Beautiful Wreck (72 page)

A shiny light pierced my eye, followed over and over by what felt like a tiny ice pick. A bright needle. It sunk over and over into the soft skin around my eye. In the bony places, the pain was sharpest, and I gripped the edges of the clean table. Pain hovered just on the edge of bearable. The doctors removed the scars from my orbital bone, my temple.

During surgery, I thought of things past. Moments like dry leaves on a breeze, lifted and were whisked away one by one. My traveling, my bumbling efforts to learn things, to love people. Images of Betta’s capable hands, Magnus’s patient eyes, Hár’s lean and grisly face. Images of the green and living house, the vast, sun-warmed fields stretching out from our high hill. An image of honor itself, like a cramped and huddling cloud. Hah. It thought it was so grand.

When the anesthesiologist pricked my eyelid and asked, “Can you feel this?” I said no. I lied. I didn’t trust this room, without any scent. It had no colors, and none of the people looked at me. They saw me as project laid out on a sterile table, numbers in their eyes, crosshairs guiding their work.

I breathed deep and thought of the woods—their endless whiteness kissed with a million shades of apricot, rust, orange, plum, everything revealed underneath the silver and brown bark. Here I floated at the center of a featureless, odorless white world, and nothing glowed beneath.

They talked about my heart rate, respiration, and an irritated voice said “It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Nei,” I told them, my words feeling blurry, a tear on my cheek. I felt a prick in my arm, a last moment of clarity before I realized they were putting me under anyway.

My eyes slid closed.

My thoughts turned like a great water creature, slowly from the past to the future. The future as I felt it, progressing from the night I left the Thing. I saw possibilities, near ones and those farther away, every one as clear and solid as though I’d gone into the tank and visited in the flesh.

Around the heartstone, Hár was whispering a scary story to the children. Svana smiled at them, as the little bodies struggled with glee and the suspense of his tale. Svana was young as a child herself, but she fed a dark-haired babe at her breast. No more than two months old, his hair black as night against her pale skin. I thought if I touched him I would feel the hard fact of his skull covered with weightless feathers of hair. They would wave with static electricity as I drew my fingers away.

Heirik came to stand behind Svana, looking down at the child with a kind of restrained delight and awe. His eyes spoke of gratitude, commitment. He slid his hand over Svana’s shoulder and his thumb stroked her throat. Mine, his whole being said. He bent and dropped a kiss on her spun-sugar hair. He looked up, then, right at me, and his mouth curved in a small smile.

I saw other ways, too.

I came up out of the sea and onto the black sand again, and it was almost twilight, the sun resting on the horizon and lighting up a tremendous cloud bank with pale purples, hottest pink and gold. Against that sky, Heirik was a dark shape atop Vakr, the horse himself no more than a shadow. Drifa stood beside them, and Heirik’s hand rested on her saddle where I’d ridden her so many times, as if he were touching my thigh.

I called him, and when he saw me he slipped from Vakr slowly, warily, as if I were the vision, not him. Then he came running, picking up speed. He crashed into the shallow water, dropped to his knees and pulled me urgently in. My face pressed against his chest, so tight. He murmured unintelligible, old words. He held me so hard, his shirt was in my mouth, blocking my breath. He pulled back to see me and captured my face in both his hands.

And then I really saw him. He was a broken thing, his features hard, eyes weary.

“I wait for you here,” he told me in a hollow voice. His thumb was rough against my lips. “Sometimes.” The word was full of terrible longing. Hours spent walking along this shoreline, knowing just where I had gone, and hoping—with absolutely no reason to hope—that I would return. His other thumb moved along the arc of my eyebrow, pressing against bone, feeling me solid and real. His eyes searched, as if he wondered, still, whether he was dreaming.

“I bring Drifa for you.” He dropped his hands and his eyes, shy. His loneliness and stupid hope were wide open for me to see. Evenings spent walking this icy water’s edge, an empty horse at his side.

With a great gasp, a sucking in of a thousand gallons of air, I broke the surface of my vision. I looked around wildly at the white hospital, scentless steel surrounding me. The dead eye of a machine watching my breath.

It would take time for me to recover, they said. My left eye twitched and ached under bandages, temporarily useless. I wouldn’t see out of it for maybe a week, maybe more.

