We rode the waters to and from her like tides.
Back and forth and back and forth to the island, where she rose up and up. The pedestal was too wide for scaffolding, so after the iron frame was erected, some of us dangled from ropes and swung about inside, joining the pieces of her body. Endora was highly skilled at riveting. David was the most artful and efficient. I was quite delicately skilled with my hammer in hard-to-mold places — her nose, her eyes, her ears. We swarmed over steam-driven cranes and derricks like a swarm of human ants, conspiring and recombining, joining her body together.
Under our breath, we blessed the things we touched and made. From our different bodies and mouths and languages, blessings fell like flowers from our lips onto the ground and into the copper of her and into the water, every single day and night. Some of the blessings were for family members: May my mother or grandmother live through the night. May my husband be safe. May my brothers and sister find enough to eat. May this boy or this girl survive while they are held in the hands of others. Some were for the materials or the tools or the ropes and pulleys, or for the weather that surrounded and buffeted us: May this wood and plaster hold and carry us and all of our labor ever upward. May this steam-driven crane move her mighty neck and shoulders in the rhythm of our labor. May this storm pass us by without injury. And some of the blessings were malformed, half-thought, missing parts: May no one discover my fears, my secrets; may my family members not be deported; may the desires growing inside my body never be taken from me. May swirls of opium smoke comfort our suffering; may the laugh of an ample woman help me to breathe full in the chest; may this ache under my belly where my very sex seethes meet an equal want; may my desire be whetted without punishment or shame.
Because underneath our labor was our hunger.
We were men and women and humans and children of all different kinds. We were driven by our embodied existences: the need to eat, to shelter, to fuck, to work, to protect other bodies. We the body were driven to earn the money, since money was the only path to everything we needed: food and electricity and heat and blankets and medicine. Our bodies labored to the point of fatigue, so deep that we moved as if in a trance, like sleepwalkers.
It was our sweat that made her come. Our fucking burst open our fatigue and bred lust; our lust combusted into children. Some men loved women and the women loved the men back. Some men loved other men; some women, other women. There was a free flow of physical demand in the spaces we worked, in the workshops and warehouses and alleys and docks. Some of the children who worked among us had parents and others did not. Certain jobs were served best by small hands; others required a delicate touch. Some bodies did heavy work and some bodies bent and curled, tracing the shapes of the details we crafted. Some of us washed and cleaned and swept, carving an endless S in our backs. We worked together in waves and weaves, and when we went home at night, we were just ourselves again, apart from the work.
No one who worked to build her body died.
The girl slept on a blanket under Endora’s bed for many nights in a row. One night, after everyone else was asleep, the girl came to me. “You love David Chen,” she said, standing over my cot in the room I shared with John Joseph, Endora, and David. I could hear a symphony of soft snoring around me. But she was awake, and she meant for me to understand that she could see me. “You love him more than you’ve ever loved anything in your life. You desire him unto death.”
Her voice made my body tremble.
I looked across the room to where David lay sleeping. I had chosen a bed as far away from his as possible, but also one that would give me a good view of his back, so that I could watch over him as whatever voices and bodies and suffering moved through him in his sleep.
I do desire David unto death, god help me. His body, a color between white and wheat. His hair, the color of night. His torso, between muscle and some otherworldly fluid, its heavy grace apparent every time he moved in his sleep. When the sheet fell away, and I could see the glistening marks on his back, I thought of hundreds of feathers or wings. As if David were turning into a great crane. I wanted to crawl onto his cot and cup his body with my body, like a double parenthesis, something held inside another, where no one anywhere could find us. I want to push my cock into him I want to tendril my arm around to his waist to the velvet pulse of his cock I want to hold him and work the desire out of him in a rush. I want to put my face at the back of his neck I want him to violently throw me off him and then push my legs up until it feels like they will snap from my hips I want him to shove into me, sweet suction sweet thrust.
I also want none of this. I want David Chen to stay turned away from me, so that all there is of him is his back, the hieroglyphics writing the unsaid story of whatever happened to him, his back the new world. If he stays turned away from me, if he stays asleep, nothing and no one can ever take my love for him away. There is another kind of freedom in that.
Bless this man’s body. Bless his skin, his cock. Bless his sleep.
The girl pulled something from underneath her shirt and brought it over to me. A perfectly coiled white rope. “When do you feel most human?” she asked me.
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at David’s back: His hair. His shoulders. The rise of his hips. His feet. His sleep.
“This is kinbaku,” she said. “Kinbaku-bi means ‘the beauty of tight binding.’ This rope is made from hemp.” She placed the rope on my belly. “In the late Edo period in Japan, Seiu Ito studied the art of binding prisoners of war. Hojojutsu was used to capture and restrain prisoners, and sometimes to hold prisoners in place for execution or crucifixion or death by fire. Someone’s limbs might be tied to decrease their mobility. Rope loops at the neck, or anywhere blood vessels and nerves are, so that numbness might be achieved during struggle.” There must have been some look in my eye — a look of something unknown, unresolved — that made her pause, then continue. “Ask Aurora. She knows a different story from torture. David has met Aurora. He knows how to find her Rooms. Freedom isn’t what they say.”
I don’t say anything to the girl. For the rest of the night, I hold the rope tightly to my chest. My mouth goes wet, then dry, then wet again.
—
The next morning, she was gone. I’m not sure what the four of us were thinking about her anyway — did we think we could make a family inside our shared labor? Make this girl one of us?
But her words stayed with me. I did find Aurora. And her Rooms. And so did David.
It is possible that desire needs to let loose, here and now, before it is snuffed out by laws meant to suffocate and kill it. It is possible that we need to find the doors of the Rooms where we feel most human, and open them out toward the sky, the water, the world, and back to one another’s bodies.
I keep thinking about the broken shackle, the way it was supposed to be prominently held in the statue’s hand for all to see — and how it ended up near her foot, like something hidden or disappeared.
I keep thinking about how her skin changed from copper to green, its own kind of vitiligo.
After our work was completed, after we had no more reasons to be bound together, we broke apart. The breaking apart of the body of us happened in the same streets and political forums where Reconstruction had crumbled even as we were working. It happened in the same courts that crushed the rights and protections that had made us feel part of something larger than ourselves, as if we were living in a country that could see us and count us as real. It happened in the tightening grip of laws mandating separations of peoples in public schools, public places, public transportation, pulling us apart in restrooms and restaurants, pulling our very lips away from fountains of water.
Every day that passed, we were told in more and more ways that we could not fully exist. Could not vote. Could not hold a job. Could not get an education. We faced arrest, jail, violence, death, each of us in our own way. And I began to emerge between us, purely for survival reasons. It felt like the we of us couldn’t hold.
Endora found work at an orphanage. As a groundskeeper.
John Joseph returned to the nation north of here. He returned for many more ironworks projects in this city as it grew. So did his descendants.
For many years, Endora, John Joseph, David, and I would meet up in the fall and ride out together to see the statue. We’d make a toast together at her feet, smile and reminisce, then go back to our lives — the lives where we had to make a go of it, as Endora said, no matter what came next.
The statue did turn color over the years.
No other girl appeared.
Sometimes I found myself checking the level of the water.
David and I…
I can see the head of the statue over David’s shoulder through the window of our loft. The room is not large, but the windows stretch out for an entire wall. She’s something like a secular angel, crowned and stern, our labor inside her forever.
David stirs but does not wake. A light rain whispers morning.
Bless his exquisite form.
The story of workers is buried under the weight of every monument to progress or power. Our labor never reaches the height of the sacred. No one ever tells the story of how beautiful we were. How the body of us moved. How we lifted entire epochs.
May our story survive the rise of this city.
Cunt.”
The air in the room vibrates.
“Say it.” Aurora looks down at me kneeling beneath her on the carpet. “Say, ‘My cunt.’ ”
I do.
“Hold still,” she says.
I do.
Between her thighs, between the folds of her labia majora, is an apple. Most of the apple is visible. The rest of the fruit is nested inside her.
A quivering apple.
Her legs are neither pressed together nor apart; the space that exists between her legs is the width of the small red world.
This room and every object and texture in it — the lushness of the indigo carpet, the cherrywood tables and chairs, the deep-green velvet curtains skirting the floor like a woman’s dress, the mahogany bed layered in linens and satins of red and umber and black and blue, gold and orange and bone white — the hues of the body’s internal truths — makes a pocket for my soul in a way that life does not.
On my knees, in the Room of Kneelings, my hands bound behind my back with an intricate weave of rope braided from human hair, head and neck and spine already aching from looking up and up at the colossus of her, my face less than an inch from her cleft, I can see her labia and the hot wet seeping sap of her already making a kind of halo around the apple.
Between her legs… oh, but I can never see her legs as legs.
One of her legs, yes, is a leg. It stands her upright from beneath red and black velvet waves of skirt, spliced up the middle and pinned back like open curtains.
The other leg — there is no other leg. Where the other leg should be, to my right, is the leg I built for her. Rosewood inlaid with gold-leaf roses from ankle to hip, its hinged knee patterned after the Salem Leg but modified to mirror the fullness of a woman’s thigh, its slender foot painted with delicate red toenails.
The apple, deep red with a bit of yellow at the top curve — that yellow is somehow maddening; any painter would agree — is situated so close to Aurora’s cleft that it seems to convulse as she pleasures herself. I try to look past the apple, up toward her head, her eyes. It hurts to try too hard to see up the length of her. My mouth is as open as I can make a mouth, as she requested. My jaw torques, the apple suspended between my lips and the gaping mouth-sex of my cousin.
From this angle, she looks larger than life.
“Hold still, Frédéric,” she admonishes in a whisper, “or else.” Her fingers making tiny furious circles around her bulging and rouge-red clitoris. Her hips move in waves almost imperceptibly, making the motion all the more painfully ecstatic. My hands, bound behind my back, writhe like fat little hungry snakes.
An apple, the world.
I can smell the sweet inside the apple. I can smell her sweat and sex, a tang, a madness.
