The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “I guessed,” I said, “on the basis of the fact that it sounded just like him.”

  A smile broke over him then, and he shook his head and turned on some music. Frank asked luck to be a lady tonight, and Angus sang along.

  I was nervous about going into Wylie’s apartment—having ducked out of their tunnel—and stuck my hand in Angus’s when we walked inside. He squeezed, then let go. Stan and Berto glanced up, looking unaffected by their stint in jail. I asked how they were doing, and Stan said, “We’re out on our own recognizance.” Sledge dutifully licked my hand. Irina smiled at me and said, “Look who’s here, Psyche,” and the baby stared at me as if I were a stranger. So, for that matter, did Wylie. Everybody was sitting around talking, and to my surprise nobody seemed distressed by their failure to keep people off the mountain for very long. They wanted to know if I’d seen their “event” on the news and made fun of Panther for being such a media hog. Every face had a rosy glow. Even Wylie looked happier than I’d seen him in ages.

  Now they were talking about whether to take the day off. Wylie was against it, arguing that “the revolution doesn’t come with vacation time,” but was outvoted and backed down with little protest, which I took as a sign of how good he was feeling. Stan and Berto wanted to hang out and drink beer, and the rest of us decided to go for a hike.

  Angus drove. The sun shone with a riotous purity, picking out sparks of bright metal in the streets and glinting off cars, the world seemingly lit and mineral, rampant with gems.

  We stopped at a grocery store near the university, where shopping carts were scattered across the asphalt expanse of the parking lot. Angus and Wylie got out. A man in a cowboy hat was leaning against the Pepsi machine outside the sliding doors, panhandling. I watched Irina change Psyche’s diaper in the backseat, putting the dirty one in a plastic bag from the back of the van.

  “I take it you don’t use disposables,” I said.

  “Goodness no! I’ll clean that one when we get into the mountains.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Lynn,” Irina said gently, “there is shit in nature. Humans shit. Animals shit.” In her accent it sounded like “sheat,” and somehow more elegant.

  “I know, I know,” I said, leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes.

  “What we have to get away from,” Irina said, settling herself and the baby in the back, “is this idea that we are separate from nature. We are natural too, with bodies and smells, just like the animals do.”

  I kept my eyes closed and listened to her lilting European intonations while ignoring the words of her harangue. Eventually I heard the car door open and felt a breeze rush into the van. “You should’ve seen that dumpster,” Wylie said. “A cornucopia of provisions. Cheetos, day-old muffins, melted cheese on pizza boxes.”

  “Please say you didn’t get our picnic from a dumpster.”

  “I was going to,” he said. “But Angus thought you’d prefer some first-time-use food.”

  “Angus,” Irina said, “I think you are getting soft.”

  “I know it,” Angus said, and started the car. Before long we were in Tijeras Canyon, the road winding between the mountains, Angus humming as we drove, Wylie and Irina chatting quietly in the backseat, Psyche gurgling along with them. I felt a tightening in my chest, heat and air compressing in my lungs, then realized what it was: I was happy.

  On the road to the Crest the traffic was thinner and we swung around to the east side of the mountains, the trees now thick and green. Angus parked at a trailhead, and we started hiking.

  Tiny brown birds flitted in the juniper scrub. Rustles in the underbrush, scissors of movement far ahead, glimpsed only out of the corner of your eye: the world narrowed to things like this. The sun beat down on the steep, rocky trail. I started to sweat, and my legs hurt. Irina was in front of me, her legs flexing with muscle as she climbed, and gradually she got farther and farther ahead. At a small lookout point I stopped to catch my breath, the mountain falling below me, banded with the switchback curls of the trail.

  Then Angus stepped up beside me, holding out his Nalgene bottle. “You look like you could use some water.”

  We smiled at each other, and I had a long drink. In the sunlight his skin looked blanched, white and shadowless, overexposed. I handed the bottle back and said, “I thought you said you always wear a hat.”