Long stretches of time drifted in and out of my two rooms, along with wall-sized images of the farm that I chose and discarded. I watched the arcs Jeff used in his designs. I saw the pictures of animals he would never know, animals I could now smell and taste in memory. I watched them without depth of field, indifferent goats and placid cows, eyes lost too, theirs to grazing and tricks of information and light.

I searched beyond them for different arcs. I swiped through file after file, until my soul felt blind, too. I saw a flat Scotland laced with mist, a New England town square, a cobblestone street clattering with hooves. I came upon dance halls lined with ladies in their puff-sleeved dresses and red and ochre shawls. Skip, skip, skip. Then one caught my eye. A dark-skinned man in glowing yellow shorts. The file read
Vida v. Cruz
.

I started the arc, and pre-fight excitement bloomed on the screen. Murmurs and shouts came from a packed crowd, and two fighters shifted and bounced on their toes, touched gloves, and the fight began. I remembered it suddenly, viscerally, from a year ago. I saw it on a flat screen now, on my wall, but it was the same fight I’d seen a year ago in the tank.

It was short and brutal, and when the Locust kicked Yusef Cruz, fear seized me too late. I hadn’t thought about whether I might accidentally travel, the same way I had in the tank, wrenched into the Atlantic Ocean of another time. But I didn’t. I remained here in the rarefied air of my room, and I watched Mateus Vida lay the championship belt at his opponent’s feet.

When that fight ended, another began, without a break. And then another. I must have sat back on my bed and pulled my feet up under me, because I found myself there later, legs numb, the artificial night of the company building gathering around me. Unfolding my stiff legs, I asked the apartment, and it told me I’d watched for seven hours.

I did the same on Day 37, and then 38 and 39.

The fights overflowed my mind and senses. The purity of purpose, the raw violence, the mixture of formality and savage freedom, all soothed me. I came back time and again to that one historic fight between Vida and Cruz. I watched Vida’s elegantly powerful kick until I felt like I was falling into the screen. I wanted to kick someone that way.

I tried it.

I stood in the silver void of my room and felt self-conscious, then even more stupid when I thought about it. There was no chance that anyone would see. No people came to visit me anymore, not now that I’d told Morgan everything I knew about buckles and weapons. There was no one who might watch me try to learn, who might laugh gently at me and tell me, Woman, you kick like a lame fox.

Awkward at first, wobbling with uncertainty, I kicked anyway. I tried a few times, rewinding the scene to follow the path of Vida’s leg as best I could. I set the fight on repeat, and I watched the wall and kicked, again and again. I kept at it, each kick blurring into the next until my breath came in gasps and a spike of pain throbbed in my side.

I saw flashes of images in my mind, and they mixed with the pictures on the screen. Ageirr’s sneer, the men chasing me at the beach. I let each picture go, as if it could be deleted from my brain, as thoroughly gone as a twice-trashed file. Delete forever. Yes.

Food tasted metallic, and people didn’t come or go, so I lived on coffee and became absorbed in the old fights. I watched Mateus Vida, and dozens of other fighters. Yusef Cruz and “Cobalt” Cabral.

I pushed the furniture to the edges of the room, and after watching hours of bouts, I’d sit on the floor and watch bios about the fighters’ lives, and vids of how they trained. I did a hundred or more push-ups every day, with both arms at first, sloppy, my guts swaying, and then soon I became stronger and could do them straight as a board, then with one arm. I forced myself through hundreds of sit-ups, while I watched other kinds of matches go by—Karate, Judo, any kind of fight.

The days passed by, and only the apartment’s announcements made me notice the change. My arms felt wiry, and the company-issue sweats hung on my hips.

One of my favorite fighters was Shan Rush. Called the Swift, he was balletic, a true wrestler. I called up all his bouts, everything I could find.

I liked the pair of wings he had etched on his back—dark blue, drawing the eye like blood coursing over his shoulder blades. The wings of a stylized raven, outstretched, wingtips indelibly inked on his upper arms. I remembered the tattoo I had longed for a year ago. Now, the blue swan reminded me not of poetic, romantic death, but of real, everyday meanness.

Rush had a small habit of tucking his wavy black hair behind his ear. He’d punch someone savagely into submission, then stand and push a lock of hair back, such a gentle gesture. Watching one of his fights, it finally struck me why I was so drawn by him. I halted the video and read his stats along the side,
175.26 cm (5'9")
. It had always been my guess at Heirik’s height.

I swiped the video off the screen and forced myself to eat dinner.