Thrust: A Novel

One year, another boy his exact age came through the facility. The boy was almost old enough to be placed in adult detention, but he had landed here instead as a kind of last chance, since he’d never seriously injured any people, just property and himself. This boy liked to set off small improvised explosive devices. Mikael did not like him, though he did feel a kind of solidarity after hearing the boy’s stories of being bullied and hated as a child. The two of them were not alike. But when they walked across a field or down a hallway side by side, their shoulders looked similar, squared off with about-to-be-men rage, the cover story for brokenhearted boys. The other young man’s name was William. His hair was red. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland. His parents divorced when he was ten, and he then had lived with his father, who was endlessly drunk and beat him severely.

William was only at the facility for a year, but in that year, two things happened: Mikael showed William his new habitat, drawing its outline in the dirt with a stick one day out in the yard. And William showed Mikael his prized possession, a letter he kept stuffed down the back of his pants. It was a kind of intimacy, to share one’s private objects that way.

“I have plans when I get out of here,” William said one day as they were hiding behind the dumpster. “I’ve been recruited by someone very important. No one should ever have to live like this, Mikael.” And he pulled out the letter and showed him. It read:

“A man with nothing left to lose is a very dangerous man and his energy/anger can be focused toward a common/righteous goal. What I’m asking you to do, then, is sit back and be honest with yourself. Is this the life you want? Would you back out at the last minute to care for family or friends? Would you be willing to use your skills for something bigger than yourself? I’m not looking for talkers, I’m looking for fighters… And if you are a Fed, think twice. Think twice about the Constitution you are supposedly enforcing (isn’t ‘enforcing freedom’ an oxymoron?) and think twice about catching us with our guard down — you will. Your family will lose. Make the righteous choice.”

Mikael received a couple of letters from William after the boy was released, but they said nothing of any substance, leaving him to believe that what he’d bragged about before he left was true: that a major building had become a target, that William’s ideas would become actions, and that people were going to die. It was that simple. There were boys like William everywhere, their hearts hollowed out by the world around them, willing to join or do anything to disrupt the landscape they’d been handed.

When Mikael thought of dead people, he thought about Vera. He thought about Indigo. He wondered if the targeted building might be full of women and children. If anyone had threatened Vera or Indigo, he knew, he would have killed them.

—

Inside his room now, inside his teen body barely existing in time and space, nothing: no pencils or pens, no shoestrings or sheets. Even the sink fixtures had been dismantled since he’d tried — or so they thought — to use the faucet parts to make a weapon. In truth, he’d been trying again to fashion something he could draw with. Now, instead of providing running water, they brought him a plastic jug with his meals, and he had to return the jug each night. Recently, after being tormented by another boy, he’d taken the blue plastic lid of his jug and jammed it into the boy’s forehead, so hard that doctors had to be brought in to remove it and suture the wound.

Lying down on the cool of the concrete floor, Mikael stretched one hand out in front of his face and studied the lines of his own veins that crisscrossed the back of his hands. He thought about how veins carried blood to the heart, the motherload.

He closed his eyes and waited for this woman, who — like every caseworker before her — would mean nothing. No woman was coming to save him.

He dreamed the same dream as always: the sound of an infant, just out of reach. Only this time, in the dream, there was a blast as big as a building.

The Floating Boy and the Butcher’s Daughter

In the detention center meeting room, Lilly stared at the feckless, rattling dark-green fan, moving less air toward her than a person would standing there blowing. The fan, the table in front of her, even the walls reminded her of high school — like a teen institution that had thrown up on itself.

The door opened. A pair of guards stepped into the room, holding Mikael by the elbows, and shoved him into the chair across from her.