Thrust: A Novel

Cruces 4

One night, after a week of hard work, there was a kind of bonfire, with drinking and dancing, along the river next to the boardinghouse. All different kinds of workers were there — those of us working on the statue and every other kind of worker in the city, carpenters and shoemakers, ditchdiggers burying gas pipes and digging tunnels, stonecutters, meatcutters, and barkeeps, those who labored laying cable for streetlights, child factory workers and women pieceworkers and women of the night, butchers and bakers and opium den owners, trash collection workers and street cleaners and those who kept care of horses — all the workers underneath the gleam and glow and noise of the city.

I think we were all coming to an understanding that this project was moving toward an ending, and no one wanted to talk about the ending. No one wanted to think about whatever would happen next.

I wanted to dance with David Chen, but the firelight was too bright and too many eyes surrounded us, so I danced with Endora. I don’t know, maybe everyone thought I was dancing with a man anyway, as by now Endora had taken to wearing men’s pants all the time. But no one said a thing; no one looked at us. And anyway, it’s not that anyone couldn’t dance with anyone else. It was my desire, and I knew to keep it close.

What I remember most was her face, how it opened up in the firelight and night. When I spun her on her toes, so fast, she laughed so hard that I saw something I never had before: Endora had joy. Until that night, I had thought she knew only hardship and the strength it took to carry it; even her face was hard and strong. But that night, as she danced and threw her head back and flung her arms out to the side, with me holding her waist, I think she felt free. A laugh came from her mouth that seemed like it carried generations.

The four of us — David and John Joseph and Endora and I — stayed after most of the others had gone, which was our habit. We all liked to be there for the after-calm, to listen as the river water collected its secrets.

On that night, a well-dressed man who was not the same as us approached our little group near the last glowing embers of the fire. His suit was of fine quality, but he was drunk — not belligerent, not loud and boisterous, as most of our coworkers usually became before passing out or turning in, just drunk enough to make him clumsy. His eyes were big and glassy. His hair had been ruffled too often in too many directions. His tie hung crumpled and undone.

“May I join you?” he said.

Before we could answer, he rested his frame on a box near Endora.

“I am Fred,” he announced to no question, taking a large quaff from a flask. “And you?”

“Danny,” Endora said with no affect at all, without even looking at him.

“A pleasure, Danny,” he continued. “And your companions?”

Endora’s shoulders stiffened. I took it as a sign to carry the story from there. “Sir, might we help you find someone? Something?” I offered. His eyes fell down toward his cheeks.

“Oh, come now,” the man said. “I mean you no harm. I’m just on a nightwalk. I was just reminded of a project I worked on — different waters.”

“Where is this… project?” John Joseph asked, looking around as if the stranger might have brought it with him.

“In another city, as it happens,” he replied. “A fountain. But not just any fountain.” He leaned into the fading glow of the embers, his enthusiasm igniting. He passed his flask to Endora without looking at her, and Endora being Endora, she took a sip without question and passed it on to David, who, being David, passed it without partaking to John Joseph. The man continued as if we’d invited him for this very purpose. His speech softening into slurry fragments.

“Cast iron. For the great exposition. I gave it to them for free! Can you imagine?” He laughed at his own narration. “Three basins…” He waved his hands in the air as he spoke, as if resculpting it there in front of us. “The basins held by three Nereids—”

“Nereids?” I asked.

“You would say… sea nymphs,” he continued. “The base is covered in seashells. And Testudines spouting water!” He seemed pleased with himself.

“Testudines?” Endora said, the tone in her voice prickling.

“Tortues!” he said in French.

Everyone looked my way. “Turtles,” I said.

“Yes! Yes, turtles!” He crouched toward us, using his hands to speak now. “The crown at the top spouts water. Water spilling from basin to basin illuminated by gas lamps. Do you see? It will be lit at night! Like our dear old girl.” He farted and laughed, the belly laugh of a happy drunk, or any person without inhibition.

He finished his story with a flourish: “It’s called The Fountain of Light and Water!”

I must admit I found that to be a fine name for a fountain. I think we all did.

“It’s meant as an allegory, do you see? An allegory of…” He seemed to drift back into his own thoughts. He leaned back, then righted himself, crouching as if he were confiding a secret. “Everything is an allegory,” he almost whispered. “Water. Light. Gas. All of this, in the city moderne,” he said, waving his hand around.

