Thrust: A Novel

Cruces 1

We dreamed we were hers.

The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She arrived by boat in pieces.

When the ship Isère finally reached port, we wept. The sailors too. They had been convinced that the tempests they’d endured on board would drown them in the ocean, and the cargo with them. The deck of the ship was nearly a farmer’s field in size. The hold had been covered with huge black tarps for the journey. When the sailors pulled the tarps back, the hold looked dark and foreboding.

I was asked to jump into that dark.

Like plunging into the ocean’s deep.

Down in the hold, my eyes began to adjust. Gigantic crates the size of houses filled with pieces of the colossus: a woman in slices, crated and shipped. One by one, we found her body parts.

Hair.

Nose.

Crown.

Eyes.

Mouth.

Fingers, hand.

Foot.

Torch.

She had arrived, in pieces of herself.

Later, while discussing her reassemblage, an engineer remarked that the “embryo lighthouse,” as they called the interior skeleton of the statue, held clues to reconstructing her form. Yet many elements of her construction went unexplained, left us puzzled. We were left with our imaginations to create adaptations.

During those months, we lived in the city and we labored on the island. We were woodworkers, ironworkers, roofers and plasterers and brick masons. We were pipe fitters and welders and carpenters. We mixed concrete, we pounded earth, we armed the saws and drills. We were sheet metal and copper specialists. She arrived in our hands as thirty-one tons of copper and one hundred and twenty-five tons of steel. Three hundred copper sheets had been pressed to create the outer skin of her.

We were cooks and cleaners and nuns and night watchpeople. We were nurses and artists and janitors, runners and messengers and thieves. Mothers and fathers and grandparents, sisters and brothers and children.

During the day you could always hear the insistent hammering, the files grating, the chains clanking, the copper singing as it was being shaped over wooden scaffolds, the cacophonous orchestra of our labor. You could always see arms swinging, hands at work, shoulders and biceps and the jaws of the workers flexing and grinding. Those sounds were our bodies. Her body coming to life from all of our hands. We the body took pride in our labor — as if we expected that someone would know our names, carry our stories.

When the winds in the harbor grew too strong, we had to abandon scaffolding. We used pulleys and ropes. We took care to be gentle against the softer metal. We dangled ourselves around her body, swung around the pieces of her, like the swoop and lift of acrobats, or birds, or window washers — though all of us were tethered to her body.

Sometimes, for just a moment, a body can feel real inside a story that way. As if each of us existed.

At night, when it was no body’s shift, some of us would stand around her head and stare at her giant rounded eyes. We thought she looked sad. Or angry and sad. Her eyes each much larger than a human head. Her face neither male nor female, or perhaps just both. We felt she had the stare of our labor but also our loss, our love, our lives. Sometimes, holding near to her, we thought or felt mother, but we meant it in some new way no one has imagined before.

We were the impossible possible voice of bodies.

Some of us were born here and some of us were the sons and daughters of mothers and fathers not from here. They came from famine they came from poverty they came from occupations and brutalities and war. They came from something to leave, which is why they crossed land and water. They spoke of persecutions or poverty, but they also spoke of rolling hills or sunsets over the desert or flowers with names that made our hearts reach out. The leaving of a place carried sorrow as well as relief, and the coming here carried both as well. We spoke of both brutality and beauty — or remembered beauty — in our homelands, or in the hands of infants born here. We let go the hand of prior homes to reach this place.

We were Jews and Italians and Lithuanians and Poles. We were Irish and Native American and Chinese. We were Lebanese and African and Mexican. We were Germans and Trinidadians and Scots. There were hundreds of us over time and across distances; it is impossible to say how many.

We were an ocean of laborers. We spoke Russian and French and Italian and English and Chinese and Irish and Yiddish, Swahili and Lakota and Spanish and a swirl of dialects. Our languages a kind of anthem.

We understood that labor crossed oceans. Some of us unloaded the statue pieces after her oceanic journey and some of us reassembled the pieces. Those of us who had unloaded pieces, and then reassembled them, felt a strange connection. Toward one another and toward her. Or we might have.

The sum of us — the we that might have been — could have understood from the passing around of stories that our French colaborers meant for her to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The French sculptor’s early model had held a broken chain in her left hand. Our eyes saw the drawings. The model. We knew what the chain meant. Some of us might have rubbed our wrists or ankles or necks at the thought or memory of it. But then the chain moved. On her body, and on our bodies. Down near her foot.

We might have known then, in our bodies, that our states were stitched imperfectly — that war had ripped open a forever wound. That some of us would not be fully counted, our rights still pounded down on a daily basis. That children were being ground into dust everywhere, in the factories. That laws were excluding us even as we the body built the means of transportation across the land. Stories were traveling between us that could have led anywhere, turned in any direction, in spite of our backbreaking work.

That we could have been born from her, but small cracks began to appear in the story, just as in the materials of her body and our labor. Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there — our labor had put them there — and we had thoughts about it.

We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden. We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don’t speak. A fear slid through some of our necks — that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers — but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings.

Once, when we were working on the head and the face at ground level, I saw a suffragist from a protest march spit on the face of her as we worked. Why should a female face represent freedom when women cannot yet vote, she asked. She shook as she yelled, as her question streaked down the hard copper cheek.

I thought about that streak for a very long time.

After everyone was gone for the night, I took a rag to the copper there, crying briefly as I wiped it away. The suffragist was right. I saw her meaning. But I had been among those who’d worked to make that statue’s face, worked so that it could hold both the gravitas and the tenderness of an idea that I believed could be beautiful. In some future — not ours, but some day to come. A face that might become something we were not yet. A freedom obscured in the shackles hidden beneath her feet, rising up her body and arm all the way to the torch, the sky, the endless heavens. I had an unusual dream in the form of her face. My face had its own markings.

Our labor had a rhythm and shape and song that were larger and reached farther than our differences. Maybe the song of us helped us feel part of some whole that did and did not exist. The song of us helped to get the work done, helped our bodies not to give out or give in. The song of we the body met the air and the water around us differently from how any one person might; we the body were part of everything and nothing at the same time.

In those days, for the first time in my weary life, I had people I loved. Endora and David, John Joseph — all of us from someplace else, all of us collected by her body.

Maybe because we were building her body, we felt our own bodies differently, and that welded some of our hearts together. Me with my patchwork-skin story. Endora’s barren gut and foul, funny mouth. The opalescent mosaic of scars on David’s back. The way John Joseph always talked with his hands, as if he were reaching for some meaning beyond words. The way his words would then return to his ancestors.

Or maybe our labor made us love one another. That happens to workers sometimes, when you labor near other bodies. Maybe we were looking so hard for something in this emerging place that we turned inside out a little. I don’t know.

I only know that we built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She carried us in her.

Or we thought she did.

Some nights, after we worked together on her body, John Joseph, Endora, David, and I would drink late at night and talk about what it would have been like if the woman we built had really represented emancipation. If the broken chains had stayed aloft, in her left hand, for everyone everywhere to see.

The original story. Instead of the story that came.

And John Joseph’s hands would come alive and he’d say, You could have been president. I’d tell him, You could have been secretary of the interior, and Endora, she could have been vice president! And Endora would say, Are you kidding? I’m the president. You lot would just muck everything up. David would stare at the fire and smile. Of all of us, David believed in fantasies the least. He was the heart of us. Then we’d all pause and take a drink. We laughed our asses off. It made such sense. It fit the stories of our labor, our bodies. The stories we told ourselves were part of the stories that created the weight of her. But sense wasn’t what was coming.

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.

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.

Laisvė whispered the names of trees as she passed them. Norway maple. Green ash. Callery pear. London plane. Littleleaf linden. Honey locust. She stepped over roots protruding from what used to be sidewalks. She never — ever — stepped on any crack in concrete. What used to be apartments and businesses yawned at her with their abandoned open doors or winked through cracked-window eyes. Her neck skin tingled now and then. She knew she was breaking the rules wandering The Brook. She knew Aster would be angry. Or terrified. She’d noticed that the two feelings often came into contact in her father, and that if those two feelings made an electrical current, her father could have a seizure.

It was much easier, Laisvė had found, to study the emotions of another than try to feel them for yourself. Wherever her feelings lived in her body, she’d yet to locate them. It was one of the many things Aster put on the list of “things to work on”—feelings. Like anger. Or fear. Two emotions that led to the Hiding.

