Our Missing Hearts (5)
In New York, traffic had snarled for hours with the bridge closed: people had posted videos showing long lines of cars, a chain of red lights stretching into the night. We didn’t get home until midnight, one driver told reporters. Under his eyes, dark rings bloomed like smudges of smoke. We were basically held hostage, he said, and no one knew what was going on—I mean, it was like terrorism. News reports calculated the gasoline wasted, the carbon monoxide released, the economic cost of those lost hours. Rumor had it that people were still finding ping-pong balls floating in the Mississippi; Memphis police released a photograph of a duck they said had choked, gullet bulging with tumor-like lumps.
Absolutely unacceptable behavior, his social studies teacher had sniffed. If any of you ever get wind of someone planning disruptions like these, it’s your civic duty under PACT to report it to the authorities.
They’d gotten an impromptu lecture and an extra assignment: Write a five-paragraph essay explaining how recent disturbances to the peace have endangered public safety for all. Bird’s hand had curled and cramped.
And here is a disruption right outside the dining hall. Bird is equally terrified and fascinated. What is it: An attack? A riot? A bomb?
From across the table, his father takes his hand. Something he did often when Bird was still small, something he almost never does anymore now that Bird is older, something Bird—secretly—misses. His father’s hand is soft and uncalloused, the hand of a man who works with his mind. His fingers wrap warm and strong around Bird’s, gently stilling them.
You know where it comes from? his father says. Dis- means apart. Like disturb, distend, dismember.
His father’s oldest habit: taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside. He is trying to calm Bird, as if telling a bedtime story. To distract him, maybe even to distract himself.
Plus rupt: to break. As in erupt, to break out; interrupt, to break between; abrupt, broken from.
His father’s voice rises half an octave in his excitement, a guitar string coming into tune. So disruption, he says, really means breaking apart. Smashing to pieces.
Bird thinks of train tracks uprooted, highways barricaded, buildings crumbling. He thinks of the photos they’ve been shown in school, protesters hurling rocks, riot officers crouched behind a wall of shields. From outside they hear indistinct screeches from police radios, voices swelling in and out of range. Around them, the students bend over their phones, looking for explanations, posting updates.
It’s okay, Noah, his father says. It’ll all be over soon. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
I’m not afraid, Bird says. And he isn’t, exactly. It isn’t fear that spiderwebs across his skin. It’s like the charge in the air before a storm, some immense and shocking potential.
About twenty minutes later another megaphone announcement crackles through the drawn curtains and the double panes of glass. It is safe to resume normal activities. Please alert authorities to any further suspicious activity.
Around them, the students begin to trickle away, depositing their trays at the wash station and hurrying off to their dorm rooms, complaining about the delay. It is past eight thirty, and everyone suddenly has somewhere else they wish to be. As Bird and his father gather their things, Peggy begins to open the curtains again, revealing the darkened street. Behind her, other dining-hall workers dart from table to table with dishcloths and spray bottles of cleaner; another shoves a push broom hastily across the tiles, collecting spilled cereal and scattered bread crumbs.
I’ll get those for you, Peggy, Bird’s father says, and Peggy gives him a grateful nod.
You take care, Mr. Gardner, Peggy says, as she hurries back into the kitchen. Bird fidgets, waiting, until his father has reopened each set of curtains, and they can head home again.
Outside the air is brisk and still. All the police cars have gone, and all the people, too; the block is deserted. He looks for signs of the disruption—craters, scorched buildings, broken glass. Nothing. Then, as they cross the street back toward the dorm, Bird sees it on the ground: spray-painted, blood-red against the asphalt, right in the center of the intersection. The size of a car, impossible to miss. A heart, he realizes, just like the banner in Brooklyn. And circling it this time, a ring of words. bring back our missing hearts.
A tingle snakes over his skin.
As they cross, he slows, reading the letters again. our missing hearts. The half-dried paint sticks to the soles of his sneakers; his breath sticks, hot, in his throat. He glances at his father, searching for a glimmer of recognition. But his father tugs him by the arm. Pulling him away, not even looking down. Not meeting Bird’s eye.
Getting late, his father says. Better head in.
* * *
? ? ?
She’d been a poet, his mother.
A famous one, Sadie had added, and he’d shrugged. Was there such a thing?
Are you kidding, Sadie said, everyone’s heard of Margaret Miu.
She considered.
Well, she said, they’ve heard her poem, at least.
* * *
? ? ?
At first it had just been a phrase, like any other.
Not long after his mother left, Bird had found a slip of paper on the bus, thin as a dead butterfly’s wing, in the gap between seat and wall. One of dozens. His father snatched it from his hand and crumpled it, tossed it to the floor.
Don’t pick up garbage, Noah, he said.