Thrust: A Novel

Everyone laughing and leaning into the wind. That father holding his infant son close, the smell of harbor water and the skin of a child.

Then: a woman with a full bosom and a purple headscarf notices a flash of color dropping from the second level of the ferry right in front of her. She screams. Too big to be a bird. Dread fills the woman’s chest. The people around her hear her scream. They look at her with alarm — is she speaking Italian? Something else? The man standing next to her tries to match the sound to the two years of a foreign language he had as a boy in Germany years ago, so many years. But this woman is Basque. No one near her understands what she is saying. A Japanese man puts his hand on her shoulder, all he knows to do. The crowd follows her face and emotion down toward the water, and in that instant, they finally see the truth of it: a small girl gone overboard in the waves, her body thrashing and fast receding in the churning white-lace waters of the ferry.

Everyone now rushes to line the railing, their hands clutching the white metal, their faces all alarm and horror. Stop the boat, people shout over and over again in different languages. Men bellow and run around. Women wail. Children weave themselves in between their parents’ legs. The girl in the water gets smaller and smaller in their collective line of sight.

Aster still clutches his infant son, but he has been shoved back a bit, and so he cannot see the action at the railing — the yelling men, the wailing women. He scans the area around him at knee-level for his daughter.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he begins to bleat. “Where is my daughter? Laisvė,” he screams, but everyone thinks he is screaming the word live in his despair.

Then, faster than you can say “America,” Aster hands his infant son to a stranger. He climbs the rail and dives into air all in one motion, like someone leaping from a building. He hits the water and sinks immediately, or that’s how it looks in the moment. This man cannot swim. Man overboard. A life preserver ring is thrown into the water.

His infant son now in the arms of a stranger, a floating boy in a crowd.

This cannot be happening, someone laments. The age-old lament.

The boat horn blares and the engines go full stop and the vessel tosses back and forth amid the waves. The souvenirs in the souvenir shop shiver. All hands on deck throw over two lifeboats; the men who pile into them start rowing furiously — toward what they don’t entirely know, some vague direction behind them, some half-heard news of a girl gone over. No one can see any girl in the water, not anymore. Is that the red of her jacket or the blue of her pants or the white hat spun into wool from rabbit’s fur and knit by hand, or isn’t it? A single arm and hand point out, toward the water.

At first, all anyone sees is the hand and arm and crown and face of a looming drowned statue: what’s left of the impossibly huge woman gleaming green in the afternoon light, the beacon, the partially submerged attraction they came for, pulling them all toward what used to be her shore but is now more like her torso.

But then a girl. Her tiny arms. Her body a faint splash of girl-fish, teasing the watchers at the surface.

Impossibly, the girl appears to be swimming.

Swimming toward the half-drowned remains of the colossus mother.

Aster, the father who cannot swim, is rescued, pulled back onto the boat.

The infant son now in the arms of an unscrupulous man who, until the moment he was handed an infant boy, a prize of great value, had considered this ferry ride a last gift to himself, a ride to see a sinking wonder, before he killed himself, unable to survive his own poverty and hunger. But a baby boy in his arms… that was something of value.

The water girl now swiftly becoming a nameless legend. The people know to keep real names inside their mouths.

How the water girl leapt into the air like an idea suspended before the fall. How she swam in spite of everything, everyone around her, toward a drowning statue of a woman. How a father tried and failed to save her, and in so doing, lost his infant son. How the girl swam all the way to the statue, didn’t she? Or did she disappear, and they only thought they saw her make it to the statue’s edge?

The Water Girl, the Comma, and the Turtle (2085)

Laisvė carried a penny in one hand and a big blue plastic letter P about the size of her head under her arm, stopping at every corner to peer around the edges of buildings, looking out for trouble. In The Brook, on her side of the Sea Wall, trouble could rise quickly. But a good trade was worth it.

To make a good trade, a carrier needs not to care about transgressing time. A carrier needs to slip her way into the barter. To use objects and signs in unorthodox ways.