The Carousel
There is a carousel in Mukilteo. It sits in a copse of evergreens at the bottom of a hill called The Devil’s Backbone. The animals impaled on that ride are angry, their eyes rolling, heads kicked back like something has spooked them. It’s what you would expect from a ride that sits on the devil’s tailbone. Isaac took me there for my thirtieth birthday, on the last day of winter.
I remember being surprised that he knew it was my birthday, and that he knew where to take me. Not to a pretentious dinner, but to a clearing in the woods where a little bit of dark magic still lived.
“As your doctor, I have access to your medical records,” he reminded me, when I asked how he knew. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He loaded me into his car and played a rap song. Six months ago my music was wordless, now I was listening to rap. Isaac was a virus.
The Devil’s Backbone is curved like a serpent; it’s a steep rock path you half walk, half skid down. Isaac held my hand as walked, dodging boulders that jutted out of the ground like knobs on a spine. When we stepped into the circle of the trees, the moon was already hanging over the carousel. My breath caught. Right away, I knew there wasn’t something right. The colors were wrong, the animals were wrong, the sentiment was wrong.
Isaac handed five dollars to an old man sitting at the controls. He was eating sardines out of a can with his fingers. He stuck the five dollars in the front pocket of his shirt, and stood to open the gate.
“Choose wisely,” Isaac whispered as we crossed the threshold. I went left; he went right.
There was a ram and a dragon and an ostrich. I passed them by. This felt important, as if what I chose to ride on my thirtieth birthday said something. I stopped beside a horse that looked more angry than scared. Black with an arrow piercing its heart. Its head was bowed like it was ready for the fight, arrow or not. I chose that one, glancing over at Isaac as I swung my leg over the saddle. He was a few rows up, already on a white horse. It had a medical cross on its saddle and blood on its hooves.
Perfect, I thought.
I liked that he didn’t feel the need to ride next to me. He took his decision as seriously as I took mine, and in the end we each rode alone.
There was no music. Just the swish of the trees and the hum of machinery. The old man let us ride twice. When it was over Isaac came over to help me down. His finger stroked my pinkie, which was still wrapped around the cracked pole that speared my horse.
“I’m in love with you,” he said.
I looked for the old man. He wasn’t by his post. He wasn’t anywhere.
“Senna…”
Maybe he went to get more sardines.
“Senna?”
“I heard you.”
I slid off my horse and stood facing Isaac. My hair was pulled up or I would have started messing with it. He wasn’t very far from me, maybe just the distance of a single step. We were wedged in between two gory, death-infatuated carousel horses.
“How many times have you been in love, Doctor?”
He pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and looked out at the trees behind my shoulder. I kept my eyes on his face so they wouldn’t wander to the ink on his arms. His tattoos confused me. They made me feel like I didn’t know him at all.
“Twice. The love of my life, and now my soulmate.”
I start. I was the writer; the worder of words—and I rarely used the beaten up idea of a soulmate. Love was sinned against too often for me to believe in that tired old concept. If someone loved you as much as they loved themselves, why did they cheat and break promises and lie? Wasn’t it in our nature to preserve ourselves? Shouldn’t we preserve our soul match with as much fervor?
“You’re saying there is a difference between those two?” I ask.
“Yes,” he said. He said it with so much conviction I almost believed him.
“Who was she?”
Isaac looked at me.
“She was a bass player. An addict. Beautiful and dangerous.”
The other Isaac, the one I don’t know, loved a woman who was very different from me. And now Doctor Isaac is saying he’s in love with me. As a rule, I try not to ask questions. It gives people a sense of friendship when you ask them things, and there is no getting rid of them. Since I can’t seem to get rid of Isaac anyway, I deem it safe to ask the most pressing question. The one that only he could answer.
“Who were you?”
It starts to rain. Not predictable Washington drizzle, but fast, fat bullets of water that explode when they hit the ground.
Isaac grabs the bottom of his sweater and pulls it over his head. I stand very still even though I’m startled. He’s shirtless in front of me.
“I was this,” he said.
Most people marked themselves with scattered ideas: a heart, a word, a skull, a pirate woman with huge breasts—little parts that represented something. Isaac had one tattoo and it was continuous.
A rope. It wound around his waist and chest, looped around his neck like a noose. It wrapped twice around each bicep before coming to an end right above the words I’ve seen poking out from underneath his sleeves. It was painful to look at. Uncomfortable.
I understood. I knew what it was like to be bound.
