Thrust: A Novel

The hardest backhanded blow he’d taken as a boy happened when he’d collected every object in the false father’s apartment — every fork and spoon, every salt and pepper shaker, every toothbrush and squeezed-to-death toothpaste tube, every cracked china cup and plate, every ashtray, cigarette pack, chipped cheap cologne bottle, straight razor, soap nub, discarded toilet paper tube, coffee mug and thick shot glass, ring of keys, handful of rags, stray matchbook, and can after can of beans, peas, peaches, soup — and lined them all up in an elaborate maze on the moldy orange-brown carpet of the main room. The artifacts of the opposite of family.

—

When his father returned from work, the big heavy backhand came, knocking his jaw hard to the left, throwing his glasses off his face, blotching the side of his cheek red, his ears ringing for days. You have exactly ten minutes to clean this shit up. Exactly ten minutes to put every single thing back exactly where you found it or I’ll take you to the woods and leave you there forever. What a goddamn mess. You goddamn idiot.

But it hadn’t been a goddamn mess. It had been a habitat.

To preserve himself, he started to draw on the floor of his room with pencils, his hand pushing graphite into concrete until the pencils were ground to nubs. In his head, an entirely new world revealed itself, like a waking dream. The images were always the same: elaborate habitats of air, land, and sea strung together by bridges like webs between worlds. In the air, individual dwellings were shaped like giant hovering birds with large bellies and broad wings. On water, he drew modules that fanned out in the shapes of starfish or curled like conch shells in great spirals. Underwater, the structures he drew resembled the broad backs of turtles or the bellies of great whales. And every habitat was connected by bridges and elevators, extending up and down, side to side, in spiraling helixes.

Of course, no one who looked down at Mikael’s elaborate habitat dreams saw them as such. Of course, he was punished for his work every single day, made to clean the floors he had covered with his dreams. And every single night, he would reconstruct the drawings, their intricate architecture becoming more and more vivid each time. Finally, at the suggestion of a case worker, they took the pencils away and gave him pastel chalk. Chalk was much easier to clean up was the thinking. So he ate the chalk to spite them, and started breaking off pieces of his environment — chairs, bed springs, bathroom fixtures — so that he could scrape the drawings into the floor. This led to a change in rooms, to a room with a dark-blue industrial-grade carpet. The carpet smelled like petroleum. At night, the floor looked like the bottom of the ocean.

After that, by necessity, he continued his drawings in a more covert fashion, using his fingernails to create a perfect map of his world on the wall behind the tattered chest of drawers, drawing images from his mind’s eye with blood from his fingertips.

Years passed.

Caseworkers came and went.

The drawings grew more detailed, more intimate; it was as though the boy were engraving his DNA into the wall. Every night, he pulled up one corner of the carpet to expose the floor, made his drawings there, and then replaced it before sunup. He even considered scratching and inking them onto his chest.

With time, in his drawings, he seemed to be growing the bones and muscles of some other land. Maybe even his land of origin, he thought. He thought about Vera’s stories. He knew, from the occasional media access he had in the facility, that if he’d lived in the places she described as long as he’d lived here, he’d have earned the tattoos that indicate rank among young men who came of age in such violent, often war-torn wastelands. Which don’t exist like the stories anyone cared about, of course, in the same way the abuse or neglect of boys doesn’t exist.