Thrust: A Novel

Cruces 3

She slept in pieces.

Before we assembled her, she slept in 350 different pieces of body packed in 214 crates. We thought about those pieces a lot as she slept on the water; we dreamed of her body pieces and felt our own limbs differently.

When she finally arrived, in the belly of a boat, each piece of her was given a number. The pieces were lined up according to the creator’s numerical system, where the pieces needed to fit together. Each piece had rows of holes that needed to be fitted — riveted.

All of this got me thinking. Bodies in the belly of a boat. Packed together like freight or animals, assigned a numerical value.

Once, at a pub back on the city side of the water, Endora cornered me to talk about how I had been sleeping. “You make moaning noises,” she said. “And sometimes you say words… or what I think are words. Do you suffer when you sleep? Does it stay with you when you wake?”

I don’t know how to talk about what it means to be haunted by other bodies, by family stories, by ancestral sorrow. By other experiences from the past. Maybe all of us carry the voices and bodies of everyone who has come before since the dawn of time. Maybe some of us carry them differently. The story of all those bodies my one body carries did not begin, nor will it end, in the belly of a boat meant to make meat of me. I won’t let it. But the weight of the suffering threads through me and beyond.

My body carries crisscrossing narratives from the past, the present, and whatever uncertain future we will face. One such story was that of Henry Moss, a man of African descent who was born in America. Moss made a show of his depigmentation, the story goes; he made a living from it. People were said to be mesmerized by his skin. There are other such stories, of men and women who were used as entertainment for freak shows and circuses: an enigma of black and white confounding the audience after the brutality and bloodshed of the war. Who would we become? Maybe the drunk man on the Frisia meant to make meat of me. Another story concerned a white man who took pity on a child originally from Saint Vincent, a child with vitiligo. The white man loved the orphan boy, the story said, and gave him a home. When the boy died young, the man was so distraught that he buried the boy in a plot he’d secured for himself, having no other children. When the man died, he was entombed with this boy. I don’t know if that was love or something else.

“I do not suffer when I sleep,” I told Endora. “I think the suffering of others finds some of us in our sleep. I think”—and now I wasn’t sure I would make any kind of sense to her—“it moves through us.”

“That seems true,” Endora said. Then she clenched her own belly and grimaced.

“Are you feeling ill?” I asked.

“No. I’m remembering something I used to carry in my body that was taken from me.”

John Joseph looked at me. David stared at her belly. We knew enough not to say a single thing out loud. Later Endora confided in me: she’d given birth to a baby out of wedlock. The baby had been taken from her. And that baby was buried in the ground behind a church. Our own bellies felt different after that.

Maybe that’s why none of us was all that surprised at the sight of a girl coming up out of the water, her arm raised and reaching. We’d lost a lot between us: Families. Languages. Identities. Heart. Finding something, there amid the vast unknown, made us feel worth something.

“Do you ever feel like going back home?” I once asked Endora.

“Home?” she said.

I didn’t know if she was giving an answer or naming us there together over a simple meal after a day of work. We all smiled, for whatever reason.

—

The night the water girl appeared, we were getting ready to board the ferry back to the city side after work, back to our shared boardinghouse.

As soon as the girl was safely on deck, she pulled something from her mouth: a penny. She handed the coin to John Joseph as if he’d been waiting for it.

He turned it over in his hands. “What’s this?” he asked.

“For an ancestor of yours who is coming later, the boy called Joseph,” said the sopping-wet girl. “They call it an Indian Head, but it’s not the head of an Indian. It’s just Liberty wearing an Indian headdress. That’s how Indians and women lose their worth, you know — they put us on their money, or make us into fake prizes and objects, so we can’t move in the world like regular people. I told Joseph that. In another time. But pennies and objects all change their worth, with time and water.”

“I don’t have any children,” John Joseph said.

“You will,” she said. “Your son and his son and his will walk the iron. Like you.”

We’d none of us seen or heard anything like this girl before. She didn’t look distraught or lost. She came out of the water looking comfortable.

Then she turned to David Chen. Walking around him, she placed her hands gently on his back and closed her eyes. We all put our heads down. It must have looked something like prayer, though it felt nothing like that. David let out the heaviest breath I’d ever heard, as if he were releasing a long, thick, coiled rope.

None of us knew what to make of this strange girl. She looked to be about twelve years old, but she also had the look of a woman in midlife — something about her jaw, or her eyes, or both. She brushed herself off, as if she could make herself fully dry with just the wave of a hand. She looked over across the water, at the work we’d been doing. By that point, only the legs and hips of the statue were standing; the torso and arms and head and crown were all still to come.

“She’s going to turn green, you know,” she said to us.

We said we knew. Oxidization of copper.

“She’s going to drown too,” she said.

None of us knew what she meant by that.

“The ocean is going to acidify and change,” she said. “Just like copper changes when it oxidizes. The water will rise faster than people think — faster than a lifetime. Some women drown, you know. Does she have a heart?”

None of us said anything until Endora did: “That’s a good question.” I think we thought of ourselves as her heart — but that’s stupid. Isn’t it?

Then the girl walked up to me, staring at my face and neck, at the place where my skin screams differently from anyone else’s. She traced the shapes with her finger. I didn’t move. “This is a map of the new world,” she said. “All the land masses will change shape. All the words will too. All the bodies will embody differently.” Her small hand rested on my face longer than you might imagine.

Then, turning back to Endora, she reached into a little rucksack slung over her back and pulled out an odd-looking roll of silvery fabric. “This is called duct tape. Only a welder might understand the power of duct tape. A mother came up with the idea. Using fabric tape. She tested it out in the ammunition factory where she worked.”

Endora held her own belly.

“You can even use it to suture a wound.” The water girl scooped Endora up in her gaze. “There are so many ways to carry.” They stared at each other. Neither flinched. A strange and brief still air surrounded them. No one’s mother locked in a gaze with no one’s daughter. There was no word for what they were to each other, unless the word was the energy itself between them.