I don’t know how much longer my cock can take the waiting. I grind myself against air, careful not to make contact with Aurora lest she arrest her motion, wishing for some other body weight to meet the ache of mine, something, anything in the world, to push back against my anguished hips and purpled cock even if it kills me. It would be an acceptable way to die. But no weight comes.
As much as I can make myself a statue, I do not move. I see the heave of her breasts bound up in a slate-gray satin corset above me as her breathing cocks like the moment before a gunshot.
“Don’t breathe,” she commands. Our eyes lock.
It makes me feel a little insane to hold my mouth open while simultaneously holding my breath and staring hard enough at Aurora’s eyes — not the apple, not her sex — that my skull feels ready to break open. My bound thoughts my bound hands my stretched neck and spine now shrieking.
I want to bite more than I want to be alive.
Then sound.
Aurora’s moans animate the entire room. Her head rocks back. Her breasts spill from her corset. Two dangerous eyes.
She tightens her cleft around the apple, and for a moment, it looks as if the apple will be swallowed by the other mouth of her.
Then and only then does she come, hard enough to flood the apple, to send it into the waiting mouth of me. I catch it in a perfect bite. I come now too, in a full body spasm. I don’t recognize the sound I make.
Something feels final about this.
I surrender my body to her thrust.
Repeating things helped make order. To make a good trade, a carrier needs not to care about transgressing time. A carrier needs to slip her way into the barter. Sometimes you had to use objects and signs differently from the way other people did.
Penny.
Cord.
Apple.
Rope.
Laisvė pulled the umbilical cord out from her shirt, its purpled winding shape wet with river water. She smelled it, touched it with her tongue, then tucked it back beneath her shirt, next to her skin.
Thanks to the turtle’s mapping advice, she had traveled from one bay through ocean through another bay, finally to a river called the Patawomeck, an Algonquian name. The name the fish in the river used on her journey. The Natives in the Chesapeake region included the Piscataway, the Mattaponi, the Nanticoke, and the Pamunkey — the people of Powhatan. In 1613, the English colonists had abducted Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, who was living with her husband, Kocoum, in a Patawomeck village. Now, on the edge of the river where Laisvė had climbed onto the shore, a tourist plaque stared back at her, confronting her with the story.
Laisvė closed her eyes and took her mind back to the volumes of history she’d read in The Brook, still likely stacked against the wall of her father’s apartment. (In her chest, an ache hole around the word father. But it wasn’t time to go get her father, not yet. He had not reached the surface.) Laisvė remembered the drawings of Indians accompanying the stories in history books. Those books were filled with lies about people and objects and animals and land. Stories they called history that were really stories of conquest. Of seizing and holding something too tightly, of ending something not yours.
Somewhere amidst the loose fabric of the lie that Pocahontas saved the English captain’s life after his capture by Opechancanough, behind the romantic notion that she often brought provisions to save the colonists from starvation, beneath the myth that she continued to serve as a sort of English emissary ever after — underneath all this, a different story seethed. The story of the baby born as Amonute, who also went by the private name Matoaka before she was abducted by English colonists and accepted Christianity as a means of survival. The possibility of any other story in the world. A hundred other possible stories of a girl. What was her suffering? Her bravery? Her desires? Her delights? Who among us can go back to recover the story of girls made into false fictions?
The umbilical cord underneath Laisvė’s shirt seemed to wriggle a bit.
She reopened her eyes and read the plaque confronting her.
INDIANS POISONED AT PEACE MEETING
According to the plaque, in May 1623, another English captain had led his soldiers from Jamestown to meet with the Indian leaders here in Pamunkey territory. The Indians were returning English prisoners taken the previous year during war leader Opechancanough’s orchestrated attacks on encroaching English settlements along the rivers that joined here. At the meeting, the English called for a toast to seal the agreement, gave the Indians poisoned wine, and then fired upon them, injuring as many as one hundred and fifty, including Opechancanough and the chief of the Kiskiack. The English had hoped to assassinate Opechancanough, who was erroneously reported as having been slain during the incident. (They would not succeed at this until 1646.)
Laisvė spit on the tourist plaque; she wasn’t quite sure why, except that it was a static marker of story, which made her angry. The river made her the opposite of angry. “Thank you, river, for bringing me here,” she whispered to the water. “Thank you, trees, for witnessing the stupidity of humans.” Unlike people, rivers and trees and animals did not misunderstand her.
There were exactly three people in Laisvė’s life who could almost understand her way of being in the world: Joseph, whom she’d met in her close future when he was younger and she was older than now, as well as in her present when she was younger and he was the older one. Aurora, whom she’d met in the deep past, and who had said, Well, there’s nothing about your story that’s harder to believe than some idiotic old man living in the heavens spewing commandments and invading the bodies of women. And her mother, who had gone to water. None of the slippages in time or lives or ages made any difference to her. None of these people ever rejected her or doubted her; all understood that time moves, or they were people for whom life no longer had edges. They did not perceive living as more important than not living; they were not afraid to die.
None of them was her father, though, and that was a fact that hurt her heart. Her father could only live and die inside the space of their present tense, and for that reason, their love for each other had a corresponding mortality to it. Her watermother’s words: Listen, my love. You cannot save your father or your brother or me or anyone or the world even though you want to. But being multiplies and moves. That is the beauty of life. Not death, but energy in a state of constant change.
Something like a gap existed inside her father, perhaps evident in that place he went to during his seizures. Laisvė believed the place was real, just like the places where dreams live, or grief or pain or ecstasy. She believed that these places all carried a kind of vibrating pulse that only some people understood, although animals and trees and water and dirt and the sky and space all seemed to be woven through with it. Just as she believed in what her watermother had told her: Listen, my love… you can do something quite useful. You can turn time. You can move forward and backward. You can become a free-flowing form in motion, a bridge between being and beyond-being. You are no one’s hero. You are a living moment between time and water.
But what did beyond-being mean, exactly? Was the living moment between time and water a real place? When? How?
Tomorrow she would deliver the umbilical cord to the person who needed it. Tonight she nestled herself at the foot of a sycamore across from several box maples. She covered herself in leaves: tulip poplar, northern spicebush.
She thought about animals — about the short bursts of intense variation within species that occur after geologic catastrophe or upheavals in the environment. Like a meteor striking the earth, or the rapid diminishment of the ozone layer that led to glacial melt, the great Water Rise, and the social collapse of nations. A species could split and its evolution could take different paths. Any speciation event you could explain by anagenesis could also be explained by cladogenesis.
Hyracotherium evolved into
Mesohippus evolved into
Merychippus evolved into
Pliohippus evolved into
Equus: Horse, a direct ancestor of Hyracotherium, small changes over time gradually, for example, from three-pronged foot into hoof.
Or:
Hyracotherium goes extinct.
Ancestor X gives rise to Mesohippus.
Mesohippus goes extinct.
Ancestor Y gives rise to Merychippus.
Merychippus goes extinct.
Ancestor Z lineage gives rise to Pliohippus.
Pliohippus goes extinct.
Equus: Horse carries seven extant species traces that branched and braided.
When Pangaea split into Laurasia to the north, and Gondwanaland to the south, and then into continents, species living on the land masses split with them.
Polar bears and brown bears shared a common ancestor with the extinct Eurasian brown bear. Glaciation made movement southward difficult, isolating them. When the glaciers melted, inside the speed and power of climate change, hybridization between brown bears and polar bears quickly followed.
Laisvė pictured the Hawaiian archipelago. In her mind’s eye they looked like pieces of land breaking away from each other, each land mass forming its own ecology. She thought of the earless Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species. The hoary bat, also endangered. The vesper bat… extinct.
Could stories break free of stasis and equilibrium, give way to bursts of radical change? Could stories themselves become extinct? Could history? Could stories carry us differently? Could children branch off, away from their ancestors, like a body disassembled and reassembled in an otherwhere across time and space?
Laisvė pictured her baby brother breaking off from the ferry ride like a puzzle piece, traveling to another formation, or family, or species.
The woman she meant to meet next did not know yet that Laisvė carried an object that could help deliver something profoundly lost to a different boy.
She fingered the cord against her chest until sleep came for her.
Morning. The scent of river water, dirt, tree bark, and tiger lilies and a tiny grunting sound. Being awake meant moving toward a fountain, as the turtle had said: “Go to the fountain with the turtles spitting water.” Laisvė opened her eyes to orange and yellow: the smell of orange and yellow, the image of orange and yellow, and that curious tiny crunch or grunting sound that came with the colors. She pushed herself to sit still, with her hands in the dirt.
The dirt moved.
A tiny voice emerged. “It’s not a problem that you’re here, girl,” the dirt said. “Just don’t get in the way of our labor.”
Laisvė focused her attention closer to the ground. Terrestrial invertebrates. Class: Clitellata, order: Opisthopora, phylum: Annelida. Earthworms. Hundreds of them. Crawling and grunting and eating their way through the roots of a patch of tiger lilies hard by the river. Now that she was paying attention, she could hear a kind of low hum, the chatter of the worms as they worked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”
“Typical human. Just mind the ground,” the worm said. “We’ve got all this organic material to get through — protozoa, rotifers, nematodes, fungi, bacteria… and the project at hand, these invasive fuckers. Look at them. With their showy arrogant orange heads. Makes me sick.”
Laisvė didn’t need encouragement to admire the earthworms: their fluid-filled, hermaphroditic coelom chambers, their hydrostatic skeletons. Their central nervous systems, with their subpharyngeal ganglia, their ventral nerve cords, their bilobed brains made from a pair of perfect pear-shaped ganglia. The profound, all-consuming power of their guts. Even their commonplace names were beautiful to her: rainworm, dew worm, night crawler.
But mostly she loved their burrowing and their mating. How, as they drove down into the wet earth, they ate soil, extracting nutrients, decomposing leaves and roots and organic matter, their little tunnels aerating the soil, making way for air and water. How, after copulation, each worm would delightfully be the genetic father of some spawn and the genetic mother of the rest, the mating pair overlapping each other, exchanging sperm with each other, injecting eggs and sperm into each other inside a kind of ring formation, the fertilization happening outside of their bodies in little cocoons after mating, their families untethered from gender or the stupid false suction of the nuclear family in humans. Parthenogenetic.
