Thrust: A Novel

He looked at his own arm, hooked up to an IV next to his shitty rickety cot. He did not feel particularly drugged, so perhaps the IV was simply a saline solution to make him look briefly cared for. He studied the faces of the others around him — their faces all like gray deflated balloons in the halting artificial light, as if all trace of race, class, or meaning could be erased simply by draining a detainee of blood and agency. Every once in a while, a low and strange vibration shook the entire tank, shook the floor, shook their cots, shook their shoulders and hearts. It was the sound of more detainees arriving, or perhaps someone coming to take them out and away through a kind of side orifice in the holding tank. The uniforms on the men who handled the people made no sense to Aster. They weren’t even uniforms, really, more like ad hoc military hand-me-downs, with boots. (Name your historical moment: there were always boots.)

Whatever happened next, he knew it would happen without his daughter unless he could get free of this place, and as his gaze traveled the walls of the holding tank, its ceiling as tall as a skyscraper, he thought of the story of James Bartley. Laisvė had been obsessed with the man, who was supposedly swallowed by a whale and survived. Aster knew well that the veracity of the story had faded with time, but Laisvė never lost interest in the story, the man, or whales. She had a kind of strange faith in their existence. She often drew pictures of the man inside the whale’s belly, cooking dinner, caring for his daughter, as if the whale’s belly were a room or a house.

“They say he was found bleached of skin from the whale’s gastric juices,” she said.

“That story isn’t true, Laisvė.”

“It is physically possible for a sperm whale to swallow a person whole. It is.”

“But not for the body to survive inside,” he said.

“How do you know? How would anyone know?”

And the question would hang suspended in the air between them — like most of her questions, which probably had answers but left him feeling lesser when he offered them.

Laisvė loved to tell Aster about whales. “When a whale dies in the ocean, it falls to the bottom and becomes a giant mound of food for fish, sharks, underwater animals. Some breach on the shore, or the half-eaten ocean carcasses wash up, which means more food for birds and other land creatures. Mammologists at the Royal Ontario Museum found a blue whale washed up in Newfoundland. They salvaged the heart by plastinating it.”

“Is plastinate even a word?” Aster knew the answer; he was just trying to keep his daughter talking, keep her telling these stories that so delighted her. He knows that plastinate is a word thanks to Laisvė, who has already recited this story to him, explained the word and the process, showed him a photo of a whale heart in a book. In his head, he can hear her.

First, extract.

Then dilate.

Ship.

Plastinate.

Cure.

During the plastinate phase, the heart is submerged in acetone. Over time, all the water molecules leave the tissue. Then the heart is soaked in a silicone polymer solution and left in a giant vacuum chamber, which drops the atmosphere around the heart to conditions resembling those in space. The polymer fills the organ.

“When the heart finally emerges after it is cured, even the grimy little hands of children in museums couldn’t penetrate the plastic-encased organ. Look! A blue whale heart is bigger than a person. You could actually climb inside one of the chambers.”

How do you search for a daughter when the world wishes you were both swallowed up and gone?

Laisvė had always wanted to know who she was, where she came from, and he could not answer her. He put his face in his hands. He felt the concave of his eye sockets, the mound of his nose, the hair on his face, the slit of his mouth. Where is my girl? And then a fact he knew well, as well as his own face, maybe better: She won’t go to the safe house. She will go to water.

Aster pulls the IV out of his arm, lets the line twirl and dangle like an umbilical cord. Blood, but not much; he holds a hand over it. He has no idea how long he has been in the holding tank, so he turns to the nearest person and asks. That person starts to cry. Aster leaves things alone.

—

When the Raid came, Aster was standing in the kitchen, cooking stew. He saw the cusp of winter through their window that day; soon they would be reinventing how to heat themselves, again calling on the best thing they had, their imaginations, to conjure survival. Heat bricks over fire in an alley. Wrap them in towels and put underneath bedcovers at night. Wear layers of newspaper or cardboard or plastic bags between your clothes and your coat.

Try not to have a seizure.