The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “Not go home,” I said, before his scowl could harden. “Someplace else. Come on, I’ll let you drive the Caprice.”

  “You’ll let me drive my own car?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m that generous.”

  I directed him through traffic without telling him where we were headed, though he figured it out soon enough.

  “Nice butterflies,” he said, looking at our old house. “You’re on a big nostalgia trip, aren’t you?”

  I opened the car door. “I want you to meet somebody,” I said. I got out, walked up to the Michaelsons’ front door, and knocked, Wylie following slowly behind me.

  Daphne herself opened the door, wearing a navy-blue business suit with white hose and matching blue pumps with little white leather bows. She looked beautiful, glassy and severe, like a Midtown skyscraper. For a second I thought I’d imagined the entire thing: her insanity, her room, her collection of Vogue magazines.

  Then she said, “I knew you were coming.” She stepped back from the door and walked away down the hall.

  I followed her, and could hear Wylie behind me, although I didn’t look at him. Daphne Michaelson led us into the same room, the magazines neatly lining the walls, and sat down in the same chair, arranging her skirt neatly over her knees. She smelled like Chanel No. 5. There was nowhere else to sit, so Wylie and I just stood there.

  “What I’m about to tell you,” she said, “cannot leave this room.”

  “Mrs. Michaelson, do you remember us? Wylie and Lynn Fleming, we used to live next door?”

  She nodded. “You’re here for the files. Everything is carefully maintained.” She pointed to a box on the floor that held another stack of magazines, an issue of Mademoiselle on top. “Rose red, romantic red, red in the afternoon,” she said, looking back and forth between me and Wylie with a gaze of such intensity that I had to will myself not to nod. She took a manicured finger and wiped the pad of it across her mouth, then held it up. “Ragtime red,” she said.

  I realized that she was naming lipstick colors. “Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “I think—”

  “Listen,” she said, “I tried to tell you earlier. It’s a permanent wave.”

  Wylie said, “Mrs. Michaelson, are you taking your medication?”

  She stood up. In her classic pumps she was as tall as he was. “Light is what makes every color,” she said. “Especially red. I prefer a red with bluish undertones myself.”

  Wylie was looking away from her, at the door.

  “Light can be both particle and wave,” she said to me. “Did you know that?”

  I couldn’t get enough of looking at her. I was fascinated by her conviction, her craziness, her aging, manicured beauty, and I wanted to hear what she would say next. She could have been a performance-art piece, a portrait of a madwoman in an attic of fashion magazines; yet she wasn’t acting. I could have stayed there all day, and I probably would have if Wylie hadn’t physically dragged me—exerting a surprisingly strong grip around my shoulders—from the house.

  On the sidewalk, in the painful, brilliant sun, Wylie punched the air and said, “Why did you show me that? Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “there’s nobody else to show.”

  Fourteen

  At midnight, there were more people in Wylie’s apartment than I’d seen since that first, partylike meeting, and the same atmosphere was building. Some people were drunk or at least tipsy, and Berto greeted me with an uncharacteristic hug, his breath sweet with beer. From what he and Stan said, I knew Angus had been out drinking with them, but it didn’t show. His posture was as straight as ever, and when I came in, alone— after our little excursion, I’d gone back to my mother’s and Wylie had taken off somewhere on foot—he only winked. I sat down on the sleeping bags next to Sledge, who was gazing balefully around the room.

  There were at least ten people I didn’t recognize, all wearing hiking clothes; some had clipboards and milled around with what looked to me like a false air of efficiency. One of them cornered Wylie, just as a young woman with a long braid and a red T-shirt sat down next to me, smiling brightly.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” she said. “Would you like to be on our mailing list?”

  I looked at her. “Um, I’m just Wylie’s sister,” I said. She nodded, still beaming, and held out her hand.

  “I’m Panther,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m the media coordinator. Would you like to sign our petition?”

