The Weeping Buddha - Softcover

"Without a Trace"
By HEATHER DUNE MACADAM

It was 1984, the night Sam Todd disappeared.

He and his brother Adam were visiting our loft in Chinatown for the weekend. There were four of us, as well as a few semipermanent residents, who owned a space five flights above Canal Street that was as raw and unrenovated as our lives.

We had not planned to have a New Year's Eve party to celebrate the advent of 1984. Instead, our plan was to go to other people's parties and leave our tracks all over downtown Manhattan. Then people started stopping by, expecting something, and so spontaneously we combusted. We were an eclectic group of geeks and artists, Vassar grads commingled with dropouts, summa cum laudes with experimental artists, all bound by the thrill of the night.

It was our chance to usher in a year we had waited for ever since George Orwell's futuristic novel had become required reading in high school. We had ranted - no, raved - about the arrival of this year, touting it for its promise, as if 1984 was guaranteed to be a wonder marked on memory's calendar.

In 1983, everyone was hoping that on the stroke of midnight some miracle of society would change the world forever. We hadn't forgotten that Orwell's novel portrayed a science fiction nightmare - we were all too aware of the possibilities that technology was already providing our culture - but it was the first important New Year's for us. Young, full of hopeful delusions, despite fiction's prophecies, we kissed, sent firecrackers sailing off the rooftops, danced beneath David Bowie's hypnotic chant "1984" and had absolute faith in our futures. We believed in ourselves and who we were going to become one day, as soon as we grew up.

Then Sam Todd went for a walk around the block and never came back.

Ever . . .