The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  Then the bedroom door opened and Gerald walked out through the crowd and left the apartment without speaking to anyone. No one acknowledged him, but on the other hand they all moved aside so that he could get by. When Angus came out, the music stopped and the same immediate silence fell.

  “Reports, to me, now,” he said, then turned on his heel and went back into the bedroom, followed by three or four people. The door closed, and the party started up again. I thought I smelled pot. Irina was rocking her baby back and forth.

  “What is this?” I asked her.

  “Just people who want to be living differently,” she said.

  Still dizzy and hot, I leaned back against the counter and looked down at the floor, where a cockroach was nosing around the curling edge of the linoleum, its antennae languidly twitching.

  Irina put a hand on my shoulder. “You would like to go outside in the fresh air?”

  I nodded and followed her out of the apartment. After the press of bodies, the night air was blissfully cool. The moon still hung low in the sky, and the baby cooed at it. We walked slowly down the dark street, the sound of the party fading behind us.

  “What’s your baby’s name?”

  “Psyche,” she said.

  “As in Cupid and Psyche?”

  “Yes, Cupid is the god of love, and Psyche is the soul.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I’m going to raise her at home and teach her myself. Angus says that what they teach in schools here is useless. The only skill the children learn is conformity to a set of capitalist rules.”

  I had a sudden, obvious thought. “Is Angus—”

  Irina tilted her head and smiled at me gently. She was very pretty. “Is he what?”

  “Is he Psyche’s father?”

  “No,” she said. “He is more in a nature of an uncle. He helps me very much, though.” She turned to face me under the dim umbrella of a streetlight. “I think he likes you.”

  “We don’t know each other.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  A prickle started at the back of my neck and trailed down my back to my legs. Then I felt embarrassed. “What is this, high school?”

  “Oh, he didn’t say anything to me like that,” Irina said. We started walking again, and turned right to make a loop around the block. “I can just tell. Because I know him.”

  In the silence that followed I could hear the tiny hum and wheeze of Psyche snoring. Finally I said, “How well do you know Wylie?”

  “Pretty well, I should say.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He comes and goes. Sometimes he camps for long times in the mountains. He is a very independent person, you know.”

  I sighed. Nobody seemed to care that he wasn’t around, except for my mother and me. I felt annoyed, and concerned, and lonely—whenever I came home, Wylie was supposed to be there—and tired from the combination of it all. “I’m worried about him,” I said to Irina.

  She shrugged and ran a gentle finger under Psyche’s fat sleeping chin. “Why? I think he is happy enough.”

  “Happy enough? That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

  “It is probably more than most people can say.”

  I didn’t answer this statement, which struck me as true. We made another turn and walked back toward Wylie’s apartment. Ahead of us, a group of people was coming down the stairs of his complex. One of them stopped and blew his nose in a visible spray over the street. “That was no dog,” his friend was saying. “It was a goat!” Then they all got onto bicycles and rode away.

  I went back inside, hoping against all realistic hope that Wylie would be there, waiting for me and ready to talk. But the apartment was empty, and he wasn’t.

  Four

  Life at my mother’s house settled into a shaky routine, the tenuous reestablishment of an adult child come back home. It didn’t feel right, but it didn’t feel exactly wrong, either. In the mornings as I slept my mother left me notes, assigning me various chores—defrost the fridge, take out the trash—that I consistently ignored. She came and went day and night, to work and to go bowling or to the movies with David Michaelson, like some roommate I’d found through a classified ad. Neither of us mentioned his wife.

  Daytime television kept me sane. During the long, bright days I closed the curtains and lay on the couch, eating ice cream and learning about celebrities’ drug recovery programs, also their wedding plans, decorating styles, and diets. Sometimes I fell asleep to the Weather Channel, the calm swaths of cold fronts in the Rockies, the monotony of drought in the Southwest.

  One evening, when my mother came home from work, I turned off the television and brought out Eva Kent’s two paintings.

