Have You Seen

It is taped to the pole at eye level, or stapled to the community board by the grocery, or slipped under your wiper in a parking lot, and it is one of the plainest documents a person can produce: a photograph, a name, a few facts, a phone number, and two words at the top in the largest type the printer would allow — HAVE YOU SEEN. A missing cat. A missing dog. Sometimes, and then the whole street changes weather, a missing person. It is a flyer, a piece of paper, the most amateur kind of publishing there is, run off on a home printer at two in the morning by someone who could not sit still any longer and needed, desperately, to do something — and it is also, if you stop in front of it and actually read it, one of the most naked things a human being ever puts into public view: a private grief translated, badly and bravely, into the flat civic language of a notice.

Because that is what the missing poster is: love with nowhere left to go but the pole. When someone or something you love simply vanishes — walks off, doesn’t come home, is there and then is not — the horror of it is partly the helplessness, the total absence of anything useful to do, and the poster is the one action available. You cannot search the whole city yourself. So you make a paper version of yourself, hundreds of them, and you send them out to stand on poles and boards all over town and ask, on your behalf, the only question that matters, of every stranger who passes: have you seen. The poster is you, multiplied and taped up, keeping the search going in a thousand places you cannot personally be, pleading with the public in a way you would never plead face to face — because grief will make you do publicly what pride would never otherwise allow.

The specificity is the love

Read one closely and the love is in the details, and the details are unbearable precisely because of how much hope is packed into them. Answers to Biscuit. Very shy. Has a small notch in his left ear. Needs medication. Last seen wearing a blue coat. Distinctive laugh. Every specific is a small act of faith — faith that if you just describe them exactly enough, precisely enough, someone will recognize them, that the right detail will lodge in a stranger’s memory and bring them back. The person who wrote has a small notch in his left ear was reaching for the one feature specific enough to make a stranger sure, was loving the animal or the person in the most concrete possible terms, was translating years of intimate knowledge — the notch, the shyness, the laugh — into evidence, into a description, into something a stranger could use. And the reward, when there is one, is the same love converted into the only universal language for this matters more than anything: a number, sometimes larger than the family can afford, because there is no sum that would not be worth it, and the amount is not really a payment, it is a measure, a way of shouting THIS much, this is how much we need them back in the one currency a stranger cannot misread.

And the phone number, cut into little tear-off tabs along the bottom, each one waiting to be pulled, is its own small architecture of hope — the family imagining, as they cut the tabs with scissors at the kitchen table, the moment a stranger tears one off, the call that might come, the future in which the phone rings and it is good news. Every untorn tab is a call that hasn’t happened yet. Every poster is a net cast into the indifference of a city, hoping.

The ones that stay up too long

But the posters that stop me, that I cannot walk past without a small ache, are the old ones — the ones that have been up too long. Faded now, the ink gone grey in the sun, the paper warped and softened by rain, the tape lifting at the corners, the once-large face bleached almost to nothing. A poster for a cat that went missing two summers ago, still clinging to a pole. And the thing about the old weathered poster is that you will never know how it ended, and the not-knowing is the whole of it. Did the cat come home, and no one thought to take the poster down, so it just weathered there, a monument to a fear that resolved happily and was forgotten? Or did it not come home, and the poster stayed up because taking it down was the last thing, the final admission, the moment the family agreed to stop hoping — and they could not do it, and so the poster stayed, fading, long after the family had privately given up, because to peel it off the pole was to peel off the last of the search?

You cannot tell, from the weathered poster, which story it is. And so it holds both at once, the happy ending and the terrible one, superimposed, unresolved, and you stand in front of it not knowing whether you are looking at a small joy or a small tragedy, only that you are looking at the residue of someone’s love and fear, left up too long, going grey in the weather. I never take them down — it is not mine to decide that the search is over — and I never fail to read them, the fresh ones and the old ones, because it costs nothing to be, for a moment, one of the strangers the poster is pleading with, to actually look at the face and hold the question the way it asks to be held: have you seen, have you seen, please, have you seen. Most of the time I have not. But the least I can do, passing, is to have genuinely looked — because somewhere a person cut those tabs with kitchen scissors at two in the morning, imagining me, the stranger at the pole, actually looking, and being the one who had.