The Lost Children

He lifted the silver pipe to his lips and played. In his patchwork jacket and multistripe pants and two-tone shoes, he walked the city streets piping a tune. What tune? They turned and listened, passersby, businessmen, shoppers, secretaries, smokers, tourists, bag ladies, beggars. As the piper went past they cocked their heads, straining their ears, with an inward look in their eyes. Did they hear the tune? Yes—No—? Some of them followed him a little way, trying to hear what he was playing on his pipe. A bag lady shook her shopping cart in rage and shouted obscenities after him. A Japanese visitor ran to get ahead of him to take his photograph, but lost him in the crowds. A lawyer fell into step beside him, trying to hear the sound of the pipe, which surely was very high and sweet; but he could catch only the faintest sound on the very edge of hearing, and he turned off at Broadway. Three boys ran shoving and yelling past the piper through the crowds, their canvas and plastic shoes gaudier than his jacket. A woman coming out of a clothing store stopped, her back stooped, her lips parted, and gazed after him. Her little daughter tugged at her hand, impatient. “Mama, I want to go home, let’s go to the bus stop, mama!” Inside the mother, inside each of the women and the men he passed, a child jumped up crying in a high voice, “I hear it! I hear it! Listen!” But she could not hear, and her daughter paid no attention, did not listen, tugged at her hand, and she followed, obedient. Children shot past running or on skateboards or rollerblades. Men and women strolled or hurried on, turned to their business with a shrug or a comment about street musicians, continued their conversation about municipal bonds, the football game, the price of halibut, the trial, the election, the breakdown. Some of the men, some of the women felt a little flutter of the breath, a kind of gasp or a slight pang at the breastbone, and others felt nothing at all, when the child inside them broke out, broke free, and ran invisibly after the piper, inaudibly crying, “Wait! Wait for me!” as the gaudy, nimble figure passed on through the throngs, threading the traffic at the crossings, always playing his silver pipe. Among the crowds these escaped children passed quick and slight as dust motes or wisps of steam, more and more of them, a cloud, a comet-tail of immaterial children following the piper, skipping, capering, dancing to the tune he played, dancing right out of the city, through the suburbs, across the superhighways, till they came at last to the malls and the fast food strip. Did the piper go on past the malls towards the hidden country or did he slip away from the children among the endless aisles of the vast, windowless buildings? Did the children catch up to him or did they lose him, distracted by the signs and the goods, the toy stores, the candy stores? They dispersed quite suddenly, all the escaped children, wandering off into the shops and theaters and arcades to enter into electronic games, jumping and shooting and destroying one another in puffs of sparks, to enter into videos of isneyland and whizneyland and busineyland, running through towers and castles of smiling machinery and tunnels and orbits of machinery screaming. There the lost children are. When they are hungry they feed on the sweet greasy smoke from the grills where hamburger meat is fried forever, while the loudspeakers forever play the piper’s tune.