The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “Don’t worry. I won’t mess anything up.”

  He looked unconvinced. Angus walked up to him and whispered into his ear, their two heads close together: one hat-ted, the other bare and dark; one smile, one frown. After a minute Wylie shrugged and said, “I hope you’re right.”

  Angus turned and clapped his hands. “It’s time,” he said.

  Ten

  Sometimes I forgot that my father was gone. It was as if he were on vacation or out of town, and in the back of my mind, that trickster of a spot, I had no doubt he’d be back. Then I’d remember that his absence was permanent, and couldn’t decide which was worse: the forgetting or the remembering, the loss of knowledge or its sudden return. He was fifty-one when he died, an absurdly young age, seriously ridiculous; an age that would force you to wonder what was wrong with his heart, potentially my own and others’ of my acquaintance, not to mention hearts in general, which seemed like flawed mechanisms all around.

  Also there was the question of what I hated most. On one side was the fact that I was forgetting what he looked like. I knew he was angular and dark-haired, with hair bristling from his ears and nose; when I was little, I sometimes saw him in the bathroom, tweezing them out and swearing with pain, which made me feel both amused and sorry for him. But the way his eyes flicked rapidly from side to side when he talked, his rare laughter (highly prized by Wylie and me, because it was harder to get him to laugh than our mother) when we did something either funny or ridiculous, his tendency to fall asleep in front of the television and snore—at times I found myself recovering these things, and understood that I’d been losing them, that the reality of my father was receding and in its place were photographs, hardening.

  On the other side was the fact that my brother looked a lot like him: the same dark hair, sharp shoulders, and slouch. Seeing Wylie bent over a map next to Angus was, however slightly, like seeing my father again, and I didn’t enjoy it at all. And the more I saw him, the more acutely I felt that slingshot process of remembering my own forgetting, the push and pull I’d stayed in New York to avoid. I thought of my mother’s voice on the telephone saying “Come home, you can’t have to work all the time,” and my own voice saying “I can’t get away.” We must have had this conversation fifty times since my father died.

  And yet, I thought, looking at my brother, I’d been missing him, too. Missing people all around.

  I stared over his shoulder at the map, even though he shot me a look of utter annoyance. I shrugged and said, “Don’t let me distract you.”

  What they had was a map of the city, on which Wylie was highlighting, with a Day-Glo pink marker, a section of streets. I wondered if they had another sprinkler-related prank planned. I’d never met anyone who hated grass as much as they did.

  “Up and down this whole street,” he was saying, “is water waste central.”

  “Yeah, it’s hideous,” Stan agreed. “That is some ugly stuff.”

  “I hear you, man,” Berto said glumly. He was eating corn nuts out of a plastic bag and, every once in a while, wiping his hands on his shorts. Sledge was lying there next to him, tenderly licking the fabric where this wiping occurred.

  Irina sat nursing Psyche, a benevolent look on her face, and she motioned me over. “Isn’t it all highly exciting?” she said.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Our committee is executing the second strike of the summer. Action number two.”

  “Something to do with pools, I take it.”

  From across the room I saw Wylie look up, and knew that he was waiting to hear my reaction.

  “That’s right,” Irina said. Psyche pulled away from her breast, sucking her own lips and muttering to herself, and Irina covered her chest and smoothed the few strands of hair on the baby’s head. “It is of course highly sad to have pools of water in the center of the desert. It is a wrong. So we are going to drain them.”

  “What, the public pools? In this heat? That won’t make you guys very popular,” I said. As soon as the first words were out of my mouth, I could feel unfriendliness building in the room. Only Angus continued studying the map, whistling under his breath.

  “Not the city pools,” Wylie said, standing up and stepping toward me. “Private pools. In this neighborhood practically every damn house has a pool. Think of the amount of water that is, and how little it gets used. It’s a criminal overallocation of valuable resources.”

  “You said it, man,” Berto said.

  I pictured the pools of Albuquerque spread out in the brilliant sunshine, their turquoise surfaces ringed by gladioli and umbrellas, all of it pretty as a Hockney painting. “What are you going to do with the water?” I asked.

