The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

She knows she shouldn’t have gotten into the vehicle. That’s how girls vanish. That’s how girls vanish every day. If you get in the car it’s over. If you get in the car, you’re lost forever. You don’t get in the vehicle, you turn around and you run, run, run.

The woman groans and then there is the sound of a single gunshot.

The sky is falling. The sky is coming down. She can’t breathe. She doesn’t want to breathe. Her baby girl. No. It isn’t true. Nobody has taken Kylie. This woman doesn’t sound like a kidnapper. It’s a lie.

George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.

As J. G. Ballard pointed out, civilization is just a thin, fragile veneer over the law of the jungle: Better you than me. Better your kid than my kid.

You’ve never experienced fear until something or someone puts your child in danger. Dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you. The worst thing that can happen to you is for something to happen to your kid. Having a child instantly turns you into a grown-up. Absurdity is the ontological mismatch between the desire for meaning and the inability to find meaning in this world. Absurdity is a luxury parents of missing children can’t afford.

Life is a cascade of nows falling on top of one another without meaning or purpose. Of all the philosophers, only Schopenhauer ever got that right.

Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.

Love is what undid Ariadne and Theseus. The Minotaur too, in the Borges story. Love, or a fumbling attempt at love, is what nearly undid Ginger.

The Chain is a metaphor for the ties that bind all of us to friends and family. It is the umbilical link between mother and child, the way or path that the hero must travel in a quest, and it is the thin clew of crimson thread that is the solution Ariadne comes up with to the problem of the labyrinth.

Life is fragile, fleeting, and precious. And to live at all is miracle enough.