“A toast, then?” I offered, and the flask made another circle. “To The Fountain of Light and Water,” I said. And then: “My name is Kem.” It seemed the least I could share, given what we had between us.

We toasted, and then his face fell to sorrow again. “Thank you, friends,” he said, “for the pleasure of your company. Someone I love has gone from me.” With that, he stood and walked unevenly away into the night.

In the firelight, Endora’s cheeks looked like apples. She raised her flask and toasted us all. “Look at you lot. What a cast of characters we make! To the next chapter in our story!” she proclaimed, and passed the flask. “May we make something as mighty of ourselves here as our lady!” Her smile wide.

David took the flask, gave it a tender look, then paused before passing it to John Joseph. “Why did we come here?” He turned to Endora. “Why did you come here?”

Endora looked at the dirt in the strobe of the firelight. Her smile flickered, then faded. “For work,” she finally said, then added, “For a better life.” She hugged herself. The two answers were a story that had formed like a cradle in which immigrants sang themselves to sleep.

David looked at me next. The eye contact made my chest pound. “Do you think we were right? To come here? To this place, not some other? Any of us?” His eyes never left me.

I took a long time answering, partly because David so rarely spoke — his way of getting his meanings across did not depend on words like the rest of us did — and partly because I didn’t know the answer, or I didn’t want to know the answer.

Finally I spoke. “They say my name means ‘the sun,’ but that’s only one story,” I said. “In German, it means something like ‘the combmaker.’ Can you picture me as the combmaker?” I smiled and my smile drew laughter from everyone. “Or it might be short for kemet. In ancient Egypt, the word kemet meant “the black land”; ancient Egyptians were Black Africans called the Kemet People. Kemet is the root of words like kam or ham, a reference to Black people in Hebrew translations.”

“What the hell are you going on about?” Endora asked.

“What I mean is, not even our names hold still,” I said. “Who knows what our stories will turn out to mean. I mean, beyond right now. With this fire and one another. Maybe we came here just for this.”

David smiled. It was as good an answer as I had in me, even though it was no kind of answer.

Later, in the newspaper, I came across a dispatch from the Centennial Exposition. Our visitor’s fountain, his vision of light and water, has another name: the Bartholdi Fountain. We had shared our evening with our own sculptor. We had seen him before, we felt sure, but in such a rare time and space that he had seemed to be a different person.

When we saw the girl who came to us from the water, we told her about the fountain. The things he said reminded us of her, of how she emerged from water and how she would return to it.

Aurora’s Thrust

There was to be a Raid on my house. On the day of the factory fire, a client approaching from the back alley had seen our faces pressed against the window; to him, we must have looked like fugitives, all those faces of children like question marks. The client alerted the authorities. When we learned of the plan — you’ll not be surprised that my sources extend to the city’s official bureaus — we needed an escape, and though I did consider other options, in the end it was that otherworldly girl who won me over, by reciting to me with precision exactly everything that had happened to me and to the children in the last few weeks despite the fact that we had never met.

It was this all-knowing girl who offered the most promising plan: to escape by water.

She sealed the case in an unusual way: by showing me a coin she said she carried with her at all times, a one-cent piece from the nation’s earliest days, its central figure a woman with the hair of a lion. “When this penny first emerged,” she said, “people thought the image was a horror. They thought she was monstrous, that she looked insane. Her unruly hair, is what they said.” She turned the coin over and over in her hand. “Like mine,” she said. Her own long black hair, wrestling its way down her back, was unruly — beautifully so. I reached out to touch it, but she pulled back. My hand hung suspended just above her head. Something about the coin, the girl, something about women and children and monsters, set into my abdomen.

There exists a city within this city, made by women and children.

Cagey, sly, and ingenious girls with barely-there breasts furrowing paths beneath the ebb and flow of city life. Bellicose wives with tongues as formidable as whips and torsos the size of battleships. Hopeless-to-the-point-of-reckless house cleaners and cooks and ladies’ maids. Bands of little-girl thieves, their faces of hunger merging with their oncoming sexuality and drive to survive. Tiny ambitions in collision, or collusion, with desire. The city they inhabit inverts its own alleged social structure. Women and children first may be its cover story, but women and children creating their own society — their underground economy, below where its very sex sits — that is a deeper story.

