The Missing Person (3 page)

Two

Mid-morning I woke to an empty house, my mother gone to work early, at least in my terms; she'd left a note inviting me to lunch. I wandered around the house opening curtains. The sun was plangent and full, striking through the neighborhood's occasional pines, her street deserted except for a few cars parked neatly against the curb. It all seemed weirdly quiet. Wylie's old car from high school, a boat-sized, ivory-colored Chevy, sat in the driveway. These days, according to my mother, he'd abandoned gasoline transport and went everywhere on foot or by bike, but couldn't bear to actually sell the Caprice. The sun had bleached its paint, turning the ivory uneven and mottled as the keys of an old piano, and its wide red-leather interior was peeling and patched in places with duct tape. Nonetheless, it started right up. Despite his politics my brother apparently came back and serviced it regularly.

I drove around Albuquerque for a while, getting used to the feel of things. One-story buildings shedding turquoise paint, dirt lawns parked with old pickups. To the east, the bare brown mountains; to the west, the lone peak of Mount Taylor. Fast-food franchises brightened every block, a rainbow of reds and yellows, their white marquees advertising specials that were always misspelled or missing a letter or two: MIL-SHAKES, ROTBEER, FENCH FRIES. The colored shards of a million broken bottles glittered among wildflowers in abandoned lots and alleys. Every now and then, billowy clouds of grit rose in front of the car. It takes some kind of city, I thought, to make Brooklyn seem clean.

Among the adobes, here and there, stood the green landscapes of rich homes and corporate parks. I drove past the thickly watered emerald of a golf course, where men in festive pants lifted their clubs to the desert sky. Another green spot was the cemetery, where I stopped to look at the square, undistinguished marker I hated. It wore his name, Arthur Fleming, and the dates of his life, primly chiseled letters and numbers that seemed to have nothing to do with the fact that once this person, my own father, had lived in the world, and now did not. I pictured his face, with all its familiar crags and shadows, then shelved it in a corner of my mind, a gesture as physical and as habitual to me as folding clothes into a drawer. In the weeks after he died, I saw him everywhere on the streets of New York—getting on the 6 train at Union Square, buying a donut, waiting in line for a movie, not that he ever actually did any of these things—and knew that I had to put him away in order to keep going on. Now I spent barely a minute in front of his grave. I hadn't brought flowers or any other gifts, and felt that the moment was lacking in ceremony. Then I got back in the car and headed toward Wylie's.

On Central Avenue, opposite the low-slung campus buildings, a few summer students sat at the Frontier drinking coffee among the Hare Krishnas and the homeless. A man in tattered, abbreviated shorts, the rest of his body tanned to leather, had taken up a post outside the library, holding up a placard to the passing traffic: I'M A NUDIST AND I VOTE. A woman with an umbrella and many layers of clothing was muttering private endearments to the sidewalk.

Wylie lived on the second floor of a negligible apartment building three blocks from the university. Out front, several old cars sat slumped in the gravel, two of them missing wheels.

I knocked on his door and waited for a good long time. “Wylie, it's Lynn.” There was no answer, so I knocked again.

A middle-aged woman in a thin housedress opened the door of an apartment below and squinted up at me, the smell of long-standing smoke drifting into the morning air.

“I'm sorry if I—”

“I thought you was from the property management,” she said, and slammed the door.

I knocked once more, without much hope. But as I was leaving, the door opened, and I turned to see a red-haired man standing there in nothing but blue boxer shorts. He had brown, freckled arms and a tanned face, but very white skin in the outline of a T-shirt, so that his paleness seemed to cover him like clothes. He smiled broadly, as if he were delighted to see me, and for some reason this surprised me more than anything. Finally I said, “You're not my brother.”

“Probably not,” he agreed. He ran a hand through his short red hair, which stood up straight as a field of red grass; then he opened the door wider and stepped backwards. “Would you like to come in?”

The apartment was dark behind him. “Is Wylie here?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Or when he'll be back?”

“No, ma'am,” he said, smiling widely.

His skin, even his pale chest, had a glow that reminded me I'd been inside an apartment in Brooklyn for most of the past ten months. He was possibly the healthiest-looking person I had ever seen.

“Would you like to come in?” he said again.

I tried to look around him, into the cavelike apartment, but couldn't see anything. “All right,” I said, brushing past him into the living room. I flicked a light switch, which did nothing. The power was apparently off. Boxer Shorts walked around the room pulling down sheets attached to the windows with duct tape, seemingly Wylie's favorite design accessory. The sun stormed in, and he turned around, covering his eyes.