  “Dump it into the aquifer!” Stan said.

  “Can’t do that,” Wylie said. “We’ll have to dump it onto their lawns. And if it kills all the nonnative plants, it serves them right. We should kill all that East Coast grass.”

  “Isn’t it a little bit mean?” I said. He glared at me. “Because it’s mostly kids who use pools.” He was still glaring. “And kids like to swim when it’s hot and everything,” I finished lamely.

  “If you want to talk about kids,” he said, “picture the thousands who die of dysentery each year in India due to lack of clean water while little Johnny in Rio Rancho practices the front crawl with his private swim coach. Save your sympathy for the right people, Lynn. Chemically processing vast quantities of chlorinated water in the middle of an arid ecosystem is an absurd, destructive act. By confronting them with the untenability of this position, we can effectively illustrate the necessity of change.”

  “Confronting kids?” I said.

  My brother shrugged. “Presumably their parents will notice as well.”

  “Totally, man,” Berto said.

  “Those pools are ugly,” Stan said. “They are like an abomination upon the land.”

  “Plus imagine the looks on their faces when they see they’re empty,” Angus said, and winked at me.

  I could tell Wylie wanted to continue lecturing me, but Angus waved him over. “We do need to talk about the drainage.”

  “Would you mind holding the baby?” Irina said. “I will be right back.” She deposited Psyche in my arms and went into the bathroom. Sound asleep, the baby lay motionless in my lap. Her head was heavy and inert, like a miniature bowling ball. She was snoring, and her tiny hands were curled in delicate fists. I sat there and studied her. After a few minutes, her weight started to cut off the circulation in my legs—not exactly painful, but not pleasant, either.

  “Look, Lynn,” Wylie said, obviously bothered that he hadn’t convinced me of their righteousness. “Once people come out and see what we’ve done, they’ll have to ask themselves why.” He was standing against the counter now, arms crossed.

  They’ll be asking themselves who vandalized their pool, I thought, but didn’t say so out loud.

  “I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and I’ve decided that the revolution has to move out of the wilderness and into the city. It’s no good sitting in a tree when the vast majority of people don’t go anywhere near that tree. It’s no good selling them calendars with glossy pictures of the landscape to help them decorate the breakfast nooks and entertainment centers of their oversized suburban homes. You’ve got to attack people where they live.”

  His eyes glowed in the apartment’s dim light. Stan and Berto were nodding appreciatively, and Angus was looking at him and smiling.

  There was a kind of logic to his argument, albeit only a certain kind. I couldn’t summon a ready defense of swimming pools, suburban sprawl, and waste. I wondered what the hell Irina was doing in the bathroom that took so long. “Listen,” I said to the room at large, “my legs are numb.”

  Angus laughed. He took the baby from my lap—expertly, without waking her—and laid her down on his own. Holding one of Psyche’s feet in his hands, he peered into her sleeping face with a naked tenderness that made
me feel somehow ashamed. She woke up and looked at him without dismay.

  “A little chaos never hurt anybody,” he said softly, moving Psyche’s foot in a slow, lazy circle, as she watched him, expectant and oddly grown-up, like a patient with a physical therapist. Irina emerged from the bathroom, and I decided to use it too. When I stood up, my legs were on fire with the return of blood.

  Wylie said, “It’s not chaos. It’s a calculated gesture.”

  “Sure,” Angus said, “that’s what I meant.”

  I was surprised to find the bathroom clean and smelling faintly of orange, with signs of Psyche everywhere: a bottle of organic baby shampoo, a spotless tub, a folded stack of unbleached cotton towels. Some water usage was okay, apparently, at least where babies were involved. Lifting the toilet cover, though, I saw that flushing was only an occasional affair. When I returned to the living room Irina and Wylie were conferring and Psyche was standing in Angus’s lap, his hands around her chubby body. She punched him in the face and laughed. He stuck out his tongue and waggled his ears, rolling her gently from side to side, as if his lap were an ocean and his motions the waves.

