Every day they were trapped, we checked in with the nightly news to hear how the Wild Boars were doing. A boot camp had been set up at the mouth of the cave after two divers discovered the boys and their coach perched on a rocky ledge, licking the walls for water, edging away from the questioning sweep of the camera as if afraid of exposure to the light of the divers’ flashlights, then bowing in gratitude, their thin limbs, reminiscent of children in newsreels from the liberated camps. We listened for updates: volunteers pouring in—an Aussie doctor stayed with them, checking their hearts, their lungs, the ambient oxygen; a Danish spelunker cut short his vacation to map the underground labyrinth; a billionaire built a mini submarine to float them out of the narrow birth-canal-type tunnels; ministers offered prayers, rescuers their lives (one taken in earnest)—everyone working together to get the Wild Boars out before the rains fell and the waters rose. But before we could switch channels and savor the jubilation of watching them saved from the worst that could happen, trotted out of the cave, wrapped in tin foil like baked potatoes and rushed under golf umbrellas to the thunderous sound of a downpour of clapping into the waiting helicopters, their mothers, aunties, grandmothers already readying the meals the boys had requested— fried rice with crispy pork, spicy chicken— we heard the crying of children ushered into chain-link enclosures, calling for their mothers, their fathers, the wrenching look of a toddler glancing up at the face of a stranger speaking a language she didn’t understand— And we didn’t understand how this could happen: on the one hand, saving the children, on the other hand, wresting them from their parents, as if we live in a zero sum world where something has to be taken away if something is put back together, happiness being the give of a rope that goes taut somewhere else— where a body hangs limp from the branch where the lynch mob has strung it. It must be the fault of such cruel mathematics, for how else to understand this strange disconnect, as if a part of us we didn’t know we had lost in the fear-filled caverns of the heart— the selves we discovered we could be when we saved the Wild Boars— were calling to us in the voices of terrified toddlers, in danger of being drowned out, as the waters keep rising.