“The tiger lilies,” Laisvė said gently, aiming her voice down at the worms. “They are so very beautiful, though.”
“Beautiful my ass,” the worm groused.
Laisvė heard a kind of raised murmur of agreement from the dirt.
“That’s how things go, isn’t it? The flashy beautiful thing gets all the goddamn attention. The so-called ugly thing close to the dirt gets the contempt. We move the goddamn earth around this entire planet. No credit. Not from humans.”
Laisvė considered this carefully. Aristotle had called earthworms the intestines of the soil. A few years ago, she had liberated a book of Darwin’s, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, from the library to give it a loving home with her and her father. She held worms in high regard. “I am sorry if I offended you. Anything I can do to help?”
“Your lot doesn’t help. You destroy. We were just talking about this with the mycelium. Hey, mycelium, what were you saying before? About the Amazon?”
A tender fan of white threads surfaced up through the dirt, speaking in a hundred tiny whispers. “It’s true. My god, your ignorance about the flora and fauna of the Amazon — staggering. Do you know there are around four thousand species of trees alone that none of your scientists have even named, much less analyzed? You have any idea how many fungi? I heard you finally ‘found’ a few new species of electric eels, that cobalt-blue tarantula, a couple of new river dolphins. I think also a tree that’s a hundred feet taller than the tallest tree you thought you knew of. At what point do you rethink your whole idea that these are ‘discoveries’? How does that word even have any meaning for you? Something exists just because you finally ‘found’ it? You ‘discovered’ it?”
Laisvė looked away. Her eye lit restlessly on the bark of a nearby tree, then back to her own skin. She felt something like shame except deeper.
Another worm picked up the point. “You ever seen a waxy monkey tree frog? That’s a more spectacular species than you. You know all the problems you’re having with bacteria resistance? What a man-made, idiotic problem. That frog’s skin could form the basis of a whole new arsenal of antibiotics. Did you know their skin has a protein that contains dermorphin, an opioid fifty times more potent than morphine? You know what you knuckleheads use dermorphin for? Doping thoroughbred horses. So your racehorses can ignore the pain you’re putting them through and run faster.”
The mycelium joined in: “There are seventy-five species of poison-dart frogs, in more colors than you have names for, with more than four hundred novel alkaloids in their skin.”
The first worm raised up some off the ground for emphasis. “You spend so much time mythologizing monsters! The vampire bat? Sure, it bites its prey, sucks the wound — but it also carries a unique anticoagulant in its spit. The vampire bat produces this substance you call draculin. Someday you’ll ‘discover’ that draculin is an effective agent for retarding clotting. But you’re too busy making up cutesy names and blaming the damn bats for your own idiotic diseases.”
Laisvė knelt down into the dirt.
The mycelium curled around her knees. “There are literally thousands of Amazonian fungi you haven’t even noticed yet. And all of you who don’t live here, who live in cities full of corporations and pollutants and death-driven, war-centered behavior, far away from the millions of people and billions of species of plants and animals who live outside those cities — what do you do? You let it burn.”
“Can I please help?” Laisvė felt infinitesimal. Not in size. In soul.
“Well,” the worm said, its tip leaning toward the tips of other worms as if conferring with them. “You could just pull up the tiger lilies around here. That way at least our work will be a little easier. But listen, word on the street has it that you’re after a lily of your own.”
Laisvė had already started pulling up flowers, strewing their carcasses in limp heaps, but now she paused. “What do you mean, worm? After a lily?”
The worm raised itself up from the dirt like a question mark. “Turtles sent word ahead of you. You’re after a girl, aren’t you? That’s your lily. She works about two miles from here, on foot, I think. But she’s not there right now. She eats her lunch nearly always at the foot of the fountain in the botanical gardens. Even when it rains! Stupid human. We don’t measure distances the way you do, but one or two miles on foot — that’s my best guess. We measure in eating and shitting and aerating soil, so our metrics won’t mean much to someone like you. Your kind should try it sometime.”
“Try what?”
“Eating dirt,” the worm said. A tiny chorus of worm laughter.
“Oh, that. I have tried it. When I was young, I used to eat handfuls of dirt, straight out of the ground. And apple cores. Seeds. Balls of paper. And pennies,” Laisvė said. “My father said it was pica. I never understood why it needed a name.”
“I see. Then we have some things in common. You should also try getting it on with the earth instead of destroying it with your own endless reproduction. You humans are all so full of yourselves! What a waste of being. Anyway. Go that way. Or just meditate on the word lily… I don’t know what kind of girl you are, but sometimes human-child spawn can travel differently, I’ve noticed. Once your species hits adulthood, it’s all over. Dead matter. Stasis. Stuck inside their own dramas.”
“I travel by water. Backward and forward in time,” Laisvė said.
“Well, there’s always the sewer system if you don’t want to walk. Unless swimming through shit is a problem for you. Humans are so… averse, to — what? Their own damn organic matter.”
A tiny group chuckle.
“All righty, then. Back to work.” The worm joined its worm brothersistermotherfather bodies in their labor. The sounds of their labor receding, Laisvė began to walk in the direction her imagination pulled her. In her mind’s eye, she could see a fountain with mermaids and seashells and turtles spitting water. She held it there as if it were a beacon.
On the streets, in this city and inside this time, garbage blew around on the ground. The closer she got to the buildings, to the city blocks in which they were arranged, the more the colors around her faded and a kind of monochrome took over; she felt surrounded by the smell of concrete and steel and hot dog stands and car exhaust. The more she walked, the more the cars multiplied. Streetlights and the clack of heels on pavement. Oddly curated lines of trees and shrubbery and lawns. A tidiness that made her tummy hurt. This time looked familiar — a history not so distant from her own, except that the buildings were intact and the electrical grid seemed functional and people looked to be engaged in things like jobs and driving to and from places and eating and business transactions — their labor hidden behind suits and high-rises and blocklike institutional buildings. The wind moved differently here, diverted by man-made things. By city being. The sound of the airspeak drowned out by engines, tires on pavement, horns, whistles, the occasional whine of a siren.
Laisvė heard the voices of people moving around her.
Then water.
Then she saw it: a fountain, as she had already seen inside her mind. Perched on the surrounding marble bench, a woman in a suit, her legs tucked under her like a doe’s. The fountain, more than the woman, drew Laisvė’s attention — the glory of it. Three Nereids, sea nymphs, served as corporeal support for basins above and below them. Atop the fountain was a crown, from which water spilled gracefully, falling from basin to basin below. The figures stood on a pedestal decorated with seashells. At the base, jets of water sprayed from the mouths of — yes, it was true, just as Bertrand said: “Look for a fountain with water-spitting turtles.”
A plaque on the fountain read the fountain of light and water, but in the sculpture, Laisvė saw only her mother. Not really her mother, but a kind of symbol, a reimagined archetype that set her mind and heart at ease. This was the place. She felt sure.
The woman seated there, eating a sandwich, looked rumpled — not her clothes, but her face. Something less than wrinkles but more than concern.
Laisvė walked up to the woman. She had a lanyard dangling from her neck, with a tiny image of her on a name tag — she looked crumpled there too — and a name: lilly juknevicius. Laisvė stared at her.
“Can I help you?” Agitation pricked the edges of the woman’s voice.
“No, but I have something important to trade,” Laisvė said.
“Oh,” she said, distracted, opening her bag as if looking for a scrap of food. “Listen, I—”
Laisvė persisted. “Do you have something for me?” She was certain what she needed was near. “Lilly, right?” Laisvė pointed to the name tag.
Laisvė watched as the woman rummaged around in her purse. At last, she sighed heavily, a nope, nothing here sigh, part performance, part relief.
Laisvė sat down next to Lilly. Lilly scooted over a bit, alarmed by the proximity.
“Try your sack,” Laisvė offered.
Lilly stared at Laisvė, who could read what she was trying to hide in her expression: Can’t a woman eat a fucking sandwich in peace? But something was happening within the stare this girl held her inside. Without looking away from the girl’s eyes, Lilly reached for an apple she knew was in her brown sack. She handed the apple over to the girl, who slowly, without speaking, reached into her clothing and pulled out a strange-looking purplish twist of unknown nature, as if some kind of trade was actually going down. Jesus. What is that, rotting meat? Some kind of dead snake? Just accept it and walk away, Lilly. At least you’ve given her something to eat.
Laisvė took the apple and released the twirl of purpled rope to Lilly. “This will help you help him,” she said.
Before Lilly could say a word, a speeding black van swerved up over the curb, skidding to a halt nearly right on top of them. A side door slid open and two men piled out, both dressed in dark clothes and glasses, both armed. Vests and helmets. No identifying details. Lilly gasped and curled backward, clutching the purplish object toward her breast as if it had great value.
“Your name!” she yelled.
Lilly’s chest constricted; her breathing locked in her throat. She could see the apple in the girl’s hand and hear her voice — then the two men snatched the girl’s small body up, all in one motion, and swallowed her into the belly of the van. Before the doors slammed shut, the girl said, “Liza! My name is Liza! It’s okay, it’s okay, I know where the story is going.” Then the van screeched back into gear and disappeared into the river of traffic alongside them.
Lilly felt a full-body oh my god overcome her. She began to shake.
—
Inside the belly of the black-windowed van, Laisvė makes a compass of her body. She needs to know what’s what.
The men in the van drive fast.
She is strapped in by a network of belts. Her mouth is covered in duct tape.
A black bag on her head smells like dirt.
The black van makes a lot of stops and starts and turns for a while; then not.
Open road to somewhere.
The belly of the van is dark, like the insides of whales or deep water.
The inside of the bag is dark.
Inside the dark is fear. Inside the fear is a memory, one she has carried too heavy, a piece at a time, in all the chambers of her heart. Of the Hiding. The way memory can spring you back in the space of a moment.
