Thrust: A Novel

I don’t know what happens, over time, to dead mothers at the bottom of the ocean. Or to brothers who float away.

We never finished making the story. Our mother-daughter story.

—

I can feel my father nearby now, inside the belly of a holding tank. Like a heartbeat inside a giant metal container.

When we arrive, I ask Bal to rest on the ocean floor.

She does.

We hold as still as a sunken statue.

“Memory is proof that imagination is a real place,” Bal says.

The whale’s body begins to dissolve, the walls of her gut begin to shimmer and soften and liquefy, until I am surrounded by the cage of her rib bones. Then the rib bones rise, slowly, with me embedded inside them, up and up from the ocean floor toward the surface. Colors go from black blue to deep blue to green blue and then a kind of indigo before what was the rib cage turns into the hull of a boat on the surface of the water.

The boat has a hull sturdy enough for passengers, blankets, and food and water. It is a kind of ferry between epochs. This carrier, like the whale, is and is not a boat. It is an allegory and it is real. I understand that now — what my mother taught me, what Bal said. How a story can be anything at any moment if we need it badly enough.

“May the boat travel well across time and space,” I say up into the night sky. I think I can see the white whale’s star map.

A small distance away from me, I see a great plume of aquamarine bubbling up on the surface. The gush of water is also a gush of bodies. Some of the bodies are alive; they thrash and squirm and yell. Some are dead; they float facedown with a melancholic serenity. Some of the bodies begin to sink; others are drubbing around to save themselves. I see a man trying to hold a young boy up so that the boy does not drown. I see the man’s gasping and struggling, I see the boy’s fear in his eyes.

Then I see that the man is my father.

As I row toward him, I sing the song my mother and I made up, inventing new words with each stroke. When I reach him, my father is crying amid the salt water, amid the sinking bodies around us. “Svajonė, Svajonė,” he wails. In his drowning, he must see me as my mother.

And then, “Laisvė!”

I can tell his strength is leaving. I can see he is on the verge of drowning. I climb down a rope ladder on the side of the boat. “Kick your legs! Hard,” I yell. My father looks like he is beaten by the water, but he is beating it back with his legs. Once my father is close enough to me, he lifts the baby boy above the water with both arms. With his last breath, he finds the strength to hand me the floating boy. He is right, the boy is heavy.

For a moment, my father and I lock eyes. The water between us calms. I reach out to him. He just stares at me, barely treading water. I say, “Father?”

“Laisvė, my love. My life.” He gurgles barely above the water’s swell, “This is the end of my story. The beginning of yours. I love you. Let me go to her. Svajonė. Let go.”

I remember my mother’s words: You cannot save your father. You cannot save your brother.

I remember the strength of dreams and water and stories, how they move differently: repetitions and associations, images and accumulations, fragmentations and displacements.

I feel Aster surrender to the gentle fall of the water. When I can no longer see him, when the image of Aster’s hands and arms and face are lost to dark water, I look up.

So many stars. Constellations that seem to come apart for a moment, then reunite, then part again. I close my eyes and reopen them. Suddenly, the stars seem to stitch new stories across the sky.

I put the toddler in the hull of a boat. I wrap a blanket around this child and ask the boat to hold it in its belly. I speak a prayer for protection up to the white whale stars in the sky.

Then I dive down after my father.

Motherwaters

Fear is not with me on this journey. For to enter the depths has become a part of living a life. The baby I left on the boat is a floating boy. The descent I make now is toward father. At the bottom of the ocean, mother. Between them, my life, like a language you can endlessly rearrange.