This girl, she had an unimaginable plan for our escape. I remember feeling a little dizzy from the sheer will of her. But the story she told, in trade for my trust, won me over.

“This is a story from my father,” she said. “But it is actually the story of my mother. Aster has carried it long enough, though. I think perhaps he is dying from carrying this story,” she said, and the sorrow on her face seemed larger than a body.

“This is the Tale of the Fur Spinner,” she told me. “Sit down in that green chair and I will perform it for you.” And then she began.

“The moment my father first saw my mother, Svajonė, he had a seizure. Sometimes I think he wishes he’d died right then, inside the image of her following his fall to the ground, kneeling to put his head in her lap.”

“What kind of seizure was this?” I asked. I had not yet been enveloped into her storytelling.

“Epileptic. People with epilepsy have suffered greatly, you know. They are thrown into places with criminals and mentally ill people, just like prostitutes and poor people and orphans are. If we ever meet again, I’ll tell you the story of the Salpêtrière — which started out as a gunpowder factory and later became an infamous hospital. In your time, it will become a teaching center for those who study the brain.”

I was restless for her to continue. “But what became of your father?”

“There is nothing wrong with my father. Sometimes he just slips time because he can’t hold the weight of his life. That is the story I came here for. But you need to listen. Can you hold still while I tell it, as still as a statue?”

From that moment, I understood. My task was to listen.

—

“My mother was studying the Yakut indigenous language. My father’s mother had been Yakut. When my father met my mother, he knew only a few phrases, words really. The village he grew up in within Yakutia rested inside a tension next to a former Siberian gulag. Former gulag prisoners taught the villagers how to grow potatoes, how to fight for a life — so many things about the space between living and dying. After the collapse, most of the villagers became hunters and fishers. The villagers simply never found someplace else to go. A woman who lived alone in the woods where my father grew up gave him a bone necklace that she claimed belonged to his mother. The woman had no idea if the shards of bone were from a human or a reindeer or what.

“Maybe it was from his mother, maybe from some other woman. Stories multiply and disperse in a village like that.

“His father was an exile — or so the story goes. They said his father murdered a soldier. No one knew what kind of soldier, only that he had a uniform and a rifle. A guard? Or was he military? His father — my grandfather — was maybe a Yakut, but maybe not; everyone my father spoke to was hazy on this. Some villagers described his father’s hair as black like night; others thought it was blond; some said he was a Jew, or Ukrainian; still others shook their heads no and said, Turk! or something else. He could have been anyone’s son from anywhere, and yet he knew, whoever he was, that there had been ice and water and earth and blood all around him.

“Both his mother and his father were dead and gone before my father reached the age of three. Both shot dead in some kind of Raid, the story goes. Both buried in ground near the village, near enough sometimes that he could still hear their bones singing in the wind. Or he thought he could.

“The village raised him. People who’d been exiled or forgotten, indigenous Yakut people mixed with Siberians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Albanians, Turks, Russian Jews — even an American or two whose wits had atrophied. He still knew some people in the village who knew more Yakut words than he ever would, so when this woman arrived to study the languages, he offered to help her.

“That woman was my mother.

“Svajonė came from Lithuania. In her case, there was no question of who she was or where she came from. She came with a real story — an important lineage. Her grandfather had been a famous book smuggler, a knygnešys during the Lithuanian language and press ban instigated by the empire. Her father had continued the tradition later by opening a bookstore in Panėvežys. It is thought to this day that, had the knygnešiai never existed, the Lithuanian language itself would have slipped away forever.

“Language slips away sometimes, like objects, like peoples.

“Svajonė became a linguist in order to study what happens to languages under siege. She understood profoundly how power could drive individuals underground and reshape them into a new species capable of a kind of resistance and resilience no one had dreamed of. When her grandfather was caught delivering books to a secret transport on its way to America, he was shot on the spot. Her grandmother swallowed a wail larger than a country as she stood unmoving next to his body on the ground. All she had were her eyes locking eyes with the murderer as he spit on the ground, laughed, and walked away. My mother’s grandmother and mother raised money to send her away from her country of origin to receive an education, away from the violence of a family narrative. But the violence never left her body.

