Thrust: A Novel

And why had it taken years for him to land on her desk? Christ. The kid was fifteen now. When he was still ten, maybe she’d have had a chance. Kids you could work with. Boy teens, though, they were hard cases. Belligerent, pissed off, hormonal hard cases. Sometimes she wondered if boys carry all our sins for us so that the rest of us can feign innocence of the world we made — a world with less and less space for them to feel loved.

—

Mikael walked the yard, kicked dirt up with each step. He spit on his arm, rubbed the spit into his flesh until a sheen appeared. He studied the word he’d carved into his own arm with a sharpened-toothbrush shiv: indigo. He’d filled the letters with pen ink. Now he was no longer allowed to have pens or even a toothbrush.

He could see the woman across the yard. Yet another caseworker assigned to him. A thought crossed briefly through his mind: breaking her arms himself. Why not? His story had no beginning anymore, so his story had no ending. His story was lost to meaning.

A horn blared: return inside.

Back inside, he walked down the hall to his room, scraping his knuckles against the concrete wall as he went. He passed a boy of about nine, his pants too high, clutching his own forearms. Glasses, like he used to have. Mikael couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen things properly. He’d stopped wearing them after that day in the yard when he stabbed a boy in the throat with one of the temples. No one tried to fuck him after that, or hold him down, or anything. He’d almost been sent to the adult system then, but the prisons were too crowded to take him. Now, as he walked past the nine-year-old, he knocked the boy’s throat with his forearm, sending him like a slingshot to the floor. He couldn’t remember ever being nine.

In the facility, when the other boys had held him down — one of them even put a boot to the back of his neck there on the concrete floor — he remembered smelling the knees of the boy forcing himself into him. The other boy’s knees dragging bloody on the hard concrete surface of the facility floor. Just be flat, he thought. Just wait. Later you can kill anyone. You’re a killer now. It’s official.

He always remembered that smell, during the violence — the smell of pennies.

—

In Lilly’s first visits to the library, on her off hours, she studied the system her father had occupied: the posts, the assignments, the ranks. She learned what position her father had occupied in the order of things. She learned what power he’d had, the kinds of commands he’d issued. It was easy; he was not an obscure figure. What did you think, that the information would be hidden? She learned that her father had no superiors. She learned that he’d had one of his own right-hand men killed for refusing an order. She learned about another order he’d issued, to sever the arm of a photographer who had taken his photo.

Butcher’s Daughter.

Perhaps because she’d grown tired from trying to reinvent a life too many times; perhaps because she’d jettisoned what she’d known her entire life — that her father had recruited her brother first into abuse and then into barbarism, that he’d ordered her brother to execute a woman and child to prove that his loyalty could not be swayed by women and children — perhaps because she wished she were anyone else’s daughter, a child beater’s, a sodomizer’s, whatever; perhaps because of all this, she directed her life toward the purpose of saving boys from becoming monsters.

She devoted the rest of her life to these floating boys — those who drifted away from a story that might have nurtured them into security and health, whose lives were lived on the sharp edge between violence and beauty, who took the place of the word brother.

What she could not decide from her own track record — a tiny three percent liberated from the juvenile detention system and recirculated back into supposed regular lives, some of them former immigrants, or refugees, or just strays — was whether she was helping or hurting. Who takes the side of boys or men who behave brutally, anyway? Who should?

In the library, going over documents, peering at screens, launching searches, she opened a notebook and wrote down a single phrase.

daughter of a war criminal.

Then she tore the piece of paper from the notebook and ate it to stop herself from crying.

—

Those early days had been the hardest, when he’d taken a beating every single day, sometimes more than once a day, when he’d been made to eat dirt, or drink urine, or when they’d smeared shit on his face. He’d still been a boy then. A scared small weak soft boy. Repulsive.

There was no revelation, no equation, no scientific experiment that could change that. His boyhood obsessions? Nothing to open your mouth about here. Ever. So he hid his unstoppable brain deep down, at the bottom of some ocean inside his gut.