—

In memory, the Hiding had begun not long after she and Aster tried to integrate into a group of people who were trying to create a community by squatting in a bombed-out apartment building. Most of the people had children of various ages and sizes and dispositions.

The parents were worried about the impact that isolation and hiding and scarcity were having on the psyches of their spawn, as near as she could tell, so they were making an effort to collect themselves, maybe for safety and to share resources too. But they made one grand error: they wanted to socialize their children. The parents had a strange terror that the children would suffer without proper education and social engagement.

This puzzled Laisvė.

They tried to collect the children together to play. The idea was that the children would teach one another things they knew, and spend a good bit of time “just being children” too, playing, that sort of thing. Any open field or urban area not overrun entirely by thick weeds and bushes worked, but caged courtyards near apartment buildings worked best. One in particular nested near the Narrows; the parents took some comfort in the idea that a fresh breeze laden with moisture would keep the children well. But the experiment had gone badly, at least for Laisvė. Or maybe mostly for Aster. If the parents had just thought the idea through a little better, Laisvė thought, they would have realized that none of the children had any human social skills left whatsoever. Either they’d lost what skills they had, or they’d been born without them. All they had were survival instincts—animal skills.

Laisvė was thinking of bonobos. The genus Pan, the closest living relative to Homo sapiens. They shared the genus with chimpanzees, but their matriarchal order was more altruistic, empathetic, compassionate, and sensitive than chimps’. In bonobo societies, males derive their power from the status of their mothers.

That day, in the midst of the children’s play, Aster heard screaming. He ran through a crowd of kids that had gathered in a corner and found Laisvė standing alone, holding one hand in the air. The hand was bloody. At her feet was a male toddler, his body still. She killed the baby she killed the baby, they were all saying, but when he asked, How? How?, the words punching through his throat on the way up, no one could answer him. No one had seen it. All they’d seen were her outstretched arm and her bloody hand, held up above her head.

The toddler was an orphan, and he was not dead after all. But his mouth and neck were covered in blood.

No one, including Aster, thought to ask Laisvė what had happened. Nor did anyone notice the balled fist of her hand — or try to open it — or they might have found the small object she was holding. An object the toddler had found somewhere, and which two other boys had told him to put in his mouth. A rusted nail, it turned out, which the toddler had swallowed, and which Laisvė had pulled from his throat so he did not die.

No one noticed either, probably because of the male toddler so near death—My god, she nearly killed that boy—that Laisvė had seized one of the boys who’d made a joke out of trying to get a smaller boy to eat a nail, that she’d taken justice upon herself. She pushed the cruel boy away from the immediate area, out into the water. No one would notice for several hours that the boy had floated away, his internal organs already beginning to fail, how he grabbed at his gut with abdominal pain, how he shat himself and vomited for hours as he floated, until he became jaundiced and died from liver failure, like a fish gone belly-up in the waves.

After that, Laisvė had to be kept secret.

—

In their falling-to-pieces apartment building, time never budged. She understood that Aster wanted to protect her and hide her from harm, but she was starting to learn how stasis could kill a person. Look at evolution. The question was a kind of trade: Was it more dangerous to risk being out in the world, knowing that the refugee Raids were happening everywhere these days — armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets, taking people away to god knows where — or was it more dangerous to atrophy, like a stone growing moss, inside a squatter’s apartment with a father dying from grief? No one ever became anything stuck inside staring at shadows, languishing inside Plato’s cave. People could forget they had bodies at all, living that way. Being alive meant walking toward death, and she had no special fear of death. Life and death were a story familiar to her.

She’d located the penny she carried in the swollen riverway lapping around The Brook. The P she’d found in an alley between abandoned and misshapen buildings, half buried in rubble and ensnared by weeds. This falling-to-pieces city was beautiful. She had no fear on this day, except the fears her father had put into her. To Laisvė, objects were everything, because they moved backward and forward in time. Sometimes the same was true of people: the right people might be in the wrong time and thus need carrying. When that happened, she went to the Awn Shop.

The closer she got to the shop, the louder her heart beat. She knew she was supposed to be a secret of a self — staying at home while her father was at work, walking the iron to build the Sea Wall to keep the water back — but she couldn’t sit still the way he wanted her to. The beauty of abandoned subway tunnels piled with debris and grown over with thorns and ivy that didn’t need much light, the sound of moles and rats and mice dotting the ground, the decommissioned library filled with falling-apart books, the fractured windows, a roof caved in here and there — well, everything vibrated, beckoned to her, come.

What used to be the public library was now a strange word-and-sound church, filled with all manner of birds and small rodents and disheveled books. When it rained or snowed, she sometimes moved books to different rooms or floors in the library, away from the weather. Sometimes she’d see someone else in the library, but not often. If she met up with any other person, she had instructions from her father: she should give her name as Liza, then hide. Names were tricky in these times.

Her armpit itched from the big blue P she’d tucked under her arm. At the door of the Awn Shop, she closed her eyes briefly, calming her breathing to a four-count rhythm as Aster had shown her.

Inside the shop, an old, old, old man sat curled like a comma over a great glass case. His eyes sat embedded within such a deep nexus of wrinkles that his face looked to her like an aerial map, which she very much loved. His hands were even better — veins like mycelia dancing over skin and bone. She suspected that he was blind, but he never let on.

Her favorite thing about the Awn Shop: the most important objects were always in the front glass case, but the whole shop was filled with time, as if time itself were among the objects on display. Everything there was from some other epoch. There were no customers left in The Brook, that she knew of, except in the underground economy. What used to be businesses had turned to debris. The peeled paint of the Awn Shop’s exterior walls was dung green. The front window was clouded with grime and time. She had no idea how the shop endured.

Today her excitement made everything orange and yellow. Steadying her breathing, Laisvė opened the front door and entered.

“Liza,” the old comma said. “Welcome.”

She set the P carefully atop the glass counter.

He looked at her, then at the blue plastic letter. Her cheeks flushed. She scratched her armpit. She knew it was something.

After a pause — long enough for Laisvė’s eyes to focus on actual dust particles moving through the light and air between them — he opened his mouth. “This object has been missing for a long time,” he said. Then he did something strange. He bowed, as if to thank her. She’d never seen him bow before.

“Is it yours?” she asked, the pulse at her neck quickening.

“In a way, yes,” he said. “This letter belongs to a word, and the word used to be very important in my life. The word used to be my livelihood. Before the pandemics. Before collapse. Before the water. Before the Raids.” He bowed again. “Come with me,” he said, and they walked outside of the building for a bit. He pointed to the big blue plastic letters of the Awn Shop sign. “See?”

She didn’t see, but she nodded and smiled, and they went back inside. Something important had been exchanged, she knew. Adults were weird. Then, her confidence renewed, she placed the penny on the glass counter between them.

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.

But eventually she remembered her father’s fear for her, and she opened her eyes and sped up her serpentine trek. When she heard a tat-tat-tat—it could mean either machinery or trouble — she stopped, then turned away from the sound and tried to walk a different path. To distract her mind, she listed the names of worms she knew: compost worms, earth-mover worms, root-dwelling worms, whispered under her breath over and over: Eisenia fetida — tiger worm. Dendrobaena veneta — nightcrawler. Lumbricus rubellus — red wiggler. Eisenia andrei — red tiger worm. Lumbricus terrestris — earthworm, beloved of Darwin.

Another flurry of popping sounds — still some distance away, she thought. She paused and spoke aloud to no one but the dirt and the building walls reaching up on either side of her: “Darwin put the worms on his billiard table at night. He shouted at them, clapped at them, played the piano and the bassoon at them. He blew whistles at them. He decided they didn’t have ears. But when he played a C, for a moment, there was silence. They’d felt the vibrations.” She then went back to whisper walking, her eyes closed, her hand running lightly against the wall, tracing place, making for home. Didymogaster sylvaticus — extremely rare. Megascolides australis — possibly extinct.

Walking walking walking, her hand against the bumps and chunks and bricks of buildings, her mind making its patterns. The corner of a building emerged beneath her palm and the rocky dirt gave over to pavement beneath her feet. She came to the end of an alley that opened up onto a street near her apartment building. Her intention already across the street. Get back before there’s trouble.

