Of Water and Limbs
A week before the Raid that separated Laisvė from Aster, she’d been searching for information about two waterways: the Lena River in Siberia and Lake Xochimilco near Mexico City.
Laisvė was trying to remember something about death and something about life that was bound not to human history but to the history of animals and water and desire. Once, between rails in the overgrown subway system, she’d found what looked like a white rose pendant carved from an animal tusk. Ivory, perhaps. She’d taken it to the Awn Shop.
“That’s not from an elephant,” the old comma-shaped man said. “This is something much older.” He adjusted his eye magnifier. “This piece is straight out of the mouth of history.”
“Mammoth?” Laisvė whispered. In the years just before the great water rise and global collapse, she knew, the tusks of ancient mammoths had been discovered rising from the mud and permafrost along the Lena River. Around the same time, axolotls, the colorful amphibians that were among Laisvė’s favorite creatures in existence, had started migrating through a network of canals from Lake Xochimilco. One of these species was extinct, and the other had come back from near extinction, and this is what interested her.
Two things fascinated her even more. One was that an underground economy had grown up around the hunting and selling of prehistoric mammoth tusks the moment they reemerged. The other was that axolotls had the ability to regenerate their own lost limbs.
In Yakutia, where people had spent lifetimes scratching out a living hunting and fishing in the surrounding forests and rivers, whole villages suddenly became rich as the blooming of mammoth tusks, known as “ice ivory,” gave rise to an ivory gold rush. The biggest demand came from China, where they harvested more than eighty tons a year. Traditional ivory carvers, their work long thwarted by a ban on the sale of elephant ivory, swarmed to get hold of the mammoth tusks. For those who partook of this new ivory trade, the tusks were an unexpected source of income; for researchers, they were a potential key to everything they’d wanted to know about mammoths and their demise. Two countervailing forces — money or knowledge; money or survival — creating torque among humans.
It was hard to say if the rush on mammoth tusks had helped or hurt the illegal killing of African elephants to harvest their ivory. But Laisvė understood that the earth had spit the mammoth tusks up as a test, to see what her species would do. Every time the earth did that — as with diamonds, as with gold — humans had a choice. She had a kind of sense-memory of seeing the tusks herself in childhood, a kind of retinal flash — a series of tiny moving images next to the image of her mother she carried in her body. The tusks reaching out of the mud seemed to be saying something, but she wasn’t sure what. They rose like ghostly question marks toward the sky.
Once, Laisvė remembered, she and her mother had happened upon a prospector knee-deep in river mud, trying to pry a tusk loose from the detritus. The tusk hunter had a large knife and a gun. Her mother was carrying her brother on her back. Hold as still as a statue, her mother told her. They hid behind a tree. The tree spoke to Laisvė when she put her hand against its bark: This is the end of an epoch, it said. The animals are returning, and they are doing it one fossil at a time. Water is rearranging.
Laisvė watched the river Lena rushing by. The river had already washed away more than one village and many people.
The history of animals and plants and water made Laisvė see all history differently, and she told her mother this even as a young child.
“What is history to you?” her mother had asked her once.
Laisvė recited her understanding of the word history, in triplets: “Explosion, cosmos, chaos. Water, land, cells. Plants, fish, animals. Indigenous humans, habitats, stories. Dreams, desire, death. Invasion, dispossession, colonization. Money, ships, slavery. God, goods and services, slaughter. War, power, genocide. Civilization, progress, destruction. Science, transportation, cities. Skyscrapers, bridges, poison.
“Nations, power, brutality. Terror, insurrection, incarceration. Collapse, raids, water.”
“I see,” her mother said. Then, to calm her daughter, her mother told her a story.
“You know the axolotl, Laisvė?” she began. “Ambystoma mexicanum, from the Nahuatl ‘walking fish.’ But it’s not a fish. The axolotl is an amphibian. It reaches adulthood without changing in any way. For that reason, it’s a model organism for scientists. Its body does things humans cannot. It can regenerate its own tail. Its legs. The tissue that makes up its eyes, its heart, its brain. Its whole nervous system.”
Axolotls even have four different breathing methods, she explained. They can breathe through their external gill branches, known as fimbria capillaries. They can breathe through their skin. They can breathe through the backs of their throats, in what is called buccal respiration. And they can breathe through their lungs — a curious adaptation, as most animals have gills in place of lungs. Axolotls can swim to the surface of the water, swallow a bubble, and then either send it to their tiny lungs or, for a little while, use it to float.
Underwater, Laisvė’s memory leaps to mother with or without her permission.
Motherwaters
The past is always in present tense when it emerges in her memory. Like a movie, the images quickening. So when she remembers the first time she went to water, when she thinks of her mother, the memory is inside a perpetual now.
The first time Laisvė leaps into the water, she is jumping in after her mother. Her mother shot dead in that moment, quick and sure, a step away from boarding a boat meant to save their lives. At the sight of it, Laisvė does not feel or think. Instead, she leaps.
Under the great weight of blue, she feels the weightless shift of her body. Back to a breathable blue past, an amniotic sea, liquid lungs. Gray green blue murky veil of water and then sight, plain as day. Laisvė turns her head and arms and body, in a kind of girl-swirl, until her feet find the bottom. She holds her hands up to her face and stares at them: empty but real. She half-pulls half-walks her way along the bottom of the ocean, feeling her way for mother.
A dark shape approaches. It grows in size, until it becomes enormous, and as it turns in front of her, Laisvė finally sees: it is a whale. For a moment, her heart feels like it might be too big for her chest. Her love of whales is bigger than a lot of things in her young life.
“Do you know where my mother is?”
The whale eye widens. “Yes, child. Behind you. Not too far. She has an important object she needs to give you. Then she must come with me. You trust me, don’t you?”
Laisvė nods. The logic of the world on land and the logic of the world underwater are different universes. Only children and animals understand. (And trees, but talking to trees is risky.)
Laisvė turns around, slow enough to prepare herself. She does not want to cry like a baby. She knows her mother is shot; she knows they are down there for a reason. When she finally sees her mother’s face, her own body dissolves into the tiniest particles, the way sand is made from everything in the ocean crushed down to tiny particles over time. She is wave and particle when her mother speaks to her, a see-through water girl.
“Laisvė,” the motherbody says. “Take this object. Put it in your hand. Hold it tight. Take it back to the world with you. It will become as you become. Keep it close to your body. This object doesn’t earn you anything. It will only have value in your hands.”