Thrust: A Novel

Cruces 2

What if our labor could help our arms and legs and bodies to understand that our worth might go beyond money? What if we labored together with other bodies toward a single purpose: to build this woman’s body into the sky, so that she could show our secrets to god?

I have never felt homesick. Instead, I feel hope-sick.

Because, you see, her body had other secrets underneath the weight of her. I remember when John Joseph told us that there were Lenape Nation bodies and sacred artifacts on Bedloe and Ellis Islands. Someday, he said, people would dig there and find prehistoric objects — iron, pipes, clay pots, coins — that belonged to his Lenape ancestors. It bothered him, that we labored on top of the bones of his ancestors. Sometimes, when we weren’t working, he just stood and stared at the dirt. It bothered us too, Endora and David and I — we felt like we were desecrating a grave — but we all kept working, to build her on that land, and our labor bound us to one another. After he told us that, though, from time to time some of us whispered tiny prayers toward the dirt.

I first met John Joseph at the boardinghouse, when we both showed up at the front desk looking for a place to stay. The man in charge said he had a room that slept four people, nothing fancy, just solid shelter for laborers. I looked at John Joseph’s hair, black to the middle of his back. He looked at the discolorations on my face. This silent exchange seemed to work like language; we took the room. Endora and David joined us not long after.

Years later, John Joseph and I were both hired to work on another project, a monument to Indians to be built on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. I liked the idea; the two of us liked working together, and I thought our statue would be pleased to have a companion. The new statue was to be an American Indian warrior — similar in scale to the woman we built, but reaching even higher into the air. Any oceangoing ship on its way into the city would see the monument well before the woman we built. Thirty-two chiefs attended the ground-breaking ceremony, including Red Hawk, from the Oglala Lakota, and Two Moons, the Cheyenne chief, both of whom had fought the army at Little Bighorn and elsewhere. Two Moons had even been one of the models for the buffalo nickel.

But then the fundraising failed. Thanks to arguments among politicians and the wealthy, the project, like the chain, was dropped. By the time the world war came along, the following year, it was forgotten altogether. Even the chiefs’ names — Cetan Luta, Éše’he Ôhnéšesêstse — were remembered wrong, in the wrong language for the real story.

Stories get overwritten that way. In my home country, slavery was rewritten as discovery. When French colonials came to Saint-Domingue, they devoured the population as if we were the raw material for their own story of themselves.

Once I asked John Joseph what he thought about “discovery.”

“Be wary of travelers arriving during a storm,” he said. “The stories that come across water have teeth in them.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it stayed with me.

Sometimes, when we were drinking together at night after a day’s work, John Joseph, David, Endora, and I would talk about what might have been: if the woman we built had been allowed to represent emancipation — broken chains in her hand, the original story, her form standing on the bones of the Indigenous killed there, not as a monument to killing, but as a reminder that the birth of this place carried death with it in a way we’d need to reckon with. What if she had stood within that story, the Indian warrior her sentry and companion overlooking the Narrows? What if that had been told as the story of America? Instead of the story that came?

Endora was a former Dominican nun. We met aboard the Frisia, on the journey from Ireland. Our meeting is either a stain or a salvation in my memory, I’ve never been sure which. I was heading west because I needed work — factory work, I was hoping, in a steel mill. The steel mills were paying more than paper mills or cane fields or coal mines.

Late on the fifth night of the journey, a phenomenally drunk man was giving me grief on the lower deck. I couldn’t sleep at night, packed in so tightly among the hundreds of people and piled-up cargo, so I’d taken to venturing out after dark to stand by the railing nearest the stairs that led down to steerage. That night he came up to puke, and when he saw me, he whipped a knife from his jacket and came for me. He had me backed up to the edge of a railing, his arm swinging wildly back and forth with the blade, his head lolling with drink. I could hear the rush of water at my back. It was the middle of the night — almost morning. Dark enough not to matter to anyone. Plus, we both had among the least evident worth of any of the passengers on the ship; maybe, with his threadbare jacket and darkened teeth, he was looking for a way to feel bigger. The drunk man swiped at my arm and caught a lucky slice. Looks like we got a leper on board, he said — talking about my mottled face, my neck. Looks like you’re turning into a sea monster, best get you back where you belong. He said other words too, words I’d been called my entire life in four different countries. I don’t know where he was from, but his mouth was filled with bile, and as he sliced away at the air with the knife, closer and closer to my face, I couldn’t tell if he was looking to kill me or send me over. I lunged at his midsection, trying to knock him to the ground, but he clubbed his hand down on my back, hard, and I lost my bearings. He shouted down at me, drooling, then raised his arm for another attack. You diseased devil, he spat, his breath like rotting apples.

Just before the knife reached my head, I closed my eyes. That’s when I heard her.

“It’s got a name,” she bellowed. When I opened my eyes, I caught Endora in the moment before she smashed in his skull with a fireman’s axe. The man crumpled to the deck in a heap. “It’s called vitiligo,” she told the still mound of him at our feet.

