“Do you ever feel like going back home?” I once asked Endora.
“Home?” she said.
I didn’t know if she was giving an answer or naming us there together over a simple meal after a day of work. We all smiled, for whatever reason.
—
The night the water girl appeared, we were getting ready to board the ferry back to the city side after work, back to our shared boardinghouse.
As soon as the girl was safely on deck, she pulled something from her mouth: a penny. She handed the coin to John Joseph as if he’d been waiting for it.
He turned it over in his hands. “What’s this?” he asked.
“For an ancestor of yours who is coming later, the boy called Joseph,” said the sopping-wet girl. “They call it an Indian Head, but it’s not the head of an Indian. It’s just Liberty wearing an Indian headdress. That’s how Indians and women lose their worth, you know — they put us on their money, or make us into fake prizes and objects, so we can’t move in the world like regular people. I told Joseph that. In another time. But pennies and objects all change their worth, with time and water.”
“I don’t have any children,” John Joseph said.
“You will,” she said. “Your son and his son and his will walk the iron. Like you.”
We’d none of us seen or heard anything like this girl before. She didn’t look distraught or lost. She came out of the water looking comfortable.
Then she turned to David Chen. Walking around him, she placed her hands gently on his back and closed her eyes. We all put our heads down. It must have looked something like prayer, though it felt nothing like that. David let out the heaviest breath I’d ever heard, as if he were releasing a long, thick, coiled rope.
None of us knew what to make of this strange girl. She looked to be about twelve years old, but she also had the look of a woman in midlife — something about her jaw, or her eyes, or both. She brushed herself off, as if she could make herself fully dry with just the wave of a hand. She looked over across the water, at the work we’d been doing. By that point, only the legs and hips of the statue were standing; the torso and arms and head and crown were all still to come.
“She’s going to turn green, you know,” she said to us.
We said we knew. Oxidization of copper.
“She’s going to drown too,” she said.
None of us knew what she meant by that.
“The ocean is going to acidify and change,” she said. “Just like copper changes when it oxidizes. The water will rise faster than people think — faster than a lifetime. Some women drown, you know. Does she have a heart?”
None of us said anything until Endora did: “That’s a good question.” I think we thought of ourselves as her heart — but that’s stupid. Isn’t it?
Then the girl walked up to me, staring at my face and neck, at the place where my skin screams differently from anyone else’s. She traced the shapes with her finger. I didn’t move. “This is a map of the new world,” she said. “All the land masses will change shape. All the words will too. All the bodies will embody differently.” Her small hand rested on my face longer than you might imagine.
Then, turning back to Endora, she reached into a little rucksack slung over her back and pulled out an odd-looking roll of silvery fabric. “This is called duct tape. Only a welder might understand the power of duct tape. A mother came up with the idea. Using fabric tape. She tested it out in the ammunition factory where she worked.”
Endora held her own belly.
“You can even use it to suture a wound.” The water girl scooped Endora up in her gaze. “There are so many ways to carry.” They stared at each other. Neither flinched. A strange and brief still air surrounded them. No one’s mother locked in a gaze with no one’s daughter. There was no word for what they were to each other, unless the word was the energy itself between them.
—
One night, early in the project, John Joseph threw his shoulder out of joint and cracked a rib. Endora, a fine riveter, also had medical skills, and she tended to him. Taking John Joseph’s arm, she put his hand on her shoulder, then whapped him a good one, so that his shoulder went back where it was supposed to be. He didn’t scream or anything.
“Well, that’s it, then,” Endora said.
That’s how we felt listening to this girclass="underline" Well, that’s it, then.
When we boarded the ferry back to the city that night, the girl came with us. John Joseph turned the penny over and over in his hand. Endora looked — well, this isn’t possible, of course, but she looked taller. The girl wove around our bodies there at the railing, humming contentedly under her breath, or seeming to. She appeared entirely at home with us. She wasn’t afraid to touch us or lean on us. At one point she even took David’s hand; then she reached out and held mine too, this girl between us like some kind of conduit as we crossed the water. My hand warmed in hers.
Behind us, our half-made woman watched us leave. One hundred thousand pounds of copper, even more iron. When she was finished, her total weight was two hundred and twenty-five tons. Yet her skin — copper sheeting — is about the thickness of a penny. Enough copper to make more than 430 million pennies.
As we all hung over the ferry railing, Endora pressed the girl to tell her story. “Where are your parents? Where do you live? What’s your name?”
They seemed responsible questions to ask. As it turned out, though, they were not the important questions. The important question turned out to be: How do we assemble our hearts to keep us from breaking apart?
The Lament of the Butcher’s Daughter
(1995)
Lilly Juknevicius woke in the night again, bathed in her own sweat, wrestling her own sheets, grinding her teeth. Same dream. Same goddamn dream. A box the size of a body — a coffin stood upright — then her father stepping out of it and walking toward her. Her past a secret locked in her body. She waited for her breathing to return to normal. She grabbed a pillow and bit into it as hard as she could.
She got up, naked and wet, and walked to the bathroom, where she cupped her hands under the faucet, drank, splashed her face. In the mirror, she was the spitting image of her father. And her brother.
She thought about the — what was it, thousands of dollars? — she’d spent in group therapy for survivors and immigrants and refugees. She was neither a survivor nor a refugee, yet her life felt hemmed in by their violent narratives. They’d survived war, atrocity, dislocation. She’d survived… what, beyond what they’d left her?
In this city, she knew, a library housed the documents of their brutality: atrocity files, trial records, reports and videotapes and recordings, storage disks and microfiche, artifacts of infamous events, dates and times and names and faces, all organized into one great historical pileup. Miles of information, gathered in one place and made available so that a person might hold the evidence in their own palms, so that questions might be answered, so that judgments might be made, so that stories would not be lost, so that memory might outlive slaughter. So that crimes against humanity could be witnessed by the humanity that survived them.
An exhibit greeted visitors in the library’s grand lobby, confronting one and all with the evidence of atrocity: a pile of gold fillings the size of a bed. Diaries and journals discovered hidden behind toilets, under floorboards, inside walls. Names written but unspoken for years, scratched onto paper marked by age and rot and rain and the oils of an ordinary hand. In another pile, children’s shoes stacked to the ceiling. In an art museum, this might be mistaken for an aesthetic object; in this library, the pile of shoes stood like an act of resistance.