The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “Your grant runs through the end of the summer,” Michael said. “You can take these next few months and then—well, make up your mind. Decide whether you’re going to put out or get out.”

  “Not to criticize,” I said, “but do you think that’s the best choice of words?”

  He sighed. “Look, Lynn, you might not believe this, but I’m only trying to help.”

  “Oh, you’re a big help,” I said. “You’re massive. You’re huge.”

  I could barely hear him saying good-bye as I walked out of the office and down the hall. All professors sleep with students, and then with other ones, and nobody is surprised. I wasn’t surprised myself. It was amazing how unhelpful, in the end, lack of surprise could be.

  On I went through the building’s pale hallways. Other people in my program had finagled research opportunities in quaint medieval libraries or internships in plushly air-conditioned museums. Everybody was gone for the summer, and soon Michael would be off to Europe or California or Asia or wherever he was heading with his wife, who was a professor in the anthropology department. The two of them were always jetting off to deliver papers or consultations in exotic locales. I’d met Marianna several times at departmental functions. She was a stoop-shouldered woman given to scarves and shawls and wraps, anything soft to bundle around her angular body—whether to accentuate or to disguise it, I never could decide. I knew she knew who I was. She never gave sign of it, though, only smiled and talked politely about Santa Fe. When anybody in New York heard I was from New Mexico they talked politely about Santa Fe’s galleries and restaurants, its clear light, the pink mountains. The rest of the state was invisible to these people. “I’m from Albuquerque,” I’d say, and they’d smile, picturing the airport. In my head I saw Albuquerque’s potholed streets and sweeping neon strips, and smiled too, glad to be gone.

  “Lynn,” Wylie had written recently with digital urgency, another late-night message. “What if we aren’t moving forwards in time? I have decided that progress is a lie.”

  During my first year of graduate school Wylie came to visit me in New York: his first, and only, visit to the city. He came off the plane stinking of sweat and pot smoke. My mother had given me orders to take him to the Metropolitan Museum and to a Broadway play. I left him at home one day while I went to the library and when I got back he and Suzanne were drinking tequila in the tiny living room with some Salvadoran waiters he’d met while taking a nap in the park. He never made it to the Met; but for weeks after he left, the phone would ring in the middle of the night, and someone would ask for my brother in Spanish, the sounds of a party ringing and dancing in the background.

  I took the subway back to Brooklyn, where the world was overcast and no light glinted on the steel cages pulled down over the closed businesses of my street. The smell of exhaust and food being cooked in the Portuguese restaurant down the block rose and stalled in the air. At home I devoted some serious scholarly time to reading People magazine.

  Past midnight, I’d just fallen asleep when the buzzer rang— a loud, old-fashioned buzz that always made me think of fire drills.

  Michael came in wearing art-party clothes and an expression of drunken concern. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said, then lay down on the bed, his arm with its silver bracelet flung across my pillow.

  “Where’s Marianna?”

  “Chicago. No, San Francisco. Are you all right? You seemed depressed today.”

  “I have a melancholy temperament,” I said.

  “I like your temperament.”

  I sat down on the bed and allowed him to hold my hand. This happened once in a while. He’d show up late at night, reeking sweetly of gallery wine and acting sentimental; in the morning, he was still married and we were still broken up.

  “And you wonder why I’m confused,” I said afterwards. A yellow line of streetlight poked through the window grate. I could hear the distant crash of traffic. There was no response; he was already asleep. I lay awake for quite a while, picturing a life in which Marianna fell madly in love with one of her students and moved to Prague or Berkeley or somewhere, and I moved into their enormous apartment on the Upper West Side with Hudson River views and book-lined rooms and copper pans hanging over the stove. Then the idea of me living in a place like that made me laugh, and then time passed, until finally it was morning.

  He never disappeared in the early hours, like men do in movies. Instead he had to be prodded out of bed and served coffee. He even asked for eggs.

