The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  Inside the apartment, Irina was up and nursing the baby again. Angus went to the kitchen and poured water into his Nalgene bottle, which he handed to me and stared until I drank. Then he nodded—pleased with himself, it seemed— and turned to Irina. “Who’s coming today?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Stan and Berto for sure. I don’t know about Wylie.”

  “No one ever knows about Wylie,” Angus said, and winked at me. “Maybe he’ll be at the thing tonight. Do you have the maps?”

  “Yes, hold on.” Irina reached into the sling, somewhere underneath her baby’s butt, and pulled out a folded, creased piece of paper.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, and was conspicuously ignored. Sledge came over and sadly licked my ankle. I found a shallow dish in the kitchen and gave him some water, which he drank in great sloppy mouthfuls. Then I spent a while nosing through the cupboards, which were stocked with neatly labeled plastic containers: rice, dried beans, lentils, oatmeal. There was enough food to keep a group going for weeks, as long as they didn’t mind eating the bomb-shelter diet. I remembered Wylie badgering our dad for more Nilla wafers when we were hiking, which in an attempt to guarantee good behavior were withheld until the last possible moment. I guessed he’d put Nilla wafers behind him by now.

  I wandered into the bedroom, where Irina had been napping. At least this room held ordinary signs of habitation. A single cot draped with a sleeping bag sat against the back wall, underneath a window whose blinds were drawn. On the foot was a supply of cloth diapers, a jar of talcum powder, a box of baby wipes. The air smelled of baby: part dirty diaper, part No More Tears shampoo. I pulled up the blinds and looked into the backyard of another apartment complex, where a motorcycle was leaning on a rusty kickstand underneath a green archway that made it look like some kind of shrine; morning glories composed the arch, their blossoms twisted and closed, all the vines sagging in the afternoon heat, everything drooping and listless and dry. I turned from the window and opened the closet, which was empty. There were no pictures anywhere on the walls, no clothes thrown in the closet or on the floor, no tracts or manifestos, even. Aside from the traces of Irina and Psyche the apartment was desiccated, stripped of the invisible currents that people bring to a place they live. It was clear that Wylie didn’t live here anymore—at least not in the way that I defined living.

  Back in the living room, Angus and Irina were sitting cross-legged on the floor, examining maps and muttering like spies.

  “Are they metal or plastic?”

  “Metal.”

  “Pop-ups or shrub?”

  “Pop-ups.”

  This went on for some time. I stood behind Angus and peered over his curved back at a diagram that showed a long pipe with a spring curling around it, housed in some larger casing. The parts weren’t labeled, and I had no idea whether the thing was a carburetor or a bomb.

  “What’s the earliest we can go?” Angus said.

  “Gerald would know.”

  “Who is Gerald, exactly?” I said.

  “A friend of ours,” Irina said. She was crouching on the floor with her bent knees splayed out to either side, the baby asleep on her chest, her face inexplicably radiant. I couldn’t believe she was actually comfortable.

  “Stan and Berto were supposed to be here already with his information,” Angus said.

  “Who are Stan and Berto?” I said.

  “Friends of ours,” Irina answered sweetly.

  I sighed. “You guys have a lot of friends.”

  Without saying anything Angus reached behind his back and wrapped his hand around the bare skin of my right ankle. It was so quick that I actually gasped a little bit. I could feel his dry palm, even the calluses, and as he peered over his shoulder I met his light-blue eyes. Then he broke into another wide smile and said, “We’re friendly people.”

  The door opened and two guys walked in without knocking or even saying hello. They both looked familiar, so I must have seen them at the meeting. One looked like a wide receiver, with a muscular hairy chest he was flaunting under a tight white tank top. The other was short and older, a gaunt, gray-faced man whose shorts hung slackly on his skinny hips.

  I stepped in front of Angus and Irina and stuck out my hand. “Hi, how’s it going? I’m Lynn.”

  “Stan,” said the wide receiver. “This is Berto.”

  “Yo,” said Berto.

  Stan set a backpack down on the floor and pulled out a plastic bag. “Supplies,” he said.

