Thrust: A Novel

Of Time and Water

Tell me the story again.”

Indigo sits under the kitchen table turning an object over in her small hands. Outside the window of their floating habitat, the water sloshes against the platforms. The sky is gray today, the water gray, or she’d be outside helping to plant more rosemary and potatoes and tomatoes in the floating greenhouse nearest their pod.

Miles inland, what was once The Brook has taken a different shape again; buildings have either lost their bearings and collapsed or changed form, like bodies bending and leaning. London plane trees, Norway maples, and Callery pear trees originally from Asia thread through the former streets and alleys, or rest fallen and uprooted with broken limbs becoming detritus or food for worms and insects. Pin oaks, stuck stubbornly in concrete, stand steadfast. Vegetation rewilds everything urban. Animals make their homes.

On water, the floating habitats spread out across the surface, or dip under into the bellies of aquatic dwellings; some bamboo-framed cylindrical structures punch skyward like stubborn thumbs. Crabs, oysters, lobsters, shrimp, northern pipefish, pufferfish, jellyfish, and tiny seahorses thrive in the riverway and ocean. Whales and seals have conversations regarding the stamina of sturgeons.

Mikael unrolls several large sheaths of drafting paper out onto the table in the kitchen. The blue ink of the drawings is almost like a language to him. Rooftop farms. Parks with paths that soak up water and reduce heat. Healing gardens. Education centers powered by environmentally generated electricity. Hydropower stations. Terraced farms that recycle organic waste. Floodplains remade into villages with giant retention ponds to collect rainwater. Indigo emerges from under the table, stands up, and looks at the drawings with him.

“That looks like a starfish,” she says of one.

“The habitats all have names that reflect their forms and inspirations — can you see?” He gently passes his hand over some of the forms. “The Sea Manta, gently undulating across the top of the water like the wings of manta rays, the belly of the structure dipping down into the ocean.”

“Yes! And the same colors — black on top, white on the bottom.”

He points to another. “The Tropos, a series of floating cities that turn and curl like seashells. Sea star habitats that radiate outward and turn. Marine nomad pods secured to shallow sea-floor areas in clusters like coral. Seascrapers diving down below the surface of the water and extending into the sky. Aquaponic hubs for floating food islands.” Every drawing a piece of the emerging Species Cohabitation Project.

“I see,” Indigo says, returning to her spot underneath the table. “Now can you tell me the story again?”

The desire of a child is everything.

He looks underneath the table. “You were pulled from the water by a magical water girl.” He sits. He starts to draw, waits for a response. “Then you grew a mermaid tail in place of legs.”

Indigo smiles beneath the weight of his drawing. “I don’t have a mermaid tail. I’m twelve. I know there’s no such thing as mermaids.” She reaches around to touch the back of her neck, where her name is written in blue ink forever.

“I know. I just wanted to see if you were listening.” He drops his head below the table to see her. “What’s that in your hand?”

She scooches around so that her back is to him.

“You were delivered by a beautiful aquanaut.”

“What’s an aquanaut?” She puts the object into her mouth, rolls her tongue over it, around it: Salt. Copper.

Mikael holds his breath, then pulls a blue pen from his pocket, starts sketching another transportation feature to the bridge. “An aquanaut is any person who remains under the water breathing at the ambient pressure long enough for the concentration of inert components of the breath, as dissolved in the body tissues, to reach equilibrium.”

“Saturation,” Indigo says.

“Yes. From the Latin word aqua and the Greek nautes. Water sailor. Like an astronaut, only in water. Much more phenomenal than a mermaid.”

“So Laisvė is… a water sailor?”

“Yes. Although that’s not exactly accurate. It’s just one translation. She thinks of herself as a carrier.”

Indigo begins to hum between sentences. Some tune of her own design. “Does she always bring people back and forth?”

“No!” Mikael laughs. “It’s kind of weird. Sometimes she brings old rusted things I can’t even understand. She’ll set something on the table, and I won’t even know what it is. One time, she brought up this old object with barnacles and coral and mussels all over it. It was found in the remains of a Roman shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901. The object dated to around 200 to 90 BC. The Antikythera Mechanism, they called it. It was a machine the ancient Greeks used to predict the positions of the stars and the motion of the sun and moon. It’s the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world; nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. I used to wonder if she stole it from a museum.”