We both stared at the dead man. Blood pooled on the deck around his head. “Help me get this louse overboard,” she said.

There was no noise at all around us in that moment, nothing but the sound of water. No lights but our faint navigation lights and the stars.

We pushed the man overboard; the splash barely registered as sound. She threw the axe over behind him. The ocean swallowed them both without comment. “Sad to see that go,” she said. “My father said he recovered it off a Dead Rabbit in that free-for-all at Five Points, years ago. I’ve kept it with me for comfort.” She looked up into the night sky. Thunder rolled up from the horizon. The air smelled of sky and sea. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, it started raining, so hard that we took shelter underneath a lifeboat.

The woman was wearing a gray nun’s habit and glasses. By her face, I made her to be in her teens, but what I remember was her physical strength — with the axe, with the business of hauling the man overboard. She reached into the arm of her frock and pulled out a flask. We drank. For a long time, we said nothing, until finally she spoke. “My name is Endora.” When she tipped the flask back, I caught a glimpse of a cross at her neck. Not on a golden necklace, but in the blue-black stain of a handmade tattoo under her jaw. I learned later that the same man who attacked me had ravaged her earlier in the trip. She saw me looking at her neck. She dropped her eyes to look at my neck, where the stains on my skin were most obvious. We stared at each other’s necks, stories forming from our two bodies. Then she reached up and removed her clothing — veil and coif and scapula, the whole habit — and threw them overboard. She stood up and removed her tunic too, hurling it into the sea; it wavered in the night wind like a flying dolphin, then dropped into the churning water.

Without the habit, Endora looked to be without gender, hair all which way. She ruffled it with a hand. She looked like a man, and not like a man.

“My name is Kem,” I said.

I don’t know if god was there or not.

—

David Chen came into our body, and our story, when the iron framework began to climb into the sky. The statue’s inner skeleton was a wrought-iron square, ninety-four feet high. David and John Joseph worked near each other on the iron rivets, the saddles and armature bars, and the double-helix metal staircase that ran straight up her middle. It looks like a vertical twisting railroad, David said. It looks like metal thatching, John Joseph said. It looks like a corset, Endora said. From the inside, the workings of her body became apparent — the webs of beams and posts and iron, not bones, that she was made from.

John Joseph said that he never saw anyone as good as David was at dangling himself between armature bars and iron. He’d rig the roping as gracefully as a dancer, tying off or untying and retying as he moved from place to place across her body. Sometimes he hung suspended from one arm with his leg wrapped around rope and his other arm just loose, his head tilted, staring at something or nothing. John Joseph said that no one was braver than his ancestors, but I believe no one was ever more beautiful in his bravery than David.

On one particularly hot day, David took off his shirt during a break in the labor and turned to look out at the harbor. He didn’t know anyone was near him, but we all saw what looked like hundreds of tiny white feathers all over his back. I opened my mouth to ask, but Endora shot me a look that shut it. Later, when I asked her about it, she said one word: “Scars.” Endora had seen all manner of bodies as a nurse during the war. I spent many nights dreaming about how David’s back might have become marked like that. As if some kind of blast had etched itself across the whole length and breadth of his back.

On some nights, David did not come back to the boardinghouse with us. When he did stay with us, he slept only fitfully. Once, just before dawn, in his sleep, I heard him whisper one word: aurora. He looked to be dreaming, like a child. It made me smile. My favorite time of the day or night happened watching David sleep.

Not all of us worked on the crown, but David did. He had read, in the papers, that the crown was modeled after the bonnet given to Roman slaves when they were freed. The seven rays, he said, were meant to symbolize the reach of freedom, across all the oceans and continents. The twenty-five windows in the crown were meant to give the illusion of light, reflecting the light like facets of a diamond.

To us, it seemed right that David worked inside the crown. Whatever had happened to his body gave him some kind of right to ascend into that space.

Frédéric and the Apple (1870)

Strewn across my desk on cream-colored parchments, my own drawings stare back at me: designs in red Conté crayon, at once regal and sublime and then mocking, like specters who materialize only to laugh at my incompetence before they dissolve into abstraction again. I cannot seem to find the form. The body. In the dim piss-yellow light of my office, my project demands a design: a sculpture like no other. A monument to the Franco-American alliance. I push the failed drawings aside until I uncover Aurora’s most recent letter. I close my eyes. I smell it. Ocean water and the faintest hint of lavender. And perhaps dirt.

Sometimes I think my relationship with my cousin Aurora is like the relationship France has with America. She has always inspired me and simultaneously challenged me. So it is fortuitous, and both exciting and frightening, that we will reconnect as a result of my work. When I open one of her letters, for a moment, I want to cross oceans of time and water to reach her. When I open her letters, I have to sit down. I smell the envelopes, eager for hints of her, of lavender and skin. My hands shake as I open the envelope.