  “I don’t make eggs,” I said. “Who do you think I am?”

  He laughed, both hands around his coffee cup. No wedding ring, but Marianna didn’t wear one either. They had some kind of agreement.

  “Okay, no eggs.” He stretched, running his hands through his shaggy black hair. His glance took in my tiny living room, and the former closets that passed for bedrooms, with something I took for nostalgia. “I’m going to France,” he said. “Want to come?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I stood at the window and watched the psychic sit at a table in her window, reach down, and then set something in front of her on the table, staring at it intently. Tarot cards, I thought, or runes. She started to move one hand over the other, rhythmically, as if performing some incantation. After a second I realized that she was painting her nails.

  “It’ll cheer you up. Maybe get you excited about work again. In two weeks. I’ve got an extra ticket.”

  “Marianna’s ticket.”

  “She has to go to Venezuela instead.”

  “You want me to go to France using your wife’s ticket.”

  “I want to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris with a man whose company, based on recent evidence, I’m fairly sure you enjoy.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “That’s what I like to think,” he said. “So you’re coming?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  And I did. I lounged around my apartment for those two weeks, committing several issues of People to memory and thinking about the two of us holding hands as we walked along the Seine by moonlight, et cetera. Then I thought about Melinda, the visiting assistant professor from Costa Rica whose year-long appointment in our department had precipitated our breakup and who I guessed had gone back home. I also thought about New Mexico, the blank astringency of the air and the bleak sunny streets sprawling with gas stations and chain restaurants. Finally I thought about my brother and his fervent midnight e-mails demanding, “How do we live decently in an indecent world?” It was true that I hadn’t received any messages for a while, but knowing Wylie, he was probably just too busy writing his manifesto or picketing butcher shops or getting drunk with waiters or whatever else he did with his time.

  In the end, I told Michael I’d meet him at his apartment— I wanted to picture him there, petty in my revenge, waiting for me—and boarded a plane to Albuquerque instead.

  Long hours afterwards I stepped into the hushed boredom of the small, clean airport. My mother stood by the gate wearing a blue sundress, her hair clipped and neat; she was smiling broadly, as she always did when she’d gotten her way.

  “How was the flight?”

  “Fine.”

  “How was Minneapolis?”

  “I only connected there.”

  “But was it efficient?”

  “My flight was on time.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “They’re very efficient in Minneapolis. I think it’s the cold weather. They have no distractions like we do here.”

  “It’s June, Mom,” I said.

  We walked through the uncrowded hallways alongside men in cowboy hats and boots embracing their children and wives, their tight jeans cinched even tighter at the hips with large-buckled belts. Passing the airport restaurant, I smelled green-chile stew. I felt like I was on a different planet, in a separate, contrived dimension; a place created for vacations. The air outside was co
ol and dry, the lights of Albuquerque gleaming on a miniature scale against the blackness of the desert. Everything seemed very small. My mother drove through the familiar streets, past the gaudy neon, the Pop ’n’ Taco, the Sirloin Stockade, then the brown shadows of adobe houses. Pink rays of cosmos and tall, nodding sunflowers bloomed in the yards. Everything was exactly the same, shabby and plain, as if I’d never moved away, as if New York were only a dream I’d had, an ongoing dream every night for years.

  Lynn: We cannot return to the elemental things. There is no way to go back. But how to move forward when so much has been lost? How can we even think about the future when we are burdened by such an oppressive past and pessimistic present?

  “Did you tell Wylie I was coming?”

  “How could I tell him?” my mother said. “He has no phone, he’s never at home, and God help the person who tries to get a straight answer from one of his so-called friends.”

  We pulled up to her small condo. She lived alone now, in a two-bedroom place, having moved out of the house where I grew up, in the Northeast Heights, within a couple months after my father died. Sitting in the living room, I waited for her to say more about Wylie, to deliver my marching orders. But now that I was finally home she didn’t seem to be in any rush. I closed my eyes—it was midnight in New York—as she puttered in the kitchen. The sounds of her movements were like my native language, the first I’d ever heard and learned: the hiss of water, her footfalls on a tile floor, a drawer being pulled out, spoons clinking against ceramic cups.

