Thrust: A Novel

Aurora, my lost forever dawn. Where are you?

I can’t remember if this is the third or fourth bottle I’ve thrown into the harbor with a letter to you inside it. It isn’t hope, unless there really is such a thing as hope against hope. In my heart I believe that you would admire the act too. The care with which I roll each letter into a tube small enough to fit inside a bottle. The bottles themselves are in hues of green and blue and amber, sometimes with an ornate stopper. I watch them float away in the evenings at dusk. I imagine you finding them, beautiful reliquaries carrying what’s left of our knowledge of each other.

I wouldn’t say the harbor water is indifferent. Somehow it seems to me that the swirling eddies and soft currents receive the bottles and epistles gently. Like hands. So many things we put to water to try to give them meaning: Petals. Bodies. Wreaths for the departed. Coins for luck.

And my Big Daughter in the harbor. Standing tall. Still.

I do not know where you are.

I do know that, in your last letter, you told me to watch for a gift if I ever found you gone.

To say that I left my interlude with you the night of the apple feeling a snake coiled at the base of my spine — to say that would be an understatement. I never thought of it being perhaps the last night I would see you. I left with the lunge and swell of someone who can’t wait until the next time, and the next, and the next, like an addict.

Why didn’t you tell me? I just walked away like an idiot, hoping the night would never end.

I have thought many hours since your disappearance about that night: what I did, where I went.

The doors on your street all lead to a place where someone could slip from one reality into another. Two doors to the left and I could lose this ache with someone whose ram’s-head-of-a-cock would bring me quite close to losing consciousness. Our dear friend Kate’s well-traveled establishment around the corner. Four doors down and across the street and I could slip into my dreams through the pipe.

I can still hear you explaining your rules to the client through the door when I was leaving. “No sexual intercourse. In the strictest definition of that term, as you recognize it. If that’s your game, you’ve come to the wrong Rooms. Go down the street with your shriveled”—and here a quick crotch-glance—“imagination.” I know your aims well, my secular and singular angel. Cocks and cunts and anuses and mouths and hands and tongues and feet and breasts and ears and necks and torsos and legs and those muscular flabs that are the sweet thick truth of an ass are for something else than people have been trained to understand. You offered your differently bodied experiences to anyone who was willing to learn how to be in their body differently as well. You meant to push flesh against “the idiotic limits of the ridiculous reproductive impulse.” From your point of view, we’d gotten the body all wrong.

In your Rooms, intense varieties of sensual sensation refigured everything. Nothing to do with immorality or morality. I understood that even in our youth. It was always your imagination at the helm, let loose, navigating us up and through uncharted channels. “Anyone can have sex,” you’d quip. “I’ve been there. I’ve done all of that. What I want is… colossal. Unnamable. Something that might seem like ordinariness or nothingness on the surface until it reveals itself to you as a universe. A going beyond the sexual. An evolution. An odyssey into erotics — not a Homerian odyssey of all-conquering might and war, which to me is duller than death, whole purblind epochs have been built on that tyrannical and impotent thrust”—and you would roll your eyes—“but in its place an odyssey that carries humans past simple pleasure and through ecstatic pain unto deeper pleasure, both a thrust and a devouring.”

When I’d look at you without understanding, you’d speak to me like a child. “Dearest, just picture two women joining their miraculous angles with each other, thrusting endlessly, opening into each other. That will give you a sense of the shape, the how of it. Mouth to mouth in waves. You boys always just want to know where to stick your appendage, where to aim, where to shoot. That’s been part of the problem all along — a formal problem at base. Not your fault, however. You were made that way. The protuberance dulls your wits. If you’d like, I can harness that thing so that your blood flows more freely to feed your imagination.”

An American woman and her two daughters ran the nearest opium establishment. On this street, all people from everywhere bled into one another without discrimination. People recently released from the poorhouses and prisons, well-to-do businessmen and bankers and lawyers and judges, whores and thieves and bar owners and patrons, shopkeepers and laborers from mills and factories, all mixed together — and children, children everywhere. Children who worked the dens or the brothels, children who worked the streets and the clients, children who had no homes to call their own except the streets.

For about eight dollars I could procure a ration of five ounces, then go home to ready my smoker’s kit — a lamp, a sponge, a shell with opium, bowl cleaner, scissors, needle. But my pleasure would be better cared for at the opium joint, where the mother and her daughters could supply me with a reclining sleeping pad, a hookah, a pipe, and tins, and constant soothing, partly domestic and familial attention.

That night, a girl of no more than seventeen, upper-class by the look of her dress, was on the bed just above mine, unconscious, ahead of me in her dream journey. To my right, a man who might have been one hundred years old. I slept.

Then, the detonation.

It shook the beds, my body, the building. The light had come, so it had to be morning. The people who had been near me were gone; others stole in before my dreaming had ended. My head knocked the headboard of the sleeping pad. I got up but not quickly; others were at the window before me. I couldn’t see beyond their heads, but I could hear them.

Fire.

A building had exploded and now it was on fire. I could see the flickering light above their heads.

I retrieved my coat and ran outside, hoping you were nowhere near the blast. I ran past your building a ways, and when I looked up, I thought I saw you — I did, with a hundred faces of children all around you.

But it must have been an opium haze.

Where are you? I am lost.

Frédéric