“I’m this now,” he said. He used two fingers to point to the words on his forearm.
Die to Save
My eyes go to his other arm.
Save to Die
“What does that mean?”
Isaac looked at me closely, like he didn’t know if he should tell me.
“A part of me had to die in order to save myself.” My eyes move to his left arm.
Save to Die
He saved lives to die to himself. To keep the bad part dead he had to be constantly reminded of the frailty of life. Being a doctor was Isaac’s only salvation.
God.
“What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?”
“One is a choice, and one is not.”
I’d never thought of love as a choice. Rather, it seemed like the un-choice. But if you stayed with someone who was self-destructing and chose to keep loving, I suppose it could be a choice.
I waited for him to go on. To explain how I fit in.
“There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye,” he said. “Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are these invisible strings.” As if to make his point, his finger traced a black ribbon that ran through my horse’s mane. “Maybe the chances that you’ll find each and every one of your soulmates is slim. But sometimes you’re lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it’s not so much a choice to love them through their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws.”
He was talking about soulmate polygamy. How could you take something like that seriously?
“You’re a fool,” I breathed. “You don’t make any sense.”
I felt angry with him. I wanted to lash out and make him see how stupid he was for believing in such flimsy ideals.
“I make too much sense for you,” he said.
I shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it. The distance between us grew for just a second as his left foot took a step backward to keep his balance. Then I launched myself at him, throwing him against the painted horse at his back. Fury in fists. I pounded at his chest and slapped at his face while he stood and let me. How dare he. How dare he.
Every blow I delivered set my anger to a lower simmer. I hit him until it was gone and I was mostly spent. Then I slid down, my hands touching the metal diamonds of the carousel floor as my back rested against the hooves of the horse I’d ridden.
“You can’t fix me,” I said, looking at his knees.
“I don’t want to.”
“I’m mangled,” I said. “On the inside and the outside.”
“And yet I love you.”
He leaned down and I felt his hands on my wrists. I let him pull me up. I was wearing a black fleece that had a zipper down the length of it. Isaac reached for my neck; grabbing the top of the zipper, he pulled it down to my waist. I was so shocked I didn’t have time to react. Minutes ago he had been bare-chested, now I was. If I had nipples they would have peaked in the frigid air. If.
I am just scars and pieces of a woman. Isaac has seen me like this. In a sense he made me like this, with his scalpel and steady hands, but I still reached up to cover my chest. He stopped me. Reaching for my waist he lifted me up until I was sitting sideways in the saddle of my pierced horse. He opened my fleece the rest of the way, then he kissed the skin where my breasts used to be. He kissed softly, over the scars. My heart—surely he could feel my pounding heart. My nerve endings had been damaged, but I felt his warm lips and his breath move across my skin. I made a sound. It wasn’t a real sound. It was air and relief. Every breath I’d ever caught came whooshing out of me at once.
Isaac kissed up my neck, behind my ear, my chin, the corner of my mouth. I turned my head when he tried to kiss the other corner, and we met in the middle. Soft lips and his smell. He’d kissed me once before in the foyer of my house, it had been a drumbeat. This kiss was a sigh. It was relief and we were so drunk from it that we clung to each other like we’d been waiting for a kiss like this our whole, entire lives. His hands wrapped around my ribcage, inside of my fleece. Mine were holding his face. He pulled me off the horse. I steered him toward the only bench on the carousel. It was a chariot, curved with a leather seat. Isaac sat. I sat on his lap.
“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I said. I pulled down the zipper on his pants. I was determined. I was sure. He didn’t move his hands from my waist. He didn’t speak. He waited as I lifted myself up, pulling off my jeans and climbing back onto his lap. I left my panties on. His pants were pushed mid thigh. We were clothed and we were not. Isaac let me do everything, and that’s the way I needed it to be; half concealed, in the cold air, with the ability to climb off and leave if I wanted to. I felt less than I thought I would. I also felt more. There was no fear, just the vibrations of something loud that I didn’t quite understand. He kissed me while we moved. Then once, when it was over. The old man never came back. We zipped our clothes, and walked back up the hill chilled and in a daze. There were no more words between us. The next day I filed a restraining order against him.
And that was the last of Isaac Asterholder and me.
I try to remember sometimes what his last words to me had been. If he said something as we walked up that hill, or on the car ride home. But all I remember was his presence and his silence. And the slight echo of, and yet I love you.
And yet he loved me.
And yet I couldn’t love him back.