Thrust: A Novel

The turtle studied her. He turned his head from side to side. He considered lying. Who the hell did she think she was to demand his identity? But something in her eyes compelled him. “Bertrand,” he said. “And you?” he asked, though he wasn’t necessarily interested. Still, she had a head on her shoulders, this one, underdeveloped and odd as she was. Most humans were stupid; the rest of them suffered from a melancholia that was something like an irrational addiction to nostalgia, or so it seemed to him. A decidedly human ailment. They were addicted to dead things.

“My name is Laisvė,” she said. “But please don’t mention any of this to my father. I’m supposed to stay inside every day, now that the Raids are getting closer.”

The turtle nodded. “Best get to it,” he said, nodding toward the previous trouble.

With one hand clenched around the dead woman’s locket and the other around the turtle, Laisvė jumped into the water.

Aster and the Fear of Falling

At the end of a day of labor, in the moments after the horn sounded, Aster would straddle the iron beams, locking his legs and closing his eyes, and then hold his arms out away from his body. Up at that height, the clouds and the descending sun seemed more like kin than faraway elements, and he felt held. If there was wind, it would find him, a strange pull toward the open sky, toward a kind of upward surrender, before he had to climb back down to land, to reality, to daughter.

How easy it would be. The leap.

It was a thought he could never stop.

He wished he could talk to Joseph. He missed Joseph terribly — missed him mostly in his legs. If Joseph was still there, he imagined, they’d have a talk before making their way back down to ground.

“Well, shit. It doesn’t matter to me where you’re from,” Joseph had said the second day he knew him. Aster had been told about Joseph Tekanatoken by a man from Ontario who had passed through the Yakutia territory in Siberia long ago on a geological expedition. Joseph in The Brook can get work, he said, for anyone crazy enough to walk the iron, work in the sky.

Every night that followed, Aster dreamed of a man walking on lines in the clouds. His dreams became a want in him. The want carried him like a craving, and then, like all addictions and contractions of the imagination, his want destroyed his life.

When Aster arrived in The Brook with nowhere to live, with grief larger than an ocean and a daughter whose face was blank with trauma and a baby boy who cried too much, Joseph Tekanatoken had let them sleep on the couch in his trailer. The trailer was parked on a patch of dirt far from water. All three of them came to rest there, like some strange animals braided into one another’s bodies. Joseph fed them eggs and cheese, and brought them milk. Every single day for a year.

One night the electricity went dead and the trailer was too cold for children to sleep. Joseph never said a word, but he brought in a giant thick blanket woven from wool and put it over them all like a tent. Then he surrounded them with his own body in a gesture that was as gentle as it was gigantic. (But that couldn’t be true, could it? That Joseph had been able to surround the whole of them with his body? It felt true to Aster.) The air was warm. The children slept.

It felt good to talk to Joseph, and in those days, almost nothing felt good to Aster. He tried to narrate to Joseph who he was, where he had come from, but every time he tried, the story split into too many tributaries. The one story he could replicate with any consistency was built from a tiny fragment of memory involving a woman who may have been Aster’s mother. The woman in the memory sat inside a long building with a long table. When she spoke, everyone in the room listened. If he closed his eyes, he could see her silver hair. Was the woman in the memory his mother? A mother? Or a dream he had conjured in place of a mother?

“She was probably an animal or tree soul,” Joseph said, and then they stared at each other while Aster tried to figure out if Joseph was fucking with him or not. Then came that laugh, something like car tires going over small stones in a road, and the sound of it made him wish what Joseph said was true. Whoever his mother had been, she’d been killed like an animal. Maybe the woman in his memory was just one of the women from the village who raised him; maybe she was just a woman who’d raised her voice at some shared and useless dinner. Maybe she was just a woman he’d seen in a movie or a book, someone who seemed like a mother. Maybe the woman in his memory was a ghost. Maybe she was a tree soul.

The only female in his present tense was his daughter, Laisvė, and his only job on earth was to get her safely to womanhood, to help her forward until some path — any path — appeared in front of her. It occurred to him she might have to swim open a path. Aster had never learned to swim.