Chapter Twenty-Six

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…

The fire goes.

Our hearts are slowing. We are resolute.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

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?

I know. I see it all—what I saw last night in my delirium. The table from my book. I wrote about it metaphorically; the concept that all great things are made around a table: relationships, plans for war, the meals that keep our bodies alive. A table is an image that represents life and choices. We see it in Camelot when King Arthur’s knights gathered around the Round Table, and in the paintings of The Last Supper. We see it in commercials where families eat dinner, laughing and passing a basket of bread. I wrote about a table that was a well. I was at the bottom end of my relationship with Nick and I was trying to illustrate where we had gone wrong. We needed to come back to the table, draw life into our dying relationship. It was melodramatic and stupid, but the zookeeper brought it to life. Built it in our kitchen, and I refused to see it.

I roll onto my knees and crawl … to the hole. I make it halfway down before I fall. I don’t know if the cold has numbed me or if my lack of air is consuming my senses, but I feel nothing when I crack against the wood. I crawl some more toward the stairs … toward the table. I … can’t … breathe…

I am there. My scribbles in the wood are there. I can feel them with the tips of my fingers, but it’s so dark. I go to the cabinet, under the sink, and find the industrial flashlight that Isaac won’t let us use unless it’s an emergency. I flip the switch and place it on top of the counter, pointing it toward the object of my interest. I stagger forward. I know what I need to do, but I don’t have the energy to do it. Three steps feel like twenty. I stand sideways and place my hip just below the lip of the table. Planting one foot against the wall, and the other on the floor, I push. With all and everything.

At first there is nothing, then I hear the grating. It is louder than the hissing, rattling noise that is coming from between my lips. It is confirmation. It’s enough to make me push harder. I push until the heavy wooden slab has moved off center and is wobbling and ready to fall. I stand back to watch. There is an impressive thud as it angles sideways and then tips over, landing upright between the base and the wall. I stumble forward and peer down. I am looking into a dark hole. It’s a well. Or, sort of, because there is no water. There is something down the table/well. But I still can’t breathe, and Isaac is dying. I have nothing to lose. I climb onto the bench and swing my legs over the side. Then I jump.