Case Closed by Gabriele Micozzi

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    When the children began to disappear, the city did not look for them. The city formed a committee, which is what a place does when it wants the comfort of action without the risk of finding anything.
    The committee commissioned a dashboard. A dashboard requires categories, because a dashboard without categories is only a feeling, and the city had resolved, in an earlier session, that feelings were not actionable. So the children were sorted. Missing. Probably Missing. Statistically Absorbed.
    Statistically Absorbed was the category that drew applause. It described a child who had not been found, but whose absence no longer bent the trend line. A child could be absorbed without being anywhere. The word did the work that searching used to do, and it did it faster, and it did it from a chair.
    Around this time, people began to notice a sound in the new municipal offices — a faint, irregular tapping, low in the walls, mostly after dark. Knuckle-soft. The sound a child makes when it does not yet dare to knock properly. The contractor was consulted. He attributed it to the ventilation. The explanation was accepted, minuted, and filed, because an explanation, like a category, is a place to put a thing so that you no longer have to carry it.
    A cleaner pressed her ear to the wall one night and did not sleep again in that building. The next morning she requested a transfer. Her reason, on the form, was left blank — there being no category for what she had heard.
    Grief, meanwhile, was moved online. Parents submitted their loss through the appropriate portal, in the appropriate field, within the appropriate window. There was a character limit. A mother named Petra — who still set two places at dinner, then one, then could not decide — wrote her son’s name into the box. Tomas. Seven years old. A chipped front tooth. A habit of falling asleep mid-sentence, as though sleep were something that happened to him in the middle of being alive. The counter told her she had nineteen characters remaining. She did not know what to do with them. She left them empty. In the months that followed she would think about those nineteen characters more than she thought about almost anything, because they were the last space the city had offered her, and she had not known how to fill it with a child.
    Then someone found the incentive. Closed cases scored higher than open ones. A resolved file improved every metric it touched, regardless of how it had resolved. No one decided to prefer the children gone; no one would ever have decided that. It was only that the system ran more smoothly when they were, and a system that runs more smoothly is difficult to argue with, especially in a
quarter when the numbers are good.
    Response times improved. The portal thanked each parent for their patience. Satisfaction scores, collected immediately after each bereavement was logged, rose for three consecutive quarters. Engagement, a footnote observed, was strongest among the recently affected.

    By spring, no child in the city was missing. This was not a turn of phrase. Each had been given a status, and a status is not an absence; it is a presence of an administrable kind. At the ribbon-cutting for the Family Resolution Center — a low building with good light — the mayor said exactly that, and the room applauded, and behind him the wall hummed its small irregular hum, and not one person in the room could hear it anymore.
    At the final public meeting the room was calm. The categories had done their work. People had learned to speak of their children the way the dashboard spoke of them, and there is a peace in that — the peace of any language that has agreed, in advance, to ask nothing further of you.
    Petra stood. She had been the only one in the room with her head tilted, very slightly, toward the wall. She had not learned the language. She asked where her son was.
    The chair smiled. It was a good smile, rehearsed into sincerity, the smile of a man trained to receive pain and return process. He turned the monitor so she could see it properly. A bar, full, green, complete.
    “Madam,” he said, gently, professionally, “your case is closed.”
    His eyes had already moved to the next name on the list. He was, in the kindest possible sense, finished with her.
    Petra looked at the green bar. She understood that it was meant to comfort her, and that everyone in the room found it comforting, and that the failure to be comforted was now, technically, hers.
    She opened her mouth. She never found out what she would have said.
    Because behind the chair, low in the wall, in the place the contractor had blamed on the ventilation, the tapping began. Not knuckle-soft now. Not shy. Slow. Deliberate. The seriousness of a child who has just learned his letters and wants, more than anything, to get them right.
    M. O. T. H. E. R.
    The chair did not turn around. He had the dashboard open in another tab, and on the dashboard the bar was green, and a thing that is green does not require a man to turn around.
    He thanked everyone for coming. He said, once more, that the case was closed.
    In the wall, the tapping started over. From the top. More carefully this time — the way you repeat your name to someone who has decided, for reasons of efficiency, not to hear it.
    And then, beneath it, fainter, from somewhere deeper in the same wall, a second tapping. Then a third. Then more than anyone could count, overlapping, each one slightly out of time with the others, each one learning the rhythm, each one spelling, letter by patient letter, the only word it had left.
    All of them absorbed. All of them present. None of them anywhere. And in all that bright, well-managed city, the only people still tuned to that frequency — the ones who might have pressed an ear to the wall and known — had each, in their turn, been shown a green bar, and thanked, and told that their case was closed.