Thrust: A Novel

Laisvė whispered the names of trees as she passed them. Norway maple. Green ash. Callery pear. London plane. Littleleaf linden. Honey locust. She stepped over roots protruding from what used to be sidewalks. She never — ever — stepped on any crack in concrete. What used to be apartments and businesses yawned at her with their abandoned open doors or winked through cracked-window eyes. Her neck skin tingled now and then. She knew she was breaking the rules wandering The Brook. She knew Aster would be angry. Or terrified. She’d noticed that the two feelings often came into contact in her father, and that if those two feelings made an electrical current, her father could have a seizure.

It was much easier, Laisvė had found, to study the emotions of another than try to feel them for yourself. Wherever her feelings lived in her body, she’d yet to locate them. It was one of the many things Aster put on the list of “things to work on”—feelings. Like anger. Or fear. Two emotions that led to the Hiding.

—

In memory, the Hiding had begun not long after she and Aster tried to integrate into a group of people who were trying to create a community by squatting in a bombed-out apartment building. Most of the people had children of various ages and sizes and dispositions.

The parents were worried about the impact that isolation and hiding and scarcity were having on the psyches of their spawn, as near as she could tell, so they were making an effort to collect themselves, maybe for safety and to share resources too. But they made one grand error: they wanted to socialize their children. The parents had a strange terror that the children would suffer without proper education and social engagement.

This puzzled Laisvė.

They tried to collect the children together to play. The idea was that the children would teach one another things they knew, and spend a good bit of time “just being children” too, playing, that sort of thing. Any open field or urban area not overrun entirely by thick weeds and bushes worked, but caged courtyards near apartment buildings worked best. One in particular nested near the Narrows; the parents took some comfort in the idea that a fresh breeze laden with moisture would keep the children well. But the experiment had gone badly, at least for Laisvė. Or maybe mostly for Aster. If the parents had just thought the idea through a little better, Laisvė thought, they would have realized that none of the children had any human social skills left whatsoever. Either they’d lost what skills they had, or they’d been born without them. All they had were survival instincts—animal skills.

Laisvė was thinking of bonobos. The genus Pan, the closest living relative to Homo sapiens. They shared the genus with chimpanzees, but their matriarchal order was more altruistic, empathetic, compassionate, and sensitive than chimps’. In bonobo societies, males derive their power from the status of their mothers.

That day, in the midst of the children’s play, Aster heard screaming. He ran through a crowd of kids that had gathered in a corner and found Laisvė standing alone, holding one hand in the air. The hand was bloody. At her feet was a male toddler, his body still. She killed the baby she killed the baby, they were all saying, but when he asked, How? How?, the words punching through his throat on the way up, no one could answer him. No one had seen it. All they’d seen were her outstretched arm and her bloody hand, held up above her head.

The toddler was an orphan, and he was not dead after all. But his mouth and neck were covered in blood.

No one, including Aster, thought to ask Laisvė what had happened. Nor did anyone notice the balled fist of her hand — or try to open it — or they might have found the small object she was holding. An object the toddler had found somewhere, and which two other boys had told him to put in his mouth. A rusted nail, it turned out, which the toddler had swallowed, and which Laisvė had pulled from his throat so he did not die.

No one noticed either, probably because of the male toddler so near death—My god, she nearly killed that boy—that Laisvė had seized one of the boys who’d made a joke out of trying to get a smaller boy to eat a nail, that she’d taken justice upon herself. She pushed the cruel boy away from the immediate area, out into the water. No one would notice for several hours that the boy had floated away, his internal organs already beginning to fail, how he grabbed at his gut with abdominal pain, how he shat himself and vomited for hours as he floated, until he became jaundiced and died from liver failure, like a fish gone belly-up in the waves.

After that, Laisvė had to be kept secret.

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