Thrust: A Novel

“I do not suffer when I sleep,” I told Endora. “I think the suffering of others finds some of us in our sleep. I think”—and now I wasn’t sure I would make any kind of sense to her—“it moves through us.”

“That seems true,” Endora said. Then she clenched her own belly and grimaced.

“Are you feeling ill?” I asked.

“No. I’m remembering something I used to carry in my body that was taken from me.”

John Joseph looked at me. David stared at her belly. We knew enough not to say a single thing out loud. Later Endora confided in me: she’d given birth to a baby out of wedlock. The baby had been taken from her. And that baby was buried in the ground behind a church. Our own bellies felt different after that.

Maybe that’s why none of us was all that surprised at the sight of a girl coming up out of the water, her arm raised and reaching. We’d lost a lot between us: Families. Languages. Identities. Heart. Finding something, there amid the vast unknown, made us feel worth something.

“Do you ever feel like going back home?” I once asked Endora.

“Home?” she said.

I didn’t know if she was giving an answer or naming us there together over a simple meal after a day of work. We all smiled, for whatever reason.

—

The night the water girl appeared, we were getting ready to board the ferry back to the city side after work, back to our shared boardinghouse.

As soon as the girl was safely on deck, she pulled something from her mouth: a penny. She handed the coin to John Joseph as if he’d been waiting for it.

He turned it over in his hands. “What’s this?” he asked.

“For an ancestor of yours who is coming later, the boy called Joseph,” said the sopping-wet girl. “They call it an Indian Head, but it’s not the head of an Indian. It’s just Liberty wearing an Indian headdress. That’s how Indians and women lose their worth, you know — they put us on their money, or make us into fake prizes and objects, so we can’t move in the world like regular people. I told Joseph that. In another time. But pennies and objects all change their worth, with time and water.”

“I don’t have any children,” John Joseph said.

“You will,” she said. “Your son and his son and his will walk the iron. Like you.”

We’d none of us seen or heard anything like this girl before. She didn’t look distraught or lost. She came out of the water looking comfortable.

Then she turned to David Chen. Walking around him, she placed her hands gently on his back and closed her eyes. We all put our heads down. It must have looked something like prayer, though it felt nothing like that. David let out the heaviest breath I’d ever heard, as if he were releasing a long, thick, coiled rope.

None of us knew what to make of this strange girl. She looked to be about twelve years old, but she also had the look of a woman in midlife — something about her jaw, or her eyes, or both. She brushed herself off, as if she could make herself fully dry with just the wave of a hand. She looked over across the water, at the work we’d been doing. By that point, only the legs and hips of the statue were standing; the torso and arms and head and crown were all still to come.

“She’s going to turn green, you know,” she said to us.

We said we knew. Oxidization of copper.

“She’s going to drown too,” she said.

None of us knew what she meant by that.

“The ocean is going to acidify and change,” she said. “Just like copper changes when it oxidizes. The water will rise faster than people think — faster than a lifetime. Some women drown, you know. Does she have a heart?”

None of us said anything until Endora did: “That’s a good question.” I think we thought of ourselves as her heart — but that’s stupid. Isn’t it?

Then the girl walked up to me, staring at my face and neck, at the place where my skin screams differently from anyone else’s. She traced the shapes with her finger. I didn’t move. “This is a map of the new world,” she said. “All the land masses will change shape. All the words will too. All the bodies will embody differently.” Her small hand rested on my face longer than you might imagine.

Then, turning back to Endora, she reached into a little rucksack slung over her back and pulled out an odd-looking roll of silvery fabric. “This is called duct tape. Only a welder might understand the power of duct tape. A mother came up with the idea. Using fabric tape. She tested it out in the ammunition factory where she worked.”

Endora held her own belly.

“You can even use it to suture a wound.” The water girl scooped Endora up in her gaze. “There are so many ways to carry.” They stared at each other. Neither flinched. A strange and brief still air surrounded them. No one’s mother locked in a gaze with no one’s daughter. There was no word for what they were to each other, unless the word was the energy itself between them.

—