She peeked around the corner. In one direction, about six blocks down, she saw the sounds, saw the black and gray, saw what she was supposed to run from. The sounds had a name: Raid. A Raid, like her father warned of in his terror voice, was raging just down the road. She could see the uniformed men with guns, she could see the black vans lined up, she could see the terrified or angry people pouring out of the buildings, hands on heads, men, women, children. Piled into the black vans. Screeching tires toward who knows where. She could feel her father’s fear in her shoulders.

She watched until all sound stilled. Then she looked in the other direction. No one, nothing, it seemed — just good, solid, still, soundless air — so she took a step forward. But the bottom of her red skirt shivered, then cut back across her leg — a violent whoosh of air and heat so close to her face and body that she jumped almost into the sound of it, something like a hundred rabbits landing thud-squish onto pavement as if they’d all been thrown at once, violently, from a great height.

Next to her — in fact so close it could have killed her — landed the body of a woman in an indigo flower-print dress, her head exploded into blood, her face rearranged until it was just an array of shapes, arms and legs splayed in wrong directions, the shape of her body slack and bent. Laisvė felt dizzy. She squatted down low to the ground, closing her eyes until she stopped seeing spots and her breathing felt real again. She stared at the woman. No breathing. No sound at all. Laisvė looked up to the sky, past the top of the buildings. Nothingness.

She waited for a feeling. Terror. Anger. Sorrow. But nothing came. Instead, when she stared at the dead woman in the street, she saw colors — red and blue and gray and a putrid yellow, all in waves. The colors were the word dead. She smelled piss and shit. The woman’s blood began to travel on the pavement.

Laisvė did what came most easily to her: she studied what she saw. She let her eyes wander like fingers across the terrain of the body, pausing here at the place where a shoulder made a rounded boulder, peering in toward the creases made in the indigo dress by the woman’s bulk. She let the woman’s hips and legs bathe her in their humanness; she felt the body before her lose its hold on reality and become fluid, like air or molecules or water, so that maybe their two bodies were no longer even two separate things at all. Then, aiming her focus at one hand, she counted out loud the fingers on the woman’s right hand, then began to count the fingers on the twisted left hand, nearer to her. Cupped in the woman’s left upturned palm was a small object. It was the object that made Laisvė’s imagination vibrate.

For a moment, nothing moved except Laisvė’s breathing. Her eyes fixed on the object. It was a locket on a chain, gold, dirty, old, or just scratched and faded with time. She couldn’t not reach for the object. She couldn’t not yank it free. She couldn’t not open it.

Inside, under glass, was a lock of baby-fine hair.

She was studying the object and the hair until she saw a flash of color and movement in the corner of her eye, low to the ground, something about the size of a hand, coming closer to her. A turtle — a northern box turtle. The turtle ambled up to the dead woman’s hand and stopped.

“Please, girl, can you help me back to the Narrows?”

Laisvė looked at the turtle. The turtle strained its neck up toward her.

“It’s not a rhetorical question,” the turtle groused. “What’s that thing?” The turtle turned its little head toward the mound of dead woman. Was that a furrowed brow? she wondered. Did box turtles have brows?

“A woman fell here. Next to me,” Laisvė said. “That’s her. She’s dead. She almost landed on me.”

The animal raised its voice. “Well, that’s nothing to do with me, is it? Is it anything to do with you?”

Laisvė puzzled on the question. She did feel a tug at her attention, if nothing else. The color of the print on the woman’s dress was impossible to ignore. Along with the pattern of the turtle’s shell, god, you know, the flowered fabric was mesmerizing.

“Look,” the turtle said. “I’m in need of aid. I have an injured leg. Might you return me to the Narrows Botanical Garden’s turtle sanctuary?”

Laisvė was still staring at the dead woman’s dress when she answered. “That sanctuary has been gone for years and years. It lives in another time. I read about it.”

“Right, I know. However, there is still an overgrown plot there where we are relatively safe from predators. Nothing that existed before isn’t something else now. And, anyway, it’s not the sanctuary but the old Narrows I’m trying to reach. If you are able to help me, that is. I’ve a relative in greater need than I am. I could just use a lift. Besides… there’s trouble about.”

Laisvė’s gaze drifted to the mud and yellow shapes on the dome of the turtle’s back. She could not help but admire the creature’s shell, the bright orange-yellow eyes, even the skin — the slime-green bumpy jaw and upper neck giving way to the smoother folds of the lower neck, the yellow-spotted legs, even the toenails. Well, phalanges, actually, but to her they resembled beautiful elongated toenails. She wondered at the perfect body, the plastron connected to the carapace. Briefly, she imagined herself shelled and immediately felt less exposed and anxious. Why had she been born a human girl?

Her choice was not difficult. With one hand, she snatched the locket’s chain from the dead woman’s grasp; with the other, she picked up the turtle. “I can take you to the old Narrows.” She began a brisk walk across the street toward the waterway, bypassing the Awn Shop, which made her heart beat fast enough that she could feel it in her neck. “But you have to show me which current path to take.”

“Current path?” The turtle’s little head swayed back and forth as she carried him. “What are you talking about?” Now the girl was running.

Soon they were at the lip between land and the old Narrows.

The turtle was grateful, if a bit suspicious. This girl seemed strange. He wished she would put him down. Or even just throw him into the Narrows. He could smell where he wanted to be. He was craving earthworms, wishing he’d sucked one down back at the dirt patch.

The girl stopped running at the edge of a dock, or what remained of one. He could see the surface of the Narrows.

Laisvė held the turtle up to her face, so that they were eye to eye. “I know about you box turtles,” she said. “You appeared abruptly in the fossil record, essentially in modern form.” She turned the turtle over to glimpse its belly and then back again. “In just a moment,” she said, “when we reach the water, I want very specific directions. A deal’s a deal. There’s a penny I need to carry.”

What was this girl thinking of? “What do you mean, carry?”

“You know, like carrier pigeons. Derived from rock doves. The ones with magnetoreceptive abilities.” She scratched her head. When had she become a carrier anyway? Maybe the moment they shot her mother and she watched her sink into the sea, her outstretched hand sinking into the water Laisvė’s very last glimpse of her mother. Or possibly the day her brother dissolved into a crowd on the ferry, nothing left but the words of him in her, a forever floating boy. The holes in a girl have to fill with something. Her fingers twitched. “What’s your name?” she asked.

He sighed. “Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class: Reptilia—”

But she continued for him: “Order: Testudines, suborder: Cryptodira, family: Emydidae, genus: Terrapene. Not what I asked, though. What is your name?”

The turtle studied her. He turned his head from side to side. He considered lying. Who the hell did she think she was to demand his identity? But something in her eyes compelled him. “Bertrand,” he said. “And you?” he asked, though he wasn’t necessarily interested. Still, she had a head on her shoulders, this one, underdeveloped and odd as she was. Most humans were stupid; the rest of them suffered from a melancholia that was something like an irrational addiction to nostalgia, or so it seemed to him. A decidedly human ailment. They were addicted to dead things.

“My name is Laisvė,” she said. “But please don’t mention any of this to my father. I’m supposed to stay inside every day, now that the Raids are getting closer.”

The turtle nodded. “Best get to it,” he said, nodding toward the previous trouble.

With one hand clenched around the dead woman’s locket and the other around the turtle, Laisvė jumped into the water.

Aster and the Fear of Falling

At the end of a day of labor, in the moments after the horn sounded, Aster would straddle the iron beams, locking his legs and closing his eyes, and then hold his arms out away from his body. Up at that height, the clouds and the descending sun seemed more like kin than faraway elements, and he felt held. If there was wind, it would find him, a strange pull toward the open sky, toward a kind of upward surrender, before he had to climb back down to land, to reality, to daughter.

How easy it would be. The leap.

It was a thought he could never stop.

He wished he could talk to Joseph. He missed Joseph terribly — missed him mostly in his legs. If Joseph was still there, he imagined, they’d have a talk before making their way back down to ground.

“Well, shit. It doesn’t matter to me where you’re from,” Joseph had said the second day he knew him. Aster had been told about Joseph Tekanatoken by a man from Ontario who had passed through the Yakutia territory in Siberia long ago on a geological expedition. Joseph in The Brook can get work, he said, for anyone crazy enough to walk the iron, work in the sky.

