The Missing Person (16 page)

Wylie came in from some other tunnel and stared as if challenging me to say something, which I didn't. I could tell that he was proud of what they'd done, and it was pretty amazing, their little fort.

“We've got enough food and water,” he said, “for four of us to last two weeks.”

“Would you really stay here that long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Takes to do what?”

“Make a point,” Wylie said. Berto muttered, “Excuse me”—to me apparently—and picked up an empty plastic bottle, then ducked out of sight into one of the tunnels.

“You can stay if you want,” Wylie went on, “but you'll have to bring your own supplies. You can take Irina and Psyche back in the Caprice, and be back before the walls go up.”

“You're welcome to stay,” Angus put in. “But we thought you should see the place before you made your decision.”

“What walls?” I said.

“We're barricading the road,” Wylie said. “To make the refuge. Weren't you listening to my position paper?”

I sat down on the ground next to Angus, who touched my knee gently, in a gesture of either encouragement or concern, I couldn't tell which.

Berto reappeared, sloshing his plastic jug. “We're going totally feral down here, man,” he said.

“Except for the beer,” I pointed out.

“Nobody ever said beer and ecology are incompatible,” Angus said cheerfully.

“How do you—” I said.

“The bottles are for pissing,” Wylie said, “obviously. There's a funnel setup girls can use. Women, I mean. There's plastic bags and toilet paper for the other business. It's two weeks, Lynnie. Not the rest of your life.”

I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard him use my name. He was waiting for me to answer, and I wanted to prove to him—to all of them—that I could make it. That they could survive down here impressed me as much as the space itself. But the smell of dirt all around me turned from fresh to rancid, and I thought about worms in my hair and the stench of shit in plastic bags. I imagined the tunnels collapsing, and couldn't breathe. “I'm sorry,” I said, “but there's no way.”

My brother nodded, as if he'd known all along that this would be my response.

Angus stood up, and he didn't look particularly surprised, either. “I'll take you up,” he said.

Berto and Stan didn't even wave.

It was two o'clock in the morning when I pulled into my mother's driveway. I was about to unlock the front door when David Michaelson opened it.

“Well, if it isn't the coal miner's daughter,” he said, smiling broadly.

I didn't smile back. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing past him.

My mother was sitting on the couch by the television in a light-blue bathrobe, a mug of what looked like warm milk cradled on her lap. “You're back,” she said.

“What are you doing up?”

“I haven't been sleeping well,” she said. Her tone was so extremely neutral as to make it even more laden with reproach. “We were watching a late movie.”

On the TV, Frank Sinatra was sweating horribly in black and white, and I thought of his sweet sounds playing in Wylie's car, Angus beside me, singing along. But here, in
The
Manchurian Candidate,
Frank was drunk. Raymond Shaw, the angular, government-programmed assassin, was also drunk, and waxing nostalgic. “I used to be lovable,” he was telling Sinatra. “You wouldn't believe how lovable I used to be.”

“This is a good movie,” I said, and my mother nodded.

“The days were lovable, the nights were lovable, everybody was lovable,” Raymond Shaw said bitterly. He was recalling an innocent and happy summer of his youth, a time that was sunny and irretrievable, and I thought I knew how he felt.

My mother patted the couch beside her. David was still lingering somewhere behind me, waiting, I guessed, to see what I'd do. “Have a seat,” she said in the same weirdly neutral tone. “Tell me what you've been up to.”

I shook my head, gesturing down at myself. There was no way I could sit down next to her, in her clean bathrobe, on that clean couch. “I'd better take a shower,” I said, “I'm filthy.”

“That you are!” David boomed. When I turned around, he was smiling widely at me. “You're filthier than an alley cat in a rainstorm.”

“Is that a saying?” I said.

“It is now,” he said, patting my shoulder. “You go wash up, dear.”