  Her house was clean and spare. Unlike in my apartment, there were no stacks of anything anywhere, not a mote of apparent dust. On the white mantel above the fireplace she had arranged her collection of artifacts: Hopi kachinas, a storyteller doll, a bowl from Acoma. I thought about Wylie’s contempt for the material world. Lynn: We purchase our crumbling senses of self at the store, then try to mend the body politic with items advertised at attractive discounts during the President’s Day Sale. I sat there on the couch, my eyes still closed. Cicadas pulsed outside.

  My mother came out of the kitchen and brought me a glass of water, touching me on the shoulder. “You’re falling asleep,” she said, and I realized she was right.

  Two

  Mid-morning I woke to an empty house, my mother gone to work early, at least in my terms; she’d left a note inviting me to lunch. I wandered around the house opening curtains. The sun was plangent and full, striking through the neighborhood’s occasional pines, her street deserted except for a few cars parked neatly against the curb. It all seemed weirdly quiet. Wylie’s old car from high school, a boat-sized, ivory-colored Chevy, sat in the driveway. These days, according to my mother, he’d abandoned gasoline transport and went everywhere on foot or by bike, but couldn’t bear to actually sell the Caprice. The sun had bleached its paint, turning the ivory uneven and mottled as the keys of an old piano, and its wide red-leather interior was peeling and patched in places with duct tape. Nonetheless, it started right up. Despite his politics my brother apparently came back and serviced it regularly.

  I drove around Albuquerque for a while, getting used to the feel of things. One-story buildings shedding turquoise paint, dirt lawns parked with old pickups. To the east, the bare brown mountains; to the west, the lone peak of Mount Taylor. Fast-food franchises brightened every block, a rainbow of reds and yellows, their white marquees advertising specials that were always misspelled or missing a letter or two: MIL-SHAKES, ROTBEER, FENCH FRIES. The colored shards of a million broken bottles glittered among wildflowers in abandoned lots and alleys. Every now and then, billowy clouds of grit rose in front of the car. It takes some kind of city, I thought, to make Brooklyn seem clean.

  Among the adobes, here and there, stood the green landscapes of rich homes and corporate parks. I drove past the thickly watered emerald of a golf course, where men in festive pants lifted their clubs to the desert sky. Another green spot was the cemetery, where I stopped to look at the square, undistinguished marker I hated. It wore his name, Arthur Fleming, and the dates of his life, primly chiseled letters and numbers that seemed to have nothing to do with the fact that once this person, my own father, had lived in the world, and now did not. I pictured his face, with all its familiar crags and shadows, then shelved it in a corner of my mind, a gesture as physical and as habitual to me as folding clothes into a drawer. In the weeks after he died, I saw him everywhere on the streets of New York—getting on the 6 train at Union Square, buying a donut, waiting in line for a movie, not that he ever actually did any of these things—and knew that I had to put him away in order to keep going on. Now I spent barely a minute in front of his grave. I hadn’t brought flowers or any other gifts, and felt that the moment was lacking in ceremony. Then I got back in the car and headed toward Wylie’s.

  On Central Avenue, opposite the low-slung campus buildings, a few summer students sat at the Frontier drinking coffee among the Hare Krishnas and the homeless. A man in tattered, abbreviated shorts, the rest of his body tanned to leather, had taken up a post outside the library, holding up a placard to the passing traffic: I’M A NUDIST AND I VOTE. A woman with an umbrella and many layers of clothing was muttering private endearments to the sidewalk.

  Wylie lived on the second floor of a negligible apartment building three blocks from the university. Out front, several old cars sat slumped in the gravel, two of them missing wheels.