  We didn’t leave the apartment until well past midnight. Irina’s job, she told me, was to stand watch in front of the houses. If anybody showed up she’d distract them, explaining that she was trying to calm her crying baby by walking her around the neighborhood.

  “What if the baby isn’t crying?” I said.

  “It is often not so difficult to arrange,” she said.

  I drove the Caprice, Irina holding Psyche beside me, Berto staring glumly out the window in the backseat. My passengers smelled ripe and organic, like farm animals or produce just starting to rot. I was getting used to it, but rolled my windows down nonetheless. Angus, Wylie, and Stan were ahead of us in the Plumbarama van, and I followed them through traffic, feeling like a spy. There was a weird lightness in my head, neither adrenaline nor dizziness, just the loose, hazy excitement that comes from throwing good sense to the winds. Letting go of things—fear, logic, laziness, whatever—I turned on the radio, and a pop song bounced into the car. Irina swayed along with the beat, Psyche gazing dreamily up at her from her sling.

  “You don’t have a car seat for her?” I said.

  “No,” Irina answered without stopping her swaying.

  The nighttime city was painted in lurid hues. The neon of stores, the lights of intersections, the custom paint jobs and trembling basses of cruising cars. Then ahead of me the purple van signaled a right-hand turn and we left all those colors behind. In a residential neighborhood the streets turned hushed and pastel: brown houses, pink flowers, the buttery glow of streetlights. Even the air itself seemed a lighter shade. I switched off the radio. The wind carried the smell of watered gardens into the car.

  Psyche cooed and garbled a private language, delivering her own speech on the status of babies in car rides after dark. “Guala, guala,” she said, or words to that effect.

  “There’s no gorillas here,” Irina said. “Don’t be silly.”

  “That we know of,” Berto said from the back.

  The van kept signaling, making lefts and rights through streets that all looked the same to me: row after row of the Albuquerque houses I remembered so clearly, with their flat roofs and windows trimmed in white or turquoise blue. I could picture each one inside, its hardwood floors and tile accents and the phone niche built into the hallway, with a shelf for the phone book carved out beneath it. “What are they doing?” I said.

  “You can let us out if you want,” Berto said. In the rearview mirror I could see his glum, jowly face. “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot. If you’re, like, having doubts.”

  “Berto,” Irina said.

  “I’m just saying, man, she doesn’t have to come.”

  “I want to be here.” And as I said it, I realized it was true. I wanted to know if they could get away with it, what would happen after, what conceivable difference any of it could make.

  “We don’t even know her,” Berto blurted from the back. “Remember that last chick Angus brought along, Tiffany, when we were trying to break into the computer-chip plant that time? She was freakin’ crazy, man, running around screaming her head off about how we should free the planet, free the animals from the zoo, free the children from the schools. And Wylie was all ‘Shut that woman up!’”

  “Berto,” Irina said.

  “But Angus just laughed, ’cause he thought it was funny, right, like everything’s funny? Me and Wylie had to drag her away in the end, man.”

  “This is different,” Irina said.

  “How is it different?” Berto said. He saw me in the rearview mirror and looked away. “Nothing against you, like, specifically or anything.”

  “It’s different,” Irina said sweetly, “because this is Lynn.”

  Gratitude surged through me, and I turned to her and smiled. Psyche garbled her agreement. I caught Berto’s eye again, and held it. “I’m Wylie’s sister,” I told him.

  The van finally pulled to the curb on a street canopied by a tall line of elms and serene with wealth. Porch lights glowed on the faces of tall, gabled houses, reflecting off large, gleaming vehicles parked in the driveways and casting faint circles on lush green lawns. I parked a few feet back and cut the engine. It was almost one in the morning, and I wondered if everybody else had taken naps. Angus, Wylie, and Stan were scurrying across someone’s front yard, keeping to the shadows, carrying a small blue machine I guessed was a pump. Berto scrambled out the back and set off after them, and soon they were climbing a fence at the side of the house, clanging the pump against it, a terrible noise. Down the street, a dog issued a warning howl.