Every night that followed, Aster dreamed of a man walking on lines in the clouds. His dreams became a want in him. The want carried him like a craving, and then, like all addictions and contractions of the imagination, his want destroyed his life.

When Aster arrived in The Brook with nowhere to live, with grief larger than an ocean and a daughter whose face was blank with trauma and a baby boy who cried too much, Joseph Tekanatoken had let them sleep on the couch in his trailer. The trailer was parked on a patch of dirt far from water. All three of them came to rest there, like some strange animals braided into one another’s bodies. Joseph fed them eggs and cheese, and brought them milk. Every single day for a year.

One night the electricity went dead and the trailer was too cold for children to sleep. Joseph never said a word, but he brought in a giant thick blanket woven from wool and put it over them all like a tent. Then he surrounded them with his own body in a gesture that was as gentle as it was gigantic. (But that couldn’t be true, could it? That Joseph had been able to surround the whole of them with his body? It felt true to Aster.) The air was warm. The children slept.

It felt good to talk to Joseph, and in those days, almost nothing felt good to Aster. He tried to narrate to Joseph who he was, where he had come from, but every time he tried, the story split into too many tributaries. The one story he could replicate with any consistency was built from a tiny fragment of memory involving a woman who may have been Aster’s mother. The woman in the memory sat inside a long building with a long table. When she spoke, everyone in the room listened. If he closed his eyes, he could see her silver hair. Was the woman in the memory his mother? A mother? Or a dream he had conjured in place of a mother?

“She was probably an animal or tree soul,” Joseph said, and then they stared at each other while Aster tried to figure out if Joseph was fucking with him or not. Then came that laugh, something like car tires going over small stones in a road, and the sound of it made him wish what Joseph said was true. Whoever his mother had been, she’d been killed like an animal. Maybe the woman in his memory was just one of the women from the village who raised him; maybe she was just a woman who’d raised her voice at some shared and useless dinner. Maybe she was just a woman he’d seen in a movie or a book, someone who seemed like a mother. Maybe the woman in his memory was a ghost. Maybe she was a tree soul.

The only female in his present tense was his daughter, Laisvė, and his only job on earth was to get her safely to womanhood, to help her forward until some path — any path — appeared in front of her. It occurred to him she might have to swim open a path. Aster had never learned to swim.

When Aster started working with Joseph in The Brook, on the Sea Wall, he’d listened for hours as Joseph told him the stories of things from before. Told him about a line of men who might tell and tell and tell a story, as if it were a lifeline to something.

“You know, generations of us Mohawks have been coming down from Canada since the twenties to build the frames for buildings all over that city. Immigration tried to deport us as illegal aliens — stupid, right? They’re the foreigners. But then a court ruled that you can’t arrest and deport Mohawks, because we’re a people from a nation within two nations and treaty rights say we can move through our own tribal territories and their imaginary lines that are supposed to divide us. We have a special kind of freedom. Not that they still don’t try and make it a pain in the ass for us to go back and forth.” Joseph’s laugh emerged gravel-throated and deep from his chest, as if the sound had taken miles to grow. “Freedom of movement gave us the ability to pile ourselves up in the big city. Ain’t that some shit? We had the most skill walking iron. You know the Empire State Building?”

Aster hears Laisvė’s voice again in his head — one of her lists, her endless whispered recitals: The transcontinental railroad. The Canadian Pacific Railway. The Hell Gate Bridge. The George Washington Bridge. The Waldorf Astoria. The Empire State Building. The United Nations, Lincoln Center. The Twin Towers. The Freedom Tower. The Sea Wall.

Joseph continues. “The Twin Towers? We Mohawks topped off the Twin Towers. And we were there again for rescue and support when they fell. We knew them better than anyone. We helped carry out the dead bodies. We helped build the Freedom Tower.”

Aster sometimes said something stupid when Joseph would finish narrating, like “I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” and Joseph would say, “What this?”

“Staying alive,” Aster would respond. “That this.”

And Joseph would say, “That’s some stupid-ass shit. What kind of talk is that? You got a daughter, man.”

Sometimes Aster would stumble a little further—I have no origins, he’d say — but then he’d get lost trying to explain and Joseph would be silent for a while. Maybe night would fall. Maybe Aster’s arms would feel too heavy. And then Joseph would tell Aster how the Mohawk had always taken people into their tribes, for a hundred different reasons. War reasons. Family reasons. Love reasons. Hate reasons. Orphan reasons. Shelter and displacement reasons. Some reasons were brutal and some reasons were beautiful. But every one of those taken in were considered members of the clans and tribes into which they were adopted.

“Some are from ancestral blood and some are from migrations of the gut or heart,” Joseph would say, and then Aster would feel less like someone whose body was about to leave an orbit and spin off into space. “I barely knew my father. I mean, I knew him for a little while — about twenty years. Then he died. So what?” Joseph would clap Aster on the shoulder, then light a cigarette with one hand while driving, and take in and slowly release a drag. “But they say my grandfather John Joseph was the best iron walker ever. Worked on the statue, all that pretty copper. How’s that for pride? Tough to beat that. Shit, Aster, maybe it is in your blood, maybe not, but your body sure knows something. I’ve never seen anyone as sure-footed as you up there.”

Sure-footed. A father who could not save his wife, a father who lost his infant son. A father unsure how long he could keep his own daughter alive.

Once, Aster confided in Joseph his desire to surrender. Joseph, who had taken him in when they first arrived. Joseph, who’d taken care of him and his infant son and daughter as a father might have, or as Aster imagined a father might do. Joseph, who’d taught him how to walk.

“It’s so peaceful up here,” Aster told Joseph one evening as they straddled the beams, looking out toward the water and in toward the land.

Joseph looked up into space, then down at the ground. “Yeah, well, it’s always fucking windy, and you ain’t no goddamn bird,” he said. “You’re a father.”

Of course, his heart would lurch homeward then, the fact of his daughter would jolt his sternum, and down he’d climb, grateful for another day’s labor, grateful to be working on the one thing that might hold the water back enough to keep them alive. Only after he was on the ground did his fears creep back up his legs and hips to his gut. Keep feeding her, keep brushing her hair, keep teaching her about the world that was. Keep her hidden. Keep her alive.

—

The sun had nearly folded into the horizon. The water glowed blue and orange. The Brook’s dappled dwellings and half-submerged bridges, dripping with vegetation, red-tailed hawks, and eagle’s nests, all went to shadow.

Aster made his way from the Sea Wall site down to the ground. He unhooked his rig, pulled his coat collar up to his ears. He wondered, for a moment, whether the Sea Wall was really designed to keep water out, or perhaps to seal people in. He turned and set off on a circuitous route back to the apartment. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. A map of his daughter’s making, covered with her writing and drawings, strange lines crossing through their streets in The Brook. All of it labeled with syllables he didn’t recognize, the names of objects, Latinate terms and categories for animals. What does any of it mean? Where is my girl? A map to nowhere:

Then he cried.

I do not understand my own daughter, and I will die if I cannot keep her safe.

—

Once, Aster came across a doctor who was squatting in a warehouse a few buildings down from theirs. He met him standing around a fire in a metal can after work. The man said he had a brother who’d been taken in a Raid; he told Aster that he’d become a doctor years ago in an effort to help his brother, who was living with a brain tumor that impacted his speech and behavior. The man wept for his lost brother.

One particularly desperate night, after Laisvė had come home late carrying a knife, Aster found the doctor again and asked him to visit Laisvė. When the man arrived, he sat down across from the girl in the kitchen.

“Where do you go when Aster is at work?” he asked.

“Nowhere. I just make up the stories I tell him. I have a vivid imagination.”

“Where do you find all these objects, then?”

“Just here, in the apartment building. Things people leave behind, I guess.”

“Do you hear voices?”

“No.”

“Do you see things?”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, things that look more like a dream than the regular world. You know, irregular things.”

“No. Isn’t this world irregular enough?”

“Do you miss your mother and your brother?”

Here there was a long silence. Aster watched his daughter look at her hands, no doubt weighing something as invisible as love. “No, I have Aster.”