  I knocked on his door and waited for a good long time. “Wylie, it’s Lynn.” There was no answer, so I knocked again.

  A middle-aged woman in a thin housedress opened the door of an apartment below and squinted up at me, the smell of long-standing smoke drifting into the morning air.

  “I’m sorry if I—”

  “I thought you was from the property management,” she said, and slammed the door.

  I knocked once more, without much hope. But as I was leaving, the door opened, and I turned to see a red-haired man standing there in nothing but blue boxer shorts. He had brown, freckled arms and a tanned face, but very white skin in the outline of a T-shirt, so that his paleness seemed to cover him like clothes. He smiled broadly, as if he were delighted to see me, and for some reason this surprised me more than anything. Finally I said, “You’re not my brother.”

  “Probably not,” he agreed. He ran a hand through his short red hair, which stood up straight as a field of red grass; then he opened the door wider and stepped backwards. “Would you like to come in?”

  The apartment was dark behind him. “Is Wylie here?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Or when he’ll be back?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, smiling widely.

  His skin, even his pale chest, had a glow that reminded me I’d been inside an apartment in Brooklyn for most of the past ten months. He was possibly the healthiest-looking person I had ever seen.

  “Would you like to come in?” he said again.

  I tried to look around him, into the cavelike apartment, but couldn’t see anything. “All right,” I said, brushing past him into the living room. I flicked a light switch, which did nothing. The power was apparently off. Boxer Shorts walked around the room pulling down sheets attached to the windows with duct tape, seemingly Wylie’s favorite design accessory. The sun stormed in, and he turned around, covering his eyes.

  “Excuse the mess,” he said. “I just got up.” He stretched his arms out from his long, pale chest and then went over to a sleeping bag in the corner and picked a pair of jeans off the floor. The jeans themselves were spotted with holes and showed a fair amount of skin.

  “You sleep late,” I said.

  “I was up late, um, working.”

  “And where do you work?”

  He squinted at me in the brilliant light. “I work for the good of Planet Earth,” he said.

  I burst out laughing. “Yeah, okay.”

  I took a clearer look around the apartm
ent. Last time I’d been here, everything was pretty normal: small student desk, small student chair, small student bed. Now the walls were stripped of decoration. There was no furniture anywhere, only sleeping bags and backpacks tucked into corners. A shelving unit against one wall was stacked with wrenches, drills, emergency flares. The place was neat and empty, thoroughly impersonal, like an army barracks.

  “So you’re Wylie’s sister? From New York City?” He crossed the room to the kitchen, leaned against the counter and smiled.

  “How did you know that?”

  He looked me up and down—at my black dress, my black sandals, my black leather purse—and shrugged. “Just a guess.”

  “Look, I’m trying to find Wylie. Could you tell me when you saw him last?”

  He shrugged again. “Not sure.”

  “And you’re not worried about him?”

  “Wylie’s a deep thinker,” he said. “He’s grappling with serious issues, and sometimes he needs to be alone.”

  “To grapple.”

  “That’s what I said, yes.”

  There was a weird smell in the apartment—not unpleasant but vaguely acrid, layered, and chemical. I moved a foot or two closer to Boxer Shorts, who was still leaning, pale and shirtless, against the counter. It was coming from him. “I have to go now,” I said.

  “Come back anytime,” he said, his broad grin showing very white teeth.

  I turned on my heel and left, annoyed. Wylie’d been involved with causes and crusades for years, constantly enrolling in new student groups, petitioning, marching, bouncing from civil rights to homeless rights to animal rights. He could never find the right rights to hold his attention for long. But throughout it all, he’d never gone so far as to disappear.

  I was unlocking the Caprice when I heard a voice shout, “Wylie’s sister! Wylie’s sister!”

  Boxer Shorts, in his white chest and holey jeans, was running down the building’s stairway. He ran like a soldier, his back rigid, knees high in the air; and although he was going pretty fast, he stopped on a dime in front of me and wasn’t even out of breath.