I found myself in the gift shop, staring at a photograph of them, on a postcard. The two figures together, in icy blackness, and from far enough away that their anguish was not really discernible. The impulse to buy it nearly gave way to another impulse, which was to pull the sheaf of cards from display rack and rip them to shreds. No one should look at this! Or, not like this, not on a postcard—it was like playing “Clair de Lune,” using this image of horrible suffering as the backdrop to “wish you were here, grandma is fine, blah blah blah.”

The exhibit had been nearing the end of its run. Why had I waited so long to see it? Soon, they would be returning everything to a storeroom at Concordia University. I returned every day, until I had gotten to know half the staff it seemed, but the promised restoration never happened. The statue was never brought back out again. The exhibit closed, but I couldn’t just leave them there, all alone in some storage area. I had the stupid impulse to loiter around the museum as long as I knew that they were somewhere inside, but of course they could just as readily be stored somewhere else, couldn’t they? How could I find out where? I spent much of my scant free time searching for images of them, for writings about them, more to keep in contact with them than out of any desire for knowledge. Knowing things about them was not unimportant to me, but it was only a means to an end. I couldn’t leave them.

If it weren’t for this persistent searching, I would almost certainly have overlooked the news that they had gone missing. No one was prepared to call it a theft, not yet, although that possibility had of course not been ruled out, either, not by any means. After the defect in their display lighting had been found, the two of them had been shifted to “storage”—whatever that means—and then it appears they were never quite accounted for after that. Someone at the museum, a person with whom, as it happens, I had spoken more than once, was quoted, saying that there might have been a miscommunication about the statues requiring restoration or cleaning. It seems that the antiquities at the museum were not kept under constant watch, but were simply set aside, now here, now there, not at random, of course, not by any means, but without the constant supervision that would have, more or less, been their best protection against theft. How could anyone leave them unprotected? How could anyone leave them, at all?