Thrust: A Novel

Once, Laisvė remembered, she and her mother had happened upon a prospector knee-deep in river mud, trying to pry a tusk loose from the detritus. The tusk hunter had a large knife and a gun. Her mother was carrying her brother on her back. Hold as still as a statue, her mother told her. They hid behind a tree. The tree spoke to Laisvė when she put her hand against its bark: This is the end of an epoch, it said. The animals are returning, and they are doing it one fossil at a time. Water is rearranging.

Laisvė watched the river Lena rushing by. The river had already washed away more than one village and many people.

The history of animals and plants and water made Laisvė see all history differently, and she told her mother this even as a young child.

“What is history to you?” her mother had asked her once.

Laisvė recited her understanding of the word history, in triplets: “Explosion, cosmos, chaos. Water, land, cells. Plants, fish, animals. Indigenous humans, habitats, stories. Dreams, desire, death. Invasion, dispossession, colonization. Money, ships, slavery. God, goods and services, slaughter. War, power, genocide. Civilization, progress, destruction. Science, transportation, cities. Skyscrapers, bridges, poison.

“Nations, power, brutality. Terror, insurrection, incarceration. Collapse, raids, water.”

“I see,” her mother said. Then, to calm her daughter, her mother told her a story.

“You know the axolotl, Laisvė?” she began. “Ambystoma mexicanum, from the Nahuatl ‘walking fish.’ But it’s not a fish. The axolotl is an amphibian. It reaches adulthood without changing in any way. For that reason, it’s a model organism for scientists. Its body does things humans cannot. It can regenerate its own tail. Its legs. The tissue that makes up its eyes, its heart, its brain. Its whole nervous system.”

Axolotls even have four different breathing methods, she explained. They can breathe through their external gill branches, known as fimbria capillaries. They can breathe through their skin. They can breathe through the backs of their throats, in what is called buccal respiration. And they can breathe through their lungs — a curious adaptation, as most animals have gills in place of lungs. Axolotls can swim to the surface of the water, swallow a bubble, and then either send it to their tiny lungs or, for a little while, use it to float.

Underwater, Laisvė’s memory leaps to mother with or without her permission.

Motherwaters

The past is always in present tense when it emerges in her memory. Like a movie, the images quickening. So when she remembers the first time she went to water, when she thinks of her mother, the memory is inside a perpetual now.

The first time Laisvė leaps into the water, she is jumping in after her mother. Her mother shot dead in that moment, quick and sure, a step away from boarding a boat meant to save their lives. At the sight of it, Laisvė does not feel or think. Instead, she leaps.

Under the great weight of blue, she feels the weightless shift of her body. Back to a breathable blue past, an amniotic sea, liquid lungs. Gray green blue murky veil of water and then sight, plain as day. Laisvė turns her head and arms and body, in a kind of girl-swirl, until her feet find the bottom. She holds her hands up to her face and stares at them: empty but real. She half-pulls half-walks her way along the bottom of the ocean, feeling her way for mother.