—

My first memory of my cousin Aurora is a scene from her bedroom when we were children. She was twelve, and tall for her age. I was just ten. She stood in front of an extraordinary pair of deep-red velvet curtains.

Aurora had recently undergone surgery for a partially cleft lip. In this and other ways, her body has always carried the trace of things gone wrong in the world. Unable to eat solid foods, she’d been fed for days on nothing but milkshakes and ice cream and porridge, which made me painfully jealous, even though she shared what she had.

On this particular day, she led me into her bedroom and pulled an apple from a pocket of her dress, a look of great seriousness in her eyes. I was mesmerized. When she held the apple up between us, her lips stitched and swollen and red, she said, “Don’t move a muscle, don’t tell anyone, or I will forget you ever existed.” Her words were almost swallowed up by her wounded mouth. “Hold as still as a statue,” she said. I did.

In that moment, I believed her more than I had ever believed anything in my entire short life. She was the only person in the world who gave me attention, the only person who did not find me odd or anemic or too preoccupied with things no one else cared about.

She stepped toward me, till she was only an apple’s distance away. I stared at her eyes as hard as I knew how. I could smell her skin. Lavender soap and the sweat of a girl and blood on her lips. The smell of the apple. The smell of a boy who has no idea what will happen next, a feeling I would long for the rest of my life.

She plunged her teeth into the apple, enough to hold it in her mouth without using her hands. Her stitches stretched and she bloodied her own lips further.

Then she waited for me to do what she had instructed me to do. My body felt like one human tremor. But there was nothing I would not do for Aurora — then or now, for the rest of my life — so I took my dumb little fist and pulled my dumb little arm back and socked the apple out of Aurora’s mouth.

Her head snapped to one side. She made not a sound.

Blood everywhere.

Stitches unsutured.

Mouth unholy in its wound.

She turned to face me. She smiled. Monstrous in her beauty. The laugh that came from that ragged hole of her clattered my little spine.

I was scared — but I was also drawn to her. So I smiled too.

Then she started to peel off her bloodied dress, right in front of me. For a moment, all I could see was her white slip and the form of her, a tiny drop of blood having made it to the crest of her breasts, then just beginning.

For the rest of my life, that image of Aurora would become my understanding of things. And I knew that moment would shape my life’s devotion to her.

My life, and possibly hers, were shaped in that childhood room.

—

Much later, when Aurora lost her leg in the war, my devotion took material form. I could not bear the weight of her lost leg. In my nightmares I watched her try to walk and fall, try to stand and fall, try to move at all and fall again, like a statue collapsing but infinitely worse.

So I set about to design and build her a new leg.

First, I studied the history. And there was history — which surprised me.

In ancient Egypt, the wholeness of the human form was important in the afterlife as well as the living realm. Some of these objects have survived to be rediscovered in our time. The Greville Chester Great Toe was made from linen, glue, and plaster.

The horse-hoofed prosthetic leg was popular in China.

The Middle Ages were filled with peg legs and iron legs.

Tezcatlipoca, the ancient Aztec god of creation, lost his foot in a battle with the Earth Monster. He is often depicted with an obsidian mirror where his flesh foot used to live.

In the mid-to-late 1500s, Ambroise Paré invented the modern prosthetic leg. He is also considered to be the father of modern surgery. He was a barber, a surgeon, and an anatomist for four different French kings. In addition to improving amputation techniques, and thus survival rates, he developed functional limbs for all parts of the body. The adjustable harness and hinge knee, with lock control, are still used today.

In the United States, the demand for prosthetic legs burgeoned during and after the Civil War. James Edward Hanger, a Confederate engineer — and, it is said, the first amputee of the Civil War — designed and patented a prosthetic leg while he was convalescing, a device known as the Hanger Limb. Hanger and other prosthetic pioneers, including the Salem Leg Company of Massachusetts, marketed a range of devices, extolling their comfort, strength, durability, convenience, and elegance. Their products were notable for the use of sockets and sheet metal and steel, enhancing their steadiness, smoothness, and silence; they were often lined with leather dyed to resemble flesh, and often included hair.

It would be no exaggeration to say that I became obsessed with the design and construction of Aurora’s leg.

I began by studying the basic form of the Salem Leg, designed in 1862. I admired especially the joints and the smooth lines of the foot. For Aurora, however, the leg had to have something quite different: it must be beautiful. Beautiful enough to be its own objet, an artwork worthy of museum display. I used rosewood, a favorite of ours—A wood with blood in it, she joked. After devising the basic construction of my own version — its own formidable task — I set about hand-carving the wooden frame, adorning it with roses and vines and gold inlay. I hand-painted bloodred toenails as well. And, after weeks of labor, when I was finally satisfied that it was worthy of her gaze, I bundled and wrapped this precious object and sent it over the ocean to her.

Of course, I never saw her reaction when she opened the package. And she never spoke of it, except in one brief letter she sent by return:

—

With my first monument commission, I bought Aurora a boardinghouse.

I devoted my life to creating larger-than-life statues.

