Kiss Me, Stranger. Ron Tanner

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      What can we say in our defense? We love their clamorous company. There are times when, stooping to pick up one or the other, I want only to bury my face in the warm tangle of their writhing arms and legs—to lose myself in their giddy chaos. Selfish, I know. I feel buoyed by my children as, during my girlhood summers, I felt buoyed when floating in our too-salty sea. But increasingly I have a fear of the depths my feet cannot reach.

      Call it a fear of drowning.

      “Metal man! Metal man!” the children scream.

      They have clustered at the window. No tears now. The Metal Man, as they call him, is an Officer of the President’s Militia who makes the rounds once a week—unannounced—to collect metal to be melted down for the PM’s weaponry. It is the citizens’ job to gather nails, shrapnel, rebar, tin cans, anything for the cause. As our President puts it: “Your Metal Makes Me Strong!” Heaven help you if the Officer finds more than one cooking pot in your kitchen.

      “Get your nails,” I tell the children. Every morning we spend hours picking through the debris from recent bombings. While the children, under the close supervision of my most responsible—Lori, Nadia, Del, and Simon—scavenge for metal scrap, nails from wallboard and aluminum from window frames, I scavenge for copper and, if I’m lucky, terminal boards, relay switches, network junctions, flatscreens. You never know what you’ll find.

      The metals Officer wears an aluminum stewpot which he’s fashioned into a helmet. It bears a high, scratchy shine and sits a little too low on his head. An older man—that is, older than I—he is tall, lean, and handsome and looks remarkably like the English actor Christopher Lee, who used to star in so many vampire movies of my youth. The name “Hermes,” stitched in hand-sized gold script across the back of his shirt, could be his real name, a nickname, or a brand name. Every time I see him I wonder why he is not on the front lines with everyone else.

      Some days we’re winning the war, some days we’re not. Every day, at random, the Mimis scream overhead. If they’re rocketing south, they’re fired by the President’s Militia. If they’re rocketing north, they’re fired by the Revolutionary Militia. Rumor says that half the PM has defected to the RM and half the RM to the PM. As one RM slogan puts it: Who’s the enemy? Look in the mirror!

      The children open the door before Officer Hermes knocks. He bows ever so slightly when he sees me. It seems he finds me attractive, though I don’t know why, a mother of fourteen. I’ve lost weight, it’s true, and I’ve noticed that a streak of gray at my left temple, which seems to have appeared over night, gives me a haunted look, the kind of gloomy allure you might expect of the heroine of a romance novel.

      “Officer,” I say stiffly. “What a pleasant surprise.”

      He smiles his hungry smile. “Penelope.” He makes my name sound like an exhalation. I’ve decided that he is frightening.

      “Metal man! Metal man!” the children call. It’s almost a taunt but also an expression of terror—as if calling after a scarecrow that has come alive and begun to haunt the neighborhood.

      He holds open his canvas bag like a trick-or-treater, his jaw working a wad of toffee. He says, “Good morning, kittens, what gifts have you for me today?”

      “Can we have some candy?” they whine. I think of chicks in a nest, mouths gaping. The children grasp at the Officer’s shiny polyester shirt, his leather belt, his rubber waders, his very blue jeans.

      four views of the metal man

      He’s well fed, anybody can see, a little paunch above his belt. Sometimes I’m tempted to punch his belly, just to feel how soft it really is.

      “Where would I get candy?” he asks cheerfully.

      “You’re eating it!” they shout.

      “You’re an official!” Nadia says. “You can get anything!”

      Join the President’s Militia, the PM says. Make yourself Official!

      Had our President not squandered the nation’s trust, we would have done well enough. When younger, I was never political enough to keep track. I thought The Man, as he insisted we call him, was sufficiently presidential for his role. He made the trains run on time, he opened his Ferris wheel collection to the nation’s children twice a year, he posed for photos with people in the street.

      “Get your nails,” I tell the children again. We make a production of our offering, the children parading one after the other to the Officer’s open bag. As the nails accumulate, their collective noise like the sound of someone going through a change purse, I think of the money Marcel and I horded before he was forced to join the PM—big paper bills which featured The Man’s smiling face over the slogan that made him popular so many years ago: “Let’s grow grow smart,let’s grow rich!”

      I try not to think of the many ways I could have spent our horde before it became worthless. Now the bills paper our leaky wall seams, and my children are wearing sandals I’ve fashioned from duct tape and polystyrene packing sheets. Boys and girls alike wear shifts I’ve stitched together from plastic shower curtains. I have failed them.

      “Nice,” Officer Hermes is saying. “Very nice.” He nods his approval at each handful of nails.

      Just then we hear a crash from the kitchen and I fear the worst, that Lori has not finished hiding the cookware.

      The Officer looks up abruptly, like an alerted guard dog: “Sounded like a pan to me.”

      “That would be surprising,” I say.

      He purses his lips, suppressing a smile. “Let’s take a look.”

      The children surround him, waving their hands and hopping in protest:“We don’t have any pans!” “We’re not hiding!” “Nobody’s in there!” All of which make a convincing show of guilt. Still, I can’t help but love them for trying.

      When Officer Hermes opens the kitchen door, whose hinges are solid brass, by the way, Lori stands at the kitchen sink scrubbing a plastic bowl furiously.

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