Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

I looked at him, flushed with annoyance. For the first time since that day in June at Wylie’s apartment my body had no reaction to his; no heat on my skin, no ripple down my spine, no sensations elsewhere, either. It was an unsettling feeling, like an alcohol buzz wearing off too early in the evening.

He smiled at me and lifted his glass. “Cheers,” he said.

Wylie, who’d been facing the other direction, turned around and nodded. Irina came fluttering toward me, her face flushed, and kissed me on the cheek. Psyche cooed and hit her fist against Irina’s collarbone, and when I touched her cheek she looked at me, her eyes wide open, and laughed. Her skin looked rosier than usual, and I wondered if everyone had been out hiking again. Then they all started talking at the same time.

“Can I fix you a drink?”

“We’re here making preparations.”

“Your time is perfect, we are just making ready.”

“Ready for what?” I said.

“Oh, our biggest project yet,” Irina said. “It is very exciting. We have been planning many aspects of things.”

The baby now cooed in earnest, hitting Irina again.

Irina laughed and said, “She wants a cocktail, like everybody else has.”

“Cute,” I said.

Irina gave her some apple juice, and she sucked happily at the bottle. On the stereo, Frank decided it was just one of those things.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked Wylie.

He shrugged. “Haven’t seen her.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“No.”

“I messed up with Daphne Michaelson. She went kind of crazy — even crazier than she was before, I mean.”

“Well, that’s no surprise.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re kind of messed up.”

“Pot. Kettle. Black!”

He shrugged again, his lips pursed.

“Here’s your drink,” Angus said, materializing at my side. The ice swayed and bumped in the glass, a thin, elegant lime slice floating between two cubes.

“I didn’t ask for that.”

“I brought it anyway,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek. “Now if everyone has food and drink, it’s time for a meeting of the high council, and I propose the backyard as our secure location.”

“Well, if the high council’s meeting, I’ll take my drink and go elsewhere.”

“Oh no,” Wylie said. “You’re coming.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not on the high council,” I said.

“You are now. That’s why we’re here.”

I looked around at them. Irina smiled at me encouragingly. Angus winked, and I thought, Who winks anymore? Nobody winks. I paused to take a long, slow swallow of gin and tonic. “Look,” I said. “Just because Angus wants me around doesn’t mean I have to be part of your little capers.”

“I want you around,” Wylie said. “I’m the one who said we should come get you.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you need us,” he said. “We’re good for you.”

By the time everyone had taken their sandwiches and drinks to the patio furniture in the small, square backyard, Stan and Berto had shown up with a case of beer and two bags of takeout from Taco Bell. They sprawled on the ground spurting hot sauce from little flat packets into their foil-wrapped burritos. The sound of children splashing in a backyard pool carried from somewhere down the street. I sat down on a plastic lawn chair in the shade, and Irina sat next to me, feeding the baby a biscuit that she gnawed and slobbered on happily. I waited for Angus to call the meeting to order, but it was Wylie who started talking first. Since the closing of the Crest, he seemed to stand taller, scowl less, and talk with greater ease, or maybe I’d started listening to him more. At any rate, everyone was paying attention.

“Now is the time for all good people to come to the defense of their country,” he said. “The mountains are catching fire while the city spreads at their feet. If you saw a murder being committed, you’d rush in to stop it; your conscience would demand it. It’s time for us to rush. We can’t let the summer pass without a grand gesture. People say that gestures accomplish nothing, but they’re wrong. If we abandon gestures, we abandon the fight to assert what we believe.”

“Hear, hear, man,” Berto said. Irina clapped prettily, one arm around the baby, the other arm reaching around to meet it. Angus, who was lying propped on one elbow in the grass, clapped too, but I could see a kind of smirk in his smile, as if he were an adult watching a child ride a bicycle: half proud, half waiting for him to fall. And Wylie seemed to know it; despite his ease in speaking, I could tell he was watching Angus watching him.

I sipped my drink. The breeze that ruffled my hair was almost cool, with August moving toward September. In the days of unceasing sunshine, in my visits to various crazy women and my nights with Angus, I’d almost forgotten that summer would ever end. Looking at my brother, I thought that he was right: I was messed up, and he had it together, with a life built on his beliefs. At least he actually had beliefs.

“Wylie,” I said, “I still don’t really know why I’m here.”

He smiled at me then, genuinely, for the first time in recent memory. “You have to drive,” he said.

Wylie and Angus were consulting a pad of paper covered in mysterious diagrams that reminded me of the plumbing model I’d seen over martinis. Maybe they were going to break into people’s houses and start installing low-flow toilets. It was early evening. I could smell the spicy smoke of piñon wood, people so eager for fall that they couldn’t wait for an actually cold night. Angus came over and sat down next to me against the back wall of the condo. He put his arm around me, and I let him. On my other side the baby huddled against Irina for warmth; she kept turning and squirming restlessly, and knocking her head against Irina’s chest as if she couldn’t get close enough to her body and whimpering. Everyone was talking, their lips thick with spittle, the words tumbling out fast as the evening shaded into darkness. All around us lights went on in houses, and the habitual blue glow of televisions. The baby started crying and Irina took her inside, bouncing her up and down in the sling.

I wondered where my mother was, if she was coming back soon, if she would forgive me when she did. I stood up and almost lost my balance. “I’m going to bed,” I said.

“Oh no you’re not,” Wylie said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“Now?” I said.

“Of course now.”

“Wylie, I really need to talk to Mom.”

“After,” he said.

So I found myself driving my brother’s car through the neon-lit streets of Albuquerque, with the whole group chattering and happy, except for Psyche, in Irina’s arms beside me, who kept squirming and muttering angry complaints. Nothing her mother did could soothe her.

“Maybe you should take her to the doctor,” I said.

Irina shook her head. “Everything will be fine,” she said, smiling sweetly.

I drove to Wylie’s, as instructed. The place looked different, and I noticed that the dog was gone.

“Where’s Sledge?” I asked Irina.

“With a friend of Angus,” she said.

“What friend?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

The walls, previously bare, were plastered now with topographical maps of New Mexico, region by region, its mountains graphed in pale green ink, shot through with thin strands of blue rivers and red roads, the old Spanish land grants neatly labeled. I walked the room, passing from map to map, the contours of the state traced before my eyes in awe-some detail; it seemed like a crazy thing for a human hand to have accomplished, to have charted each rise and dip and curve of the land. On the last map, by the kitchen, was Bernalillo County, and the Rio Grande washed across the sheet. Albuquerque spread red and pink at the center of it, the land parceled into tiny geometrical squares. In the context of the green blobs that defined the wilderness around it, the city looked belated and sad, a cluster of cubbyholes and closets and shoeboxes that people called homes. With my finger I traced a route from Indian School to Central, then over to this apartment. Wylie came and stood beside me, and together we looked at the map, the foothills where our childhood home stood and the edge where, high in the Sandias, Bernalillo County gave way to Sandoval.