The Vanishing Hundreds – Kenan Meral

October 15, 2025

In the bar room corner there was a drunkard and his boy.
        The father crooned his head into his chest like a sleeping swan. The boy sat etching meaningless into wall paint using his dad’s car keys—began refining the jagged details of an arbitrary map or an unreal logos. The boy-artificer chipped off a paint wafer and took it with a drink of liquor slush. He sipped and winced at the content’s bitterness. His cup was his father’s. His rum tumbler, a makeshift ashtray. I looked closer at the child’s image, at his ruddy face and Irish sunglasses. His cleft palate. I observed his lazy eye gazing into the middle distance, looking constantly rightwards. Then the other one looking at me.
        “You eat, kid?” I asked.
        The lead-paint-eater stared at me out of a lucent hole in his head.
        “You eat?” I made a bowl and utensil out of my hands and fed myself imaginary. Then I pointed at him.
        “Food?”
        “Don’t mind him.” The bartender said. “He won’t speak.”
        “His Pop doesn’t much mind him?”
        “He’s another type.” He said. “Can I get you another?”
        “No I’m not really here to drink.”
        “You’re at a bar and you’re not here to drink?”
        “I’m really supposed to be meeting someone.”
        “Who is she?”
        “Actually there’s this guy I worked on a construction site with. His daughter went missing.”
        “I know about him.”
        “You seen him lately?”
        “Not recently.”
        “He was supposed to meet me here an hour ago.”
        When the boy’s mother arrived she gathered him up in her arms and took him away not before scowling at me like that stupid babe was mine and I’d failed them all. In the dark-corner, her livid eyes glared with a beauty, a ferocity that should not look so with such a son.
        “What’d I do?”
        “Nothing I’d say.” The bartender said. “You just sat there.”
        I told myself I was going to wait for half an hour more, so I ordered another drink and I waited.
        It was raining. I was staring out the window. Had a memory of it of when I was that kid’s age. This time of year. In the midsummer night, a dream of running innocently through the rain. The fat droplets falling on my face. The flickering lightning. The rain-dappled road. I ran into my neighbor’s house for cover. He was an older fellow. He’d take his dentures out and smile funny at me. Though, there’s nothing I can do about it now.
        As I was getting up to leave the man finally arrived. He was dressed in grease stained jeans and a ripped gray t-shirt and cheapo work boots.
        “What’s going on Orson?”
        “I’m sorry I’m late. Never buy Nissan.”
        I smiled faintly. I didn’t want to humiliate the guy. Strangely, Orson had almost no accent. He was remarkably well spoken for someone who came to this country not too long ago.
        Eventually we got to talking. I told him I could try to help. Orson told me her last known whereabouts. He showed me his daughter’s picture. His family made it all the way from Guatemala, just for her to come here and get lost. There was a non-profit that her parents hired to get her upstate when the mother got detained. They had family up here. His daughter boarded a bus in Fort Worth. One bus took her to another. Drove her all the way into Richmond, Virginia. She contacted her mother saying she was getting onto a transportation van. Then she called from a Philly gas station. The last attempt at contact was made around 3 a.m. Mariela then called twice from a Central Scranton Expressway bus station. That was most likely around when she was abducted.
        I looked at Orson carefully. Stress-lines ran rivulets around his eyes. In a wallet sized photo, Mariela Gutierrez is 15. If she’s still alive, she’s 17. Orson told me there were two Mexican families in the area who had a similar story. He gave me their phone numbers. We finished our drinks and I told him I’d do what I could.