  “Were you going through my room?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I just wanted to see some of the old things again.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care for those paintings.”

  “I like them. I think they’re pretty good, actually.”

  We both glanced at the paintings—I’d set them against the living-room wall—as if they might have something to contribute to the conversation.

  My mother raised one eyebrow, briefly. I could tell she put stock in my judgment, even though it contradicted her own, which was touching, if probably a mistake.

  “Well,” she said, “you would know.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Oh, your father came home with them one day. My birthday present, I think.”

  I was surprised to hear this, and couldn’t remember it happening. Then again, if he’d given them to her around the time they were painted, I would’ve been a baby. Still, my father always gave abstract and wildly impersonal presents: board games, magazine subscriptions, T-shirts. The popularization of the gift certificate was the best thing that ever happened to him, birthday-wise.

  “Probably his secretary picked them out for him,” she went on. “I hated them all along, to be honest with you. Those naked, unhappy-looking people. And what’s happening in that second painting, with the woman lying on the man’s lap? I don’t even want to know. But I didn’t want to hurt your father’s feelings, so up they went.”

  “Do you know anything about her? Eva Kent, I mean.”

  She studied my face for a moment. “The artist? Why are you so interested in her all of a sudden? You never showed one bit of interest in those paintings before.”

  “I have more training now,” I said. “I, um, know things.”

  This shut her up. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.” Then she went into the kitchen and changed the subject. “What about Wylie? Have you made any progress on figuring out where he is?”

  “Well,” I said, and sighed. “I’ve decided that progress is a lie.”

  She came out of the kitchen to pick up my ice-cream bowl and carry it back in there, a gesture I interpreted as laden with reproach.

  “Don’t do that, I’ll take care of it.”

  “You will?” she said.

  “Eventually.”

  She picked the bowl up anyway, and I followed her to the sink, where she started scrubbing away as if at years of accumulated dirt. Still in her work clothes, a navy-blue skirt and a light-blue blouse with short sleeves, she looked like the head attendant on an exhausting flight. The flesh of her arms bounced and shook a little as she washed.

  I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer.

  “Lynnie,” she said.

  “The thing is, Mom, if you’re so desperate to find Wylie, why don’t you look for him yourself?”

  She set the bowl gently in the drainer and turned around, water from the sink stretching across her abdomen, like a smile or a scar. “Do you think I haven’t?” she said.

  So in the morning I set off again in the Caprice, the radio turned up loud, and drove through the sun-addled streets. The city looked criminal: dust blew across the windshield, men leered at me from corners
and from behind the wheels of their pickups, working girls paced beneath the bleached neon signs of fleabag motels. The Sandias were brown in the distance. The houses were brown. The highways were brown. Everything was brown. The car’s wheezing air-conditioning blew a stream of tepid air over my right shoulder. I was sweating and cursing by the time I pulled up at Wylie’s place.

  No one answered my knock. I sat down in a slice of shade on the landing outside his door and waited for someone to come back. A stray dog ambled down the block, head down, marking its territory here and there in the brown lawns. In this neighborhood dirt and weeds were fighting a winning battle against all grass. The dog lifted its head, sniffed the air, and looked at me.

  When we were kids Wylie and I had a dog named Sycamore—Syc for short, which my parents thought was funny— that we took on hikes in the Sandias with my father. Hiking was our main activity together. During the week he got home too late for us to see him much, but on Saturdays or Sundays my mother would send the three of us packing so she could clean up or chat with her friends or talk to her mother on the phone. My father always wore the same thing, brown shorts and those too-high socks and a broad-brimmed hat, and he almost always took us on the same trail. It led to a cave, where we ate a lunch he’d carried for us in his knapsack. Sometimes he invited a friend, another scientist from work, and they’d walk too fast, talking shop and ignoring me and Wylie until we turned on each other and had to be yelled at. Other times, though, alone, he’d talk about his own childhood in Chicago, a place that sounded dramatic and foreign to me, with snowdrifts higher than I was and hot dogs as long as my arm. For years I dreamed about going there in winter to skate on the streets to my father’s school, the way he’d done when he was a kid.