  “Always,” he said, “except right now.”

  “Hey!” Wylie shouted from up ahead, and we started back up the trail, which soon sank into shadow and was carpeted with pine needles. After a minute or two I saw bright swatches of clothing through the trees. Wylie and Irina were standing off the trail, looking at a washing machine, square, white, half-rusted, suspended on its side in the act of falling downhill. Its chrome dials were black, absent any markings or instructions. A word I’d always liked in high school ambled into my brain: “erratic,” the word for boulders swept into new territories by the movements of glaciers.

  “How do you think it got here?” Irina said.

  “Somebody dumped it,” my brother said. He tried opening the lid, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Litterbug,” I said.

  Wylie found a stick, wedged it under the lid, and lifted it, releasing a terrible, thick, sick-making smell. I backed away and covered my mouth with the tail of my shirt.

  “Oh, no,” Irina said. She covered up the baby and moved well up the trail, and I followed. But the smell was still with us, so I motioned for her to keep going. I didn’t know what Wylie and Angus were doing back there, and didn’t care. Finally we stopped in a sunny place where the air smelled fresh and waited for them.

  “What was it?” Irina asked when they caught up with us.

  Wylie was looking at Psyche. “It was a cat,” he said.

  “With kittens,” Angus added.

  “What? How did a cat get in there?”

  “I think it got dumped with the machine,” Angus said. “At the same time.”

  “But that machine’s all rusted,” I said. “Wouldn’t the cat already be, you know, disintegrated?”

  “Oh, dear,” Irina said.

  “That’s what I said,” Wylie said.

  “But with the door closed,” Angus said, “it’s almost a seal. That would slow down the process.”

  “But it wasn’t a seal,” my brother said, “because there was rotting.”

  “I said almost.”

  “I don’t know, Angus,” Wylie said. “I think the cat was feral. It just climbed in there to have its kittens, then the door slammed shut and trapped them.”

  They stood there for a few minutes, calmly discussing the chemistry of rot, the population of feral cats in the Sandias, recent weather patterns and their likely effect on corpses in the wild. I started to feel sick again, and, without speaking, I took off up the trail, my stomach churning.

  Wylie caught up to me and we hiked together without saying anything.

  “What did it look like?” I asked him after a while.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  Looking at him, I thought about the animals piled up in the pale blue basin of the old washing machine; I thought also of a famous painting I’d once seen, an elegant oil of a hare on a wooden table, dribbling fresh blood, in a gilt frame. Irina’s words about shit ran through my mind, and so did the naked self-portraits and paintings executed with menstrual blood I’d studied, and Eva Kent’s paintings, and so, finally, did the face of my father as he lay in the coffin my mother had chosen, recognizably himself and yet not, his skin plumped with embalming fluid and his cheeks rouged with the undertaker’s makeup. You can celebrate the body all you want, I thought, you can sing hymns to its presence, its shit and stink, but it will only ever betray you in the end. I touched Wylie’s arm.

  “It’d been taken over,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maggots,” he said. “Blowflies. Other insects. They take over the body.”

  “That is so gross,”
I said.

  “It’s beautiful, if you think about it.” All of a sudden, his eyes were glowing with enthusiasm. “It’s egalitarian in concept. We act like the human body is the center of the universe, but it decays and gets reabsorbed into the system, just like that cat and its kittens, just like everything else. It loses its boundaries, its privileged status.”

  “Wylie.”

  “We don’t like to think about it, but that’s only symptomatic of our power-driven—”

  “Wylie, shut up, for God’s sake.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Just shut up,” I said.

  At that moment I smelled smoke, and Wylie started walking fast in front of me. Before long I saw a red cloth hanging from a juniper tree, and the burning smell clarified itself into a joint. A couple of hippies were sitting on a boulder in front of a rocky overhang, a scenic overlook behind them. I recognized the place then, and wondered if Wylie had brought me here on purpose. It was another place we used to hike to, when we were kids; one time we’d even spent the night here, Wylie and I in one tent, our parents in another. It occurred to me that this was probably where Wylie stayed when he lived in the woods.

