Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

“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.

“I brought you here? You think I brought us here to starve and freeze? For what?”

“It was convenient that you were the one to cut me free. Why weren’t you the one tied up and gagged?”

“Listen to yourself,” I say. “It wasn’t me who did this!”

“How do I know that?” His words are sharp, but he says them slowly.

I shift my feet and rice fills the spaces between my toes.

My chin trembles. I can feel my bottom lip shaking with it. I clutch it between my teeth.

“I guess you have to trust me.”

He points to the living room where the chest is, where the books lay in piles.

“Your book, Nick’s book, and now your mother’s book? Why?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know my mother wrote a book. I haven’t seen her since I was a kid!”

“You know who did this,” he says. “Deep down, you know.”

I shake my head. How can he possibly believe that? I have searched—wracked—my brain for answers.

He backs up, covering his eyes with his palms. His back hits the wall and he bends at the waist with his hands on his knees. It looks like he can’t breathe. I reach a hand out to him, and then drop it to my side. It’s no use. No matter what I say, I took his wife and baby away. I birthed this psycho’s obsession.

Three weeks later, Isaac removes my cast. He uses a kitchen knife to cut it off. It’s the same knife he carried around on our first day here. We are both wide-eyed and short of breath as the fiberglass falls away. What will we see? How much more broken will I be? In the end there is just a hairy, skinny leg that looks a little off. It reminds me of blood in a cup, a sweater in a bathtub, a rock in a mouth. It’s just visually off and I can’t tell why.

I still have to use my crutch, but I like the freedom I feel after all those weeks lying in bed. Isaac still won’t speak to me. But the sun has returned. It rises again. We stop using the lights to save the generator from burning gas. I read all of Knotted, but surprisingly it doesn’t hurt as much as the nameless book my mother wrote. I see Nick a little differently; less glimmer. It’s his best work, but I’m left unimpressed with his love note.

Isaac carries the rest of the supplies up from the well at the bottom of the table. He fills the cupboards and the fridge and the wood closet. So we don’t have to climb down there anymore, he tells me. It takes him all day. Then he puts the table back together. When he goes to his room I come down from the carousel room and creep into the kitchen. I’m still in my robe and my legs are cold. I feel naked without my cast. I press the back of my legs to the lip of the table, and hop up. I scoot back until I’m sitting, my legs hanging over the side. My runner’s legs look spindly and weak. A scar runs like a seam across my shin. I trace it lightly with the tip of my finger. I’m starting to look like a stitched-up Emo doll. All I need are the button eyes. I reach up, slipping my hand into the opening at the top of my robe, running my fingers across the skin on my chest. There are scars there too. Ugly ones. I’m used to being disfigured. It feels like parts of me keep being taken; eaten by disease, hacked off, snapped in two. I wonder when my body will become tired of it and just give up.