Thrust: A Novel

The currents are fastest near Antarctica if you are traveling through the time portals west to east, the same as if you were on a ship.

Highways between buildings and cities are not like riverways or oceanic currents. Man-made highways don’t lead to anything larger than themselves.

I do remember my mother telling me about Olonkho. The stories known as Olonkho are a collection of folktales from the Yakut. The Olonkho are like poem songs. Or like the singing I heard inside the whale belly. Or maybe like the sound I hear when I go to water, which has waves and repetitions I can’t explain properly to anyone. Or maybe like at night, when I look up at the Pleiades and see a girl with a sieve measuring out star showers where other people see other things.

My mother told me that anyone who performed Olonkho had to be a truly great singer or actor or poet. Many Olonkho have more than twenty thousand verses. I’ve never even heard of anything that long recited from memory. Then again, memory is just making stories, like I said. I once asked my mother if she could sing one to me. She said no. To sing a true Olonkho, she said, could last up to eight hours. Some Olonkho could take more than a month to perform. She said they’re not written down; that’s when she explained to me what oral traditions were, and how they are handed down by mouth from generation to generation.

She said, Just studying a thing isn’t the same thing as being part of a thing.

She said, Don’t take things that are not yours.

She also said, Step into stories at the places where they cross each other, at the cruces. Bring gifts. Let go of them.

I asked her if we could make one up. Our own pretend epic story. She laughed. When she laughed, her eyes made little wrinkles and I always wanted to climb into her lap then. To be inside her laughing. Inside her voice. Inside her body. All I remember about the story we started making together is the beginning.

The girl fish loved her water life, swimming with currents and against currents and rolling around onto her back and flipping her tail and breaching briefly midair with a sky twirl, suspended like an idea before plunging back into the deep-water world. There was nothing better than being a girl fish and there never would be. She lived in a building made from amber, with other girl fish, with turtles and whales and dolphins and seahorses and starfish.

We even made sure to sing it, and so we changed it a little every time we sang it, which didn’t matter, because that was part of the performance.

But that was as far as we got. Before my mother went to water.

—

My father’s wail is louder now. I think we must be close.

Traveling in a dark van and traveling in the belly of a whale and slipping across time and space are all very similar. To be a girl inside the gut of something bigger than you is a form of adaptation. Your body moving from one form to another.

Think of an object of great value sinking, slipping, moving through water. Sunken treasures have a way of rearranging the story. A ship at the bottom of the sea folds gently over into sand and barnacle and sea-creature ecosystems, losing its former worth and moorings, for a ship is built to float. Its sinking is a kind of failure — and yet, when someone finds the sunken thing, new value emerges. The ship changes forms when it goes from sailing the surface to wrecked at the bottom. The wreck changes forms after the dead people disintegrate and the cargo settles to sand.

For a time, unless the wreck is discovered, no one owns anything. The fish find homes and hiding places. Radar sweeps can take years to detect the great masses driven off course. Whole histories, life stories, and meanings fall away from existence, only to be rediscovered and attached to the new stories we make up because we need things to mean something besides nothing. We need human history to mean something. We need the things we do with our hands to mean something, not nothing. We need the sunken treasure to mean that something of human value, once lost, is found again; that something of ourselves has been salvaged and brought back in pieces to the surface; that something we thought dead and gone yet holds life. Delicate truths, delicate artifacts.

Fish need nothing from ships.

Whale bodies become a life source for fish and other ocean life when they decay.