“She’s a thief?”

“No. Not really. She carries things. It’s like she doesn’t truly care about the difference between people and objects, animals and building materials — treasures, lost things. Like everything has the same value as everything else. Except children. She pulls children from waters all over time.”

“Is something wrong with her?” Indigo’s brows make small wave shapes.

“No,” Mikael says a little too slowly.

“Is Laisvė my mother?” Indigo peers up at Mikael from the underneath of things, something in her mouth making her words a little off.

“That’s a hard question,” Mikael says. “In some ways, you were born of water. We all are, really. But it is true that Laisvė went to find you across time, she brought you here, and she lifted you up out of the water, into my arms.” He crouches down to her level. “Now spit whatever is in your mouth out into my hand, please.” You are something like the broken chain. You are something like an umbilical cord. You are a connection between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, the past and the present and the future. You are beautiful in a way language has not yet named.

“But babies don’t come from just water. I’ve read all about it. Babies come from their mother’s bellies after a sperm and an egg love each other.”

“We all came from water, if you think about it. We all move through water to get to the world,” Mikael reminds her. “Now spit.” He holds his hand out in front of her face.

“Am I an orphan?” Indigo’s last word warbles as she spits the object — an old coin — into his hand.

“No,” he says, his heartbeat loud in his ears. “There are many meanings to the word mother. Or father. Or family. Other kinds of stories. Other ways of coming into the world. We can learn to tell different stories to ourselves about who we are.” He palms Indigo’s cheek as softly as a whisper.

“Is my mother dead?” Indigo’s eyes are the word for it — this feeling Mikael has, to be lost, to be found, to have to invent the story in between over and over again, to surrender to unnameableness so that new words and sentences and myths might get born. He remembers Vera dying in the street. He remembers the day Laisvė brought him Indigo. The memories live in his hands, his hands making designs for life.

—

The night before Laisvė delivered Indigo to him, Mikael wept an ocean.

He dreamed of the habitats rising from the sea, reaching for the cosmos where the sky platforms were being constructed, then diving back down to the floor of the ocean, where the seascapes were nearing completion. He dreamed a beautiful collection of habitats spreading in all directions. Or it wasn’t a dream at all, it was his boyhood vision coming true in his life with Laisvė, his never-ending dream, turning into his life’s labor. He saw the surface of the ocean and the swell of the sky and the seam of the horizon.

But in the middle of the dream, a great dark mass emerged from the ocean and swallowed all the water away. What seemed impossible changed instantly. Next there was no sky, just the black of space, without stars. He rolled around, naked, in the emptiness. No sound except a kind of rushing in his ears, like when your own blood becomes too loud in your own head. This must be death, he thought. Something catastrophic must have occurred while I was sleeping. Mikael wept. He wept so violently from his floating place in space that his tears became cosmic torrents, like the sky was now the ocean. And then he was back in his bed.

He woke up dreaming that he was in a pool of sweat, only the water was real, it was just lapping outside his window, pushing gently in rhythmic waves against the platforms that made up the habitats. The water the thing between sky living and sea living, between earth and the cosmos, between past and present, between dream and real.

He stepped out onto the platform, felt the night air raise the hairs on his arms and legs. A light rain fell.

The water below him stirred. A kind of green glow drew his attention to the surface. He kneeled down, tried to touch it, and before he could make contact with the wet world, a child was bawling up at him, raised from the waters by a hand, an arm, a shoulder, and then Laisvė’s familiar face. A crying child, impossible to ignore. He dropped to his knees and scooped the infant up in his arms. He held it close to his chest. “Shhhhhhhhhhhh, little creature,” he whispered, patting its back gently.

“Look at the back of her neck,” Laisvė said, treading water, her voice filled with electricity. “I found her.”

As if she’d recovered a sunken treasure.

At first, Mikael didn’t know what Laisvė was talking about, but then the water and the baby and the word neck closed a circuit in his body. Could she…? He gently turned the baby’s head, just enough to see the tattoo.

“But how? How did you find her?” Mikael gasped, cradling the infant in his arms. The child was no longer crying.

