Chapter 25: Isabelle

There had been plenty of dodgy situations in Isabelle’s life but none that threatened her safety as much as this one. As a college student studying journalism, the daydream of traveling to unstable countries and delving into stories of dictators and coups, scrappy bands of rebels carrying homemade ammunition clashing against the powers that be. She imagined what it would be like to crawl under skies exploding into fragments, sticky from mud and humidity, communicating with the locals by hand signals to keep their position secret. There was a romanticism to it like the way she felt watching movies of journalists and whistle blowers navigating the thick underbelly of corruption and gray areas.

It hadn’t occurred to her that she would find herself in so dangerous a situation within the borders of her own country and at the hands of ranch workers after she was sent to shoot a fluff piece.

“The truth can be a dangerous thing,” a professor of hers enjoyed saying whenever the topic of murdered journalists bubbled up to the surface of class discussion. It was always tickling away under the skin of the students; Isabelle felt it dancing on the tips of her nerves when black and white photos from the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin wall, the Iranian hostage situation projected grainy freeze frames of history in front of them. Like being repulsed and attracted at the same time. Like being both sides of the magnetic and the metal.

A few girls in the classes she took mentioned not wanting to be field reporters covering chaos the way the boys did. No one ever thought they’d wind up doing human interest pieces or the light-weight junk that puffed up the space between real news but they weren’t hopping onboard for what was an inherently dangerous job.

“I can move to DC and find plenty of shit there to write about,” a classmate said when they were doing a unit on war photographers. “I’d rather focus on national issues anyway.”

“Yeah, there’s always going to be homegrown riots,” Isabelle agreed. The classmate in question read Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer and had writing samples thick with description and prose. Her goal was clearly to move into novels, not burn along the gunpowder line of journalism, scribbling down objective truths in the hopes of bringing such a beacon to the masses.

How much danger she had been willing to face when that danger was abstract and distant startled her now. Just the building heat in the room was becoming unbearable and at the very least she was being fed and kept out of harm's way. Relatively. She watched the shape of Cormac cross the paddock throughout the day, his face turning towards the window every time he did. Relatively safe. Safe for the moment but who knew for how long.

Claustrophobia set in as the day elongated. The sensation of the walls closing in was not uncommon for Isabelle. Sitting on the inside of a booth or a row of airplane seats often made her sweaty, twitchy, facing the sudden urge to stand and move now that there were bodies in the way. The tightening of her chest, the sound of her heart growing to a hollow thud, knowing that what she was really terrified was the cabin fever of being trapped inside her own mind, these were all too frequent visitors in her life, and now for the first time, they were warranted.

Isabelle took a seat in the corner of the room as far away from the crossed puddles of white-hot sunlight as she could. She closed her eyes, picturing vistas of blue oceans and gentle breezes and infinite space where no one was peeking in on her. The watery thump of her heart in her chest steadied itself, and Isabelle brought all her focus to it. Her breathing slowed, even-keeled, deep through her nose. A few years back she had found a book on meditation for anxiety and adapted several of the practices to help when she felt shackled into place. Usually they worked since her panic was born out of a trivial concern. She was never really trapped, never really a prisoner. All she had to do was ask for people to move and wait as they did so. The problem was less that she was enclosed and more that she was impatient. Watching as people creakingly got to their feet, shuffled out of her way, bumped and knocked into her as she moved past was where her anxiety peaked.

“You’re a big one, huh?” a man had remarked as she squeezed between him and the sliver of space he made for her to get out. Isabelle had given him what she hoped was a withering look, standing at her full height and exhaling through her nose down at him.

As it turned out, the meditation techniques worked less when there was an actual threat of danger. When she was truly trapped and being watched like a prisoner, the visuals of infinite oceans and fields of stars only ramped up the neurosis. Instead of receiving relief, she imagined herself hurtling outward into space, claustrophobic at the idea of never getting out of the abyss.

Isabelle abandoned the practice and lay flat on the floor. The sunlight puddles had moved ever so slightly and were now receding away from her. She swallowed the lump in her throat, blinked at the hot angry tears piercing through the corners of her eyes. How silly she felt to be held captive, no one but an old woman standing watch. She thought of the men she had idolized through journalism school. They had been shot at, taken hostage, reported on the darkest sides of humanity. Had they fallen flush to the floor and clenched their jaw in a futile attempt to hold back frustrated tears? Had they rescinded themselves to prisoner status without a struggle like she had?

Her anger emboldened her, got her onto her feet. She yanked a sheet off the bed and wrapped it multiple times around her fist until she thought it was fully cloaked. The window that faced the back of the ranch showed no one in sight so she stood off to the side and after a deep breath, she plunged her fabric fist into the glass, shuddering at the stabs from the shards that poked into her but didn’t penetrate. She brushed the frame clean just as she heard Tara calling down the hall to her.

“What was that sound?” the old lady asked, her footsteps moving in a flurry towards Isabelle’s now breached cell.

Isabelle swung her leg out the window and tumbled to the dusty ground in one fluid motion. She could hear Tara unlocking the door so she stayed low and crawled to the other side of the house before taking off in an adrenaline powered sprint. There was no place to hide in the desert but she hoped she could get to the road before anyone spotted her, waved down a car and just beg them to take her anywhere they were going.

