Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

“Why do you care, Senna?”

“I don’t,” I say quickly. “But your wife and baby do.”

He looks away.

“We are going to get out of here eventually.” I sound way more sure than I actually am. “You can’t go back to them all messed up.”

“Someone left us here to die,” he says, blandly.

“Bullshit.” I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut. I’m feeling queasy again. “All the food … the supplies. Someone wants us to survive.”

“Limited food. Limited supplies.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. We both stopped messing with the keypad the day I spilled all that nonsense about Adam and Eve.

“Maybe we should get back to breaking out of here,” I say.

Then I run back to the bathroom and throw up.

Later as I lie in my bed, still green-faced and queasy, I decide not to try to help anymore. It’s not my forte. I want to be left alone, I should therefore leave others alone. We pick up our code breaking again, for lack of anything else to do.

To stave off boredom I try my hand at reading again. It doesn’t work; I have kidnapped ADD. I like the feel of paper beneath my fingertips. The sound a page makes when it turns over. So I don’t see the words, but I touch the pages and turn them until I’ve finished the book. Isaac sees me doing it one day, and laughs at me.

“Why don’t you just read the book?” he asks.

“I can’t focus. I want to, but I can’t.”

He comes over and takes it from my hands. The sofa yields as he sits down next to me and opens it to the first page. He’s sitting so close our legs are touching.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

I close my eyes and listen to his voice. When he reads the words, “I was destined to be unlucky in life…” my eyes shoot open. I want to say Jinx. Maybe I’ll like David Copperfield after all. This isn’t the first time Isaac’s read to me. The last time was under very different circumstances. Very different and very much the same. He reads until his voice becomes hoarse. Then I take the book from him and read until mine gives, too. We mark the spot and set it down until tomorrow.

Nothing happens for weeks. We develop a routine, if you can call it that. It’s more of a day-to-day stay sane and survive kind of thing. I call it Sanity Circulation. When you’re caged up you need somewhere to send your hours, or you start getting prickly, like when you sit in the same position for too long and your legs get pins and needles. Except when you get them in your brain, you’re pretty much on your way to the nuthouse. So we try to circulate. Or, I do at least. Isaac looks like he’s two blinks away from needing Haloperidol and a padded room. He makes coffee in the morning, that’s consistent. There is a huge sack of coffee beans in the pantry and several industrial sized cans of instant. He uses the beans, saying that when we run out of juice in the generator we can heat water for the instant over the fire. When … not if.

We drink our coffee at the table. Usually in silence, but sometimes Isaac talks to fill the space. I like those days. He tells me about cases that he’s had … difficult surgeries, the patients who lived and ones who didn’t. We eat breakfast after that: oatmeal or powdered eggs. Sometimes crackers with jam spread on them. Then we part ways for a few hours. I go up, he stays down. Usually I use that time to shower and sit in the carousel room. I don’t know why I sit in there except to focus on the bizarre. We switch after that. He comes up to take his shower and I go down to sit for a while in the living room. That’s when I pretend to read the books. We meet up in the kitchen for lunch. We know it’s lunch by our hunger, not by the position of the sun, or by a clock. Tick-tock, tick- tock.

Lunch is canned soup or baked beans cooked with hot dogs. Sometimes he defrosts a loaf of bread and we eat that with butter. I clean the dishes. He watches the snow. We drink more coffee, then I go to the attic room to sleep. I don’t know what he does during that time, but when I come downstairs again he’s restless. He wants to talk. I climb up and down the stairs for exercise. Every other day I jog around the house and do sit-ups and push-ups until I feel as if I can’t move. There are a lot of hours between lunch and dinner. Mostly we just wander around from room to room. Dinner is the big event. Isaac makes three things: meat, vegetable and starch. I look forward to his dinners, not just because of the food, but the entertainment as well. I come downstairs early and perch myself on the tablet to watch him cook. Once I asked him to verbalize everything he was doing so I could pretend I was watching a cooking show. He did, only he changed his voice and his accent and spoke in the third person.

Isseeec veel sautee zees undetermined meat over ze stove veeth butter and….

Every few days when the mood is lighter I request a different Isaac cook me dinner. My favorite being Rocky Balboa, in which Isaac calls me Adrian and mimics Sylvester Stallone’s awful attempt at a Philly accent. Those are the better nights—little slivers in between the very bad ones. On the bad ones we don’t speak at all. On those days the snow is louder than the kidnapped houseguests.

Sometimes I hate him. When he does the dishes, he shakes off each one before setting it in the drying rack. Water flies everywhere. A couple of drops always hit me in the face. I have to leave the room to avoid smashing a plate against his head. He hums in the shower. I can hear him from all the way downstairs, mostly AC/DC and Journey. He wears mismatched socks. He squints his eyes when he reads and then insists that there is nothing wrong with his eyesight. He closes the lid of the toilet. He looks at me funny. Like, really funny. Sometimes I catch him doing it and he doesn’t even bother to look away. It makes my face and neck get this tingly burn feeling. He barely makes any noise when he moves. He sneaks up on me all the time. When you’ve been kidnapped it’s never a good idea to be too quiet when entering a room. He’s received countless elbows in the ribs and loose-handed slaps as a result.

