"Aspirin in the Afterlife"

"Perhaps the ancients had other skills, metaphysical ones, which allowed them to see the unseeable and base a pictographic language on it."

A Hunger for Sons & Daughters

They liked to strike in the early evenings—when children were still playing outside in the last fading light of the day, when parents were still cooking dinner, still closing up shop, still exhausted from their commute, from their boss, from their finances. They liked to strike in the early evening, their long black Cadillacs sliding like snakes down the open road, their swollen white vans crawling like lice down the soft suburban streets of America. 

While no one yet knows who they are, Peter Garofalo, 41, knows their methods. Mr. Garofalo, the owner of a tropical fish and aquarium supply store in Arlington Heights, IL, is a large but short man with glasses and a robust mustache that is tinged with flecks of gray. As he was helping his last customers of the day, a man grabbed his six-year-old son from the crowded courtyard of this suburban strip mall. “He was tired of sitting in the shop all day,” Mr. Garofalo said of his son. “I let him outside for a minute, just right out front. Told him to stay where I could see him while I rang out the last customer. I only turned away for a minute. When I called out for him he was gone.” There were throngs of people outside Mr. Garofalo’s shop, enjoying coffee from a neighboring storefront on a cool spring evening. No one said a thing as the van pulled silently away.  

Meanwhile, Melissa Green’s nine-month-old brother was snatched right from her arms. Melissa, 12, was standing on the curb in front of her Memphis home watching neighborhood kids play baseball. The game halted as a black Cadillac came sliding down the road. A pair of arms reached out of the rear passenger window and grabbed the boy. The car did not even stop. 

Susan Hempsted, 32, a resident of Levittown, Long Island, lost her four-year-old daughter in a King Kullen grocery store. “I let go of her hand while I asked a clerk where the steak sauce was. She was standing right next to me—until she wasn’t.” Ms. Hempsted ran through the store—her long brown hair swirling in a cloud behind her, her hazel eyes wild like an animal's as she screamed her daughter’s name down the aisles—until an employee made an announcement over the loudspeaker. Security cameras revealed that the girl was lured from Ms. Hempsted’s side by a man with a bag of gummy worms and a unicorn figurine.  

“I put up flyers immediately that same night,” Ms. Hempsted said. “But the only people who contacted me were other parents who lost their kids. That was when I learned how many children were missing.” 

These and thousands of other children have never been returned to their parents. They are victims of a new wave of human trafficking sweeping the country. Some of the children are thought to be sold to far-off buyers in Canada, Mexico, or even Jamaica. However, parents of abducted children who have investigated the matter say that most are purchased domestically by rural families in other parts of the country, places like Iowa, Idaho, and Appalachia. With the country in the grips of a harsh recession, the sale of stolen children is becoming a thriving business, they say. 

“Yeah, I know a guy can get you a kid for maybe five, six thou,” said Jackson Nash, 42, a carpenter from Wisconsin. “Friend of a friend. Hear about it all the time. Dunno what they use the kids for, could be anything. Heard a lot of different rumors. Some say they’re using the kids to work the meth labs out here. Others say it’s cheaper and safer to buy some kids to be the farmhands than to hire them illegal alien workers. Get to work ‘em for years, ain’t even got to pay ‘em so long as everybody thinks they’re your kid. I also heard about this group over in the Dakotas buying up these kids to turn ‘em into a militia, take back the country. You know, heard a lot of things. Can’t say I really know for sure why or what’s going on.” 

Even the extent of the problem is debated. According to law enforcement authorities, the children are simply runaways. All of them. The White House insists there are fewer than 1,000 cases of human trafficking per year—a figure which they say includes not just children but also pregnant women, old men, and people in wheelchairs. Advocates for abducted children, however, say there may be hundreds of thousands across the nation, perhaps even millions. 

Samuel Montgomery, 29, whose son disappeared in 2007, has collected a list of nearly 2,000 children in and around Cleveland that have disappeared in the last two years alone. None of the children in his database have been recovered. “It’s like angling for a goldfish in the Marianas Trench,” he said as he pasted up posters. Mr. Montgomery is a tall man, just slightly overweight, his face long and his hands large. A young parent and a former advertising copywriter, he dressed in a combination of casual and business wear, an oxford button-down with a tie over baggy stained jeans and canvas sneakers. His backpack bulged with carefully-rolled posters, brushes, and jars of homemade wheatpaste. His hands caressed a newly hung poster that featured the word MISSING in capital letters above crudely-photocopied pictures of his son’s face. “It’s like hunting for an Indian Head penny in a pile of coins the size of the Earth.”  

