Thrust: A Novel

“This time, you were given a coin. The coin will help you to move your father. He needs it more than he has any idea. His grief is killing him, and it endangers others. There is a man named Joseph who can help, at least a little. You need to find Joseph — he is in the past, and then also in the present. The next time, you will swim to a woman — she is larger than life — and help her to save a multitude of children by moving them toward an aurora, a new dawn.

“Then, finally, you will look for your someone-like-a-brother. The boy you find may have a fever in him; he might seem as if he will kill you, but I promise you, my beautiful water girl, my seal, he will not kill you. It’s the world that pulls boys away from their possible becomings. Remember: you can’t save anyone. Not me, not your brother, not your father, not the world. You can only move objects and people and stories around in time. Rearrangements. Like rebuilding meaning from falling-apart pieces.”

Laisvė tries to run to this mother, but the mother turns entirely to water.

Then the whale returns and gently lifts Laisvė toward the surface of the sea. She hears a giant crashing sound, like a wave or the hull of a boat ramming into something, and the water bubbles around her and some force wrenches her upward — back to the surface, back to the save-a-life boat, her shivering father sobbing, her bundled-up infant brother wailing, the mother gone to water forever.

After that, she knew not to be afraid to go to water, because time slips and moves forward and backward, just as objects and stories do. She knew something new, about moving pieces around. She knew something new, about death and becoming.

Ethnography 1