This story went through about ten drafts before reaching this point. I’m still not satisfied with the ending, but I was able to clarify some of the thought process of my main character, which was a great challenge.
Berry’s been crushed by an eighteen-wheeler.
The second I stepped into the parking lot I knew it. He’d been dilly-dallying in the bathroom when the rest of the class boarded the bus, and I’d had to leave him to watch the other kids. No doubt that’s when he’d come a-running out into the parking lot, abuzz with busses and yakking families, and the poor kid, that round, blind smile and that wriggly pool noodle body, running first and looking later, hadn’t noticed the first thing.
Calm down, admonishes my brother Mike’s voice in the back of my mind.
Because now that I’m looking more closely, it’s not a flattened body in the streets, but Berry’s bodiless blue jumper.
So, here’s the situation: ten minutes ago, my teaching assistant, Deborah Mei, and I had exited the park, corralling a chain of fours and fives year olds back onto the bus. It had been an eventful fieldtrip at the Interactive Science Park in the city if Nanhu China, on Children’s Day. The land was parkland, converted into a giant playground, with the trappings of an air and space museum thrown in for good measure. It’s the sort of architectural Frankenstein only a place like Nanhu could stitch together.
We’d hovered latex balloons over tiny air ducts and squiggled our palms in blue and in yellow to make green goo, and we’d had lunch on a plastic moon, and taken a billion phots in front of the decommissioned roller coaster “Escape from Humanity,” with its mucky, ceramic escape pod statue for climbing, and now it was time to get on the bus and piss off back home.
But we’d lost Berry. No: let’s be precise: Berry had lost us. Had flown the coop. Had struck out by himself. A bold feat: Berry’s the sort of kid they make labels for that say: “Don’t touch: Hot Surface.” You know his dossier already: an absentee parents-hard-hitting-grandma kind of kid. Afraid of his own shadow. Probably a genius. He alone, of my entire class of fifteen, had preloaded the field-trip vocabulary: SCIENCE. POD. ESCAPE.
I examine the little genius’s sweatshirt, but then I get a call from Deborah Mei.
“I can see you. You’re in the parking lot, meaning you haven’t found him yet.”
I ducked back into the park gates. “He’s in the bathroom. It’ll just be a minute.”
“You said that ten minutes ago.”
“Yeah, but now I mean it.”
“Have you tried the East Side bathroom?”
“On my way now.”
“Should we alert the guards?”
“And tell them what? Look for a little Chinese boy? There’s ten million kids here.”
“Give them some details.”
“He’s lost the sweatshirt. That had the school logo on it.”
“Is there anything else?’
I thought a second. “I gave him my ball cap just before we went in. It was for promising to be a good boy. But he could’ve lost that too.”
“Huh. By the way, Kitty says they got into a fight and that’s how his sweatshirt got stripped off. I’m trying to get the rest of the story out of them.”
“A fight? About what?”
“Still waiting to get the story out of her. Don’t worry about Berry. He’s only five, he can’t have gone far.”
End call. With her master’s in early years education, you’d think Deborah Mei would say something more intelligent than: “He can’t have gone far.” Berry could lose himself in a hall of mirrors, already at five the perfect prototype for the absentminded professor. Something forgotten every day: workbook, backpack. Grandma would thrash him, and Berry would cry and pout and occasionally spit up little gobfulls of English between his tears. Then we’d do the whole thing again the next day, and the next, and those English lersons.
No: far is exactly where Berry had gone. Perhaps dead, for what was the purpose of Interactive Science parks except for providing a thousand creative ways for kids to kill themselves? Parking lots for being rammed by cars, and toilets with little hooks for strangling yourself. Not to mention “The Perfect Getaway Gyrating Space Shuttle:” shiny, metal tubes that slung you back and forth behind a small perimeter of red rope which the kids kept trampling down. And then there were the exhibitions of guillotines, and something called EXPERIENCE GRAVITY! On a twenty-meter spread of trampoline, the bouncing kids, ignoring the warning placards, did not take off their shoes or exercise safety, but leapt and fell and kicked each other’s faces to the occasional reprimand of the teenage attendant scrolling her Tiktok feed.
A fight. Perhaps Berry had run off hurt, hidden himself away to lick his wounds? And perhaps a tall kindly stranger had happened by and offered him a tasty snack, and Berry—poor, genius, vulnerable, unloved Berry—had taken the arm and been spirited into the back of a white van?
No, stop. Mike would remind me not to let my imagination run things. That’d been one of my brother’s mottos. Mike who’d gotten it from Dad, who might have been angry but occasionally said smart things too, like: “You’re enough people to worry about for now.”
Thinking of the fight, I run to the East Side bathroom, arriving just in time, for on the floor are the frayed ends of Berry’s nametag, and as I tear open the stall door I am already seeing it: Berry, as blue as his namesake, garroted in the bathroom by the silk cord of his nametag, which he’d twisted around the bathroom door hook.