“I thought of the color indigo,” Laisvė said, hoisting herself up from the water onto the platform. “There was a dead woman with a flowered dress, and that opened a portal up in the water. You know how I’ve told you — the motherwaters carry me. I found her in your previous time and place, in an orphan house run by women. Artists or lesbians or nuns or something. I knew it was her because of the tattoo,” she answered, as if any of that were possible.

And yet, with Laisvė, any story was possible.

—

“Look.”

Mikael follows Indigo’s outstretched arm all the way to her finger, pointing out the window. There he sees Laisvė, pulling herself up from the water onto the dock. He can’t tell if she looks old or young or neither. More and more, she seems less human and more… something else.

They walk out together to greet her, help her up out of the water.

Laisvė emerges midsentence. “I’m sure you know the first designs for Proteus, don’t you? They were pretty magnificent.” She pulls long wet curls of black hair away from her eyes. “Around the year 2020, Fabien Cousteau and this industrial designer, Yves Béhar, created a four-thousand-square-foot modular lab sixty feet underwater, off the coast of Curaçao. Fabien took after his grandfather Jacques, whose early Conshelf projects were meant to be precursors to future underwater villages. But your creations are much more phenomenal, Mikael.” She gazes out at the collection of habitats. “Look at the beauty. The vision.” Then she continues. “Anyway, this French diver, Henri Cosquer, found prehistoric cave paintings a hundred and twenty feet underwater. Beautiful animals. Bisons, horses, antelope, ibex — and penguins, seals, even jellyfish. There’s even an image that might be the first representation of murder! A human with a seal’s head pierced by a spear.”

Mikael hands Laisvė a towel. Indigo places a pair of sneakers near her feet. They know her stories don’t necessarily have beginnings, middles, or ends. They fragment and accumulate, however they happen to appear in Laisvė’s head. They’ve learned to listen differently.

Laisvė steps into the sneakers and dries her hair, her head tilted sideways, still talking. A few aquanauts in full gear emerge behind her, their oxygen tanks and wetsuits and masks making them look like odd sea creatures. Some are missing an arm or a leg or hand or a foot, but Mikael’s aquaprosthetic designs make them look as if they are really a new species of water creatures.

Laisvė continues her narration, delivering information, objects, ideas: “The habitat power supplies all check out — ocean, sun, wind… But we need to talk about the underwater farms and the pods. The labs and medical bays are solid, but the dormitories are… well, they’re kind of ugly. They can’t be ugly. Living underwater should feel like the dreams children have. We can’t have ugly.” She dries her hair. “The moon pool is perfect, though.”

“Why is it called a moon pool?” Indigo’s question folds into Laisvė’s monologue as they walk back into the habitat, painted indigo, cerulean, aquamarine, and midnight blue.

“Good question. Because, on very calm nights, the water under the rig reflects moonlight. Like the ocean is glowing open,” Laisvė says, “like a perfect portal. You know, portals are everything. Even a single thought can be a portal. A single word. You know, the way poetry moves.”

A Bedtime Story

Most people think the future is unbelievable, but that’s only because they think the past, the present, and the future are like lines going in a single direction. What Laisvė knows in her heart is that everything that we might become at first sounds unbelievable, like a speculative story or a fairy tale, both in the world and lifted a little away from it. Imagination leaping from sea into sky and back, like a beautiful black orca.

When Laisvė tells bedtime stories to the children, they sound different from the stories other mothers or sisters or wives or daughters tell. They gather around her in all shapes and sizes, differently bodied, differently abled, untethered from their origins.

Today she brings a treasure in the form of a poem by Emma Lazarus:

The children clap or smile or make their faces into questions. A girl who stands up, in her bold curiosity, asks, “Are we the tempest-tossed? Tempest means storm.”

“I think yes,” Laisvė says. “And I think the ancient lands and storied pomp — well, all that kind of… drowned.” The children laugh.

“Is there still a lamp?” a shy boy ventures.

“Yes. It’s underwater sometimes. But we can go see it.” She pulls something from her coat pocket — a clod of dirt. She pokes her finger around within it, turning up a few mycelia and a worm. “See these?”

The children get up and gather around her hand. “Are those roots?” asks one child with a wandering eye.

