Thrust: A Novel

“Not as much as the Flowing Hair cent,” she said. “At the time it was born, everyone says the cent woman looked insane.” She walked over to me till she was standing a little too close. Her hair smelled like night. Her eyes were the color of water. Her shoulders underneath my height made me want to touch them. I could feel her beauty in my jaw. No, not beauty like you’re thinking of it in other women. It was more a beauty from the inside. A beauty screaming.

“I’ll give it to you,” she said. “I’ll give you the whole collection — if you lie down with me. Now. Tonight.”

I took a step back. “Collection? What collection?”

“Your father isn’t coming home,” she said.

My heart started pounding.

She started to take off her dress, a dress I could now see was covered in indigo flowers. The flowers seemed to quiver, or maybe that was just my eyes playing tricks on me. I was about to try to stop her, but… my god. Her body. Her collarbones. The barely-there dip between her breasts. The skin of her belly, so soft that it looked like sand-colored velvet. Her hips. And down to the dark hair covering her sex or leading me down and in. And that goddamn coin. Which she put on the kitchen table. And then another — the crazy-hair-lady coin. She started pulling coins from her hair, one and then another and another, until coins were falling to the floor all around us. Where were they all coming from?

Then she got on top of the kitchen table. I eased my pants off my hips and down my thighs and over my knees, which, goddamn, were shaking some. Pulled my feet free. Climbed onto her. Coins everywhere.

On top of her, I could see the snake in the corner birthing her eggs. The piles of coins at our feet were growing all around us. The air smelled like copper and our sweat.

She was right; my father never came home. Not that night, not the next day, not for the weeks she stayed with me. He had fallen. He had died.

The grief and loss were as heavy as iron. He was all I had. He was a son of a bitch most of the time, but he was my son of a bitch. And he was the best iron walker there was. Ask anyone. The only one greater might have been my grandfather, John Joseph, but I never met him. He was just a story.

She said, “I will enter desire with you inside your loss. I will carry it with you inside our lovemaking until you can breathe again. Grief is an object you have to carry over time, like a body. Someday, you will be able to take care of me and my father in return.”

One night, as we lay coiled around each other, I asked her how she’d known what had happened to my father. This is the story she told.

“There was a whale.” She drew small objects on my chest with her finger. I could feel her speech and breath on my skin.

“I was in the current, on my way to an otherwhere, and the whale swallowed me. After I scraped my way beyond the baleen, and crawled across the tongue, and made my way down the tunnel of the whale’s throat, I could hear the whale’s voice vibrating the whale gut as well as my whole body. The whale was singing. Inside the whale’s belly, she carried me through the Antarctic current. I could hear the speed of things in the walls of her. The vibrations shook my whole body. We made our way through water. After a while, she stopped and vomited me out.

“I made the rest of my way through water to children. Then the whale became a boat. Then we came to my father, Aster.”

“The whale became your father?” I asked, her head against my skin and shoulder. I wanted her to become my body — I wanted to forge her to me, to solder our bodies together.

“No,” she said. “I mean, my father’s people…” But then she fell silent and licked my nipple instead of finishing her sentence. She straddled me.

“What about your father’s people?”

“I was going to tell you something about the Yakut, about Yakutia, but that’s just a story I could tell. Truth is, my father doesn’t have any people — as far as he knows, as far as I know. There are a hundred stories I could tell. One of them is about how the prisoners were rounded up in Yakutia, and about the long Road of Bones, where tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to gold mines and work camps and gulags in Siberia. More than a million laborers and prisoners traveled the Road of Bones. Geologists looking for gold deposits are still finding piles of soggy coffins and decaying bones. Everything there is resting on bones.”

I put my hands on her hips, then her breasts.

“Isn’t everything everywhere resting on bones?” I said.

“Yes, the past gets buried like that, and then comes back when people least expect it. Like ice melting away. Or water rising. The Indigenous death toll in this land, where we are, was probably more than thirteen million, but that’s not the story that got told.”

She leaned over me. Mouthed shapes on my neck. Her hair keeping the rest of the world out of sight.