The Collectors

ONE Summer afternoon, in the middle of a very large city, at the edge of a very large park, sat one very small boy named Van.

His full name was Giovanni Carlos Gaugez-Garcia Markson, but nobody called him that. His mother, who’d given him all those names in the first place, called him Giovanni. Most people just called him Van, which he liked much better. And the kids at school called him Minivan, which he didn’t.

Van was always the smallest kid in class. Because his mother was an opera singer whose work took them all around the world, Van was always the newest kid too. And he was generally the only kid with a tiny blue hearing aid behind each ear. He tended to like different games, and watch different shows, and read different books than everyone else. He was used to being on his own.

In fact, he’d gotten very good at it.

So, on this particular afternoon, Van was sitting on his own on a wide stone bench. His mother was trying on shoes in a shop across the street, and every now and then, she’d look up and check on him through the plate-glass window. She’d warned him not to leave the bench. Van didn’t mind. He was more interested in looking around than in getting up, anyway.

There was plenty to watch. People were picnicking in the shade, jogging on the pathways, playing fetch with their dogs on the soft green grass. Pigeons waddled everywhere. A man with a pink guitar sang a song whose words Van couldn’t quite catch. And just a few feet away, a huge stone fountain splashed and shimmered, droplets of water falling from one bowl to the next like curtains of glass beads.

A boy on a bicycle zoomed past the fountain, his tires flattening a strip of grass.

And that was where Van saw it.
A small red plastic arm stuck up from the crushed grass of the tire track. Its hand was open, and its palm was turned out, so it looked like it had an important question and was just waiting for someone to call on it.

Van glanced over his shoulder. His mother was sitting in a
shoe-shop chair, her head bowed over a pair of high heels.
The arm was still waiting. Van scooted his behind toward the edge of the bench.

Then, with a last quick look at the shoe shop, he slid off the bench and dashed across the grass.
He crouched beside the red plastic arm. The rest of its body-if there was a rest-was buried in the dirt. Van took hold of the arm and gave a tug, and a small red man popped out of the ground.