Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“So. I was living out of the dumpsters. And I met these people, these boys, who were also living out of the dumpsters. We were always meeting at these same dumpsters. The ones behind the pizza restaurant by the school are good, and also behind the grocery store. But these young men are doing this by their choice. It was like a whole new idea to me, do you see? A whole new meaning of life. I thought, maybe I am not just a drug-addicted person. Maybe I can believe in something also.”

There was a pause.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You are thinking, Jesus H. Christ. But this is what happened. And then Wylie, he helped me go away from the drugs, and he let me stay here whenever I wanted to, and the rest was easy. I have learned so much since I have met these people.”

“Okay,” I said. I stood up to stretch, and I was in the middle of a big one — arms above my head, stomach exposed— when Angus opened the door and saw me.

“Hello, stranger,” he said, and his voice warmed me like the sun.

Then my brother, Stan, and Berto came through the door behind him, their skin and clothes smeared with dirt and sweat. Sledge went into a welcoming frenzy, leaping up on each of them and licking their faces and stinking bodies. I felt the same way the dog did. I was being released from my calm existence in my mother’s condo, from the days of boredom and good behavior. I caught Wylie’s eye and said hello as Angus and the others carried backpacks and milk crates into the apartment and dropped them on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“Looking for you,” I said, “like always.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, glancing at Angus.

I blushed for the second time that morning, strongly and with conviction. I’d really taken to shame, it seemed. Then I looked over at Irina; she smiled as if she understood, and I felt better. “Where have you guys been, anyway?”

“Bisbee,” Wylie said.

“What the hell’s in Bisbee? And please don’t say ‘Bisbee.’”

“It’s just a place we like to go,” Wylie said, and rested his skinny hand, for the briefest moment, on my shoulder.

The group convened, cross-legged, on the floor. It was daylight now, and through the open windows I could smell freshly laid asphalt from some distant driveway.

Angus clapped his hands.

“The time has come,” he said, “for the next plan.”

I was more curious than I would have expected to hear what new instance of extreme behavior they’d invented this time.

“No way, man,” Berto said, to my surprise, his gray, hang-dog face even more ashen than usual. “The time has come for breakfast, man, if you know what I’m saying.”

Angus put his hands on his hips. His clothing was in tatters: his jeans had holes, his white T-shirt had holes, even his socks had holes. Through the tears in the fabric his pale skin glowed. I wanted to go over and touch it.

“Is this how everybody feels?” he said.

Everybody nodded.

“I can cook breakfast if you bring me some supplies,” Irina said from the counter, where she was perched with the baby in the sling.

“All right, then,” Angus said. “The time has come for breakfast.”

So the morning began all over again. Angus left and returned with a backpack crammed full of fruit and eggs and bread and sausages, which Irina cooked over the propane stove. People showered, more quickly than I’d thought possible, and some even rummaged around by their sleeping bags for clean clothes.

After eating, Stan and Berto fell asleep on the floor, their heads on their still-rolled sleeping bags, Sledge snoring along with them. My brother was standing in the bedroom doorway watching Irina and the baby, who were also sleeping. He’d grown a beard since I’d seen him and looked fatherly and devoted, and in the back of my throat I felt the sudden, harsh salt of tears.

Angus came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “There’s a roof,” he whispered.

We climbed up a fire escape and found ourselves looking out over the drab rooftops of the student ghetto. It was still early in the morning, and the sun was gentle. Angus lit a joint, then handed it to me.

“Did you get this in Bisbee?” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s where Wylie said you went.”

“Well, Bisbee’s less an actual destination than a state of mind.”

“If you say so,” I said. I was trying to identify precisely when I got stoned, a moment that had always eluded me in the past and now seemed, for some reason, within my reach.

“How’s the research coming along?” Angus said.

“Not so good,” I said, not even wanting to think about it.

Angus sat down on the roof, leaning back on his elbows, and grinned at me. His cheeks and the bridge of his nose were pink from the sun. I sat down beside him, wondering where his hat was.

“You should leave the library and take to the streets,” he said. “Put down your pen and join the cause.”

“I mostly use a computer,” I told him. “Not a pen.”

“My point remains the same,” he said, and exhaled smoke.

“I think you’d like some of the art I work with,” I said. “I study a lot of revolutionary people, guerrillas who were trying to change society. Women putting their bodies on the line.”

He raised his eyebrows and looked unconvinced, then rolled onto his side and put his hand on my thigh. “Like how?” he said.

“Picketing museums, doing outrageous performance art in public spaces, that kind of thing. This one woman wrote a poem, rolled the piece of paper up, then scrolled it from within her, you know, body and read it out loud to an audience. And there were these others who dressed up like cheer-leaders and each had a letter on her sweater — a C, a U, an N, a T — and they did cheers to, like, take back the word or whatever. They were very political.”

Angus was smiling, with his eyes closed. “I like you,” he said, “because your secret rebellious side is so badly concealed. That’s why you hang out with me so much.”

“I don’t have a secret rebellious side.”

“In fact it’s not even a secret.”

“It is too,” I said.

“So you admit it.”

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” I said.

Angus laughed, and after a second I did too. I lay down next to him, my face to the sun, and put my hand on his leg. The sweet smell of pot rose and buzzed around my ears. Angus covered my hand with his. Then, long before I was ready to leave, he stood up and pulled me to my feet and said it was time to get going.

Back in the apartment the troops were rallying, sort of, sleepily and with some complaints. “Does this have to be done today, man?” Berto kept saying. Wylie sat in the corner with Irina, silent and deeply tanned and expressionless, holding the baby. Even the dog lay on its side, only one eye open, mustering a minimum of enthusiasm.

“This one’s ready to go, so why wait?” Angus said. “The hard work’s been done. The rest of the troops have been informed. It’s a cakewalk.”

“What is a cakewalk?” Irina asked.

“It’s something easy,” Angus said eventually. “Easy as pie.”

“You know, I have tried to make pie,” she said, “and it is not very easy.”

“Irina,” Wylie said. “Never mind.”

“It is the crust part that can be hard.”

“What are you guys going to do?” I asked him.

“It’s the Sandias,” Angus said.

The plan, he explained, was to remove the crest of the Sandias from the life of the city, to take it away, temporarily, so that people would remember that it was there. Most people forgot to even look at the mountains, as they went about their pitiful day-to-day lives. This was what he called them, “pitiful day-to-day lives,” in a tone I hadn’t heard before: sharp with not just excitement but disdain. I wondered if he thought my mother’s life was pitiful, or mine. In fact, I decided, he probably did, but also thought that I could be saved from it or somehow redeemed.