-Hello?

-Quick, tell me what to do with my life.

-Join the circus.

-Hate elephants. Hate them. Wanna punch clowns in the face.

-Ok, get married, have some kids, work a job you hate for 20 years to put them through school and hope one them eventually says ‘I love you.’

-Those kids will wind up drug addicts dying together in a ditch filled with dog shit. Next option.

-You sound like you’re freaking out.

-That’s because I’m freaking out, sweetie.

-I’m not your sweetie. We broke up, remember?

-I’m freaking out, stranger. I’m about to start throwing punches at work.

-Don’t do that. It’s a bad idea. What happened?

-Bad day. Filled with idiots. The usual, you know.

-Find a new job?

-Ok, there’s option #1. Already trying. Option #1 is to just keeping working here, going slowly insane while I apply for newer and better editorial jobs preferably at a university press, reading something interesting. I have been pursuing Option #1 for several months. From the moment I started. Ok, so that’s Option #1. Option #2 is sell all my possessions and move to India.

-Don’t go to India. The Ganges is filled with AIDS.

-Ok, so sell all my possessions and move to Prague. Maybe teach English.

-But then what do you do when you come back? Won’t you just be in the same position?

-Yes. That is the flaw in Option #2. I have a wonderful, life-affirming adventure but if and when I come back I need to figure this all out again.

-Can you do that? Teach English? You have no teaching experience.

-Don’t need any. There are companies that train you. I’ve got a cousin that did it in Thailand for two years. All need is a BA and American citizenship. Honey, I got both.

-Don’t call me honey.

-Option #3, honey. I go back to school for an MFA in creative writing.

-Why wouldn’t you go for a PhD in something? Seems like more of a career path.

-Which is Option #4. You’re jumping ahead now. The problem with Option #3 is that I am already 30 grand in the hole for loans for a master’s degree I don’t use and which I can not afford to pay back. The pros: I like to write. I want to write. I want to publish.

-You can do that on your own.

-Can I? I haven’t published anything yet, have I?

-I think you should get a PhD.

-And the problems with Option #4 are: what if I don’t get in anywhere; what if I only get in to bumfuck Nebraska University; what if there is no funding for what I want to study; what if I can’t find a job in my field afterwards, its very competitive you know, what if I can only find a job at bumfuck Nebraska University? I lived in a sleepy college town already. I did that already. For six years. That is over for me. I am on to other things. And if I really want to write shouldn’t I devote myself to that? To make a go of it while I still have the time and desire and talent and very little bitterness?

-You can take writing classes while you take PhD classes. I vote Option #4.

-Option #5 is I become a hobo.

-I vote Option #5.

-Are you fucking anyone?

-Ugh! Goodbye.

-I love you.

click

-Tell me what to do with all this life.

"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

they don't sing in captivity

It was a winter of disconnection, loaded and heavy, and we were finally coming out of it, heads held like something had changed, hands held like something was different. It was a winter where people realized their prosperity was a joke, their ideology a lie, their work meaningless, their children ugly, their country broken, and their fears wasted on petty things—balloon animals, termites, cannibals, the flu. There were prophets and presidents and pariahs all shouting their prescriptions from pillars they personally placed on every street corner but no one was there to listen.

And then there was Rose, standing on my corner. She was a girl who lived down the street from me, only I didn't know it. If you went to the end of the block and made a left, her house was right there. We spent some time analyzing our similarities, half-joking and half-astonished. We were both relatively new to the city, both had spent unproductive, demoralizing seasons of unemployment before landing our current jobs, both of which were in publishing. We were the same age, both had bright yellow bikes and lived with roommates who had cats. We liked similar music, the same books. I asked her if I should be scared, if she was about to pull a "Single White Female" and try to become me and take over my life.

"I think you'll be disappointed with it," I said. Because I was.

"I'll wait to decide," she said, smiling over bright red glasses. "You’re a single white male though.”

“Am I?”

“I think so. I’ve never seen that movie.”

“Neither have I.”

But when we found out we lived in the same neighborhood, on the same block, I did get a little scared. We were either characters in a romantic comedy, marionettes on cosmic strings, or else she was a goddamn spy.

We started to see each other every day and I learned things about her, over tea or Thai food, things that scared me more. I learned she played guitar. I learned she tried to decipher her favorite songs, singing along in a soft, uncertain voice over shaky chords that were never quite right—female singer-songwriters, '90s rock bands, girl punk bands, and '50s rockabilly. I learned she tried to write short stories but left them largely unfinished or unstarted. In her career she wanted to work with fiction, with long novels, important epics of surrealism and absurdity that made statements about contemporary society. Mostly she worked with pet guides and novelty titles.