In this memory, she is cradled in the warmth of her father’s pickup. At a certain point in the workday, after taking a bite or two of a peanut butter sandwich and drinking some water, Laisvė had crawled up into the driver’s side of the truck to look at things. Her baby brother was nearby, nestled in blankets on the floor behind the cab, sucking on a bottle, spit bubbles forming on his lips, eyes droopy with sleep.
She could see the workers quite clearly. The pickup truck was parked very close to their worksite, probably dangerously close, but Aster and Joseph needed to make sure they could see the truck, the rusted red beast holding the children inside. Most of the laborers were on the ground, working to complete a base about the height of six men stacked vertically. But it wasn’t these laborers who had Laisvė’s attention. Joseph was so high in the sky, he looked nonhuman, except that he walked across his rusted-orange iron beam one human foot at a time. Just below him, Aster was walking a different iron beam in the opposite direction. Each man had a rope tied around his body — secured to something, she imagined — but before she could puzzle out how the harnesses worked, she felt a spike of fever. Her vision doubled, then tripled, then blurred into a hot haze. But she did not close her eyes. Something was emerging, coming into focus, just as it might underwater. Her breath fogged the window of the truck.
Laisvė took her fist and rubbed a small portal through the fog on the window. Where first she had seen only her father and Joseph, now she saw Kem and David Chen, John Joseph, and Endora too, all swinging around the iron, the body of them in motion like an organism, sort of coming apart but also holding together, like bees in a honeycomb. David Chen the most graceful of all, swinging between beams, almost in flight, the people in and out of time, in and out of vision — and then she was with them or in them or something; she was so close, she could see the sweat on Joseph’s biceps and forearms, the bite of Endora’s jaw and her unruly hair and eyes, the blue cross on Endora’s neck, and a hint of the white feathers crawling a bit up the neck of David Chen. She could see her father’s eyes — only now they looked unusually deep, like pools or moon pods, not dead as they often were with the weight of loss and grief. The nexus of past and present and their bodies and their work — all these together, she realized somehow, were the fever in her. And a kind of calm came with it.
—
In the van, Laisvė smells the sweat of the uniformed men. Power smells like the sweat of men mixed with the scent of gunmetal. Laisvė thinks of how people often see danger where change is happening, and then her fear floats away.
In the van, she closes herself up.
The sweat of the men becomes the smell of salt.
The smell of salt becomes the possibility of an ocean.
She thinks, I am in the belly of a whale.
Since I am in the belly of a whale, I can go anywhere.
Imagine the bottom of the ocean, motherwaters.
No, don’t imagine it. See it. In this dark underneath this hood.
Let loose your imagination.
The floor of this van is the belly of the whale.
There are no wheels or walls.
There are no men; the men in the van washed up on a shore somewhere, thrown onto land from a wave.
Just baleen plates, sifting foreign matter out and nutrients in.
In the belly of the whale, she rests and rolls in wet.
Laisvė puts her hands on the inside wall of the whale and closes her eyes. A great humming emerges, threaded through the sounds of their travel. The humming vibrates through Laisvė’s entire body.
“Have you ever swallowed a man?” Laisvė asks the whale.
“What on earth?” the whale responds. “No, I’ve never swallowed a man. That’s absurd. Do you have a name, dear?”
“Liza. Do you?”
“Well, Balaenoptera musculus, but that’s in your language. If you like, you can call me Bal. I think humans are comforted by names, isn’t that right?”
Laisvė gives thought to the question. “Yes, I think names and naming do matter a lot. For good or bad. Also, I think names can slip their meanings.”
The whale continues. “I see. You may be right about that. I’m not familiar with meaning-making gestures in your species — you seem so lost and angry all the time. Like you have no songs in you. Anyway, the mythology that we swallow men—that didn’t come from us. That story emerged because the moment your kind catches sight of us a fear emerges in them from our so-called monstrous size, or maybe from a fear of drowning; and that fear needs someplace to go. Or that seems to be true of most humans, at least. The more interesting of you seem to be more inclined to see us as an instance of the sublime. Anyway, I’ve long understood that our size is the key. That’s the whole idea of monsters, how you got from monster to monstrosity. You’ve turned my gaping mouth into an icon of danger even as I go on eating krill, not men, as I always have.”
Laisvė looked around the belly of the whale: luminescent pinks and blues and grays, surfaces slick with digestive goo.
“Think about that,” Bal said. “Krill! My teeth are not like daggers. They’re more like enormous unruly hair. They’re not even teeth, really — they’re plates.”
Laisvė stared at the roof of the whale, then out toward the baleen plates. “Yes,” she said. “I know. They’re filter-feeding systems. You take in water filled with krill, then push it back out in a great heave, so that the krill gets filtered by the baleen. I read that it’s made from keratin. My fingernails and hair have keratin too.”
“Girl, are you considered different from others on land?”
Again she gave the question silence and thought. “Yes. I think I am. That’s one reason I need to be hidden. I think maybe I’m not quite right. I talk too much about too many things and sometimes I make mistakes. I read books from the library.” She paused, caught by a memory. “I did read a story, once, about a whale swallowing a man. But I didn’t… believe it, exactly.”
“I see,” said Bal. “Well, the evolution of my mouth began before you can imagine. Maybe in the Oligocene epoch, when Antarctica became more isolated from Gondwanaland and the West Wind Drift was formed. It’s possible we had teeth then. Some stories say so. Some ancestors believe the stories. If so, our teeth must have evolved over many years into baleen. I don’t know where teeth go across epochs. Have you read about the Antarctic Convergence, where the warm waters of the sub-Antarctic meet the cold water of the Antarctic? That stirs up nutrients and food chains for many species. Including the upwelling of krill. You see?”
Laisvė nodded.
“I’m thinking that all those stories about leviathans may have been connected to the evolution of teeth in my kind. So many stories. Always swallowing men.”
Laisvė stood up. “In the Christian New Testament, Jonah appears at least twice. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The ‘sign of Jonah’ is invoked by Jesus — it’s a miracle, since he comes back to life after living for three days inside a whale.”
“Can you picture that? Living inside a whale?” said Bal.
“Not until just now,” Laisvė said.
“What’s it like for you?” Bal asked.
“Amniotic,” Laisvė said. “I am a very good swimmer. In Judaism, the Book of Jonah concerns a minor prophet included in the Tanakh. Jonah, in Judaism, was also swallowed by a giant fish and brought back to life. The Book of Jonah is read every year in Hebrew on Yom Kippur. In this story, the fish is said to have been of a primordial era. The inside of the fish was a synagogue, and the eyes were windows.”
“That’s not a bad metaphor,” Bal said.
“In the Quran, Jonah appears as a prophet faithful to Allah. Dhul-Nun, or ‘the one of the fish,’ is swallowed by a big fish,” Laisvė continued. “He stayed for a few days in the belly. A Persian historian named Al-Tabari wrote in the ninth century that Allah made the body of the fish transparent so that Jonah could see ‘wonders of the deep.’ He also reported that Jonah could hear the fish singing.” She walked toward the front of Bal’s cavernous gut. “I’ve always loved that image. A transparent whale.”
Bal sighed hugely. Her gut shook and Laisvė fell onto her back. “So many stories. Heaped upon one another. I’ve never eaten a man. No whale that I know of, in any lineage, ever has. But the stories seem important to your species. Doesn’t it seem strange, in all these years, that no one tries to learn the truth from the whales? I could tell you stories… the ones we tell about your lot, for instance. You wouldn’t like them, though.”
“I might,” Laisvė said. “I am unusually fond of storytelling. Try me.”
“Here’s one. In 1830, in the waters off the island of Mocha near Chile, an albino sperm whale was killed. The whale was said to have more than twenty harpoons in his back. Sailors at the time described the whale as a ferocious monster. No one asked the whale. Or any whales around. At the time, your people called him Mocha Dick, after the island. You probably know him by another name, from a story about a monstrous whale. But we have a different story.
“Our story is about those twenty harpoons in his back, about the glow of his magnificent skin at night under the moon, about his son and his daughter and those kindred souls he swam with. How he led the great journeys through the Antarctic Convergence, where the roil of the waters stirs up nutrients for many species. Those twenty harpoons? To us, they were points in the night sky.”
“You mean like an undiscovered constellation?” Laisvė asked.
“No, no. The constellations you people imagine are nothing to do with us. For us, the points in the night sky are like story maps.”
“That white whale who carried the harpoons in his back… the stars in the sky are a map to where?” Laisvė asked.
“To our dying grounds. Where our bodies, as they decay, become the life source for other ocean species. And the white of the whale is understood as dying light, like stars, and the black of night, like the black of many whales, is seen as lighting the way for the living.”
Laisvė’s eyes stung with tears. “You mean like beacons or guides? Black light in the water?”
“Yes,” Bal said. “Black is the cosmos. Creation. Life itself.”
They moved in silence for some time.
“I’ve heard recordings of whale songs,” Laisvė said. “They’re not ferocious. They are beautiful.”
Bal’s voice inside the belly vibrated her whole body now. “Here is a story for you — about your species. We will all die, we whales. But your species will not care about the history we are carrying. You won’t care how much older we are than you, how we care for and carry our dead, how we emerged from the time before time, how much older water and mountains and trees are than you. Your species will likely continue to obsess on things like whales being sea monsters, or black being dark or without light — or on idiotic economic things, like the fact that the Antarctic current helps preserve shipwrecks from wood-boring shipworms. You’ll keep searching for buried treasure, at the bottom of the ocean, in the melting ice of Siberia, under the ground. You’ll keep destroying yourselves.
“You will all die too, is the thing. But you haven’t figured out how to make death-stories, and death-places, that have generative power.”
Laisvė took the story into her body without flinching.
“Tell them I’ve never swallowed a man, will you, dear?” Bal said. “Tell them that, when whales die and sink to the ocean floor, our decaying bodies create life, just like your shipwrecks create a new habitat.”