I fled the room. In the shower I lathered, rinsed, and repeated, trying to get my hair clean. The smell of my mother's strawberry shampoo was like candy. I felt like I couldn't keep going back and forth between these two worlds—from tunnels to strawberry shampoo—without going crazy. I understood, now, why Wylie couldn't answer my mother's questions about what he was doing: because it was absurd to be feral in a condo; it was ludicrous; it was damning. Yet the condo itself was absurd, too, its cleanliness and decor almost wilfully oblivious to the real matters of the world. I rubbed conditioner that smelled like almonds into my scalp, and stood in the shower for a long, long time.

When I got out, my skin was loose and puckered, and my mother was standing in my room, going through the clothes on the floor, checking the pockets before dropping them into a laundry basket.

“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.

It seemed like the nicest thing anybody had said to me in a very long time.

Fifteen

When I got back to my mother's the condo was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner and the muted cries of sun-dazed children playing in the yard next door. I went to my room and lay down on the bed, looking at Eva's paintings. On the dresser was the junk my mother had removed from my grimy clothes, and I sighed and made to throw it away. Loose change, a bottle cap, a matchbook, scraps of paper: the negligible archaeology of my summer. One slip of paper turned out to be the flyer from Blue Butterfly Yoga. Harold was probably in class right now, breathing deeply. I glanced at the schedule, to see whether he might in fact be there, and only then did I notice that the name of the skinny, uptight instructor was Lincoln Kent.

I sat down on the bed and puzzled this through. I'd had the sense that Harold was hiding something, and while Kent wasn't a particularly unusual name, the yoga instructor looked about the right age.

Moments later I was driving the now-familiar route to Santa Fe, the Shangri-la billboard still promising a lush green future, though a corner of it had begun to peel away, revealing the old ad beneath. I saw a car stopped on the shoulder, and a man peeing beside it, with nowhere to hide in the open landscape and no shyness about it, either.

Harold answered the door wearing a long linen tunic and matching beige pants. His eyes were bloodshot, and his red face was crisscrossed with wrinkles and broken capillaries.

“Advanced Ashtanga,” Harold said agreeably, and stepped aside. “Would you like to come in?”

Standing in his white living room, I wasn't sure what to say next. A glass of white wine was sitting on the coffee table.

“Can I get you anything?” He didn't seem at all disturbed that I'd just shown up, unannounced, at his house. “Maybe a drink?”

“Okay,” I said.

He rubbed his hands and nodded, looking pleased. Any drinking companion at all was probably fine by him. He went into the kitchen and came back with another glass of white wine. It was barely noon, but I shrugged and took a sip.

“Lincoln Kent,” I said. “He's Eva's son, isn't he?”

“Well, aren't you the detective,” Harold said.

I guessed he was being sarcastic, and chose to ignore it.

He sat down on the couch and gestured for me to do the same, giving me another up-and-down look. I had the distinct feeling that he approved of the sundress I was wearing. I rolled my eyes and sat down at the far end of the couch. “Why didn't you tell me?” I said. “And pretend not to remember Eva in the first place?”

“Because it isn't really any of your business,” he said. “You call my house, then show up asking all kinds of questions. Some people like their privacy, and I don't know anything about you.”

“I'm not doing anything terrible,” I protested. “I'm just trying to learn something about an interesting painter. How bad can that be?”

“I don't know,” Harold said. “How bad
can
it be?”

“Is Lincoln your son?” I asked.

Harold sighed and took a leisurely sip of wine before setting his glass down again. He was shaking his head slowly, though whether in denial or disbelief at my nosy questions it was hard to say.

I decided to ask another. “What happened to Eva Kent?” I took a long swallow of the wine he'd poured for me. It tasted expensive. I put the glass down and turned my knees toward him.

He leaned back and laid his arm across the back of the couch. “Well, Eva had that postpartum thing you were talking about. We all thought she'd snap out of it but she kept getting worse. I was giving her a solo show at the Gallery Gecko, a big deal. We got all excited about it—you know, hanging the paintings just right. Little Linc was maybe a year old.”

He chuckled, fondly, and sipped his wine, on the verge of another reverie.

I suspected this was a pose designed to keep me in his living room for as long as possible; it seemed less lecherous than desperate, and I wondered just how alone he was. “So then what?” I said.

