Beautiful Wreck

by Larissa Brown

  They’d hunted me, and like a pursued animal, my heart raced hard and I shrieked. My hand spasmed, fingers tapped my wrist, once, twice, and I felt the familiar endless falling, the blinding pain. A serrated knife dragged through my brain.

  I convulsed on the floor of an empty lab, alarms blaring on all sides.

  FREEZING

  The future

  The company hid me. They wouldn’t let me go.

  I told everything to Jeff and Morgan. I told them about my family, about the smells and sounds of the house and farm, about haying and the ocean and feasts and axes. Morgan’s interest perked up around weapons and jewelry, and she listened more closely. Words tumbled out about everything, the ravine and the enormous sky.

  About Heirik. I could hardly describe him. I was loved by a powerful chieftain, had been close to becoming his wife. None of those words worked.

  A long stream of people wanted to talk with me, more than ever before. Programmers, physicists, historians, therapists. A reconstructive surgeon. Even the elusive, never-before-seen owners of the company sent their people. Neurologists grilled me about the sensations I’d experienced and the physical aftereffects. Costume historians asked about the exact design of my shift, which now sat in an air-tight baggie somewhere deep in this glacier. My cherry dress—the one I’d loved and lived in for so long—laid there with it, maybe hanging, freeze-dried like a fish.

  Now I wore clothes like an inmate, drawstring pants, soft t-shirts. They wanted to study me, study what happened, avoid trouble, delve into possibility. I huddled the whole time everyone came and went and talked, my knees drawn up, a big pale sweater wrapped tight, my arms lost inside.

  They said I would be given the best of everything, anything I wanted, as long as I stayed put. As long as I told no one else about where I’d been. As if these were choices.

  They had never made it public that one of their people was missing. The secret of my disappearance became the secret of my return—and of what they now knew the tank could do.

  They gave me two impeccable, frigid rooms to live in, inside the prettiest blue cave of the glacier. I didn’t struggle against it. I could have lived anywhere. I burrowed into the downy blankets of those rooms and stared. Mist crawled out of air conditioning vents, high on the walls. It formed a cloud cover, as if there could ever be a sky in here.

  When I asked the room, a fire sprang up in my fireplace, without scent. Without wood or smoke at all. I looked into its blue falseness and thought of Brosa, breathing life into an apricot-orange ember.

  Morgan visited sometimes, and I gave her coffee and listened to her questions, over and over, about the jewelry and knives we’d seen at the market, the bracelets Heirik wore, and for which occasions. I told her about his hands.

  I let my heart pour out, bloody on the white rug, telling her how powerful my love was, how I belonged at his side, at the head of my household and farm. I told her about the fight on the beach, and she asked about spears. I talked of Ageirr’s hatred and grief, how I had to tell Heirik about Fjoðr. I tried to capture in words what the chief was like at feasts, that indescribable mix of angry and entitled and proud and shy. Heirik was gorgeous, I told her, even though everyone said he was so ugly. I told her about his voice, his bloody mark, his pitch-dark hair and incandescent eyes. Told her how people didn’t truly see him.

  She wanted to know about his ax. The manner in which its head was attached to its handle.

  “Jen,” she said. “He’s been dead a thousand years.”

  I made a small plan. It wasn’t an escape plan, or even a good or honorable plan at all, just a set of instructions to get my heart to stop aching.

  I would read the diary, but only after a hundred days. I’d save it, with the sure knowledge that it waited in my electronic files, just as patiently as Swimmer waited under the mattress of my cushy bed. And then on Day 100, I would read it all, every poetic and lovely line, and I’d destroy it. I would dissolve the files in the river of time, and they would rush away in pieces so small they could never be found.

  I’d destroy anything I had left. Even Swimmer. I’d sneak into Morgan’s studio and melt my little knife. That was my plan.

  I set the apartment to count down the days, telling me how far I’d come. It was the only way I knew that time passed.

  On Day 29, the psychologists and surgeons agreed I was ready to heal.

