what to wear when last seen
January 26, 2008This was written in early March 2003 following an odd experience—a clash of memory, imagination and reality. I have revised it since and thought about it a lot. Because it’s real. These really are dead kids, and they have found their way inside me through their presence, absence, and the living who befriend me, who remind me that what I do is not contained, does matter, and does change if not who reads it… then at least who writes it. This is me trying to remember what it’s like to not know what it means to disappear.
If you grew up in the eighties, you know a stranger could snatch you from your mother’s arms and cut her heart to pieces. When you were four, she brought you and your brothers to the mall. Smiling adults took your picture and weighed and measured and fingerprinted you. They put you in a computer and gave your mom a file. Sometimes, at home, you sneaked a look at the file. It showed an outline of a child like an inside-out shadow branded here and there with a black magic marker.
This is you, and these are your scars.
Just before noon on February 28, 2003, as I walk into the library, a boy a few steps ahead of me turns and glances back. Moves forward. Though sure I’ve never seen him before, I swear he seems familiar. Soon he turns back again, All-American Kid, with short dirty-blond hair, school-colored casual clothes, a smudge of chub and shade of uncertainty. Staring at me. Turning back. Staring again oh my god I suddenly think it’s that dead kid—it’s Chris Jenkins, missing since Halloween. Though I’ve never met him, I’ve seen him a thousand times, a photocopied grinning kid missing all over in Dinkytown, Downtown and Stadium Village, on the West and East Banks, in every campus building.
After the initial panic, his search force came up with “Someone Knows”—signs printed with just those words someone knows an information ad campaign, like they were selling insecurity or a past life. They continued the ones with the portraits, too, different shots and different editions, the later ones lacking the last seeing wearing. Would you deny the face of a missing kid in your storefront, your restaurant, would you turn away hope, would you tell his friends and family I want to help, truly, but that poster’s an obituary—I’m tired of looking at the photograph of a dead kid I’ve never met.
If you grew up in the eighties in the Midwest, you know Jacob Wetterling. You and your friends made kidnapper kits you kept in fanny packs and wore on your hips everywhere you went, you carried needles to stab through eyes, bobby pins to pick the locks of trunks from the inside, and batteries for their acid because acid burns, and candy and crackers to eat to survive. The dye in this plastic film container will blind. This peroxide will poison. You will roll these slippery BBs across the floor like a sly kid genius, like your captor’s a cartoon, and this glass you ground to put into his food will rip apart his guts like your brothers said it would, and these wires and clay you wrapped in foil will turn into a bomb like on MacGyver.
You should have been friends with us, Jake. Be ready, always, it could happen anytime.
You could disappear, and when you’re disappeared, make sure you’re last seen wearing something not embarrassing and wear clean underwear without any holes so when your kidnapper and coroner cut open your clothes, they will not know you are poor.
To me Chris Jenkins was alive about a week. Though I couldn’t think otherwise, I couldn’t say it aloud, couldn’t with my own tongue ask, tell myself c’mon, what’s the use? it’s homicide, suicide, in-some-way goodbye. In December discussing his mother with her heart all cut to pieces and her censure of the police who dared and how dare they tell her that her son was depressed and jumped into the river, a classmate exclaimed much too loudly, “He’s dead!”
He’s been a dead kid from my lips ever since.
If you grew up in Fargo-Moorhead in the early nineties, you know Jeanna North. Her have-you-seen-me eyes followed you at the public pool, watching your belly flops and watermelons. She never joined in, though, she preferred the river, a hiding place she hasn’t given up, a place that hasn’t given up her.
When you visit the water and vivisect your memories, make fiction out of mud and when years after her nabbing you clip from the Fargo Forum, “body to prove she was dead. With cut banks where large chunks of the shore fell into the water and deep sinkholes, the Sheyenne is a river that hides secrets” and take these words with you to Minneapolis, you try not to feel guilty for replacing her memory—if only in your mind—with your imagination of leaving behind an adolescence she never had the chance to enter, your own teenage years you barely remember and cannot disassociate with tearing away.
What will you wear when you are last seen?
On the night Chris Jenkins disappeared, he wore an American Indian costume for Halloween—a loud red feather in a headband cut from felt, and a brown shirt and pants with Navajo accents made by a machine. All-American Insensitivity.
Have you ever wanted to punch a dead kid?
Friends tell me about me nervously. Say they were afraid of me before they got to know me. I laugh because I’m stupid-shy. My moments of mania are pure creation—nothing to be scared of. I know I have a presence; I don’t project it, it projects me. But am I turn-and-look-back-five-times strange?
As we near the stairs, the boy who I know is not Chris Jenkins but reminds me of Chris Jenkins in a way I can’t define glances at me again. Could a person unfindable for several months show up in a library? Pass through unnoticed, just another student? but he’s not another student, he’s Chris Jenkins, and I stare at him because he stares at me. We both head to the basement; I’m on one flight of stairs, he on the one below, and a final time his eyes drift to mine.
He lacks the tensed expression of one who recognizes. This person doesn’t know me, he just looks and looks like he wants to tell me something, a secret someone knows a tired expression it’s warming up and river freeze is thawing to ask me a question where am I? where were you the night I stopped breathing? then I lose the missing kid around a corner.
A few hours later, Chris Jenkins was pulled from the Mississippi.
You’ve never met a river that didn’t hide a body. You will not forget the faces burned into your memory. You cannot remove what you will wear last seen. When you ready yourself to enter the world where unknown kids disappear and their absence is the presence that haunts your mind—aged eleven, eleven, and twenty-one until the end of time—you look in the mirror and tell yourself,