The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (5 page)

H
e didn't want the cake anymore. Now that he could have it, now that it was his and no one else's, he didn't want it, not the cake, not the matchbox car, they had no meaning. No—they had new meaning. They meant:
If you eat you'll become that Fluff-devouring guy on the kitchen floor
. Or they meant:
You'll become him anyway, but faster if you eat
.

That wasn't true either. They meant:
Who are you kidding, kid? You're him already. You were born him
.

He sat at the table wishing he were somewhere else.

Three years before, his mother had taken him into the city. She wanted to eat a special kind of sandwich and bring him to a shop that sold famous pickles. She wanted to buy them each a new pair of shoes. But what did he care about shoes? The city was magnificent and filthy. Poo spit breath pee yeast. Being there was like entering someone's body—it made him think of a movie where the heroes get miniaturized and injected into a human bloodstream and travel around in a special submarine, dodging vessels and cells. How could he try on a pair of shoes? How could he be expected to care about his feet? He'd let go of her hand and gotten lost.

Fifteen hours later he'd gotten found.

He wasn't allowed to play baseball or see any kids for a month after that, no dessert either, or TV, though the TV part lasted only a few days. Without TV he was always hanging around her, tapping her elbows, interrupting her magazine time and bath time with jokes he'd invented and numerical equations. It was a lonely month. She kept saying, “You've fried my nerves, Paul…You've fried me all up,” and she did look fried for a while after that, fidgety, tense, always chewing the inside of her cheek so her mouth looked twisted and old. “That was the very worst night of my whole life,” she said, and he saw that she meant it.

He was sorry, he was, but it wasn't the worst night of his life. He hadn't meant to get lost. He'd been just seven years old, a little kid, fascinated still by sewer sludge and bottle caps, by the faces in kneecaps. He couldn't be blamed. The city was loud and pure. It was itself the way a body is itself; it had no say in the matter. He couldn't avoid the windows full of radios and robots, the shuttering subway grates, the jolt that rose splendidly into his loins when a train passed underneath—
underneath
—him, and the rows of phone booths, all those phones with their rigid silver cords like the tails of the rats of the future. There was a man whose beard was a squirrel. There was a beach ball in the gutter, fully inflated, floating along in the wind made by traffic. But these were not the things that took him from his mother. They just held him back a little, and then she would turn and grab him, tug his wrist for a while, until she herself got distracted and would loosen her grip again.

After walking for a long time, they came upon a park. They turned a corner and there it was, endless, full of yellow flowers and squirrels and birds, everything fluttering. A shirtless man on roller skates flew by them, by Paul and his mother, and she turned to watch, cried “Speed demon! Hot potata!” and this is when she let go of Paul's hand for the last time.

The park smelled of grease and melon, a picnic air. Free of his mother's grasp, he was drawn to a stream where a pale red fish whipped itself in circles around a beer bottle. He was drawn to a tangle of barbwire. He found a yo-yo without its string. He found an unopened can of RC Cola. The place was full of traps, bitty snares, harmless and perfect mysteries, a pile of athletic socks here, a trumpet case there, more and more yellow flowers the deeper in you went, orange newts. But it wasn't nature that interested him, it was how ruined nature was, how full of metal and glass and plastic, and he understood that in some essential way nature really was best when it was spoiled, you could know it better like this, could see it for what it was, though you weren't allowed to say so or you were a litterer and unlawful. He didn't want to litter; he just enjoyed the effect. When did he realize he'd lost sight of his mother? It dawned on him slowly. He let himself pretend it wasn't true. He turned in a few circles. He called for her. He retraced his steps, then surged forward on the path. But she was nowhere.

Before he could panic he heard a voice say, “Looking for something?” It was a lady pushing a shopping cart and dragging four old dogs. She wore two leashes around each wrist.

“My mother,” he said.

She shook her arms, releasing the animals. They approached him shyly, nuzzled his armpits and belly. Coffee cans, bags of dog food, newspapers, and tangled clothing filled the shopping cart. Her hair was long and coarse, like an Indian's.

“My mother,” he said again. “I can't find her.”

She gave him a glinting, easy smile. “You can't, can you?” She nodded. “That's
the
problem, isn't it? Can't find her anywhere. But look.” She motioned to the stream and the trees and the purplish sky—it was dusk by now.