“Stories have a way of burying themselves underneath skin.

“Svajonė was the most beautiful woman Aster had ever seen. According to my father, she looked nothing like him or anyone. She looked like she’d been spun from moon and water — her skin alabaster, her eyes a clear blue, her auburn hair falling down her shoulders in unkempt tendrils. She had tiny lyrical lines around her eyes and mouth — lines that looked like writing, he said, like a poem trying to write itself on her face when she smiled. The first time she spoke to him, my father wanted to touch her face. This continued for the rest of his life. He wanted to leave everything he’d ever known to enter the world of this woman, who knew more words in his so-called ancestral language than he did. Did he even have an ancestral language? From whose mouth?

“I don’t know if this was love or not, but if what he felt about her was love, it was love-unto-death from the very beginning.

“Everyone and everything there loved her. In a desolate place, she was life — a woman giving meaning to what seemed like a dead environment, dead animals, dead vegetables, dead people, dead hearts. It was the power of her desire to learn that brought them all back to life.

“He loved to listen to her mind race. The fascinating thing is, ‘rain’ in Mohawk is ayokeanore. In Turkish, the word is yaghmur. Can you hear it? The Turkish word for ‘five,’ besh, is also the Cayuga word wish and the Mohawk wisk. The Mohawk negative yagh is the Turkish yok. Waktare, an Iroquois word — well, I shouldn’t say Iroquois, because that’s an idiotic French colonizers’ word for the Haudenosaunee people, I should say People of the Longhouse — anyway, waktare means ‘to speak,’ and the Yakut word is ittare. ‘To hide’ in Haudenosaunee is kasethai and kistya in Yakut. The word ‘three’ is ahsen in Mohawk, ahse in Tuscarora, uch in Turkish, ush in Yakut… Do you see how exciting?

“My father would stare at her and smile, as contented as a child listening to a fairy tale. But he did not see. He just wanted her to keep narrating sounds and languages to him for the rest of his life.

“I believe that this itself was a kind of love…”

The girl stopped for a moment, staring into space or maybe time. I considered offering some comment or question, but then she looked at me and her eyes seemed to hold me silent. Do not enter this story. Do not reroute its meaning. She continued.

“What did she think of him, my mother who fell into love with him, who agreed to take the most dangerous journey with him across water so much bigger than the hubris of a man? Why did she agree to go to North America with him? For what? Because he could not stop the rush of fever dreams telling him to go? To leave forever this forsaken place? To protect his family? Or for some dreamstory about America? Or for some even smaller reason? Because a man needs work to have worth, or a violence grows inside him?

“When the permafrost began to thaw in their area, the tusks of ancient mammoths began to rise from the mud like giant bony fingers. The past was not so dead, as it turns out, though the smell of death was everywhere. Of course, as always happens, some people made themselves rich by recovering the ivory.

“Yakutia had once been rich in farmland. But the melting of the permafrost turned the farmland into swamps or lakes; whole fields just caved in until they pulled down the ground and whole villages sank. Rivers around villages ran so fast that they swept neighborhoods away.

“My father worked for a while as a reindeer herder, but the pasturelands gave way to the rotten stench of plant and animal life that had been frozen for thousands of years, their decomposition coming back to life, an invisible stream of carbon dioxide and gas pluming into the atmosphere.

“They’d heard of massive craters popping open on the Yamal Peninsula, created during the eruptions of methane gas that happened as the permafrost thawed. They were all waiting for the ground under their feet to explode.

“One of the last times my father herded reindeer, he found a she-calf stuck in a mud lake. One of its eyes had been gouged somehow. My father pulled the calf free and took it home. He thought about slaughtering and eating it, but Svajonė wouldn’t let him. Instead, she sewed its eye shut, nursed it with a bottle, and brought it back to health. When I was a baby, my father told me, I sometimes took naps curled up on a blanket next to the reindeer’s stomach. The reindeer protected me, or so Svajonė believed.

“When my father was just a person living on the edges of wanting to be alive at all, nothing really mattered to him. Who he was — if he lived or died — didn’t matter in this place no one knew existed. After Svajonė, everything mattered so acutely that he almost couldn’t breathe. One night, he broke down and told her he was afraid. Afraid for her. Afraid for me and my unborn brother. He knew she was happy, but he begged her to leave. He told her he knew someone who could find him work in America, or what was left of it.