“Good guess,” she answers. “But no. These are mycelia, from which grow mushrooms. Fungi are heterotrophs.”

“What’s a heteruff?”

“Heterotrophs get energy from their surroundings, just like humans. The largest living organism in the world is mycelium, a honey fungus in what used to be the Pacific Northwest. It might even be the oldest living mass on the planet. See that little creature?”

“A worm,” a kid with glasses says.

“Not just ‘a worm,’ ” another kid pipes up. “Eisenia fetida—tiger worm. Dendrobaena veneta—blue nose worm. Lumbricus rubellus—bloodworm. Eisenia Andrei—red tiger worm. Lumbricus terrestris—earthworm, Darwin’s favorite…”

Laisvė smiles.

“Geologic time has caught up with the lifetime of a human being,” she continues. “Look at the water.” The children move like a single organism to gaze at the water around them. “The acid in the ocean and the glacial melts happened in my father’s lifetime; in this way, time changed. Slipped forever. So geologic change has shrunk to the size of a story we can tell one another in a single sitting.

“But that means we have a hard job to do. We have to figure out the words to the story together.”

A girl squats down and puts her hand in the water with reverence.

“Some of the first multicelled animals were worms. Sponges. Arthropods. Soft jelly creatures like beautiful bags, delicate disks. Then, after the Cambrian explosion, most of the modern animal forms emerged. Early corals, mollusks and clams, nautiloids and bryozoa and echinoderms. Early plankton. Then the first green plants and fungi on land. Almost like the land and water kissed, and that gave rise to life and color.”

“The fish in the oceans. Coral,” a boy says, beaming with belonging.

“Correct,” Laisvė says. “Next, mosses and ferns. Seed-bearing plants making a break for it. Trees. The first land vertebrates. Frogs. Mice. Salamanders. Mountains becoming mountains. Early sharks and winged insects radiating suddenly, like a flash, larger than your hand.”

The children hold their hands up, mimicking her.

“Did life make the water happy in the beginning? Was the water lonely?” asks a girl with an amphibious extension on her prosthetic leg.

Is it lonely underwater?

“I think life made the water very happy, yes,” Laisvė says. Tears threaten to flood her eyes without her permission. “But then something like a planetary heart attack happened, maybe the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Nearly all life on the planet became extinct. Can you imagine this moment? All life disappears, just as things are really getting interesting?”

The children’s eyes go wide. Some of their mouths drop open.

“Is that when the dinosaurs dropped dead?”

“No, that was a different extinction. Maybe the Chicxulub impact. A huge comet or asteroid, something between ten and eighty kilometers in diameter, blasts open a crater underneath the Yucatán peninsula. The K-Pg extinction event. Suddenly, three-quarters of animal and plant species on earth were wiped out. Extinctions are always happening, though. Death into life into death into life.”

Laisvė senses a tendril of fear in the group of children. She kneels down with them. “But glorious things happen all the time too,” she says. “Leatherback sea turtles and green sea turtles survived. Crocodiles. Birds survived. Such beautiful birds. Horseshoe crabs!” She makes fake pincers with her hands and the children laugh. “Sharks. Platypuses. Bees. So even though the K-Pg extinction may have devastated life on Earth, it also created an enormous evolutionary opportunity, radical adaptive radiation, sudden and prolific divergence into new species, shapes, sizes, forms. Bears. Horses. Bats. Birds. Fish. Whales. Primates…”

“Us,” several children say.

“Eventually, yes. But listen. The time of recognizable human beings is so tiny — too small to be visible against geologic time. Our lives, our history, our species, haven’t even come close to beginning. Your existence is not yet even recordable, not when you try to measure it against geologic time, against the Earth’s story of herself. The tsunami that drowned the Sea Wall and The Brook was like a single raindrop.”

The children hush and consider this.

Laisvė thinks of Aster and Svajonė.

She holds the handful of dirt out again as she tells the story. The worm wriggles.

“Fungi are six times heavier than the mass of all animals combined on the planet. Including human animals. Do they look like anything else to you?” The children gather around her hand.

“Dendrites?”

“Neurons?”

“Star systems?”

Laisvė smiles through tears. She then repeats the words she loves most from the language of geologic time. The children repeat them, creating a kind of chorus.