But he is nowhere to be seen.
Instead, there is a bent, very old cleaning lady, her face a shrunken turnip, her mop a wet web of floor gunk, who gives me a look and clucks off something in Chinese, which could mean: are you looking for a five-year-old child, or please don’t strangle me with that nametag, kind sir. I do all the things foreigners do who don’t speak Chinese: smile, shake my head, mutter a few half-phrases, and scooch out and over to the GIANT PENDULUM, the threads of Berry’s nametag in my hands and a a sinking feeling in my gut as I stare at the aluminum balls of the pendulum and see, son of a bitch, Berry’s head slotted just between two of the two massive, metallic balls, seconds before the collision.
Mangled, bloodied, spread-eagled body. Oh, God. “Stop that ball!” I rush, I fly, tearing tossing children and grandmothers, indiscriminately aside even as the ball described its curve towards Berry’s head, ripe for the pulping. Just in time, I reach the kid and drag him away, and the two balls bounce harmlessly off each other. Plastic. Goddamn physics.
Naturally, the kid is not Berry, but another decoy, as round and toothy grinning as our missing child. I let him sulk back to his angry grandmother and answer my phone. Deborah Mei, once again.
“Kitty says Berry started it.”
“And Berry will say Kitty started it. What else you got?”
“Did you check the bathroom? Did you retrace your steps?”
“Where do you think I’ve been the last five minutes?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Do you need me to come over there and bail you out?”
“No, I can do this by myself. Just tell them I’ll be a minute. And see if you can’t get anything else out of the kids.”
“I told you,” she said icily, “he’s the one who started it.” She hung up.
A bit like Dad: always with the last words. At least Deborah Mei didn’t have Dad’s temper. Mike always said he’d blow a gasket yelling the way he did. I said you couldn’t blame the guy: when you were Dad’s age, with his heart problems, no wife, and years of loneliness to look forward to, why not let off a bit of steam? My brother problem was that he was a sensitive soul: he had to argue right back with Dad, and when he couldn’t argue anymore, he’d just shut up and take the car and disappear for an hour.
“Brilliant kid,” Dad would say, “glass skin.’
“Am I a brilliant kid too?” Id ask.
“You’re a bum but you’re thick. You move outta here, you’re gonna be a bum without a country.”
Dad wasn’t wrong about that. I’d been planning a move, doing something with my no college and poor future prospects. Mike had floated China: two years teaching’ at fifty thousand a year no tax could set you up nicely. He was planning on going himself. The idea was not unpleasing. I was ignorant of the place and had never taught a day in my life, but I was romantic-adventurous. Stupid-optimistic, Dad would say. Perhaps I’d become a Tiktok sensation, learn the lingo, get married.
As did Berry, that rascal. Prior to his getting lost, he and I enjoyed mutual trust. Dare I say an affection? I am convinced this is because I have never clobbered Berry in the head with the textbook: a standard method for at least half of our children. During parent Demo Days when the grandmas and grandpas who look after the kids squeeze into our tiny classrooms, I have witnessed more than one fussy four-year-old treated to the old head-smack at their failure to sing or clap in rhythm during the Line Up Song, or the Cool Down Song, or even the Sit-Down Song. On the other hand, when I say: “let’s sing the Circle Song,” Berry, Bless Him, will sit down, hands neatly lapped, and await the Circle Song, which goes: “Let’s all make a circle, let’s all make a circle, let’s all make a circle, let’s make a circle now.” Never a book raised in anger. The Circle song is so popular we usually sing it three or four times, and end with a collapse. Berry is a big fan of the collapse. Nary a successful lesson without at least a handful. They were the body’s comma.
Except when, for example, Cherry bites Feifei’s arm, drawing blood, and Deborah Mei rushes into the room and you have to forego the Circle Song and attendant collapses to remind everybody about Etiquette and Management and Conduct and Class Expectations.
And then, there is the accidental collapse, or collapses that should not have been. As when, for example, having just gone through the Cool Down Song, some of the students, including Berry, get it into their heads to spring around the table like little monkeys, hopping this way and that rather than loading up on the new vocabulary —SCIENCE SHUTTLE ESCAPE POD—and though you attempt to corral them back into order, Berry takes a corner at too close a swipe, cracking his little head against the table and going down like a sack of rice. Silence.
Moment like this spell PANIC and FEAR, for Grandma has made it all but crystal clear that nothing bad must happen to her Little Prodigy, in which the hopes for the future are invested.
Amazingly, though he’d gone down so hard, seconds later there emerged not a cry, but a giggle. And then, flashing that toothy grin, Berry got up and let out a squeal of stupid joy. He had not hit the table at all. The collapse was simply another game.
There are times when Etiquette and Conduct give way to Rage and Frustration. As in, for instance, a toddler playing Chicken with the hard edge of a table and mimicking a dead body. Such things are not okay in my book. Such things hit a little too close to home.