—

One night, early in the project, John Joseph threw his shoulder out of joint and cracked a rib. Endora, a fine riveter, also had medical skills, and she tended to him. Taking John Joseph’s arm, she put his hand on her shoulder, then whapped him a good one, so that his shoulder went back where it was supposed to be. He didn’t scream or anything.

“Well, that’s it, then,” Endora said.

That’s how we felt listening to this girl: Well, that’s it, then.

When we boarded the ferry back to the city that night, the girl came with us. John Joseph turned the penny over and over in his hand. Endora looked — well, this isn’t possible, of course, but she looked taller. The girl wove around our bodies there at the railing, humming contentedly under her breath, or seeming to. She appeared entirely at home with us. She wasn’t afraid to touch us or lean on us. At one point she even took David’s hand; then she reached out and held mine too, this girl between us like some kind of conduit as we crossed the water. My hand warmed in hers.

Behind us, our half-made woman watched us leave. One hundred thousand pounds of copper, even more iron. When she was finished, her total weight was two hundred and twenty-five tons. Yet her skin — copper sheeting — is about the thickness of a penny. Enough copper to make more than 430 million pennies.

As we all hung over the ferry railing, Endora pressed the girl to tell her story. “Where are your parents? Where do you live? What’s your name?”

They seemed responsible questions to ask. As it turned out, though, they were not the important questions. The important question turned out to be: How do we assemble our hearts to keep us from breaking apart?

The Lament of the Butcher’s Daughter (1995)

Lilly Juknevicius woke in the night again, bathed in her own sweat, wrestling her own sheets, grinding her teeth. Same dream. Same goddamn dream. A box the size of a body — a coffin stood upright — then her father stepping out of it and walking toward her. Her past a secret locked in her body. She waited for her breathing to return to normal. She grabbed a pillow and bit into it as hard as she could.

She got up, naked and wet, and walked to the bathroom, where she cupped her hands under the faucet, drank, splashed her face. In the mirror, she was the spitting image of her father. And her brother.

She thought about the — what was it, thousands of dollars? — she’d spent in group therapy for survivors and immigrants and refugees. She was neither a survivor nor a refugee, yet her life felt hemmed in by their violent narratives. They’d survived war, atrocity, dislocation. She’d survived… what, beyond what they’d left her?

In this city, she knew, a library housed the documents of their brutality: atrocity files, trial records, reports and videotapes and recordings, storage disks and microfiche, artifacts of infamous events, dates and times and names and faces, all organized into one great historical pileup. Miles of information, gathered in one place and made available so that a person might hold the evidence in their own palms, so that questions might be answered, so that judgments might be made, so that stories would not be lost, so that memory might outlive slaughter. So that crimes against humanity could be witnessed by the humanity that survived them.

An exhibit greeted visitors in the library’s grand lobby, confronting one and all with the evidence of atrocity: a pile of gold fillings the size of a bed. Diaries and journals discovered hidden behind toilets, under floorboards, inside walls. Names written but unspoken for years, scratched onto paper marked by age and rot and rain and the oils of an ordinary hand. In another pile, children’s shoes stacked to the ceiling. In an art museum, this might be mistaken for an aesthetic object; in this library, the pile of shoes stood like an act of resistance.

The first time Lilly tried to walk from her apartment to the library, not long after she moved to the city, her feet looked ridiculous to her. The feet of an immigrant, she thought. But I’ve changed; these shoes do not belong to me. That day, instead of going to the library, she found a boutique and bought a pair of tall black leather boots. Then she strode back down the sidewalk until she came to a posh bar with a partial view of the city’s great monument—Just the tip, she joked in her head. There she drank whiskey for five hours until the obelisk began to sag on its axis. On the way home, her toes and ankles burned in their stiff new leather casing. But the heel-toe heel-toe tap, hypnotic against the blacktop, brought her home. Freedom, she thought.

After the first month and the second had passed, and she’d settled on the same black pencil skirt and crisp white blouse and black blazer to wear every day, she found her legs taking her back toward the library. Almost as if she were an ordinary visitor.

—

Her newest case was a lost cause. Dangerous, or so they said.

“That one’s yours?” the guard said. “Don’t even bother. He won’t respond.” Blotches of sweat stained the guard’s gray-blue shirt.

“Is that so,” Lilly muttered, looking past the guard at the boy-nearly-man standing awkwardly across the facility grounds. “Why’s that?” Standing out there with this guard, in this patchy shadeless yard, she felt the humidity weighting her breath. Why were there no trees, no bushes or shrubs? What few trees there were had been shoved out toward the perimeter, a safe distance. Even the grass looked like dirt.

“He’s a tough nut. Probably run out of chances. Kid’s fifteen — nobody in their right mind even tries to save a boy like that anymore. I’d say he’s in the system for good now. From here right into some institution.”

“Institution? He’s a long way from eighteen.” Lilly dug into the ground with the tip of her shoe. “When did he stop speaking?” she asked.

The guard removed his sunglasses, swabbed sweat from his forehead with his forearm. “ ’Bout two years in. Used to scream every night. All night. During the day, he just raged at anyone or anything he could. He’d fight with the other boys, cafeteria workers, counselors, guards. Then it all escalated. He started fires. He shoved another kid’s head into a wall so hard that one of his eyes popped loose. One day, the guard checking his cell found him trying to cut off his own hand at the wrist with a torn-up piece of scrap metal—shit, the blood. Came this close to losing that hand.” The guard kicked at the dirt between them. “See how his right hand hangs different?” He pointed through the chain-link fence to the boy across the yard. “Lost feeling in most of the fingers on that hand.”

Lilly squinted to focus her gaze. Sure enough, one hand looked loose and limp. The boy’s hair was shoulder-length, tucked behind his ears. Blond like wood shavings. She wasn’t close enough to make out his expression.