She offered to help him look. They walked the great park in many wide loops. They passed many mothers, none his. She took him into the park's nooks, its snarls of trash and overgrowth, and never did he feel afraid. He felt shaky from hunger and exertion, and feared the punishment coming when he saw his mother again, but he knew he was safe with this lady, that she would help. She pushed her cart, grunting sometimes as they went uphill, exuding calm. She sang a song in a different language and now and then yelled out to the dogs, who heeded her. It grew dark, so she brought him to her house, which was a tiny shed like a cave, four walls of particle board and a tin roof tucked into a stand of poplars. She promised they'd look again tomorrow. She gave him graham crackers and a piece of chocolate from a padlocked box (she made him close his eyes while she entered the combination). Then she told him the story of the three bears. Its familiarity was a relief and a disappointment. She was a kindly monster. If she ate him she would eat him with tenderness. As he lay on the dogs' beanbag, sleep approaching, an unexpected calm settled over him. It was like he'd come home, like this was the place that was meant for him. He knew that was silly but felt it anyhow. The dog called Shelby curled around him. For a few moments, until guilt overwhelmed him, he pretended she was his mother. A rain began, like a barrage of bullets on the tin roof, but he was safe.

He woke up early and knew for sure his mother would be angry and crying black tears. He left quietly. The old woman did not stir when he stood up, nor when he took one last graham cracker from the box. Three dogs were asleep; one watched him. He smiled at it, then hurried away. The sun was just rising, the park more ordinary today, uglier in the new light. Litter, today, was more like litter. He walked toward traffic noise, certain someone would see him and help him find his way to being found, which is just what happened. An old man brought him to a police officer on a horse, who to Paul's disappointment did not put Paul on the horse but instead called another police officer, who put him in a car, not even a cop car, an ordinary car, and buckled him in.

Paul often wondered what that lady was doing now. Was she as lonely as he was, in her cold shed? Or had they gathered her up long ago and put her someplace? He was not stupid. He knew something was wrong with her. But he couldn't help it: sometimes he wished he hadn't left. Why do some people get what they want and others don't? He sat at the table with these thoughts. They were too familiar to be distressing. But then something that
was
distressing began to happen. It started in his throat—a flickering, flitting sensation—and all at once he wanted to do something mean. The feeling in his throat became a commotion in his whole body, a fluttering in his stomach, then his groin, his thighs, knees, soon filling him from head to feet. It urged him to hurt something, it was the force of badness rippling through him. It was in his body but did not belong to him, not yet, and he wanted to get it out. Could he get it out? He rose from the table, shook out his hands. He stamped his feet. It didn't help.

He clutched his hammer and, one by one, loosened the floorboard nails. Then he pounded them back into place. This didn't help either. It wasn't a real chore. He had no work to do, no duty except to stay, to listen, to wait. The cake was toxic, like Clover said, and Paul thought about pounding the cake with his hammer, making a mess of it, but what would that accomplish? He felt terrible, crimpy, fluttering and hot, his body no longer his body. The strange sensation radiated lengthwise, like a twisting ribbon. It found even his toes and made them tingle. He took off his slippers. His feet were pink and ugly and blockish. With his fingernails he pinched his toes. He started with all of them but felt the pull of a single place, the skin between the big toe and the one next to it, that webbing on his right foot. He pinched harder, there.

The sensation stopped. His heart calmed. He breathed. His mother was decent, his father irrelevant, the lady in the park a harmless ghost. He breathed some more. But then, as soon as he released the webbing, the feeling returned. He pinched again—it stopped again. Let go—it returned. He could not pinch himself for the rest of his life. Panic.

With the hammer he pried a nail from a floorboard in the corner and held it between his thumb and forefinger. He pressed the point of the nail to the web between his toes. He inhaled, raised the hammer, and struck. The nail pierced the skin and entered the floorboards.

“Ma,” he said, but that wouldn't get him anywhere. So he called: “Oh God,” and this is when he saw the man watching him through the window.

T
hey pushed through a crowd of people to get in. The new club was red and black, a checkered floor, velvet booths along the walls, flat faces looking daringly at hers. It was like walking into a playing card. She held on to Mister Clover's wrist; he yanked her though the throng to the back where it was less crowded, where they found a nook and stood, bobbing to the thrumming—you couldn't quite call it a song. The band was four chubby guys on a vaulted stage, long hair, wristbands, the singer's words impossible to make out though you could tell from the veins in his neck he meant them something awful.

