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garbage when the lights came on.
    There’d also been the young man who slicked his hair and tucked his shirts and affected melancholy even when working at the toolbox factory. We knew his sort. When he talked about the movies, he said he still dreamed of being part of them, an idea that was tedious, and when he disappeared behind the black door, we told ourselves he’d run away to live some other life. Having a family and watching movies weren’t good enough for him.
    And finally, there’d been Lon Stellmacher, the Stellmachers’ retarded son who was such a burden to his parents, he made Beth look old before her time and forced Carl to put away all his hearty ambitions. Poor Lon almost didn’t make it down the aisle because he had trouble seeing in the dark. When he stumbled against a row of seats, a few of us reached out and put him back on his way. Beth and
Carl blamed themselves for letting him go to the Orpheum alone, but we didn’t place such blame. Even watchfulness and care have their limits.
    David Miller didn’t know that we’d been observing disappearances for years, never quite thinking of them as sacrifices. We knew only that our parents had done the same as us, and their parents before that. Any one of our grandparents could have stopped Roy Elkhart before he stabbed Common Woolbrink eleven times, but instead they stood by and marveled at the way his wounds opened like mouths in his red coat.
    David didn’t call for our help on the night Kitty slipped behind the black door. Instead, he merely stared at us there in our threadbare seats, still dressed in our work clothes, the expression on his face becoming a kind of mirror. On the day-bright streets, he knew most of us by name, but in the Orpheum, we were different, a single organism, immense yet paralyzed, and our beautiful theater, with all its rich trappings and pictures of youth, was nothing more than a funeral hall, holding services, night after night, for the same powdered corpse. Perhaps what frightened David the most was not our empty faces but the fact that so many seats in the Orpheum remained empty too, like invitations to sit for a show.
     
    In the lobby, May Avalon reclined, eyes buried in blue makeup, listening to the cheerful voices drifting from her record player. Her pale fingers played absently against the seam of her nylon pants.
    “Something happened to my sister,” David said breathlessly, having run the length of the aisle and burst into the lobby.
    With effort, May roused herself, white braids brushing the shoulders of her uniform blouse. “What did you
say?”
    “Kitty, my sister,” he said. “She got up and walked away.”
    May attempted a smile. “Kitty’s quite an old-fashioned named isn’t it? Maybe the movie didn’t agree with her. These sorts are for men. We have a woman’s story coming next week.”
    He took off his baseball cap and folded the brim, trying in earnest to stay calm. “She didn’t leave, ma’am. She went through that door under the screen and now she’s locked in.”
    Her smile became a colorless line. “Are you sure?”
    “Of course I am,” he said.
    “It usually only happens if they’re alone,” she said.
    “Happens?”
    May lifted a pair of gold-rimmed glasses from the ticket console and put them carefully on her nose, studying David’s damp blond hair. “Do I know you? ” she said.
    He shrugged. “You’ve been selling me tickets all my life. Me and Kitty.”
    Taking off her glasses, she sighed. “That makes you no different than the rest of them, I suppose. But I can see you care about your sister. She must be a darling.”
    “The rest of who, lady? What are you talking about? ”
    “My name is May, dear,” she said. “It’s better if you call me by my name.”
    He took a deep breath. “Look, May, my sister is locked behind the door under the screen. She is a . . . darling, I guess. But she’s sad tonight because of a stupid thing that happened with some guy. Something