“Then one day — this was after every last object in his room was taken away from him, all but one flat pillow — he kept damaging property; walls, floors, you name it— he started saying, There’s a blast coming that will change everything. He said it to us, he said it to other boys, he said it to his caseworker. The caseworker before you started getting concerned, and come to find out, the boy had been communicating with some nutball latter-day white supremacists hell-bent on making trouble, thanks to some other kid who came through here who had connections with those idiots. So the caseworker alerted the Feds. It was around then that this one went silent. But his eyes… there’s a world of shit in those eyes. All you’re gonna get are the eyes. Whatever he knows, or doesn’t know — these boys, after a certain age, they’re just lost… When a kid like that starts to see that his own future has got nothing in it for him, he turns rageful. Fills up with whatever makes him feel like he exists.” He spit.

“All the same, I need to meet with him.” Lilly retrieved her own sunglasses and put them on. The guard just stood there, dull and thick and reluctant. “Now, please.” She glanced back across the field; the boy was already watching her.

As she and the guard walked back to the main building, the boy seemed to track their movements. She thought about what she’d read so far in his file: Single immigrant foster father. Child maltreatment. Poor family-management practices. Low parent involvement. And yet he’d achieved high grades — very high — in elementary school. Until he didn’t.

What put this boy in high-security detention was infanticide and patricide. Or so it was alleged.

The details were shadowed and layered, like some irrecoverable palimpsest. Some saw his case as prosecutable; others dismissed the boy as hopeless, a mental health casualty, with no known relatives, who’d slipped through the cracks. The evidence wasn’t much, but the boy’s fingerprints were everywhere — whatever that meant. (The alleged crime took place in his own apartment building.) If anyone had been around to give a shit about him, to take him in, he might have had an entirely different life. How the hell did he go from straight-A student, shy little misfit with glasses, possibly a savant, to this? There was no record of mental or physical illness in his files prior to the incident. No record of any trouble at all. Just a low-income immigrant foster father’s oddball son.

And why had it taken years for him to land on her desk? Christ. The kid was fifteen now. When he was still ten, maybe she’d have had a chance. Kids you could work with. Boy teens, though, they were hard cases. Belligerent, pissed off, hormonal hard cases. Sometimes she wondered if boys carry all our sins for us so that the rest of us can feign innocence of the world we made — a world with less and less space for them to feel loved.

—

Mikael walked the yard, kicked dirt up with each step. He spit on his arm, rubbed the spit into his flesh until a sheen appeared. He studied the word he’d carved into his own arm with a sharpened-toothbrush shiv: indigo. He’d filled the letters with pen ink. Now he was no longer allowed to have pens or even a toothbrush.

He could see the woman across the yard. Yet another caseworker assigned to him. A thought crossed briefly through his mind: breaking her arms himself. Why not? His story had no beginning anymore, so his story had no ending. His story was lost to meaning.

A horn blared: return inside.

Back inside, he walked down the hall to his room, scraping his knuckles against the concrete wall as he went. He passed a boy of about nine, his pants too high, clutching his own forearms. Glasses, like he used to have. Mikael couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen things properly. He’d stopped wearing them after that day in the yard when he stabbed a boy in the throat with one of the temples. No one tried to fuck him after that, or hold him down, or anything. He’d almost been sent to the adult system then, but the prisons were too crowded to take him. Now, as he walked past the nine-year-old, he knocked the boy’s throat with his forearm, sending him like a slingshot to the floor. He couldn’t remember ever being nine.

In the facility, when the other boys had held him down — one of them even put a boot to the back of his neck there on the concrete floor — he remembered smelling the knees of the boy forcing himself into him. The other boy’s knees dragging bloody on the hard concrete surface of the facility floor. Just be flat, he thought. Just wait. Later you can kill anyone. You’re a killer now. It’s official.

He always remembered that smell, during the violence — the smell of pennies.

—

In Lilly’s first visits to the library, on her off hours, she studied the system her father had occupied: the posts, the assignments, the ranks. She learned what position her father had occupied in the order of things. She learned what power he’d had, the kinds of commands he’d issued. It was easy; he was not an obscure figure. What did you think, that the information would be hidden? She learned that her father had no superiors. She learned that he’d had one of his own right-hand men killed for refusing an order. She learned about another order he’d issued, to sever the arm of a photographer who had taken his photo.

Butcher’s Daughter.

Perhaps because she’d grown tired from trying to reinvent a life too many times; perhaps because she’d jettisoned what she’d known her entire life — that her father had recruited her brother first into abuse and then into barbarism, that he’d ordered her brother to execute a woman and child to prove that his loyalty could not be swayed by women and children — perhaps because she wished she were anyone else’s daughter, a child beater’s, a sodomizer’s, whatever; perhaps because of all this, she directed her life toward the purpose of saving boys from becoming monsters.

She devoted the rest of her life to these floating boys — those who drifted away from a story that might have nurtured them into security and health, whose lives were lived on the sharp edge between violence and beauty, who took the place of the word brother.

What she could not decide from her own track record — a tiny three percent liberated from the juvenile detention system and recirculated back into supposed regular lives, some of them former immigrants, or refugees, or just strays — was whether she was helping or hurting. Who takes the side of boys or men who behave brutally, anyway? Who should?

In the library, going over documents, peering at screens, launching searches, she opened a notebook and wrote down a single phrase.

daughter of a war criminal.

Then she tore the piece of paper from the notebook and ate it to stop herself from crying.

—

Those early days had been the hardest, when he’d taken a beating every single day, sometimes more than once a day, when he’d been made to eat dirt, or drink urine, or when they’d smeared shit on his face. He’d still been a boy then. A scared small weak soft boy. Repulsive.

There was no revelation, no equation, no scientific experiment that could change that. His boyhood obsessions? Nothing to open your mouth about here. Ever. So he hid his unstoppable brain deep down, at the bottom of some ocean inside his gut.