It was late.
        It was drizzling faintly. In the mountains I heard a coal train trumpeting. As I was walking down Broadway in Jim Thorpe, I came to a conclusion that there was possibly nothing I could do. That after all my trials and travails, there was no one who would find them and that the missing children had been jettisoned out of the material world. My suspicion is that law enforcement is, at the very least, choosing to not get involved in the missing cases of the nationally known “Vanishing Hundreds.” I was doing too much off-duty snooping for it to not be true. Facing too much discouragement.
        After the storm picked up lightning began.
        Blue light crackled across the black sky.
        Two women were running through gouts of rain. I watched them from underneath an awning of a closed restaurant. Besides streetlights, and the sky-made fire, scarcely any light shone besides of that of the staring moon. For a moment the two running women flickered as if they were draped in bright silk. They scampered down a street side and became one with the shadows. The storm wasn’t letting up, so I decided to make a run for it through the railing waters. As I ran, my clothes weighed heavily upon my body like rags. Neon signs threw red rapid trails. I was smiling somehow, running through the puddles. How the rain makes manifold the night’s starlorn colors. Just as the storm ended I made it home.
        I kicked my spongey shoes off at the door and made it to the shower. I took off my clothes in the bathtub and tried to wring them out. They were uselessly drenched. I turned the faucet on. The running showerhead chased the cold water off my body while I dropped my t-shirt and jeans onto the bathtub floor and laid down in the tub and fell asleep with my shirt draped over my eyes. As I was drifting off, I made a covenant and placed it behind a seal within my heart. I don’t know where they went but I will save at least one.
        The next morning, I didn’t have work. Chief Matthews was sorry to let me go.
        Something, something, “We’re downsizing police departments from Scranton to Wilkes-Barre. It has nothing to do with your job performance, or you as a man. This is strictly due to a change in funding. You’re young. You don’t have a lot of seniority. I can write you any recommendations you’d need.” Blah, blah, blah. It was an ugly scene to cause. Especially when they couldn’t give me a proper reason for firing after five years of service.
        Oddly enough, I was one of the few detectives leading efforts into the Wilkes-Barre cold cases. Almost two dozen missing illegals. They migrated out of countries ranging from Mexico to Venezuela. All ages 11-23. Mostly women and girls. On the drive home, I’d realized that my suspicions were confirmed.
        I think a lot of the lower ranking cops I talked to found the disappearances convenient.
        Less complaints from locals, less work for them. It sounds rough, but when violent criminals and repeat offenders die of fentanyl overdoses or get killed, it’s less of a burden on the community. A lot of people out in the countryside feel that way about migrants too, or asylum seekers, or whatever you’d like to call them. We all know the what were talking about. The language games are bullshit. It’s just one less person to worry about. Still, I lost my job over it and taking a man’s livelihood is a serious matter.

***

As of that August I was officially unemployed. I didn’t have a lot to do. So that summer I started hiring prostitutes.
        I figured that if I could get to know the girls, who was hiring them and who was pimping them out, I could formulate a map of a sex trafficking network. I started hiring Hispanic ones in particular. Ones around Scranton. They’d come to meet me at a Motel Six and I’d try to interrogate them. It wouldn’t do much good unless I flashed extra cash. Some of these women were young. I guess it didn’t matter considering I was already acting extrajudicially.
        Isabella was 19. At least that’s what she told me. Fair-skinned, dark haired Colombian. I asked Isabella if her parents were around. She said no. So I asked her who takes care of her. She said a guy named Benny. So I gave her 200 dollars and she told me where I could meet him. This process went on from the end of August into mid-September. Eventually after talking to two dozen girls I was able to gather more information. With regards to the johns, I discovered that several general managers from the Scranton Defense and Munitions Plant were hiring these girls out for parties. I asked them if they knew any more details. Seven girls said they went home with General Dynamics vice-presidents who were visiting the SDMP. Three others said they went to hotels with Army Contracting Command subordinates.
        “How do you know who they worked for?” I asked Isabella.
        “They weren’t quiet about it.” She said. “I think those men assumed we were too naive to understand. Also, when they don’t give you the option to forget, you remember everything.”
        “I’m sorry to hear that.”
        That summer, I had too many likesuch conversations. Confessions. These young women would never cry. Their eyes knew an evil estranged from speakable words, and that the hearing of painful knowledge would do little in conveying a therein meaning.
        Eventually I got a job on a construction crew. Steadily I tried to build evidence but a lot of the trails I followed went cold. Then in November I got my ass kicked for asking too many questions. A couple of these pimps were waiting for me at the motel I was frequenting. Showed up with several guys. Almost beat me to death with rebar bundles.
        It wasn’t so much a cold case, more like a firewall. If I wanted to continue working for a living, eating for a living for that matter, I’d have to stop playing vigilante. That was the end of that.