“She stared at him a long time. Then — as if her mind had already arrived at the place he meant to take us — she said, The Haudenosaunee languages include Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Huron-Wyandot. Among others. When we leave, those are the languages I want to study next. The death of languages is what precedes the death of the world.

“They married in the woods, my mother and father, a ritual of their own making.

“My brother was born shortly before they tried to leave to cross the waters.

“In that moment of time, we were a family. Now, all of that is lost forever. Like a lost language. Like a forgotten word.”

She fell silent.

I felt the room soften when she stopped speaking. She’d been using her hands a great deal while she spoke; now they dropped to her sides like objects without use. A lamp flickered and then went out, giving the moment an eerie punctuation.

Her story held me caught, like some great epoch brought to stillness after a seizure. The story of a mother’s death, maybe also the story of all mothers, the dead and the living. “I don’t know what to say,” I said in a kind of breathless gasp. “Your story, your song of your mother, is beautiful.” After that, I would have done anything for this girl.

—

Before I die, I want to give everything back.

To mothers. Everything our mothers took from us when they couldn’t understand how to exist inside the impossible contradictions; everything that was taken from our mothers as a means of keeping the house, the country, the world in order. I would give them back their arms, their legs. Return to them their heads, their hair, their lips and eyes. Mothers, here are your bound and heavy hearts, stricken by the beatings they tricked you into. Mothers, I give your body back to land, your original intimacy. Most of all, I give mothers back their breasts, their wombs, their cunts, their desire.

I would set us free from the word mother. May your body be yours again; may your blood belong to you again. Even to the dead mothers: may your body belong to whatever you might have become, had you not been strapped to the service of breeding.

And to the blossom of every girl ever born: May that violent rush of cosmic possibility in your body, between your legs, be let loose from reproduction. May you open yourself to the cosmos, creating new constellations. May it wreck the wrong world back to life.

The Lament of the Butcher’s Daughter

Mikael’s story — of the boy, and the woman on the sidewalk, and the life she held as hers escaped — made Lilly’s gut feel numb. The more he moved toward its inevitable conclusion, the heavier and hollower her own body seemed. She could almost feel what his next words would be, but she didn’t want them to be real.

As he narrated this story of a boy — as if some other boy were the matter — the fact of him sitting there in front of her receded. He was not a young man on the constant cusp of violence. He was not her lost brother. He was… possible again. His voice a storyteller’s. She needed the bathroom, but no way was she going now. She crossed one leg tightly over the other and kegeled and told herself, You will hold this in, no matter how much it hurts. You will hold this in if your eyes water an ocean.

Mikael looked different now as he spoke. He sat up and he used his hands. Lilly noticed how long his fingers were, how delicate his gestures. His hands were beautiful. His story began to make shapes in front of her. His voice traveling through time, or so it seemed.

“He picked the thing up and held it hard against his chest, like a ball. The baby girl. He’d caught a football exactly once in his life, almost by accident; the ball was meant for another boy, but he’d seen the physics in the air and reached up to snag it because he knew he could. Most of the time he’d spent around boys and balls involved getting hit in the skull, in the face, hit so hard in the chest that it knocked the wind out of him. He’d spent most of his physical education classes sitting on a stupid wooden bench alone, just him and his glasses, but now the coach yelled, Bring it to your chest, hard!

“And he did. With both arms, hard to his chest, he ran.

“In the furnace room, in the basement of his apartment building, the boy knew every hidden space: a million shadowy corners, tucked behind piles of things in storage. The room was as warm as a tub for hatching chickens, a device he’d seen in his science class. That was the thing: the warmth, and all the old things stored there, made the basement feel like a giant nest. And the sounds down there were cacophonous, one of his very favorite words. The furnace roared, and whatever it was connected to growled, and the pipes moaned and screeched, and just being at the bottom of things — all those floors above them, the cooking and cleaning and families and husbands yelling at wives and mothers yelling at children and women like Vera making their body songs all day and night — it felt like all that sound might hide them.