  The girl had long hair gnarled into dreadlocks that twisted down her back like vines. The boy had thin dark hair that fell into his eyes; he’d taken off his shirt—the cloth hanging from the tree—and was sunning his pale, sunken chest.

  “Hey, how’s your life today, man?” he said calmly to Wylie.

  “Could be better, could be worse,” Wylie said.

  The hippie held out the joint between his thumb and his index finger. It was thickly rolled and coated at the end with saliva that sparkled visibly in the sun. We both shook our heads. The sweet, acrid fragrance of pot mingled with the scent of juniper and the heat and the buzz of insects all around us, and I started to feel faint.

  “You guys want some jerky?” the girl said.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “It’s homemade, from all-natural cows.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Okay, that’s cool,” she said. She took the joint and breathed in deeply, still smiling at us with her mouth carefully closed.

  When Wylie stepped closer to them—wanting to take in the view, I guess—the boy took offense. “Hey, man, what’re you doing?”

  “I just wanted to have a look,” Wylie told him. “We came here a lot when we were kids.”

  “Well, that’s sweet and everything, man, but we’re hanging here right now, you know what I mean? It’s kind of our personal space at the moment, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t invade.”

  “Yeah,” the girl said.

  “We just want to take a look,” I said.

  “I totally respect that, but no way,” the boy said. He stood up and faced us, his chest stuck out defiantly. “Don’t make me get rough with you guys.” At this, Wylie snorted. The girl nodded, sitting cross-legged on the rock, smoking the joint and chewing a stick of homemade jerky at the same time.

  I stared at these ridiculous people and started to cry. “It’s just a fucking view,” I said, embarrassed and choking, and what I meant was this: of my father there was nothing left, and in the taxonomy of his absence I could list only his grave marker and places like this where he’d once been and the fading memory of his voice saying my name, and these were paltry things. Snot bubbled out of my nose, and I sniffled it back in.

  “Let’s just go,” Wylie said.

  He set off at a brisk pace, and I had to jog to keep up with him. I kept sniffling and wiping my nose, my shoulders spasming, my breath coming in hiccups.

  Finally he turned around and said, “Stop it. I mean it. Stop it.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” Wylie said, looking away. “Just deal with it.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll deal with it,” I said. “I’ll go find myself a cave to live in, and eat trash from dumpsters, and stop talking to Mom, and plan absurd guerrilla actions. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”

  “You think the actions are absurd?” he said.

  “Wylie, of course they’re absurd.”

  He scowled at me for a few seconds, then shook his head. “You’re so full of shit,” he said. “You think I’m the one who avoids things? Who lives in New York and hardly comes home for two years? Who takes up with a boyfriend within two days of being back so she can run off with him all the time and not have to be around? Who’s been home all summer and hasn’t even gone to the grave?”

  “I went,” I said. “Once.”

  “Yeah, well.” He shook his head again. “If you’re worried about me,” he said, “you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

  I lifted my shirt to my face and wiped away my tears and snot. “I feel like hell,” I finally said.

  “I know,” my brother said. Behind us, coming up the trail, were Irina and Angus. They looked red and sweaty and bedraggled, as, I realized, we must have too. Psyche was shifting uncomfortably on her mother’s chest, burbling a stream of annoyed complaint, and her skin had broken out in a rash that resembled hives.

  Wylie looked at Irina and said, “Is Psyche okay?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  Angus smiled at me, broadly, genuinely. “Isn’t this great?” he said.