  These turned out to be peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, which Stan offered around in a cursory manner before he and Berto devoured them. Aside from Psyche, Sledge, and me, everyone was huddled around the diagram, nodding.

  “Gerald says earliest tee-off is ten-fifteen,” Berto said. “Get it?”

  “Right.”

  “I still think we need to have a name,” Berto said. “I was talking about this to some other people at the meeting, and they agreed with me.”

  “Go work with them, then,” Stan said, and when Berto scowled at him, he scowled back. “The name doesn’t matter.”

  “Can’t claim responsibility if we don’t got a name.”

  “We don’t need to claim responsibility.”

  “They’ll think it’s just a bunch of fucking kids.”

  “Maybe we are a bunch of fucking kids,” Angus said.

  “That’s bullshit,” Berto said angrily. “And not all of us are kids, man.” He reached into the bag and took another sandwich, shaking his head.

  “No name, no claims,” Angus said decisively. “Nothing matters but the action itself.”

  “What about, like, Citizens for Environmental Action? CEA,” Berto mused, waving his sandwich in the air.

  “Berto, let the name go.”

  “You’re right, it’s kind of bland. Okay, what about Earth Now? Kind of like Earth First, but different.”

  “Tell me what you guys are planning,” I said.

  “Excuse us,” Angus said. He stood up and pulled me by the elbow into the kitchen. My back was against the fridge, and his face loomed close to mine: his red hair, his pale skin, all those freckles. “Do you understand that I’m doing you a favor?” he whispered.

  “No,” I whispered back.

  “Wylie will be here, okay? He’ll be with us tonight. So just tag along with the crowd.”

  “I’m more of a loner, generally speaking.”

  “Try,” he said.

  He bent down and kissed me then, gentle and unhurried, for a period of several minutes. I put up zero resistance. For some reason, the word “consent” rose over and over in the back of my mind, but I saw it as more substance than word: something liquid pouring over me, hot and wet, capillaries opened, skin flushed. Behind my eyelids the world turned red.

  Afterwards, the group went on making their plans, although they apparently were keeping them vague in my presence. I was still curious but didn’t ask any questions. The sandwiches finished, Berto went into the kitchen and rinsed out the plastic bag, then hung it up to dry. Looking around, I counted the sleeping bags rolled against the walls—four, including the one on the cot—and realized they were all living here. Beyond the occasional backpack and Irina’s baby supplies, none of them had any belongings to speak of. It was bizarre and impressive at the same time. Most people know that we shouldn’t live as wastefully as we do, but could never change their lives as drastically as these guys had. Irina was right: they were living differently.

  I cleared a space on the counter and listened. Berto continued to obsess over names and was repeatedly, uselessly shushed. Irina sang low-voiced songs to her baby and nodded in agreement, though rarely was it clear about what. In the dark room—most of the light came through the bedroom blinds I’d opened—time stretched itself out, slowly.

  Stan and Angus were talking about water: the dearth of it around the globe, our reckless overindulgence in it as consumers, its diversion by financial interests. The go
vernment encouraged individual citizens to reduce their residential water use while giving tax breaks to corporations whose water use was massive in comparison. We were groundwater overdrafting, taking more out of our water account than we had. In China the water table was dropping by a meter a year. The Nile Valley was drying up. The Athabasca Glacier was receding. The Aral Sea was gone. The Ogallala Aquifer that extended through the West had been overpumped for decades. Half the world’s wetlands had been destroyed in the last century. The Yangtze, Ganges, and Colorado rivers rarely flowed all the way to the sea because of upstream withdrawals. Pollution was decimating freshwater fish species, twenty percent of which were endangered or extinct, and causing at least five million human deaths a year from disease. The world was rife with appalling scarcity, and people unwilling to face it.

  These two had an array of statistics, and a familiarity with geography, that far exceeded mine, as well as a kind of fervor I’d seldom encountered after sophomore year of college. When Stan said that people were guilty of cynical and craven acts, he glanced at me, and I almost flinched; but then he looked back at Angus and went on to say that they planted desert shrubbery while insisting on hour-long showers every day. Soon everything would be ruined—most things already were ruined—and it was all our own fault.

