned down and I felt his hands on my wrists. I let him pull me up. I was wearing a black fleece that had a zipper down the length of it. Isaac reached for my neck; grabbing the top of the zipper, he pulled it down to my waist.
I was so shocked I didn’t have time to react. Minutes ago he had been bare-chested, now I was. If I had nipples they would have peaked in the frigid air. If.

  I am just scars and pieces of a woman. Isaac has seen me like this. In a sense he made me like this, with his scalpel and steady hands, but I still reached up to cover my chest. He stopped me. Reaching for my waist he lifted me up until I was sitting sideways in the saddle of my pierced horse. He opened my fleece the rest of the way, then he kissed the skin where my breasts used to be. He kissed softly, over the scars. My heart—surely he could feel my pounding heart. My nerve endings had been damaged, but I felt his warm lips and his breath move across my skin. I made a sound. It wasn’t a real sound. It was air and relief. Every breath I’d ever caught came whooshing out of me at once.

  Isaac kissed up my neck, behind my ear, my chin, the corner of my mouth. I turned my head when he tried to kiss the other corner, and we met in the middle. Soft lips and his smell. He’d kissed me once before in the foyer of my house, it had been a drumbeat. This kiss was a sigh. It was relief and we were so drunk from it that we clung to each other like we’d been waiting for a kiss like this our whole, entire lives. His hands wrapped around my ribcage, inside of my fleece. Mine were holding his face. He pulled me off the horse. I steered him toward the only bench on the carousel. It was a chariot, curved with a leather seat. Isaac sat. I sat on his lap.

  “Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I said. I pulled down the zipper on his pants. I was determined. I was sure. He didn’t move his hands from my waist. He didn’t speak. He waited as I lifted myself up, pulling off my jeans and climbing back onto his lap. I left my panties on. His pants were pushed mid thigh. We were clothed and we were not. Isaac let me do everything, and that’s the way I needed it to be; half concealed, in the cold air, with the ability to climb off and leave if I wanted to. I felt less than I thought I would. I also felt more. There was no fear, just the vibrations of something loud that I didn’t quite understand. He kissed me while we moved. Then once, when it was over. The old man never came back. We zipped our clothes, and walked back up the hill chilled and in a daze. There were no more words between us. The next day I filed a restraining order against him.