According to rumors, the older children, less in demand on the market, can end up as prostitutes or indentured servants. Some of the children begging or busking in major U.S. cities are believed to be in the employ of the very criminal gangs that abducted them. Rumors also persist of a new blood sport gaining popularity in rural clubs, a variation on dogfighting that does not involve dogs. “I don’t even want to think about what happens to those kids,” Mr. Montgomery said , tearing up. “I like to think my son’s been bought by a lonely rich couple looking for a kid to take care of them in their old age.” 

Mr. Montgomery, tired of waiting for the police to take some action on his case, has started a support group for parents of stolen children, as well as a website, KidsComeHome.com. “We get almost no help from the police,” he said, shaking his head. “Usually they insist we wait 48 hours before we can even file a missing persons report. Then they say it’s been too long, the trail is cold, and they can’t mount an effective investigation.” 

Ms. Hempsted, armed with the supermarket’s surveillance video of her daughter’s abduction, met only official indifference. “They told me the video wasn’t enough, a face isn’t enough, that they needed a name too,” she said, pulling her large sunglasses off the bridge of her nose and snapping them closed. “If I had a name, I could find the bastard myself.” 

Mr. Montgomery, whose son disappeared from their backyard just outside Cleveland, said he called the police immediately. “They said they’d come right over so I went outside to wait. They never came.” Mr. Montgomery quit his job as a copywriter to continue the search for his son—his stubble is now a few days thick, his hair just past unruly and, as he says, his appearance is “probably inappropriate for the office, even in advertising.” When he is not postering, fliering, or otherwise searching the streets and the Internet for his son, Mr. Montgomery and his girlfriend, Wendy James, petition the local police station. “We cry and beg them to help,” he says, “and every time they say, ‘We don’t have the time to look into every runaway case.’ They say, ‘Just get on with your lives. He’ll come home someday.’ They say, ‘Why are you so hung up on this?’” Mr. Montgomery shook his head and looked at his feet. “I hate myself for losing my child, for letting someone just walk up and take him, but I hate the police more.” 

The reluctance of the police to investigate these cases is a topic of much speculation among Mr. Montgomery’s online support group. In most cases, he said, the police prefer not to open a missing person inquiry because unsolved cases can threaten their annual bonuses and the political clout of local commissioners. 

“That’s ridiculous,” said Richard Strob, director of the Office of Human Trafficking, a six-month-old government agency based in Washington. Mr. Strob, 38, wore a pinstriped coal suit, his hair prematurely gray but carefully manicured, frosted in place. He was not quite tall enough for his large oak desk and constantly adjusts his chair. “This problem of the stolen children is vastly exaggerated. These parents and all the news reports want you to believe this situation is out of control, that it’s some kind of epidemic. But the number of cases is actually on the decline.” When pressed for evidence of a decline, Mr. Strob, whose office is still mostly in boxes, offered the following: “Let’s just say its dropping by like ... fifteen percent a year,” he said. When asked if he was quoting official government statistics, he said, “Yeah. Sure.”  

“Strob is full of it,” said Zaxby Thomas, a legislator in Washington state. “You go walk around my district for a day, you won’t even see any kids. Half of them have disappeared or been kidnapped; the rest aren’t allowed outside anymore. You can see them peeking out of barred windows, straining for some daylight. There are black Cadillacs on every corner. It’s just shameful.”  

Mr. Thomas, 52, says he has been trying with little success to get the federal government’s attention. Last June, after he sent a report to the Office of Human Trafficking and received no response, Mr. Thomas started sending copies to the FBI, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Health and Human Services—any department he could contact, without results. “I just can’t understand why no one is paying any attention to this problem,” he said. “We need someone in the federal government who will fight for the rights of the people, someone who has a conscience. Someone like me. That’s why I’m making a run for the Senate next year. Vote for me if you value your children. Vote for me if you love your children. Vote for me if you want lower taxes!” 

For the parents of missing children, the heartbreak and the frustration have turned into anger. Last March, about 65 families traveled to Washington to draw attention to the problem of kidnapped children. They staged a brief protest in front of the White House but dozens of police officers arrived within minutes to arrest them. 

“It was unsightly,” said Mr. Strob, waving his hand as he walked down the halls of his office. “First the White House, then they were planning to sit outside my office next. My office! As if I had stolen their kids. We can’t have that kind of rabble out here. We’re trying to run a country, not a damn NASCAR exhibition; not one of those blood sport baby-fighting games they’re holding out in the backwoods these days.”  