The whale paused a moment, then smiled. “I did once swallow a girl. But that story takes a hundred different forms, a hundred different songs. You can tell ’em that.”
The holding tanks, made of metal, are underwater. Aster can see the soldering, can imagine the process as a metalworker. So this is where they take us.
Aster’s anxiety about being underwater lives near his sternum. He thinks perhaps his oh god got stuck there — the oh god when his wife was shot and fell, the oh god of Laisvė’s plunge from the ferry, the oh god of never again seeing his infant son.
And not only those: the oh god of Joseph’s disappearance one night, the oh god of the air around Aster’s life shifting forever.
Right now, though, what he knows is that he can’t feel his feet. He wishes he could tell Joseph that the opposite of walking the iron is being at the bottom of the ocean, in an enormous puke-green steel tank with no windows and nothing to see except terrified people waiting to be taken away.
Taken where? There were rumors, but no one knew for sure, and no one ever came back. In place of all that nothingness, stories emerged. Maybe the detained people scooped up in the Raids were executed, their bodies dumped as fish food out in the ocean. Who would know? Maybe people were taken to some other island or country or piece of the world, to be deposited like trash and set loose to evolutionary entropy. Wasn’t Australia once a penal colony? Hadn’t Laisvė recited all that to him once, listing it all off the way she did? And what happened to Joseph? Did he sit in a tank exactly like this one?
He looked at his own arm, hooked up to an IV next to his shitty rickety cot. He did not feel particularly drugged, so perhaps the IV was simply a saline solution to make him look briefly cared for. He studied the faces of the others around him — their faces all like gray deflated balloons in the halting artificial light, as if all trace of race, class, or meaning could be erased simply by draining a detainee of blood and agency. Every once in a while, a low and strange vibration shook the entire tank, shook the floor, shook their cots, shook their shoulders and hearts. It was the sound of more detainees arriving, or perhaps someone coming to take them out and away through a kind of side orifice in the holding tank. The uniforms on the men who handled the people made no sense to Aster. They weren’t even uniforms, really, more like ad hoc military hand-me-downs, with boots. (Name your historical moment: there were always boots.)
Whatever happened next, he knew it would happen without his daughter unless he could get free of this place, and as his gaze traveled the walls of the holding tank, its ceiling as tall as a skyscraper, he thought of the story of James Bartley. Laisvė had been obsessed with the man, who was supposedly swallowed by a whale and survived. Aster knew well that the veracity of the story had faded with time, but Laisvė never lost interest in the story, the man, or whales. She had a kind of strange faith in their existence. She often drew pictures of the man inside the whale’s belly, cooking dinner, caring for his daughter, as if the whale’s belly were a room or a house.
“They say he was found bleached of skin from the whale’s gastric juices,” she said.
“That story isn’t true, Laisvė.”
“It is physically possible for a sperm whale to swallow a person whole. It is.”
“But not for the body to survive inside,” he said.
“How do you know? How would anyone know?”
And the question would hang suspended in the air between them — like most of her questions, which probably had answers but left him feeling lesser when he offered them.
Laisvė loved to tell Aster about whales. “When a whale dies in the ocean, it falls to the bottom and becomes a giant mound of food for fish, sharks, underwater animals. Some breach on the shore, or the half-eaten ocean carcasses wash up, which means more food for birds and other land creatures. Mammologists at the Royal Ontario Museum found a blue whale washed up in Newfoundland. They salvaged the heart by plastinating it.”
“Is plastinate even a word?” Aster knew the answer; he was just trying to keep his daughter talking, keep her telling these stories that so delighted her. He knows that plastinate is a word thanks to Laisvė, who has already recited this story to him, explained the word and the process, showed him a photo of a whale heart in a book. In his head, he can hear her.
First, extract.
Then dilate.
Ship.
Plastinate.
Cure.
During the plastinate phase, the heart is submerged in acetone. Over time, all the water molecules leave the tissue. Then the heart is soaked in a silicone polymer solution and left in a giant vacuum chamber, which drops the atmosphere around the heart to conditions resembling those in space. The polymer fills the organ.
“When the heart finally emerges after it is cured, even the grimy little hands of children in museums couldn’t penetrate the plastic-encased organ. Look! A blue whale heart is bigger than a person. You could actually climb inside one of the chambers.”
How do you search for a daughter when the world wishes you were both swallowed up and gone?
Laisvė had always wanted to know who she was, where she came from, and he could not answer her. He put his face in his hands. He felt the concave of his eye sockets, the mound of his nose, the hair on his face, the slit of his mouth. Where is my girl? And then a fact he knew well, as well as his own face, maybe better: She won’t go to the safe house. She will go to water.
Aster pulls the IV out of his arm, lets the line twirl and dangle like an umbilical cord. Blood, but not much; he holds a hand over it. He has no idea how long he has been in the holding tank, so he turns to the nearest person and asks. That person starts to cry. Aster leaves things alone.
—
When the Raid came, Aster was standing in the kitchen, cooking stew. He saw the cusp of winter through their window that day; soon they would be reinventing how to heat themselves, again calling on the best thing they had, their imaginations, to conjure survival. Heat bricks over fire in an alley. Wrap them in towels and put underneath bedcovers at night. Wear layers of newspaper or cardboard or plastic bags between your clothes and your coat.
Try not to have a seizure.
He saw snow, he remembers — the first flakes of snow, not yet falling, blowing directionless in the air. Laisvė’s red coat was hanging on a nail on the kitchen wall. When they came, she didn’t even have time to grab the coat.
How will my daughter survive without her coat?
Did they track her and find her? Did they enter the throat of the crawl tube under the kitchen sink and climb down after her? He feels as if his own heart might stop, might plasticize in his chest like a petrified apple. Did they find strands of her hair in the tunnel, perhaps where it took a sharp turn? Was there the faintest trace of blood? Did she hit her head in her rush to crawl as fast as her hands and knees could carry her? Did she scrape her skull against the wall looking back over her shoulder for me? Did they find any pieces of her at all? A shoe?
Or one of her beloved objects?
A few cots away, another detainee — this one a small child — starts to cry. A boy, barely more than an infant, yet already beginning to take shape, the way children evolve. The tank holds the hearts of too many submerged children. Aster walks over to the boy, sits next to him, puts his arm around the smaller body, then cradles him.
Everything Aster knows about tenderness he learned from his friend Joseph Tekanatoken.
“You’re the same age as my grandson,” Joseph had told him over and over. Joseph who took him under his wing, Joseph with more lines in his face than a map, Joseph whose father and grandfather were neither Canadian nor American but who traversed nations for work, Joseph from the Haudenosaunee Six Nations ironworkers, generations who built most of the city’s most famous buildings and bridges. Joseph from seven generations of Mohawks who walked the iron.
Joseph who disappeared in a Raid.
If Aster only knew who his ancestors were, he would have given that story to Laisvė. The men he worked with on the Sea Wall had taken him in because of a story he made up about his ancestors; Aster has no idea who his ancestors actually were. Maybe he was just a random man from nowhere, laboring on a massive ironwork, living illegally in this place, trying to feed his daughter.
She wanted to know who she was. He had no idea what story to tell.
He rubs the small back of the boy. The boy’s crying gets swallowed up by other ambient sounds.
Aster’s feet tingle. At the bottom of the holding tank, his body feels pressurized. His ears ache and his limbs are as heavy as lead. It isn’t true that men who walk the iron are not afraid of heights. He can vouch for it. They just want work and are willing to do what others aren’t to get it.
“In history and in the now,” Joseph always reminded him. Aster’s chest still convulsed every time he walked the iron. His hands still felt like a hundred butterflies alive in his fingertips. His legs still went numb. But his feet found the iron.
“Aster,” Joseph often told him. “You could close your eyes and your feet would still find the iron.” Then he’d add, “But goddamn, don’t ever close your eyes, okay? Don’t be a fucking idiot.”
Who are men when they’re untethered from fathers? From mothers? From daughters?
Is his son weightless inside, a floating boy somewhere out there in the world?
The boy beneath his hands — someone’s, anyone’s son — stops crying.
I know my father is nearing the surface of the water. I can feel him in my belly. Bal showed me how to feel the map between a belly and the stars.
I know what current to take to get there.
I know he’s probably wondering what happened to me. But he’s wondered that for a long time, ever since I first dove in after my mother.
The last thing I heard that day, before I dove into the water, was the wail of his voice. That’s how I know how to find him now, by the vibration he carries in his body.
I don’t know how old I am in this moment. It doesn’t matter. Though I feel like I might be midlife inside my body. And anyway, in the belly of a whale, there is no time.
I don’t know if my memory of the stories my mother told me is real, or if those memories are mixed-up fragments from my time carrying objects and turning time. I know that my mother was studying Yakut, and the people of the ice forests of Siberia, when she met my father. My father had no idea if he was related to those people or not, but they acted like he might be. They were kind. They didn’t treat him or any of us like outsiders. They helped my father to heal my mother when she was spit out of the prison.
So maybe the stories in my head are from her, or from the people we met there, or maybe they’re mixed up with stories my father told me. Or maybe the stories just keep multiplying, accumulating from my own witness of animals and trees and objects and water, repeating and repeating in waves.
So know this: When I say I remember my mother, I could mean anything. When I say once I had an infant brother, I could mean anything.
The currents are fastest near Antarctica if you are traveling through the time portals west to east, the same as if you were on a ship.
Highways between buildings and cities are not like riverways or oceanic currents. Man-made highways don’t lead to anything larger than themselves.
I do remember my mother telling me about Olonkho. The stories known as Olonkho are a collection of folktales from the Yakut. The Olonkho are like poem songs. Or like the singing I heard inside the whale belly. Or maybe like the sound I hear when I go to water, which has waves and repetitions I can’t explain properly to anyone. Or maybe like at night, when I look up at the Pleiades and see a girl with a sieve measuring out star showers where other people see other things.
