Thrust: A Novel

He saw snow, he remembers — the first flakes of snow, not yet falling, blowing directionless in the air. Laisvė’s red coat was hanging on a nail on the kitchen wall. When they came, she didn’t even have time to grab the coat.

How will my daughter survive without her coat?

Did they track her and find her? Did they enter the throat of the crawl tube under the kitchen sink and climb down after her? He feels as if his own heart might stop, might plasticize in his chest like a petrified apple. Did they find strands of her hair in the tunnel, perhaps where it took a sharp turn? Was there the faintest trace of blood? Did she hit her head in her rush to crawl as fast as her hands and knees could carry her? Did she scrape her skull against the wall looking back over her shoulder for me? Did they find any pieces of her at all? A shoe?

Or one of her beloved objects?

A few cots away, another detainee — this one a small child — starts to cry. A boy, barely more than an infant, yet already beginning to take shape, the way children evolve. The tank holds the hearts of too many submerged children. Aster walks over to the boy, sits next to him, puts his arm around the smaller body, then cradles him.

Everything Aster knows about tenderness he learned from his friend Joseph Tekanatoken.

“You’re the same age as my grandson,” Joseph had told him over and over. Joseph who took him under his wing, Joseph with more lines in his face than a map, Joseph whose father and grandfather were neither Canadian nor American but who traversed nations for work, Joseph from the Haudenosaunee Six Nations ironworkers, generations who built most of the city’s most famous buildings and bridges. Joseph from seven generations of Mohawks who walked the iron.

Joseph who disappeared in a Raid.

If Aster only knew who his ancestors were, he would have given that story to Laisvė. The men he worked with on the Sea Wall had taken him in because of a story he made up about his ancestors; Aster has no idea who his ancestors actually were. Maybe he was just a random man from nowhere, laboring on a massive ironwork, living illegally in this place, trying to feed his daughter.

She wanted to know who she was. He had no idea what story to tell.

He rubs the small back of the boy. The boy’s crying gets swallowed up by other ambient sounds.

Aster’s feet tingle. At the bottom of the holding tank, his body feels pressurized. His ears ache and his limbs are as heavy as lead. It isn’t true that men who walk the iron are not afraid of heights. He can vouch for it. They just want work and are willing to do what others aren’t to get it.

“In history and in the now,” Joseph always reminded him. Aster’s chest still convulsed every time he walked the iron. His hands still felt like a hundred butterflies alive in his fingertips. His legs still went numb. But his feet found the iron.

“Aster,” Joseph often told him. “You could close your eyes and your feet would still find the iron.” Then he’d add, “But goddamn, don’t ever close your eyes, okay? Don’t be a fucking idiot.”

Who are men when they’re untethered from fathers? From mothers? From daughters?

Is his son weightless inside, a floating boy somewhere out there in the world?

The boy beneath his hands — someone’s, anyone’s son — stops crying.

The Water Girl and the Wail of Father

I know my father is nearing the surface of the water. I can feel him in my belly. Bal showed me how to feel the map between a belly and the stars.

I know what current to take to get there.

I know he’s probably wondering what happened to me. But he’s wondered that for a long time, ever since I first dove in after my mother.

The last thing I heard that day, before I dove into the water, was the wail of his voice. That’s how I know how to find him now, by the vibration he carries in his body.

I don’t know how old I am in this moment. It doesn’t matter. Though I feel like I might be midlife inside my body. And anyway, in the belly of a whale, there is no time.

I don’t know if my memory of the stories my mother told me is real, or if those memories are mixed-up fragments from my time carrying objects and turning time. I know that my mother was studying Yakut, and the people of the ice forests of Siberia, when she met my father. My father had no idea if he was related to those people or not, but they acted like he might be. They were kind. They didn’t treat him or any of us like outsiders. They helped my father to heal my mother when she was spit out of the prison.

So maybe the stories in my head are from her, or from the people we met there, or maybe they’re mixed up with stories my father told me. Or maybe the stories just keep multiplying, accumulating from my own witness of animals and trees and objects and water, repeating and repeating in waves.

So know this: When I say I remember my mother, I could mean anything. When I say once I had an infant brother, I could mean anything.