They watched the crowd. A few girls had kicked off their shoes. One was applying lipstick to a man's mouth. People danced sloppily, bravely. It was a new club, with newfangled décor, but it smelled like every club she'd ever been to, the same smoke and sweat and beer. You couldn't hide that. You couldn't cover that up with paint or heart decals. The music quieted a moment, and in the lull she thanked Clover again, and told him how much she liked him.

“You're so—” For a moment she couldn't think of the word. “So different.” It wasn't the word she meant, wasn't a good word, for what did
different
mean? Nothing. It only had meaning when you explained what he was different from, and she wasn't about to do that. She wanted to say something else. She told him that she found him handsome.

“Quit with the Clover, yeah? You should call me Joel.”

“I didn't know that's your name.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

The music picked up again.

Clover—Joel, but the name did not suit him—placed a glass of something in her hand. She drank it. Then a different man put a bottle of beer in her hand, and she drank that too. Everyone was laughing. Clover held the camera up to his face. She smiled; she raised her glass to the camera. She smiled and pictured them living together, far from her cottage, in his clean apartment that would have plush carpet, houseplants, a long-haired cat. He'd make fresh-squeezed juice. He'd make pancakes. He'd take pictures of them, Paul too. Paul liked to see pictures of himself.

“Stop with the smiling—I want to see Dark Goldie. I want to see Goldie Without Her Locks.”

She stopped smiling.

“That's right. Yes. I want Goldie Who Knows.”

She tried to make her face know.

“I like you a lot,” she said.

“Raise your arms now, yeah? Put your hands behind your head.”

She did. His camera flashed.

She said, “A lot.”

“Look over that way—what a beauty. Yes, raise your chin.”

She did.

“Close your eyes a little, like you're sleepy.”

She did, she was.

“I'd like to be alone with you.” She wasn't sure he heard, so she said it again.

“You're a true beauty,” he said in return. “The rarest sort.”

Next he snapped her at a table of men in cowboy hats; they were game—they played the doe-eyed fools, mouths gaping, she the queen, pious among them, chin high, arms over the backs of the chairs at her sides. “That's it, that's it, yes sir!” Clover, squatting, froggy, captured it from many angles. Afterwards the men returned to their taut, upright bodies, while she collapsed more deeply into herself, shoulders slumping.

Then he wanted her to lie on top of the bar, provided the bartender approved. Would she be up for that? A rose or at least a carnation between her teeth?

“I don't know,” she said.

“You'll look like Marilyn Monroe,” he shouted, and walked off.

One of the cowboy hats was talking to her, his hand touching her waist, pulling her toward him. She kept trying to turn and find Clover. She didn't want to lie on the bar but had told Clover she was up for anything. She wanted to please him. She wanted to be in McFee's catalog, to model their merchandise, wanted for people to see her glossy and proper.

“You want to take a look at her?” the guy in the cowboy hat was saying. He was talking about a car. She kept turning to find Clover—for a moment he was lost in the crowd—but there he was, right there, standing next to the bar and talking to a man in rubber pants, and she saw that they were touching each other's lower backs, and that the man's hand was sliding down onto Clover's ass, and that Clover laughed. Then they kissed each other. The kiss started out like a joke, a goof, but it didn't end that way.

The guy in the cowboy hat was hovering, still talking. When Goldie turned to leave he grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away, freed herself from his grip with a quick jerk, the way you tear off a Band-Aid.

The bathroom was red: lightbulbs, floor, stalls, even the toilets. It gave the women young, febrile skin, which they admired in the mirror as if it were really theirs. She sat on a toilet and blew into her hands. She reminded herself that she was smarter now.
Remember that, Goldie
. She'd come through a war. All those rooms, that slippery bar, Paul's dud of a father, all of it was a war. But she'd come through.
You need to think of it like that, Goldie: you're
smart
now
. Smart meant patient. Smart meant careful. She knew better than to get into that car. She knew better than to lie on a bar. And didn't she know better than to do anything for anyone's camera? At once she felt sober, composed. Her lips were gummy, and she wiped her lipstick off with toilet paper. How would she get home? She didn't want to see Clover again. The only person she cared to see right now was Paul. She could call a cab. That would be smart. That was what a person does who has come through a war. She calls a cab. She finds an anonymous person who will do what she wants without question, who will protect her not because she is she but because the rules say so.