She seems like the rest of us out here, the doctor had said. Traumatized, all of us, and just getting on with things.

Now, heading home, Aster folded his map back up and returned it to his pocket. He rubbed his arms for warmth.

Outside their falling-apart building, he steadied himself on a tree. This bark is older than I am, he thinks; maybe this tree remembers things that can help me break through this fear. Things from the world before this one.

There were things he knew himself, things he was sure of: Once there was a wife. Once there was a son. A journey across water. All I have left now is water and daughter.

He climbed the stairs — even his breathing sounded like giving up — and opened the door to their apartment. There, instead of despair, he saw his daughter at the kitchen table with a pile of crayons. She was drawing a whale. The whale’s eye blue. Her own hair wet.

“Laisvė, why is your hair damp?” he managed to say, though the words in his mouth felt heavy. He took his coat off and hung it by the door.

“I’m just hot,” she said.

“You mean wet,” he said.

But he already knew that anger was of no use with Laisvė. Rage just shut her down for days, and so he knew he must start the story over again whenever he needed to remind her to be careful, to stay inside, to stay away from trouble.

“Tell me the story again,” his daughter, his love, his life said.

The apartment shuddered with the coming of late fall. His daughter had already started a vegetable stew — just potatoes and carrots and onions and water, really, with a handful of wild herbs she’d found breaking through the cracks in the ground. He walked to the stove, stirred the stew with a wooden spoon. He looked back over his shoulder. Laisvė turned something small over and over in her hand, a tiny secret. He knew it now: she’d left again, against his wishes, and come back with a new object. Nothing is more daughter than this: a father making dinner in place of a mother, trying to keep his terror and anger at bay; a girl keeping her secrets, taking her chances, asking for a story where a family, a home, a city should be.

“What’s that you’ve got?” he asked.

“Story,” she reminded him, holding her treasure under the table. “Tell me the story.”

“You fell out of a boat as a young child and turned into a whale,” he said.

Laisvė half smiled. Rolled her eyes. “I’m not a whale, Dad.”

You fell out of a boat and nearly drowned. More than once.

“Aster? What’s it like?”

“What’s it?”

“Your seizures. What’s it like when you have one.”

A line of pain shot from his sternum to his forehead. How wrong it is, he thinks, this world she endures. How I hate it. “It’s like being trapped at the bottom of the ocean,” he tells her. “Cold and black and alone. But my imagination keeps going.”

“Like when you dream at night?”

“Sort of, yes. And then the bottom of the ocean becomes a whale, and the whale takes me to…” He paused.

“Svajonė. Where my mother is. At the bottom of the ocean.”

“Yes.” He stared at the wall. “But seriously, one day you fell out of a boat and became a mermaid. Look at that tail!”

The girl laughed like a daughter, caught in domestic comfort. There was a big distance between the words jumped and fell. For a second, the words son and mother and daughter made him bite down his back teeth hard enough to make his temples pulse. Where has she gotten to this time? Did she steal anything? The collection of objects in her room flashed up in his mind’s eye. Coins. Feathers. Bones. Rocks and shells. The skin of a corn snake. Dead insects. Books everywhere, and pages and pages of lists. Did anyone see her? Follow her? He counted to four and breathed in, held it, counted to four breathing out to calm himself.

“Okay. Now the real story. From the beginning.”

Sometimes all a father can do is smile for his daughter and give her the story she desires. Perhaps in fairy tale form children can live with what really happened.

The walls of the kitchen pressed in on him, the cracks and splotchy paint scratching his body like old skin. The smallness and cold and mold of the entire apartment tightened. He stole a glance at the cardboard and duct tape they’d used to cover up wall holes and window cracks. He fought off the feeling that the apartment was nothing but a moldy and diseased blanket folding them up toward death.

“Once there was a star in the sky who fell in love with a fur spinner,” Aster began.

Her smile widened with satisfaction. She kept turning the object in her hand, out of sight beneath the kitchen table. “And they lived across water, in a place that used to have land bridges. And the land bridges before them carried their ancestors,” she answered.

“Who is telling the story?” he asked her, grinning.

“You are,” Laisvė said.

He continued. “Far enough back in time, yes — a land called Siberia. Though, before that land was taken over, it had other names.”

“Where is Siberia? What were the other names?”

He walked over to the tiny kitchen window, crisscrossed with duct tape covering cracks in the glass and sealing the edges. On the wall nearby, he’d hung an old map from the turn of the last century in America. He’s made this journey across the kitchen before, has told his daughter this story before — it doesn’t matter how many times. “Siberia lived inside what used to be Russia, and before that, it was the Soviet Union. Here.” He pointed to the expanse that once — before the ice melted, before nations became unstitched — was Siberia, traced it with his forefinger. Then he lifted his pointer finger and studied his own skin for a moment. His finger had a cut that never healed properly, never quite scarred over as it should have, like the land and the people.

“What were they like? Countries? Was the Soviet Union a bad place? Was Siberia? Was America?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on who is telling the story. Times change.”

“You’re telling it.”

“Nations were like forever-dancing animals. Sometimes one was the prey, sometimes the other; sometimes they both were but neither one knew it. Nations used to be forged by wars and power. And Siberia? It was a kind of enigma—”

“What’s enigma?”

“Am I telling the story?” He began again. I could not love this girl more. In fact, sometimes I think this is all I have left of love. The way I carry it in my body — it may kill me. That’s what happens when love is desperate, when it’s filled with a skin-shivering terror.

“Siberia was a place bigger than just a place. It was unknowable. That’s an enigma. People lived and died there in a way no one knows anything about. People were sent there and they just disappeared. Or they formed strange communities in the nothingness. It was a land covered in ice — until one day the ice began to give, to melt, and it revealed what had been unknowable before. That’s the afterlife of an enigma.”

Aster paused to feel the weight of the fact that their very existence — a father, a daughter — remained an enigma to him. He stirred the stew. “The earliest Siberians — some of the very first of them — they left their home to cross the great land bridge called Beringia in the glacial time, and they landed in the Americas. Before there were Americas.”

“Or they went in a boat.”

“Yes,” he conceded. “That may be too.”

“Or they swam…” Laisvė whispered, but her voice faded into the wood of the table in front of her.

“What?” Aster asked, stirring.

“And what about this place. Where we are. Is this home?”

The word home. It was there and then it drowned, which is how he thinks of everything now: language and people and his dead wife and what she knew about words. His infant son, the small warm weight of him, lost. His own heart an abyss — like some giant empty iron tank.

Who would his daughter be if he could allow her to go to school like children used to, a classroom where she might learn whatever it is they’re teaching in this place these days about things like history and geography and anthropology and the existence of countries and nations? Is there even school anymore? In a place where fathers and daughters are not? He could brush her unruly black girl-hair forever, and he would still never know how to be the father of a twelve-year-old girl, her life snared in such a liminal state — thanks to him.

The skin around his eyes tightened. He ground his teeth against the truth of it — their secret lives, years and years without proper paperwork to live legally in this place. Or any other place. All the borders in chaos, all the countries shifting underfoot. A father and a daughter nested inside a crappy apartment building. His labor and the trades they made for food and clothing and shelter — a tenuous living at best.

So he told her the story, over and over again, and soothed his guilt.

“So you fell off a boat and turned into a whale.”

“Daaad!” Laisvė moaned, cracking a smile. On the paper before her, she’d drawn a girl inside the belly of a whale.

“What? I just wanted to see if you were listening.” Nothing on earth is more beautiful than her smile. How does he not die from loving her? His head swam with terror and anger. And then a different question came into his body: How does she carry so much in so small a body without feeling it?

“Your mother, Svajonė, was studying the Yakut indigenous languages when I met her in Siberia,” Aster said. “The first moment I saw her, I actually had a seizure.” Aster held his breath. Sometimes he wished he had died right then, in that moment, inside the image of her following his fall to the ground, kneeling to put his head in her lap. “She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen in my life.”

“My mother was a linguist. And a philologist.”

“All right, all right.” Aster surrendered. “I will tell you the story of your mother. Show me what’s in your hand, and I’ll tell you.”

