Thrust: A Novel

This factory owner was kind, at least in my company. He only ever wanted to be ever so gently spanked, and the only remarkable aspect of that desire was his stamina; he could take that light touch for several hours — far longer than any other client. He liked to sustain the quality of a treasured thing over long periods of time. Like a tomato or peach hidden inside a tin can, its surprising hue and ripe bulge glistening from within the moment you sawed through the edges of the silvery-blue metal. And he liked to keep one hand clenched around my artificial leg, as if his life depended on it. That leg holds a thousand of his tender kisses.

Once, as he was dressing after his session, I walked over to the cabinet, pulled a tin of pears from its blue cave, and opened it with a can opener. Lifting the lid, I held the can out toward his mouth. He dipped his fingers into the thick sugary pear muck, pulled out a pear, and ate it, his eyes never leaving mine, except when he closed them to experience his brief autoerotic pleasure more fully.

You may know that the French inventors of the tin can failed to invent an opener for their container, and for years, the cans could only be opened in a brutal manner — with a hammer and chisel, a rock, or a bayonet. Equally interesting to me is the fact that the first canned food was invented for seamen who were inefficiently fed disgusting meals, by all reports, of meat and fish stored in barrels of brine. Everything tasted of salt. (Too much salt on the ocean? Well, that’s the thinking of men for you.)

My favorite can story involves the lost expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin. In 1845, Franklin, an officer of the British Royal Navy, departed on two ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus on an expedition to cross the last unnavigated territory of the Northwest Passage. When the two ships became icebound near the Victoria Strait, however, the mission collapsed and all 129 men were lost.

Three years later, Franklin’s wife helped launch a search, which became the first of many. In 1850, relics from the expedition were found near the coast of Beechey Island, in the northern Canadian archipelago. Further relics and stories of the Franklin party were collected from local Inuit communities.

It’s here that the story fades — except for what I gathered from another girl who approached me one day, a strange girl who claimed to be from the future. In the year 1981, she said, a team of scientists from Canada studied the bodies, graves, and relics collected from the ships and concluded that the crew likely died from tuberculosis, pneumonia, starvation, and lead poisoning caused by badly soldered cans on board.

You heard right. A visitor from the future.

She went on and on when I first met her, this girl, like she couldn’t stop: the history of the tin can, its invention and manufacture, its evolution. She told me all about the original inventors of canned food. Some Parisian fellow, named Halpern or Appern or Appert, who worked out a way to seal prepared food in glass bottles with cork stoppers, then boiled the bottles in water. An Englishman who developed tinplate cans with soldered lids instead of glass containers — good for sailors, she said, since salted meats hastened the onset of scurvy. In her time, this girl claimed — a time unimaginably far away — canned food had once again become as sought-after as it had been useful at sea with Napoleon or on land in the Civil War. With visceral joy, she told me about a can of tomatoes she’d eaten, in her world, that very morning.

Poor girl, I thought. It’s a good story, though, isn’t it?

I’d never met a girl like her before.

Though, as I mentioned, children always found me.

When I first met her, I was carrying a bag of soup cans over to Laborers’ Row. The night I met her, she was standing across the street from my building. Her hair hung black and wet. She stood across the street, her dress wet, her right arm held straight up in the air. She had an object in her hand, but I could not see what it was. We both held our ground. We held each other’s gaze. Finally, I said, “Well, then?” And she lowered her arm back down like it was a regular arm and came toward me.

I don’t know how to explain what I felt in my body as she walked toward me. Like a hard pang in my abdomen.

What is inside the abdomen of the aging and childless woman? Is it a hollowed-out nothing? Is it something? Is it a hole as if each woman were suddenly excavated through and through, like a statue of our former selves, not the object of anyone’s desire any longer, but an object with questionable use-value?

When she reached me, her brow made the V of a child reaching for seriousness. “I have something very important to trade,” she said. “I mean, in… the underground economy.”