Thrust: A Novel

“He nudged it.

“It jiggled some, but then oozed back into its splatter.

“A taxi drove by, going the other direction. A woman opened her window and emptied a dustpan into the air. He squatted down next to his find. Down here, below regular people’s sight, he could feel things shift immediately. Now he was at eye level with tires, with stacks of paper at the newsstand, closer to gutters and drains and bird poop and cats and the curbside. From this angle, the thing looked bigger and wronger. The veins running through it were blue-gray and white, fanning out like little rivers.

“It smelled like the butcher’s it smelled like dead washed-up jellyfish it smelled like car exhaust and donuts. He was less than a block from his favorite donut shop. His stomach growled. His knees and thighs ached from squatting. He wished he had a stick or a fork or even a pencil, but all he had in his backpack were books. Then he thought of the parts of his glasses that go over his ears. He took his glasses off and stared at them. The black plastic was sturdy and thick. In truth, his glasses felt vaguely magical to him. He’d already survived gunfire, hadn’t he?

“He took them off his face and used the temple to point at the glob. Then he poked at it. Deeply. When he pulled his glasses back, a thread of gooey ooze clung to them for a moment.

“That’s when he heard the air say his name. Mikael, he heard it whisper. Then again, louder, till he snapped his head to the right and spotted the edge of a brick alleyway corner.

“It wasn’t the air after all.

“Between the glob and the voice, he was hearing his name. If he followed the ick of the glistening wormlike thing, it seemed to point around the corner. Like a map.

“Was that singing he heard? He couldn’t tell. His hands itched; his ears felt hot.

“He didn’t want to follow the sound, or the trail that led from the mess on the sidewalk to around the corner of the brick wall, but as always, his body betrayed him. He stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and walked toward the sound. His backpack weighed down his shoulders, and he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. His glasses felt heavy on his nose and cheeks, as if they were pulling his eye sockets down.

“Even before he was around the corner, he realized what he was hearing: Vera’s voice. Vera, who read stories in foreign languages to him as a child; who smelled like year-old lavender perfume; who petted his hair and adjusted his glasses and gave him goat’s milk when he visited her. Vera was a place where he’d hidden from bullies like Victor Michelovsky; where he’d waited for hours after school for his father to come home or not; where he’d come when the pilot light went out in the stove and he was afraid to try to light it himself. Vera was a place in the night too, pretending to be dead or asleep as he came and went with his father, but that was something not to talk about if you didn’t want to get smacked in the jaw.

“Vera sometimes sang to him, if no one else was around, her eyes glazed over like indigo marbles, little worlds, her vision cast out of the filthy apartment window toward he wished he knew what. Little folk songs was what she called them. From home. And she’d put her hand on her chest above her breasts and he’d stare there for as long as he could.

“So when he finally got his head and eyes around the corner and saw Vera splayed out on the trash-stinking concrete, her blood and urine staining her silky slip that was shoved up above her hips — faintly blue, oh, blue like the springtime sky — the word Vera was already on his lips. The hidden world of her, as open and bloody and horrible as a tiger’s mouth. He bent down to her, reaching out, toward what, he had no idea.

“He let himself look. In her arms, a squirming and grunting. Gray and red and white matter, like a cocoon covering skin. A terrible too-small mouth opened and sucked. The pink eye pockets closed as tightly as fists. A mewing mammal.

“Not for a boy your age. That’s what Vera always told him, sliding a bottle of vodka behind her back, then putting it on top of the refrigerator. Or closing her blue satin robe over her chest, then smiling and petting his hair.

“To keep himself from having to see the things he looked at, he’d long since trained himself to think about a specific word: indigo. The word, and everything he knew of it, came from Vera. You are an indigo child, she told him, fluffing the hair on his head then petting it smooth. From her mouth, and the broad gestures she made as she spoke, he learned that indigo is one of the seven colors of the rainbow — the color between blue and violet, named for a plant called Indigofera tinctoria.

“She also told him that indigo represented the sixth chakra, the third eye. Indigo children would grow up with the ability to master complex systems. And they would know how to care for both animals and humans.