“He’d learned how to use an eyedropper to feed baby chicks or baby birds fallen from trees. He knew how to feed abandoned kittens or puppies, even a baby ferret once, with food he’d chewed in his mouth first. Mother eagles did this. It was called regurgitation, another favorite word — not for its meaning but for the syllables.

“And the best thing of all was: he knew how to read better than anyone in the entire school, possibly including his teachers, which meant he could find whatever he needed to know about the idea of mother. In fact, the more he thought about it — about resting the baby girl inside his coat and an old blanket he found, and then carefully laying her down in an old wooden box — the more he believed he had a purpose. For the first time in his stupid boy life.

“He stared at the girl as she lay there, in the box, cooing like a pigeon. Then his heart seized: How to make the box rock? He scanned the room, spotted an old bike leaning against the wall. If he brought his father’s hacksaw down, he might be able to cut a rim in half. He ran upstairs to retrieve some water and saltines, which he chewed up while walking back down to the basement. After letting her suck on a washcloth doused in water, he made a kind of mush of the water and saltines, and put a little at a time on the end of his finger for her to suck. He had so much to learn.

“For the first time in his life, he’d found a reason to survive school. He set about constructing a kind of fort in a dark corner of the basement, away from sight and sound, where the box would be safe and protected. A place he could visit every moment he had: every morning before school, every afternoon as soon as he got home, and every night after dinner, before he went to bed.

“On the second day, he began to feed the tiny girl with a bottle. He warmed the milk patiently next to the furnace.

“On the third day, he stopped going to school. He pretended to go, he rode the bus, he got off the bus, he walked around the buildings, he walked home.

“On the fourth day, someone heard crying in the middle of the night.

“On the fifth day, his father found out he’d been skipping school and hit him so hard across the face that his glasses ended up in the next room, but he said nothing.

“On the sixth day, the baby smiled up at Mikael, and his entire world shifted on some imagined axis.

“On the seventh day, unbeknownst to Mikael, his father followed him down to the basement. He tried to take that beautiful baby girl. All that was left of Vera.

“On that day, the boy from nowhere had a choice to make.”

He looked at Lilly dead-on. “Didn’t he.”

—

Lilly was not sure she had taken a breath in more than an hour listening to Mikael narrate his story. Narrate a past that was forever gone to him. A self that simply slipped, like those of so many foster kids who go violent or dormant with trauma, or those who stray when it becomes clear that no one and no place will have them. An image of her own brother, lost to unimaginable violence — Was he alive? Dead? — crept up her throat and lodged in her temples. A sea of lost children surged in her psyche; most of the minors she worked with were lost to the system or worse.

“You see?” Mikael said, his voice now hard again, as his teen eyes sank back into the cinder-block room. “He was going to take her.” The fact of it seemed to punctuate his sentences. “When he bent over, I hit him. In the head. I had a bicycle-tire pump, so I used that. Did it hard, four times, so he couldn’t come back and attack me. I hit him harder than he’d ever hit me, I think. The second time, I heard a cracking sound. There was blood everywhere. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t alive.

“Then I went and got her box, her little box on rockers, and I put it over by the door where I knew I could grab her quickly. I had an old plastic lighter, and I started touching it to everything in the room that would burn. Then I grabbed the girl out of the box and I ran, with her tucked against my body. Up the stairs, out of the basement, out of the door, into the night. She did not cry. I ran and ran.

“I made it to the railyards, and I climbed onto a train before it left. We rode that way all night till we were in another city. Where they found me. After the building burned and all those people died.”

Now he looked at Lilly again, as if somehow what he knew, the story he told, had restored to him some temporary grasp on his life.

“I left her there, in the new city. And I want you to look for her.”

He reached up to pull back his collar, twisted his neck to show Lilly something that wasn’t there. “She has a little tattoo, right here on the back of her neck. I gave it to her with a needle and ink and fire. It says indigo. She cried when I did it, but only a little. Like she knew. I would never burn her in that basement — but I burned a word into her, so she’d have it and no one else could take it.”

Lilly knew something too. From the file. She couldn’t say it, but Mikael could tell.

“I know about the skull they found. I don’t know whose skull that was, what baby it was. But I heard about the police report. Maybe someone killed their baby there because they couldn’t feed it. I don’t know. People in the building were always doing things for money. One man sold his wife, his young wife, Albanian.

“They said someone saw me with a baby, but no one saw me. Except my father.