  A shiny light pierced my eye, followed over and over by what felt like a tiny ice pick. A bright needle. It sunk over and over into the soft skin around my eye. In the bony places, the pain was sharpest, and I gripped the edges of the clean table. Pain hovered just on the edge of bearable. The doctors removed the scars from my orbital bone, my temple.

  During surgery, I thought of things past. Moments like dry leaves on a breeze, lifted and were whisked away one by one. My traveling, my bumbling efforts to learn things, to love people. Images of Betta’s capable hands, Magnus’s patient eyes, Hár’s lean and grisly face. Images of the green and living house, the vast, sun-warmed fields stretching out from our high hill. An image of honor itself, like a cramped and huddling cloud. Hah. It thought it was so grand.

  When the anesthesiologist pricked my eyelid and asked, “Can you feel this?” I said no. I lied. I didn’t trust this room, without any scent. It had no colors, and none of the people looked at me. They saw me as project laid out on a sterile table, numbers in their eyes, crosshairs guiding their work.

  I breathed deep and thought of the woods—their endless whiteness kissed with a million shades of apricot, rust, orange, plum, everything revealed underneath the silver and brown bark. Here I floated at the center of a featureless, odorless white world, and nothing glowed beneath.

  They talked about my heart rate, respiration, and an irritated voice said “It hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “Nei,” I told them, my words feeling blurry, a tear on my cheek. I felt a prick in my arm, a last moment of clarity before I realized they were putting me under anyway.

  My eyes slid closed.

  My thoughts turned like a great water creature, slowly from the past to the future. The future as I felt it, progressing from the night I left the Thing. I saw possibilities, near ones and those farther away, every one as clear and solid as though I’d gone into the tank and visited in the flesh.

  Around the heartstone, Hár was whispering a scary story to the children. Svana smiled at them, as the little bodies struggled with glee and the suspense of his tale. Svana was young as a child herself, but she fed a dark-haired babe at her breast. No more than two months old, his hair black as night against her pale skin. I thought if I touched him I would feel the hard fact of his skull covered with weightless feathers of hair. They would wave with static electricity as I drew my fingers away.

  Heirik came to stand behind Svana, looking down at the child with a kind of restrained delight and awe. His eyes spoke of gratitude, commitment. He slid his hand over Svana’s shoulder and his thumb stroked her throat. Mine, his whole being said. He bent and dropped a kiss on her spun-sugar hair. He looked up, then, right at me, and his mouth curved in a small smile.

  I saw other ways, too.

  I came up out of the sea and onto the black sand again, and it was almost twilight, the sun resting on the horizon and lighting up a tremendous cloud bank with pale purples, hottest pink and gold. Against that sky, Heirik was a dark shape atop Vakr, the horse himself no more than a shadow. Drifa stood beside them, and Heirik’s hand rested on her saddle where I’d ridden her so many times, as if he were touching my thigh.

  I called him, and when he saw me he slipped from Vakr slowly, warily, as if I were the vision, not him. Then he came running, picking up speed. He crashed into the shallow water, dropped to his knees and pulled me urgently in. My face pressed against his chest, so tight. He murmured unintelligible, old words. He held me so hard, his shirt was in my mouth, blocking my breath. He pulled back to see me and captured my face in both his hands.

  And then I real
ly saw him. He was a broken thing, his features hard, eyes weary.

  “I wait for you here,” he told me in a hollow voice. His thumb was rough against my lips. “Sometimes.” The word was full of terrible longing. Hours spent walking along this shoreline, knowing just where I had gone, and hoping—with absolutely no reason to hope—that I would return. His other thumb moved along the arc of my eyebrow, pressing against bone, feeling me solid and real. His eyes searched, as if he wondered, still, whether he was dreaming.

  “I bring Drifa for you.” He dropped his hands and his eyes, shy. His loneliness and stupid hope were wide open for me to see. Evenings spent walking this icy water’s edge, an empty horse at his side.

  With a great gasp, a sucking in of a thousand gallons of air, I broke the surface of my vision. I looked around wildly at the white hospital, scentless steel surrounding me. The dead eye of a machine watching my breath.