There are times when I think they are all for her.

Aurora’s Children (1885)

To Whom It May Concern:

Before I begin, two items of note. First: should you someday find me gone, please use the following as a mortality document: “Aurora Boréales, successful businesswoman, aged forty-three, mysteriously disappeared from her residence on the tenth of May while she was meant to be delivering canned goods to the less fortunate. A week ago, her body was found in the Narrows. The face was terribly mutilated, and the body indicated that a fearful outrage had been committed on her person. No clue of the circumstances of her death has yet been discovered.” You’ll know how to place the story.

A juicy murder mystery. I’d like that.

The second item of note. What I intend here to write is my anti-obituary. That is, I intend to write myself back to life. Let these letters, between myself and my cousin the genius sculptor, draw me back to life.

Should I disappear, watch out for an unexpected object. A gift.

And now the story.

—

They came to me first because of my leg. I think children were enchanted by the idea of a woman who existed in pieces. An adult like a doll, with a removable part!

The first child who came to me approached as I stepped into an alley to adjust a strap on my leg. The street clattered with the syncopated clop and rattle of hooves and carriage wheels, and as I turned back around, I was confronted with a mess of a boy, standing so near me I thought sure he meant to rob me. Not that he could have, mind you, but I thought he might try.

The alley smelled of piss, the boy not much better. He had the face of a creature unused to bathing. Instead of attempting to snatch my pocketbook, however, he watched me lower the curtain of my dress back over my knee, down below my shin to my ornamental shoe. His eye traced the path with an intensity that interested me. Under his gaze, I could almost feel a foot where none existed.

“Please, ma’am, may I see it again?”

I took a closer look at him, and that’s when I saw it: he was missing an arm. My cheeks flushed from the idiocy of my earlier thought. There hung a little lump of flesh, the right arm of his dingy shirt short enough for me to see it. His right side announcing an absence where an arm should be.

The look in his pale-blue eyes and his night-dark scruff of hair suggested that he was not originally from the city. “Where have you come from?”

“Ireland,” he said.

“By the belly of a steamer, I’d wager. Packed in with the cargo?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His eyes returned to my leg. “May I see it? Please?”

He removed his hat, or what passed for one, to further his plea.

Slowly — and I do know how to perform a task with seductive patience — I began to raise my skirt. His eyes moved me. His eyes reminded me of my beloved cousin Frédéric’s. The only gaze that has ever truly moved me, even when we were children.

Is it wrong to say that his stare meant everything to me? The way he gave my body his full attention as I pulled my skirt up over my prosthetic; the way I felt a leg, a foot, captured inside his stare? The way I imagined his absent arm and hand lifting my skirt to reveal my absent leg and foot?

Despite the new labor laws, child workers were everywhere. I’d see them emerging from factories and mills at all hours, day and night. Children were of high value to industry — and there were so many of them. The manufacturers knew they needn’t pay them anywhere near as much as adults. In fact, adults often sold their children’s labor to the factories and mills. Even today, my reformer friends tell me, the changes they seek are vehemently opposed by parents, industry — even by children who live in their own care, and who remain steadily in need of employment and food. As sentiment hardened against the work mills and factories, a desperate backlash evolved; owners began to speed up the machines and overpack the rooms laborers worked in, you see. The children were of even higher value now, due to the smallness of their hands, but often the children were unable to keep up with the whir and bite of the machines, and the runaway technology tore through their body parts.

What is the worth of a child in this era of industrial multiplication? It’s a question I think about often, as a childless woman with a womb so barren that if one were to peek between my legs you might find yourself looking up a long vacant tunnel straight to my brains. Every day that I walk my own city streets, I see plainly that the machines and their product are valued infinitely more than the battered, dirty, often maimed, always hungry children I see departing their shifts, day and night — like small ghosts, really. Their mechanization as valuable workers erases them as humans. They become the same as the commodities being produced — no, maybe less, the same as the raw materials used to make the products. The child body at the cannery is worth less than the tin can she stamps.

Once a child, who looked to be missing half her face, noticed my lingering glance and held my gaze long enough to explain: she suffered from phossy jaw. I had no idea what she meant. I put my hand to her face, and she continued — with difficulty; her speech had been impacted — that her facial disfigurement was the product of her work in a matchstick factory, where she applied the yellow phosphorus that makes matchstick heads easier to light. Her fellow workers had mouth abscesses, she said. Some suffered facial disfigurements, others brain damage.

“Come see me at night,” she told me. “Me gums glow greenish in the dark.”

A migrant child, then. Fresh immigrants, around the age of eight, were considered the ideal workforce. Just the right size, the right level of desperate. New faces arriving weekly, in infinite supply, infinitely replaceable.

Some industries had special needs. Coal-mining companies employed children as young as five — small bodies still able to slip through tiny tunnels and fissures where men could not. Girls and boys were strapped to coal sledges, crawling on hands and knees. Textile factories packed women and children in together like colorful bobbins in a box, always with the windows and doors locked. The smallest of children were forced to crawl under blazing machines to collect fallen production materials.

