Thrust: A Novel

Inside the belly of the black-windowed van, Laisvė makes a compass of her body. She needs to know what’s what.

The men in the van drive fast.

She is strapped in by a network of belts. Her mouth is covered in duct tape.

A black bag on her head smells like dirt.

The black van makes a lot of stops and starts and turns for a while; then not.

Open road to somewhere.

The belly of the van is dark, like the insides of whales or deep water.

The inside of the bag is dark.

Inside the dark is fear. Inside the fear is a memory, one she has carried too heavy, a piece at a time, in all the chambers of her heart. Of the Hiding. The way memory can spring you back in the space of a moment.

In this memory, she is cradled in the warmth of her father’s pickup. At a certain point in the workday, after taking a bite or two of a peanut butter sandwich and drinking some water, Laisvė had crawled up into the driver’s side of the truck to look at things. Her baby brother was nearby, nestled in blankets on the floor behind the cab, sucking on a bottle, spit bubbles forming on his lips, eyes droopy with sleep.

She could see the workers quite clearly. The pickup truck was parked very close to their worksite, probably dangerously close, but Aster and Joseph needed to make sure they could see the truck, the rusted red beast holding the children inside. Most of the laborers were on the ground, working to complete a base about the height of six men stacked vertically. But it wasn’t these laborers who had Laisvė’s attention. Joseph was so high in the sky, he looked nonhuman, except that he walked across his rusted-orange iron beam one human foot at a time. Just below him, Aster was walking a different iron beam in the opposite direction. Each man had a rope tied around his body — secured to something, she imagined — but before she could puzzle out how the harnesses worked, she felt a spike of fever. Her vision doubled, then tripled, then blurred into a hot haze. But she did not close her eyes. Something was emerging, coming into focus, just as it might underwater. Her breath fogged the window of the truck.

Laisvė took her fist and rubbed a small portal through the fog on the window. Where first she had seen only her father and Joseph, now she saw Kem and David Chen, John Joseph, and Endora too, all swinging around the iron, the body of them in motion like an organism, sort of coming apart but also holding together, like bees in a honeycomb. David Chen the most graceful of all, swinging between beams, almost in flight, the people in and out of time, in and out of vision — and then she was with them or in them or something; she was so close, she could see the sweat on Joseph’s biceps and forearms, the bite of Endora’s jaw and her unruly hair and eyes, the blue cross on Endora’s neck, and a hint of the white feathers crawling a bit up the neck of David Chen. She could see her father’s eyes — only now they looked unusually deep, like pools or moon pods, not dead as they often were with the weight of loss and grief. The nexus of past and present and their bodies and their work — all these together, she realized somehow, were the fever in her. And a kind of calm came with it.

—

In the van, Laisvė smells the sweat of the uniformed men. Power smells like the sweat of men mixed with the scent of gunmetal. Laisvė thinks of how people often see danger where change is happening, and then her fear floats away.

In the van, she closes herself up.

The sweat of the men becomes the smell of salt.

The smell of salt becomes the possibility of an ocean.

She thinks, I am in the belly of a whale.

Since I am in the belly of a whale, I can go anywhere.

Imagine the bottom of the ocean, motherwaters.

No, don’t imagine it. See it. In this dark underneath this hood.

Let loose your imagination.

The floor of this van is the belly of the whale.

There are no wheels or walls.

There are no men; the men in the van washed up on a shore somewhere, thrown onto land from a wave.

Just baleen plates, sifting foreign matter out and nutrients in.

In the belly of the whale, she rests and rolls in wet.

The Water Girl and the Whale

Laisvė puts her hands on the inside wall of the whale and closes her eyes. A great humming emerges, threaded through the sounds of their travel. The humming vibrates through Laisvė’s entire body.

“Have you ever swallowed a man?” Laisvė asks the whale.

“What on earth?” the whale responds. “No, I’ve never swallowed a man. That’s absurd. Do you have a name, dear?”

“Liza. Do you?”