Oh? said the woman beside me. She was short and sour-looking, her hair wavy-dry and going gray, but when the man spoke, her face softened. Bespectacled and bearded, the man talked to everyone there waiting, and instead of each of us standing inside her separate loneliness, he pulled us together as a community.
Kids was always disappearing then, he said. You could lock your door, but it didn’t matter. They’d drag them out. There wasn’t much you could do. They’d just take them if they wanted them.
The woman was listening in close, stitching her brows together—a charged, attentive pity shaping her face. I took out my book. It was large and heavy with gold script on the cover. The story was based on a B horror movie in which a small town is terrorized by a scaled, human-shaped beast I was pretty sure didn’t actually exist.
Of course, they took men and women too, not just children, the man said. Old ones and young ones—they did not discriminate! At this he laughed, his eyes going small beneath his glasses.
We had, of course, read about that era when we were in school. The kidnappings and all that went along with them always seemed to have happened elsewhere and deep in the past—it wasn’t a history we included ourselves in—but now the old man was pulling this history out, unfolding it, showing us it was not so long ago. History had caught up to us. It had, in fact, become a present-tense kind of situation, and it was this: There was a group of men killing children at night. Going into homes and taking them from their beds. Taking them off the streets. We the people thought we knew who the men were during the day, but because of some technicality we could not arrest them then. They had to be caught in the act. But at night it was dark and they wore hats casting shadows over their faces, and some people thought that the children deserved it. They were not considered the brightest kids in school and were known to steal candy and cigarettes from the corner store, which had always been a rite of passage for people in the area, and even I had once palmed a long, flat apple candy before unwrapping it down the street and letting it form to the roof of my mouth. Stealing from this store was talked about in a weren’t-we-crazy-kids-back-then sort of way, but when these kids did it, these kids-these-days kids, people likened it to a greater problem with children in general, and they said these children huffed paint too and that some of them had once found a few stray cats and had used them for some dark purpose that had to do with the music they listened to, music whose lyrics we could not understand.
Can’t believe this is happening again, the man said. He shook his head. His voice had a certain cadence, a quality that made us like whatever he was saying, even if it was tragic.
What to do, these children? he said. What can one do? No one is safe.
You’re absolutely right, the woman said. It is so shameful. I’m ashamed to live in this world. She shook her head the way the old man had done.
I had a way of angling from tragedy. I listened but let my face go flat. I wanted people to make a joke of it then put it away, to make it feel less like a scar they were showing me. The most recent kidnapping had been over a week ago, and I hoped it would be the last. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true, knew it wouldn’t be the last time, and the real bother wasn’t that it wasn’t going to be the last time but that the situation wasn’t going to change by some old man at the bus stop, as jolly and beloved as he was, talking and sighing and shaking his head, so why not let’s not talk about it anymore?
Little Miss, he said, seeming to only then notice me. How old are you?
I’m an adult, I said, and looked down the street. There was a great cube of a clock jutting from the building on the corner—multi-faced so that you could read it from any direction. It always kept perfect time.
It began to rain as my bus pulled up. It took me from the central square and passed through several neighborhoods, each more depressed than the next: gray two-flats with bricks busted out like bad teeth, storefronts behind black bars, trash—heavy and wet—clotting the sewer grates with its pulpy mash, and, on one bent sidewalk, a diapered baby sitting flat on its bottom. The change from straight and square downtown to gray ruin happened so plainly as to serve as a time-lapse example of such collapse, a linear progression charted on an x/y axis: bad, worse, worst.
The bus rattled fast ahead through the rain, the windows shaking as the wheels dipped into each pothole. From behind me came the sound of a marble or ball bearing dropping from some height then rolling along the floor.
Falling apart? the woman in front of me turned to ask. Her lips shaped a wry smile.
Yes, Dear Stranger , I answered in my head. The world is about to run off the rails. We’re all going to get knocked out of orbit, a pool ball chipped off the table. It’s not just a feeling I have, Dear Stranger, rather an assurance, a surety, everything so goddamn out of whack that it’s no longer a matter of if but when.
THE BUS TOOK ME to a neighborhood that looked excerpted from elsewhere—an ivied campus where it was eternally autumn, the air sharp and clean, leaves frozen in their most vibrant shade of decay. That this neighborhood was surrounded by the other, grayer neighborhoods served to some as an indicator of all the good that could happen in the world. A rose blooming in the desert! For others, it was tasteless bragging, an opulent oasis to which access was highly regulated. I tried not to take sides.
In the rosy neighborhood, I made smart children smarter. They lived in large houses with tall gates, so their parents didn’t worry or they didn’t worry too much or they worried just the right amount to keep them safe.
As I searched my bag for my room key, a security guard halted his squeak up the hall and said, You’re here awful early, young lady. Do you have a pass?
I work here, I said, and handed him my ID.
I see, he said. He took his time studying my two faces. The guard’s sleeves stopped at his biceps, his arms bigger affairs than seemed necessary.
Won’t happen again, he said.
Doubtful, I thought but didn’t say.
In first period, the kids took turns telling me about their summers. Piano lessons. French lessons. A month on an island I’d never heard of. One boy finished a long-beloved book series then buried each volume in his backyard.
My sister told me there are almost endless good books, he said. But none like these.
His face was bony and slight, creating dark pockets of sensitivity beneath his eyes. His hair was chin-length, dark brown, and straight, and he shyly tucked it behind his ear as he talked. I hated choosing favorites, which meant I always did and immediately. His quiet maturity was so stark that it conjured in me the thought of a future when the difference in our ages would shrink to nothing. He, like all of them—as precocious as any darling prodigy—was half my age, me divided in two. I didn’t know anything about his parents, save they’d given him the most beautiful name one can to a boy in this language.
During the passing period, I watched the children move up and down the hallway. The girls had long, straight hair, the bright natural blondes and browns of undyed, unaltered youth; the boys were covered in sour, shiny pimples or were girlish and small still—elfin angles in their chins and a flipping bit of hair covering one eye. Our school was an island of beauty and learning and sharing, I told myself, far apart from the mainland of smog and grime and crime, these children princes and princesses of their own sparkling futures.
SOMETIMES I TOOK the train home, a different crowd all the way. None of the old ladies with cagey carts from the bus, clothes humped on backs, or mothers and bundled babies, but people with jobs, moving to and from them. Women in gray pencil skirts and blade-thin heels, hair in sleek curtains down their backs.