Thrust: A Novel

One night, early in the project, John Joseph threw his shoulder out of joint and cracked a rib. Endora, a fine riveter, also had medical skills, and she tended to him. Taking John Joseph’s arm, she put his hand on her shoulder, then whapped him a good one, so that his shoulder went back where it was supposed to be. He didn’t scream or anything.

“Well, that’s it, then,” Endora said.

That’s how we felt listening to this girl: Well, that’s it, then.

When we boarded the ferry back to the city that night, the girl came with us. John Joseph turned the penny over and over in his hand. Endora looked — well, this isn’t possible, of course, but she looked taller. The girl wove around our bodies there at the railing, humming contentedly under her breath, or seeming to. She appeared entirely at home with us. She wasn’t afraid to touch us or lean on us. At one point she even took David’s hand; then she reached out and held mine too, this girl between us like some kind of conduit as we crossed the water. My hand warmed in hers.

Behind us, our half-made woman watched us leave. One hundred thousand pounds of copper, even more iron. When she was finished, her total weight was two hundred and twenty-five tons. Yet her skin — copper sheeting — is about the thickness of a penny. Enough copper to make more than 430 million pennies.

As we all hung over the ferry railing, Endora pressed the girl to tell her story. “Where are your parents? Where do you live? What’s your name?”

They seemed responsible questions to ask. As it turned out, though, they were not the important questions. The important question turned out to be: How do we assemble our hearts to keep us from breaking apart?

The Lament of the Butcher’s Daughter (1995)

Lilly Juknevicius woke in the night again, bathed in her own sweat, wrestling her own sheets, grinding her teeth. Same dream. Same goddamn dream. A box the size of a body — a coffin stood upright — then her father stepping out of it and walking toward her. Her past a secret locked in her body. She waited for her breathing to return to normal. She grabbed a pillow and bit into it as hard as she could.

She got up, naked and wet, and walked to the bathroom, where she cupped her hands under the faucet, drank, splashed her face. In the mirror, she was the spitting image of her father. And her brother.

She thought about the — what was it, thousands of dollars? — she’d spent in group therapy for survivors and immigrants and refugees. She was neither a survivor nor a refugee, yet her life felt hemmed in by their violent narratives. They’d survived war, atrocity, dislocation. She’d survived… what, beyond what they’d left her?

In this city, she knew, a library housed the documents of their brutality: atrocity files, trial records, reports and videotapes and recordings, storage disks and microfiche, artifacts of infamous events, dates and times and names and faces, all organized into one great historical pileup. Miles of information, gathered in one place and made available so that a person might hold the evidence in their own palms, so that questions might be answered, so that judgments might be made, so that stories would not be lost, so that memory might outlive slaughter. So that crimes against humanity could be witnessed by the humanity that survived them.

An exhibit greeted visitors in the library’s grand lobby, confronting one and all with the evidence of atrocity: a pile of gold fillings the size of a bed. Diaries and journals discovered hidden behind toilets, under floorboards, inside walls. Names written but unspoken for years, scratched onto paper marked by age and rot and rain and the oils of an ordinary hand. In another pile, children’s shoes stacked to the ceiling. In an art museum, this might be mistaken for an aesthetic object; in this library, the pile of shoes stood like an act of resistance.

The first time Lilly tried to walk from her apartment to the library, not long after she moved to the city, her feet looked ridiculous to her. The feet of an immigrant, she thought. But I’ve changed; these shoes do not belong to me. That day, instead of going to the library, she found a boutique and bought a pair of tall black leather boots. Then she strode back down the sidewalk until she came to a posh bar with a partial view of the city’s great monument—Just the tip, she joked in her head. There she drank whiskey for five hours until the obelisk began to sag on its axis. On the way home, her toes and ankles burned in their stiff new leather casing. But the heel-toe heel-toe tap, hypnotic against the blacktop, brought her home. Freedom, she thought.