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.
But Bird had already read the words at the top: all our missing hearts.
A phrase he’d never heard before but that sprang up elsewhere in the months, then years, after his mother had gone. Graffitied in the bike tunnel, on the wall of the basketball court, on the plywood around a long-stalled construction site. don’t forget our missing hearts. Scrawled across the neighborhood-watch posters with a fat-bladed brush: where are our missing hearts? And on pamphlets, appearing overnight one memorable morning: pinned under the wipers of parked cars, scattered on the sidewalk, caught against the concrete feet of lampposts. Palm-sized, xeroxed handbills reading simply this: all our missing hearts.
The next day, the graffiti was painted over, the posters replaced, the pamphlets swept away like dead leaves. Everything so clean he might have imagined it all.
It didn’t mean anything to him then.
It’s an anti-PACT slogan, his father said curtly, when Bird asked. From people who want to overturn PACT. Crazy people, he’d added. Real lunatics.
You’d have to be a lunatic, Bird had agreed, to overturn PACT. PACT had helped end the Crisis; PACT kept things peaceful and safe. Even kindergarteners knew that. PACT was common sense, really: If you acted unpatriotic, there would be consequences. If you didn’t, then what were you worried about? And if you saw or heard of something unpatriotic, it was your duty to let the authorities know. He has never known a world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didn’t understand why anyone would oppose it, what any of this had to do with hearts, how a heart could be missing. How could you survive without your heart beating inside you?
It made no sense until he met Sadie. Who’d been removed from her home and replaced, because her parents had protested PACT.
Didn’t you know? she’d said. What the consequences were? Bird. Come on.
She tapped the worksheet they’d been given as homework: The Three Pillars of PACT. Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. And there, beneath Sadie’s finger: Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.
Even then, he hadn’t wanted to believe it. Maybe there were a few PACT removals, but they couldn’t happen much—or why did no one talk about it? Sure, every now and then, you heard of a case like Sadie, but surely those were exceptions. If it happened, you really must have done something dangerous, your kid needed to be protected—from you, and whatever you were doing or saying. What’s next, some people said, you think molesters and child-beaters deserve to keep their kids, too?
He’d said this to Sadie, without thinking, and she went silent. Then she wadded up her sandwich in a ball of tuna and mayonnaise and smashed it into his face. By the time he wiped his eyes clear, she was gone, and all afternoon, the stink of fish clung to his hair and skin.
A few days later Sadie had pulled something from her backpack.
Look, she’d said. The first words she’d spoken to him since. Bird, look what I found.
A newspaper, corners tattered, ink smudged to gray. Almost two years old already. And there, just below the fold, a headline: local poet tied to insurrections. His mother’s photo, a dimple hovering at the edge of her smile. Around him, the world went hazy and gray.
Where did you get this, he asked, and Sadie shrugged.
At the library.