The hardest backhanded blow he’d taken as a boy happened when he’d collected every object in the false father’s apartment — every fork and spoon, every salt and pepper shaker, every toothbrush and squeezed-to-death toothpaste tube, every cracked china cup and plate, every ashtray, cigarette pack, chipped cheap cologne bottle, straight razor, soap nub, discarded toilet paper tube, coffee mug and thick shot glass, ring of keys, handful of rags, stray matchbook, and can after can of beans, peas, peaches, soup — and lined them all up in an elaborate maze on the moldy orange-brown carpet of the main room. The artifacts of the opposite of family.

—

When his father returned from work, the big heavy backhand came, knocking his jaw hard to the left, throwing his glasses off his face, blotching the side of his cheek red, his ears ringing for days. You have exactly ten minutes to clean this shit up. Exactly ten minutes to put every single thing back exactly where you found it or I’ll take you to the woods and leave you there forever. What a goddamn mess. You goddamn idiot.

But it hadn’t been a goddamn mess. It had been a habitat.

To preserve himself, he started to draw on the floor of his room with pencils, his hand pushing graphite into concrete until the pencils were ground to nubs. In his head, an entirely new world revealed itself, like a waking dream. The images were always the same: elaborate habitats of air, land, and sea strung together by bridges like webs between worlds. In the air, individual dwellings were shaped like giant hovering birds with large bellies and broad wings. On water, he drew modules that fanned out in the shapes of starfish or curled like conch shells in great spirals. Underwater, the structures he drew resembled the broad backs of turtles or the bellies of great whales. And every habitat was connected by bridges and elevators, extending up and down, side to side, in spiraling helixes.

Of course, no one who looked down at Mikael’s elaborate habitat dreams saw them as such. Of course, he was punished for his work every single day, made to clean the floors he had covered with his dreams. And every single night, he would reconstruct the drawings, their intricate architecture becoming more and more vivid each time. Finally, at the suggestion of a case worker, they took the pencils away and gave him pastel chalk. Chalk was much easier to clean up was the thinking. So he ate the chalk to spite them, and started breaking off pieces of his environment — chairs, bed springs, bathroom fixtures — so that he could scrape the drawings into the floor. This led to a change in rooms, to a room with a dark-blue industrial-grade carpet. The carpet smelled like petroleum. At night, the floor looked like the bottom of the ocean.

After that, by necessity, he continued his drawings in a more covert fashion, using his fingernails to create a perfect map of his world on the wall behind the tattered chest of drawers, drawing images from his mind’s eye with blood from his fingertips.

Years passed.

Caseworkers came and went.

The drawings grew more detailed, more intimate; it was as though the boy were engraving his DNA into the wall. Every night, he pulled up one corner of the carpet to expose the floor, made his drawings there, and then replaced it before sunup. He even considered scratching and inking them onto his chest.

With time, in his drawings, he seemed to be growing the bones and muscles of some other land. Maybe even his land of origin, he thought. He thought about Vera’s stories. He knew, from the occasional media access he had in the facility, that if he’d lived in the places she described as long as he’d lived here, he’d have earned the tattoos that indicate rank among young men who came of age in such violent, often war-torn wastelands. Which don’t exist like the stories anyone cared about, of course, in the same way the abuse or neglect of boys doesn’t exist.

One year, another boy his exact age came through the facility. The boy was almost old enough to be placed in adult detention, but he had landed here instead as a kind of last chance, since he’d never seriously injured any people, just property and himself. This boy liked to set off small improvised explosive devices. Mikael did not like him, though he did feel a kind of solidarity after hearing the boy’s stories of being bullied and hated as a child. The two of them were not alike. But when they walked across a field or down a hallway side by side, their shoulders looked similar, squared off with about-to-be-men rage, the cover story for brokenhearted boys. The other young man’s name was William. His hair was red. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland. His parents divorced when he was ten, and he then had lived with his father, who was endlessly drunk and beat him severely.

William was only at the facility for a year, but in that year, two things happened: Mikael showed William his new habitat, drawing its outline in the dirt with a stick one day out in the yard. And William showed Mikael his prized possession, a letter he kept stuffed down the back of his pants. It was a kind of intimacy, to share one’s private objects that way.

“I have plans when I get out of here,” William said one day as they were hiding behind the dumpster. “I’ve been recruited by someone very important. No one should ever have to live like this, Mikael.” And he pulled out the letter and showed him. It read:

“A man with nothing left to lose is a very dangerous man and his energy/anger can be focused toward a common/righteous goal. What I’m asking you to do, then, is sit back and be honest with yourself. Is this the life you want? Would you back out at the last minute to care for family or friends? Would you be willing to use your skills for something bigger than yourself? I’m not looking for talkers, I’m looking for fighters… And if you are a Fed, think twice. Think twice about the Constitution you are supposedly enforcing (isn’t ‘enforcing freedom’ an oxymoron?) and think twice about catching us with our guard down — you will. Your family will lose. Make the righteous choice.”

Mikael received a couple of letters from William after the boy was released, but they said nothing of any substance, leaving him to believe that what he’d bragged about before he left was true: that a major building had become a target, that William’s ideas would become actions, and that people were going to die. It was that simple. There were boys like William everywhere, their hearts hollowed out by the world around them, willing to join or do anything to disrupt the landscape they’d been handed.

When Mikael thought of dead people, he thought about Vera. He thought about Indigo. He wondered if the targeted building might be full of women and children. If anyone had threatened Vera or Indigo, he knew, he would have killed them.

—

Inside his room now, inside his teen body barely existing in time and space, nothing: no pencils or pens, no shoestrings or sheets. Even the sink fixtures had been dismantled since he’d tried — or so they thought — to use the faucet parts to make a weapon. In truth, he’d been trying again to fashion something he could draw with. Now, instead of providing running water, they brought him a plastic jug with his meals, and he had to return the jug each night. Recently, after being tormented by another boy, he’d taken the blue plastic lid of his jug and jammed it into the boy’s forehead, so hard that doctors had to be brought in to remove it and suture the wound.