My mother told me that anyone who performed Olonkho had to be a truly great singer or actor or poet. Many Olonkho have more than twenty thousand verses. I’ve never even heard of anything that long recited from memory. Then again, memory is just making stories, like I said. I once asked my mother if she could sing one to me. She said no. To sing a true Olonkho, she said, could last up to eight hours. Some Olonkho could take more than a month to perform. She said they’re not written down; that’s when she explained to me what oral traditions were, and how they are handed down by mouth from generation to generation.
She said, Just studying a thing isn’t the same thing as being part of a thing.
She said, Don’t take things that are not yours.
She also said, Step into stories at the places where they cross each other, at the cruces. Bring gifts. Let go of them.
I asked her if we could make one up. Our own pretend epic story. She laughed. When she laughed, her eyes made little wrinkles and I always wanted to climb into her lap then. To be inside her laughing. Inside her voice. Inside her body. All I remember about the story we started making together is the beginning.
The girl fish loved her water life, swimming with currents and against currents and rolling around onto her back and flipping her tail and breaching briefly midair with a sky twirl, suspended like an idea before plunging back into the deep-water world. There was nothing better than being a girl fish and there never would be. She lived in a building made from amber, with other girl fish, with turtles and whales and dolphins and seahorses and starfish.
We even made sure to sing it, and so we changed it a little every time we sang it, which didn’t matter, because that was part of the performance.
But that was as far as we got. Before my mother went to water.
—
My father’s wail is louder now. I think we must be close.
Traveling in a dark van and traveling in the belly of a whale and slipping across time and space are all very similar. To be a girl inside the gut of something bigger than you is a form of adaptation. Your body moving from one form to another.
Think of an object of great value sinking, slipping, moving through water. Sunken treasures have a way of rearranging the story. A ship at the bottom of the sea folds gently over into sand and barnacle and sea-creature ecosystems, losing its former worth and moorings, for a ship is built to float. Its sinking is a kind of failure — and yet, when someone finds the sunken thing, new value emerges. The ship changes forms when it goes from sailing the surface to wrecked at the bottom. The wreck changes forms after the dead people disintegrate and the cargo settles to sand.
For a time, unless the wreck is discovered, no one owns anything. The fish find homes and hiding places. Radar sweeps can take years to detect the great masses driven off course. Whole histories, life stories, and meanings fall away from existence, only to be rediscovered and attached to the new stories we make up because we need things to mean something besides nothing. We need human history to mean something. We need the things we do with our hands to mean something, not nothing. We need the sunken treasure to mean that something of human value, once lost, is found again; that something of ourselves has been salvaged and brought back in pieces to the surface; that something we thought dead and gone yet holds life. Delicate truths, delicate artifacts.
Fish need nothing from ships.
Whale bodies become a life source for fish and other ocean life when they decay.
I don’t know what happens, over time, to dead mothers at the bottom of the ocean. Or to brothers who float away.
We never finished making the story. Our mother-daughter story.
—
I can feel my father nearby now, inside the belly of a holding tank. Like a heartbeat inside a giant metal container.
When we arrive, I ask Bal to rest on the ocean floor.
She does.
We hold as still as a sunken statue.
“Memory is proof that imagination is a real place,” Bal says.
The whale’s body begins to dissolve, the walls of her gut begin to shimmer and soften and liquefy, until I am surrounded by the cage of her rib bones. Then the rib bones rise, slowly, with me embedded inside them, up and up from the ocean floor toward the surface. Colors go from black blue to deep blue to green blue and then a kind of indigo before what was the rib cage turns into the hull of a boat on the surface of the water.
The boat has a hull sturdy enough for passengers, blankets, and food and water. It is a kind of ferry between epochs. This carrier, like the whale, is and is not a boat. It is an allegory and it is real. I understand that now — what my mother taught me, what Bal said. How a story can be anything at any moment if we need it badly enough.
“May the boat travel well across time and space,” I say up into the night sky. I think I can see the white whale’s star map.
A small distance away from me, I see a great plume of aquamarine bubbling up on the surface. The gush of water is also a gush of bodies. Some of the bodies are alive; they thrash and squirm and yell. Some are dead; they float facedown with a melancholic serenity. Some of the bodies begin to sink; others are drubbing around to save themselves. I see a man trying to hold a young boy up so that the boy does not drown. I see the man’s gasping and struggling, I see the boy’s fear in his eyes.
Then I see that the man is my father.
As I row toward him, I sing the song my mother and I made up, inventing new words with each stroke. When I reach him, my father is crying amid the salt water, amid the sinking bodies around us. “Svajonė, Svajonė,” he wails. In his drowning, he must see me as my mother.
And then, “Laisvė!”
I can tell his strength is leaving. I can see he is on the verge of drowning. I climb down a rope ladder on the side of the boat. “Kick your legs! Hard,” I yell. My father looks like he is beaten by the water, but he is beating it back with his legs. Once my father is close enough to me, he lifts the baby boy above the water with both arms. With his last breath, he finds the strength to hand me the floating boy. He is right, the boy is heavy.
For a moment, my father and I lock eyes. The water between us calms. I reach out to him. He just stares at me, barely treading water. I say, “Father?”
“Laisvė, my love. My life.” He gurgles barely above the water’s swell, “This is the end of my story. The beginning of yours. I love you. Let me go to her. Svajonė. Let go.”
I remember my mother’s words: You cannot save your father. You cannot save your brother.
I remember the strength of dreams and water and stories, how they move differently: repetitions and associations, images and accumulations, fragmentations and displacements.
I feel Aster surrender to the gentle fall of the water. When I can no longer see him, when the image of Aster’s hands and arms and face are lost to dark water, I look up.
So many stars. Constellations that seem to come apart for a moment, then reunite, then part again. I close my eyes and reopen them. Suddenly, the stars seem to stitch new stories across the sky.
I put the toddler in the hull of a boat. I wrap a blanket around this child and ask the boat to hold it in its belly. I speak a prayer for protection up to the white whale stars in the sky.
Then I dive down after my father.
Fear is not with me on this journey. For to enter the depths has become a part of living a life. The baby I left on the boat is a floating boy. The descent I make now is toward father. At the bottom of the ocean, mother. Between them, my life, like a language you can endlessly rearrange.
In the ocean, bubbles rise like a second skin around my body. The water goes from dark green, to indigo blue, to midnight. The deeper I go, the more I enter a realm between light and dark. When I reach the floor of sand, tiny flickers of color blink and glide around me. Silver and blue fish make their undulations in huge schools. Underwater hills and valleys rise and fall. A glorious aquamarine and green octopus with hot-pink suckers on her tentacles slithers around coral and disappears into a rock cave. Neon-green anemones and red-stained starfish clutch geoformations, looking like decorations. Purple urchins and tube coral the color of rose blush dot rocks. The bell shapes of orange and blue giant jellyfish dangle their tentacles and oral arms like fluid lace as they pass by me.
What if home is this?
Why wasn’t I born to it? Why was I made to leave the lifewaters? Couldn’t I have been left like a creature from a fairy tale to inhabit a story?
My own hair sways before my face, black seaweed. Something is coming. A shape as big as a man. I part my own hair like a curtain. “Hello, Aster.”
“Hello, my beloved,” my father responds.
Aster does not look drowned. He looks as he did in life, weighted with grief, handsome but lost. The water between us brings him in and out of focus.
“May I bring you back to life?” I ask my father, although I can tell he is already in an afterdrowned place. I don’t know if I can revive him on any surface.
“I want to show you something,” Aster says, and he holds out his hand.
I take his hand underwater, there on the sea floor. We walk slowly. It is not possible for humans to do anything underwater quickly. We’ve lost our tails and skill. Our bipedalism keeps putting us upright. We walk some distance. Two seals tease a playful visit in my periphery, circling each other. Something looms ahead of us. At first, I think it’s a whale, but it is not.
As we approach, I make out the shape: some enormous sunken shipwreck.
“This is the SS Oregon,” Aster says, his voice reverberating. “In March of 1886, just fifteen miles from landing, the ship crashed into a schooner. There were only enough lifeboats for half of its 852 passengers. Another ship arrived shortly after the crash, so the passengers were saved, but the ship sank here. Until that moment, she was the fastest liner on the Atlantic.”
I can see what’s left of the hull and the iron frame of the decks. I can see the engine standing about twelve meters above the ocean floor, I can see several of the ship’s boilers, the propeller, the masts. The iron is covered with ghostly purple, green, and gray anemones. Small striped fish swerve in and around the carcass of her. Sea bass and blue cunners navigate the maze of sea fans and coral. Mussels line the shipwreck’s bones, strange thumb ridges. Limpets and barnacles adorn the spokes of the helm.
“Beautiful.” I sigh, not knowing what else to say. Aster is smiling. I try to remember other times I saw him smiling. With peace. I cannot. I start to ask him a question, but my mother appears, standing next to him, and I think maybe my heart swallows everything about me. Standing there together, they look wed.
Wet, I mean. Beautifully wet.
“There are more than three million shipwrecks spread across the planet,” I add. “They carry history.”
“Hello, Laisvė,” my mother says.
Whatever happens next, I know that I will be leaving the water alone again. This time, truly alone. But I also know that there is a floating boy in a boat above us, and I will not abandon him, even though my heart feels like it is rising up my throat into my mouth.
“Is there a story?” It’s all I know to ask.
“Yes,” my mother says. “My love, listen carefully. A tsunami is coming that will raise the waters even higher—”
“Tsunami — it means ‘harbor wave’ in Japanese,” I say, reaching back into my memory library. “But that’s not entirely accurate. A tsunami has nothing to do with harbors. Some people call them tidal waves, but that’s wrong too. Tsunamis have nothing to do with the tides, or the moon or the sun…” It’s hard to breathe. A world of words and images scrolls through my head: migration histories. The face of Bertrand. The voice of Bal. My brother as a baby. The laughs of worms.
“Do not be afraid, Laisvė. You’re right, my dearest. About the waves. These waves will destroy the rest of The Brook. They’ll destroy the Sea Wall too. But anything de-storied can be re-storied. These waves will reshape the order of things. But you are not part of the ending.”