Cambrian

Proterozoic

Archean

Hadean

Anthropocene

Holocene

Pleistocene

Pliocene

Miocene

Oligocene

Eocene

Paleocene

Cretaceous

Jurassic

Triassic

Permian

Carboniferous

Devonian

Silurian

Ordovician

The words make a kind of poem, and when the children pull the words apart, stories of plants and animals emerge and fill their dreams. If their future is not to be made from nuclear families and cities and countries and governments and nations and wars, perhaps it will be made of stories connecting all forms of existence, a story in which even their humanity is just a thread, like the harmony of cosmic strings in space.

She wants to show the children how to memorize the story, to change it with their own tongue and breath and song. She wants to give them the words as if they were objects you could hold in your hand and use to turn time. She wants the words to become fluid in time and space, untethered from law and order and institutions that towered into collapse. She wants the words to rearrange, to locate differently, the way language itself could if you loosened it from human hubris and let it flow freely again as a sign system, as the land and water did, as species of plants and animals did, everything in existence suddenly again in flux, everything again possible.

Song of the Floating Boy and the Water Girl

The statue has been drowned now for a long time. As the tides ebb and flow, the tips of the torch are the only things still visible from what was once the colossus, the beacon, the icon of a nation. Sometimes Laisvė and Mikael and Indigo take a boat out toward her; sometimes they bring some of the other habitat children with them.

One of the floating habitats they built for children without origins rests on the water, in the place where an immigrant hospital did many years ago. Sometimes Laisvė imagines the hospital’s autopsy theater, or the contagious-disease area, or the laboratories. Sometimes she thinks about how, in an earlier epoch, her father would have been held there for his epilepsy — likely in the psychiatric holding area — tormented for something he never deserved.

Immigrant babies were born in the hospital. At the time, they automatically became citizens of a country. Within sight of a statue that was meant to signal to them their freedom. Whatever the word freedom meant, then, to them.

“The sick weren’t the only ones shut out of the old hospitals,” Laisvė once told Mikael, pausing to take a bite of kelp. “And the word immigration has been used as a cover story for bigotry and brutality since forever, all over the world. You know that. Even as the same nations were stocking their industries with an endless supply of human laborers.” Then she’d remind him how xenophobic tendencies exist in all times, shutting out the same people no matter what lessons history has left us.

Anarchists

Murderers

Communists

Utopians

Radical socialists

Queer people

Mentally ill

Poor single mothers

Foreigners

Immigrants

Thieves

Orphans

And then she’d be off again, lost in her narrations of competing histories, opening long-lost times and places to him as if she were a human book.

When Mikael ushered Laisvė into the very first habitat he designed and built, she said, inexplicably, “The survivors of the Titanic were brought here, and allowed onto land. Except for six seamen from China… The people who took this land and called it their own were poisoned by their own bigotry from the start.” She then returned to reciting the immigration histories she’d been telling him the entire time he’d known her, as if she were unable to stop.

Sometimes Mikael wondered if Laisvė suffered from mental illness. More often, he wept with relief that she existed in his life at all. Perhaps this is love: that space in between words, in between the meanings of words and things.

What Laisvė wanted, he finally decided, was to reverse pieces of history with her body. She wanted to create a real home for children who’d been orphaned or lost or abandoned or did not know where they came from, or children on the edge of danger. A place on water where a boy or a girl or anyone could float freely without fear of violence. Where children could educate one another outside the constraints of any institution or law meant to mold them into good citizens and laborers. This was a story he could bear.

It was easier, he realized, because there were no more Raids by then. There were no more nations, and so no more borders, and so no more immigrants, and so no more arrests or leaders or prisons. No more mass deportations. There were simply pockets of people all over the globe trying to exist alongside one another without a system of power to organize them. Like a new species.

Maybe a new system was coming. Maybe not. Here, in the place where they were, the people hadn’t even wanted to gather together enough to make a name for their new existence. People stopped calling the area The Brook. They stopped caring where anyone was from. Maybe someday they’d want to gather, share resources, stories. For now, they existed in habitats connected by sky bridges and sea tunnels, or they were just floating, living, or learning to live.