Lying down on the cool of the concrete floor, Mikael stretched one hand out in front of his face and studied the lines of his own veins that crisscrossed the back of his hands. He thought about how veins carried blood to the heart, the motherload.

He closed his eyes and waited for this woman, who — like every caseworker before her — would mean nothing. No woman was coming to save him.

He dreamed the same dream as always: the sound of an infant, just out of reach. Only this time, in the dream, there was a blast as big as a building.

The Floating Boy and the Butcher’s Daughter

In the detention center meeting room, Lilly stared at the feckless, rattling dark-green fan, moving less air toward her than a person would standing there blowing. The fan, the table in front of her, even the walls reminded her of high school — like a teen institution that had thrown up on itself.

The door opened. A pair of guards stepped into the room, holding Mikael by the elbows, and shoved him into the chair across from her.

The boy stared at her. Or not at her exactly, but at her cheek. His jaw looked like it could crack a wrist. His forearms were covered with marks — not the feathery traces of a serial cutter, but the gouged valleys of someone far beyond giving a shit. The guards chain-harnessed him to his chair, locked his handcuffs to a metal ring on the table, and stepped away.

Several seconds of quiet.

Then the sound of metal screaming and he lunged at her from across the table.

She flinched but didn’t yelp, thank Christ.

He laughed, a kind of fuck-you growl.

She had the impression that they could sit like that for hours unless she did something to surprise him, catch him off his stride. She had exactly one move.

She reached into her bag, pulled out the object, and placed it on the table between them.

His laugh caved in.

The object sat between them, as silent as anything had ever been.

Lilly watched Mikael stare at the strange twist of flesh, dried into a husk, wound into a shape something between a letter S and a spiral staircase. She had expected the silence; she’d been reminded over and over again that the boy had long since stopped speaking. What she didn’t expect was that, when she drew a breath to speak, she would be interrupted.

“Where did you get that?”

She recalibrated. “It was in with the artifacts and evidence left after the fire,” she lied. “They said it was found inside—”

“A lockbox.”

“Yes.” In her head, a clicking sound. How was she sounding: Neutral? Aggressive? Benevolent? She had no idea. She looked at this boy-going-to-man in front of her, coiled in a spring of heated rage and dislocated want. Without permission, she thought: brother. How do you get a boy like that to open? How long had it been since this boy had even seen a woman? She hadn’t seen a single one since she’d arrived.

She knew she had next to no shot. All she had going for her was adulthood, and her own reckless instincts.

“I have a recurring dream about a box,” she said. She opened her shirt collar wider, exposing her neck. “A bad dream.” He didn’t move. “Really fucking bad.”

He didn’t speak. His eyes were fixed on her chin. Was there some danger in telling her secrets to this kid, about to disappear into a prison system that didn’t give a fuck who he’d been or what he might be? He had nowhere to go but down. And she lived in a liminal space where no one gets saved.

Now or never.

“Yeah. The dreams are about my father. He was… a war criminal.” Her throat was thick. She’d never said that out loud. Even in group therapy she’d lied, said her father had gone to jail for murdering someone. But her father had tortured and murdered thousands. He had turned her brother into a killing machine. Even the phrase war criminal barely covered it.

She stood up and walked over to the triple-barred security window in the cinder-block box of a room. She wondered if he was watching her ass, but when she turned around to look, he was staring at the ceiling. She could see a scar at the side of his neck. A big one. His Adam’s apple, ungainly like any boy’s, made her heart hurt.

“What’s your last name?” Mikael did not stop looking at the ceiling.

Her breath cut short against her ribs—he is speaking he is speaking don’t fuck this up. She remained near the anti-window, holding as still as a statue. “Why?”

“I can hear your accent. You think it’s gone, but it’s not.”

“Bullshit.” She palmed the scar at her own neck. Her skin felt cold, like uncooked chicken. A year of failed group therapy spent covertly cutting the thinnest line imaginable over and over and over again, just the whisper of a line, just to feel something besides nothing. She had no accent. Her mother had successfully escaped and relocated her, thanks to her American uncle at the State Department, long before her father was global news. She. Had. No. Accent. God. Damn. It.

But now he looked her dead in the eye. Could he see her scar? Was he smiling?

“Tell me your dream,” he said. In Serbo-Croatian.

Little prick, she thought. And yet she realized she had no other game but this. She wet her lips with her tongue. The air between them crackled a little. Fuck group therapy. Roll the dice. In her own half-assed Serbo-Croatian, she continued.

“In the dream, my father is inside an upright coffin in my living room. The coffin lid opens like a door and he walks out, though he’s dead. His skin is rotten, falling off — it’s gray, like ash, but all his internal organs are bright colors, red and pink and bluish. His jaw is barely hanging from his head. He’s reaching for me.” She put her hand at her own neck again. She sees the dream in present tense, like it’s in the room with them. Her father. Her throat constricts and the line of sweat between her legs goes cold, as if it were ice trickling down her inner thigh. “He’s trying to say something or do something. I want to kill him, but he’s already dead. I don’t know what… I had a brother. My brother was good. My father—”

“There’s a blast coming,” Mikael interrupted.

Shit. He could shut back up like a lockbox if I say anything. But he was baiting her now. She couldn’t ignore it. “A… blast?”

“A bomb.”

“When?”

“Soon,” Mikael said. “A van. In front of a government building. But I won’t say where.”

“Right. How do I know you’re not full of complete shit?”

Mikael studied Lilly. “You don’t. Women don’t seem to get what has happened. We’re all holding so many stories in here”—and he pounded his chest. “All of us. I could tell you one of a hundred different stories. I’m trying to decide which one to tell you. For instance, one story is, there are men out there who think their lives have been stolen from them. There are men who want to recruit boys like us”—he gestured in the air around his own body—“to do terrible things. All over the world. No one wants boys like us,” he said. “So the world eases us into the cracks, lights us up like dynamite.”