When — or should I say if? — these children made it to adulthood, they arrived malformed. Hunched backs and bowed legs, crushed pelvises. Forever damaged vision. Loss of hearing.

Lost limbs.

Many machines sucked in a girl’s hair. Some tore off pieces of scalp.

Countless hands were lost. Arms, even faces, mangled. The sunk cost of mechanizing America, creating the fiction of freedom, included the slashing of woman and child bodies. The disconnected pieces fell to the ground, reaching for one another across brutalities and absence, until the wet gutters carried them away.

At a granite mill, twenty young girls, some as young as five, were killed in a fire. Burned alive. Suffocated. Killed while trying to leap to safety. Papers called for reform: Not a reduction in child labor, but an increase in fire-safety measures. The workplace must be made safer for children.

How in the world will we ever become whole from this?

I designed a different solution.

“Come with me,” I told the boy transfixed by my missing leg, the boy with one arm. And I led him through the corridors of my infamous establishment, past unparted curtains, to the largest room in the building — Room 8, a former theater space of some kind — where I lead the children I can. Here, safely behind a wall and sturdy door, beyond reach of the all-consuming bulge of monied men in my city, is the room where I conspire to bring children of every nationality and age and size to be educated, to be drawn away from industry toward intellect, toward economic autonomy.

In a thriving city, children make such plump targets. As much for capitalists as for kidnappers, slavers, and sociopaths.

If my city wants these children, it will have to come and get them.

Aurora’s Eye

The makeshift school behind the door of Room 8 in my building had desks made from the finest cherrywood to be found in the city. The chairs were equally exquisite, with velvet cushions and backs so that each small body might feel held in a way that had eluded them in life. Prosthetics were abundant throughout the room — some of the newest inventions, their works clicking surely into position, some even humming mechanically. All of it the bequest of a former client upon his death: his work impeccable, my secret safe.

People give up on children all the time. They hurt them, abuse them, abduct them, extract their labor to the point of exhaustion, then throw them out like trash. One weekend in 1874, a Philadelphia dry-goods purveyor named Christian Ross looked up to see his five-year-old son, Walter, approaching him with an object in his hand.

“Open your hand, my boy. What have you got there?” he asked in a fatherly way.

The boy opened his hand. The object held in the cup of his small pink skin was a candy. The father asked the boy where the candy had come from.

“From a man in a wagon,” the boy explained. “He gave one to Charley too.” Charley was the boy’s four-year-old brother.

Three days later, while washing dishes, a local woman looked through her kitchen window and saw a wagon pull up to the curb near the home. The driver and another man talked to the two boys; then the wagon drove away with the boys.

On his way to the police station, filled with terror, the father saw his son Walter coming back to him, in the company of a man who had found him lost and crying. The story his son told him cracked his heart. The man they’d met earlier in the week, the man who had given Walter and his brother candy, had drawn up to them in a wagon with another man. They asked the boys if they wanted to buy fireworks for the upcoming Fourth of July. What boy could say no to fireworks? The boys went with the men. Charley sat between the men and Walter sat on the second man’s knee. When they arrived at a cigar store, the men gave Walter twenty-five cents to go inside and purchase firecrackers.

When Walter came out of the cigar store, the wagon — with the men, with his brother — was gone.

The abduction became a sensation, of course. But what made its infamy linger was that the kidnapping of Charley Ross was the first recorded case in which a ransom was demanded. The four-year-old boy was never found. Two years later, the father wrote a book about the disappearance of his son. Soon, however, it was all forgotten.

So, you see, I do not believe that anyone is searching for these children in my care. My goal, in gathering them together, was to give them a chance to exist without violence or fear.

You may wonder about teachers.

You will question my judgment.

But I was certain of my methods.

In Room 8, the children were the teachers. Each was tasked with gathering a piece of information, of truth, and sharing it with the rest. I was present at times, but not often.

You see, their hunger to be full people in the world drives children to gather knowledge voraciously, to study, to share what they’ve found. What I could grant them was to see that they were fed and clothed and cared for in a beautiful house, where a child was free and safe to be a child. In place of a maternal embrace, I gave them the space to exist as full humans. Also: Books. Maps. Information. Drawings. Photographs. Paper and pencils and drawing pads and paints and canvas. All manner of small machines, including candy-making machinery — to study the mechanics. The new invention of sound reproduction — Mr. Edison’s phonograph, Mr. Bell’s graphophone — will soon give children the chance to capture their own voice. I wanted to give them the chance to invent their own world.

For years, the Raids had constantly replenished the workforce, a sinister kind of labor trafficking machine. Nightly roundups, perpetrated by unscrupulous men with clubs and ropes and nets. At first, they trained their sights on black children and Native American children and Asian and Mexican children, who rarely received pay, since their debt tethered them to their owners. Then, as demand increased, they expanded their reach to all children, to the endless supply that arrived in the city from the farmlands, from overseas, from anywhere. Debt bondage was common. The men who worked the Raid force may well have been victims of debt bondage themselves, or criminals seeking something besides a life behind bars or the poorhouse. Some, of course, were simply evil.

