Thrust: A Novel

He produced an eye magnification device. He studied the penny. “You see this green coloration?”

“Yes,” she said, their heads nearly touching.

“That’s what happens when oxidation occurs between copper and air. Over time, copper turns green.”

“Like the drowning statue,” Laisvė said. The statue was her favorite large object that lived in water. As she’d told him ten thousand times. “The drowned statue is made from thirty tons of copper,” she continued. “Enough to make more than four hundred and thirty million pennies.”

“Yes, yes, so you’ve said.” The old comma had a gentle way of redirecting the story. “This coin here is the Flowing Hair cent. Incredibly rare. You know what? People hated it! They thought Lady Liberty looked insane. And people fear the insane. Evil people, thinking evil things.”

Laisvė stared at the coin: the flowing hair, the wide eyes. “Evil is just live going a different direction,” she said. “People need to learn to understand backward better. Words. Objects. Time. People get stuck too easily.”

“So true,” he said. He stared out behind her, beyond her. “When coins stopped making their way through the economy, the feel of them in your hands left too.” He picked the coin up and held it between them, staring at it so closely, his eyes seemed to cross a little. “Buying shriveled up as the disasters came: pandemics, fires, floods, the Raids. From the highest towers of government down to the bank tellers and hardware stores and candy shops and restaurants, that strange metallic feel in the palm, that noise not quite nameable, not a rattle, not a clanging — it disappeared.”

They sat inside the silence a moment, honoring the fact. She thought about the taste of copper in her mouth; she thought about his story, what he’d told her of it anyway. His ancestors had been from Guangdong Province, as it was called before it sank into the sea. He’d been something like a historian before he became an old old old comma, or that’s what Laisvė deduced.

Laisvė had probably been something else before too. At least in the prenatal stage, when a fetus could be a pig or a dolphin or a person.

“I’ll trade you an apple for the P, he said, leaning back and waiting for her answer. “And for the penny—”

Laisvė gently pulled the penny back. “I have to keep the penny. I have to carry it. Also, I’d better get back home. Before there’s trouble.”

The Awn Shop man peered down at her. “I see,” he said. And he reached behind his chair, retrieved an apple, and handed it to her.

She turned the apple around, noticed a faint yellow glowing spot, and plunged her teeth in. The sound of her bite hung between them. “Goodbye, then,” she said.

She stared at the penny as she turned and left the shop. A penny was a complex object, an artifact. She thought, not for the first time, about the word thief. It was a word her father used, but not a word she would apply to what she did. Whatever she was holding, her father always took it out of her hand to examine it, worrying about what trouble it would bring.

She thought of herself with another word: carrier. A thousand times she had to convince her father that she did not steal objects from the Awn Shop. Aster was convinced that losing her mother and brother had subjected Laisvė to some kind of trauma that led to problematic, erratic behaviors: stealing objects, endless list making, a tendency to focus obsessively on meaningless things. She was convinced that Aster’s seizures came from the same origins, only he had yet to understand them as meaning-making spaces.

To her mind, when she carried objects, she was participating in the so-called underground economies she’d read about in the dilapidated library. And it was during her reading that she came to realize how, sometimes, people too moved backward and forward in time. How the right people might be in the wrong time and thus need carrying.

She walked home from the shop feeling, if not happy or content, then complete, like a sentence or a math equation solved. She walked in a zigzag pattern through the alleyways between buildings, every structure holding its emptiness or its stories or its people and secrets. Sometimes she closed her eyes and let herself be guided by her hand as it ran along a building wall. It was a fun game, to walk the urban textures with your eyes closed, follow old paths made by different feet. Smells and sounds and cold and heat became more real, and colors filled her head.