Lilly tried to make her jaw as strong and square as possible. “Well, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t give a shit.” Her words meant to hold steady like a bridge. “Are you trying to tell me you know something about a bomb?”

“When I was a boy, I had a baby,” he said.

Her heart lurched.

Mikael closed his eyes. Silence sat thick and hot between them. Without reopening his eyes, Mikael began to tell a story. “Once there was a boy,” he said into the air between them, like the words were trying to make a great journey.

“This boy lost his place in the world.” Mikael’s eyes were closed, as if closing his eyes could shut out the present tense, as if he could step back in time all the way through to childhood with the eyes of a keen observer. Or a loving parent who had suffered a great loss. The story of his boyhood spilling out of him in waves, the opposite of silence.

—

“Once there was a boy who slipped from his story, but he carried secrets with him, whether or not there was a place for him in the world.

“This boy was different from everyone and everything around him. The world looked strange to him, through his glasses — which were always smudged — and the way he reacted to things didn’t make the normal kind of sense. For instance, he trusted mycelia, the tiny threads that give birth to fungus, more than he trusted people. The thing about mycelia was, they stick together. They’re like a colony, a close-knit mass of branches. They live in ecosystems on the land and in the water; they absorb nutrients and break them down. They’re as important to decomposition as they are to life, which is a carbon cycle.

“Whereas the thing about people was, they’re mostly individual meat sacks that own and devour everything in their path, and you never know when their insides will come out.

“One time, in his neighborhood, the boy saw a large woman get shot in the face, by a seemingly kind-eyed boy, as she was boarding the bus. Her mind never made it onto the bus with her. Blood splashed on the windows. People screamed. The driver made everyone get off the bus. Police got hold of the gun-boy, and as they took him away, he saw in the gun-boy’s eyes that he’d been holding something that boys sometimes lose: the people they should have belonged to. That gun-boy looked right at him. He must have been from someplace else, like him, who knows where. Later, he heard that the gun-boy got sent away to something called a juvenile correction facility. Like a foster home, he thought.

“Finally, after the gun-boy was led away, another bus came and the kids were all taken home. When the boy got to his stop, he pushed his glasses up tighter to his eyes, felt the security of the thick black plastic above his ears. He stood and made his way to the front of the bus, passing various people along the way, though he didn’t dare make eye contact with any of them, because who knew what might happen.

“He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to ride the bus after that, but that would mean he’d have to walk, and his knees and shins already hurt from how far he had to walk just to get to the bus every day. The bus — no matter what risks sat inside — was still his best option. And the streets were dangerous. That was just true. You can’t help where foster fathers bring you. America, the gun.

“The bus always smelled like worn rubber floor liners and too many feet, and he couldn’t wait to get off, but even just stepping off the bus felt like a test to him. He kept his hands jammed into his pockets as he waited to get off, feeling the seams and bits of lint and the beginning of a hole at the bottom. He pushed his fingers through it till they reached the flesh of his thigh. He could feel his skin, his leg hair, which was barely there yet. His backpack felt heavier than it should. He wondered if he looked like a human turtle. He stared straight down, doing this thing where he made himself go a little deaf until danger had passed. Up front, the bus smelled like underarms and pee and tires. For a minute, he thought he might barf, but then the sound of the bus door opening and the rush of cold air woke him up again. The bus driver was a guy he was actually fond of, but if the man said anything as the boy went down the stairs, he didn’t hear it.

“The boy’s cheeks flushed the instant the cold air hit him. It made his teeth ache. His eyes dried up like a forgotten ice cube kicked into a dusty corner. The tips of his ears pinched. He wished he had a hat. Weren’t boys supposed to be sent off to school with hats, with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with a kiss goodbye? That’s what he saw on TV, anyway. He trudged along, watching the tops of his shoes, wondering why one was scuffed and the other wasn’t. He wondered what that said about him. Was there something weird about the way he walked? Was he doing something with his feet all day at school that he didn’t realize? Did he kick things and not remember? Did anyone else notice?

“Sometimes the boy wondered how long he’d have to drag through this boyhood before he got to something better. Sometimes he worried he wouldn’t make it to the other side. Sometimes he worried there was no other side, just some trick of height and weight and the sag of man-gut and the way men grew pouches where their cheeks used to be. And their noses and ears. Men’s noses never stop growing, he thought, or maybe he heard it at school, or saw it on a screen somewhere. He pictured a man with a nose like a moose’s, tipping over, unable to stand, falling on his face.

“His walk home changed every day. He took the same path, which helped him recognize his way, but what happened was never the same, which confused him if he wasn’t careful. If he took a left but it turned out to be a right, someone might run a red light and hit the side of an old Buick hard enough to push it up onto the curb. Crowds could form out of nowhere. Cops. Dogs. Pigeons. One little change could have epic effects. Once, a man came running out of the mini-mart with armfuls of beer, and two bottles slipped from the man’s grasp and shattered, splashing onto the sidewalk. The owner came rushing out with an actual rifle, yelling and yelling in some language the boy didn’t know, or a language he did know that sounded different when yelled, until the thief got down on the ground and started begging or something — it looked vaguely like praying, or what the boy imagined praying might be. (Beer he knew about. Rifles and praying were from TV and movies and the nightly news.) The thief went down on the ground under the rifle and yelling, his cheek against the concrete beer everywhere. The boy saw the thief lick the concrete and cry.

“That whole day, the world seemed tilted to the boy. When he was almost home, he nearly missed the turnoff to his apartment building. All the apartment buildings suddenly looked like upset, crooked faces.

“The boy loved the thief, but he couldn’t understand why.

“Now, as he was walking home, on an average day, two months after the shooting, the mini-mart just looked like a mini-mart. A dog barked around the corner. The smell of pee came in whiffs from every alley.