—

At dusk, the habitats glow indigo, then black as the sun sets. From the windows of the surface habitats, depending on the tides, you can see the tips of the statue’s torch poking up from the waves. At other times, the torch remains submerged. By now limpets and mussels, anemones and urchins, likely adorn her standard. Fish and octopuses make homes around her oxidized body. Who knows what other forms of life have emerged near her. Mikael has watched Laisvė stare out in that direction. But there is something more important to be seen.

Sometimes he watches her watch water for hours.

“Dolphins, sea turtles, seals, manatees, and whales all have an arc of bones in their front flippers,” Laisvė says, staring at the fingers she has stretched in front of her.

When Laisvė steps from the ledge of the habitat back into the water, the motion no longer concerns Mikael. He knows she will carry an object with her, and he knows she’ll bring a different object back. He knows she will bring other people back with her or take them to an otherwhere. He knows that the word future does not mean “away from us,” but something more like “in us.” Like everything that lives inside her imagination and dreams.

Once a month, a barge brings them supplies. The inhabitants of nearby habitats provide mutual aid in the form of food grown to share with inlanders, who are busy rewilding land from coast to coast, or sky folk, who feed all manner of birds. The man who steers the barge is an old old comma of a man. The old ship’s bridge bears a blue letter P over the helm. When the old old comma of a man arrives, he always sits down for a visit with the water girl who has become a grown woman.

“Do you have a good trade in hand?”

“I believe I do,” Laisvė says.

His eyes have receded into wrinkles and age. She thought he was old in the past, but that was because she was a child, she can see that now. She has her hair pulled back, woven into a braid as sturdy as a rope. They sit close together on crates on the barge. She holds her fisted hand toward him, then opens it. Inside her hand is an oxidized coin.

He carefully takes the coin into his hand, holds it up in front of him. “Ah. You are ready to part with it, are you?” The Flowing Hair cent.

“Yes, I believe I’ve carried this one long enough.”

He nods his head. Closes his eyes. Then he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a box turtle.

“Bertrand?”

The turtle stretches his head out and nods. Makes a little croak, almost a burp.

The comma of a man says, “He’s grown old enough for both of us, and he could use some extra care. One of his legs doesn’t work quite right—” But before he can finish, Bertrand interrupts.

“Just hold on a minute here,” he says. “I’m not here for pity. I’m here to make sure you two idiots from your species properly introduce yourselves! My god. The weirdness of you people. Your great, grand humanity! Your idiotic egos, all that individualism — what a crock! Now tell each other your names.”

“Victor,” the old man says quietly. “Isn’t that a funny name? My mother was from what used to be Hong Kong China, but my father was Siberian! Apparently, my mother — who was a poet — wanted to name me Lìshĭ. But my father said, ‘What kind of name is that? That’s not a name! Not for a boy!’ And so he gave me a boy’s name, one that has never fit my face or my life. I’m no warrior!”

When he laughed, the crinkles around his eyes danced.

“In my heart, I carry Lìshĭ. I’m told it means ‘history.’ ”

For just a moment, Laisvė looked at him in quiet wonder. Then she spoke. “I’m not Liza, the name you know. My mother chose my real name. My father wanted me to hide it to keep me safe. But I carry my real name in my heart too. My mother was a linguist. Mine is Laisvė. It means ‘liberty.’ But no one’s name is Liberty.”

Victor bowed. “History and Liberty sat on crates talking… while a cranky little turtle ordered them around.” Victor’s laugh filled the space between their bodies with light.

“Well, thank oceans that’s done.” Bertrand harrumphed. “Now show me where I can eat. You know — roots, mushrooms, flowers, berries, eggs, insects, that sort of thing. I’ve got all the drinking, soaking, and wading water I need around here. What I’ve got to do is burrow. You can’t expect me not to burrow. Where is the nearest wild grass?”

“He’s kind of bossy,” Victor said.

Laisvė smiled and took Bertrand into her hands, held him close to her chest.

“Watch the leg, lady,” Bertrand grumbled.