  “Sure,” I said. I scribbled my name without even bothering to read the sheet, distracted by Wylie, whose quiet conversation had turned into an argument.

  “We’ve put a lot of work into this,” he was saying, “and you won’t even listen to my position paper?”

  “Because that’s not how you deal with the media,” the other guy said, exasperated. “Because there are proven ways to conduct effective activism. Because antics like draining pools detract from those of us making real change.”

  Wylie got right in his face, the toad-killer look back in his eyes.

  “What do you call real? Sitting in a tree again? Helping suburban moms master recycling techniques? Giving inspirational talks to schoolchildren about saving the cute little animals of the forest?”

  “Damn,” Panther said quietly, next to me.

  “Nothing ever changes. Go sell some more greeting cards.”

  “Those were postcards,” the other guy said, “and they raised money for overhead.”

  “Get out of here,” Wylie said.

  Stan and Berto were staring at the ground. Angus was watching, avidly and without distress, as if it were a gripping scene from a movie. Irina, standing in the bedroom doorway with Psyche in the ever-present sling, went over to Wylie and touched his arm. It was the first time I noticed the way she looked at him—as if he were a hero whose most sterling qualities she alone appreciated. She stood on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear, and he shook his head and folded his skinny arms.

  “Let’s go,” the other guy said. “This is bullshit.”

  “But you were supposed to help us with the media, man,” Berto said.

  “Wylie doesn’t think you need any help,” he said. All the strangers filed out behind him, with their clipboards and backpacks and water bottles, and some of them, I noticed, looked like they regretted leaving the party.

  When they were gone Wylie pulled a folded piece of paper out of the back pocket of his dirty jeans. “I’ve written our position paper,” he said very quietly.

  “Go ahead,” Angus said.

  Wylie read like a kid giving a book report, forgetting to pause at commas and periods, assuming he’d used any to begin with. “We are creating a wilderness refuge. What is the nature of a wilderness refuge? We think of it as a place where animals are guaranteed a livable habitat, but this guarantee is all too limited in scope. It is the habitat itself that requires a refuge from the constantly encroaching structures of civilization. We must develop a form of resistance to these structures. We must be willing to imagine an alternate world.” As he read, I closed my eyes and remembered those middle-of-the-night e-mails; their tone seemed different to me now, less ranting than lonely. I bet he wished I were still in New York, the conveniently silent recipient of his ideas.

  “Do we save wilderness so that humans can enjoy it, aesthetically or otherwise? This way of thinking leads to shallow, insincere, and manipulative forms of conservation. Trees left uncut by the highway while behind them denuded, clear-cut land extends for miles. Farmed salmon dyed pink to mimic the flesh of wild fish that have been harvested to extinction. These pretenses allow us to believe that we are not destroying the world in which we live. But we do not save wilderness for our own sakes; we save it for its own. Because ethics are real, and once they are acknowledged they must be pursued to their logical ends.”

  I listened carefully to this speech. Earlier in the summer I’d seen Wylie and the rest as operating under the sway of irrational passions, bu
t by now my feelings had changed. I even understood their dissatisfaction with the larger group. They were after something bigger than greeting cards and media coordination. Most activism seems crazy at the beginning; any position that imagines changing the status quo contains an element of the fantastic. I thought of what Irina had said, the first night I’d met her: “Just people who want to be living differently.”

  “Ordinarily such an act of creation has been the province of the federal government but we see no reason why this power should be held in the hands of civil servants rather than ordinary and enlightened citizens. We see no reason why ‘refuge’ should be a bureaucratic label rather than a political act. Therefore as of today we are making the mountains into a wilderness refuge. The place itself is a refugee from humans; the place itself, not one endangered species or tree or habitat. The fact that this act will be temporary makes it no less meaningful. The wilderness needs a refuge.”

  Heads bowed, coughing slightly, we waited to see if this was in fact the end of the paper.

  “That’s it,” Wylie muttered.