  It would take time for me to recover, they said. My left eye twitched and ached under bandages, temporarily useless. I wouldn’t see out of it for maybe a week, maybe more.

  Long stretches of time drifted in and out of my two rooms, along with wall-sized images of the farm that I chose and discarded. I watched the arcs Jeff used in his designs. I saw the pictures of animals he would never know, animals I could now smell and taste in memory. I watched them without depth of field, indifferent goats and placid cows, eyes lost too, theirs to grazing and tricks of information and light.

  I searched beyond them for different arcs. I swiped through file after file, until my soul felt blind, too. I saw a flat Scotland laced with mist, a New England town square, a cobblestone street clattering with hooves. I came upon dance halls lined with ladies in their puff-sleeved dresses and red and ochre shawls. Skip, skip, skip. Then one caught my eye. A dark-skinned man in glowing yellow shorts. The file read Vida v. Cruz.

  I started the arc, and pre-fight excitement bloomed on the screen. Murmurs and shouts came from a packed crowd, and two fighters shifted and bounced on their toes, touched gloves, and the fight began. I remembered it suddenly, viscerally, from a year ago. I saw it on a flat screen now, on my wall, but it was the same fight I’d seen a year ago in the tank.

  It was short and brutal, and when the Locust kicked Yusef Cruz, fear seized me too late. I hadn’t thought about whether I might accidentally travel, the same way I had in the tank, wrenched into the Atlantic Ocean of another time. But I didn’t. I remained here in the rarefied air of my room, and I watched Mateus Vida lay the championship belt at his opponent’s feet.

  When that fight ended, another began, without a break. And then another. I must have sat back on my bed and pulled my feet up under me, because I found myself there later, legs numb, the artificial night of the company building gathering around me. Unfolding my stiff legs, I asked the apartment, and it told me I’d watched for seven hours.

  I did the same on Day 37, and then 38 and 39.

  The fights overflowed my mind and senses. The purity of purpose, the raw violence, the mixture of formality and savage freedom, all soothed me. I came back time and again to that one historic fight between Vida and Cruz. I watched Vida’s elegantly powerful kick until I felt like I was falling into the screen. I wanted to kick someone that way.

  I tried it.

  I stood in the silver void of my room and felt self-conscious, then even more stupid when I thought about it. There was no chance that anyone would see. No people came to visit me anymore, not now that I’d told Morgan everything I knew about buckles and weapons. There was no one who might watch me try to learn, who might laugh gently at me and tell me, Woman, you kick like a lame fox.

  Awkward at first, wobbling with uncertainty, I kicked anyway. I tried a few times, rewinding the scene to follow the path of Vida’s leg as best I could. I set the fight on repeat, and I watched the wall and kicked, again and again. I kept at it, each kick blurring into the next until my breath came in gasps and a spike of pain throbbed in my side.

  I saw flashes of images in my mind, and they mixed with the pictures on the screen. Ageirr’s sneer, the men chasing me at the beach. I let each picture go, as if it could be deleted from my brain, as thoroughly gone as a twice-trashed file. Delete forever. Yes.

  Food tasted metallic, and people didn’t come or go, so I lived on coffee and became absorbed in the old fights. I watched Mateus Vida, and dozens of other fighters. Yusef Cruz and “Cobalt” Cabral.

  I pushed the furniture to the edges of the room, and after watching hours of bouts, I’d sit on the floor and watch bios about the fighters’ lives, and vids of how they trained. I did a hundred or more push-ups every day, with both arms at first, sloppy, my guts swaying, and then soon I became stronger and could do them straight as a board, then with one arm. I forced myself through hundreds of sit-ups, while I watched other kinds of matches go by—Karate, Judo, any kind of fight.

  The days passed by, and only the apartment’s announcements made me notice the change. My arms felt wiry, and the company-issue sweats hung on my hips.

  One of my favorite fighters was Shan Rush. Called the Swift, he was balletic, a true wrestler. I called up all his bouts, everything I could find.

  I liked the pair of wings he had etched on his back—dark blue, drawing the eye like blood coursing over his shoulder blades. The wings of a stylized raven, outstretched, wingtips indelibly inked on his upper arms. I remembered the tattoo I had longed for a year ago. Now, the blue swan reminded me not of poetic, romantic death, but of real, everyday meanness.