  “The world is going down the drain,” Angus said, and laughed. But as they talked on and on, Stan flexed his significant arm muscles as if he wanted to pummel some sense into each water delinquent, one at a time. He predicted there was going to be a war over water. He said there ought to be.

  Who knows how long we sat there? The conversation was circular; Irina’s songs never ended; the dog whimpered and chased something in his sleep. Then my brother walked into the apartment—panting, flushed, bent beneath the weight of a massive backpack, carrying two six-packs of beer under each of his scrawny arms—and everybody fell quiet.

  Without acknowledging anyone, Wylie set the beer down on the floor and slipped out of the backpack, which hit the floor with a clank of metal. Pine needles and other leaflike matter nested in his hair. He was wearing the same camp T-shirt he had on the night before, and smelled bad even from where I sat.

  “I brought beer,” he said.

  “Where’d you get all that, man?” Berto said.

  “Stole it from some frat boys,” Wylie said, grinning, “then ran like hell.”

  “Excellent!” Berto stood up to give him a high five, and the tension in the room visibly dissipated. Everybody started drinking, including Irina and me. After a terse hello, Wylie acted as if I weren’t there at all. Every once in a while Angus came over and put his arm around me or touched my shoulder, and I watched for my brother’s reaction, but there wasn’t one.

  “Hey, Wylie, what do you think about this list of names I’ve got?” Berto asked, and they immediately plunged into a deep discussion of semantics and philosophical resonance and educational or promotional value. Irina and Stan disappeared and eventually came back with a bag of apples, a round of cheese, and several loaves of bread. The food wasn’t bagged, and I didn’t ask where it had come from.

  As I was eating, Angus brought me another beer. “You’re biting your lip,” he said.

  “He’s ignoring me.”

  “Maybe you make him uncomfortable.”

  “I haven’t said anything!”

  “Maybe that’s the problem.”

  “Why’s he so weird?” I said.

  Angus laughed as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  “You’re not very patient,” he said. “I like that.”

  I sighed. “I’m starting to think you’re not very discriminating.”

  “Hey,” Wylie called from across the room. I expected him to be looking at me and Angus, but he wasn’t. “It’s time,” he said.

  It was already dark. The group fanned out on foot. I saw Wylie and Stan turn the corner, heading south. Angus loped off down the street in the opposite direction without saying anything, and I found myself in step with Irina and Psyche.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. In the lit windows of the houses we passed people were on display. A woman laughed drunkenly at a dinner party, the table crowded with candles, guests slumped in their chairs, the chaos of emptied plates. A cat peered angrily into the darkness from the back of a sofa. A young couple sat on a front-porch swing, smoking cigarettes and watching their sprinkler fan back and forth across the lawn. From most homes, falling over the sidewalks was the blue light of television.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Irina said. “Stay by me and I will tell you what to do.”

  We walked for half an hour through quiet residential streets, seeing no trace of the others. I suspected that Irina’s job was to divert me from whatever task was at hand. From within the sling Psyche gurgled softly to herself, as if forming opinions on the journey. Irina was humming—whether to herself or to her baby I couldn’t tell, or what she might be thinking about, if she thought at all. Maybe she just followed Angus wherever he went, enjoying her television-induced fantasy of the great American desert.

  “Who’s Psyche’s father?” I said.

  Irina answered with one of her sweet smiles, and I was annoyed. How many smiles and nonanswers could a person take in a single day? The baby gurgled again, louder and with an edge in her voice, as if sensing the approach of a sensitive subject.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Who is it?”

  “It is nobody who you know.”

  “Do you have to be so coy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She stopped and looked at me with what appeared to be real consternation. “What is ‘coy’?”

  “It’s . . . like lying.”

  Psyche’s gurgle crescendoed to a pissed-off wail. She beat her tiny fist against Irina’s chest and her cheeks flushed and swelled with reproach, tears streaming down her face. People came to their windows to see who was crying. Irina hushed her, swaying her hips and whispering into her child’s tiny ears. Finally Psyche sniffled and buried her head against her mother’s neck.

