We might have known then, in our bodies, that our states were stitched imperfectly — that war had ripped open a forever wound. That some of us would not be fully counted, our rights still pounded down on a daily basis. That children were being ground into dust everywhere, in the factories. That laws were excluding us even as we the body built the means of transportation across the land. Stories were traveling between us that could have led anywhere, turned in any direction, in spite of our backbreaking work.
That we could have been born from her, but small cracks began to appear in the story, just as in the materials of her body and our labor. Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there — our labor had put them there — and we had thoughts about it.
We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden. We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don’t speak. A fear slid through some of our necks — that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers — but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings.
Once, when we were working on the head and the face at ground level, I saw a suffragist from a protest march spit on the face of her as we worked. Why should a female face represent freedom when women cannot yet vote, she asked. She shook as she yelled, as her question streaked down the hard copper cheek.
I thought about that streak for a very long time.
After everyone was gone for the night, I took a rag to the copper there, crying briefly as I wiped it away. The suffragist was right. I saw her meaning. But I had been among those who’d worked to make that statue’s face, worked so that it could hold both the gravitas and the tenderness of an idea that I believed could be beautiful. In some future — not ours, but some day to come. A face that might become something we were not yet. A freedom obscured in the shackles hidden beneath her feet, rising up her body and arm all the way to the torch, the sky, the endless heavens. I had an unusual dream in the form of her face. My face had its own markings.
Our labor had a rhythm and shape and song that were larger and reached farther than our differences. Maybe the song of us helped us feel part of some whole that did and did not exist. The song of us helped to get the work done, helped our bodies not to give out or give in. The song of we the body met the air and the water around us differently from how any one person might; we the body were part of everything and nothing at the same time.
In those days, for the first time in my weary life, I had people I loved. Endora and David, John Joseph — all of us from someplace else, all of us collected by her body.
Maybe because we were building her body, we felt our own bodies differently, and that welded some of our hearts together. Me with my patchwork-skin story. Endora’s barren gut and foul, funny mouth. The opalescent mosaic of scars on David’s back. The way John Joseph always talked with his hands, as if he were reaching for some meaning beyond words. The way his words would then return to his ancestors.
Or maybe our labor made us love one another. That happens to workers sometimes, when you labor near other bodies. Maybe we were looking so hard for something in this emerging place that we turned inside out a little. I don’t know.
I only know that we built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She carried us in her.
Or we thought she did.
Some nights, after we worked together on her body, John Joseph, Endora, David, and I would drink late at night and talk about what it would have been like if the woman we built had really represented emancipation. If the broken chains had stayed aloft, in her left hand, for everyone everywhere to see.
The original story. Instead of the story that came.
And John Joseph’s hands would come alive and he’d say, You could have been president. I’d tell him, You could have been secretary of the interior, and Endora, she could have been vice president! And Endora would say, Are you kidding? I’m the president. You lot would just muck everything up. David would stare at the fire and smile. Of all of us, David believed in fantasies the least. He was the heart of us. Then we’d all pause and take a drink. We laughed our asses off. It made such sense. It fit the stories of our labor, our bodies. The stories we told ourselves were part of the stories that created the weight of her. But sense wasn’t what was coming.
One night, as we stood together on the ground at the edge of the water, before we boarded the ferry back to the city after work, John Joseph bent down on the ground and scooped something out of the mud. It was a turtle. He handed the turtle to me. I looked at it with some strange sorrow. The shell so beautiful and small and strong. The creature inside wrinkled and ugly. I kissed it. I don’t know why. Then I threw the turtle back into the Narrows.
That’s when the four of us saw something thrashing in the water, and Endora, half breathless, said, By saints, there is a girl.
The Water Girl
(2079)
She looks like a man,” whispers a young girl with hair as black as space, her lips barely the height of the ferry railing. Under her breath, she whispers a list: 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.
“I think she was meant to look… majestic,” her father answers. “Like an archetype.” Aster looks down at the red of his daughter’s jacket and the blue of her pants and the white hat spun into wool from rabbit’s fur and knit by a mother’s hands.
“Can people be archetypes?” Laisvė asks. But the wind picks up and so Aster just smiles at his daughter and tousles the hair on her head.
They have all taken risks, traded things they had, for tickets to see the drowning statue. The ferries that come and go in The Brook are fewer and less frequent now. No one knows for how long. Those who have lived through the collapse, and the great Water Rise, move around in tiny circles to avoid attracting attention in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trouble rises and falls in seemingly random waves. Visiting the underwater woman reminds them of a story they once knew.
The people cluster at the ferry’s edges like a human organism as the boat makes its way toward what was once an island. Their wonder takes the shape of draping arms and hands over one another as well as the ferry railings. People who do not know one another taking a small act of time to share some sense of wonder is no small thing in the world.
The girl with hair as black as space nests herself amid the legs of a mass of passengers on the ferry.
“Not so close to the edge, Laisvė,” Aster says. He knows the pull of water in his daughter.
The murmuring layers of language float up toward the sky as the ferry nears its destination. The backs of the children’s heads, foreshortened as children are, populate the front of the boat. A few of them now begin to point toward the object hovering on the waterline in the distance, their fingers becoming the word for it.