She was too exposed as she ran. Anyone looking could see for miles. Low desert scrub and rocks all sat at ground level and here she was at nearly six feet tall like a zebra in the wide open on the plains of the veldt.

Behind her, Tara was screaming for the men. Isabelle couldn’t make out the words but she got the gist of it.

The rutted blacktop of the rural road did little to assuage her fears. She kept running, seeing no vehicles or people in either direction. In the time she had been out there, she had seen a car or two per day pass by that hadn’t been someone coming to the ranch. People who came out this way must have come with a purpose or otherwise they were hopelessly lost. Isablle would have taken either option at that point.

A noise began to advance to her back, a steady drumbeat of a sound that swelled closer no matter how fast she ran. She couldn’t turn around to see what it was; she didn’t want to and from her perspective it didn’t matter. She had to keep moving.

“Hol’ up, girl!” someone shouted at her, a voice surfing along the drumbeat sound. “Where ya gonna go?!”

If Isabelle had been inclined to answer, she would have told the voice she was going anywhere she could. Anywhere that wasn’t this hot, dusty ranch surrounded by morphing creatures and dangerous men.

Her feet slapped the blacktop, skipping over potholes and chunks of glittering onyx asphalt. The pace was too much to maintain but she was powered by panic and fear and the thought of being back in that sun exposed room, tucking into a corner away from the blazing light. Her legs trembled with each step and yet she refused to yield.

Something struck her in the back between her shoulder blades. Isablle lost her footing, tumbling and scraping along the pockmarked road. She scrambled up again, dizzy and demoralized but not done with her escape attempt. Another shout was directed at her. A hand gripped into the collar of her shirt before she could start running again.

“I said where ya gonna go?!”

The hand tugged her hard, and Isabelle landed on the blacktop. Her head snapped back, connected with the road and a cracking noise reverberated in the interior of her skull. It turned to waves behind her eyelids, warped her vision to squiggles and a blanket of white.

She must have only been out a minute or so. An entire story had been played in that flash of time, a dream where she was standing waist deep in a liquid sludge, unseen creatures dragging dull teeth across the flesh of her legs. There were people watching her, faces she knew from childhood and college, work colleagues from other cities and past jobs that left barely a dent of an impression in her mind. It baffled her that experiences she hardly registered in her waking hours could have a vaulted appearance in her dreams.

Those faces didn’t appear too concerned with her encased state. She struggled against the sludge, a viscous river of black and thick grays carrying opalescent streaks like the residue of gasoline in parking lots. At the end of this line, she saw Cormac. He was crouched down, his fingertips trailing along the top of the fluid. Everyone else was standing upright, their hands thrust into their pockets as if protecting something precious. They were observing him; he was watching her.

“Where ya gonna go?” he asked in the warbled voice of interior dream worlds. “There ain’t nowhere else to go.”

His arm fully extended but Isabelle couldn’t get her own limbs out of the mixture to grab on. The sludge began to rise, inching and creeping towards her throat, her mouth, covering her face as she thrashed underneath its undulating surface. Cormac’s hand was unflinching, never recoiled.

“Where ya gonna go?”

Isabelle jerked awake as someone lifted her roughly by the armpits. Her head throbbed, the back of feeling swollen and blood heavy. Whoever was trying to pick her up was struggling, her limbs flopping like dead weight as they pushed her against the warm side of a horse’s haunches.

“No one wants to hurt ya, girl,” the voice said, “but ya gotta understand: we can’t be found out. Ya hear?”

Isabelle twisted her head to see the weathered face of Gus only inches away from hers. She could see the salt and pepper follicles of his scruff pushing up through the leather of his chin. Her eyes were still swimming, shifting focus to keep herself from getting dizzy.

“People don’t take too well to us,” he was saying, doing whatever he could to boost Isabelle onto the back of the horse. “I’m sure Cormac told ya all ‘bout it.”

“Told me about what?”

Her own voice was too loud in her ears. Standing upright was testing her and the contents of her stomach tumbled around. She bent at the waist, vomiting whatever was in her onto the chipped asphalt and sand.

“Told ya ‘bout Maxine. What happened to her.”

Isabelle shook her head. Gus’s eyes faltered to the ground as she straightened up and wiped the remnants of her sick off of her mouth. It hadn’t occurred to her that he was the one she had spotted that night, stuck between shapes, struggling to get through a process he had done countless times before.

“He ain’t never said nothing about Maxine?” Gus asked.

“I don’t even know who Maxine is.”

Gus sighed, looked over his shoulder at the ranch behind them. Isabelle had gotten a pretty solid distance away but the fact remained that there was nowhere for her to go and no one out there to help her.

“Get on the horse,” Gus said, his focus still on the ranch. “Let’s just get you back inside.”

Isabelle didn’t argue. Her feet burnt against the blacktop and she was sick and dizzy from the heat, the fall, the swelling lump on the back of her head. She put her foot into Gus’s cupped hands and swung her leg over the horse the same way she had climbed out of the window only minutes earlier. Gus hopped up in front of her, clicked his tongue, dug his heels into the thick of the horse’s body, and they ambled towards the ranch to return Isabelle to her cell.