Thrust: A Novel

“When Vera said it, the word indigo took on a power, as if it were some kind of spirit, as if it were a myth. Like indigo meant something close to life. The boy pictured himself as an adult, in an indigo jumpsuit, working with elephants and bats and sad people in some kind of room filled with computer servers. It would be a large room, with lines of monitors and black lights and knowledge banks and straw on the floor for the animals. As he thought back on all of this now, he briefly forgot what was surging and moaning on the ground before him.

“A scent he knew the word for—lavender—mixed with the smell of gutter water.

“Then, a sound — the bawl of an infant.

“He looked at Vera’s face. Her skin was so pale, he could see through it. It was full of veins and he could see the bruised color of bones and cartilage holding up her facial features. The holes in her face — her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth — suddenly looked wrong to him. Too big or too deep or too pleading. The fact of what he was looking at — her body — suddenly overcame him. He tried to focus on some small thing that might bring him back to human: A cigarette butt a few inches from Vera’s head. An Anheuser-Busch bottle cap near a graying dandelion poking through the concrete. Water dripping off the corner of the gutter. He looked up to the top of the five-story brick building, past the dung-splattered wall toward a fragment of cloud. Then a sound he knew, Vera’s voice, a voice he felt in his gut. He looked back down, right into her mouth. Her teeth were so small.

“Listen to me, Mikael. She pulled at him with a whisper. You have to take her.

“He shook his head back and forth in a panic, so hard that his glasses flew from his face and landed near Vera. With her free hand, the one not holding the infant, she handed them back. Vera pulled her stained slip back down over her hips.

“I know, Vera said. Too much. You are just a boy. She petted her own chest as if she were reaching to comfort him.

Not wanting to look directly at it, he closed his eyes. He heard differently this way, with his eyes closed. He could hear a fractured rasp nearby, like an animal clawing at garbage. No — not that. Something was wrong with Vera’s breathing.

“Shhhh, Vera said, soothing him.

“His body slackened a little. His aching knees and thighs finally gave in and he shifted his weight to one hip, propping himself on one elbow, stretching his numb legs out sideways, so that he was almost reclining on his side next to Vera. The thing between them stilled and quieted. He almost forgot it was there, except that he couldn’t look away from its mouth as it closed on Vera’s nipple.

“Then Vera started to sing.

“When her voice trailed off, he realized he was smiling — a half smile, his eyes closed, his mind off where boys’ heads go when women sing to them. As if now were like always. But when he opened his eyes, Vera was staring at the sky, her mouth too open, her skin wrong-colored. And the thing, the squirming pinkness of it…

“He stood up. Which took longer than it should have. He stared at it. For a moment, he considered simply turning around and walking away. Instead, he squatted back down and took his glasses off, holding them in the air between himself and Vera.

“Vera?

“He brought a temple close to Vera’s face. Gently, gently, he poked her cheek. Her eyes did not blink the way eyes should blink. Her mouth retained its shape. He put his glasses back on.

“Wherever it was that he’d been born, in that other country with the other language that his mouth was fast forgetting, there were stories. Vera used to tell him the stories. The place he was from was cold, he knew, and they said it was war-torn, like some kind of ripped-up blanket. And he had the impression that death moved easily there, between people and things. It was a place cold enough that dogs were left to freeze in the street. Daughters were dragged off to sheds by soldiers in the night, laughing, vodka-drenched soldiers, the air full of sweat. Sometimes the daughters returned later, with their sight taken from their eyes; sometimes they were sold away forever.

“The sons were turned into dogs — or daughters — too, treated as whatever the soldiers needed the meat of them to be. Some of them were turned into guns, killers of anything for anyone, if they wanted to stay alive.

“He always wondered, the boys they used to be — where did they go? Did they recede into the folds of their brains like a well-tucked secret, something to be retrieved later in life? Was that kind of brutality a universal initiation into the world of men? Or did those inner boys just shrivel and disappear? What happened to them? Not the ones who died; they went to dirt. But the others? Did they go to facilities to be corrected?

“He used to hear his foster father’s voice: