LITMIR.BIZ

      DISAPPEARANCE

      The summer Etan Patz disappeared, New York was burning something fierce. ‘It’s hotter than a hooker in hell,’ my father would say after a day’s work, his collar slack and soiled, his scalp like wet sandpaper.

      For three months our mothers kept us indoors, wouldn’t let us out no-way-no-how, convinced that the man who’d snatched Etan was prowling the neighborhood for more. I imagined a lunatic in a sorcerer’s cap stirring a pot of boys with a broom handle, bending over and pinching their thighs to feel for tenderness. Wondered what we’d smell like in that pot. Probably something awful, all that Kool-Aid and Play-Doh, gym socks and rusted pennies, pooled together like that.

      ‘Let me out, woman,’ I’d demand each morning and duck in time to miss my mother’s palm swinging toward the back of my head. I hated her in those moments, my larger-than-life warden, wide and rubbery like an inflatable raft sheathed in floral cloth. Why I had to be kept from the swimming pool, baseball games and sugar cones balancing scoops of rainbow sherbet, I didn’t understand. She never budged, not once. Stayed like that too, the rest of her life, unyielding as a nail in cement, until we buried her. Even then, at the very end, she’d still go on about ‘Poor Etan.’

      Only thing that kept me from grabbing a bedsheet and parachuting out the window that summer was Tommy Palansky. He’d moved into the apartment beneath ours and his mother wasn’t letting him out either. We’d spend every morning running up and down the stairs of our four-story building, the light filtering in through window panes thick with dust and falling across us in streaks of gray. We’d gather Legos, rubber balls, wadded newspaper, candles melted down to their stubs, old slippers – anything we could filch undetected. Then we’d position ourselves on the steps on either side of the stairwell and build military posts out of broken-down cardboard boxes and plastic tubs and declare War with our ragtag arsenal. My brother Ralph would stand in the doorway and watch, drooling all over himself and saying nothing.

      ‘Ben, let Ralph play with you,’ my mother would holler from the living room where she sat peeling potatoes or snipping green beans into a colander, the record player behind her always screeching nothing but Fairuz.

      ‘All he does is drool, Ma,’ I’d yell back. I’d hold real still then, listening for the creak of wooden baseboards beneath her swollen feet. Sometimes she’d leave me be a little longer but eventually she’d come, her weight pressing down on linoleum and thudding across the cement of the stairwell. She’d pinch my ear between fingers, plump and damp, and pull me so close I could make out the short black prickles sprouting from her chin.

      ‘His whole life people gonna look to us to see how they oughta treat him,’ she’d say. But the kid really did drool everywhere, spit that mixed and mingled with all the other fluids he leaked. Sweat and snot and saliva on his face and neck, t-shirts, every Tonka truck and green army man we owned. The heat made it worse. He’d wake up dry enough and by lunchtime he was like a sponge left in a bucket of dirty water.

      Rubbing my ear, I’d take his hand and lead him to my post, prop him up on the front line and hand him artillery to launch at Tommy. He was good at taking orders from me when he was in the mood for it, I had to give him that. Would strike Tommy on the shoulder with empty shampoo bottles and right on the head with wooden blocks.

      ‘That’s not fair, there’s two of you now,’ Tommy would groan.

      ‘Pipe down. He’s like half a damn person,’ I’d say. Then Tommy would get bored and start crawling on all fours, hooting and roaring and pounding his chest like a mad gorilla or some other wild beast. He’d circle Ralph like that, coming close enough to sniff him and then retracting in disgust. Guess I couldn’t blame him. The kid smelled like pickled eggs most days. Ralph never would react. He’d just stare right ahead and you couldn’t be certain if he was actually seeing Tommy or even looking at him. I can’t say I felt bad for my brother then the way my mother did. Didn’t see any sense in feeling bad for someone who didn’t seem to mind.

      ‘What do you think he thinks about?’ Tommy asked. I couldn’t guess what went through Ralph’s mind any more than I could name what was broken in the first place. I was three when he was born and my mother would say I spent a couple of years just waiting for him to get up and play. I’d try giving him my newest Hot Wheel, my best Transformer, even tucked a pillowcase into the back of his collar so we could make like superheroes and fly. But he never had a want for any of that. Sure enough he got up and learned some words but his eyes, they just didn’t move like ours. It was like we were nothing more than stagehands to him and he was waiting for the show to start.

      By noon the stairwell would get too hot to bear and we’d escape to the basement, where walls of exposed brick escaped the sun’s reach and remained cool to the touch. Except for a few empty trunks and a lone chair there was nothing much else in the space. Sometimes our mothers would let us carry down a couple of fans and we’d set them up near opposing walls and position Ralph in the center. Then we’d veer and tilt around him like jet planes, spreading our arms and letting the breeze make its way through our thin t-shirts, drying our underarms and sending shivers down our spines.

      Spent, we’d collapse onto the floor and talk about our dwindling summer in captivity and the approaching start of another nine months spent in classrooms that smelled like mildew and vinegar. ‘Is he ever gonna go to school?’ Tommy asked once about Ralph. I didn’t answer. My father had wanted Ralph to go to school, even tried enrolling him in special classes for a few weeks the year before. Then some kid scratched him up pretty bad, pressed a pencil with a broken tip into the soft flesh of his wrist and dragged it up and down his forearm until the skin broke. All that afternoon Ralph said nothing about it. Sat through the rest of his classes and dinner, even watched some Tom and Jerry with me. It wasn’t until she undressed him for a bath that my mother saw the carved skin, the dried blood flaking off like red ash. That’s when she put her foot down and said No more. She got approval to home-school him then, but not before she clomped down the stairs and the three blocks to the school and made every official cower or cry.

      Without fail our basement conversations would soon turn to Poor Etan. Whole afternoons we spent imagining what happened to him. Six years old, same as Ralph, and he goes missing the first time he walks alone to the bus stop. How’s that for luck? We imagined him holed in a basement like ours, tied up and invisible to the world. Sometimes we’d really get into it and invent entire scenarios. We imagined him stoned to death and buried alive. Burned in a fire as an offering to some cult god, his screams growing in pitch as the flames surged upward. We imagined him skinned and hanging in one of the meat shops in Chinatown, like a rabbit waiting to be fried or baked for dinner. I could always picture it so perfectly. His photo was on the news each night and on the cover of my father’s paper each morning. I knew his face better than I knew anyone else’s, maybe even my own. Hair blond and long like a girl’s. Eyes wide-set and blue. A smile that cut into his cheeks and spread past his lips, a smirk to maybe say it was

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