I admit, perhaps I made this point to Berry a little roughly. Perhaps, in grabbing that little genius porker by the neck shirt and screaming: “What The Hell Were You Thinking!” I might have reacted somewhat strongly. And when Berry’s eyes, twinkling through the tears on that betrayed little face, registered Panic and Pain and Hurt, like Dude, what the hell? I thought we were friends, perhaps it was harsh excommunicating the penitent to fifteen minutes of Time Out.
“Never play dead with me,” I said.
How does one climb back the bluff of broken trust? Not by little murmured apologies. Not by squashing down my extra-special blue and white Seabirds cap onto his little head: Mike’s parting gift to me. Last time we’d been together was that game. Berry couldn’t have cared less. He threw the cap it on the ground, crying himself into silence.
I thought we were friends.
I collapse by the Giant Pendulum, exhausted. Give or take there are perhaps five thousand children in this park: an impossible feat to find one. Realistically, I should just admit defeat, defer to Deborah Mei and Security. And then? If the kid was truly Lost, Berry would stay Lost. I’d seen it in him: he had the will to stay away as long as he pleased.
But then there were the other possibilities. Hurt. Hiding. Kidnapped. I’ve heard stories featuring desperate country mothers on the prowl for male scions. Get them young and acculturate them to your family. Berry’s the closed-off, protected type. Dangle some shiny keys in his face, offer a few sweets.
Or worse.
There was always worse.
Next thing I knew, some spiffy looking security guard would tell me to come with him so that I could identify a body, and there he’d be, stretched out like a stone statue, a little Seabirds-cap wearing five-year-old with a crushed body and wavy black hair all matted with blood…
I run my hands over my bald head and squeeze my palms in my eyes, and then I drag my hands away and in the splotches of my vision, I see a cap. A blue and white Seabirds cap—given by Mike on the occasion of our last hurrah. A cap I’d slapped right on Berry’s head the moment we entered the park with the words: “you stay close now, big guy.”
Berry’d never have lost the cap unless something disastrous had happened, but I have no chance to think of the possibilities because Deborah is on the line again.
“I’ve got it.”
“You found him?” I almost gasp.
“No,” she sounds confused. “The fight with Kitty.”
“Oh.” I turn the cap over in my hand, my eyes flickering to the exits. Berry was kidnapped and dropped the cap. Berry got angry and stormed away. Berry lost the cap and stomped into the parking lot to find us and got hit by an oncoming semi and is just waiting for us to find him.
“Apparently they’d been playing hide and seek when he caught her cheating, and then they had this argument but Kitty says he hit her first, and she was definitely clear about that, and then she grabbed him by the nametag and yanked it and knocked his hat off.”
“But where is he now!” I shouted. “I don’t need to know about any fights or who started it! Where is he? How are we going to find him? Is he alright?”
“I don’t know,” she says, spacing the words evenly. “But we’ve got a bus full of rowdy kids who were supposed to be home an hour ago. And now you are shouting at me.”
She hangs up.
Little Golden Boy with everything ahead of him, gone missing in a park and lost forever.
I stand up, cap in hand, and find the lake over by the decommissioned roller coaster “Escape from Humanity” and features a space capsule composed of many shuttles and a track that leaps into the skies. One of the pods has been removed from the track and bears a sign: UNDER CONSTRUCTION UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Missing, or kidnapped, or dead, but not matter because it was Your Fault again, big guy.
I bunch the cap into a little ball and make to pitch it right over the track of “Escape from Humanity.” And then I stop, a little blue nametag catching my eye. I put the cap down, and pick up the nametag, and then I look once more at the half-way constructed roller-coaster, and the little decommissioned pod.
Slowly, I push past the construction tape and enter the escape pod, where a tiny figure, alone in a dark tube, hugs his knees with his soggy little fists, clutching the frayed wet strings where the nametag had been pulled off. The thing comes together in a second. A fight with Kitty. A yanked nametag, tugged sweater, lost cap. He must have gone around looking for the missing ends and unable to find them, ended up here, not even a hundred feet from the park entrance.
“Hey buddy.”
I gently put the cap back on Berry’s head. He doesn’t shake it off. Little Berry who learned the words before anybody else. Who only wants to please. Who runs away at anger—mine, Kitty’s, Deborah’s—the same as Mike.
“I’ve got you now, buddy. Everything’s alright.”
He let me sit a little closer—sniveling, sweaty, snotty—but there, complete and alive, not crushed inside his broken Nissan Ultima, crashed alongside a snowy road half a mile outside of home. Not fresh from a fight with his dad and with a few glasses of still-warm Jim Bean in his belly. Not buried under half a ton of twisted steel with a cop’s white light in his face, asking his brother to identify his body. But there are mistakes we cannot make up, and there are those we get a second chance at.
I look at Berry—Didi, the Chinese would say, little brother—and stand, and he stands with me, sticking his little fist in my hand as we leave the hatch and rejoin humanity.
Brandon Cook Writer 
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