***

Several years later I met a sweet woman and we ended up having a boy of our own.
        As he grew, Nick and I would go down to the park together.
        One of my favorite things about talking to my son was finding out how creative he was. There was a sandbox there where he’d construct shapes and patterns. It looked like the way Picasso wanted to paint towards the end of his career.
        “What’s that?”
        “It’s you Daddy.”
        “That doesn’t look anything like me.” I smiled.
        He decorated my mandala portrait with a crown of dandelions. They were bunched up in such a silly way that you’d think a golden flowers shot up out of my head like antennae.
        “Now what do those flowers do?” I asked him.
        “You see out of ‘em.” He giggled.
        I was laughing, tickling him. When he was done laughing, I pointed at his sand drawing. “And what about you? Where’s your drawing?” “I don’t know.”
        “Hm?” I ruffled his hair.
        “What’s that castle?”
        “I just like building. It’s fun makin things. It’s fun wreckin em too.”
        “It sure is.”
        I went back up to sit on my porch where I could keep a close eye on my boy from afar. After the swings and the endless running up and down the small hill by our house, he’d fall face first into the unkempt field. I’d see his sprinting shade go to and fro the hill by our home.
        “What are you doing now?” I’d call out to him.
        He’d sit up and look at me, swaying his torso back and forth.
        He didn’t say.
        I watched my son sit there in the field far off, imitating the grass.
        Things were okay then. I was running my own construction company. Was working a lot less hard now that I was managing things and had a reliable team. One September morning I got a call from Orson as I was getting ready for work. I didn’t pick up. I looked at my phone and watched it ring for a couple seconds until it stopped. Then he called again. So out of guilt I picked up. Said he was looking for work. I told him I didn’t have any. It was a blatant lie. I couldn’t see that man again. Not after everything he’s been through. Not after leaving behind a timeline where I thought I could be of any help to anyone; where I mistakenly believed that dignity was something more than remaining alive for yourself and your progeny. Now all dignity means is coming home.

As for a man like Orson Gutierrez, I don’t know what dignity means. I don’t know what justice means either. I’d imagine it entails painfully killing a lot of bad people.
        “Look Orson, I don’t have a lot of contracts going at the moment but landscaping work is around the corner. If I need help you’ll be the first one I call.”
        “Ryan there’s one thing.”
        “What’s that?”
        “We should get together soon. Are you free tonight?”
        “I’ll have to let you know when I get off work.”
        “Okay. It’s important.”
        “Fine. How about the Broadway Pub?”
        “Sounds good.”
        “Ryan?”
        “Yeah?”
        “They found her.”
        I shuddered at the thought of the image.
        We met later on. We talked. I drank little. He drank a lot.
        Orson used to be a deeply religious man. Theologically motivated. Before he came to America he’d studied theology for two years. Then he had a daughter. Before, he had a rational coherence of the meaning of God and a well thought out Catholic apprehension. Not anymore. Once Orson told me, “God is all. Else all is nothing.” And now I don’t know what he thinks. He was waxing drunk by the time I got there. Talking frivolously. Meant to be taken for a man who wasn’t at desperation’s edge. The way he described it, there are kinds of evils appearing as agents of decay. They are bare and chitinous. Unsuspecting. He said when they found her these agents were acting in their natural accordance, denigrating her body to the clay. The insects are stupid, though themselves beyond degeneration. When they found her he saw dozens of dark-seeking centipedes, traversing flesh in skittering spines. An illusion I had shattered: There was nothing more than the perspectivalism of gray. No white. No black. Just different shades in an earth-wide grisaille painting. What I mean is that there is little in the light that is white-in-itself, white of its own purity, but merely bright by contrast of additional layers of darkness. I was wrong about that.
        “That’s the queer thing about evil. It’s often times beneath reason.” He said. “Though you can know it. You can see it and hear it and it can be spoken. Sometimes, evil just is uh… Evil is itself.”
        I didn’t know what to say.
        “You know why they’re doing it right?” He asked.
        “They’re having sex parties.”
        He looked at me like I was naive.
        “They’re blackmailing each other.”
        “Who’s blackmailing who?”
        “The managers at the Scranton Munitions Plant are blackmailing everybody. Or maybe the other way around?”
        “Who’s everybody?”
        “Everybody. Shit. Anybody important that wants to make sure those bombs get to Libya, or whenever bombs go next. I think they are leveraging evidence against each other. Government employees. Army people. Local politicians I’d bet.”
        “Why?”
        He puffed out his cheeks and rolled his eyes.
        “How the fuck should I know?”
        “All these girls. Boys too.”
        “I think most end up getting moved. Some are possibly still around. Some definitely end up like Mariela.”
        His eyes were welling up. “But I don’t know how they’re doing it. Almost all of the disappearances have no identity. They were never technically here. So they just vanish.”
        “But they’re working with these non-profit organizations?”

