Thrust: A Novel

My dream manifester, my vision-maker Frédéric,

Do you know what I wanted to be as a girl, my apple?

A nun! Is that not priceless?

On my childhood journey across the Atlantic, aboard the German liner Frisia, I met — well, I suppose it would be more accurate to say I pestered — a Dominican nun. The woman was a mere four years my senior, yet the distance between ten and fourteen in a girl is vast. I know the same is true of boys and men and every creature in between, but the distance plays itself out differently on the bodies of girls. What blooms there — supposedly between our legs, but really everywhere in the world, drawing us to it as if we were starving children — is desire. There is no desire greater than the desire of the child. One must not speak of it. One must not admit it. We hurry to create taboos around what first emerged in us in place of tails: that incredible world where piss, shit, cum, and life fully live. Otherwise, girl children would people the earth with devils!

The steamer carried around ninety first-class passengers, one hundred and fifty or so in second class, and about six hundred in third and steerage. I know these figures because I positively hounded Endora, the Dominican nun, and she had made it her business to know everything she could about the souls who would share our passage. I had fixed my eye upon her — you will love this, my love — from the moment I spied her travel trunk being loaded when we were still ashore. It was a simple trunk, covered in horsehair, but nothing about that journey was more mesmerizing to me than that trunk, as if held within it were the real object of my girl-curiosity, the nun’s story.

Before the ship had sailed, I found my way into her line of sight, and soon into her confidence — and, by the time we reached your statue’s city, I had decided that I too would become a nun. You laugh! But I was dead serious. And I think you know how formidable my desire was, even as a child. What interested me about the nun’s story were her descriptions of caring for gravely ill hospital patients. Diseased bodies and horrible sores and broken bones, illnesses so horrific that nurses had to wear protective clothing and tend to patients by reaching their gloved hands through gauze curtains.

But this Endora nun wasn’t like other nuns; her piety carried a dangerous otherness. She had the jaw and strength of a man.

Something entirely erotic to the mind of a child.

Oh, I know other children would have experienced horror and abjection. As you know, I was not other children.

But, cousin, this is no simpleton’s story of a girl toggling between virgin nun and sex-craving whore. That story lacks complexity, lacks even a subject. That story frames women as objects of a desire not their own. Take heed: if that thought is beginning to tendril around in your brain, as you are reading this, I will feel it — and make no mistake, if that is what you are thinking, I swear on my vulva that I will make you wait an entire year for your next fulfillment. And I know already that your longing will be too puny and impatient to stand in wait that long. You will die from your own longing. And how would that be? So consider yourself warned.

No, my oscillation between two callings — woman of god and woman of sex — came from one thing: my bone-deep understanding that spiritual agency and capital agency each give women mobility and subjectivity in the world. In the case of the former, that mobility was tied to the feet of a holy man. In the case of the latter? Well. Women have been outsmarting their counter-genders since the dawn of time.

I do wonder, though, when women will tire of their part in the story and revolt. I imagine the bloodbath.

But here is the scene — for I know I have now activated the eros of storytelling in you. The first person I clapped eyes on, after we disembarked the Frisia and stepped onto our new country’s soil, was a creature so convulsively and magnificently free I nearly vanished the nun’s existence in a single intake of breath. I forgot her even as she stood by my side — let go of her hand! That protective, maternal nun, the person who could deliver me safe to this new world!

Remember that cleft on my lip? With my now-free hand, I fingered the scar and smiled, remembering the blood between us. You and I, blood-bound for life.

There she sat in her carriage, this creature, like a crowned bird of her own species. Powdered ever so slightly, rouged with small faint circles of pink, like two aureoles — or perhaps areolas — on her face. A perfect specimen of beauty and, I recognized, of perversion.

A man walked up to the side of the carriage, intent on making a quick and easy transaction. He held money up toward her. I understood the action to be obscene. He looked puny. Just from the impact of her gaze, looking down on him, he stumbled the slightest bit. When he tried again, she flogged him head and shoulders with a horse whip.

The horse did not move. The man fled.

That’s freedom, my dear.

Love,

Aurora