He walked the small distance to her and gently took her hand in his and removed the object. His face instantly hot. “Laisvė. Where did you get this?” He turned the tiny object over in his hands. An old coin, rusted and dull. It looked to be some kind of penny, but not like any penny he remembered. Pennies had been out of use for years. He barely remembered them at all. Rubbing the coin with a dish towel over the steam from the stew, he saw the date: 1793. Across the top, the word liberty. The kind of thing you might find in a museum — or a pawn shop. His ribs ached.

“Where did this come from?”

Her eyes widened, but not with fear. “Close to here.”

Aster couldn’t stop himself — his worry leapt ahead of his logic. Without conscious intent, he grabbed his daughter’s shoulders and shook her. “Laisvė, how many times do we have to have this conversation? You cannot steal things! Ever. Is this from the shop across the street?” His voice crescendoed and thinned. “Listen to me — this is serious. It’s dangerous. That man could turn us in! He is not your friend. We cannot trust anyone. Ever. There could be a Raid at any moment and we could be on their damn lists. I don’t even know where they would send us anymore. We have no identities, no home, nothing to tie us to anywhere…. I’ve told you a hundred times you cannot steal things. Not ever again. Or—” His voice fissured with terror, rising in tone and pitch until it was almost like a mother’s. In his mind, a familiar storm took shape: Have they seen her? This daughter who sometimes roams the neighborhood unsupervised, this daughter whose curiosity is as untamable as her tangled hair?

“I didn’t get it from the shop! I didn’t steal it!” Laisvė stomped over to the map on the wall and jabbed her small finger on the fading blue part, the part that was not land. “I got it here. The water.”

“What water?” Aster asked, alarm now skittering chaotically at the edge of his voice.

“The water you pretend I almost drowned in!”

If she could feel rage, could feel need, could feel anything like the rush of emotion her father battled daily, it might look like her face right now. Laisvė lunged at Aster, hugged him as hard as she knew how, her head driving into his gut. For a minute, it felt as if she were trying to press her head into the meat of him and beyond, to hollow out a womb in his body, but his stomach pushed back with the muscles of a laborer, their two bodies clenched tightly against each other.

Just as her small force was relaxing into him, everything crashed. Aster heard footsteps pounding up the apartment stairs. His heart a stiff apple in his chest. He put his forefinger against his lips so hard that it would leave a bruise. “Get down,” he whisper-yelled.

His daughter dropped to the floor, then crawled to the cupboard under the kitchen sink and climbed into the space behind the wall just as they’d practiced, as stealthy as an animal diving into a burrow.

Aster’s head swam. His arms went numb. His legs collapsed. He saw stars. He couldn’t say which happened next: the seizure that wracked his body, or the Raid breaking down the door.

The Water Girl and Her Story

Laisvė crawls hard and fast, drilling down like a worm into the bowels of the apartment building. The sounds she feels at her heels make her feet hot. Her knees scream.

This is not a story. This is a Raid.

The crawl space she navigates for the hundredth time behind the kitchen sink is made from old boards lodged between walls. Sixteen feet deep, she hits the dug-out hole in the crawlway. She turns and places one foot down a rough hole onto the rung of a ladder. Do not stop for anything. Do not even turn around to look back. If they are here, then your only choice is to go. If they have come for us, your only choice is life or not-life. This is the right time to have no feelings. She drops her whole body down into the eye of the hole. Rung under rung, she watches her own hands, imagining in her mind’s eye how many floors until she touches the ground. Her father a question mark, a tension, a vibration made of fear the color of a blood river, becoming more and more distant above her with each foothold. Will they take my father? Will I ever see him again? Will they shove him from the roof like the woman with the locket who dropped dead from the sky in the indigo flowered dress? Did they come for her in a Raid? Did they push her out of a window? Will Aster die or will he be taken? Her heart in her eyes.

To calm the rush of her own fear, Laisvė imagines her collection of coins — making head lists of things is the only way she knows to give a pattern to the racing colors in her head. She pictures her coin collection. 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 Lincoln penny.

She sees a kind of glowing copper ribbon, but then her thoughts click like marbles in bright yellow sparks, so she starts to speak out loud as she descends. The collection of pennies dissipates in her mind’s eye.

She moves on in her imagination to other objects she hasn’t been able to stop collecting, still climbing the ladder ever downward. Out loud now, she names the objects she collects, to no one but her climbing self: “Rocks from every river or ocean I have been to. Pennies. Spoons. The bones of animals. The wings of insects. Maps. Feathers from different birds. Animal and bird skulls. Hair: deer hair and dog hair, the hairs of goats, cows, horses, cats, donkeys, bear hair, fox hair, beaver hair, rat and mouse hair, the hair of a reindeer, the moss from a reindeer’s antlers, my mother’s hair, my father’s, Joseph’s knife, Aurora’s hair.”

Something besides words rising in her throat. The Raid team may take her father. The Raid team may kill her father. The Raid team may follow her. This is the right time to have no feelings.

She smells the damp reality of dirt underground pluming up toward her. She says the number of ladder rungs out loud—“twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one”—and a purple color like a helmet forms around her head. She knows the ground is near because the number 1 is purple.

Mercifully for her brain flux, Laisvė’s right foot hits solid ground. Against the mud wall, hanging from a wooden rod, is a backpack. Inside the backpack there is food and water and the address of a safe house. Laisvė reaches into the pack and pulls out a miner’s cap with a headlamp, a pair of kneepads, thick work gloves. Do not slow down for any reason. Do not stop. Do not remember anything about what your life has been, since you might have to forget it to have a life at all from this point forward.

She begins her dirt crawl. The tunnel is about a foot wider than her body on the sides and above her; she feels lucky to be a child, not an adult. She thinks briefly of Aster falling to the floor, having a seizure, and she begins to cry, but not in a way that would slow her down. The tears fall but her breathing is steady. She licks the salt of the drops when they reach her lips. They have told each other this story hundreds of times: The story is in her skin. The story says move or be captured or put on a boat and sent away to god knows where, a final fracturing forever.

The pack on her back scrapes the ceiling now and again, and each time it does, she gets a jolt of silver white in her peripheral vision. The sound of her knees and hands is blue and purple and yellow, in bursts in front of her eyes that extend as far ahead of her as she can see. The smell of the dirt floor and walls is a low vibration in her ears, a kind of constant low-noted hum. What she smells is red. A dark, almost black, red. Color in her where fear would be in some other child.

At a bend in the tunnel, its throat opens up some. She scrapes her shoulder and the side of her head near her temple on the wall trying to move too quickly. She knows that soon after this bend she will be able to stand, to run, to run like children do. She can run to the safe house that is the father-daughter plan.

Except she isn’t going to the safe house, and she knows it. Forgive me, father. She will make for the water. The Narrows.

Her crawling is frenzied now. She touches her head and her hand comes away red, but not a lot, not enough to stop her. Her knees ache and the balls of her hands ache and her heart aches, but she sees the color turquoise ahead of her, so she doesn’t stop; she thinks of all the people who have come and gone in the world; she thinks of all the journeys across history of all the people and plants and animals and water. She thinks the most about water, how water cut the shape of land everywhere on this planet, how water took her mother and hid her brother from her, how she must enter the water, how she must find people and things not now but in an otherwhere, how she cannot save her father but she must follow his wail anyway, how water is where she must go because water is without time, and yet water could still swallow them whole.

Feet first, arms at her sides, into the plunge.

Bubbles.

Then calm.

The water is the only place on the planet where her body instantly calms.

“Girl, is that you?” A small wavering voice.

Laisvė turns, her hair swarming around her like seaweed, and sees the box turtle swimming up to her face. Her urgency and fear subside; everything underwater loosens into blur and wet.

“Bertrand?”

“You seem agitated. What’s wrong?”

Laisvė fades into her own underwaterness to calm herself. “I need to be in another time.”

The turtle tilts its little head. “Tell me a story and I’ll tell you how to get to the other time.”

“I know a little about moving through time waters, but this is urgent. I’ve got to make an important trade. I’ll give you one story but that’s it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“There is a water girl who lives in the belly of a whale—”

Bertrand interrupts: “Is the girl you?”

“Who is telling the story?” Laisvė stares through water. Easier to think of herself as a girl from some oceanic fable than live in the endless fear-filled life her father has made for them.

Bertrand pulls his head in a little and treads water where he floats. “I’m listening. How’s the story go?”

