by Alix Ohlin
Three
Wylie as a kid was chubby and pale, with a shock of fine dark hair that was always falling in front of his eyes. One day, I remember, we were playing together in the front yard. Maybe we were six and four; it was before my mother went back to work. Wylie and I had just learned about April Fools’ Day and were smitten by the prospect of pulling our own hilarious pranks, so I told him to lie down in the dirt and stay very, very still. I ran inside yelling my head off that Wylie was hurt. Our mother was in the kitchen drying dishes, and she threw her towel down and raced outside toward his small prone body.
But Wylie was too excited to wait, so he stood up and started jumping up and down. “It’s a joke, Mom!” he shrieked. “April Fools’ Day!”
She stopped in the driveway with her hands still reaching out toward him, then slowly let them drop. Her green dress had a full skirt, and with her apron on she looked like a pioneer woman confronting some early, primitive danger to her family. A hot and sickening feeling advanced from my stomach to the back of my throat. When she shook her head and went back inside, Wylie turned to me for explanation. “Why wasn’t it funny?” he said.
That afternoon in my mother’s condo I made myself a drink and sat in the cool living room, the glass sweating in my hand. I had no idea where Wylie was, or how to find him, and I felt tired and homesick for Brooklyn, my apartment, the psychic, those weird sickly kittens in the pet-store window. Michael stopping by late at night. When I first moved to New York for grad school, I had the sense that everyone there belonged to a club I’d always wanted to join, and Michael was inside the velvet ropes. People spoke to him at openings, with one or two others standing a few feet away, hoping to be invited into the conversation. Even sauntering across campus he was a star. Late at night, in some bar in TriBeCa, artists would sit at our table, drinking and laughing, and when Michael laughed at them, at some bald categorical statement or self-promotional ploy, they didn’t seem to mind. I loved it when he talked about their work with me in private, evaluating its place in the river of art history that flowed cleanly through his mind. And I loved hearing him lecture in class; even now, my memories of the seminar room, the drone of the projector, his voice the soundtrack to every slide, were both drowsy and erotic.
Growing up, I’d gone to the art museum in Albuquerque all the time. I’d take the bus there after school and spend the late afternoon wandering through its deserted exhibits and historical dioramas, its paintings of local scenes by local artists. The art wasn’t very good, but I didn’t care. The lights were always dim and the air conditioning pumped on and off, regular and rhythmic. It was peaceful, the hush and stillness of it, the suspension of life outside. Sometimes it seemed that the main reason I decided to study art history was to gain the license to wander quietly through rooms, looking at pictures on the walls. Maybe not the best reason, but there it is.
It was Michael who made me think that this impulse was significant. Who wouldn’t want a person like that to fasten his eyes on you, to compliment your work, to tell you your ideas were interesting and your eye for art acute? Which is exactly what happened, and how all the flirting began. Then, in a swell of urgency after my father died, I threw myself at Michael, and he caught me; we went from flirting to fixture. Out on the town on his arm, I was recognized as his current “companion” and knew it. Can an experience feel degrading and like an honor at the same time? Yes, of course it can. And the fact that I suspected I would be discarded eventually, that perhaps I’d even chosen him for this very reason, didn’t make me feel better when it came to pass.
A latch clicked and my mother stepped through the door, dropping an enormous tote bag on the table in the front hall.
“Any word from your brother?”
I shook my head and she nodded, her shoulders sagging a little. Before I could say anything else she went into the kitchen and almost immediately set to work fixing dinner. I put my drink down and joined her, and before long she was giving me intricate details of a trip she was planning for a client, who for some reason wanted to visit every single country in South America.
“You wouldn’t believe how long this takes. These places don’t have faxes. They don’t even have phones. I’m making reservations by letter, and they send back some dog-eared piece of paper that says, ‘Everything okay, come now, pay later.’ They must attach the note to a mule or something, then the mule trots down a dirt road that eventually leads by the post office. I do believe that mules are involved in these places, Lynn. I’ll just be pleased if Dr. Trujillo comes back alive.”
She kept this up all through dinner preparations. I thought about how people say travel broadens the mind, and what this meant for my mother, who was expert at organizing its every feature but never, ever went anywhere herself. She’d barely been out of town since I was in high school. There was something either heroic or insane about it. I set the table for our tidy, well-balanced meal: baked chicken, green beans, and rice. When my mother offered me a glass of milk, I laughed and shook my head.
“What?” she said.
I shrugged. “This is nice,” I told her. I never cooked in Brooklyn and had almost forgotten people still did. I assumed the world had completely gone over to takeout. My mother sat down opposite me and smiled.
“So, how long have you and David been going out?”
She set her fork and knife down without touching her food. “Well, I wouldn’t call it that, Lynn.”
“What would you call it?”
“We enjoy each other’s company.”
“So, how long have you and David been enjoying each other’s company?”
She cut her chicken into neat geometric pieces, took a dainty sip of milk, and carefully wiped her mouth with her napkin, an act of stalling so obvious as to be almost a parody of stalling. “A while,” she finally said.
“I see. Where does he live, anyway?”
“Still in the same place, next to our old house.”
