Mud Vein

  “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.

  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… br />
  The fire goes.

  Our hearts are slowing. We are resolute.

  I wake up. I am not dead. I push at Isaac’s chest to wake him up. He doesn’t move. His skin feels strange—cold and stiff. Oh my God.

  “Isaac!” I shove at him with the little bit of leverage that I have. “Isaac!”

  I press my ear to his chest. My hair is in my mouth, falling in my eyes. I can’t reach the pulse at his neck; I’m trapped between him and the blanket. I’m going to have an asthma attack. I can feel it coming. There’s not enough air in this blanket. All I can hear is my own frantic breathing. I have to unroll us, but he feels like a thousand pounds. I push him onto his back and struggle to get out of the blanket. Struggle to breathe as my airways constrict. I have to wiggle up and out. When I am free of the joint, the air hits me. It’s freezing. I need it in my lungs, but I don’t know how to get it there. I pull the blanket away from his face and press my fingers to his neck. I’m mumbling please over and over.

  Please don’t be dead.

  Please don’t leave me here alone.

  Please don’t leave me.

  Please don’t let me have this asthma attack right now.

  I can feel a pulse. It’s barely there. I roll onto my back and wheeze. It’s a terrible sound. It’s the sound of dying. Why am I always dying? I arch my back, my eyes roll. I have to help Isaac.

  The table! … What was it about the table?