Thrust: A Novel

When Laisvė sings stories to children, it can take several hours. The stories have many layers; they’re full of animals and natural elements as characters, like turtles and snakes and trees and worms, and always water. There is always a character named Aster, who pitches stars across the sky at night, and always a woman named Aurora, who brings the dawn, who spreads white lilies over any ground where war occurred, and always a man named Joseph, who brings the blanket of night gently around everyone and everything. There is always a beautiful man named Kem, who has a map of a new geography on his face and down his neck, like a human allegory of becoming and change, and a person named Endora, who welds the wounds between people, and a man named David, who sometimes turns into a swallow.

She asks the children who wants to play each role.

Who wants to be Aster, who marries the sea and changes the landforms?

Who wants to be Kem, whose body is a map of possibility?

Who can play the dawn?

David the swallow?

What about Endora? She likes to swear!

Who among you can be the beautiful lilies, like a hundred hands holding light?

And who can be Joseph, like a blanket at nighttime?

Who can be the Tiktaalik?

What it might feel like to pull oneself forward onto the ground from water an elbow at a time. She had done it herself. From the Narrows, from rivers, oceans, streams, a lake. Sometimes she also just felt compelled to drop to dirt and reinhabit the motion for no reason, just the pleasure of it. One elbow at a time.

Did the Tiktaalik take air in differently that first time, somehow longer; did she linger? Did she swivel her head around from that great neck, did her head want more even as her hind end and tail pulled her back to water? Did she open her mouth? Close it? Speak some sensation before language? Did she close her eyes in sensory delight or confusion as the air washed over her? Did her scales sing with eager curiosity, or cry for home? What pulled her? Hunger? Blind lunge? Accident of the stars? Did something call her? And when she finally made her S-body turn back to water, back to our shared, breathable blue past, was it relief or reserve that she felt swimming away?

Not only the moment that the Tiktaalik lingered on land, but the impossibility of ever telling the story — that is what Laisvė can’t stop imagining.

The children spend the night inside the storytelling, their voices and heads raised up toward the night sky, naming new constellations.

Some say you can hear whales accompanying the story songs from the water, their wails threaded through her song stories. They say that if you throw a coin into water and make a wish, your wish might turn an entire epoch. These stories about stories are one way that stories survive.

But Mikael tends to think everything turns on imagination — the smile on a worker’s face at the end of a day’s labor building a future anyone might inhabit, or the face of a child who believes in something larger than themselves, a beauty held like a world, a marble, in your hand.

And liberty.

Coda

In the cages, we work to take care of one another. I stopped wondering when we could have showers, clean clothes, toothbrushes, or beds after two weeks. Children as young as two or three years old were with us without adult caregivers. A boy here, eleven years old, takes care of his three-year-old brother. He is so tired, he can barely stay awake. Another twelve-year-old girl cares for a four-year-old girl she does not know; she gives her extra food and protects her if someone is bullying her. The younger girl wears diapers. The older girl changes them. If you have the flu, you can sleep on a mattress on the floor in the flu cells. Sometimes we have fevers. Nobody puts their hands on our foreheads here. When I had the flu, if that’s really what I had, there were twenty-seven other children in the cinder-block space, all with a fever, some shivering, all sharing mattresses on the floor. No one was looking after us. Sometimes they gave us pills, then not.

In the other Americas, where most of us began our lives, throwing rocks is a girl’s first duty. You know you are choosing life over death. If you can be beaten for studying, raped for being in public, kidnapped on the street, why not fight? Fight to live. It’s easy not to scream as a child. We all learn it. Before embarking on the journey, I witnessed a soldier dragging a girl. By her hair. He hit her, she fell, and then he kicked her while she was on the ground. With his boot. She didn’t scream. Then she got up and ran. He followed her to a roof. He hit her again and told her that he would throw her off the roof. She said, Do it. Then she jumped up and stood on the ledge, daring him. Yesterday, the girl I sleep next to on the floor died in her sleep. I covered her face with the silver shock blanket. I said a silent prayer. Sometimes they leave the bright lights on all night.