“Right. Anyway, after this depression thing Eva'd been painting these crazy pictures. She thought she could see into the future. Her work was always real sexual, but after the baby it got kind of distorted, and people started freaking out. The pictures of her and the baby—well, they didn't seem right. This only egged her on, of course. She liked controversy. Or at least the attention.”

“What happened to those paintings? Did you sell any?”

“No, I didn't,” Harold said. “Because the night before the opening, after we finished hanging the show, she left Linc at home and burned the whole gallery down with a can of gasoline and a book of matches. She hated herself, I think that's why, but of course nobody knows.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “So most of her work is gone?”

“I thought all of it was,” Harold said. “And I'm not sure how your dad got hold of the ones you have. But it really was tragic. She had talent, and everybody knew it. You could just tell she was working on a whole different level, if you—”

“I know what you mean,” I said sincerely.

“Anyway, they put her in some kind of home. First they'd tried letting her live on her own, but she stopped taking her drugs and ran away to California—which is when she sent me that picture you saw. Then they got her back and stuck her in a place in Albuquerque, and she never painted again. Not that I know of, anyway.”

“And Lincoln?”

“Farmed out to various relatives and whatnot. Under the circumstances, I don't know how he grew up to be so normal. It must be all that yoga. I go to his classes all the time. I like to keep an eye on him. Sometimes we have lunch.”

“Are you his father?” I said.

Harold snorted. “God only knows. Well, God, and Eva.”

I stared at him in repulsion.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “I'm just kidding. I'm not his father.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, staring down at his white carpet for another long moment. “I was doing a lot of stuff those days,” he finally said. “It was a time of experimentation, of pushing boundaries.”

I nodded. “Yes, I know. I study that period. Experimentation with sexual politics, a push to be frank and honest about the body's functions and desires.”

“That's not exactly what I meant,” Harold said wrily. “More like drugs and drinking . . .” His voice trailed off as I kept looking at him; then he added, “You can imagine the effect of that kind of lifestyle.”

I had no idea what he was talking about: forgetfulness, or promiscuity, or sloppy personal hygiene? Then I did. If you do a lot of drugs and drinking, you can't always follow through on the body's functions and desires. From the darkness of his blush and the fact that he could not meet my eyes I understood that he was telling the truth, and that all his sexual bragging had been just that, an exaggerated fiction.

“I know what you mean,” I said gently, almost wanting to put a hand on his shoulder. But if Harold wasn't the father, I thought, then who was? I pictured Eva in my mind, and the vision was nightmarish: she was dribbling a can of gasoline around a room, deranged and leering, insane, while fire trucks howled outside. Putting my father in that picture with her was impossible, and yet I couldn't stop thinking about it, either. I felt a kind of energy building inside me, a force that swam through my blood like intuition. Fragments turned and spun in my head: the disorienting paintings; Eva's strange, grinning face; my father, who owned her only surviving work. I remembered the serious and distracted look he always had after a long day at the office, and now in my imagination this look took on a deeper, more romantic cast. All my memories were changing, shifting their forms. I saw an almost logical progression from past to present, from him to me, that was confirmed by the paintings propped against my dresser. The reason I'd felt that jolt of electricity, that lightning-bolt sense of recognition when I'd seen them, had to do the persistence of objects, the power of physical things, which were how the dead could communicate with the living.

In
The Ball and Chain
there were slashes of paint on the woman's body, all shades of red, thick as mayonnaise, raised and bumpy. Some reds had blue undertones, others yellow, some as dark as Daphne Michaelson's red lipstick. I thought of the way she'd named colors, as if reciting a code. Light is what makes every color, she'd said, and can be both particle and wave—these were such weird statements coming out of her mouth, and not likely something she'd read about in the pages of
Vogue.

It made me wish I'd deciphered my father's book on the temporal dimension in physics, and I thought, then, of Daphne standing alone at the backyard party, watching my father at the grill, watching the other women from inside the house. It occurred to me that she was trying to tell me something about my parents. She was there, after all, and could've seen everything that went on between my father and Eva Kent, between my mother and her husband. She'd identified the slash of red across her own face with a purposeful tone that was difficult to ignore; it was as if she were invoking the slash of red on the face of the woman in
The Wilderness Kiss.
And that light can be both wave and particle—what did that have to do with lipstick? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she meant that a single person can have two natures—that the father I knew was also painted by Eva Kent.