  On one of our hikes, Syc came bounding back onto the trail, his tail wagging like crazy, with something in his mouth. My father bent down, sweat loosening his glasses from the bridge of his nose, and said his name softly. Syc just stood there, wagging. My father gently pried his jaws apart and a pale-gray rabbit dropped onto the ground, shiny ropes of dog saliva coating his fur. Wylie and I stood there looking at it. Then my father put the rabbit behind a tree and shooed Syc away. Wylie asked to keep it, but my dad said no, so he pouted all the way home. But I’d seen what Wylie didn’t: that the rabbit just lay there, stiff, on the ground.

  The shade had widened over the landing. In front of me, the stray dog snapped up a piece of garbage in somebody’s yard, seemed dubious about it, then moved on. I watched it leave, shaking my head at myself. It had been over ten years since I’d gone on a hike of any kind. But if your brother held wilderness all-important in an overly civilized world, why on earth wait for him at an apartment building? Why would you, unless you didn’t really want to find him in the first place? I decided I was an idiot and got back into the car.

  I could remember only that one trail, which started in the western foothills by a water reservoir, a round white container that always looked to me like an oversized aspirin the mountain was trying, year after year, to swallow. At the trailhead, two mountain bikers in fluorescent gear were squirting energy food from tubes into their mouths. It was a weekday afternoon, and aside from a single jogger far ahead up the trail, there was no one else around: just the sky and the sun and the arid ground, with dry husks of burnt-out cactus making the skeleton shapes of bushes.

  I started walking. Where the dusty foothills pulled steeply upwards into a bit more greenery, I saw the jogger disappear around a bend. Now there was really no one around. Gradually the trail took on a malevolent air. The dead cacti rustled and whispered; invisible animals scurried underneath. Fifteen minutes later I was exhausted. I could walk for hours on city blocks in high-heeled boots, but a quick stroll at Albuquerque elevation was killing me.

  On a rock barely shaded by a juniper tree, I sat down and wiped my forehead with my T-shirt. “I hate being hot,” I said out loud. I hated being thirsty, too. I vaguely recalled there was some kind of stream on this trail, although maybe you weren’t supposed to drink from it because of the bacteria. Or was that somewhere else? I was ignorant; my feet hurt. I thought about Wylie spending weeks at a time in the mountains, philosophizing or thinking or whatever it was that he did out here, and felt a profound wash of affection, even gratitude, for the attributes of civilized life, for apartments and stoplights and magazines and the steam that issued from manholes on the streets of New York.

  But none of that was within my reach just now, so I stood up again. Somewhere up ahead was the cave where Wylie and I used to pretend, over lunch, that we were prehistoric man, if prehistoric man had had access to peanut-butter sandwiches and Nilla wafers. My father often began those hikes with a distant, preoccupied air, speaking about current events and the weather as if we were strangers he’d just happened to fall in step with; but gradually he’d relax into his more fatherly self, telling stories and jokes, every once in a while ruffling Wylie’s hair. I always thought that it took him a while to get used to his family again, not because he didn’t like us but because during the week, when he was at work, he just didn’t think about us that much. We weren’t the central focus of his life, and he was capable of forgetting us. When he died I thought: if he’d cared a little more, he would have fought harder to stay.

  Birds muttered in the low bushes by the side of the trail. The sun shone on the back of my neck, the heat a pressure as real and finite as an iron flat on your skin. My shoes were covered in brown dust. I climbed up through rocky crags, heading up switchbacks, turning back and forth like a goat. I kept thinking the cave would be around the next corner, but it never was. On another rock I rested again, this time looking back toward the city, flat and undistinguished below me: the gray acreage of parking lots, the beige hulks of new malls, the streets hectic with tiny cars. In the distance I could see the small peak of Mount Taylor, floating in the desert like an island rising from a brown sea. My throat and feet and neck were dry and sore and sunburned, respectively.