  Irina clapped madly and everyone else joined in, making Wylie blush. Blushing was epidemic among this crowd. The saying “his heart is in the right place” ran through my mind, as if I could picture it, visible through his chest, his young, still-beating heart.

  Stan and Berto took off on bicycles, their muscled legs pumping. Wylie got the keys from me and drove the Caprice with Angus next to him up front and me and Irina in the back, with Psyche in the sling murmuring commentary. “Guala guala,” she said to the window. I spoke her name, and she turned to me and said the same thing. She had some kind of rash across her face, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Angus kept looking back over his freckled shoulder to check on me and smile, which I found nice at first and then kind of annoying. After a while I stared out the window at the rows of subdivisions, the bright hulks of shopping malls and cineplexes, the great arcs of overpasses. As we approached one, I saw two shadows moving beneath a light up there, a movement that for a second resolved itself: teenage boys staring down at traffic, holding rocks in their hands.

  After twenty minutes or so, Wylie turned onto a road that was dark and wooded, lacking in neon and traffic. We passed a church with a bright white sign: THIS IS A C H C H. WHAT’S MISSING? U R. Psyche began to fuss, and Irina jiggled her on her knee and then nursed her until she quieted. Nobody was saying anything, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was there or because they were preparing themselves for what was about to happen.

  The road started winding up the crest of the mountain, signs for picnic spots and fire-danger warnings posted alongside the asphalt. We hadn’t seen a single car since turning off. I wondered how Stan and Berto were supposed to ride their bikes all the way up here after drinking for hours, and began to doubt that the plan would come off. I felt sorry for Wylie, actually, all his philosophy and passion dissipated into this midnight drive. Then he pulled onto the shoulder and parked.

  “Wylie and I are disabling the tram,” Angus said after we all got out. “Stan and Berto are working on it from the bottom. On the way down we’ll close the road. You guys are lookouts.”

  “Lookouts?” I said. “That’s it?”

  “Lynn,” Irina said softly, smiling her pretty, calming smile. “It’s okay.”

  “But it seems so sexist. Men do the big stuff, and women just stand around.”

  Angus winked at me. “Can you wrestle a steel cable? Or drag a log across a road?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Then you’re the lookout.”

  I put my hands on my hips and watched as Angus and Wylie disappeared into the darkness.

  Irina didn’t seem to feel slighted in the least and sat down on the Caprice’s massive hood while managing to keep the sling in place around her chest. Nothing fazed her, I realized, nothing would ever faze her, a fact that annoyed me very much. I set off walking after Angus and my brother. It was almost cold up here at the top of the mountain, and I crossed my arms against my chest. Pine branches were scraping against each other in the wind. I thought I heard an owl hoot, although given what I knew about owls, it could as easily have been a distant car horn. Beneath the trees it was very dark, but as I followed the trail that led to the tram, I heard a crash and scuffle that was almost certainly the sound of vandalism and moved in that direction.

  The last time I’d ridden the tram was with my family, when I was a teenager, and an old college friend of my father’s was visiting. The only time anyone from Albuquerque takes the tram is with out-of-town friends. Mr. Dennison was tall, thin, and youthful, with curly black hair and a bizarre penchant for Adidas shorts and Hawaiian shirts. But it wasn’t his clothes that bothered me. I was convinced he was looking at me inappropriately. I was fifteen and had just figured out that men were capable of and even prone to such behavior. I slouched against the glass as the tram ascended and my father pointed out various features of the steeply inclined landscape, the hay-colored sprays of cactus and stark, strong blooms of century plants. My mother and Wylie stood on the other side of the car, both facing out the window: Wylie with his nose pressed up against the glass, leaving smudge marks, and my mother behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Mr. Dennison kept glancing over at me and smiling with a friendly zeal that I found highly suspicious. “This is spectacular!” he said to my father, still smiling at me. My father just nodded and kept on listing species of cactus; he’d memorized all their names when he moved to New Mexico and never missed a chance to demonstrate this feat of botanical knowledge. Once we got to the top I took off on a walk, abandoning everybody else, and soon was standing in the pine trees, alone—fists clenched in anger, disoriented, wanting to make some kind of gesture or point—and lost. I was filled with wordless rage toward my parents, and especially my father, for not noticing what was going on.

