Thrust: A Novel

A line of pain shot from his sternum to his forehead. How wrong it is, he thinks, this world she endures. How I hate it. “It’s like being trapped at the bottom of the ocean,” he tells her. “Cold and black and alone. But my imagination keeps going.”

“Like when you dream at night?”

“Sort of, yes. And then the bottom of the ocean becomes a whale, and the whale takes me to…” He paused.

“Svajonė. Where my mother is. At the bottom of the ocean.”

“Yes.” He stared at the wall. “But seriously, one day you fell out of a boat and became a mermaid. Look at that tail!”

The girl laughed like a daughter, caught in domestic comfort. There was a big distance between the words jumped and fell. For a second, the words son and mother and daughter made him bite down his back teeth hard enough to make his temples pulse. Where has she gotten to this time? Did she steal anything? The collection of objects in her room flashed up in his mind’s eye. Coins. Feathers. Bones. Rocks and shells. The skin of a corn snake. Dead insects. Books everywhere, and pages and pages of lists. Did anyone see her? Follow her? He counted to four and breathed in, held it, counted to four breathing out to calm himself.

“Okay. Now the real story. From the beginning.”

Sometimes all a father can do is smile for his daughter and give her the story she desires. Perhaps in fairy tale form children can live with what really happened.

The walls of the kitchen pressed in on him, the cracks and splotchy paint scratching his body like old skin. The smallness and cold and mold of the entire apartment tightened. He stole a glance at the cardboard and duct tape they’d used to cover up wall holes and window cracks. He fought off the feeling that the apartment was nothing but a moldy and diseased blanket folding them up toward death.

“Once there was a star in the sky who fell in love with a fur spinner,” Aster began.

Her smile widened with satisfaction. She kept turning the object in her hand, out of sight beneath the kitchen table. “And they lived across water, in a place that used to have land bridges. And the land bridges before them carried their ancestors,” she answered.

“Who is telling the story?” he asked her, grinning.

“You are,” Laisvė said.

He continued. “Far enough back in time, yes — a land called Siberia. Though, before that land was taken over, it had other names.”

“Where is Siberia? What were the other names?”

He walked over to the tiny kitchen window, crisscrossed with duct tape covering cracks in the glass and sealing the edges. On the wall nearby, he’d hung an old map from the turn of the last century in America. He’s made this journey across the kitchen before, has told his daughter this story before — it doesn’t matter how many times. “Siberia lived inside what used to be Russia, and before that, it was the Soviet Union. Here.” He pointed to the expanse that once — before the ice melted, before nations became unstitched — was Siberia, traced it with his forefinger. Then he lifted his pointer finger and studied his own skin for a moment. His finger had a cut that never healed properly, never quite scarred over as it should have, like the land and the people.

“What were they like? Countries? Was the Soviet Union a bad place? Was Siberia? Was America?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on who is telling the story. Times change.”

“You’re telling it.”

“Nations were like forever-dancing animals. Sometimes one was the prey, sometimes the other; sometimes they both were but neither one knew it. Nations used to be forged by wars and power. And Siberia? It was a kind of enigma—”

“What’s enigma?”

“Am I telling the story?” He began again. I could not love this girl more. In fact, sometimes I think this is all I have left of love. The way I carry it in my body — it may kill me. That’s what happens when love is desperate, when it’s filled with a skin-shivering terror.

“Siberia was a place bigger than just a place. It was unknowable. That’s an enigma. People lived and died there in a way no one knows anything about. People were sent there and they just disappeared. Or they formed strange communities in the nothingness. It was a land covered in ice — until one day the ice began to give, to melt, and it revealed what had been unknowable before. That’s the afterlife of an enigma.”

Aster paused to feel the weight of the fact that their very existence — a father, a daughter — remained an enigma to him. He stirred the stew. “The earliest Siberians — some of the very first of them — they left their home to cross the great land bridge called Beringia in the glacial time, and they landed in the Americas. Before there were Americas.”

“Or they went in a boat.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “That may be too.”