In place of a mother’s love, I felt an embodied responsibility to reflect their exquisite worth back to them from the inside out. A girl known as Ruby wrote with her left hand, since her right hand was missing two fingers. An eight-year-old called Cammy, long employed picking cranberries in a New England bog, had fingers curled like those of an old woman with arthritis. The boys who had been cutters in canning companies had the faces of shrunken old men and hands that had been hacked to pieces. A boy named Hiram, who’d been paid five cents a box to pack sardine cans, though he could manage only four boxes a day, could no longer extend his fingers from their bent positions without pain. Before being sent to the cannery, he’d worked full nights at a spinning factory; he was so young and small that he had to clamber up the sides of the spinning frames to work the threads and bobbins, and he’d lost most of one foot in the process. A girl of nine named Mary had a scar running all the way down her cheek, ending at her collarbone. When a man tried to rape her, she’d used the considerable blade of a sardine knife to stab him at the jugular. Before he died, he got off one slice that disfigured her face forever. One seven-year-old boy’s wrong move at a glassworks left him with no hands at all.

What I gave them was witness: You exist. You are not nothing. Take your life back.

—

One day, in the midst of a history lesson — and when I say “history,” I mean showing the children of Room 8 the paths of global commerce and migration and immigration overlaid on the paths and lives of the original inhabitants, the national and local trade routes, the pirating routes, not to mention the laws surrounding individuals and their bodies and movements, the arc of geologic time, and the myths and stories people have created to track and remember themselves — the girl named Ruby, an eight-year-old former oyster shucker, was asking me, Please wait, I can’t keep up, when a noise cracked through the air, so loud that it shook all the desks and even my own vertebrae. A great flash of light, then another, larger explosion. The window glass quivering, the floor briefly buckling, my jaw clacking so hard that I drew coppery blood from my own tongue. The children held on to the sides of their desks. More than one crawled underneath.

When the shock passed, we all ran to the windows and looked out toward the water. With our faces pressed against the glass, we must have looked like immigrants lining the hull of a ship.

Just three buildings away from us blazed a furious fire.

Twenty women, mostly girls under the age of fifteen, perished that day when they could not get out. The doors and windows had been locked.

I took in the deepest breath of my life, held it, thought about shirts and collars and corsets; odd, the images that come into the mind during a crisis.

Aurora and the Want of a Child

To anyone who inquires earnestly, I explain that my business involves bodies.

Beyond the separate undertaking that fills Room 8, I rent rooms. The rooms I let are not residential. I have… rearranged the aims of the building my beloved cousin purchased for me. My clientele are men and women of means, and I curate my rooms based on their wants. In return, along with the customary consideration, they never cease to provide me with good stories — as if they were all characters, I sometimes muse, in a novel or stage play.

Sometimes their occupancy makes the walls vibrate.

For example, some years back, a man walked into my building, introducing himself as the owner of a very successful preserve manufactory, a company that produced canned tomatoes, jellies, fruits, vegetables, meats, and soups. At the time, I gave little thought to his tiny empire; it was enough for me that he seemed able to pay his bills with us. He was a frequent visitor, which meant he did not lack an imagination, and in time, I came to admire him.

During the war that took my leg, many of us had been saved from starving by eating food from cans, and during the intervening years, I had amassed a small collection of these “survival soups,” as I liked to call them. More than once in my life I had to rely on the survival soups, to help others or even myself survive. But I always restocked them when times improved. I became fond of their presence. They were an antidote against fear, and a reminder that scarcity and wealth are no distance from each other. Once the preserve canner became a client, I hired a local finish carpenter to design a special blue cabinet, with sixty little square caves only slightly bigger than the cans, and displayed it in a place of honor in my business quarters. The cabinet of gleaming and colorful cans was a frequent topic of curiosity and conversation with other clients.

This factory owner was kind, at least in my company. He only ever wanted to be ever so gently spanked, and the only remarkable aspect of that desire was his stamina; he could take that light touch for several hours — far longer than any other client. He liked to sustain the quality of a treasured thing over long periods of time. Like a tomato or peach hidden inside a tin can, its surprising hue and ripe bulge glistening from within the moment you sawed through the edges of the silvery-blue metal. And he liked to keep one hand clenched around my artificial leg, as if his life depended on it. That leg holds a thousand of his tender kisses.

Once, as he was dressing after his session, I walked over to the cabinet, pulled a tin of pears from its blue cave, and opened it with a can opener. Lifting the lid, I held the can out toward his mouth. He dipped his fingers into the thick sugary pear muck, pulled out a pear, and ate it, his eyes never leaving mine, except when he closed them to experience his brief autoerotic pleasure more fully.