“Is there anything I do that irritates you?” I ask him one day. We are both in irritable moods. He’s been lurking; I’ve been stalking. We bump into each other as I come from the kitchen and he comes from the little living room. We stand in limbo in the space between the two rooms.

“I hate it when you go comatose.”

“I haven’t done that in a while,” I point out. “Four days at least. Give me something more tangible.”

He looks up at the ceiling. “I hate it when you watch me eat.”

“Gah!” I throw my hands up in the air—which is completely unlike me. Isaac snickers.

“You eat with too many rules,” I tell him. There is humor in my voice. Even I can hear it. He narrows his eyes like something is bothering him, then he seems to shake it off.

“When I met you, you didn’t listen to music with words, “ he says, folding his arms across his chest.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Why don’t we discuss this over a snack.” He points to the kitchen. I nod but don’t move. He takes a step forward, placing us impossibly close. I step back twice, allowing him room to move into the kitchen. He sets crackers on a plate with some beef jerky and dried bananas and puts it between us. He makes a show out of eating a cracker, hiding his mouth behind his hand in mock embarrassment.

“You live by rules. Mine are just more socially appropriate than yours,” he says.

I snicker.

“I’m trying really hard not to watch you eat,” I tell him.

“I know. Thanks for making the effort.”

I pick up a piece of banana. “Open your mouth,” I say. He does without question. I toss the banana at his mouth. It hits his nose, but I lift my hands in triumph.

“Why are you celebrating?” He laughs. “You missed.”

“No. I was aiming for your nose.”

“My turn.”

I nod and open my mouth, tilting my head forward instead of back so I can make it harder for him.

The banana lands directly on my tongue. I chew it sulkily.

“You’re a surgeon. Your aim is impeccable.”

He shrugs.

“I can beat you,” I say, “at something. I know I can.”

“I never said you couldn’t.”

“You imply it with your eyes,” I wail. I chew on the inside of my cheek while I try to cook something up. “Wait here.”

I sprint up the stairs. There is a metal chest in the carousel room at the foot of the bed. I found games in there earlier, a couple of puzzles, even some books on human anatomy and how to survive in the wild. I rifle through its contents and pull out two puzzles. Each one has a thousand pieces. One depicts two deer on a cliff. The other is a “Where’s Waldo at the Zoo.” I carry them downstairs and toss them on the table. “Puzzle race,” I say. Isaac looks a little taken back.

“Seriously?” he asks. “You want to play a game?”

“Seriously. And it’s a puzzle, not a game.”

He leans back and stretches his arms over his head while he considers this. “We stop at the same time for bathroom breaks,” he says firmly. “And I get the deer.”

I extend my hand and we shake on it.

Ten minutes later we are sitting across from each other at the table. It is so large in circumference that there is plenty of room for both of us to spread out with our respective thousand pieces. Isaac sets two mugs of coffee between us before we start.

“We need some rules,” he announces. I slide my mug over and hook a finger in the handle. “Like what kind?”

“Don’t use that tone with me.”

My face actually feels stiff when I smile. Other than my manic laughing the first day we woke up here, it’s probably the first time my face has moved in the upward direction.

“Those there are the laziest muscles on your body,” Isaac announces when he sees it. He slides into his chair. “I think I’ve seen you smile one other time. Ever.”

It feels awkward to even have it on my face, so I let it drop to sip the coffee.

“That’s not true.” But I know it is.

“Okay, the rules,” he says. “We take a shot every half hour.”

“A shot of liquor?”

He nods.

“NO!” I protest. “We’ll never be able to do this if we are drunk!”

“It levels the playing field,” he says. “Don’t think I don’t know about your puzzle love.”

“What are you talking about?” I drag a piece of my puzzle around the table with my fingertip. I make figure eights with it—big ones then small ones. How could he possibly know something like that? I try to remember if I had puzzles in my house when…

“I read your book,” he says.

I flush. Oh yeah. “That was just a character...”

“No,” he says, watching the path my puzzle piece is making. “That was you.”

I glance at him from beneath my lashes. I don’t have the energy to argue, and I’m not sure I can make a compelling argument anyway. Guilty, I think. Of telling too much truth. I think about the last time we took shots and my stomach rolls. If I get a hangover I’ll sleep through most of the following day and be too sick to eat. That saves food and kills at least twelve boring hours. “I’m in,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

I pick up the piece underneath my fingertip. I can make out colorful pant legs and a tiny bulldog on a red leash. I set it back down, pick up another, roll it between my fingertips. I’m bothered by what he said, but I also just found Waldo. I set him underneath my coffee mug for safekeeping.

“I’m an artist, Senna. I know what it is to put yourself into what you create.”

“What are you talking about?” I fake confusion.

Isaac already has a small corner put together. I watch his hand travel over the pieces until he plucks up another. He’s getting a good head start on me. He has at least twenty pieces. I’ll wait.

“Stop it,” he says. “We’re being fun and open tonight.”

I sigh. “It’s not fun to be open.” And then, “I was more honest in that book than I was in any of the others.”

Isaac hooks another piece onto his growing continent. “I know.”

I let spit pool in my mouth until I have enough of it to hang a really good lugie, then swallow it all at once. He’d read my books. I should have known. He’s at thirty pieces now. I tap my fingers on the table.