“I want you to find her. I left her on the doorstep of a blue-painted house in that city. The one where they found me. You must have it in the notes. I told them all, but no one here believes me. Go find her. He was going to take her. My father was an animal. But only to children. Do you understand? My father is not my father. He stole me. He took a baby. To sell for money. Only no one wanted me. He was a fucking thief.”

Mikael slammed his hands onto the table, loud enough for the guards to hear. He picked up the twisted gray rope of umbilical cord, nestled it under his shirt, and dared her with his eyes to tell.

She would not. But neither did she have any clue what to do with what he’d told her. Who would believe a story like that?

The air in the room disappeared, as if some vacuum had sucked it away.

Lilly felt marooned — in a time between her life and his, between foster fathers and war-criminal fathers, between lost sons and daughters untethered from families. Mothers emptied out of children and left for dead. Lost in a scatter that was both ancestral and geographic.

Brother.

Was there really a baby out there? Or was Mikael just a hard teenager making up a story about a lost girl just to save his ass, a boy lying on his way to becoming a violent man?

Aurora and the Water Girl

And so, in anticipation of the coming Raid, I decided: we would empty the very womb of my Rooms, leaving only the evidence of pleasure and pain. They would find my creations, but not these children.

In advance, I made three choices that I knew would create great consternation among my clients, my colleagues, and my friends: I chose not to tell my dear Frédéric, with confidence that the grief and loss would only contribute to his artistic practice. For grief and loss, when they do not kill you, engender creation. I would leave him a parting gift that he could not forget.

I chose to believe a girl I barely knew, a girl who claimed that the water is the only way; it seemed insane. I don’t know what to think about the story Liza told me. But the pull she seeded within me was unstoppable. And so we struck a bold trade, one that will hold whether or not we succeed in saving these children. In all times, it is worth the attempt. Children are what was or is or will be the best of us. Stand at the gravesite of a child who died too young from this wrong world we’ve made, as I did too many times during the war, as I have too many times when a child’s labor is exploited to death. Tell me what you feel in your body as you stand at their grave. What you feel? It has no linear time. It does not exist in linear time. The grief crosses all times.

This was the last night I would create a Room for my beloved Frédéric, but he did not know this. I had mapped out the plan on that odd night when I met Liza and made our secret trade, and I held the secret inside my body as if my body could still hold treasured secrets. The scene we played out reminded me of what was last best about both of us, that we had once been unafraid children who could imagine anything.

As for the children from Room 8, we invented a private ritual for our journey. Each child held an apple in a half bite in their mouth. They stood in a great circle, all apple-mouthed. Then, on my command, each child knocked the apple from another’s mouth, so that the rest of the apple flew away, leaving only a small bite between their teeth. The force of knocking the apple from another’s mouth a reminder that anything a woman or child wants in the world will be forcefully taken from them unless they bite down — an animal truth. One boy accidentally socked another boy in the jaw, missing the apple at first, because he still hadn’t mastered coordination with his left hand, having lost his right. But the two boys simply tried again and got it right the second time, punching each other in the shoulder upon completion.

And the girls? One lost a front tooth, her mouth left bloody, the tooth lodged in the apple. She laughed. I felt something like love, I think. Or perhaps just kinship.

When we completed our ritual, Liza led us to the river’s edge. The night and dark were kind to us. There was a fog. One by one, when Liza said jump, we leapt into the river — with Liza herself directly behind us.

Liza gathered all the children around her in the water, then reached out and commandeered a rickety stray boat floating nearby, herding us all over the side into the boat, placing one strong girl and one boy at the oars. Once we were safely under way, she placed what looked like a squirming bald baby rodent into my hand. I recoiled but managed to hold on to the thing. “Oh my god,” I said. “What is this creature?”

“A leucistic axolotl,” she said, cupping my hand in hers as if to guide me. “Now, you must swallow it.”

I must…?

I was less than thrilled.

She thrust the creature toward my face. “Do it now, please. While we are on the water.”

“Why on earth should I swallow this creature?” A reasonable question, you might think, but even as I uttered it, I realized how unlike me it was. I felt immediately ashamed for my lack of courage — my lack of imagination.

Liza looked down at my skirt. Reaching over, she lifted the fabric, then knelt down, at knee level, and traced the roses on my prosthetic with her hand.

