Lost and Found

Falling into step with the boy, Thisman draws close and whispers in a voice only for him. Says, “I wish I had a little boy just like you. I wish you were my own,” and the boy believes it, every single word.

He is lost, but not in the way he has been taught to be. Not in a supermarket; not in a shopping mall. There are no police officers or security guards to whom he can give his name and address. There is no one to page his parents over a loudspeaker to come and get him. None of the clocks where they go give the correct time and there are no calendars to mark the days. He never knows where or when he is. He remembers little of how he came to be with Thisman. He remembers only: being pulled into a car; waking up and finding himself tied to a chair in an unrecognizable room of an unfamiliar house; Thisman sitting nearby, watching and waiting; the television beside Thisman showing a movie with two naked women coiling around each other and writhing like snakes; Thisman predicting he would be a fast learner—pointing to the women, saying he would learn to do the same.

 

They never stay in any one place too long. They get into the car and Thisman drives. The boy is given something to drink before they leave and he never wakes until they have made it. Where they are is always secret. Sometimes it is a hotel room and they stay for weeks. Sometimes it is a borrowed house to which Thisman has the keys and they stay just long enough for the food in the fridge to spoil. In the borrowed house, Thisman feeds him soda and Cheetos for breakfast. The boy asks for cereal, milk, and juice because that is what his parents give him; that is what he knows. At the mention of his parents, Thisman grows angry, cuts him off, says, “You’re my little boy. I’m your father now.” But Thisman looks nothing like the boy’s father and—besides—his father never touches him that way.

Hardly ever is the boy left alone. He and Thisman are together everywhere they go. Unlike his parents who woke him every day only to leave him—feeding him, dressing him, rushing him only to rid themselves of him, dropping him off with strangers paid to care, and later depositing him at school in a classroom full of other left-behind boys and girls, Thisman wants him near all the time. If Thisman has a name, the boy doesn’t know it. Has never been told it. Has been told not to ask. Has been told he asks too many questions. Thisman says that from now on the boy must call him Dad. If Thisman must leave, he ties the boy to a chair—twining ropes across his thighs and under the seat, across his chest and torso, and over his hands crossed at the wrists—until he returns. “Stay put,” he says, as if the boy could do anything else.

Only once does Thisman forget to bind him. They are in a motel near an airfield—the boy can hear the planes as they take off and land—when Thisman decides to shower and leave the boy free. The boy waits until he hears the water running before he tries to call home. He lifts the phone’s receiver and dials the only number he knows by heart. As soon as the voice says hello, the boy whispers, “I’m your son.”

Someone not his parents asks, “Who is this?”

The boy says, “Come get me.”

The listener hangs up. The boy does not guess that Thisman can play havoc with the phone, rearranging the numbers so that nothing matches up. Guessing the truth would only fuel the fire of his fear.

From there on out, it’s easy for the boy to believe what Thisman says. And why shouldn’t he? After all, his parents have never come. No one in his family wants him anymore; honestly, they never did. His parents are happy now, so much happier without him. Glad to be rid of him, they’ve moved on with their lives. Now they have only one child to care for, one less mouth to feed. They now spend less money on cereal and save on presents come Christmas. Now there is one less boy to whine and beg as they push the shopping cart down the aisles of the supermarket, one less child to distract them. They wouldn’t want him now anyway, since he’s no longer a good boy. Thisman is the only one who wants him; Thisman is the only one who loves him; Thisman is the only one who cares. The boy knows these things because Thisman tells him so, his words a litany the boy hears so often he thinks they are the thoughts inside his own head.

Once, during his predictions, Thisman put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Your little brother doesn’t even remember you anymore. He thinks he’s an only child. He doesn’t remember a thing about having you for a brother.” He’d squeezed the boy’s shoulder and squinted into the distance as if he could see past the thick motel curtains and the dirty windows that were sealed shut, past the motel parking lot that he had already checked for out-of-town plates, past it all and straight into the boy’s home—past his front door and the foyer where he always left his toys and on through the swinging door and into the kitchen and dining room where his mother sat feeding his brother. He doesn’t ask how Thisman knows he has a baby brother. It confirms what he suspects. Thisman knows all; Thisman can see all things; Thisman’s threats are not idle. If Thisman says that he’ll kill the boy’s family unless the boy behaves, the boy knows it to be so.

 

The television in their next motel room has just a handful of channels. The boy finds a holiday special, a not-quite cartoon with stop-motion characters. A bullied reindeer has run away from home and ended up on an island of misfit toys. Each toy is defective in its own way; the choo-choo train has square wheels; the elephant is covered in polka dots; the fish flies instead of swims. Before the boy can find out what will happen to all the rejected toys, Thisman turns the channel, flips to his favorite show.

