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They were victims themselves as much as their children had been.

Who in your opinion were the perpetrators?
I asked. Several of them looked at me aghast and wouldn't speak to me again.

This was the end of a long day that had begun in the morning with a plenary session addressed by Ms. Carolyn Williams, the driving force behind organizing the conference. She told the assembled attendeesthat bringing them all together had brought her life meaning after the terrible events of May 17th and that she hoped and prayed that they would find solace in one another's company, that they would cry together and heal together. That they would find hope to begin to rebuild their lives. Tears streamed down her face.

After that there were break-out groups, then lunch, then a series of panels of people from various disciplines—psychology, sociology, communications, technology—who had studied the phenomenon of 5/17 and tried to illuminate the reasons for its occurrence or to develop reliable methods for preventing something like it happening in the future. The session that I attended was chaired by a psychoanalyst who claimed that the problem was that this generation of children had been raised to view their lives as renewable; cyberspace had fundamentally confused the development of the self-protective ego instincts. The children believed they could simply restart the game when it was over, and so the concept of death had become abstracted to them, vacant; it had ceased to have any sense of gravity.

A man stood up in the back row.

Are you telling me that I raised a son who didn't know the difference between a video game and reality?

Perhaps not consciously
, the psychoanalyst replied.
But, yes, somewhere deep in his unconscious, there was a flaw, a fatal error, buried and forgotten, waiting to explode . . .

Bullshit,
said the father in the back row and left the room letting the door slam behind him.

There seemed to be similar disgruntlement with the other professionals who spoke. I passed a group of mothers who were all talking angrily about a social psychologist who had told them that the problem was the isolation in which people now lived. The anxiety of parents about their children's safety had caused them to curtail the freedom of their children to roam and to have “unstructured” time. As a result, the only genuine playing that these kids did was online, where they built extensive and elaborate networks of trust and interaction stretching far beyond the boundaries of their physical communities. These kids had been conclusively demonstrated to feel pressure to conform and to gain the respect of their peer group, as they did in conventional “real world” peer groups. But the rules for how to do this were different in these widely dispersed networks and worked on a consumerist model—the only model these kids were familiar with. Since the usual measures of social value in American society (wealth, beauty) were stripped away by the medium, the only thing left by which children could measure success or failure was simple: quantity.

So they felt that they had to have more friends than anyone else; and then they needed to show that these weren't just names on a list but real, genuine bonds, people whom they trusted and who trusted them back. People to whom they were connected in some deep and ineradicable way. What could they do to demonstrate this bond? Well, the evidence was before us all . . .

The mothers were outraged. They absolutely rejected the man's explanation of their children's deaths. He was disrespectful, unfeeling, a crank, a charlatan.

It occurred to me that, really, people didn't want an explanation of what had happened. They wanted it to remain a mystery now and forever. This was understandable. Any theory that thoroughly and adequately accounted for the May 17th Fires, as they were known in the press coverage afterward, would reduce all these people's particular children, whom they had loved and cherished as unique, to something standardized, identical, the same. It would erase the individuality of each child, which was all they had left now: the way, for example, Annabel, my niece, loved the word “exceedingly” when she was a child, how she pronounced it as if there were four e's in it—
exceeeedingly
. Or how she used to show me her gymnastics every time I visited. Or how she used to climb up the tree in her backyard and hide among the branches until someone came to find her. That was before she turned into an almost-teenager who spent all her time in front of the computer in her room.

Any wholesale explanation for 5/17 would mean that, as far as it affected the most important matter of their young lives, all these different children might as well have been the same child, raised by the same parents. No one wanted to accept that.

This was why, I think, the conference fell apart at the end of that first day. The chaos broke out when the poet Lisa Romini-Malone got up to read the long poem she had composed for the occasion. She was not herself a Parent of 5/17 but, she said, she had close friends among those who'd lost their bright hopes for the future and she felt she could channel some of their pain through the profound act of empathy that was writing.

The parents sat attentive. Ms. Romini-Malone began to read. I think it was at the line

Burning forth in a magnificent fire / Their young and precious hearts
that the trouble began. Or it might have been when she said:
Planning in secret / The message passed from hand to hand like signal fires.
There was a murmuring in the hall that grew until it began to drown out the speaker at the front. Ms. Williams stood up and asked the audience for quiet. A woman called out from the third row:
She's celebrating this, like it is something great that happened! Like it was something beautiful,
and after that there was no quieting the room. What the poet said was lost in the angry, undifferentiated roar that came from the until-then polite and contained audience. It was a sound like the ocean rising up in a storm to burst over the land, unreasonable, unreasoning and bottomless: the sound of grief. As if united into one force, the parents rushed toward the podium and toppled it and then kept going, out into the carpeted halls of the hotel, knocking over ficus plants and tables, smashing lamps, tearing the deliberately inoffensive art down from the walls.

I stayed sheltered in a recessed window of the room with some other journalists until the main energy of the riot had made its way out into the corridor and the main lobby downstairs. Then I followed at a distance, watching from the mezzanine balcony and taking notes for the story I would write and file later that evening. Soon, from outside in the street, there came the undulating sound of sirens as the police pulled up in front of the hotel.

As I watched them storm in through the doors and push the mass of rioting parents back with their big, Plexiglas shields, I remembered, suddenly and vividly, the May morning, almost two years earlier, when the telephone woke me with its bleating and it was my sister on the other end screaming how something had happened to her daughter. I remembered how I turned on the television to the news and saw those first, terrible images that everyone knows now so well.

And I remembered how a few months earlier than that, when my sister was concerned that Annabel was spending so much time with her computer instead of with her friends, I told her not to worry. Annabel was just shy like I had been at her age, she would grow out of it, she would be fine, I said.
You have a tendency to over-parent just like Mom
, I said, feeling pleased with myself for speaking plainly to my older sister, standing up to her.
Leave Annabel alone. She'll be okay.