“Yeah and they report the disappearances to the police. Who, in turn, can’t dig up much evidence on cold cases with a suspiciously limited investigation.”
        “There’s an entire trafficking ring here.”
        I was looking at Orson. I could tell he’s not been well in some time. I don’t think he’ll ever be well but I was still worried about him. He looked like a man with a nemesis on the verge of insane movements. The terrifying thing about Orson is that I knew he was a man with nothing to lose. Beneath it all, I believe every man has considered a forlorn contingency, about how they would go about their reckoning in a stage of free fall inertia. Who they would drag by the ankles on their descent down.
        Before he left, Orson told me he managed to get a job at the the Scranton Arms Plant and had uncovered unsavory details about a rumor-has-it middle manager. Orson told me he followed him home and beat him in an apartment complex parking lot until his loins fountained red. Orson discovered the man who most likely killed Mariela was retired and living on some property deep in Jersey Poconos.
        “How do you know for sure it was him?”
        “The supply chain manager told me that nobody else is doing any killing except for this one. A lot of the prostitutes they trafficked were getting name changes if they’re lucky enough to get visas, then are forced move to the West Coast. Some are trafficked up to Canada through Erie or the Finger Lakes. Some get sent back to wherever they came from. Others die or go missing for unclear reasons. This old man, Norton Wallace, was a former colonel who got a senior position at the Scranton Plant after being discharged from the Joint Munitions Command. Norton was the one responsible for human trafficking as far as I could figure out. His brother Elvin was a police chief in Wilkes-Barre. A third involved, a half-brother, became a district attorney for Luzerne County.”
        “What do you need me to do?”
        “The manager told me they’re keeping some at the compound.”
        “How do you know that?”
        “I’ve got him locked up.”
        “You kidnapped him?”
        “I swear it’s true.”
        I looked at him stupid.
        “I don’t have a lot of time. So if I don’t come back I’m going to need you to send this out somewhere.”
        He passed me a backpack along the underside of the bar counter. I unzipped the tattered JanSport. Inside, there was a laptop and several USB flash drives and piece of paper with an New York City address written on it. “What’s this?”
        “This has everything. Incriminating evidence. I’ve been working on it for a long time. Deliver it to the address in the envelope. That is if you care to help. Or don’t. I don’t care so much one way or the other.”
        “What’s in it?”
        “You were right about one thing. The Army guys and the Scranton plant managers are blackmailing each other.”
        We sat quietly for a couple minutes. He finished his drink in one gulp and placed his glass over a crumpled twenty.
        “The address is a rental in Greenwich. There’s two whistleblowers. You need to bring this to them. One’s a longtime journalist and another is a Gulf War veteran who saw some dark shit working his way up a JMC chain of command. I don’t plan on being around tomorrow. So if you wanna save some people, if you wanna get retribution, this is your chance.”
        “What are you gonna do?”
        “I don’t have a lot of time. Maybe not even tomorrow. They’re looking for this guy. Velez. I had him locked up in the mechanic shop basement for a while. Free him. Or let him rot. He’s not my problem anymore.”
        As he was getting up, he stared at the bag. Orson’s eyes were charged with electricity. “So are you gonna?” He asked.
        “Yeah I’ll do it.”
        He looked at me for a while. Scanning me.