They watch The Twilight Zone in every place they stay. The boy has seen enough episodes by now to have even seen some twice. Thisman has seen them all but doesn’t mind repeats. He’s looking forward to the all-day marathon that will run in a few days—after the holidays—to bring in the New Year.

When the striped nipple cone whirls away from the star-studded screen, Thisman claims to be Rod Serling, says that he went into hiding because the fame was too much for him to bear. This the boy does not believe. He doesn’t know that Thisman isn’t old enough, nor that Serling has long been dead, but he sees no resemblance between the two men. Thisman is much taller, his hair is not so severe, and he doesn’t talk out of only one side of his mouth like the smirking narrator. When confronted, Thisman says it’s all a ruse, says that the face he shows the boy is not his real one, says he is in disguise, says he had to change his appearance so people wouldn’t recognize him. Thisman says disguises are easy to construct and that they will make one for him too. He sits in a chair and pulls the boy onto his lap. The boy squirms; he is too old for such baby treatment; he is too heavy and his legs are much longer now than when he first came, but Thisman isn’t bothered. He tells him he’s not heavy, he’s his brother, which the boy doesn’t understand at all. With one hand, Thisman squeezes the boy’s thigh hard enough to bruise; with the other he smoothes the boy’s hair flat. It has grown long and shaggy, which Thisman says makes him look too much like Lennon. “Time for a trim and maybe some color,” Thisman announces, but they aren’t going to a barbershop; Thisman will do it himself, right here and now. From his pocket come the scissors. The metal against the back of the boy’s neck is cool, biting, sharp. The scissors close on a lock of the boy’s hair and the hair slithers down his back and Thisman catches it and kisses it. “For a keepsake,” Thisman says, holding the hair in one hand and the scissors in the other. The sight of those two things together triggers in the boy a new fear—a fear of being slowly cut up, first his hair and then piece after piece of him until all of him has been hacked away—that makes him quiet and keeps him still.

When Thisman is finished, the boy looks nothing like himself, nothing like the boy in the school pictures in the office on his father’s desk, the boy in the plastic sleeves within his mother’s wallet, the boy beneath the strawberry-shaped magnet stuck to the refrigerator. His parents would not even recognize him now. How could they? The cuts have mostly healed but he has lost two teeth since leaving home and his hair is now a different color from when he’d first arrived; it’s been cut short and dyed black, as black as Rod Serling’s.

 

Today’s episode is a new one—new for him, that is. It’s all about a freckle-faced kid who controls all of the adults in his town. So far, the boy has seen episodes where the Martians trick the humans into getting on their spaceship so they can eat them, where a woman wants plastic surgery in order to have a pig nose, and where Captain Kirk sees a monster outside on the airplane wing but no one believes him, but until now he hasn’t seen any episodes starring kids. The kid on the show is about his own age, yet he wields tremendous power and rules over his entire town. The boy has never ever seen a kid with that much power. The adults in the episode live in fear of the kid; they do everything to please him. They agree with him at all times. No matter what terrible thing he does, they tell him, “That was a good thing you did, Anthony. A real good thing.” Anytime he wants, the kid can rid himself of grown-ups by sending them to the cornfield, which the boy watching knows without being told is not a real cornfield at all but just another way of saying die—like how his teachers say passed away, like how his classmates say bought the farm and kicking up dirt. He has learned that this is something one can do with words, stretch them into softness and push them past their meaning.

Take him, for example. He prefers lost instead of taken. Lost is much much better. Things that are taken are never given back. Things that are lost can be found. He doesn’t like to think of himself as a stolen thing, taken away in plain sight of his own home, plucked from the curb like a penny found on the sidewalk. He hates to think of himself as an easily snatched-up thing—a carton of milk off a lunch tray, a pencil off a desk, a cookie from a jar. He knows there is a place for things that are lost. He still remembers the time his father lost the car keys at the children’s museum. After retracing their steps with no success, they’d gone to the Lost and Found. There, a lady pulled out a big white bin and at its bottom they found his father’s keys. He remembers the Lost and Found at the school he no longer attends, the one made from a box and sitting beneath his teacher’s desk. Lost mittens and hats and gloves, pencil cases, notebook binders, and folders all went there. It was the place to check for anything lost during class. Someone found the thing you’d lost and took it to the teacher, who dropped it in the bin. When you went to look for it at the end of the day before lining up for dismissal, it was there waiting. Where is the Lost and Found around here? If only here was not a secret; then he could find the Lost and Found and turn his own self in. He prefers to be lost the right way—to be deposited, placed into a bin beside all the other lost things; he wants to sit in the plastic tub, keeping company with the keys and wallets and things that jangle that have been left behind; to take cover among the leashes and umbrellas, the glasses and the gloves, the Walkmans, sweatbands, and watches, to wait there for his parents to come and claim him—to lie safe and sound in a pile with those other missing and forgotten items, lost among all the other lost things of which he is but one.