Then May 17th arrived. All across the world, children executed what they'd organized in secret, never speaking of their plan out loud and communicating only with a network of others whom they knew just as words onscreen, by email, on discussion boards, through cell phones, in coded messages and downloaded, encrypted files, so that just before 11 p.m. EST, they left their homes and climbed whatever they could find that was tall enough, carrying those useless homemade parachutes that one of them, no one would ever know who, had designed.

Some climbed water towers; others went onto the roofs of houses or apartment buildings. One boy in Tucson climbed up the inside of the enormous tilted dish of a radio telescope. A girl in San Francisco pulled herself onto the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge. They took their places in the dark. They waited for the hour to arrive. And when it did, they lit the fireworks they'd tied onto their ankles or wrists or stuffed into their backpacks and launched themselves out so that they all blazed up in a single moment and then plummeted burning through the night engulfed by flames before they hit the ground and burned and guttered there like candles laid out in remembrance of something, then forgotten.

Down in the lobby, the police were starting to cuff and take away the rioters, though some were still breaking and dismantling the furnishings. Below me a woman was sitting on the floor, holding her head, looking dazed. A man, perhaps her husband, tried to comfort her. I thought about my niece, how on earth it might have been for her as she fell from the eighth floor of the library in town—to which she had the key because she volunteered there twice a week—how she must have known at some point that the parachute was not going to save her and how entirely alone she must have been. I felt something like a wave of molten lava rising up inside my body and I tried to tamp it down as I had done many times before, keeping a careful hold of myself so that I could report objectively on all that had occurred. But I did not succeed this time, and the great, hot mass welled up out of my chest and came out of my mouth as a sound I'd never heard myself or anyone else make until that moment and before I knew what I was doing, I found that I was running down the wide, carpeted staircase, with my fists swinging out in front of me, still shouting without words and looking, looking, looking for something, anything to smash.

Biographies

1.

Emily Mitchell was born in London in the middle of a garbage collectors' strike. The strike began when the year had just crawled out from winter and it was still cold and rainy and the garbage collectors were unhappy because exponential growth in the manufacture and use of disposable food containers had added to their workload but there had been no expanded hiring to meet this increased demand. The leader of their union was a charismatic man called Donkey who got his moniker for his very long ears and braying voice as well as for his stubborn nature, although it is worth noting that Donkey, whose real name was Clive, was also a father and husband whose wife and children remember him as very kind, gentle and patient.

All spring the garbage piled up against the walls of the city. Fruit and scraps of meat dampened and drooped; vegetables blackened, frayed, disintegrated. Bristling animals slipped in and out of the mounting piles of plastic bags and bottles, beverage cartons, tin cans, old shoes. Children had to be warned not to play and climb on the heaps of refuse clogging up the streets, but some nevertheless made games of running up their sides and some of them fell into the piles of trash and had to be rescued. In places around town, whole streets were blocked and traffic had to be diverted.

In the end, the government decided to settle with the garbage collectors, but by this time the mountains of trash were so high and so dense from the pressures of the layers above that they could not be moved by the normal means. In some places the city used helicopters to dislodge the mass of compacted matter and hoist it into the air so that it could be flown away. People who were alive at that time remember from that summer the frequent spectacle of fleets of helicopters flying across the sky, each with a misshapen mass attached beneath it on the end of a long cord, silhouetted against the setting sun. As picturesque as these flights were, they had the disadvantage that the masses of garbage would lose their integrity in flight and start to shed, showering the populace below with banana peels and old chocolate-bar wrappers.

By the time Emily Mitchell was born, in the fall of that year, most of the garbage had been cleared away. Some of it had been buried and the land above turned into parks. Some of it had been moved to a secret location. The strike was over and the growling trucks moved again through the blue early streets waking people before dawn.

One surprising aftereffect of the strike was not discovered until the following year. It was found that several species of insects, including a variety of butterfly, and some types of flowering plants—a ragweed, a tasslewort—had begun to adapt to the garbage mountains even in the short time they existed. These insects and plants had changed their colors and in some cases their shapes in order to camouflage themselves more effectively and had come to mimic the prevalent designs found in their new environment. The bold red-and-white design of the Coca-Cola can in particular seems to have inspired these adaptations, and several of the plants began to select for a mutation of brilliant scarlet with white curlicues. Even today, these flowers can be seen growing wild in unexpected places around the city. They are deemed rare and desirable and expensive—when they can be found. Efforts to raise them commercially have not been successful. So if you can locate them, you can sell them for a remarkable sum.

2.

Emily Mitchell has worked as a waitress, a receptionist at a bakery/tanning salon, a short-order cook, a snowmobile driver, a crime-scene cleanup technician, an exotic animal trainer, a war correspondent, a phone dispatcher, a secretary, an environmental campaigner, a freelance journalist, a bean counter and a holistic pediatric oncologist.

She has never worked as an exotic dancer. She might have done this—since she has no moral objection to sex work as such and certainly not to the deliberate and conscious choice by women to use their sexual desirability, long the source of their unjust and egregious oppression, as a means of obtaining economic and social power—if only her breasts had been bigger. Not
much
bigger, but big enough that they appeared large in proportion to her torso, which seems to be the important ratio in these cases. Or maybe it was her torso that was too big. Or her hips, which are round and scoop-shaped, so her body is like a chemistry flask or a tulip bulb or an old-fashioned earthenware jug. She thinks she might have been pretty good at exotic dancing, actually, if not for her overwhelming self-consciousness, her basic discomfort with disrobing in front of people with whom she's not intimate, her physical clumsiness and her inconvenient but persistent sense that there is something ineradicably exploitative about the whole endeavor.