Every time you want to remember what love feels like, you look for me.
That line grabbed every woman who had ever offered their throbbing little heart to a man. Because we all have someone who reminds us of what love stings like. That unreliquished love that slips between our fingers like sand. The second line of the book confused them a little. It’s why their eyes kept following my trail of words. I was dropping breadcrumbs for the disaster that was to come.
Stay the fuck away from me.
I only wrote the book because he wrote one for me. It seemed fair. Most people text, or call, or write e-mails. My love and I write each other books. Hey! Here’s a hundred thousand words of ‘Why the hell did we break up anyway?’ It was Nick who had finally crippled me; it was Nick who took my belief away. And I decided sometime after I filed the restraining order against Isaac that it was a story worth telling.
When we broke up it was his choice. Nick liked to love me. I was not like him, and he valued that. I think I made him feel more like an artist because he didn’t know how to suffer until I came into his life. But he didn’t understand me. He tried to change me. And that was our destruction. And then Isaac read that book to me, perched on the edge of my hospital bed, my breasts sitting in a medical waste container somewhere. Suddenly I was hearing Nick’s thoughts, seeing myself as he saw me, and I heard him calling to me.
Nick Nissley was perfect. Perfect looking, perfectly flawed, perfect in everything he said. His life was graceful and his words were whetted to poignancy—both written and spoken. But he didn’t mean any of them. And that was the greatest disappointment. He was a pretender, trying to grasp what it felt like to live. So, he found me looking at a lake and grabbed me. Because I wore a shroud of darkness and he wanted desperately to understand what that was like. I was charmed for a while. Charmed that someone so gifted was interested in me. I thought that by being with him, his talent would rub off on me.
I was always waiting to see what he would do next. How he would handle the waitress who spilled an entire dish of pumpkin curry on his pants (he took his pants off and ate his meal in boxers); or what he would say to the fan who tracked him down and showed up at his door while we were having sex (he signed her book half leaning out the door with his hair ruffled and a sheet wrapped around his waist). He taught me how to write by simply existing—and existing well. I can’t say for sure when it was that I fell in love with him. It might have been when he told me that I had a mud vein. It might have been days later when I realized it was true. But whatever moment it took for my heart to decide to love him, it decided swiftly, and it decided for me.
God knows I didn’t want to be in love. It was cliché—men and women and their social conformities to celebrate love. Engagement pictures made me want to vomit—especially when they were taken on railroad tracks. I always pictured Thomas the Train rolling over them, his smiley blue face beaded with their blood. I didn’t want to want those things. Love was good enough, without the three-layered almond/fondant wedding cake and the sparkly blood diamonds encased in white gold. Just love. And I loved Nick. Hard.
Nick loved wedding cake. He told me so. He also told me that he’d like for us to have one someday. In that moment, my heart rate slowed, my eyes glazed and I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. It was pretty—because it was with Nick. But I hated it. It made me angry that he’d expect me to live that way. The way normal people lived.
“I don’t want to get married,” I told him, trying to control my voice. We used to have this game we’d play. As soon as we’d see each other, we’d dialogue the physical description of what the other person looked like. It was a writer’s game. He’d always start with, button nose, limpid eyes, full lips, freckles.
Now he was looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “Well, what do you want to do then?”
We were sitting on our knees in front of his coffee table, sipping warm sake and eating lo mein with our fingers.
“I want to eat with you, and fuck and see things that are beautiful.”
“Why can’t we do that after the wedding?” he asked. He licked each of his fingers and then mine, and leaned back against the couch.
“Because I respect love too much to get married.”
“That’s bitter.”
I stared at him. Was he kidding?
“I don’t think I’m bitter just because I don’t want the same things you want.”
“We can come to a compromise. Be like Persephone and Hades,” he said.
I laughed. Too much sake. “You’re not brooding enough to be Hades, and unlike Persephone, I don’t have a mother.”
My mouth clamped shut and I started sweating. Nick’s head immediately tilted to the right. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and stood up, grabbing the containers of food and carrying them to the kitchen. He followed me in there. I wanted to kick him off my heels. Nick’s mother was still married to his father. Thirty-five years. And from what I’d seen they were happy, uncomplicated years. Nick was so well balanced it was ridiculous.
“Is she dead?”
He had to ask twice.
“To me.”
“Where is she?”
“Off being selfish somewhere.”
“Aha,” he said. “Do you want dessert?”
And that’s what I liked about Nick. He was only interested in what you were interested in. And I was not interested in my past. He liked that I was dark, but he didn’t know why. And he didn’t ask. He definitely didn’t understand. But for all of our differences he took me as I was. I needed that.
Until he didn’t. Until he said that I was an emotional fort. Until nothing about me came easy, and he grew tired of trying. Nick and his words. Nick and his promises of never-ending love. I believed them all and then he left me. Love comes slow, but God does it go fast. He was beautiful—then he was ugly. I esteemed him, then I esteemed him not.