She was short, well-proportioned, her light brown hair chopped and sprawled in an adorable way, bangs uneven, but perfectly so. She had slender hips and copper-colored lips. She was small but small in a cute way, like something out of woodland folklore—a mischievous elf or a sprite, the kind that would lure unsuspecting medieval children into the woods, never to be seen again—or something more perverse. She wore bright colors, mostly: turquoise coats, red glasses, aqua t-shirts, pink leggings, gold scarves, orange knee socks. The colors she chose should clash but they all seemed to go together, all the same shade of different primary colors, and they made her glow and glitter, visible in a crowd, sun-drenched in grey winter.

Stuffed on tea and Thai, she walked me home from her house. We turned the corner and went the 115 feet down the block to my house, staring at the tops of the houses, at the roofs of our neighbors, comparing the peaks in silence. We walked through the gate. She pushed it closed, letting it click behind us. She stood about shoulder-height with me, neck craned up, watching me, perfectly motionless—legs, fingers, eyes, all painted in stillness—only a thin stream of steam escaped from her lips, drifting up and untangling slowly.

"Well," I said. Fumbling for my keys.

"Well," she said smiling.

The downstairs neighbor turned on a lamp inside, casting a bright rectangle around us. The light played across her neck, sliding down her temple, her chin, her throat, touching her soft skin.

"So, I—" I said and coughed.

Her eyes, framed by those big red glasses, were locked on mine.

"Uh huh," she said, waiting. One hand was squeezing the other. She bit her lip.

My palms felt hot. Her skin looked like it was carved of white wax or soap. I leaned in a little. She closed her eyes but didn't move. I stopped, uncertain. She opened her eyes, saw me paused, suspended, right in front of her. I didn't realize I moved but there it was, a warm rush as our lips touched. Her eyes were still open. So were mine. Her lips felt soft and humid, like bathwater down the spine, like clouds of tea suspending in glass—soothing, scalding, delirious, and caffeinated but solid too. Her eyes closed and I put my hand on her hips, felt the glide, the bend, the ache of them pressing gently, pulling closer, her body against mine. Her mouth gained confidence and power and she seemed certain, more certain of the kiss, more certain of her chest pressing against me. She bit my lower lip, soft but insistent, pulling me closer. I felt her leg rubbing softly on mine as she grabbed my coat, pulling me down and into her mouth. My heart felt hard and huge, like it was eating my chest.

I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. Sensation rushed back in, sharpening and flooding, lucid but bent and warped. The light in the house was off now but a man with a dog walked by and he turned his head and stared directly at us as he passed without breaking his stride. Rose noticed him out of the corner of her eye.

I was confused watching the dog walker, watching the little dog sniff at the edge of the concrete, confused because it was almost midnight and really, who walks a dog at midnight. I turned back to her. "So do you—"

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to come in?"

Her eyes flicked to the ground and then back at me. "Maybe. Maybe just for a bit."

I smiled. "Ok," I said, head spinning, heart pumping hard.

"Ok," she said.

We walked up the stairs and into the dull house, down the dark hall to my room, plastered with old posters and maps of places I'd never been, scattered with scratched records and books I hadn't read yet. Our coats came off as the door closed, her shirt came off as the lights went off. Glasses on the floor, her tongue in my mouth, hand under my shirt, heavy breath in my mouth. My hand was down her pants feeling rough and soft skin, feeling elastic and cotton and stubble. She pulled back and looked me right in the eyes, took a deep breath and said, "I can't. I just. This is, this is too much." She touched her face.

Her skin looked soft in the dark, like there were feathers hidden underneath; her breasts young and uncertain. They looked like they needed hands on them, around them. My fingers were still in her underwear, her pelvis in my palm. She closed her eyes, pushing her hair off her forehead. I tried to catch my breath as she got up to leave—picking up her glasses from the floor, untangling her bra strap from my shoulder, finding her coat and her shirt and reaching for the door.

"I'll walk you home," I said, grabbing my shirt and feeling like something was missing.

"But its so far," she said. I smiled, not sure if she could see in the dark.

We walked the 115 feet down the block and turned the corner to her house, staring at the fences of the houses, at the gates of our neighbors, comparing the hedges in silence. We stopped in front of her door.

"Well," she said. Fumbling for her keys.

"Well," I said and smiled. We kissed again, our breath mingling and rising up. Her nose felt cold on my cheek. It was difficult to stop, hands groping, tongues touching, blood pushing.

"I'll call you," she said, pushing away. "Ok?"

"Ok." I could feel saliva streaked across my cheek.

"Just to warn you, I tend to like guys that ignore me," she said. "You should wait till you hear from me." The door closed behind her with a slap.

She called the next day.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of writing and of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

the key to survival--in a factory, in an office, in a boardroom or a classroom or the bedroom--is to dream.

all of a sudden and for the first time, I felt my body moving from inside.