Amber Alert
One of those parties where you know no one but those you came with. Drinks in the garden. Instagrammable cocktail in one hand, a stranger’s hand in the other. You begin putting out the political feelers, discerning what is safe to say here. The quiet, bespectacled husband you find yourself talking to surprises you by suggesting someone should really just put a bullet in his head already. You see, suddenly, like a glimpsed sign that makes you stomp on the brake, his latent radicalism. His work with the anarchist collective on Shattuck. Afternoons thrusting pamphlets into the hands of bewildered undergrads just trying to get to lecture. Sweating through his shirt at basement shows that left his ears ringing for days. Now he twists between finger and thumb the sprig of rosemary he pulled out of his drink, squinting over his wife’s shoulder at the text she is sending the babysitter. They seem to hardly be here, these two, wearing as they do the strained faces of those whose minds are elsewhere. They won’t stay long. Their lives aren’t here in this burgeoning garden but in that dark room where their daughter is sleeping. While the phone is still in her hand, it starts buzzing, differently than it usually does, like a grenade she pulled the pin from but forgot to throw. It buzzes in her husband’s hand, too, and in your pocket, and in the pockets and hands and purses of everyone in the garden. On the counter where the hostess left it in distraction. In the hand of the babysitter on the couch, snipping the sensuous text thread she and her boyfriend have been weaving all evening. Even after you’ve heard her say, to no one in particular, “Amber alert,” you look at your phone’s cracked face to confirm it. You imagine the truck or van, the swarthy man driving, the wide-eyed child beside him, borne away from everything familiar as if by a rogue wave. This couple with their phones in their hands look worried, though they must know they have nothing to fear. Parents aren’t the ones alerted in amber, the color of despair, and anyway, they were just texting with the babysitter, who, anticipating that they would want to know that she’d done so, has just gone upstairs to check. The husband says, “Where were we?” as if you’ve all been lost. As everyone puts their phones away and resumes their conversations, you can’t stop thinking about the amber alert, how it spread through the party, then died out. It reminds you of something you read once, a theory as to why yawns are contagious. It is believed to be evolutionary, a selected behavior in herds, a mechanism by which, if one member is tiring, the whole can know, the yawn a kind of information, or, rather, the means by which information is communicated, suggesting that the herd should close ranks, bed down, bring the weakest within.