Dr. Saphira Elgin had tried to teach me to control my anger. She wanted me to be able to pinpoint the source of it so I could rationalize my feelings. Talk myself down. I can never pinpoint the source. It runs around and around in my body without a point of origin.
I blew her off. I always blew her off. But now I try to pinpoint it. I’m angry because…
Isaac is touch, and he is sound. He is smell and he is sight. I tried to make him a single sense like I did with everyone else, but he is all of them. He overpowers my senses and that is exactly why I ran from him. I was afraid of feeling brightly—afraid I would become used to the color and sounds and smells, and they would be taken from me. I was a self-fulfilling prophecy; destroying before I could be destroyed. I wrote about women like that, I didn’t realize I was one. For years I believed that Nick left me because I failed him. I couldn’t be what he needed because I was empty and shallow. That’s what he insinuated.
“Why can’t you love wedding cake, Brenna?”
“Why can’t I take your darkness away?”
“Why can’t you be who I need?”
But, I didn’t fail Nick. He failed me. Love sticks, and it stays and it braves the bullshit. Like Isaac did. And I am mad at Isaac because he is all of that. And I am all of this. It’s irrational.
We finish our project—the page project, as we call it. In the end we have four piles and only three books: Mine, Nick’s, and the nameless book. The fourth pile is the thickest and the most confusing. I stack each one with care that is mostly habit, lining up the corners until none of the pages poke past each other. The problem is, there is nothing on the pages. Each one is bone white. I have the fleeting thought that the zookeeper wants me to write a new book, then Yul Brenner reminds me that my personal Annie Wilkes didn’t leave me a pen. Can’t write a book without a pen. I wonder if I can resuscitate the old Bic we used when we first woke up here.
It must be symbolic, like the pictures hung all over the house—pictures of hollow sparrows, and bearers of death. I stare at the piles of paper while Isaac makes us tea. I can hear the tinkle of the spo
on as it hits the sides of the ceramic cup. I murmur something to the books spread out around me, my lips moving in incantation. We may have separated them, but without page numbers they are still out of order. How do you bring order to a book you’ve never read? Or maybe that’s point of this little exercise. Maybe I’m supposed to bring my own personal order to the two books I’ve never read. Either way, I’m telling them to sort themselves out and speak to me. Voices have been, and always will be, too afraid to speak with as much volume as a book. That’s why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard. In these pages are thoughts that the zookeeper wants me to hear. I don’t know why, and I don’t care except to get out of here. To get Isaac out of here.
“Do you want to have children?” he asks me when he carries our tea into the room. I am startled by the randomness of his question. We don’t talk about normal things. Our conversations are about survival. My hand trembles when I take the cup. Who could think about children at a time like this? Two pals just sitting around, chatting about their life expectations? I want to rip open my shirt and remind him that he cut off my breasts. Remind him that we are prisoners. People in our predicament didn’t talk about the possibility of children. But still … because it is Isaac who asks me, and because he has given so much, I let my mind rove over what he’s saying.
I once saw a toddler throw a fit at Heathrow Airport. Her older sister confiscated an iPhone from the little girl’s hands when she threatened to send it flying across the floor. As with most children, the tiny girl, who teetered on fresh, newly-walking legs, had a loud, indignant response. She wailed, dropped to her knees and made an awful herky-jerky noise that sounded like an ambulance siren. It rose and fell in crescendo, causing people to look and wince. As she wailed, she slid backwards on the ground until she was lying face up, her knees bent underneath her. I watched in astonishment as her arms flailed about, alternating between what looked like the backstroke and an interpretive butterfly dance. Her face was pressed into an anguished scowl, her mouth still sending out those godawful noises, when all of a sudden she scrambled to her feet, and ran laughing toward a fountain a few yards away.
As far as I was concerned children had bipolar disorder. They were angry, unpredictable, emotional ambulance-sirens with pigtails, grubby hands and food-crusted mouths that twisted from smiles to frowns and back again as quick as a breath. No, thank you very much. If I wanted a three-foot warlord as my master, I’d hire a rabid monkey to do the job.
“No,” I say.
He takes a long sip. Nods. “I didn’t think so.”
I wait for him to tell me why he asked, but he doesn’t. After a few minutes it clicks together—snap, snap, snap—and I feel sick. Isaac hasn’t been eating. He hasn’t been sleeping. He hasn’t been speaking much. I’ve watched him deteriorate slowly over the last week, coming alive only for the delivery of the white box. I suddenly feel less angry about his out-of-place question. More concerned.
“How long have we been here?” I ask.
“Nine months.”
My Rubik’s cube brain twists. More of my anger dissipates.
When we first woke up here he told me that Daphne was eight weeks pregnant.
“She carried to term,” I say, firmly. I search my brain for something else he needs to hear. “You have a healthy baby and it comforts her to have a part of you with her.”
I don’t know if this comforts him, but it’s all I know how to say.
He doesn’t move or acknowledge my words. He’s suffering. I stand up wobbling slightly. I have to do something. I have to feed him. Like he fed me when I was suffering. I linger in the doorway, watching the slight rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes.