“When will it happen?”
“It’s happening now, my soul. Do not be afraid.”
The sea floor lurches and vibrates. “I left a baby boy in the boat; I have to go—”
“It’s okay, Laisvė, love, the boat is also a whale. The floating boy is safe. The whale is descending. You’ll want to take the beautiful baby boy to the place where lilies meet the dawn. There you need to collect a different boy, a young man who is on the verge of creating new life — you have done so well, my love. You are so brave.”
“Who is this different boy? Is he a boy or a young man?”
“Everything about him is in his hands. He is not like other people. He doesn’t think like other people; he doesn’t speak or act like other people. He is misunderstood. He’s trapped in a time and place that cannot understand him. In that liminal space between boy and man. Like you are, between girl and woman.”
The sea floor undulates. Not violently. Gently.
“Is he like me?” My chest tightens. There’s never been a girl like you—that’s what my mother told me when she was alive. I don’t think she understood how heavy that would be to carry alone.
My mother stares at me. Her eyes glow very blue. Is it love, her eyes?
“A little,” she says. “Yes. The two of you both understand how water moves, how water will change the story. Sometimes you have to believe that people can yet be moved, even when it seems that they cannot. You both understand things differently, not the way other people do.”
Aster comes close to me now. He is still smiling. His smile is like a new word that has never been said. As if he’s entered a dream he never has to leave. A good dream. His smile is the answer.
I put my hand up to his face, his cheek. “Aster, is this your seizure place?”
“Laisvė, my perfect daughter,” he says, and I hear in his voice for the first time the absence of grief. I hear a giving way. “Do not be afraid. We are with you into the everything. We are in the air and the water and the earth, the plants and the animals. We are even in the night sky; we are made from everything in the cosmos. We arrive, we leave, we emerge, we dissolve. We are in the meteor, in this tsunami, in all the bones of whales on the floors of the world’s oceans. All the fish and creatures, all the roots and branches of trees, everything reaching into everything else.”
Is it love, what Aster says? I think this may be love. A great swelling of the sea that overtakes every story we have been told. The chance for a different story to emerge. Godless, and filled with animals and rearranged history pieces and the motion of elements.
“I love you. I think—” I say to them. Beautiful Aster and Svajonė.
The story of a star and a dream.
When I leave them, I enter the great waterways as a carrier, untethered from time and space. Perhaps I was meant to be a sea creature after all, but some slippage, some cosmic rupture, sent me through my mother’s body and spat me out on land like a wave throwing rocks onto the shore. Leaving me something like a marine mammal, or a terrestrial fish, or some creature from a folktale.
I think some people slip time and enter a life wrongly — or, if not wrongly, at least formed differently, mismatched with the material conditions around them. I do not think any god with some odd intention put them where they are. I think that beings emerge and decompose endlessly, like cosmic or oceanic particles, so whoever we are and wherever we were emerges and dissolves endlessly, like all matter and energy.
The innocence of children is the most complex system on the planet. We’ve simply gotten the story wrong, and thus raised legions of wrongly dispatched beings. We pretended that “innocent” meant “without sin.” But that’s not what innocent children born into this world think. No one asks us what we think.
Once I killed a boy to save another. The killing was easy, compared to blind cruelty.
Once, in the river water as it moved toward the sea, I asked Bertrand if he believed in god. He said, “What do you mean by ‘god,’ girl?” I said, “Some divine creator or creators, not wanting to give special privilege to any religious cosmology.”
Bertrand said, “What if I told you there’s a magical teapot between Earth and Mars, a teapot revolving around the sun, and that all life on this planet emerged one day from that teapot, poured out like tea? And what if a whole group of kooks got together and decided to formalize the story of this invisible teapot and, worse, to develop their own set of rules and laws of behavior based on their theories of teapot logic?”
“That just sounds stupid,” I said. “There’s no magical teapot in the sky.”
“Exactly,” Bertrand said. “This god business is absurd. It’s a fiction untethered from matter and energy. It’s got you all mucked up out there. I fear for your species. I always have. You keep looking up or down and inventing all manner of nonsense when everything about existence is neither up nor down, but always in motion and rhythm, all existence connected in waves and cycles and circles. I don’t mean to be rude, but your species is… well, not the smartest shrimp in the sea.
“By the way, I told the worms you were coming. Don’t be surprised if they’re grumpy. Worms aren’t too happy with the state of things lately.”
—
The whale returns. Her body brings a beautiful black glow to everything. A black shimmer everywhere. She gently opens her mouth and swallows me away from Aster and Svajonė, from their beautiful story. Through her baleen plates, before they close, I can see them; they hold each other close — a father, a mother — then dissolve. The baby boy is safe and sound inside the belly of the whale. After a few days of travel, the whale becomes a boat again, carrying us in her hull, ignoring human ideas of time and space, bringing us back to the surface of the world, where the sun is coming up and the lilies are blooming inside a different story.
The first time I met Laisvė, she was twenty years old. I was twenty years old. I know, you’ll say that’s not possible. Just let me tell the story, okay? Stories are quantum.
She was the most beautiful anything I’d ever seen, with the possible exception of a corn snake. Corn snakes, man, they have it bad. They often get mistaken for copperheads even though corn snakes are harmless to humans. They kill their prey by hugging them to death — ha! I mean constriction, of course. But I digress.
Laisvė’s skin the color of desert sand and her eyes a clear blue and her crazy black hair falling down her shoulders in unkempt waves.
At the time, I was living with my father, Flint, near a grain store. My father and I worked together on the early iron frame of the Sea Wall. We walked the iron up top. I don’t know if anyone understood fully how bad things were about to get; maybe we did, maybe not. The last great collapse was on the horizon. The great Water Rise. We heard about Raids here and there, to sweep refugees away, but not on any mass scale. Still, the signs were there — even about my father. One morning, one of the carabiners on his ropes failed and he dropped about eighty feet from the top beam we were working on. Right next to me. I mean, he fell like a stone, then jerked to a stop as the harness caught his fall, then dangled and swung. I saw the whole thing. There wasn’t time to be shocked, it happened so fast. But the image of him falling stuck with me. Like a felled bird, his arms outstretched, his back wide and strong.
The rats and mice were plentiful in our cabin next to the grain store; the corn snake was fat and so orange that I swear it glowed in the dark. Corn snakes are docile. They don’t like to bite unless they have to. The oldest corn snake in captivity lived to be more than thirty years old.
That corn snake was gorgeous. But no, not as gorgeous as this young woman walking into our cabin. She said, “Are you Joseph?”
My father named me after my ancestor John Joseph. Our families all originate with a female ancestor, but I never knew any of mine. My mother left my father when I was five, so I don’t think of her as an ancestor; I don’t think of her sisters, her sister’s daughters, or any of their daughters as ancestors either. I don’t know where any of those women are. Maybe the women leaving is why there are so many of us Josephs. I don’t know.
Living with men made a bitterness in me, but it was a bitterness I could trust. No one brought us into a longhouse to live. My father and I lived in a shack he built near the grain store. My father told me about my ancestor, John Joseph. He said that John Joseph was the best sky walker anyone ever knew. My father and I both walked the iron; our skill probably came from John Joseph, I don’t know.
Anyway. That night I was taking off my muddy boots to leave in the mudroom at the front of the cabin. First, I caught a glimpse of the snake. “Hey, snake,” I said, and I swear she smiled. But then I saw something moving that wasn’t the snake. It was a young woman walking into the mudroom. So I said, “Hey,” again, still taking off my shoes, trying to act cool.
She asked if I was Joseph, and I nodded. Then she said, “Throw water on me.”
I just minded my shoes. Didn’t look up or anything. Finished my business. When I finally looked up, I tried not to look too interested. I mean, maybe this girl was crazy. Maybe she had a weapon. She had something in her hand for sure, clenched in a tight fist. Finally, I replied: “Why the fuck would I want to throw water on you?”
“Well, it’s a fast way to figure out if I can trust you or not,” she said.
I sat there and stared at her for a bit. She didn’t look crazy. She looked beautiful. I could see her better now, half in moonlight, half in shadow. Jesus, man, I was tired. We’d worked our asses off that day. I knocked off before Flint, walked home on legs so tired they felt like someone else’s. I probably stank too. “You don’t think you can trust me? Ask the snake,” I said, gesturing to the corn snake. Then I pulled my shirt off. I had the intention of going to the outdoor shower. I stood up and began to walk toward the back of the cabin.
“I need to tell you something,” she said, following me.
“Is that so,” I said, not looking back.
“Yes. I need to make a trade with you. My mother told me to find you. She told me you’re a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. People of the Longhouse.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“My mother was a linguist. I love histories that live underneath history.”
“History. Okay. Right.”
I reached the shower stall and opened the chest-high wooden door. Once inside, I took off my pants and draped them over the door. I eyeballed the knife in the shower, just to remind myself where it was. She just kept talking. Almost like she couldn’t stop.
“I’ve read all the names, if you don’t believe me. Mohawks, People of the Flint; Oneidas, People of the Upright Stone; Onondagas, People of the Hills; Cayugas, People of the Great Swamp; Senecas, People of the Great Hill; Tuscaroras, the Shirt-Wearing People. I know about the clan mother structure. Oldest participatory democracy on earth.” She stopped talking and stared at the snake.
It was weird listening to her recite all that at me. I have no idea who her ancestors were, though she was definitely in the ballpark with mine. But me and my father were laborers — urban workers, city people, more than we were anything else anymore. We didn’t talk about ancestors much. Besides, how is anyone supposed to know who they are anymore? As I listened to her, the words seemed like they might belong to me and my body, even though they were coming out of her mouth and her body. Ordinarily, I would have just ignored her, because typical white person ignorant gibberish. But I couldn’t tell if this girl was white or what; she looked like she was from someplace else.
Then she came over to the wooden shower door and peeped over the top. “Are you the first people?” she asked.
