Thrust: A Novel

The sun had nearly folded into the horizon. The water glowed blue and orange. The Brook’s dappled dwellings and half-submerged bridges, dripping with vegetation, red-tailed hawks, and eagle’s nests, all went to shadow.

Aster made his way from the Sea Wall site down to the ground. He unhooked his rig, pulled his coat collar up to his ears. He wondered, for a moment, whether the Sea Wall was really designed to keep water out, or perhaps to seal people in. He turned and set off on a circuitous route back to the apartment. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. A map of his daughter’s making, covered with her writing and drawings, strange lines crossing through their streets in The Brook. All of it labeled with syllables he didn’t recognize, the names of objects, Latinate terms and categories for animals. What does any of it mean? Where is my girl? A map to nowhere:

Then he cried.

I do not understand my own daughter, and I will die if I cannot keep her safe.

—

Once, Aster came across a doctor who was squatting in a warehouse a few buildings down from theirs. He met him standing around a fire in a metal can after work. The man said he had a brother who’d been taken in a Raid; he told Aster that he’d become a doctor years ago in an effort to help his brother, who was living with a brain tumor that impacted his speech and behavior. The man wept for his lost brother.

One particularly desperate night, after Laisvė had come home late carrying a knife, Aster found the doctor again and asked him to visit Laisvė. When the man arrived, he sat down across from the girl in the kitchen.

“Where do you go when Aster is at work?” he asked.

“Nowhere. I just make up the stories I tell him. I have a vivid imagination.”

“Where do you find all these objects, then?”

“Just here, in the apartment building. Things people leave behind, I guess.”

“Do you hear voices?”

“No.”

“Do you see things?”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, things that look more like a dream than the regular world. You know, irregular things.”

“No. Isn’t this world irregular enough?”

“Do you miss your mother and your brother?”

Here there was a long silence. Aster watched his daughter look at her hands, no doubt weighing something as invisible as love. “No, I have Aster.”

She seems like the rest of us out here, the doctor had said. Traumatized, all of us, and just getting on with things.

Now, heading home, Aster folded his map back up and returned it to his pocket. He rubbed his arms for warmth.

Outside their falling-apart building, he steadied himself on a tree. This bark is older than I am, he thinks; maybe this tree remembers things that can help me break through this fear. Things from the world before this one.

There were things he knew himself, things he was sure of: Once there was a wife. Once there was a son. A journey across water. All I have left now is water and daughter.

He climbed the stairs — even his breathing sounded like giving up — and opened the door to their apartment. There, instead of despair, he saw his daughter at the kitchen table with a pile of crayons. She was drawing a whale. The whale’s eye blue. Her own hair wet.

“Laisvė, why is your hair damp?” he managed to say, though the words in his mouth felt heavy. He took his coat off and hung it by the door.

“I’m just hot,” she said.

“You mean wet,” he said.

But he already knew that anger was of no use with Laisvė. Rage just shut her down for days, and so he knew he must start the story over again whenever he needed to remind her to be careful, to stay inside, to stay away from trouble.

“Tell me the story again,” his daughter, his love, his life said.

The apartment shuddered with the coming of late fall. His daughter had already started a vegetable stew — just potatoes and carrots and onions and water, really, with a handful of wild herbs she’d found breaking through the cracks in the ground. He walked to the stove, stirred the stew with a wooden spoon. He looked back over his shoulder. Laisvė turned something small over and over in her hand, a tiny secret. He knew it now: she’d left again, against his wishes, and come back with a new object. Nothing is more daughter than this: a father making dinner in place of a mother, trying to keep his terror and anger at bay; a girl keeping her secrets, taking her chances, asking for a story where a family, a home, a city should be.

“What’s that you’ve got?” he asked.

“Story,” she reminded him, holding her treasure under the table. “Tell me the story.”

“You fell out of a boat as a young child and turned into a whale,” he said.

Laisvė half smiled. Rolled her eyes. “I’m not a whale, Dad.”

You fell out of a boat and nearly drowned. More than once.

“Aster? What’s it like?”

“What’s it?”

“Your seizures. What’s it like when you have one.”