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.
The Water Girl and the Whale
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.”