“The girl loves her father. She loves him and loves him, but it is not a love she has ever heard of anywhere else, not in the world and not in any story that she knows. She loves her father like she loves history and animals and plants and fossils and, most of all, lost objects and water. She loves her father because she understands how deeply the love of a daughter can make meaning in the world, even when the meanings in the world seem to be shutting. Without daughters, fathers are dead. It’s not that any daughter can save a father, ever. All fathers are doomed, the girl knows this with her whole body. We’ve made a wrong place for fathers in the world, so they throw their lives at heroisms and braveries and wars, and winning and owning, and desire poking out of their pants in a way that is desperate, and then they die with a want inside them that is larger than a body.”

“My god, that sounds terrible,” Bertrand says. “Turtles are not like fathers. In Africa, we’re considered the smartest. In Egypt, we’re understood as part of the underworld, which makes sense to a certain extent — but then the whole concept of evil… what the hell is that all about?” He casts his eyes sidelong, then continues.

“In ancient Greece, we showed up on their money, their seals. And there’s that story about Aeschylus, the playwright — killed when a bird dropped a tortoise on his head. What a hoot. The Chinese consider us sacred — to them we represent power, tenacity, longevity. They think a tortoise helped Pangu to create the world. The Chinese used to inscribe all kinds of ancient stories on our shells. The Chippewa, the Menominee, the Huron-Wyandot, the Abenaki, Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee put us into their stories too. Look at my shell — shaped like the land, even like the dome of the universe, see it?” He twists his neck slightly, then turns back to her. “Our backs are very important in India too. In Japan, the tortoise is a safe place for immortals. In the Mohawk tradition, earthquakes are a sign that the World Turtle is flexing, turning beneath the enormous weight that she is carrying.”

Laisvė listens until the turtle finishes.

Bertrand stretches his head all the way out from his shell. “Now, what about this daughter girl?”

“What daughters can do is carry new meanings into the world. Like a beacon.” And with that, her story emerges fully:

Once there was a water girl who lived in the belly of a whale.

Her father feels like a gun. Laisvė knows that the sentence is true and untrue. She knows that her father did not harm her mother or disappear her brother, but she also knows that her father is hopelessly and forever tethered to their deaths. As fate played out, their deaths ended up bearing her into the world, giving her a life.

The last image she has of her mother lives between worlds. She sees the shore of the northeastern edge of a land of mostly snow — her father has pointed to the map on the kitchen wall a hundred times, saying, This used to be Siberia—and she sees the lip of a boat in the Bering Sea and she sees her mother’s body between the land and the boat. Her father already on the boat that will take them away to safety with her infant brother. She sees her mother stepping, as if to board the boat, and then her mother is not; her mother is shot; her mother falls into the water in the most graceful slow-motion death in the world, more beautiful than any other death; her mother’s long and languid beautiful arm reaching out to them, her too-white hand held out toward daughter or family or something of them. Her mother’s outstretched arm and hand then rising toward the sky then slowly sinking, beginning to go to water. The last image is of her arm and hand, sinking.

Then whoever was shooting at her mother — Do we ever really know who does the shooting? — was directing their fire at the people left on the boat, and the boatmen hurried to move the boat away from the shore. All the people crowded down onto the floor of the boat, which wasn’t much of a boat in the first place, some kind of used-to-be sea fishing vessel that had been repurposed for the kinds of people who might be fleeing the shore of war or poverty or punishment from boat to boat out into the vast unknown of the ocean.

Once there was a water girl who lived in the belly of a whale, but really, she rolled over onto the floor of the save-your-life boat and looked at her father’s face, her father gripping her swaddled infant brother. The two of them looked like a single organism caught in anguish. In that moment, as she watched, everything about life and love in her father drowned. For an instant, her father’s eyes looked dead, then the shooting sounds brought them back to life, as the boat created distance and wake, and when she locked eyes with her father, she understood that the rest of his life would be about his children not dying. She also understood that she was a piece of the dead and drowned mother in a way that her brother could never be.

Her daughter-body leapt up and threw her over the side of the boat; motherwater mothertongue motherheart.

Laisvė finishes the tale for the turtle: “The men in charge of the save-your-life boat could have left the girl to the waves, but they did not. One of them, who had spent most of his life as a sea fisherman, acted as quickly as lightning and netted her. For a long minute, she dragged through the teeth-cracking, skull-numbing icy waters, gulping air when she could, letting her arms and legs lose feeling so that they flopped to her sides desiring to become fins. Then she was pulled back onto the boat and wrapped in wool blankets, and some men yelled at her and other men rubbed her body and her father with her infant brother looked at her as if she were a dangerous fish, a new species he hadn’t a name for, water girl both of him and never again of him. The girl willing to throw herself into the motherwaters, to make them home. Then they were herded into the hull of the boat, crammed full of other anguished people.

“Once there was a water girl who lived in the belly of a whale. The whale was a boat that carried her father and her brother and her body, brought back to life and a different, motherless shore.”

“Ah… so the whale was a boat,” Bertrand says. “Or was it a kind of world? A holding place? The whale is a metaphor?”

“The whale was also a whale,” Laisvė says, beginning to lose her patience.

“I’ve known a number of whales,” the turtle says, turning its little head back and forth to crack its neck. “The way you want is a whale way. You want to move toward ocean. That way. The Hudson to the Atlantic, or so your people called them in the gone time. These water paths, we don’t call them anything. We don’t have to. Language isn’t so… stunted for us. Language moves more like the ocean.”

“Thank you,” Laisvė water-whispers. “Goodbye, Bertrand.”

Bertrand swims away.

Laisvė watches his little butt and legs until she can’t see them anymore. In her mouth, she holds a coin, wet with salt water.

Of Water and Limbs

A week before the Raid that separated Laisvė from Aster, she’d been searching for information about two waterways: the Lena River in Siberia and Lake Xochimilco near Mexico City.

Laisvė was trying to remember something about death and something about life that was bound not to human history but to the history of animals and water and desire. Once, between rails in the overgrown subway system, she’d found what looked like a white rose pendant carved from an animal tusk. Ivory, perhaps. She’d taken it to the Awn Shop.

“That’s not from an elephant,” the old comma-shaped man said. “This is something much older.” He adjusted his eye magnifier. “This piece is straight out of the mouth of history.”

“Mammoth?” Laisvė whispered. In the years just before the great water rise and global collapse, she knew, the tusks of ancient mammoths had been discovered rising from the mud and permafrost along the Lena River. Around the same time, axolotls, the colorful amphibians that were among Laisvė’s favorite creatures in existence, had started migrating through a network of canals from Lake Xochimilco. One of these species was extinct, and the other had come back from near extinction, and this is what interested her.

Two things fascinated her even more. One was that an underground economy had grown up around the hunting and selling of prehistoric mammoth tusks the moment they reemerged. The other was that axolotls had the ability to regenerate their own lost limbs.

In Yakutia, where people had spent lifetimes scratching out a living hunting and fishing in the surrounding forests and rivers, whole villages suddenly became rich as the blooming of mammoth tusks, known as “ice ivory,” gave rise to an ivory gold rush. The biggest demand came from China, where they harvested more than eighty tons a year. Traditional ivory carvers, their work long thwarted by a ban on the sale of elephant ivory, swarmed to get hold of the mammoth tusks. For those who partook of this new ivory trade, the tusks were an unexpected source of income; for researchers, they were a potential key to everything they’d wanted to know about mammoths and their demise. Two countervailing forces — money or knowledge; money or survival — creating torque among humans.

It was hard to say if the rush on mammoth tusks had helped or hurt the illegal killing of African elephants to harvest their ivory. But Laisvė understood that the earth had spit the mammoth tusks up as a test, to see what her species would do. Every time the earth did that — as with diamonds, as with gold — humans had a choice. She had a kind of sense-memory of seeing the tusks herself in childhood, a kind of retinal flash — a series of tiny moving images next to the image of her mother she carried in her body. The tusks reaching out of the mud seemed to be saying something, but she wasn’t sure what. They rose like ghostly question marks toward the sky.

