Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“I need energy,” he was saying to the clerk, a young woman with a long ponytail and glowing, rosy skin. “I feel so run-down, I can barely get up in the morning. You know what I mean?”

“It sounds as if you have systemic issues,” she told him.

“What do I take for that?” Harold said.

She steered him in the direction of some vegetarian multivitamins, and I went back to the car. Several minutes later he came out bearing a large brown bag, presumably full of systemic cures.

Back on the road, we weaved and dodged and changed lanes and turned corners — I tried to keep right behind him, for fearing of losing him — until he parked at another strip mall, in front of a coffee shop specializing in “locally roasted” beans. Pulling to the curb, I unrolled the window and smelled the burnt, acrid scent of the roasting. There were some elderly people lined up outside, apparently desperate for a jolt of caffeine. But Harold took his cloth bag next door, into Blue Butterfly Yoga. All of a sudden, following an old man with systemic issues to a yoga class, I didn’t feel like much of a scholar. I crossed my arms over the sticky vinyl of the steering wheel, telling myself I was an idiot. Then I saw a woman with long dark hair get out of a yellow convertible and go into the yoga studio. From the back I couldn’t tell how old she was, but I had a passing, insane thought: What if Harold knew a lot more about Eva than he was saying? What if this was her?

Inside, harp music was playing, and pairs of shoes were stacked in a cubbyhole unit in the entryway, exuding an unpleasant aroma. Copies of the Blue Butterfly class schedules were piled on a table and I grabbed one and stuck it in the back pocket of my shorts. On the other side of a blue batik curtain I could hear violent slapping sounds, punctuated by the occasional grunt, as if people were getting paddywhacked back there. I stuck my head around the curtain and saw it was a martial-arts class and that the slaps were people being flung to the floor by their instructor, a tiny young woman with her hair in pigtails. When she noticed me, she smiled brightly — a two-hundred-pound man still groaning at her bare feet — and said, “Ashtanga’s in the other studio.”

I left my sandals with the others and snuck into the back of another room, where Harold’s shiny black butt was now cradled gently on a folded blanket. He was sitting in the lotus position, his back to me. At the front of the room, a thin young man with short brown hair sat with his palms pressed and his eyes closed, humming. Wearing a see-through purple tank top and blue tights, he appeared to be in amazing shape; even the veins that ran along his biceps looked perfect in their contours.

The room was very warm. There were around ten people, including the woman with the long black hair, who was sitting next to Harold. I grabbed a folded blanket from a pile at the back and sat down in the lotus position. My knees cracked loudly, and a bald man turned around to stare. I could hear Harold chanting “Om,” his voice reedy and weak. The instructor raised his stringy arms straight up, displaying twin thickets of armpit hair and some remarkably well-defined abdominal muscles. The woman with the long dark hair released a long, sexual-sounding groan, but Harold paid her no mind. Imitating the instructor’s movement, I swayed to one side, held the position, then swayed to the other. I closed my eyes. It was remarkably easy to follow someone, I thought, and insert yourself into their day. I should do it more often.

A general shuffling sound made me open my eyes. Everyone else had moved to the sides of the room, where they lay flat on their backs with their legs hoisted up on the walls, and I scrambled to follow. This was a mistake. No way could I get my legs flat against the wall, not without snapping them in half. The instructor moved lightly through the room, touching shoulders, at one point placing a foot on someone’s stomach to flatten it. He had very long toes. When he reached me, sitting there in the lotus with my head bowed and eyes closed, I could hear him pause momentarily before moving on.

The heat now seemed even more intense, and sweat was streaming down my back. The people around me had moved to the middle of the room, where they sprawled on their backs, their legs doubled backwards over their heads and their arms twisted together. I had no idea how they’d accomplished this feat, or for what purpose. Even Harold had managed to contort himself into a semblance of the appropriate position. His T-shirt had slipped up, revealing a broad expanse of his starkly white skin, and sweat was puddled around him. Some people were twisted so far around that they were now looking back in my direction, their cheeks flushed and eyes eerily unfocused, their breathing labored.

The perfect muscles of the instructor were folded in on themselves like origami. “Hold it,” he was saying. “Hold it.”

How he could speak from within the pretzeled confines of his body was beyond me. I couldn’t even make out where his head was. My own legs, though I was trying to extend them over my back like the others, refused to go any higher than my ears, and my stomach was killing me.

“Feel the toxins of the day draining away. From your heart, your liver, your kidneys. From your tongue, your teeth, your throat. Feel everything letting go.”

Throughout the room, the breathing eased and quieted. People were actually taking the opportunity to ruminate while remaining in their positions. My legs mutinied and crashed onto the floor with a slap that broke the mood. The woman I’d taken to be Eva Kent turned her head and stared at me. She couldn’t have been older than I was.

“Close your eyes. Feel the worries of the day leaving your heart.” The instructor’s voice was light and pleasant, with a chime almost, like a musical instrument. “Your heart is a feather in your chest.”

I tried picturing this, and couldn’t. Then I felt a hand touching my knee, and when I looked up, the yoga instructor was kneeling by my side.

“Feel the toxins draining from your system in your sweat,” he said in his chiming voice. Then he hissed in my ear, in a distinctly unpleasant tone, “This isn’t a beginners’ class. Didn’t you consult the schedule?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to check it out.”

“Inside your body purity is emerging,” he said sweetly, still glowering at me, and then whispered, “Level one meets on Tuesdays. Today’s Wednesday!”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“This happens all the time, ” he said, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “It drives me completely freaking insane.”

I stood up. “I’m going now.” Everybody in the room was looking at me, all in various stages of unfurling, like fronds in spring. I gave Harold what I hoped was a nonchalant, vaguely surprised “Oh, you’re here too?” wave. He just sat up and stared at me.

“I don’t know why I bother to make these schedules when nobody reads them,” the instructor said. “This is advanced Ashtanga, for crying out loud. Put your blanket back. Don’t leave here without putting your blanket back.”

I did as I was told.

“Folded!” he said.

The drive back from Santa Fe passed quickly, borne on the tide of my absolute embarrassment — Harold’s face looming always before me, along with the rest of the unfurling yogis. What the hell was I thinking? I wished very much that the whole day had never happened.

I hit town at five o’clock, when Albuquerque’s offices were evacuated as if in a sudden panic. So far as I could tell, nobody in this town ever worked a minute later. Fleeing employees stalled the roads in every direction, one per car, heads lolling in boredom, staring straight ahead. I rolled down the windows and got a lungful of exhaust-redolent air. The two interstates that met in the city arched and crossed, bridges above air, in the center of the sky. Over everything in my view lay the pallor of dust. I exited and drove the back streets instead, recognizing in my desire to keep the car moving, even if the route ultimately proved far longer, a tendency of my father’s. Wylie had it too. Waiting at a red light behind two other cars, I thought I saw the eggplant-colored Plumbarama van drive past in the opposite direction. I made a quick right, but by the time I got turned around the van was nowhere in sight. Probably I had just imagined it.