Metro by Stephen Romano Page B

in begins to crumble in those first agonized stages of self-destruction, he is shipped from a tiny hospital upstate to a way station in Arkansas. The kid becomes a hot commodity for a few years, bouncing between nurseries and adoption agencies. He’s like a movie star with high-class representation in the industry, and they try to sell him to a lot of interested parties. At first the buzz on the street is great, but then it trickles off. He goes from being two years old to three years old, and then almost five, when the agents throw up their hands and stick him in the Has-Been File. It’s just bad luck, really. A healthy baby boy on the open market usually burns up the charts at this agency—the kid would go right to a nice rich family in Washington or Oregon and grow up spoiled and privileged. Families with lots of money are the ones who usually adopt, because they’ve made themselves sterile by being assholes. You know, career people. Or trust-fund brats. The poisoned one percent ruling class. It’s easy to lose track of the things that really matter when you have worlds to conquer, and then you realize one day that you’re shooting blanks and the doctor says something weird and half-informed, like It’s the stress that did it , or Be thankful that you can correct the problem in other ways and it’s, like, what the hell are these people even talking about? Truth is they’re selling you something. That’s what everybody is doing, all the time. Selling you a car, a house, a life with a precious new baby boy, bought and paid for by the state and baptized in the blood of his own mom.
    And again, our boy never knows about any of that.
    He never wants to find out because it never seems important to him. Never finds out where he came from because that place just doesn’t exist anymore. He never even questions the why of living inside the walls of an institution for abandoned and underprivileged children—it’s just the way things are . He is silent and invisible. He is frumpy and not exactly attractive—but not an ugly kid either. He is well-behaved and doesn’t cry at all. He learns to read and write. He blends right into the generic white-walled world of hallways and classrooms and play areas and lunchrooms and snack times and jungle gyms. He is not anonymous, but nothing special.
    That’s the quality they look for.
    They , being the people who finally take him away from there.
    He is almost six years old when they send a man to meet him.
    The man has white hair and a young face, but our boy doesn’t know what young really is, not yet. Our boy is a blank slate, waiting to be filled. They haven’t taught him anything yet.
    The man with the white hair sits across from him at a table in the conference room, which is white on white on white—that’s how our boy remembers it now, and he remembers it well—and the man says that our boy is special. He is not like other children, not like anyone else in the whole wide world. Most people have no idea they’re special, the man says. Most people are born into a society that wants to tell them how awful and ordinary they are, how much like everyone else they have to be. They are funneled through a school circuit and a system of government that is corrupt and absolutely unconcerned with what they really are on the inside . Our boy is still only a child and doesn’t really know what most of these words actually mean—but the man with the white hair seems like God to him. Seems like truth, like deliverance.
    They take our boy away from the institution that very afternoon, and in the car they tell him that his birthday is tomorrow.
    November 12, 1980.
    This is the first time our boy ever understands that. The first time he ever sees what a birthday cake looks like, and presents too. It’s a small party, attended only by himself and the man with the white hair. It takes place in a tiny room deep