“What institution is she in now?” I asked Harold.

“It's right by the yoga studio,” he said. “Linc rented that studio so they'd be close. He's a good kid, visits her all the time. Enchanted Mesa, I think they call it. Don't know where they come up with these names. There's nothing enchanted about the place, I'll tell you.”

“Probably not.”

“I guess you'll be going,” he said, “now that you know the story.”

He walked me to the door, looking defeated and sad. Before I could think too much about it, I leaned over and kissed his wine-sweetened lips. He accepted the kiss with a kind of stunned grace. “Thanks for your help, Harold,” I said. “I mean it.”

“You're welcome,” he said calmly. As I drove away I could see him watching me and leaning, as if swooning, against his front door.

It was late afternoon when I got back to Albuquerque, the day windless and harsh. Children and dogs were splashing in pools, shirtless men bent over the hoods of their cars, joggers with skin tanned the color of chocolate milk. In a city park, under elm trees, an extended family was having a barbecue, heat from its coals funneling up through the air, and the bright trash of chip bags and soda bottles scattered around them. There was only one person I urgently needed to see.

At our old house the butterflies still climbed across the walls, short of their destination. I rang the doorbell at the Michaelsons' and waited for a full minute before Donny came to the door, looking as if he'd just woken up, the thick creases in his meaty cheeks reminding me, eerily, of scars.

“You again,” he said. “Can't get enough of me, huh?”

“Right,” I said. “Can I see your mom?”

“My mom? Why?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question, and I wasn't sure how to answer. Because I wanted to know exactly what she meant by “It's a permanent wave”? This didn't seem like the right thing to say. I smiled at him.

“She must get lonely, sitting in that room all the time,” I said. “I thought she might like having visitors.”

Donny frowned. “I don't think she really gets lonely.”

“How do you know?” I said. “Have you ever asked her?”

“Uh, no.”

“So you don't actually know.”

“I guess not.” He nodded slowly, then stepped back from the door and started down the hallway. Passing the kitchen, I saw Darren standing there; when he saw me, he waved, seemingly without surprise, and asked if I wanted a Popsicle. I shook my head no, and he shrugged good-naturedly. Donny knocked on the door of his mother's room and let me in.

“You don't have to stay,” I said. “I'll just visit with her for a few minutes.”

He nodded again, slowly and a bit sleepily, and left.

Daphne Michaelson was as beautiful and well-maintained as the last time I'd seen her. Her red nail polish looked professionally applied, and her hair shone. She didn't look at me. She was reading
Vogue
and nodding sagely at the pictures, as if they were revealing truths she'd long suspected about the world.

“Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “What's the permanent wave?”

She lifted her head and stared at me, a band of irritation rippling across her face at the interruption.

“Do you know who I am?” I said. She didn't acknowledge the question, so I tried a different tack. I looked down at the glossy photos in her lap, where thin and gorgeous women were cavorting in an African savanna, wearing clothes of primitive and dangerous glamour; their lips were black and their teeth pointed and white. “I think those, um, fur-trimmed toga things are pretty,” I said. “Although I think it would be hard to walk around with all those claws and teeth, don't you?”

Daphne straightened her posture and smiled at me. “It's only fashion,” she said in a confiding tone. “It isn't about the everyday world.”

“I guess you're right,” I said.

“I know I am.”

“What did you mean about the permanent wave?”

She smiled at me gently, as if she felt sorry about how dense I was, and I sensed she was going to tell me something important, an answer she'd been waiting to deliver for years. What she said was, “It's a chemical process for altering the texture of hair.”

Just then the door opened and David Michaelson came into the cool, dark room. Daphne went back to looking at her pictures, without acknowledging him in the least. I spent a second wishing hard that I was not here, or that he wasn't. He was wearing one of his cowboy shirts with black jeans and a brass belt buckle. He was not smiling.