Thrust: A Novel

The Water Girl and the Floating Boy

Alone in his detention room, Mikael stares at the withered umbilical cord on his pillow.

She was real, it tells him. The baby was real. And Vera who sang was real — and he had been real too, a long time ago, as a boy. This tiny lifeline to nowhere, the last evidence of them all. Why does no one listen to children?

He does a childlike thing. He puts the crinkled object underneath his pillow, climbs onto his bed, and puts his head on the pillow. He closes his eyes. He can’t really remember what she looked like, but he does remember the tattoo on her neck, so he pictures that color.

Indigofera tinctoria. Indigo, Vera told him, represented the sixth chakra, the third eye. When they grow up, indigo children will have the power to master complex systems. And to care for both animals and humans.

As near as Mikael could tell, he was no master of anything: he could not care for a child, he could not master complex systems, he could not care for animals and humans. He felt as dead as the crinkled object underneath his pillow. No use left for him. Besides. The only part of “indigo children” he didn’t think was full of shit was the word itself: indigo.

He can’t sleep but he can’t not sleep either.

His hands make fists. He wishes he could hit something. He considers getting up to hit the wall, which he’s done many times before. If he cannot draw, he thinks that what is stuck in his body, in his hands, will kill him or someone else.

He knows they’ll find the object; they always do. There is nothing he can keep, nothing that is his, not even a self.

He thinks of William and bombs.

He thinks maybe the world deserves to be bombed, given what the world has done to children.

He wonders if he will ever get out of this place, and if he will become like William, not for any real reason other than the deep aloneness.

He rolls onto his side and faces the wall of his room. He punches the wall hard and quick. His knuckles bleed. He sketches a nautilus shell on the wall with the blood.

Then he hears water running. The running water sounds like it comes from his bathroom shower, but that seems nonsensical unless someone else is in his room, which never happens, because they think he will harm other boys.

He slides off his bed onto the carpeted floor like he’s slipping into water. His T-shirt rides up a bit; the carpet scratches his skin. He slides like a snake across the floor toward the bathroom, using his elbows like flippers. For a moment, he stops to put his cheek against the carpet. Heat and texture against his face. If death could just be this, as simple and animal as this.

The falling water recaptures his attention. It is his bathroom shower. A bit of steam like fog coming through the half-open door. Whoever is here, they shouldn’t be here; no one should be here, even he shouldn’t be here, especially right now when his ears are beginning to ring and his head feels hot and he is beginning to grind his teeth. Whoever is here, he will hurt them.

When he is very near the bathroom doorframe, before he can push himself up off the floor, a figure emerges. Standing there before him is something not possible: a girl. A naked girl, her hair wetted and making black S shapes against her body. She towers over his body, his belly still against the floor. He studies her a glance at a time: her feet, her shins and knees, her thighs, her sex glistening with water droplets, her hipbones, her belly, her ribs, her tits — mostly nipples — her shoulders, her neck, her face, her mouth. She looks to be about his age, maybe a little older. He wants to bite her. He has no idea why. The urge to bite her is so strong that he drools a little.

“Are you a scientist? Or an artist?” she asks, her words falling gently down at him.

Is he dreaming?

Is he dying?

“Yes,” he says.

“When is the time in your life that you felt the most human?” she asks.

He doesn’t want to talk to her, he doesn’t want to acknowledge anything about her, but his body won’t listen to him. “There was a baby. A long time ago.” He slaps his own jaw to make himself shut up.

Something moves between them.

Her hand.

With her right hand, she parts the lips of her cleft and fingers her way to her own blooming; she makes small rhythmic circles with her middle finger above him.

Why shouldn’t he kill her, this naked girl in his room? She is clearly not meant to be here. Is she a hallucination? Or some insane person who has somehow snuck in to murder him and steal his possessions? He thought of the shiv he’d been working on; it was lodged between the mattress and the bed frame, not quite done yet, but sharp enough.

A thief.

Probably a crazy thief.

“I have something to give you,” she says, holding her left hand out to him.