  Seventeen

  Halfway down the trail, a trailer park sitting in the scrub came into view, looking haphazard and almost forgotten. I was tired and kept stumbling. Wylie and Irina were walking together, both of them glancing anxiously at Psyche, and I thought I saw something new in the way they looked at each other, their hands nearly touching as they swung back and forth with the rhythm of their hiking. Angus stayed beside me, offering the water bottle every so often. I didn’t care what Wylie said, or even if it was true; I would cling to Angus now, and in bed later, without thinking about what it meant or why I was there.

  Back at Wylie’s apartment, there was beer and gin and music, and I told myself that everything was fine. But it wasn’t fine. The August heat made the apartment claustrophobic. Whether because of the heat or the drinking, nobody could seem to agree on anything, except to question everybody else’s ideas and commitment. When Berto suggested working with Panther’s organization, he was shouted down. Wylie’s philosophical statements had people rolling their eyes, except for Irina, who nodded in encouragement even when it was unclear what he was talking about. Angus leaned against the back wall, smiling at all of this discord, sharing his bottomless gin and tonic with me.

  Then Wylie stopped in the middle of a sentence and asked him, “What the hell’s so funny?”

  “You are, buddy,” Angus said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You always have this need to dress things up,” Angus said. “As if that makes things more important.”

  “Leave him alone,” I said.

  “You’re not even part of this,” Wylie told me.

  Looking back and forth at the two of them, I decided to shut up.

  The talk dragged on into the night, becoming more impassioned and less intelligible. The room smelled bad, and drinking was making the group less festive rather than more. The dog slept in a corner, snoring hard, an option that was starting to look better and better to me. Outside, the din of the cicadas rose to a fever pitch. Wylie sat in a corner muttering to Irina, his skinny legs tucked beneath him, Psyche asleep against his chest, a little fist flung up against his collarbone. I fell asleep, my head on Angus’s shoulder, and when I woke up everything was still the same.

  Just after two, Angus stood up and stretched, which somehow brought a hush over the room. He spoke quietly, as if to himself, though he clearly knew everybody was watching him. “You know what makes me happy?” he said, then walked over to the window and pulled the duct-taped curtains aside to look out into the empty Albuquerque night. “Human extinction. We’ll be gone before long. We’ll ruin ourselves. No matte
r what anybody in this room does.”

  “Dude, you’re depressing me,” Stan said, sprawled on the floor.

  Angus shook his head. I watched him idly, feeling flushed and a little dizzy from the gin. “It’s not depressing,” he said. “It’s a real consolation. When I can’t sleep at night, that’s what I think about. We’re a blip on the screen, except you know what? There is no screen. We’re the ones who invented blips and screens, and soon enough they’ll be gone too. And thank God.”

  “That’s a rosy view,” I said. “Why even bother then?”

  “Realism isn’t the same thing as paralysis,” Angus said, smiling around the room at everyone. “Besides, we might as well have a good time. What we need to do is take away the blip and the screen for a little while. What we need is a major event.”

  “No shit,” Berto said.

  Wylie leaned forward, still holding the baby. “A paradigm shift,” he said.

  “A military action,” Stan said.

  “A photo op,” Berto said.

  Angus gazed at me with his bright blue eyes. “What did you say at the beginning of the summer?”

  “Me? About what?”

  “About Albuquerque.”

  Tired and drunk, I frowned at him. I felt like I was being put on the spot, and didn’t like his showboating. “That it’s hot in summer?”

  He shook his head.

  “Full of chain restaurants? Hard to spell, for people who don’t live here? Located in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Exactly,” Angus said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told him.

  Neither did Stan and Berto, judging from their blank expressions. But Wylie was nodding already, his mouth set in the straight line of concentration which for him, I was starting to learn, expressed greater happiness than a smile.

  Irina said, “When I first came here, I thought it was the end of the world. In a good way. Like Mars.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” I said, slurring the words a little, “but it definitely feels like it.”

  “Not enough for me,” Angus said

  “Are you kidding? Albuquerque’s the capital of nowhere.” My tone made Stan and Berto exchange glances. “I mean, and that’s part of its scruffy charm,” I added lamely.