“From the position of the stop signs and fire hydrants, he could tell he was about halfway home. He aimed at cracks with his scuffed-up shoe: five, six, seven. If he hadn’t been looking down and concentrating so hard on the geography of the sidewalk, he probably would have missed it. The thing on the ground. Or stepped in it.

“Right there, against the hard gray of the sidewalk, was something wrong. Something that was red and purple and pink and veined and wet, with a glistening gray wormish thing trailing away from it. He tilted his head and squinted through his glasses at it, trying to figure out what was the top and what was the bottom. It looked like butcher’s meat it looked like an alien head it looked like what guts might look like if they were on the outside.

“He heard a siren, somewhere far away. He glanced up and spotted a Chinese woman two blocks away, hunched over, pulling a grocery stroller. A few guys on a corner, too far away to tell how old. Street signs and garbage and two crows and parked cars.

“He inched his scuffed shoe toward the thing, watched to see what would happen.

“It didn’t move.

“He nudged it.

“It jiggled some, but then oozed back into its splatter.

“A taxi drove by, going the other direction. A woman opened her window and emptied a dustpan into the air. He squatted down next to his find. Down here, below regular people’s sight, he could feel things shift immediately. Now he was at eye level with tires, with stacks of paper at the newsstand, closer to gutters and drains and bird poop and cats and the curbside. From this angle, the thing looked bigger and wronger. The veins running through it were blue-gray and white, fanning out like little rivers.

“It smelled like the butcher’s it smelled like dead washed-up jellyfish it smelled like car exhaust and donuts. He was less than a block from his favorite donut shop. His stomach growled. His knees and thighs ached from squatting. He wished he had a stick or a fork or even a pencil, but all he had in his backpack were books. Then he thought of the parts of his glasses that go over his ears. He took his glasses off and stared at them. The black plastic was sturdy and thick. In truth, his glasses felt vaguely magical to him. He’d already survived gunfire, hadn’t he?

“He took them off his face and used the temple to point at the glob. Then he poked at it. Deeply. When he pulled his glasses back, a thread of gooey ooze clung to them for a moment.

“That’s when he heard the air say his name. Mikael, he heard it whisper. Then again, louder, till he snapped his head to the right and spotted the edge of a brick alleyway corner.

“It wasn’t the air after all.

“Between the glob and the voice, he was hearing his name. If he followed the ick of the glistening wormlike thing, it seemed to point around the corner. Like a map.

“Was that singing he heard? He couldn’t tell. His hands itched; his ears felt hot.

“He didn’t want to follow the sound, or the trail that led from the mess on the sidewalk to around the corner of the brick wall, but as always, his body betrayed him. He stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and walked toward the sound. His backpack weighed down his shoulders, and he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. His glasses felt heavy on his nose and cheeks, as if they were pulling his eye sockets down.

“Even before he was around the corner, he realized what he was hearing: Vera’s voice. Vera, who read stories in foreign languages to him as a child; who smelled like year-old lavender perfume; who petted his hair and adjusted his glasses and gave him goat’s milk when he visited her. Vera was a place where he’d hidden from bullies like Victor Michelovsky; where he’d waited for hours after school for his father to come home or not; where he’d come when the pilot light went out in the stove and he was afraid to try to light it himself. Vera was a place in the night too, pretending to be dead or asleep as he came and went with his father, but that was something not to talk about if you didn’t want to get smacked in the jaw.

“Vera sometimes sang to him, if no one else was around, her eyes glazed over like indigo marbles, little worlds, her vision cast out of the filthy apartment window toward he wished he knew what. Little folk songs was what she called them. From home. And she’d put her hand on her chest above her breasts and he’d stare there for as long as he could.

“So when he finally got his head and eyes around the corner and saw Vera splayed out on the trash-stinking concrete, her blood and urine staining her silky slip that was shoved up above her hips — faintly blue, oh, blue like the springtime sky — the word Vera was already on his lips. The hidden world of her, as open and bloody and horrible as a tiger’s mouth. He bent down to her, reaching out, toward what, he had no idea.

“He let himself look. In her arms, a squirming and grunting. Gray and red and white matter, like a cocoon covering skin. A terrible too-small mouth opened and sucked. The pink eye pockets closed as tightly as fists. A mewing mammal.

“Not for a boy your age. That’s what Vera always told him, sliding a bottle of vodka behind her back, then putting it on top of the refrigerator. Or closing her blue satin robe over her chest, then smiling and petting his hair.

“To keep himself from having to see the things he looked at, he’d long since trained himself to think about a specific word: indigo. The word, and everything he knew of it, came from Vera. You are an indigo child, she told him, fluffing the hair on his head then petting it smooth. From her mouth, and the broad gestures she made as she spoke, he learned that indigo is one of the seven colors of the rainbow — the color between blue and violet, named for a plant called Indigofera tinctoria.

“She also told him that indigo represented the sixth chakra, the third eye. Indigo children would grow up with the ability to master complex systems. And they would know how to care for both animals and humans.

“When Vera said it, the word indigo took on a power, as if it were some kind of spirit, as if it were a myth. Like indigo meant something close to life. The boy pictured himself as an adult, in an indigo jumpsuit, working with elephants and bats and sad people in some kind of room filled with computer servers. It would be a large room, with lines of monitors and black lights and knowledge banks and straw on the floor for the animals. As he thought back on all of this now, he briefly forgot what was surging and moaning on the ground before him.

“A scent he knew the word for—lavender—mixed with the smell of gutter water.

“Then, a sound — the bawl of an infant.

“He looked at Vera’s face. Her skin was so pale, he could see through it. It was full of veins and he could see the bruised color of bones and cartilage holding up her facial features. The holes in her face — her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth — suddenly looked wrong to him. Too big or too deep or too pleading. The fact of what he was looking at — her body — suddenly overcame him. He tried to focus on some small thing that might bring him back to human: A cigarette butt a few inches from Vera’s head. An Anheuser-Busch bottle cap near a graying dandelion poking through the concrete. Water dripping off the corner of the gutter. He looked up to the top of the five-story brick building, past the dung-splattered wall toward a fragment of cloud. Then a sound he knew, Vera’s voice, a voice he felt in his gut. He looked back down, right into her mouth. Her teeth were so small.

