Thrust: A Novel

One night, as we stood together on the ground at the edge of the water, before we boarded the ferry back to the city after work, John Joseph bent down on the ground and scooped something out of the mud. It was a turtle. He handed the turtle to me. I looked at it with some strange sorrow. The shell so beautiful and small and strong. The creature inside wrinkled and ugly. I kissed it. I don’t know why. Then I threw the turtle back into the Narrows.

That’s when the four of us saw something thrashing in the water, and Endora, half breathless, said, By saints, there is a girl.

The Water Girl (2079)

She looks like a man,” whispers a young girl with hair as black as space, her lips barely the height of the ferry railing. Under her breath, she whispers a list: The Flowing Hair cent. The Liberty Cap cent. The Draped Bust cent. The Classic Head cent. The Coronet cent. The Braided Hair cent. The Flying Eagle cent. The Indian Head cent. The First Lincoln penny.

“I think she was meant to look… majestic,” her father answers. “Like an archetype.” Aster looks down at the red of his daughter’s jacket and the blue of her pants and the white hat spun into wool from rabbit’s fur and knit by a mother’s hands.

“Can people be archetypes?” Laisvė asks. But the wind picks up and so Aster just smiles at his daughter and tousles the hair on her head.

They have all taken risks, traded things they had, for tickets to see the drowning statue. The ferries that come and go in The Brook are fewer and less frequent now. No one knows for how long. Those who have lived through the collapse, and the great Water Rise, move around in tiny circles to avoid attracting attention in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trouble rises and falls in seemingly random waves. Visiting the underwater woman reminds them of a story they once knew.

The people cluster at the ferry’s edges like a human organism as the boat makes its way toward what was once an island. Their wonder takes the shape of draping arms and hands over one another as well as the ferry railings. People who do not know one another taking a small act of time to share some sense of wonder is no small thing in the world.

The girl with hair as black as space nests herself amid the legs of a mass of passengers on the ferry.

“Not so close to the edge, Laisvė,” Aster says. He knows the pull of water in his daughter.

The murmuring layers of language float up toward the sky as the ferry nears its destination. The backs of the children’s heads, foreshortened as children are, populate the front of the boat. A few of them now begin to point toward the object hovering on the waterline in the distance, their fingers becoming the word for it.

The bustling adults now create a kind of kinetic energy. The men button up their wool coats and stand a little straighter; the women arrange their scarves and hats, and place their hands on their chests, everyone — maybe everyone but, really, who knows — breathing just a little differently as they near the statue. Maybe it’s the memory of generations in their heads. Maybe the desire for beer or pizza or sex or the hope that they will not get caught and sent back home because they dared to take a day to relax and visit a sinking wonder of the world.

Aster hoists his infant son up more securely on his hip, the baby boy crying, probably hungering for his long-gone mother’s breast. He whispers, Hush my son.

And the person standing next to Aster on the boat, having no idea what the father says to the son, simply responds to the crying in his own language by saying Ah, the boy is hungry, and the woman standing next to that person, not understanding either of their languages, smiles and says, in her language, Bless this journey—or is the translation “boat ride” or is it “family”—her hands clasped in prayer or just common gesture, and everyone smiles all the same, because an infant crying for his mother’s breast is its own language in any language and a shared journey across water binds strangers.

Closer to the ground, where no one is looking, the unnoticed black-haired girl begins her climb up the rungs of the ferry railing, whispering to no one but the water — for this is not the first time the water has called to her—Mother.

Sometimes the story of who you might become comes before you understand it. You might have to go into the water to collect all the pieces.

A loudspeaker reminds people how much time they will have to view the phenomenal sinking statue. How long until they arrive, how long the boat will circle the statue and then turn back, how little time they have left to purchase snacks or souvenirs.