Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

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 government 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.