  I wondered now what my father thought I was doing, tramping off like that. Maybe he saw it as just another blind, teenage rage—which in a way, I guessed, it was. Probably I was as strange to him as he was to me. Anyway, I would never know if it had even registered on him at all. I kept walking for a few minutes, feeling my way in the dark, thinking I was getting closer, until I realized that once again I was lost. I had no idea where Wylie or Angus or the tram might be. Then the owl hooted again, twice, insistently. It was a car horn.

  I turned around and started back, climbing upward, and before long I saw the car’s headlights flash on and off, showing me where to go. By the time I got there, everybody was standing around, looking superior and amused.

  “Don’t say a word,” I warned them, and they didn’t.

  Wylie pulled into a rest area toward the bottom of the crest road and parked, Stan and Berto promptly emerging from the trees with their bicycles. Irina unclipped their front wheels and started stowing them away in the trunk, so I helped her as the men walked off into the forest. When we locked the car and followed, I could hear rustling and voices but couldn’t see a thing. Then Irina pressed a flashlight into my hand. “I’m going to wait here in the car until you come back,” she said.

  “Where am I going?”

  “They have something to show you,” she said.

  By the anemic light I could make out four silhouettes far ahead of us. I beamed it directly on Wylie, who looked back at me, startled and wide-eyed as a deer.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  I hurried toward them, but Wylie was gone—his disappearance nearly instant and complete. I stood still, breathing hard, beaming the flashlight around until it lit on Angus, who was leaning against a tree trunk, watching me stumble around.

  “How are you with small spaces?” he said.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  He was next to me then, taking the flashlight out of my hand and inserting his own hot, dry palm instead. He pointed the beam at a boulder ten steps in front of us, and I could see a hole in the ground with fresh dirt at the edges. “Down,” he said. “About six f
eet. Then you’ll walk a few steps, then go down again. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  He laughed. “Your lack of courage is very honest.” Then he pushed me forward.

  Just below the lip of the entrance I could feel a horizontal bar, the top rung of a ladder.

  “Don’t bother looking down,” Angus said, switching off the flashlight. For some reason I closed my eyes, as if that would be more comforting than the darkness of the forest.

  “Six steps,” he said. “Then dirt.”

  He was right. At the bottom of the ladder I stepped away and he came down after me, then we went farther down and moved along a cramped dirt tunnel into a space large enough to stand up in. A propane lamp sat on the open seat of a folding chair, Stan and Berto on the ground next to it, giggling and drinking beer. The air was cool and oddly fresh, fragrant with earth.

  It was a room of dirt. Lining the walls were plastic bottles, dried food in pouches, garbage bags, and a bulletin board with a diagram of the tunnel system and a small Chamber of Commerce poster. A red sun was setting over a brown, cracked landscape below cursive blue lettering: SPEND THE SUMMER IN BISBEE, ARIZONA.

  Wylie came in from some other tunnel and stared as if challenging me to say something, which I didn’t. I could tell that he was proud of what they’d done, and it was pretty amazing, their little fort.

  “We’ve got enough food and water,” he said, “for four of us to last two weeks.”

  “Would you really stay here that long?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “Takes to do what?”

  “Make a point,” Wylie said. Berto muttered, “Excuse me”—to me apparently—and picked up an empty plastic bottle, then ducked out of sight into one of the tunnels.

  “You can stay if you want,” Wylie went on, “but you’ll have to bring your own supplies. You can take Irina and Psyche back in the Caprice, and be back before the walls go up.”