Thrust: A Novel

Her daughter-body leapt up and threw her over the side of the boat; motherwater mothertongue motherheart.

Laisvė finishes the tale for the turtle: “The men in charge of the save-your-life boat could have left the girl to the waves, but they did not. One of them, who had spent most of his life as a sea fisherman, acted as quickly as lightning and netted her. For a long minute, she dragged through the teeth-cracking, skull-numbing icy waters, gulping air when she could, letting her arms and legs lose feeling so that they flopped to her sides desiring to become fins. Then she was pulled back onto the boat and wrapped in wool blankets, and some men yelled at her and other men rubbed her body and her father with her infant brother looked at her as if she were a dangerous fish, a new species he hadn’t a name for, water girl both of him and never again of him. The girl willing to throw herself into the motherwaters, to make them home. Then they were herded into the hull of the boat, crammed full of other anguished people.

“Once there was a water girl who lived in the belly of a whale. The whale was a boat that carried her father and her brother and her body, brought back to life and a different, motherless shore.”

“Ah… so the whale was a boat,” Bertrand says. “Or was it a kind of world? A holding place? The whale is a metaphor?”

“The whale was also a whale,” Laisvė says, beginning to lose her patience.

“I’ve known a number of whales,” the turtle says, turning its little head back and forth to crack its neck. “The way you want is a whale way. You want to move toward ocean. That way. The Hudson to the Atlantic, or so your people called them in the gone time. These water paths, we don’t call them anything. We don’t have to. Language isn’t so… stunted for us. Language moves more like the ocean.”

“Thank you,” Laisvė water-whispers. “Goodbye, Bertrand.”

Bertrand swims away.

Laisvė watches his little butt and legs until she can’t see them anymore. In her mouth, she holds a coin, wet with salt water.

Of Water and Limbs

A week before the Raid that separated Laisvė from Aster, she’d been searching for information about two waterways: the Lena River in Siberia and Lake Xochimilco near Mexico City.

Laisvė was trying to remember something about death and something about life that was bound not to human history but to the history of animals and water and desire. Once, between rails in the overgrown subway system, she’d found what looked like a white rose pendant carved from an animal tusk. Ivory, perhaps. She’d taken it to the Awn Shop.

“That’s not from an elephant,” the old comma-shaped man said. “This is something much older.” He adjusted his eye magnifier. “This piece is straight out of the mouth of history.”

“Mammoth?” Laisvė whispered. In the years just before the great water rise and global collapse, she knew, the tusks of ancient mammoths had been discovered rising from the mud and permafrost along the Lena River. Around the same time, axolotls, the colorful amphibians that were among Laisvė’s favorite creatures in existence, had started migrating through a network of canals from Lake Xochimilco. One of these species was extinct, and the other had come back from near extinction, and this is what interested her.

Two things fascinated her even more. One was that an underground economy had grown up around the hunting and selling of prehistoric mammoth tusks the moment they reemerged. The other was that axolotls had the ability to regenerate their own lost limbs.

In Yakutia, where people had spent lifetimes scratching out a living hunting and fishing in the surrounding forests and rivers, whole villages suddenly became rich as the blooming of mammoth tusks, known as “ice ivory,” gave rise to an ivory gold rush. The biggest demand came from China, where they harvested more than eighty tons a year. Traditional ivory carvers, their work long thwarted by a ban on the sale of elephant ivory, swarmed to get hold of the mammoth tusks. For those who partook of this new ivory trade, the tusks were an unexpected source of income; for researchers, they were a potential key to everything they’d wanted to know about mammoths and their demise. Two countervailing forces — money or knowledge; money or survival — creating torque among humans.

It was hard to say if the rush on mammoth tusks had helped or hurt the illegal killing of African elephants to harvest their ivory. But Laisvė understood that the earth had spit the mammoth tusks up as a test, to see what her species would do. Every time the earth did that — as with diamonds, as with gold — humans had a choice. She had a kind of sense-memory of seeing the tusks herself in childhood, a kind of retinal flash — a series of tiny moving images next to the image of her mother she carried in her body. The tusks reaching out of the mud seemed to be saying something, but she wasn’t sure what. They rose like ghostly question marks toward the sky.