  “This is going to end badly,” I said.

  “Everything will be fine,” Irina said. She got out of the car and stood beneath the trees, her two hands clasped beneath the base of the sling, and I joined her. In the driveway was a small, sporty Miata.

  “Why this house, anyway?” I asked her. I could hear the sound of splashing, Berto cursing, Wylie hissing at him to shut up.

  “All these families have two cars at the minimum,” she explained. “Usually one is a large SUV.”

  “What if that’s parked in the garage and everybody’s home?”

  Irina frowned. “I am thinking this has been part of Wylie’s research. Also the lights.” She reached into the sling and pulled out a piece of graph paper, a chart filled with scratchy handwriting I recognized as Wylie’s. Here he’d listed addresses, the presence of cars and their makes, the times lights went on and off.

  “When the house lights follow the same pattern every day, that is when you know they’re on a timer,” Irina said. “And that no one is in the home.”

  “Clever,” I said.

  She beamed at me. “Yes!”

  Then, from the backyard, I suddenly heard water rushing like a river. Glancing at my watch, I couldn’t understand why Irina wasn’t more nervous. Berto emerged from the shadows and fetched something from the back of the van, then dashed off again. It seemed like hours later when Angus and Wylie reappeared, carrying the pump between them, grinning like maniacs.

  “Man,” Wylie said, “I wish we had more than one pump.”

  “Only so much I could do,” Angus said.

  Berto stuck a sign—this was what he’d pulled out of the van, an unfolded piece of cardboard taped to a little wooden cross—into the front lawn: DESERT, it said, in black marker.

  Everybody was happy now. We drove on in a convoy to another house, where Irina and I set up at our posts again, the Caprice and the van parked in a cul-de-sac just around the corner. I was almost starting to enjoy myself when the problems started. I was listening to the loud suctioning of the pump—relieved that the houses were spread far apart—when there was a sudden crash, followed by whispers and soft laughter that clearly came from Angus. Berto came running around for some tool in the car, and I asked him what had happened.

  “Something got stuck in the pump,
man,” he said. “I don’t know why these assholes just let their kids leave toys in the pool.”

  “Yeah, that’s really inconsiderate,” I muttered as he ran back. They were making an unbelievable amount of noise, and I wasn’t surprised when the lights in the house next door came on. “We need to get out of here,” I said, pacing around the car, trying to figure out how long it would take for everybody to pile into the vehicles and clear out of here. “Can you make the baby cry or something?”

  “I am trying,” Irina said.

  All she was doing, from what I could tell, was jiggling Psyche up and down. I paced over to her and shook the base of the sling. “What are you doing? Pinch her or something. Pinch her!”

  Irina swiveled around, her back to me, and scowled over her shoulder. “She will cry in a minute. You keep away from her.”

  “Sorry,” I said, feeling myself flush. “I’m panicking.”

  Next door a middle-aged man in gray sweatpants and an NMSU T-shirt came out, squinting into the dark street. He looked to me like he was trying hard not to act frightened. I imagined his wife inside, goading him to see what the trouble was.

  Irina didn’t bat an eye but ran right up to him, Psyche cutting loose with an angry screech.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Irina said breathlessly, “I am having troubles. Can you help me please?”

  He took one look at her pretty face and her crying baby and his expression softened.

  I ran around the other side of the house into the backyard, hissing to Wylie that people were waking up. Angus was holding a long hose, from which enormous quantities of water were gushing out onto the lawn. The air stank of chlorine.

  “We’re almost done,” Wylie said.

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Go back and start the car.”

  “Hurry up,” I said.

  “The pump only goes so fast,” Angus said, not even bothering to whisper. He looked completely unconcerned. I could hear Psyche in the front, sobbing now, and Irina’s voice rising alongside hers. I hoped she was a good liar. Then I heard the neighbor say, loudly, “Maybe we should call the police,” as Irina protested—“No! Please, no police, I beg you!”—and I turned to Wylie again.