Thrust: A Novel

We pushed the man overboard; the splash barely registered as sound. She threw the axe over behind him. The ocean swallowed them both without comment. “Sad to see that go,” she said. “My father said he recovered it off a Dead Rabbit in that free-for-all at Five Points, years ago. I’ve kept it with me for comfort.” She looked up into the night sky. Thunder rolled up from the horizon. The air smelled of sky and sea. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, it started raining, so hard that we took shelter underneath a lifeboat.

The woman was wearing a gray nun’s habit and glasses. By her face, I made her to be in her teens, but what I remember was her physical strength — with the axe, with the business of hauling the man overboard. She reached into the arm of her frock and pulled out a flask. We drank. For a long time, we said nothing, until finally she spoke. “My name is Endora.” When she tipped the flask back, I caught a glimpse of a cross at her neck. Not on a golden necklace, but in the blue-black stain of a handmade tattoo under her jaw. I learned later that the same man who attacked me had ravaged her earlier in the trip. She saw me looking at her neck. She dropped her eyes to look at my neck, where the stains on my skin were most obvious. We stared at each other’s necks, stories forming from our two bodies. Then she reached up and removed her clothing — veil and coif and scapula, the whole habit — and threw them overboard. She stood up and removed her tunic too, hurling it into the sea; it wavered in the night wind like a flying dolphin, then dropped into the churning water.

Without the habit, Endora looked to be without gender, hair all which way. She ruffled it with a hand. She looked like a man, and not like a man.

“My name is Kem,” I said.

I don’t know if god was there or not.

—

David Chen came into our body, and our story, when the iron framework began to climb into the sky. The statue’s inner skeleton was a wrought-iron square, ninety-four feet high. David and John Joseph worked near each other on the iron rivets, the saddles and armature bars, and the double-helix metal staircase that ran straight up her middle. It looks like a vertical twisting railroad, David said. It looks like metal thatching, John Joseph said. It looks like a corset, Endora said. From the inside, the workings of her body became apparent — the webs of beams and posts and iron, not bones, that she was made from.

John Joseph said that he never saw anyone as good as David was at dangling himself between armature bars and iron. He’d rig the roping as gracefully as a dancer, tying off or untying and retying as he moved from place to place across her body. Sometimes he hung suspended from one arm with his leg wrapped around rope and his other arm just loose, his head tilted, staring at something or nothing. John Joseph said that no one was braver than his ancestors, but I believe no one was ever more beautiful in his bravery than David.

On one particularly hot day, David took off his shirt during a break in the labor and turned to look out at the harbor. He didn’t know anyone was near him, but we all saw what looked like hundreds of tiny white feathers all over his back. I opened my mouth to ask, but Endora shot me a look that shut it. Later, when I asked her about it, she said one word: “Scars.” Endora had seen all manner of bodies as a nurse during the war. I spent many nights dreaming about how David’s back might have become marked like that. As if some kind of blast had etched itself across the whole length and breadth of his back.

On some nights, David did not come back to the boardinghouse with us. When he did stay with us, he slept only fitfully. Once, just before dawn, in his sleep, I heard him whisper one word: aurora. He looked to be dreaming, like a child. It made me smile. My favorite time of the day or night happened watching David sleep.

Not all of us worked on the crown, but David did. He had read, in the papers, that the crown was modeled after the bonnet given to Roman slaves when they were freed. The seven rays, he said, were meant to symbolize the reach of freedom, across all the oceans and continents. The twenty-five windows in the crown were meant to give the illusion of light, reflecting the light like facets of a diamond.

To us, it seemed right that David worked inside the crown. Whatever had happened to his body gave him some kind of right to ascend into that space.

Frédéric and the Apple (1870)