—

When Laisvė sings stories to children, it can take several hours. The stories have many layers; they’re full of animals and natural elements as characters, like turtles and snakes and trees and worms, and always water. There is always a character named Aster, who pitches stars across the sky at night, and always a woman named Aurora, who brings the dawn, who spreads white lilies over any ground where war occurred, and always a man named Joseph, who brings the blanket of night gently around everyone and everything. There is always a beautiful man named Kem, who has a map of a new geography on his face and down his neck, like a human allegory of becoming and change, and a person named Endora, who welds the wounds between people, and a man named David, who sometimes turns into a swallow.

She asks the children who wants to play each role.

Who wants to be Aster, who marries the sea and changes the landforms?

Who wants to be Kem, whose body is a map of possibility?

Who can play the dawn?

David the swallow?

What about Endora? She likes to swear!

Who among you can be the beautiful lilies, like a hundred hands holding light?

And who can be Joseph, like a blanket at nighttime?

Who can be the Tiktaalik?

What it might feel like to pull oneself forward onto the ground from water an elbow at a time. She had done it herself. From the Narrows, from rivers, oceans, streams, a lake. Sometimes she also just felt compelled to drop to dirt and reinhabit the motion for no reason, just the pleasure of it. One elbow at a time.

Did the Tiktaalik take air in differently that first time, somehow longer; did she linger? Did she swivel her head around from that great neck, did her head want more even as her hind end and tail pulled her back to water? Did she open her mouth? Close it? Speak some sensation before language? Did she close her eyes in sensory delight or confusion as the air washed over her? Did her scales sing with eager curiosity, or cry for home? What pulled her? Hunger? Blind lunge? Accident of the stars? Did something call her? And when she finally made her S-body turn back to water, back to our shared, breathable blue past, was it relief or reserve that she felt swimming away?

Not only the moment that the Tiktaalik lingered on land, but the impossibility of ever telling the story — that is what Laisvė can’t stop imagining.

The children spend the night inside the storytelling, their voices and heads raised up toward the night sky, naming new constellations.

Some say you can hear whales accompanying the story songs from the water, their wails threaded through her song stories. They say that if you throw a coin into water and make a wish, your wish might turn an entire epoch. These stories about stories are one way that stories survive.

But Mikael tends to think everything turns on imagination — the smile on a worker’s face at the end of a day’s labor building a future anyone might inhabit, or the face of a child who believes in something larger than themselves, a beauty held like a world, a marble, in your hand.

And liberty.

Coda

In the cages, we work to take care of one another. I stopped wondering when we could have showers, clean clothes, toothbrushes, or beds after two weeks. Children as young as two or three years old were with us without adult caregivers. A boy here, eleven years old, takes care of his three-year-old brother. He is so tired, he can barely stay awake. Another twelve-year-old girl cares for a four-year-old girl she does not know; she gives her extra food and protects her if someone is bullying her. The younger girl wears diapers. The older girl changes them. If you have the flu, you can sleep on a mattress on the floor in the flu cells. Sometimes we have fevers. Nobody puts their hands on our foreheads here. When I had the flu, if that’s really what I had, there were twenty-seven other children in the cinder-block space, all with a fever, some shivering, all sharing mattresses on the floor. No one was looking after us. Sometimes they gave us pills, then not.

In the other Americas, where most of us began our lives, throwing rocks is a girl’s first duty. You know you are choosing life over death. If you can be beaten for studying, raped for being in public, kidnapped on the street, why not fight? Fight to live. It’s easy not to scream as a child. We all learn it. Before embarking on the journey, I witnessed a soldier dragging a girl. By her hair. He hit her, she fell, and then he kicked her while she was on the ground. With his boot. She didn’t scream. Then she got up and ran. He followed her to a roof. He hit her again and told her that he would throw her off the roof. She said, Do it. Then she jumped up and stood on the ledge, daring him. Yesterday, the girl I sleep next to on the floor died in her sleep. I covered her face with the silver shock blanket. I said a silent prayer. Sometimes they leave the bright lights on all night.

Sometimes I picture the ocean where a window should be in this place, away from this all-too-human light and hard concrete floors. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the salt. I can still feel the rhythm of the waves. I think of all the people who have been carried by water, or lost to it, reaching for life. We are coming for you. Someday we will be enough. Children, I mean. And our imagination. We are relentless. Insurgent.

You can’t kill the future in us.