Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

“What happened to the movie?”

“I know how it ends,” she said. “Angela Lansbury’s evil.”

“I’ve always thought so,” I said, and lay down on the bed. The Wilderness Kiss and The Ball and Chain stared at me from the dresser, their thick slabs of paint stark and shadowed in the light of the room, and I propped myself up on the pillows to look at them. The man in the first painting, I noticed, was thin and dark, Fleming-like. Why was I so convinced my father couldn’t have known Eva? How well had I really known him, after all? The longer I stared at the paintings, the more certain I felt that there was some reason I’d found them. I wasn’t given to wild imaginings or superstitious by nature, but it was as if they’d somehow demanded to be unpacked and examined.

My mother dropped what she’d found in my pockets on the dresser, then hoisted the laundry basket and left, turning the light off as she went. It seemed like only seconds later that she was back, shaking my arm, and thinking she had some question about the laundry — did I sort my whites from my colors, and how on earth had I gotten so dirty ? — I shook my head and told her to go away. Instead she opened the blinds, and sunlight rioted into the room. It was morning.

“You’ve got to come watch the news,” she said.

When I wandered into the living room, she and David were sitting on the couch in their bathrobes, now holding cups of coffee. It was like a perpetual pajama party around here. I wondered whether they watched this much television all the time. Standing in the doorway, yawning, I looked at the screen. A massive barricade made of tree trunks and barbed wire was stretched across the road to Sandia Crest, draped with posters: NO BARBECUES NO LITTER NO TRAIL EROSION and WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THE MOUNTAINS IF THE MOUNTAINS CANNOT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES?

“As if mountains even wanted to speak,” David said.

“Shut up,” I told him.

“Sorry,” he said, to my surprise, as my mother sat watching with her hands curled tightly around her mug, ignoring both of us.

A reporter explained that the tram had been vandalized and the roads blocked by a group of “radical environmentalists” who had faxed a statement to all the news channels. I knew this must have been Irina, whom I’d dropped off at a Kinko’s near campus. The reporter read a few sentences from Wylie’s position paper; then the shot widened to include Panther, whom he described as a “local activist and author.” Clipboard in hand, she was wearing her hair in a high ponytail. “These actions may be misguided,” she said breathlessly, “but the issue of wilderness protection is crucial.” Then the camera cut away to a Forest Service ranger, who said only, “Steps are being taken to reopen this popular wilderness area to the public.”

My mother sighed once, heavily, as the reporter nodded and signed off—“Live, from the road to Sandia Crest.” Neither she nor David said much as they got ready for work. I assumed that my mother didn’t ask me how much I knew about it only because she didn’t want to know how much trouble Wylie was going to be in.

Alone in the condo after they left, I kept checking the news, but there didn’t seem to be any developments. Around noon, I drove over to Wylie’s apartment, where the door was locked and no one answered my knocks. I wondered where Irina and Psyche were. Back at my mother’s, I called Worldwide Travel, and my mother told me that she and David were going out to a movie.

“You could come if you like,” she said. “Might be a good distraction.”

I decided I wasn’t desperate enough for distraction to be a third wheel on a date with the two of them, and declined.

On the five o’clock news, they showed bulldozers loading the debris from the barricades and reported that the tram would be back in service by the morning. I drank all the beer left in my mother’s fridge and ate microwave popcorn for dinner, then crawled into bed by nine.

A nightmare woke me sometime before dawn: I was being buried alive, underground, and though I knew Wylie and Angus and Berto and Stan were there, I couldn’t find them in the collapsing walls of dirt. I kept waking up every hour or so until early morning. When I finally got up, I was alone again in the condo, and on TV a different reporter was announcing that the Forest Service had taken suspects into custody. Back in the studio, the anchorman shook his head, smiled wryly, and moved on to the weather, which was hot and dry and lacking in surprises.

I drove to Wylie’s apartment, which was still empty, and then down to police headquarters.

At central booking two young clerks were busily chatting and ignoring my existence.

“So she’s all ‘What are you doing here?’” one said to the other, who was posed by a filing cabinet, holding a folder in her manicured hand.

“And I’m all ‘I was invited.’ And she’s all ‘By who?’ And I say, ‘Maybe you should ask your boyfriend. ’”

“Excuse me,” I said.

“And she’s all ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ And I’m all ‘That’s not what I heard.’”

“That’s totally what I would have said,” the other girl said.

“Excuse me,” I said again. “I’m looking for some friends of mine. I think they might be held here?”

Both girls stared at me as if I’d wandered by accident into their home.

“Wylie Fleming?” I said lamely. “Angus Beam?”

The storyteller broke into a vague smile and swiveled in her chair to her terminal, her long fingernails clicking loudly on the keys. “Not here,” she said, then spun away to continue her story.

“They were arrested up on Sandia Crest,” I said.

She glanced at me over her shoulder, surprised and a little annoyed that I was still there.

“Oh yeah, the stinkies,” the other girl said.

This made me bristle. “They’re just standing up for what they believe in.”

“They reek,” she said.

“I know,” I admitted. “Look, are they here?”

They looked at me skeptically, and I knew how Wylie and his friends must have felt all the time: indignant and moral and misunderstood. I stared back at them, waiting.

“One of them’s downstairs,” the first girl finally said. “Tall guy, in a tank top.”

“Can I see him?” I said.

While she went to check, I flipped through a worn, stained copy of People magazine that was sitting on the counter, an issue I remembered reading in Brooklyn, right after Michael invited me to Paris. Thinking of him now — his bracelet, his arms, the line of hair at the back of his neck — was like looking at something through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars: shrunken and small, as if seen from a great distance. Finally the clerk escorted me down a hallway and into a room filled with long tables. I sat down at one, and a guard brought Stan in. He was indeed wearing a tank top and did indeed reek. There were circles under his eyes and streaks of grime on his muscular arms, but he didn’t seem the slightest bit unhappy. He sat across from me with his hands folded, like an obedient student.

“Do you need a lawyer?” I asked him.

“No, we’ve got a court-appointed guy.”

“Who’s in here with you?”

“It’s me and Berto.”

“What about Wylie and Angus?”

“They got away. It was part of our agreement.”

“Kind of sucks for you,” I said.

He shrugged. “Next time it’ll be somebody else’s turn to take the fall.”

“Do you need anything?”

He looked at me. “They’ll probably take off for a while. Lay low. You’re not going to tell anybody anything, are you?”

I shook my head.

“I knew you were all right,” he said.