Thrust: A Novel

“There’s a blast coming,” Mikael interrupted.

Shit. He could shut back up like a lockbox if I say anything. But he was baiting her now. She couldn’t ignore it. “A… blast?”

“A bomb.”

“When?”

“Soon,” Mikael said. “A van. In front of a government building. But I won’t say where.”

“Right. How do I know you’re not full of complete shit?”

Mikael studied Lilly. “You don’t. Women don’t seem to get what has happened. We’re all holding so many stories in here”—and he pounded his chest. “All of us. I could tell you one of a hundred different stories. I’m trying to decide which one to tell you. For instance, one story is, there are men out there who think their lives have been stolen from them. There are men who want to recruit boys like us”—he gestured in the air around his own body—“to do terrible things. All over the world. No one wants boys like us,” he said. “So the world eases us into the cracks, lights us up like dynamite.”

Lilly tried to make her jaw as strong and square as possible. “Well, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t give a shit.” Her words meant to hold steady like a bridge. “Are you trying to tell me you know something about a bomb?”

“When I was a boy, I had a baby,” he said.

Her heart lurched.

Mikael closed his eyes. Silence sat thick and hot between them. Without reopening his eyes, Mikael began to tell a story. “Once there was a boy,” he said into the air between them, like the words were trying to make a great journey.

“This boy lost his place in the world.” Mikael’s eyes were closed, as if closing his eyes could shut out the present tense, as if he could step back in time all the way through to childhood with the eyes of a keen observer. Or a loving parent who had suffered a great loss. The story of his boyhood spilling out of him in waves, the opposite of silence.

—

“Once there was a boy who slipped from his story, but he carried secrets with him, whether or not there was a place for him in the world.

“This boy was different from everyone and everything around him. The world looked strange to him, through his glasses — which were always smudged — and the way he reacted to things didn’t make the normal kind of sense. For instance, he trusted mycelia, the tiny threads that give birth to fungus, more than he trusted people. The thing about mycelia was, they stick together. They’re like a colony, a close-knit mass of branches. They live in ecosystems on the land and in the water; they absorb nutrients and break them down. They’re as important to decomposition as they are to life, which is a carbon cycle.

“Whereas the thing about people was, they’re mostly individual meat sacks that own and devour everything in their path, and you never know when their insides will come out.

“One time, in his neighborhood, the boy saw a large woman get shot in the face, by a seemingly kind-eyed boy, as she was boarding the bus. Her mind never made it onto the bus with her. Blood splashed on the windows. People screamed. The driver made everyone get off the bus. Police got hold of the gun-boy, and as they took him away, he saw in the gun-boy’s eyes that he’d been holding something that boys sometimes lose: the people they should have belonged to. That gun-boy looked right at him. He must have been from someplace else, like him, who knows where. Later, he heard that the gun-boy got sent away to something called a juvenile correction facility. Like a foster home, he thought.

“Finally, after the gun-boy was led away, another bus came and the kids were all taken home. When the boy got to his stop, he pushed his glasses up tighter to his eyes, felt the security of the thick black plastic above his ears. He stood and made his way to the front of the bus, passing various people along the way, though he didn’t dare make eye contact with any of them, because who knew what might happen.

“He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to ride the bus after that, but that would mean he’d have to walk, and his knees and shins already hurt from how far he had to walk just to get to the bus every day. The bus — no matter what risks sat inside — was still his best option. And the streets were dangerous. That was just true. You can’t help where foster fathers bring you. America, the gun.