Alix Ohlin - The Missing Person

I stood up and went outside, the city’s apartment buildings and offices and traffic glittering in the morning sun, the slight coolness in the air hinting at fall. August was ending, the summer was ending, everything was ending.

“I thought we should have one last cocktail,” Angus said.

“It’s like seven o’clock in the morning or something.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’m leaving.”

We looked at each other. His freckles seemed to multiply before my eyes. I’d forgotten how blue his eyes were, how white his smile. “Let me guess,” I said. “Bisbee, Arizona.”

“How’d you know?” he said, and grinned.

We walked down the unscenic driveway toward the parking lot, the sun glinting off the fenders of cars. In the distance I could hear traffic and planes, the city awakening.

“I’m leaving too,” I said. “Going back to New York.”

It sounded as if I were saying it just because he was leaving, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t realized that I was going back to face Michael, school, the fortune-teller across the street, but once I said it I knew it was true. I was never going to be the kind of person I’d thought Michael could make me — art-world sophisticate, graduate-school operator, easy, slick sharer in romantic affairs — but that didn’t mean that I could just abandon the city and everything I’d started there.

Angus and I sat down on a bench located on a cement island next to the parking lot. Judging from the quantity of cigarette butts scattered on the ground, this was where the smokers from the hospital congregated. I tried to think of what to say to him, about sex and emotion and about how all touch means something, even if that something is not exactly love.

He held my hand. “How’s Psyche?”

“She’s in intensive care,” I said. “She has an upper respiratory infection and smoke inhalation and I’m not even sure what else.”

“That sounds bad.”

“It is bad,” I said.

He blew a soft sigh from between his lips.

I leaned against his shoulder and closed my eyes. I felt like I could sit there forever, in a moment without past or future, the bright light warming my eyelids. “You were going to rob the casino, weren’t you?” I said. “While the lights were out. I heard you talking about the ventilation system. HVAC.”

“Could be,” he said.

“Why?”

“For the money.”

“Angus.”

“Well, okay,” he said. “Theoretically speaking, a lot of money could prevent the development of the Shangri-la golf course. There’s a lot of state requirements that a golf course has to meet. Impact statements have to pass. Zoning and regulations. A lot of officials have to approve various permits and licenses. And officials, you know, are susceptible.”

“You’re kidding. That would never work.”

“You’re probably right.”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t go ahead with it.”

“Yeah,” he said, “a good thing.”

The tone of his voice made me open my eyes, and he was looking away. I knew they’d gone ahead and done it anyway, and that at the beginning of the summer I would’ve said it was ridiculous and reckless and stupid and wrong, and that now I wasn’t so sure. I thought of all the times I’d driven past that sign, the pure bare bones of the land beneath it, of the way the world looked when the lights of Albuquerque went dark. The sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra slid into my head. Night and day, you are the one. Only you beneath the moon and under the sun. “I can’t believe you did it,” I said. “You’re completely insane. Out of your mind.”

Angus laughed. “And you’re funny,” he said. “You stand outside of things, and hold people to standards you’re allowed to change at any time. I like that about you.”

It was the least charming compliment I’d ever received, and it made me smile.

“You’re completely insane,” I said again.

“I know it,” he said. “Shut your eyes.” He pushed gently on my shoulder until I was sitting upright, not touching him, then kissed me on the mouth.

The color of the sun behind my eyelids mingled, in my mind, with the redness of his hair and the flush of his skin, and with the memory of my blood rushing as we moved together. And I waited even longer than I had to before opening my eyes, to be sure that he was gone.

When I got back to the ER, a horrible shriek was coming down a hallway, a woman sobbing and shouting unintelligibly. The nurses at reception were acting as if nothing was happening while family members in the waiting area whispered and exchanged panicked looks as they tried to guess whether the voice was one of their own. To me it sounded like Irina.

I ran down the hallway to an open door. The shrieks were piercing and Czech. Irina was sitting up in bed wailing and banging her fists against the mattress on either side of her body, her round, pretty face twisted and splotchy, and her body wasted and frail. Wylie was standing beside her, trying helplessly to catch her fists as she flailed away. A doctor was looking on with an expression of detachment that unnerved me. The only person whose head turned when I came in was my mother, who was crying. She took my arm and led me out into the green hallway.

“They couldn’t save Psyche,” she said, and I started crying too.

After death, a great numbness, like a coat of ice over a pond. My mother and I made room in the condo for Irina and Wylie to move in. They stayed in the room I’d been using, and I slept on the couch in the living room. The days that followed, for all their grief and horror and shock, resembled my childhood more than any in recent years: living again in a house full of people, eating meals and doing dishes together, maneuvering around one another for showers. Irina was a shadow of herself, and we all thought, Wylie especially, that she would not survive the loss. He was with her every second, holding her hand and looking at her, as if the fact of being seen would somehow keep her alive. And maybe he was right; she did not die.

On a brutally hot afternoon Psyche was buried in the same cemetery that held my father. My mother had made all the arrangements, and the four of us stood under a tent as the unfathomably small casket was lowered into the ground. So far as I knew, Stan and Berto and Angus and Gerald weren’t even aware of what had happened. Irina’s eyes looked dead in their sockets. The earth was dry and cracked, and a breeze blew sandy grit into our faces. Except for the priest, nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.

We kept on rising, eating, and sleeping through the final days of August. It looked like life but wasn’t, really. The Sunrise Casino reported a substantial theft, and the Shangri-la golf course was put on hold pending environmental review. David Michaelson managed to persuade the police that Wylie, Irina, and I bore no responsibility for any materials in the car we’d borrowed; what Gerald told them, I didn’t know and didn’t care to ask. I recovered the Caprice and took it in to be repaired. When my mother went back to work, I asked her to book me a plane ticket to New York, and she did.

I wrapped Eva Kent’s paintings in bubble wrap and brown paper, and arranged to ship them back to my apartment. I wanted to hang them there, as a reminder of the desert, the summer, and, most of all, my father.

As I was finishing the packing, I decided to call Harold Wallace, who picked up the phone on the second ring and sounded happy enough to hear from me. “I’m taking the paintings back to New York,” I told him.

“Going to write that little paper of yours?” he said.

“My dissertation, ” I said, offended until I remembered that I hadn’t exactly behaved like a paragon of art-historical scholarship around him. Then I sighed. “I’m not sure it’ll be about Eva, but I am going to write it.”