Once, Laisvė remembered, she and her mother had happened upon a prospector knee-deep in river mud, trying to pry a tusk loose from the detritus. The tusk hunter had a large knife and a gun. Her mother was carrying her brother on her back. Hold as still as a statue, her mother told her. They hid behind a tree. The tree spoke to Laisvė when she put her hand against its bark: This is the end of an epoch, it said. The animals are returning, and they are doing it one fossil at a time. Water is rearranging.

Laisvė watched the river Lena rushing by. The river had already washed away more than one village and many people.

The history of animals and plants and water made Laisvė see all history differently, and she told her mother this even as a young child.

“What is history to you?” her mother had asked her once.

Laisvė recited her understanding of the word history, in triplets: “Explosion, cosmos, chaos. Water, land, cells. Plants, fish, animals. Indigenous humans, habitats, stories. Dreams, desire, death. Invasion, dispossession, colonization. Money, ships, slavery. God, goods and services, slaughter. War, power, genocide. Civilization, progress, destruction. Science, transportation, cities. Skyscrapers, bridges, poison.

“Nations, power, brutality. Terror, insurrection, incarceration. Collapse, raids, water.”

“I see,” her mother said. Then, to calm her daughter, her mother told her a story.

“You know the axolotl, Laisvė?” she began. “Ambystoma mexicanum, from the Nahuatl ‘walking fish.’ But it’s not a fish. The axolotl is an amphibian. It reaches adulthood without changing in any way. For that reason, it’s a model organism for scientists. Its body does things humans cannot. It can regenerate its own tail. Its legs. The tissue that makes up its eyes, its heart, its brain. Its whole nervous system.”

Axolotls even have four different breathing methods, she explained. They can breathe through their external gill branches, known as fimbria capillaries. They can breathe through their skin. They can breathe through the backs of their throats, in what is called buccal respiration. And they can breathe through their lungs — a curious adaptation, as most animals have gills in place of lungs. Axolotls can swim to the surface of the water, swallow a bubble, and then either send it to their tiny lungs or, for a little while, use it to float.

Underwater, Laisvė’s memory leaps to mother with or without her permission.

Motherwaters

The past is always in present tense when it emerges in her memory. Like a movie, the images quickening. So when she remembers the first time she went to water, when she thinks of her mother, the memory is inside a perpetual now.

The first time Laisvė leaps into the water, she is jumping in after her mother. Her mother shot dead in that moment, quick and sure, a step away from boarding a boat meant to save their lives. At the sight of it, Laisvė does not feel or think. Instead, she leaps.

Under the great weight of blue, she feels the weightless shift of her body. Back to a breathable blue past, an amniotic sea, liquid lungs. Gray green blue murky veil of water and then sight, plain as day. Laisvė turns her head and arms and body, in a kind of girl-swirl, until her feet find the bottom. She holds her hands up to her face and stares at them: empty but real. She half-pulls half-walks her way along the bottom of the ocean, feeling her way for mother.

A dark shape approaches. It grows in size, until it becomes enormous, and as it turns in front of her, Laisvė finally sees: it is a whale. For a moment, her heart feels like it might be too big for her chest. Her love of whales is bigger than a lot of things in her young life.

“Do you know where my mother is?”

The whale eye widens. “Yes, child. Behind you. Not too far. She has an important object she needs to give you. Then she must come with me. You trust me, don’t you?”

Laisvė nods. The logic of the world on land and the logic of the world underwater are different universes. Only children and animals understand. (And trees, but talking to trees is risky.)

Laisvė turns around, slow enough to prepare herself. She does not want to cry like a baby. She knows her mother is shot; she knows they are down there for a reason. When she finally sees her mother’s face, her own body dissolves into the tiniest particles, the way sand is made from everything in the ocean crushed down to tiny particles over time. She is wave and particle when her mother speaks to her, a see-through water girl.

“Laisvė,” the motherbody says. “Take this object. Put it in your hand. Hold it tight. Take it back to the world with you. It will become as you become. Keep it close to your body. This object doesn’t earn you anything. It will only have value in your hands.”

Laisvė takes the object. She puts it in her mouth; it tastes of blood or copper. She can see through the motherbody, see straight through to the fish behind. The motherbody smiles. The smile goes into Laisvė’s body, first into her feet, up her shins and knees, into her thighs and hips where the smile pools for a bit, then up her belly and chest and shoulders and neck, until the mother’s smile has become the daughter’s. Laisvė feels whole again.

“I love you,” the mother says, “my love will always be in your body.”

Laisvė considers how crying underwater isn’t anything. Or how crying underwater is just tears going back to their origins.

“Listen, my beloved,” the mother says, “this is not the last time you will enter the water in your life. Do you understand?”

Laisvė nods, and for a moment, her floating underwater hair entwines with the mother’s floating hair. Tendriling.

“This time, you were given a coin. The coin will help you to move your father. He needs it more than he has any idea. His grief is killing him, and it endangers others. There is a man named Joseph who can help, at least a little. You need to find Joseph — he is in the past, and then also in the present. The next time, you will swim to a woman — she is larger than life — and help her to save a multitude of children by moving them toward an aurora, a new dawn.

“Then, finally, you will look for your someone-like-a-brother. The boy you find may have a fever in him; he might seem as if he will kill you, but I promise you, my beautiful water girl, my seal, he will not kill you. It’s the world that pulls boys away from their possible becomings. Remember: you can’t save anyone. Not me, not your brother, not your father, not the world. You can only move objects and people and stories around in time. Rearrangements. Like rebuilding meaning from falling-apart pieces.”

Laisvė tries to run to this mother, but the mother turns entirely to water.

Then the whale returns and gently lifts Laisvė toward the surface of the sea. She hears a giant crashing sound, like a wave or the hull of a boat ramming into something, and the water bubbles around her and some force wrenches her upward — back to the surface, back to the save-a-life boat, her shivering father sobbing, her bundled-up infant brother wailing, the mother gone to water forever.

After that, she knew not to be afraid to go to water, because time slips and moves forward and backward, just as objects and stories do. She knew something new, about moving pieces around. She knew something new, about death and becoming.

Ethnography 1

My great-grandmother used to spit on the floor whenever anyone mentioned the Gold Rush. She said the Nisenan women were brutalized by Johann August Sutter — and then she’d spit on the ground twice, like the two Ts in his name. This man fled his country to avoid jail time, she said. He left his five children behind. He stole fifty thousand acres. He declared our homelands to be his property. He declared our women and children to be his property. We worked ourselves to death building and cooking and cleaning and helping to defend “his land” so that he would not kill us. He interfered with our tribal marriage customs. He took my sister and my cousin and other women to his bed. He liked to fuck women in clusters. He molested me as a girl. He molested my friends too, boys and girls alike. Those who did not want to have sex with him were considered enemies. Those who did not want to work with him were considered enemies. The Sacramento River carried our blood. We were fed leftover wheat bran from wooden troughs. No plates, no utensils. He ate on china. We slept in locked rooms with no beds. He beat us. Some of us he killed. Others he traded with local ranchers. Sold our labor like we were livestock. One year, after a measles epidemic killed most of us on Sutter’s Ranch — she’d spit again — he built a sawmill. Sutter’s Mill is where the Gold Rush started. Of course, we already knew there was gold in the rivers and hills. That’s where it lived and breathed. We didn’t know what they would do with it, with us, with the land. This man’s brutality made a chapter in our story that branched off in many directions, taking our children and ancestors with it. Then she’d stare at the floor where she’d spit, as if something might grow there. My great-grandmother lived to be one hundred years old, but her body was bent with sorrow and rage. Today, the only Nisenan who work here in the Sierra Nevada valley work at low-wage jobs. In the 1950s my father taught us how to stay quiet. He said, Never trust the government. They come and steal children. They did it to my brother. So learn to be quiet or you’ll get killed. My father made a turtle shell rattle on a deer hoof; I have it to this day. My mother made necklaces of abalone shells. My sister has expertise in watertight basket weaving, using redbud, bracken fern, willow. Still, some of the people I know are losing language… My great-grandmother told me that, when we speak or sing or dance, the trees and water and animals understand. I still know some words and songs. I work at a diner as a line cook. My daughter is a scientist. My daughter was just accepted for an internship at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She wants to be an astrophysicist. She says, Dad, gold was forged during a violent burst when two orbiting neutron stars collided. Neutron star mergers account for all of the gold in the universe. I listen to her.