You may know that the French inventors of the tin can failed to invent an opener for their container, and for years, the cans could only be opened in a brutal manner — with a hammer and chisel, a rock, or a bayonet. Equally interesting to me is the fact that the first canned food was invented for seamen who were inefficiently fed disgusting meals, by all reports, of meat and fish stored in barrels of brine. Everything tasted of salt. (Too much salt on the ocean? Well, that’s the thinking of men for you.)

My favorite can story involves the lost expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin. In 1845, Franklin, an officer of the British Royal Navy, departed on two ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus on an expedition to cross the last unnavigated territory of the Northwest Passage. When the two ships became icebound near the Victoria Strait, however, the mission collapsed and all 129 men were lost.

Three years later, Franklin’s wife helped launch a search, which became the first of many. In 1850, relics from the expedition were found near the coast of Beechey Island, in the northern Canadian archipelago. Further relics and stories of the Franklin party were collected from local Inuit communities.

It’s here that the story fades — except for what I gathered from another girl who approached me one day, a strange girl who claimed to be from the future. In the year 1981, she said, a team of scientists from Canada studied the bodies, graves, and relics collected from the ships and concluded that the crew likely died from tuberculosis, pneumonia, starvation, and lead poisoning caused by badly soldered cans on board.

You heard right. A visitor from the future.

She went on and on when I first met her, this girl, like she couldn’t stop: the history of the tin can, its invention and manufacture, its evolution. She told me all about the original inventors of canned food. Some Parisian fellow, named Halpern or Appern or Appert, who worked out a way to seal prepared food in glass bottles with cork stoppers, then boiled the bottles in water. An Englishman who developed tinplate cans with soldered lids instead of glass containers — good for sailors, she said, since salted meats hastened the onset of scurvy. In her time, this girl claimed — a time unimaginably far away — canned food had once again become as sought-after as it had been useful at sea with Napoleon or on land in the Civil War. With visceral joy, she told me about a can of tomatoes she’d eaten, in her world, that very morning.

Poor girl, I thought. It’s a good story, though, isn’t it?

I’d never met a girl like her before.

Though, as I mentioned, children always found me.

When I first met her, I was carrying a bag of soup cans over to Laborers’ Row. The night I met her, she was standing across the street from my building. Her hair hung black and wet. She stood across the street, her dress wet, her right arm held straight up in the air. She had an object in her hand, but I could not see what it was. We both held our ground. We held each other’s gaze. Finally, I said, “Well, then?” And she lowered her arm back down like it was a regular arm and came toward me.

I don’t know how to explain what I felt in my body as she walked toward me. Like a hard pang in my abdomen.

What is inside the abdomen of the aging and childless woman? Is it a hollowed-out nothing? Is it something? Is it a hole as if each woman were suddenly excavated through and through, like a statue of our former selves, not the object of anyone’s desire any longer, but an object with questionable use-value?

When she reached me, her brow made the V of a child reaching for seriousness. “I have something very important to trade,” she said. “I mean, in… the underground economy.”

I held in a chuckle. What a creature, to come out with such a thing. The underground economy? “But do you have a name?” I asked. She looked to be somewhere between ten and twelve years of age. Her hair cascaded past her shoulders in black turbulent waves that seemed to argue with one another all the way down her back. Her faded red dress was cut high on her legs, revealing knees that were scuffed and brown with mud and, perhaps, dried blood. She had no coat, no hat, no gloves, just her girlhood and the object in her closed hand.

She did not answer my question with any name.

“I see,” I said. “Well, then, what’s this about something to trade? Are you a thief?” I crossed my arms over my chest to signal that I expected some kind of answer.

“I’m not a thief.” She frowned. “I’m a carrier.”

Even more intriguing. Where do you come from, then?”

“Across time,” she said, looking at me directly. “That’s how I got here. I crossed through time.”

“So you’re a… carrier, and you cross time.”

She nodded.

My night was improving by the minute. “Do time-crossing carriers need to eat or sleep, like regular children? Would you like to step inside and dry off?”

She ignored my questions. “Is this 10 Reverie Road?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“In the water, my mother told me to come to 10 Reverie Road. Here I am.”

What a strange little creature.

“Either that or I’ve drowned, I guess. Either way, I’m here.” Then she held out her hand and opened it, and even under the dim light of the streetlamp, I could see what she held: a locket. “You have an object inside the Room of Reliquaries. I’d like to make a trade.”

That piqued my interest. How did she know about my rooms?

“All right, then,” I said, still thinking. At the very least, I could give her a meal, a bath, maybe some rest. Whether she could join us in our own underground economy — Room 8—I was not yet ready to decide. Her limbs were all intact. As to her wits, I was far less certain.

The girl looked up at my building. She seemed to be counting stories. Then she looked down at the river gurgling in wavelets against the foundation. Then she stared at me so hard, I thought she might bore right through my skull.

“There’s going to be a Raid tonight,” she said. “Later. Someone has revealed your secret and you are all in danger. They’ll take them. They’ll make them child workers. Or worse.”

