The Power of Art and Imagination  Theme Analysis

You’d have to be a lunatic, Bird had agreed, to overturn PACT. PACT had helped end the Crisis; PACT kept things peaceful and safe. Even kindergarteners knew that. PACT was common sense, really. If you acted unpatriotic, there would be consequences. If you didn’t, then what were you worried about? And if you saw or heard of something unpatriotic, it was your duty to let the authorities know. He has never known a world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didn’t understand why anyone would oppose it, what any of this had to do with hearts, how a heart could be missing. How could you survive without your heart beating inside you?

In this country we believe that every generation can make better choices than the one that came before. Right? Everyone gets the same chance to prove themselves, to show us who they are. We don’t hold the mistakes of parents against their children.

It’s too late: already passersby are slipping phones from pockets and bags, quietly snapping photos without breaking stride. They will be texted and posted everywhere soon. Beneath the trees, the officers circle the trunks, pistols dangling at their hips. One of them pushes his visor back up over his head; another sets his plexiglass shield down on the grass. They are equipped for violence, but not for this.

Someone complained, probably. That it encouraged pro-PAO sentiment, or something. Some of our donors have—opinions. On China, or in this case, anything that vaguely resembles it. And we need their generosity to keep this place open. Or just as likely, someone got nervous and got rid of it preemptively. Us public libraries—a lot of us just can’t take the risk. Too easy for some concerned citizen to say you’re promoting unpatriotic behavior. Being overly sympathetic to potential enemies.

I told you, she says, that’s my job. Information. Passing it on. Helping people find what they need.

She sets the opened binder atop the shelf and slides it across to him.

What you do with this information, she says, is your own business only.

Now, after all this time, he is on his way to find her. Like someone in those very stories she’d told him all those years ago. He will journey to where his mother is waiting patiently for him. As soon as she sees him, whatever spell has kept her away all this time will be broken. In the fairy tales, it happens at once, like a switch flipped: At once she recognized him. At once she knew her true self. He is certain this is how it will happen for his mother, too. She will see him and at once she will be his again and they will all live happily ever after.

In the quiet of Ethan’s apartment, poems came to her like timid animals emerging after a storm.

She wrote about the hush of the city, how the pulse of it had changed, with so many people gone. About love, and pleasure, and comfort. The smell of his neck in the early morning. The warm soft den of their bed at night. About finding stillness in the whirr that had been there for so long, a quiet place in the grinding, never-ending shriek of the Crisis.

From within, Bird kicked at her, gently this time. As if playing a game. Did the pomegranate know, she thought, did it ever wonder where they went, how they turned out. If they’d ever managed to grow. All those bits of its missing heart. Scattered, to sprout elsewhere.

The anti-American ideology was clear, which made it all the more dangerous that people were reading these poems—nearly fifty thousand copies sold so far, an unheard-of number for a book of poetry, especially from a miniscule press. […] Regardless, these poems weren’t just un-American, they were inciting rebellion. Endorsing and espousing terrorist activity. Persuading others to support insurrection. Look how many anti-PACT protests were happening.

Over and over they came, her own words echoing back to her, not on signs or in marches this time but woven into strange happenings, things so odd—half protest, half art—that they caught people’s attention, forcing them to take note; things that unsettled them days and weeks later, knotting a tangle in the chest.

She does not know if it will make any difference. She does not know if anyone is listening. She is here, locked in her cabinet, drawing cat after cat, slipping them through the cracks. Unsure if they will sink even one claw into the beast outside.

But still: she turns another page and goes on.

Bird. Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.

[…]

There are so many more stories I wish I could tell you. You’ll have to ask others—your father, your friends. Kind strangers you will meet someday. Everyone who remembers.

But in the end every story I want to tell you is the same. Once upon a time, there was a boy. Once upon a time there was a mother. Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his mother loved him very much.

And he understands, then, how it’s going to go. How he’ll find her again. What he’s going to do next, alongside everything else his life will bring. Somewhere out there are people who still know her poems, who’ve hidden scraps of them away in the fold of their minds before setting match to the papers in their hands.