  “Don’t call me a liar,” Irina said into the sudden quiet, hoisting the sling higher on her hips. “It’s unkind.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “I said it was nobody you know.”

  “And I said I was sorry.”

  She then picked up the pace, and I had to work hard to keep up with her. She didn’t look at me at all. We were in a nicer neighborhood now—well-tended gardens, chile ristras and rock lawns, wind chimes above doors, the spicy smoke of piñon wood rising through the air from backyard barbecues. Psyche was asleep.

  “This way,” Irina said, her voice low. We were at a service entrance to a golf-course development that wasn’t far, if my geography was right, from the cemetery where my father was buried. She slipped through a gap in the fence—surprisingly agile, I thought, for a woman carrying a baby—and then skulked around the perimeter of a vast expanse dotted with huge houses. I thought I could see other forms moving around, but they might have just been shadows. It was very quiet. The air wafting over acres of thick, green grass smelled cooler and wetter—like a giant swatch of Connecticut now stranded, far from home, in New Mexico. Had I come across this place in the Northeast, it would have seemed pleasant and generically suburban, but now, after hearing all the talk about water, I saw it as decadent and even outrageous, ghastly as a fur coat.

  Someone whispered my name in the darkness, and I almost tripped on my brother, who was crouching against the trunk of an elm tree. “Get down,” he hissed, and Irina and I kneeled down beside him. He kept glancing over his shoulder, craning his head to look down a nearby street and even up at the sky. I’d never seen him so twitchy. A car came through the gated entrance, its headlights bearing down as if on purpose on where we huddled together behind the tree. Wylie was pressed up against me, and I could smell the sour stench of his breath and his unwashed hair.

  After the car turned the corner and disappeared, Wylie pulled out flashlights from
his backpack and handed one to each of us. “You’re looking for glinting metal in the ground. Irina, go over to this side of the fairway. They should be spaced about twenty feet apart, okay?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, rolling the r, her voice dreamy and sweet. He reached again into his backpack and pulled out something wrapped in a towel that turned out to be a wrench. She took it and left immediately, keeping close to the fence.

  “You’re ready?” he asked, as if I were a stranger he’d been assigned to buddy with. I nodded. After despairing of catching even a glimpse of him, it was strange to be sitting so close, and I held my breath for fear any movement might startle him. He unwrapped another towel and handed me a wrench. “Come on,” he said.

  We jogged across the golf course, playing the flashlights here and there, though my eyes were fixed on his dark ponytail.

  Then he stopped short and pointed to the ground. “Put the wrench around the nozzle. If possible, you want to pull out the riser it’s mounted on too, and the spring around it. But if you can’t, just the nozzle’s okay. Then go twenty feet and look for another nozzle with your flashlight.”

  I looked down at the wrench in my hand. “Is that really going to work?”

  “According to my study of the diagrams, it should work perfectly.”

  “Wylie, this is stupid. Petty vandalism? Their insurance will cover the repairs, and it’ll all be back to normal in a couple of days. What’s the point?”

  He glowered at me in the dark. His thin shoulders rose and fell with the swift rhythm of his breath, and his chest heaved in and out, almost too fast to see. “If you’re not here to do this,” he said, “then you should leave.”

  He looked like he hated me. But he was my brother, and I missed him in the elemental way that you can only miss your family or your home. I bent down and started to struggle with the wrench, and Wylie ran off in the dark.

  I had no idea what I was doing, and was able to accomplish nothing at all with the wrench. Every time it slipped uselessly on the nozzle, I shook my head in amazement. Somehow Wylie was able to extract sprinklers from the ground, keep a twenty-year-old car running, and live successfully in the mountains for days or weeks at a time. I had no idea how he’d come by all these skills. Neither of our parents was mechanically inclined. My father, the scientist, was rendered helpless by the sight of a clogged toilet or a blown tire; after inspecting such problems, he’d shrug vaguely and leave them to my mother, who would then call the appropriate professional.