  I gave myself ten more minutes and finally reached the cave, though it was less the cave of my memory than a rocky overhang with the remains of a fire below it, charred rocks, scattered trash and paper, old beer cans and condom wrappers. It was a ready-made antidote for childhood nostalgia. I sat down in the shade, leaned my head against the rocky wall, and passed out.

  When I opened my eyes the jogger I’d seen earlier was standing over me holding out a bottle of water. It was Angus Beam. I was almost positive I was dreaming. His skin shone thickly with sweat. He was wearing a light-blue T-shirt that was soaked and translucent, sweatpants, combat boots, and a Panama hat. His arms and neck were the color of persimmons.

  “Drink this,” he said.

  I grabbed the bottle and drank almost half of it, undeterred by its weird taste, which was both chemical and citrusy. A layer of dust had somehow settled on my tongue as I slept.

  He crouched next to me, balancing lightly on his heels, and squinted at my face. “You look terrible.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Walking around,” he said. “Wearing a hat and carrying water. Which is more than I can say for some people.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Water is the key to life here in the arid Southwest.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Without it we’d all perish.”

  “I said I know,” I said. “Can I have some more?”

  I felt nauseous and stupid and annoyed. Every time I looked for Wylie, I wound up with this character instead. He took a folded handkerchief out of his pocket, dampened it with water, and gently wiped my forehead and cheeks. “Can you walk? Otherwise I’ll carry you.”

  “Don’t even think about it.” I stood up and immediately sat down again. My calves were knotted and cramped, and some floating squares of color—red, blue, green, purple— hovered weirdly in my field of vision. When I pressed a hand to my face, one was hot and the other ice cold, but for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.

&n
bsp; “Let me help you,” he said.

  It took twice as long to get back down the trail as it did to climb up. I leaned heavily against his shoulder and stopped often to drink water, and by the time we got to the trailhead I was feeling almost normal. The sun was lower now, drooping densely in the flat sky, and hikers with dogs and children spilled from their cars in the parking lot. I could see far below us the sparkle of traffic on the highway. I had no idea how long I’d been on the trail. Without saying anything Angus steered me to the Caprice, took the keys I offered, opened the door, and sat me down in the driver’s seat. Then he leaned against the door and asked if I was all right to drive. Suddenly his smell hit me: the stinky pheronomic nastiness of male sweat, plus that chemical odor I’d noticed before, and, on top of that, a general odor that was strangely but recognizably clean. It was impossible, but he smelled like water.

  “I think so,” I said. “Where’s your car?”

  “I walked.”

  “From Wylie’s apartment?”

  “As modes of transportation go, it’s both safe and reliable,” he said. “Listen, would you care for a drink?”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, and smiled. Under the brim of his hat, sweat was gathering in drops and preparing to trickle down his face.

  “So you want to get a drink,” I said slowly. “Right now.”

  He reached into the car and placed his hand flat against my forehead.

  “You’re sure you’re all right to drive?”

  I glared at him, and he grinned widely, his teeth gleaming against his dusty skin, and then sprang away from the door with a light, quick step. A millisecond later, it seemed, he was sitting on the passenger side.

  The streets were crowded with traffic, and I rolled down the windows and sighed, asking myself what the hell I was doing. Angus gave me occasional directions and fiddled constantly with the radio, listening to ten seconds or less of every single song, ten words or less of talk. It was basically the most annoying thing ever. I kept glaring at him, which only made him laugh. This went on for fifteen minutes as mothers in minivans cut me off, truckers barreled down on top of me, and packs of teenage girls stared at us and giggled for no reason that I could see. I was sweating a lot and hating it. Finally Angus reached behind him into the backseat of the car, leaning far over to rummage around on the floor, his sweatpanted butt perilously close to my shoulder.