This is my fault. Isaac shouldn’t be here. I’ve ruined his life. I never read Nick’s book. Just those few chapters that Isaac read to me while sitting on the edge of my hospital bed. I didn’t want to see how the story ended. That’s why I swallowed it. But, now I do. I suddenly have the urge to know how Nick ended our story. What he had to say about the way things between us dissolved. It was his story that compelled me to write an answer, and get myself imprisoned in the middle of the fucking South Pole. With my doctor. Who shouldn’t be here.
I make dinner. It’s difficult to focus on anything other than the gift that the zookeeper left for me, but Isaac’s hurt outweighs my obsession. I open three cans of vegetables, and boil pasta shaped like bow ties. I mix them together, adding a little canned chicken broth. I carry the plates to the living room. We can’t eat at the table anymore, so we eat here. I call up to Isaac. He comes down a minute later, but he only pushes the food around on his plate, stabbing a different vegetable on each prong of his fork. Is this what he felt when he watched me slip into darkness? I want to open his mouth and pour the food down his throat. Make him live. Eat, Isaac. I mentally plead. But he doesn’t.
I save his plate of food, setting it in the fridge, which doesn’t quite work since he stripped off the rubber sealant to make a pedal for his drums.
I hobble up to the carousel room using my new crutch. The room smells musty and there is a faint sweet smell of piss. I eye the black horse. The one who shares my pierced heart. He looks meaner today. I lean into him, resting my head against his neck. I touch his mane lightly. Then my hand goes to the arrow. I grip it in a fist, wishing I could break it off and end both of our suffering. More than that—wishing I could end Isaac’s.
My eyelids flutter as my brain trills. When did I decide that the zookeeper was a man? It doesn’t fit. My publishing company has done research on my reader base, and it consists mostly of women in their thirties and forties. I have male readers. I get e-mails from them, but to go this far … I should see a woman. But I don’t. I see a man. Either way, I’m in his head. He’s just a character to me; someone I can’t really see, but I can see how his mind works by the way he’s playing games with me. And the longer I’m here, the more he’s taking form. This is my job; this is what I’m good at. If I can figure out his plot, I can outsmart him. Get Isaac out of here. He needs to meet his baby.
I return to the books. Eye each one. My hand lingers over Knotted briefly, before settling on the unnamed pile. I’ll start right here.
I read the book. Without the pages numbered, I am forced to read pell-mell. It’s like jumping backwards into a snowdrift and not knowing how deeply you’re going to sink. My life has always been filled with order, until I was taken and set aside to rot in this place. This place is chaos, and reading with no order is chaos. I hate it and yet I am too enslaved by the words to desist.
The book is about a girl named Ophelia. On the very first page I read, which could be 5 or 500, Ophelia has been forced to give her premature baby up for adoption. Not by her parents, as most stories go, but by her controlling, schizophrenic husband. Her husband is a musician who writes what the voices tell him to write. So, when the voices tell him to give his five-pound baby girl away, he strong-arms Ophelia by threatening both her and her baby’s life.
On the next page I pick up, Ophelia is a girl of twelve. She is eating a meal with her parents. It appears to be a normal family meal, but Ophelia’s inner dialogue is riddled with the kind of markers that herald a girl both strange and strangely old. She is angry with her parents for existing, for being such simple contributors to society. She compares them to her mashed potatoes then goes on to talk about their failed attempts to replace her with another baby. My mother has had four miscarriages. I’d take that as God’s way of saying you aren’t supposed to fuck up any more kids.
I cringe at this part, wanting to know more about Carol Blithe’s broken uterus, but my page has come to an end, and I am forced to pick up a new one. It goes like this for hours, as I gather bursts of information about Ophelia, who almost seems like the anti-heroine. Ophelia is a narcissist; Ophelia has a superiority complex; Ophelia can’t stick with anything for too long before becoming bored. Ophelia marries a man who is
the antithesis of boring, and she pays for it. She leaves him eventually, and marries someone else, but then she leaves him, too. I find a page where she speaks about a china doll that she had to leave behind after divorcing her second husband. She laments the loss of the china doll in the most peculiar way. I gather these details until my brain is hurting. I am trying to sort through all of it, put it in order, when I come across the last page. She is self- actuating on the last page of the book. When I reach the final line, my eyes cross. You will feel me in the fall
I vomit.
Isaac finds me lying on my back on the floor. He stands over me with a leg on each side of my body, and hauls me to my feet. His eyes briefly explore the puddle of vomit beside me before he reaches up and feels my forehead. When he finds it cool, he asks me, “What did you read?”
I turn my face away.
“Nick’s book?”
I shake my head.
He looks at the pile closest to where I was lying.
“Do you know who wrote it?”
I can’t look at him, so I close my eyes and nod.
“My mother,” I say. I hear his breath catch.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
I hobble into the kitchen. I need water to wash out my mouth. Isaac follows behind me.
“How do I know it wasn’t you who did this?” He takes a threatening step toward me. I back into a bag of rice. It falls over. I watch, horrified, as the grains spill across the floor, flowing around my bare foot.