  Rush had a small habit of tucking his wavy black hair behind his ear. He’d punch someone savagely into submission, then stand and push a lock of hair back, such a gentle gesture. Watching one of his fights, it finally struck me why I was so drawn by him. I halted the video and read his stats along the side, 175.26 cm (5'9"). It had always been my guess at Heirik’s height.

  I swiped the video off the screen and forced myself to eat dinner.

  I drew Swimmer out from under my mattress, just to look at it. It sparkled as always, the bone handle seemingly made for my grip.

  I couldn’t help it. I sought out the fight again, sought out the raven-haired wrestler, unable to keep from watching him. I looked, now, for every similarity. Rush got his opponent on the ground and punched him hard, swinging away on the edge of control, his muscles and bones moving until it almost looked like the wings worked and he was flying.

  The hvalrif handle looked pale in the flickering light of the screen. Swimmer felt light and steady in my palm. I touched the point to the skin of my arm, to let loose a drop of blood, and as I watched it bead, I knew what I wanted to do.

  I had the doctors go back over the places where my scars had been, and decorate them with my own blue-black ink. But not with the image of a raven.

  Down the nape of my neck and onto my back, the powerful lines of a whale’s big body dove. I imagined it moving with a giant gentleness and confidence into unknown water. The split curve of another whale’s tail curled around my eye, above my brow, below my lower lid. Exaggerated, lush blue, it cupped my eye like a loving hand. A single white tendril of scar remained from my burn, a resilient mark, that became part of a blooming swirl of sea.

  My wrist was encircled with more dark blue, twining sea shapes. Things that were near-runes, meaningless marks that almost, but didn’t, speak of the whale road.

  Later, I wished the wrist marks didn’t remind me so much of Heirik’s silver bracelets. They made me think of the edge of a white sleeve falling away to let my gaze and my fingers inside. I went back and had more added, until by Day 99, the stylized images of whales and nonsense climbed my arm past the points of reminder—of bracelets, of bracers, of hunting gauntlets and arm rings. Beyond all those things.

  “Day 100,” the room told me, when I woke.

  A sharp blue ray came through the ceiling mist and pierced my eyes. This was the day that I would do it—read the farm notes and throw them away. I’d let all my love well up and flow over and then I�
��d stop caring about the past. I would stop dragging my fingers slowly up my wrist, my inner arm, imagining Heirik’s fingers there, remembering the small moments until they blended with the tingling on my skin. Stop pressing my small knife to my arms here and there like little tests, reminders. I would be courageous. I’d face real pain.

  I did it right then, like a sharp and short rip, not a long rending. I pulled the diary up and let the reading tint close over my eyes.

  I lingered on the transactions first, the trades and cows and days, with a fluttering in my belly, a hesitance to read the rest. With a twitch, I turned each page of the notebook. Twelve of them. I worked my way through methodically, reading every word, saying goodbye to each one. Goodbye to juniper on the soft skin of a throat. Goodbye to hands closing on black sand, to the scent of her husband’s sweat after haying. To sheep and horsies and violet skies.

  My dry eyes itched. No tears came to hinder my contacts.

  Sooner than I was ready, the love poem came—the last few lines of the book, written in a different hand. I kissed my fingers and tried to press them to the words, to seal them away. To put away the unknown writer’s yellow birch leaves and lattice of bones, but there was no real book to touch with my moist fingers.

  At the end of the diary’s pages, trailed a string of random images from the ruins of the Viking house. Sewing needles, spindle whorls, a whetstone, a beaded charm, an iron ring of keys. My breath caught on those last two. Hildur came to mind. Her fingers clutching at beads or resting possessively on her keys.

  I’d forced her out of my mind, hadn’t thought about her in weeks, but seeing that charm, her nastiness came back like a putrid wave. Her meanness. The big ring of keys that floated on my contacts looked so much like hers. I swiped them away, but they tugged at my thoughts, and I brought them back again with a flick.