Thrust: A Novel

“By the way, I told the worms you were coming. Don’t be surprised if they’re grumpy. Worms aren’t too happy with the state of things lately.”

—

The whale returns. Her body brings a beautiful black glow to everything. A black shimmer everywhere. She gently opens her mouth and swallows me away from Aster and Svajonė, from their beautiful story. Through her baleen plates, before they close, I can see them; they hold each other close — a father, a mother — then dissolve. The baby boy is safe and sound inside the belly of the whale. After a few days of travel, the whale becomes a boat again, carrying us in her hull, ignoring human ideas of time and space, bringing us back to the surface of the world, where the sun is coming up and the lilies are blooming inside a different story.

Joseph and the Whale

The first time I met Laisvė, she was twenty years old. I was twenty years old. I know, you’ll say that’s not possible. Just let me tell the story, okay? Stories are quantum.

She was the most beautiful anything I’d ever seen, with the possible exception of a corn snake. Corn snakes, man, they have it bad. They often get mistaken for copperheads even though corn snakes are harmless to humans. They kill their prey by hugging them to death — ha! I mean constriction, of course. But I digress.

Laisvė’s skin the color of desert sand and her eyes a clear blue and her crazy black hair falling down her shoulders in unkempt waves.

At the time, I was living with my father, Flint, near a grain store. My father and I worked together on the early iron frame of the Sea Wall. We walked the iron up top. I don’t know if anyone understood fully how bad things were about to get; maybe we did, maybe not. The last great collapse was on the horizon. The great Water Rise. We heard about Raids here and there, to sweep refugees away, but not on any mass scale. Still, the signs were there — even about my father. One morning, one of the carabiners on his ropes failed and he dropped about eighty feet from the top beam we were working on. Right next to me. I mean, he fell like a stone, then jerked to a stop as the harness caught his fall, then dangled and swung. I saw the whole thing. There wasn’t time to be shocked, it happened so fast. But the image of him falling stuck with me. Like a felled bird, his arms outstretched, his back wide and strong.

The rats and mice were plentiful in our cabin next to the grain store; the corn snake was fat and so orange that I swear it glowed in the dark. Corn snakes are docile. They don’t like to bite unless they have to. The oldest corn snake in captivity lived to be more than thirty years old.

That corn snake was gorgeous. But no, not as gorgeous as this young woman walking into our cabin. She said, “Are you Joseph?”

My father named me after my ancestor John Joseph. Our families all originate with a female ancestor, but I never knew any of mine. My mother left my father when I was five, so I don’t think of her as an ancestor; I don’t think of her sisters, her sister’s daughters, or any of their daughters as ancestors either. I don’t know where any of those women are. Maybe the women leaving is why there are so many of us Josephs. I don’t know.

Living with men made a bitterness in me, but it was a bitterness I could trust. No one brought us into a longhouse to live. My father and I lived in a shack he built near the grain store. My father told me about my ancestor, John Joseph. He said that John Joseph was the best sky walker anyone ever knew. My father and I both walked the iron; our skill probably came from John Joseph, I don’t know.

Anyway. That night I was taking off my muddy boots to leave in the mudroom at the front of the cabin. First, I caught a glimpse of the snake. “Hey, snake,” I said, and I swear she smiled. But then I saw something moving that wasn’t the snake. It was a young woman walking into the mudroom. So I said, “Hey,” again, still taking off my shoes, trying to act cool.

She asked if I was Joseph, and I nodded. Then she said, “Throw water on me.”