Thrust: A Novel

David looked at me next. The eye contact made my chest pound. “Do you think we were right? To come here? To this place, not some other? Any of us?” His eyes never left me.

I took a long time answering, partly because David so rarely spoke — his way of getting his meanings across did not depend on words like the rest of us did — and partly because I didn’t know the answer, or I didn’t want to know the answer.

Finally I spoke. “They say my name means ‘the sun,’ but that’s only one story,” I said. “In German, it means something like ‘the combmaker.’ Can you picture me as the combmaker?” I smiled and my smile drew laughter from everyone. “Or it might be short for kemet. In ancient Egypt, the word kemet meant “the black land”; ancient Egyptians were Black Africans called the Kemet People. Kemet is the root of words like kam or ham, a reference to Black people in Hebrew translations.”

“What the hell are you going on about?” Endora asked.

“What I mean is, not even our names hold still,” I said. “Who knows what our stories will turn out to mean. I mean, beyond right now. With this fire and one another. Maybe we came here just for this.”

David smiled. It was as good an answer as I had in me, even though it was no kind of answer.

Later, in the newspaper, I came across a dispatch from the Centennial Exposition. Our visitor’s fountain, his vision of light and water, has another name: the Bartholdi Fountain. We had shared our evening with our own sculptor. We had seen him before, we felt sure, but in such a rare time and space that he had seemed to be a different person.

When we saw the girl who came to us from the water, we told her about the fountain. The things he said reminded us of her, of how she emerged from water and how she would return to it.