“Who do you mean?” My throat tightened.

“The children. The whole of them. We don’t have a lot of time.”

An uneasiness spread like a fever in my body, hot and cold at once. My eye twitched. In eight years, we’d never been raided. No one had any idea there was a functioning school for orphaned children behind the door of Room 8. Not even my beloved cousin Frédéric.

“Come inside.” I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it.

On the way into the building, the girl asked me if I had seen any lighthouses in the area. The cans were suddenly nothing to her, compared to lighthouses.

“You know, the lighthouse on Turtle Hill is frozen over just now,” I ventured, which had the peculiar and fascinating effect of detouring and focusing her speech.

“Yes, the light on Turtle Hill! It lives at the end of the long island in your time. I’ve read about this. The very first public works project when the nation was in its infancy. The fourth oldest standing,” she said, as we climbed the first flight of stairs toward the Room of Reliquaries. “The light can be seen for approximately seventeen nautical miles. Designed by Ezra L’Hommedieu. L’Hommedieu means ‘the man of god,’ or just ‘man-god.’ My mother was a linguist. Lighthouses are beacons, you know.”

The girl turned off her monologue, as abruptly as she’d begun it, and looked at me with fiery eyes.

I don’t know why I was so compelled by her stare. Except that sometimes the want of a child is bigger than everything you think you know; their eyes can arrest you midlife and throw your entire purpose into the wind like seeds.

I unlocked the door to the Room of Reliquaries and watched her eyes scan the room; for a moment, I felt I could imagine her traveling through space and time. What she was looking at: hundreds of glass containers of beautiful shapes and sizes, each containing an object someone before her had found astonishing. As she looked around the room, I thought she stopped breathing. Here and there: small octopuses or giant beetles preserved in formaldehyde and water. Whole walls decorated with wet specimens. All varieties of worm, which she took a particular interest in. Feathers and bones and jaws, the organs of fish and fowl, eyes and hearts and lungs from countless creatures, minerals and claws, the wings of bats or birds.

What arrested her, though, was the thing she came for: a bluish-purple umbilical cord — an oddity to be sure — spiraling gracefully inside its fluted glass container.

She opened wide her palm, inside of which was a locket. Without taking her eyes off the pearled knot of the umbilical cord, she opened the locket to show me what was inside: a lock of hair. She meant to make her trade.

“Whose hair is that?” I had become mesmerized, not by the macrocosm of the room but by the miniature world of her hand and its object. Of course, the thought that seized me — before logic could challenge its absurdity — was that it was a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, the locket the very one I had proposed an elaborate fantasy to steal. But the girl cut into my fantasy like a thief.

“Your son’s,” she replied.

A sound came out of me, something like a laugh, but incredulous: a puff of voice and air. “But I can assure you, I have no son,” I said flatly, an odd weight on my chest.

“You will,” she said, leaving a cleft of silence between us. “With Lilly. You will be whole. In a different time.”

I had no earthly idea what she meant by that, but I took the locket from her hand to examine it more closely anyway.

“Liza,” she said. “My name is Liza.”

Ethnography 2

Most of us came from Guangdong Province. The poverty in Taishan and Xinhui devastated entire families, whole villages. Starvation and disease in waves. Famine. The civil unrest threaded like an electrical current into villages and crops and families and bodies. We were dying. The people in adjacent villages, neighbors for generations, developed new animosities, sudden distrust. When we got on boats to California, or found work cutting sugar-cane in Cuba or mining guano in Peru, we were saving our own lives. When you watch mothers without enough milk in their bodies to feed their own babies, when you see children of your own or your brother’s or your neighbors’ with arms so thin that they seem as if they might snap, when your sisters and brothers and husbands and wives and parents die in front of you wearing more bone than flesh, you’ll get on a boat — any boat — that holds out the possibility of saving them.

Some of us started on the West Coast and worked all the way out to the East Coast. We were paid twenty-five dollars a day for a six-day workweek. And a meager increase if you agreed to work the tunnels. All our work was done by hand. We opened earth and we cracked rock and we laid track. We cleared roads by moving mud and rocks and dirt and snow. We forged iron. And when something needed to be blown up, we handled the explosives. The best money went to those of us willing to be lowered on ropes to plant explosives in tunnels or into the sides of rock walls, holding on to hope — Was it hope? Was it something else? — that we’d be lifted back up before the blast. When we drilled those holes into the mountains, into the gullet of a canyon — when we dangled from precipices in baskets — I don’t know why we ever believed we would not explode along with those rock walls.

Maybe, sometimes, death isn’t death anymore. We learned the difference between being no one in Guangdong and being the raw work force in a country building everything in sight toward the end of creating money. We saw those white workers — mostly Irish — and the money they made: nearly double our take. We saw the money the Chinese accountants made. We saw the money the railroad owners made. We laid their tracks. We created transcontinental trade. But we created no profit of our own.

Still, the story of money got inside us.