Thrust: A Novel

She wants to show the children how to memorize the story, to change it with their own tongue and breath and song. She wants to give them the words as if they were objects you could hold in your hand and use to turn time. She wants the words to become fluid in time and space, untethered from law and order and institutions that towered into collapse. She wants the words to rearrange, to locate differently, the way language itself could if you loosened it from human hubris and let it flow freely again as a sign system, as the land and water did, as species of plants and animals did, everything in existence suddenly again in flux, everything again possible.

Song of the Floating Boy and the Water Girl

The statue has been drowned now for a long time. As the tides ebb and flow, the tips of the torch are the only things still visible from what was once the colossus, the beacon, the icon of a nation. Sometimes Laisvė and Mikael and Indigo take a boat out toward her; sometimes they bring some of the other habitat children with them.

One of the floating habitats they built for children without origins rests on the water, in the place where an immigrant hospital did many years ago. Sometimes Laisvė imagines the hospital’s autopsy theater, or the contagious-disease area, or the laboratories. Sometimes she thinks about how, in an earlier epoch, her father would have been held there for his epilepsy — likely in the psychiatric holding area — tormented for something he never deserved.

Immigrant babies were born in the hospital. At the time, they automatically became citizens of a country. Within sight of a statue that was meant to signal to them their freedom. Whatever the word freedom meant, then, to them.

“The sick weren’t the only ones shut out of the old hospitals,” Laisvė once told Mikael, pausing to take a bite of kelp. “And the word immigration has been used as a cover story for bigotry and brutality since forever, all over the world. You know that. Even as the same nations were stocking their industries with an endless supply of human laborers.” Then she’d remind him how xenophobic tendencies exist in all times, shutting out the same people no matter what lessons history has left us.

Anarchists

Murderers

Communists

Utopians

Radical socialists

Queer people

Mentally ill

Poor single mothers

Foreigners

Immigrants

Thieves

Orphans

And then she’d be off again, lost in her narrations of competing histories, opening long-lost times and places to him as if she were a human book.

When Mikael ushered Laisvė into the very first habitat he designed and built, she said, inexplicably, “The survivors of the Titanic were brought here, and allowed onto land. Except for six seamen from China… The people who took this land and called it their own were poisoned by their own bigotry from the start.” She then returned to reciting the immigration histories she’d been telling him the entire time he’d known her, as if she were unable to stop.

Sometimes Mikael wondered if Laisvė suffered from mental illness. More often, he wept with relief that she existed in his life at all. Perhaps this is love: that space in between words, in between the meanings of words and things.

What Laisvė wanted, he finally decided, was to reverse pieces of history with her body. She wanted to create a real home for children who’d been orphaned or lost or abandoned or did not know where they came from, or children on the edge of danger. A place on water where a boy or a girl or anyone could float freely without fear of violence. Where children could educate one another outside the constraints of any institution or law meant to mold them into good citizens and laborers. This was a story he could bear.

It was easier, he realized, because there were no more Raids by then. There were no more nations, and so no more borders, and so no more immigrants, and so no more arrests or leaders or prisons. No more mass deportations. There were simply pockets of people all over the globe trying to exist alongside one another without a system of power to organize them. Like a new species.

Maybe a new system was coming. Maybe not. Here, in the place where they were, the people hadn’t even wanted to gather together enough to make a name for their new existence. People stopped calling the area The Brook. They stopped caring where anyone was from. Maybe someday they’d want to gather, share resources, stories. For now, they existed in habitats connected by sky bridges and sea tunnels, or they were just floating, living, or learning to live.

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