“Oh.” I looked at her, but she was intently focused on the task of spearing a green bean evenly on the tines of her fork. “What happened to his family?”
“Nothing happened to them,” she said piously, then ate her bean and moved on to the next one. “Donny’s still in high school, and Darren got a hockey scholarship to a college in Connecticut. They’re both lovely boys, and David is justly proud. They both talk to him regularly. Darren calls home every Sunday evening at seven o’clock sharp.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “that sounds great. So, excuse me for asking, but what’s the deal with his wife? They got divorced?”
“No, they didn’t.” Her voice was tight and even.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.” She kept on eating, one green bean at a time, the chicken in its orderly pieces.
“You’re kidding,” I said again.
“What did I just say?”
“You’re having an affair with a married man.”
“David’s wife is very ill. She’s confined to the house. We enjoy each other’s company, and accept the situation, and I expect you to accept it too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Mom,” I said. She raised her eyebrows at me, and I opened my mouth but said nothing. Fortunately, I had chicken to fill the void. We sat in confused silence, cleaning our plates as if our lives depended on it.
When we finished, she cleared the table and took everything into the kitchen. “Lynnie, you do the dishes,” she said. “I’m going out.”
“It’s eight o’clock.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Where are you going? To see David?”
At this she turned, her eyes narrow, and the look she gave me was frightening but familiar. It was the same look she’d given me in high school when I came home with my hair dyed green, and closely related to those she’d offered when I was in college in Pennsylvania, talking about feminist art all the time, hatching plans to move to New Yor
k and referring to Albuquerque as a cultural backwater.
“You’ve been here exactly one day,” she said. “Don’t start telling me what to do.”
“You tell me what to do all the time.”
“That’s completely, one-hundred-percent different,” she said. I did the dishes, feeling irritable and put-upon. Afterwards, I went out into the suburban night. The air was warm, and the moon rose pale and low and clear above a gray bank of clouds. The enormous cockroaches that terrified me as a child scrambled scratchily across the sidewalks, great hordes of them glistening in the streetlights. For the second time that day I drove my brother’s car to his apartment, though now the streets were neon-lit. The same cars as before were parked outside his building, amid a jumble of bicycles and skateboards. Wylie’s door stood ajar, held open by a brick, and yellow light fell onto the landing. That’s where the smell hit me: dried sweat, old clothes, and a crush of bodies, the smellable ideology of water conservationists. I held my breath and walked inside, straight into Angus Beam.
“Hello, Wylie’s sister,” he said, his smile as wide as ever. “I’m glad you joined us.”
“I told you before, my name’s Lynn.”
“Lynn.” He shook my hand and held on to it. He was wearing a faded T-shirt with a million tiny holes in it, as if he’d been attacked by kittens. Up close, his skin was covered with light freckles that disappeared from view when you were farther away—pointillist pigmentation. There were even freckles on his eyelids.
“Angus Beam,” I said without thinking, “you should stay out of the sun.”
He laughed. “Why is that?”
“Your complexion. You’re extremely vulnerable.”
“You’re sweet to be concerned,” he said. “I always wear a hat.”
He stood aside and made a grand welcoming gesture. I remembered what my mother used to say when Wylie and I came in after playing outside all day: “Here they are, the great unwashed.”
The great unwashed were gathered all around me in Wylie’s apartment. The men wore khaki shorts, bright T-shirts with equally vivid logos in contrasting colors, and hiking boots with thick socks bunched halfway up their calves. The women wore dresses of flimsy, multicolored Indian fabric and their hair in long, loose ponytails. In fact there was hair everywhere, on chins and armpits and legs. From their belt loops or backpacks dangled Swiss Army knives, leather pouches, water bottles, lidded coffee cups. They looked like they either had just come back from camping or were prepared to set off at a moment’s notice. A few people glanced at me and smiled inconclusively. Others conferred in twos or threes, whispering urgently or nodding fast as they consulted notepads and maps. I couldn’t believe how many people had crammed themselves inside this one room. It was very hot. I was breathing through my mouth and hoping that it wasn’t too noticeable.
In the back of the room, behind the kitchen counter, I thought I glimpsed Wylie. It was hard to tell in the swarm of people, and his back was turned, but he had the right slouching, skinny build and the right dark, floppy hair. I hadn’t imagined there could be circumstances in which I might not recognize my own brother. Wylie, if it was him, was talking to a middle-aged Native American man with thick glasses and long, braided hair, his large hands sporting several bulky turquoise rings.
Angus Beam walked to the kitchen counter, turned around, and smiled. An automatic silence fell over the room. “I don’t believe in rhetoric or public relations,” he said, “but I believe a small group of individuals has the power to make real changes. So let’s skip the speeches and get started.”
A soft, satisfied whimper rose up from somewhere in front of me and I realized that a woman in the crowd was breast-feeding her baby. Otherwise the room was quiet. The man with glasses crossed his arms. Hidden behind his broad shoulders and large head was the one I thought might be Wylie. When we were little, Wylie and I spent hours trying to develop our telepathic powers, guessing which cards were being held up, picking numbers between one and ten. Wylie, I thought now, it’s me.