Whoever the fuck this girl was, she had strong-ass orenda.
I finished washing off and put my pants back on. (Ordinarily, I would have walked naked back to the cabin but, well, this woman with all the words was here.) When I opened the door to the shower, I noticed her squatting down to talk to the corn snake.
“Snake, you are neither of the sky world nor of the underwater world below,” she said. “You are of the earth, floating on the back of a turtle. Bertrand told me.”
The snake didn’t say anything. Or, if she did, I didn’t hear it. (I did bring the knife in with me, though.)
I let her follow me into the cabin. I wondered where my father was; it was past time for him to be home from work. In the kitchen, I took an apple from a bowl on top of the refrigerator, then pulled the knife out of my pants pocket and cut it in half. When I handed her half, she pulled out a smaller knife of her own, cut her half into smaller pieces, and fed one to the snake.
Even if this woman was crazy, I’d decided, she was okay.
We ate our apple pieces looking at the floor. My hair hung wet on my back, cooling my body from the heat of the day’s work.
“I have a trade to make you,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. The snake uncurled and recurled herself in a corner.
Finally, she opened up that clenched fist of hers. She was holding some kind of coin — not shiny but dark; maybe dirty, maybe old.
“What kind of trade?” I said.
She started whispering, some kind of list, her words aimed at no one.
“The Flowing Hair cent. The Liberty Cap cent. The Draped Bust cent. The Classic Head cent. The Coronet cent. The Braided Hair cent. The Flying Eagle cent. The Indian Head cent. The first Lincoln penny.”
Then she turned back to me. “Some stories say that the figure on this penny is meant to be a woman in an Indian headdress,” she said, handing me the coin.
“Indian Head penny,” I said. “Yeah, that’s some bigoted shit, isn’t it?” Then I rubbed it and looked more closely at it. The year read 1877. “Hey, is this worth anything?”
“Not as much as the Flowing Hair cent,” she said. “At the time it was born, everyone says the cent woman looked insane.” She walked over to me till she was standing a little too close. Her hair smelled like night. Her eyes were the color of water. Her shoulders underneath my height made me want to touch them. I could feel her beauty in my jaw. No, not beauty like you’re thinking of it in other women. It was more a beauty from the inside. A beauty screaming.
“I’ll give it to you,” she said. “I’ll give you the whole collection — if you lie down with me. Now. Tonight.”
I took a step back. “Collection? What collection?”
“Your father isn’t coming home,” she said.
My heart started pounding.
She started to take off her dress, a dress I could now see was covered in indigo flowers. The flowers seemed to quiver, or maybe that was just my eyes playing tricks on me. I was about to try to stop her, but… my god. Her body. Her collarbones. The barely-there dip between her breasts. The skin of her belly, so soft that it looked like sand-colored velvet. Her hips. And down to the dark hair covering her sex or leading me down and in. And that goddamn coin. Which she put on the kitchen table. And then another — the crazy-hair-lady coin. She started pulling coins from her hair, one and then another and another, until coins were falling to the floor all around us. Where were they all coming from?
Then she got on top of the kitchen table. I eased my pants off my hips and down my thighs and over my knees, which, goddamn, were shaking some. Pulled my feet free. Climbed onto her. Coins everywhere.
On top of her, I could see the snake in the corner birthing her eggs. The piles of coins at our feet were growing all around us. The air smelled like copper and our sweat.
She was right; my father never came home. Not that night, not the next day, not for the weeks she stayed with me. He had fallen. He had died.
The grief and loss were as heavy as iron. He was all I had. He was a son of a bitch most of the time, but he was my son of a bitch. And he was the best iron walker there was. Ask anyone. The only one greater might have been my grandfather, John Joseph, but I never met him. He was just a story.
She said, “I will enter desire with you inside your loss. I will carry it with you inside our lovemaking until you can breathe again. Grief is an object you have to carry over time, like a body. Someday, you will be able to take care of me and my father in return.”
One night, as we lay coiled around each other, I asked her how she’d known what had happened to my father. This is the story she told.
“There was a whale.” She drew small objects on my chest with her finger. I could feel her speech and breath on my skin.
“I was in the current, on my way to an otherwhere, and the whale swallowed me. After I scraped my way beyond the baleen, and crawled across the tongue, and made my way down the tunnel of the whale’s throat, I could hear the whale’s voice vibrating the whale gut as well as my whole body. The whale was singing. Inside the whale’s belly, she carried me through the Antarctic current. I could hear the speed of things in the walls of her. The vibrations shook my whole body. We made our way through water. After a while, she stopped and vomited me out.
“I made the rest of my way through water to children. Then the whale became a boat. Then we came to my father, Aster.”
“The whale became your father?” I asked, her head against my skin and shoulder. I wanted her to become my body — I wanted to forge her to me, to solder our bodies together.
“No,” she said. “I mean, my father’s people…” But then she fell silent and licked my nipple instead of finishing her sentence. She straddled me.
“What about your father’s people?”
“I was going to tell you something about the Yakut, about Yakutia, but that’s just a story I could tell. Truth is, my father doesn’t have any people — as far as he knows, as far as I know. There are a hundred stories I could tell. One of them is about how the prisoners were rounded up in Yakutia, and about the long Road of Bones, where tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to gold mines and work camps and gulags in Siberia. More than a million laborers and prisoners traveled the Road of Bones. Geologists looking for gold deposits are still finding piles of soggy coffins and decaying bones. Everything there is resting on bones.”
I put my hands on her hips, then her breasts.
“Isn’t everything everywhere resting on bones?” I said.
“Yes, the past gets buried like that, and then comes back when people least expect it. Like ice melting away. Or water rising. The Indigenous death toll in this land, where we are, was probably more than thirteen million, but that’s not the story that got told.”
She leaned over me. Mouthed shapes on my neck. Her hair keeping the rest of the world out of sight.
“You are going to meet my father. When you’re an older man, I mean. My mother told me. You’re going to meet me again too, only I’ll be younger, just a girl. I know, I know. Don’t be afraid or confused. My father and my baby brother and I — when you’re older, you’re going to take care of us for a little while, like I’m taking care of you now. I am carrying you through this grief so that you don’t die or become terrible. Your father is gone. My father will die too. Everyone goes back to the motherwaters eventually. Then becomes something else.”
Laisvė stayed for a month. When she told me she’d be leaving, I gave her my knife. An object to carry, to prove we were real.
—
The next time I saw Laisvė—the second time — she was a child, just like she’d told me. Her father was frantically looking for work and somewhere to stay. And I was an older man. There was a baby boy too, but that story took a very sad turn.
When I met Aster, I wasn’t entirely sure it was her. But I knew Aster was a man who needed help, like a boy who’d lost his parents. I could feel it radiating out of him. Turns out, he’d lost his whole heart. He was gutted, living a kind of ghost-life. From what I understood, his wife had drowned, and his boy would float away, and there is just no way for a body to bear that weight. I understood I should love him. I mean, for fuck’s sake, whatever love means.
Love isn’t what we’ve been told it is.
Time isn’t either.
What it amounts to is, I met that young woman, I met that girl, out of order. Stories don’t care how we tell them. Stories take any shape they want. Not all stories happen with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’ve come to understand maybe they never do. End, that is.
I remembered something about my own mother when Laisvė left that first time. I remembered her saying to me, This is not the end of your story. It is the beginning.
Over the years, I always thought that Laisvė must have wanted a baby — that that’s why she came to me when I was twenty and she was a young woman. I even wondered if maybe she got pregnant when she was with me. But when I met her again as a child, I saw the error in that story. She didn’t want to have a baby.
I know because of something that happened when I met her again, when she was a girl. One morning, I was drinking coffee and Aster was showering and Laisvė was standing near the front window looking out at I don’t know what. I started wondering aloud about what she wanted to do, or be, when she grew up. “Someday you’ll fall in love,” I said. “Maybe start a family.” I don’t know why I said that. Maybe because of the piece of her future that I’d seen, or maybe just how her mess of black hair fell down her back and the way her shoulders squared off against the light from the window. She didn’t know what a beautiful young woman she would turn out to be.
She turned around and looked at me. “That right belongs to the planet, to plants and animals,” she said.
“What right?” I asked.
“The right to make a family. Species, genome, family…”
I’ll admit, I worried for her after that. I wasn’t sure of how she was in the head, of how she could possibly deal with it all. But when she came into my life with Aster, and I was an older man, I could not have loved them more. What else was there to do but love them? It was my turn to take care of something besides myself.
I started working at The Crisis in 1918. I worked under Jessie Redmon Fauset. What a time that was. The novels she would write changed my life. Her characters were Black working men and women — professionals. She was more than a mentor to me. So much more. She was a mirror I could use to see myself; she was a portal I could step through to something more. She wanted literature to split open so that more voices and stories and bodies could get through — forging a second passage as proud and profound artists. She birthed and nourished so many important voices: Langston Hughes. Countee Cullen. Claude McKay. Jean Toomer. Zora Neale Hurston. Arna Bontemps. Charles Chesnutt. Her younger half brother Arthur Fauset, the folklorist and activist.
I worked hard for Jessie. I proofread and typed up notes and just swam inside the ocean of her creative and editorial waters. As she started writing for The Brownies’ Book, the children’s magazine, I worked with her on that too. Nothing is more important than giving children stories they can grab on to and live by. Stories about gender, race, class, pride; stories that inspire children, that show them where they came from. For years, Jessie created the large majority of the content in The Brownies’ Book. Its pages were filled with African folktales. Before I had that job, most of the stories I read about Black girls were about slavery, or rape, or violence against Black women and girls. But even the advertising in The Brownies’ Book was devoted to education, schools, training classes, colleges, and universities.
Sometimes it seemed to me that Jessie did the work underneath everything that was gleaming on the surface of our lives. You know, like how mothers do. Like she was a creativity mother, but she was also an intellect — an intellectual mother. Sometimes, when I think about what work is, I think of that — how there is no place that recognizes “mother” as a form of employment, recognizes how many women mother us back to life.