Thrust: A Novel

“The bus always smelled like worn rubber floor liners and too many feet, and he couldn’t wait to get off, but even just stepping off the bus felt like a test to him. He kept his hands jammed into his pockets as he waited to get off, feeling the seams and bits of lint and the beginning of a hole at the bottom. He pushed his fingers through it till they reached the flesh of his thigh. He could feel his skin, his leg hair, which was barely there yet. His backpack felt heavier than it should. He wondered if he looked like a human turtle. He stared straight down, doing this thing where he made himself go a little deaf until danger had passed. Up front, the bus smelled like underarms and pee and tires. For a minute, he thought he might barf, but then the sound of the bus door opening and the rush of cold air woke him up again. The bus driver was a guy he was actually fond of, but if the man said anything as the boy went down the stairs, he didn’t hear it.

“The boy’s cheeks flushed the instant the cold air hit him. It made his teeth ache. His eyes dried up like a forgotten ice cube kicked into a dusty corner. The tips of his ears pinched. He wished he had a hat. Weren’t boys supposed to be sent off to school with hats, with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with a kiss goodbye? That’s what he saw on TV, anyway. He trudged along, watching the tops of his shoes, wondering why one was scuffed and the other wasn’t. He wondered what that said about him. Was there something weird about the way he walked? Was he doing something with his feet all day at school that he didn’t realize? Did he kick things and not remember? Did anyone else notice?

“Sometimes the boy wondered how long he’d have to drag through this boyhood before he got to something better. Sometimes he worried he wouldn’t make it to the other side. Sometimes he worried there was no other side, just some trick of height and weight and the sag of man-gut and the way men grew pouches where their cheeks used to be. And their noses and ears. Men’s noses never stop growing, he thought, or maybe he heard it at school, or saw it on a screen somewhere. He pictured a man with a nose like a moose’s, tipping over, unable to stand, falling on his face.

“His walk home changed every day. He took the same path, which helped him recognize his way, but what happened was never the same, which confused him if he wasn’t careful. If he took a left but it turned out to be a right, someone might run a red light and hit the side of an old Buick hard enough to push it up onto the curb. Crowds could form out of nowhere. Cops. Dogs. Pigeons. One little change could have epic effects. Once, a man came running out of the mini-mart with armfuls of beer, and two bottles slipped from the man’s grasp and shattered, splashing onto the sidewalk. The owner came rushing out with an actual rifle, yelling and yelling in some language the boy didn’t know, or a language he did know that sounded different when yelled, until the thief got down on the ground and started begging or something — it looked vaguely like praying, or what the boy imagined praying might be. (Beer he knew about. Rifles and praying were from TV and movies and the nightly news.) The thief went down on the ground under the rifle and yelling, his cheek against the concrete beer everywhere. The boy saw the thief lick the concrete and cry.

“That whole day, the world seemed tilted to the boy. When he was almost home, he nearly missed the turnoff to his apartment building. All the apartment buildings suddenly looked like upset, crooked faces.

“The boy loved the thief, but he couldn’t understand why.

“Now, as he was walking home, on an average day, two months after the shooting, the mini-mart just looked like a mini-mart. A dog barked around the corner. The smell of pee came in whiffs from every alley.

“From the position of the stop signs and fire hydrants, he could tell he was about halfway home. He aimed at cracks with his scuffed-up shoe: five, six, seven. If he hadn’t been looking down and concentrating so hard on the geography of the sidewalk, he probably would have missed it. The thing on the ground. Or stepped in it.

“Right there, against the hard gray of the sidewalk, was something wrong. Something that was red and purple and pink and veined and wet, with a glistening gray wormish thing trailing away from it. He tilted his head and squinted through his glasses at it, trying to figure out what was the top and what was the bottom. It looked like butcher’s meat it looked like an alien head it looked like what guts might look like if they were on the outside.

“He heard a siren, somewhere far away. He glanced up and spotted a Chinese woman two blocks away, hunched over, pulling a grocery stroller. A few guys on a corner, too far away to tell how old. Street signs and garbage and two crows and parked cars.

“He inched his scuffed shoe toward the thing, watched to see what would happen.

“It didn’t move.