“You got one too right?”
        I stared back at him.
        “What?”
        “A boy? You got one?”
        “I have a son, yes.”
        “That’s good. That’s a good thing.” He patted me on the shoulder. Didn’t say goodbye. Just walked.
        I finished my drink on my own and drove home. On my way back, I didn’t realize how he could’ve known to ask that.
        As I was going to sleep that evening, I was thinking about the meaning of dignity again, thinking about how honor is a total vestige of the past. I don’t think any man under the age of forty could righteously speak on the topic of honor because honor is a word that can’t be uttered without an ironic smirk working its way up the sides of errant listeners, or emotionally dishonest friends.
        My dad once told me a story from the old country about a shepherd who had his flock killed by a vengeful lunatic who felt slighted by the shepherd’s fortunate marriage arrangements. This was from a time before people had last names. At least the ones governments gave you. You were Kamil, “the son of your father from this village.” The family name mattered because a reputation within a village was the measure of a man’s worth. After the Turkish Republic was formed in 1923, you became Kamil “Farmer” or Kamil “Day-Laborer,” because modernity is a seemingly unstoppable aggravation, an agent dissolving the greater family unit until the meaning of one’s existence is entirely framed around labor.
        Now when Kamil, my great-grandfather, challenged the lunatic to a fight to the death in the full view of everyone he knows, stabbing the man who took his livelihood was a means of spiritual solace. At least he had his reputation.
        America’s different. We aren’t connected to the land in a way where it feeds us. We don’t have to stay any one single place. A big part of being an American is the ability to come to this country as an abused sex slave, escape, change your name, get your green card, get a citizenship, then start a whole new identity. I suppose being completely anonymous to your society at large has its perks. Having no reputation, trading in the idea of honor for the ability to become another person, has its benefits. You can be a prostitute one day, a stay at home mom the next. A police officer today, a construction contractor tomorrow. If there’s one feature I understand about my country, it’s that the American identity is completely amorphous. Who is a Jew? I say you’re a nobody in America. In America, I say you’re everybody. That is unless you have money, then you have freedom. And that’s a problem. In the end, we can always become whoremongers, we can always rule the land.
        I got up in the predawn hours to drive to work as normal. My day started right as the moon was descending and the sun was rising. This is the daily primogeniture. The god-supported rule of the sun, the moon and the stars. A celestial body’s presidium over the sky is a mile marker in the division of days. The sun’s moving becomes typical. The moon’s too. I hate to say it but Orson’s killing plot gave me an illusory sense about the depth of the common things I was glancing at. I was paranoid. It reminded me of when I first started working as a detective before I was fired.
        I got to the worksite around six a.m. We were working on a seven bedroom around Coalvale. I told the construction crew we were going to cut out at noon.
        Around lunch time I drove out to Blairstown, New Jersey to find the Wallace Compound, to see what I could scout out, to see if this was a totally doomed affair. I couldn’t find much other than a gravel road up to a property which I assumed lead into the Worthington State Forest. I parked across the road. Pretended my car was overheating. There were CCTV cameras on a telephone pole near the gravel turn-up into the wooded hills. Whatever Orson was planning on doing afterwards was not my problem.
        I popped the hood of my Dodge and unscrewed the coolant cap on the reservoir. As I topped it off, an older man in an F-150 pulled up next to me and asked me if it needed a tow. He had analyzing eyes. Looked at my face very carefully. I told him my engine overheated. I asked the man his name but he must’ve not heard. He said if I needed any help there’s a shop three miles down the road, then drove up the gravel path into the Wallace Compound. I couldn’t figure if he was one of the brothers.

As I got into my truck, a wind blown pile of dogwood petals rustled behind me. They sounded like ghost-walking.
        When I made it home I sat out in the grass in my driveway. I looked into the sky. I was pale with fear, meditating on the fate of Orson’s loathsome enterprise. An old memory came to me. It was from when I was talking to my mother. From when I was little. This was before the innocence I didn’t know I possessed was taken from me. Taken in a way where I couldn’t know what was taken until the years drove on and I had to face it; face that I’m never getting revenge and even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because the evils of every forgotten memory are swallowed up by the all-eating dirt. Because every worm and the roots of every tree are hungry for it. Pride doesn’t last. It gets blood-laundered. At least I have the sky. How my mother taught me to read the constellations in their star’s parlance.
        “That one’s called Pisces.” She pointed. “And here fantastic fishes duskly float.” “Fantastic fishes?” I remember laughing.
        “It’s a poem.”
        “Is that the same as praying?” I asked.
        “Poems and praying are different things. Praying is like…”
        “Praying for God?”
        “Not praying for God. Praying to God. God doesn’t need anything. People pray because they want God to help them or to give them things.”
        “You said that’s because he can do everything?”
        “Anything. The impossible. I’d say the impossible is he how makes himself known.”
        I thought about that for a couple minutes. I didn’t see the meaning in the quandary.
        That evening, I stayed up all night waiting to hear the news on TV. Surely something would’ve been reported by now.
        Then at around 6:30 in the morning, the local news said that three men were killed in a break-in double homicide around Blairstown. A Guatemalan broke into a two story cabin, and killed two brothers. Ages 65 and 59. The Guatamalan was then killed by a New Jersey state trooper in a short stand off. One little girl was rescued by the officer.
        That morning I told my wife I had to go on a business trip to Manhattan to meet with a sales representative from a drywall manufacturing company. I figured it was my turn now. I took the raggedy bag and got on with it.
        As I am the servant of my son, it is time I keep my word with a mystic belligerator.