“Your leg,” she said, and then she did something unexpected: she stood up again and gestured dramatically at the axolotl in my hand, as if she were on stage. “The axolotl can regrow its limbs, you know,” she said. “Ambystoma mexicanum, in Latin. The Nahuatl word axolotl means ‘walking fish.’ But it is not a fish. The axolotl is an amphibian. Scientists are obsessed with it, because its body can do things humans cannot. It can regenerate its tail, its legs, its central nervous system. The tissue of its most complex organs — the eye, the heart, even the brain.” Her eyes, I noticed, remained fixed on the prosthetic under my skirt.

Liza must have the heart of a scientist herself, I thought, for as the boys pushed our boat through the water, she continued her monologue on the traits of this amphibian wonder. Amniotes, I learned, deposit their fertilized eggs on land — or inside the mother — whereas anamniotes, such as fish and amphibians, lay their eggs in water. “Amphibians are anamniotes. They are able to exchange oxygen, carbon dioxide, and waste with the water that surrounds them — so that their embryos can complete their own growth without being poisoned. And axolotls are unique among amphibians, because they don’t develop lungs.” Instead, she explained, they had four different ways of breathing — a fact that I’ll admit did fascinate me.

Now my imagination was in thrall to two creatures before me — the resourceful little being squirming in my hand, and the black-haired girl regaling me with knowledge. How had she managed to seize my attention so thoroughly?

I looked again at the squirming being in my hand. It had a pinkish tint, little black lidless eyes, and a fan of feathery external gills on either side of its head. It did not look appetizing. But this girl had saved the only family I had ever known from a Raid. I owed her everything. So I picked the creature up by its tail, closed my eyes, said a tiny internal prayer that I would not throw up, whispered, “My apologies and my gratitude, tiny beast.” Then I improvised a toast—“To the Mother of Oceans!”—and swallowed it whole.

Liza must have seen the look of misgiving on my face as I swallowed. “It will be okay,” she told me. “I asked her first. The animals are coming back from everything we’ve done to them — but we have to be in our bodies differently. Swallow and breathe through your nose, so you can gain hold of the rest of your body and cross time. You can go get your leg, Lilly — and your son.”

I thought about legs. I pictured lilies. Your son, she’d said again. Maybe I’d misunderstood; maybe she was talking about the sun. If she could help me get these children to safety, I would be happy ending up anywhere under the sun.

I thought as hard as I could not to think about the taste of the axolotl, but instead about the taste of eggs. As if the word itself had gotten inside me.

Ethnography 4

Like so many others — maybe more than seventy-five thousand — my father was promised citizenship after the war. For years and years after he returned, he built and worked a ranch. Then, one day, his neighbors had a secret meeting and held a secret vote. In a group, they came to his door and knocked. My mother asked them in, and they came, though they looked uneasy. Eventually, it became clear why: the neighbors wanted my father out.

Before he had this land, my father had been a vaquero for a wealthy rancher in the next county. He had a good working relationship with a wealthy white rancher nearby, and he enlisted his advice and help. My father took the matter to court; the judge permitted the legal case to proceed — but the case dragged on for years. It was said that the Office of Surveyor of General Claims would sometimes take up to fifty years to process claims or finish the permissions for trials. My father lost all his money, and the ranch itself, in his effort to argue for his own rights. Rights that had been given to him by so-called law. Government promises. After that, my mother had a stroke — or she just stopped wanting to live, I’ve never been sure. She had to get a job as a maid; maybe she just worked herself to death. After he lost everything, my father started doing dangerous mining work. He lasted two small hungry exhausted years.

In our last days on my father’s ranch, there is one day I will never forget. My father was on horseback, tracking down a stray calf. My mother was drying dishes at the kitchen window, smiling, humming some little tune. My brothers were in the barn, probably shoveling hay or shit. I was at the kitchen table, eating a hard-boiled egg. I was a kid, so what did I know, but for a moment, it felt like we were real. Do you know what I mean? Like we could be a father, a mother, a son, my brothers laughing and cutting up in the barn, all of us making a life, near animals and land. It seemed so simple. Like a dream anyone could walk into and just… rest.

For the rest of my life, I dreamed about that egg.