Thrust: A Novel

Aurora and the Water Girl

And so, in anticipation of the coming Raid, I decided: we would empty the very womb of my Rooms, leaving only the evidence of pleasure and pain. They would find my creations, but not these children.

In advance, I made three choices that I knew would create great consternation among my clients, my colleagues, and my friends: I chose not to tell my dear Frédéric, with confidence that the grief and loss would only contribute to his artistic practice. For grief and loss, when they do not kill you, engender creation. I would leave him a parting gift that he could not forget.

I chose to believe a girl I barely knew, a girl who claimed that the water is the only way; it seemed insane. I don’t know what to think about the story Liza told me. But the pull she seeded within me was unstoppable. And so we struck a bold trade, one that will hold whether or not we succeed in saving these children. In all times, it is worth the attempt. Children are what was or is or will be the best of us. Stand at the gravesite of a child who died too young from this wrong world we’ve made, as I did too many times during the war, as I have too many times when a child’s labor is exploited to death. Tell me what you feel in your body as you stand at their grave. What you feel? It has no linear time. It does not exist in linear time. The grief crosses all times.

This was the last night I would create a Room for my beloved Frédéric, but he did not know this. I had mapped out the plan on that odd night when I met Liza and made our secret trade, and I held the secret inside my body as if my body could still hold treasured secrets. The scene we played out reminded me of what was last best about both of us, that we had once been unafraid children who could imagine anything.

As for the children from Room 8, we invented a private ritual for our journey. Each child held an apple in a half bite in their mouth. They stood in a great circle, all apple-mouthed. Then, on my command, each child knocked the apple from another’s mouth, so that the rest of the apple flew away, leaving only a small bite between their teeth. The force of knocking the apple from another’s mouth a reminder that anything a woman or child wants in the world will be forcefully taken from them unless they bite down — an animal truth. One boy accidentally socked another boy in the jaw, missing the apple at first, because he still hadn’t mastered coordination with his left hand, having lost his right. But the two boys simply tried again and got it right the second time, punching each other in the shoulder upon completion.

And the girls? One lost a front tooth, her mouth left bloody, the tooth lodged in the apple. She laughed. I felt something like love, I think. Or perhaps just kinship.

When we completed our ritual, Liza led us to the river’s edge. The night and dark were kind to us. There was a fog. One by one, when Liza said jump, we leapt into the river — with Liza herself directly behind us.

Liza gathered all the children around her in the water, then reached out and commandeered a rickety stray boat floating nearby, herding us all over the side into the boat, placing one strong girl and one boy at the oars. Once we were safely under way, she placed what looked like a squirming bald baby rodent into my hand. I recoiled but managed to hold on to the thing. “Oh my god,” I said. “What is this creature?”

“A leucistic axolotl,” she said, cupping my hand in hers as if to guide me. “Now, you must swallow it.”

I must…?

I was less than thrilled.

She thrust the creature toward my face. “Do it now, please. While we are on the water.”

“Why on earth should I swallow this creature?” A reasonable question, you might think, but even as I uttered it, I realized how unlike me it was. I felt immediately ashamed for my lack of courage — my lack of imagination.

Liza looked down at my skirt. Reaching over, she lifted the fabric, then knelt down, at knee level, and traced the roses on my prosthetic with her hand.

“Your leg,” she said, and then she did something unexpected: she stood up again and gestured dramatically at the axolotl in my hand, as if she were on stage. “The axolotl can regrow its limbs, you know,” she said. “Ambystoma mexicanum, in Latin. The Nahuatl word axolotl means ‘walking fish.’ But it is not a fish. The axolotl is an amphibian. Scientists are obsessed with it, because its body can do things humans cannot. It can regenerate its tail, its legs, its central nervous system. The tissue of its most complex organs — the eye, the heart, even the brain.” Her eyes, I noticed, remained fixed on the prosthetic under my skirt.