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?