“Listen to me, Mikael. She pulled at him with a whisper. You have to take her.

“He shook his head back and forth in a panic, so hard that his glasses flew from his face and landed near Vera. With her free hand, the one not holding the infant, she handed them back. Vera pulled her stained slip back down over her hips.

“I know, Vera said. Too much. You are just a boy. She petted her own chest as if she were reaching to comfort him.

Not wanting to look directly at it, he closed his eyes. He heard differently this way, with his eyes closed. He could hear a fractured rasp nearby, like an animal clawing at garbage. No — not that. Something was wrong with Vera’s breathing.

“Shhhh, Vera said, soothing him.

“His body slackened a little. His aching knees and thighs finally gave in and he shifted his weight to one hip, propping himself on one elbow, stretching his numb legs out sideways, so that he was almost reclining on his side next to Vera. The thing between them stilled and quieted. He almost forgot it was there, except that he couldn’t look away from its mouth as it closed on Vera’s nipple.

“Then Vera started to sing.

“When her voice trailed off, he realized he was smiling — a half smile, his eyes closed, his mind off where boys’ heads go when women sing to them. As if now were like always. But when he opened his eyes, Vera was staring at the sky, her mouth too open, her skin wrong-colored. And the thing, the squirming pinkness of it…

“He stood up. Which took longer than it should have. He stared at it. For a moment, he considered simply turning around and walking away. Instead, he squatted back down and took his glasses off, holding them in the air between himself and Vera.

“Vera?

“He brought a temple close to Vera’s face. Gently, gently, he poked her cheek. Her eyes did not blink the way eyes should blink. Her mouth retained its shape. He put his glasses back on.

“Wherever it was that he’d been born, in that other country with the other language that his mouth was fast forgetting, there were stories. Vera used to tell him the stories. The place he was from was cold, he knew, and they said it was war-torn, like some kind of ripped-up blanket. And he had the impression that death moved easily there, between people and things. It was a place cold enough that dogs were left to freeze in the street. Daughters were dragged off to sheds by soldiers in the night, laughing, vodka-drenched soldiers, the air full of sweat. Sometimes the daughters returned later, with their sight taken from their eyes; sometimes they were sold away forever.

“The sons were turned into dogs — or daughters — too, treated as whatever the soldiers needed the meat of them to be. Some of them were turned into guns, killers of anything for anyone, if they wanted to stay alive.

“He always wondered, the boys they used to be — where did they go? Did they recede into the folds of their brains like a well-tucked secret, something to be retrieved later in life? Was that kind of brutality a universal initiation into the world of men? Or did those inner boys just shrivel and disappear? What happened to them? Not the ones who died; they went to dirt. But the others? Did they go to facilities to be corrected?

“He used to hear his foster father’s voice:

“You should always remember how lucky you are to be here.

“And he remembered Vera’s voice, back in her kitchen:

“Never whine for your fortune. No one likes a boy who cries.

“Now he knelt by her body, his knees grinding on concrete.

“He stared down at the little pig of a thing. It grunted.

“He could see Vera was dead, but he couldn’t think it. He placed his hands over each of her eyelids and shut them, the way people do on TV.

“Then the thing began to wail.

“Shut up, he whispered, looking around, adjusting his glasses. But it continued.

“Shut up, he said louder, and grabbed at the blanket around it, which came loose, and that’s when he finally learned that the difference between a boy and a girl lived between the legs: a soft and tiny patch of skin slit where a penis should be. He stared at it. He looked around again — where were the humans? Nothing. No one. A dog barking far away. He leaned in closer. Closer still, until his face was nearly touching the wriggling infant. He smelled the place where its skin and slit were. Its legs jerking. He winced, shivered, pulled away.

“Piss, he said.

“But then it looked right at him. Silently. Half cradled but half falling from Vera’s limp arm. It looked directly into his eyes, not crying but gasping for air or something. Then, wriggling its little fingers, it reached up to him.

“It could only have been him. Nothing else around them left alive.

“His chest felt inside out. He held his breath. His palms were wet. He felt dizzy, blurry. He closed his eyes and opened them and closed and opened them again.

“Hey!”

A voice he did not know swiveled his head around.

“You there!”

Ethnography 3

The moose here are hairless. The children blush and bloom with rashes when they eat fruit or jam. Calves are born with two heads, and there is a two-headed eagle. In the city, the permafrost is melting; in the forests, the ice is taking strange shapes. The fish in the lake are dead or mutated. Underground nuclear tests. Industrial waste from mining. Heavy metals dumped in the river. For years.

I was a factory cleaning woman for two decades. I did my work standing at the lip of the Lena River, washing out clothes. Where else would I go? I was born here. My mother and her mother and her mother. We were a house of women whose men left the moment they could. Women labor into a void — our work to raise children and husbands and animals, our work keeping home and hearth are not considered employment. My whole life’s labor lives in my hands. I stopped going to work when my hands turned red, my wrists developed lumps, and they never got better.

One day, I was washing the clothes — I remember what was in my hands at that moment, a blue flowered dress — and I looked up, and on the other side of the river, half of the shore just fell away to water. I stopped moving. I held as still as a statue, my washing suspended. Then I saw an entire house get swallowed up by the swollen river, as if the land had just given up or lost its meaning. A dog had been barking in the yard of that house. A babe had been sitting on the ground near the porch. A woman at the door was wiping her hands on her apron when the great rush came and then everything was going to water. I wept so hard.

I stepped back from the washing, from the river, and I walked back to our house. The chickens were squawking. I kept thinking about the dog. The babe. The woman. I wondered how long I would have before the river came for me too. The water comes for all of us, I think, like an answer.