Angus Beam looked around the room, smiling. “Time is of the essence,” he said, raising his hands. “Sprinkler systems, this wall. Forestry, other side. Fuel economy, to the back. Gerald, you’re with me, in the bedroom. Report on plans in half an hour.”
The crowd nodded like a small, obedient congregation. The person who might have been Wylie and the middle-aged man—Gerald, apparently—headed to the back, out of my sight, as people clotted into groups and started talking. Sweat gathered on my forehead and armpits and trickled down the small of my back.
“I can siphon the gas out of a Ford Explorer in under ten minutes,” said a man close to me.
“And then where do you put it?” a second man asked.
“It just has to be removed. One less SUV on the road, even if it’s temporary.”
“No, that’s useless. You have to show the gasoline somewhere, in quantity. Or all the stranded SUVs.”
A man next to me unrolled a blueprint and began pointing at it with a dirty fingernail. At his feet a brown lump I’d thought was a backpack uncurled itself and stood up, revealing itself as a dog.
“A revegetation campaign,” he said. “Guerrilla horticulture. We go to people’s houses and rip out, like, the California plants, right, and put in native vegetation. Free xeriscaping— those people will thank us later, man.”
“Sure they will,” somebody else said.
The noise level in the room throbbed and rose. I heard “industrial-agricultural complex” and “ranching subsidies” and “ecological catastrophe.” The dog, a skinny brown thing with protruding ribs, shook itself and padded into the kitchen.
“REM,” a man’s voice said. “It stands for Radical Equality Movement. It covers animals, plants, and humans. Everything.”
“That’s for sleep, man. Not to mention the band.”
“Shit,” somebody said in another corner. “We produce it but we don’t want to talk about it or deal with it. We take in whatever we want, then refuse to deal with the consequences of our own bodies. This culture is packed with philosophical and logistical constipation. That’s the real issue. It’s all about shit.”
What if we aren’t moving forwards in time? I have decided that progress is a lie. I stood up and tried to push through the crowd to the back room, but everywhere I turned was blocked. There seemed to be more people every second, murmuring and plotting pranks: digging up corporate gardens, taking stink bombs to shopping malls, spray-painting new subdivisions with antidevelopment slogans.
“Excuse me,” I kept saying, but as one person would step aside, I’d walk into another bare shoulder or hairy arm. The heat was suffocating. Finally, feeling dizzy and faint, I just pushed myself through a final wall of people into the kitchen, behind the counter, with the dog. I looked to the side, but the bedroom door was closed. In front of it, chatting with a tiny, wiry woman, was a man with a football player’s build, in a turquoise tank top that revealed thick armpit hair. He smiled at me politely. A moment later the wall re-formed. Three or four people sat on the counter, blocking my view. When I opened the refrigerator door, only bad-smelling air came out. There was no light, no cold, no food, nothing to drink. Suddenly I felt damp on my leg. The dog was licking my knee almost sadly, as if it couldn’t help itself, its eyes pleading and chagrined.
“Stop that,” I told it, but it kept licking and followed me as I backed up.
The woman who’d been nursing her baby broke through the people surrounding the kitchen. “Stop it, Sledge,” she said sharply, to the dog. “Stop that right now.”
The dog lay down instantly and hung its head in shame.
“I am quite sorry for that,” she said to me. She had an accent, something European. She rehoisted the baby in its cloth sling and held out her right hand. Her face was wide and pale, with broad, slanted cheekbones, and strands of brown hair curled delicately around her ears. The baby crouched against her chest like a frog.
“I’m Irina,” she said.
/> “Lynn,” I said, shaking her hand.
“Welcome,” she said. “Would you like something to drink? It is boiling with the heat in here.”
I gestured to the fridge. “There’s nothing in there.”
She laughed, a gold tooth glinting in her smile. “I have something.” She reached into the capacious sling where the baby was and fished around, then pulled out a glass bottle full of pulpy brown liquid and handed it to me. It was actually cold. “Apple juice,” she said.
“Thanks.” I drank some, and it was delicious, sweet and woody.
In her arms the baby gurgled happily. Its wide, pale face was shadowed and dimpled, like the surface of the moon.
“Are you one of these vandals?” I said.
Irina shrugged. “We all have different projects.”
“What’s yours?”
“Right now, to make sure you are doing all right.”
“You guys don’t seem very concerned about security.”
“What do you mean?”
“You let me in, and I heard all about these felonies you’re planning. I could turn you all in.”
Irina laughed again, and the moon-faced baby did too. I drank some more juice, and seeing the bottle was empty, she took it back and stuck it somewhere inside the sling. I wondered what else she had in there.
“But you’re a friend of Angus,” she said.
“I don’t know Angus. I’m here looking for my brother. Wylie.”
“Yes,” she said. “Wylie. I don’t think he’s here.”
“I saw him.”
“Did you? What I am thinking is he is not here.”
Around us, the buzz of the room rose and hissed and began to roil. I saw a bottle passing from hand to hand. A woman’s laughter sounded loud and shrill above the din, repeating at intervals, like a ringing telephone. In one corner a man strummed a guitar and sang a country song. It was turning into a party.
