Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“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.