Mr. Strob ran the fingers of both hands from his temples to the back of his head several times and sighed. “You know what rankles me most? None of the little placards or chants at their ‘protest’, not one of them, even mentioned the decline I was telling you about. What’d I say, twenty percent a year? You didn’t hear any of them talking about that.” He passed by an open door and stopped. The room was long, bathed in fluorescent light and filled with rows of new steel filing cabinets. Mr. Strob quickly closed the door but those tending the files looked naturally thin-limbed and unlined, short and shaggy like 12-year-old boys, six-year-old girls, and ages in-between. Mr. Strob smiled. “Those are our pages.” He chuckled awkwardly as he leaned on the closed door. He started walking quickly again. “Summer internship program.” 

In some cases, local officials have even been reported as encouraging people to buy children. Michael and Betty Nguyen of Lincoln, Nebraska, said that after their three-month-old daughter was abducted, a local sheriff conducting the investigation came to their home. Mrs. Nguyen, who underwent a tubal ligation after the birth of her daughter, Linda, recalled the officer’s visit. “He said, ‘Don’t cry, stop crying, you can always buy another one.’ Then he slipped me a card with a phone number written on it.” 

Rumors of larger government involvement circulate among parents who are growing ever more desperate—whispers of government experiments, of an army desperate for child soldiers to police Afghanistan. “Oh I heard all that stuff, but none of it’s true,” says Graham McNeill, an unemployed chef in Buffalo, NY. Although not missing any children of his own, Mr. McNeill, 39, regularly follows news of the situation and keeps in touch with Mr. Montgomery through KidsComeHome.com. “I’ve even heard about the anti-government militias people think the kids are being trained for in the Dakotas. No no, it’s the government alright, but not what you think.” He leans in close and whispers, “What they’re really doing, what they’re using these kids for, is a program to repopulate New Orleans. Start the whole city over again with a brand new government-approved generation of residents.”

It was on hearing such rumors that Ms. Hempsted traveled to New Orleans seeking her daughter. “I stood outside every kindergarten I could find, every preschool, every park, just calling her name as school let out. But it’s not true.” Ms. Hempsted wiped her eyes, drew a deep breath and continued. “I never found her. They’ve got kids turning up missing down there too.” 

Other rumors find their way to official channels. “I heard a lot of these kids aren’t even abducted,” said Mr. Strob, hanging a dartboard in his office, across from his large desk. “What I’m hearing from a lot of these local sheriffs, and this is from the street, is that the kids are just runaways. Does this look good here? Anyways, they say it’s a conspiracy. A conspiracy of runaways. All these kids are organizing and running away from their parents together. What we got is a case of bad parenting, no white vans involved. So much for the abduction theory, am I right?” 

Mr. Montgomery has heard the rumor as well. “I heard the ‘Children’s Crusade’ rumor, yeah. Several different versions of it showed up on the KidsComeHome.com message board. I heard they were congregating in Detroit, taking over vacant buildings and old factories in abandoned parts of town. Living in communes, trying to establish a new society, Lord of the Flies-style, in the ruins of the old.” Sweeps by Detroit police have uncovered no evidence of a new society.  

KidsComeHome.com continues to attract new parents with new tales of woe—Mr. Garofalo just discovered it—but so far it has turned up no children. Parents of the missing are not about to give up. Like Mr. Montgomery, they post fliers in places where children congregate or are thought to be sold; like Ms. Hempsted they travel the country to investigate every rumor with even the slightest plausibility. A few who run shops—like Mr. Garofalo’s aquarium supply store—have turned their storefronts into missing person displays. “We spend our life savings, we borrow money, we will do anything to find our children,” said Mr. Garofalo, touching his graying mustache. 

For his part, Mr. Garofalo continues to hold desperately to a thin edge of hope. His windows are plastered with posters decrying his plight. Photos of his child adorn different fish tanks in his shop: goldfish have his son laughing, tetras have the boy hugging a puppy, guppies feature him laying in a pile of stuffed animals. But one tank has a picture of Mr. Garofalo himself—clean-shaven, young, and much skinnier, but still wearing the khakis and striped sweater for which he is known. He tends the fish inside meticulously. "These are the zebrafish,” he says. “A zebrafish can regrow its own heart.” He smiles as he watches the fish kiss the skin of the water, their stripes shining like shadows dancing on the surface of rippling coins, like streams of gold buried under the silt and sediment of a river of ink. 

He replaces the top of the aquarium and rips his picture from the glass.  

the wind is dressing in your clothes

on the lookout for predators and enemies
we see faces in clouds, not clouds in faces