Thrust: A Novel

—

The bottle I pitch into the water is blue this time. A current catches the object, and then all is writ in water.

Ethnography 6

Underneath the massive Capitol building — with its external layers of pomp and authority, with its internal ceremonies and work conducted by elected officials as busy as bees, with its mighty facade of security and order, with its countless portals of ingress and egress, a whole underground city of laborers keeps things running. There are hundreds of us hidden in the bowels of the buildings. Painters and cleaners and plumbers and electricians, mechanics and sanitation workers and food preparation workers. Our bodies carry a different story from those that make the news. The mopping and waxing have given many of us — at least those of us who have worked more than thirty years — arthritis. The marble dusters sometimes break down. I dust the woodwork and clean the cigarette and cigar ash. There are thirty-nine buildings to clean and an underground subway and 1,400 restrooms. There are graveyard-shift architectural and engineering employees, as busy as invisible night creatures.

I like to bring a bag of apples and tangerines for the break room. My father before me, Othar, used to as well. My crew is ten people. One woman, Tisha. Sometimes we tease her, but Tisha is stronger than half the men and she insists on making the coffee. We need four or five pots a night. You can feel the ghost of all the workers before us — the people who labored under orders from others, the people who built the original structures. The battles over working conditions and wages that happened here, the New Deal, most of which didn’t apply to us. Our well-being has not been part of any story. Some of our family members and fellow workers dug through contaminated trash for years without any protection. Contaminated with asbestos or blood or toxic materials, all of it falling like dust over our bodies, some of it surely taken within, contaminating us in turn.

The stories above us happen in dramatic, televised splashes with international weight. Who lives and who dies underneath the belly of things — well, that doesn’t make the news.

I go to work around eleven at night and I finish around six in the morning. I guess you could say we keep the buildings clean so that others can achieve the great work of the nation… but we’re the ones who take care of all the shit. It’s almost like we’re an entire undercity. No telling what goes on above us. Like another history. Another world.

Tisha’s brother ascended, though. He worked for the Capitol Police. He no longer works there or anywhere. There’s a cost to ascension.

Testudines

Of Time and Water

Tell me the story again.”

Indigo sits under the kitchen table turning an object over in her small hands. Outside the window of their floating habitat, the water sloshes against the platforms. The sky is gray today, the water gray, or she’d be outside helping to plant more rosemary and potatoes and tomatoes in the floating greenhouse nearest their pod.

Miles inland, what was once The Brook has taken a different shape again; buildings have either lost their bearings and collapsed or changed form, like bodies bending and leaning. London plane trees, Norway maples, and Callery pear trees originally from Asia thread through the former streets and alleys, or rest fallen and uprooted with broken limbs becoming detritus or food for worms and insects. Pin oaks, stuck stubbornly in concrete, stand steadfast. Vegetation rewilds everything urban. Animals make their homes.

On water, the floating habitats spread out across the surface, or dip under into the bellies of aquatic dwellings; some bamboo-framed cylindrical structures punch skyward like stubborn thumbs. Crabs, oysters, lobsters, shrimp, northern pipefish, pufferfish, jellyfish, and tiny seahorses thrive in the riverway and ocean. Whales and seals have conversations regarding the stamina of sturgeons.

Mikael unrolls several large sheaths of drafting paper out onto the table in the kitchen. The blue ink of the drawings is almost like a language to him. Rooftop farms. Parks with paths that soak up water and reduce heat. Healing gardens. Education centers powered by environmentally generated electricity. Hydropower stations. Terraced farms that recycle organic waste. Floodplains remade into villages with giant retention ponds to collect rainwater. Indigo emerges from under the table, stands up, and looks at the drawings with him.

“That looks like a starfish,” she says of one.

“The habitats all have names that reflect their forms and inspirations — can you see?” He gently passes his hand over some of the forms. “The Sea Manta, gently undulating across the top of the water like the wings of manta rays, the belly of the structure dipping down into the ocean.”

“Yes! And the same colors — black on top, white on the bottom.”