“Excuse the mess,” he said. “I just got up.” He stretched his arms out from his long, pale chest and then went over to a sleeping bag in the corner and picked a pair of jeans off the floor. The jeans themselves were spotted with holes and showed a fair amount of skin.

“You sleep late,” I said.

“I was up late, um, working.”

“And where do you work?”

He squinted at me in the brilliant light. “I work for the good of Planet Earth,” he said.

I burst out laughing. “Yeah, okay.”

I took a clearer look around the apartment. Last time I'd been here, everything was pretty normal: small student desk, small student chair, small student bed. Now the walls were stripped of decoration. There was no furniture anywhere, only sleeping bags and backpacks tucked into corners. A shelving unit against one wall was stacked with wrenches, drills, emergency flares. The place was neat and empty, thoroughly impersonal, like an army barracks.

“So you're Wylie's sister? From New York City?” He crossed the room to the kitchen, leaned against the counter and smiled.

“How did you know that?”

He looked me up and down—at my black dress, my black sandals, my black leather purse—and shrugged. “Just a guess.”

“Look, I'm trying to find Wylie. Could you tell me when you saw him last?”

He shrugged again. “Not sure.”

“And you're not worried about him?”

“Wylie's a deep thinker,” he said. “He's grappling with serious issues, and sometimes he needs to be alone.”

“To grapple.”

“That's what I said, yes.”

There was a weird smell in the apartment—not unpleasant but vaguely acrid, layered, and chemical. I moved a foot or two closer to Boxer Shorts, who was still leaning, pale and shirtless, against the counter. It was coming from him. “I have to go now,” I said.

“Come back anytime,” he said, his broad grin showing very white teeth.

I turned on my heel and left, annoyed. Wylie'd been involved with causes and crusades for years, constantly enrolling in new student groups, petitioning, marching, bouncing from civil rights to homeless rights to animal rights. He could never find the right rights to hold his attention for long. But throughout it all, he'd never gone so far as to disappear.

I was unlocking the Caprice when I heard a voice shout, “Wylie's sister! Wylie's sister!”

Boxer Shorts, in his white chest and holey jeans, was running down the building's stairway. He ran like a soldier, his back rigid, knees high in the air; and although he was going pretty fast, he stopped on a dime in front of me and wasn't even out of breath.

“People usually call me Lynn,” I told him.

“I didn't know,” he said. “My name's Angus Beam.”

We shook hands and stood there for a second, looking at each other, me smelling his weird, chemical scent.

“Was there anything else?”

“There's a meeting tonight, here, of our group,” Angus said. “I thought you might want to come. Meet Wylie's friends. See what we're about.”

I nodded and thanked him, then got into the car. He stood there in the parking lot and watched me back out, which made me uncomfortable. Before hitting the street I rolled down the window and asked, “What
are
you about, anyway?”

“The meeting's at nine,” he said, and waved.

After Wylie's I dropped by the campus to look for him in the biology and philosophy buildings: a long shot, but I felt I should check anyway. It was strange to hear my footsteps echoing in another set of academic hallways, these ones decorated with fake pueblo accents. I found myself walking into the library, where I stepped to a terminal and typed in, by habit, my father's name.

Fleming, Arthur:
The Temporal Dimension in Physics.
It was his doctoral dissertation, and only published work, which had sat on a shelf at home. In the acknowledgments he thanked my mother, who was then his fiancée, for all her help, support, and typing, and as a child I'd been fascinated by that; it was hard for me to grasp the idea that my parents had once been students together, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago, drinking wine late at night, my father watching over my mother's shoulder as she turned his scrawled notations into typescript. What did they look like then? What did they say to each other? The vision was magnetic yet alien, like life on another planet. I'd thought that one day it would come into focus; in the same way, I'd always assumed that eventually I'd be able to read the whole book, decipher its diagrams and equations, resolve it into meaning just as I was learning to read harder, longer words as I got older.

But this never happened. As a teenager, I decided I wasn't interested in science. I didn't like math and especially hated physics, and my father's job was some unknown, boring thing he did for the government in a windowless office. The fact that he was a scientist was one of my many grievances against him, not because he was involved in anything sinister— although for all I knew, he was; I really had no idea what he did at work all day, and often into the night—but because of his scientist's geekiness, the knee socks he wore with shorts, his taupe-colored shirts that never seemed to fit right, the way he sometimes talked with his mouth full, all his embarrassing habits that potentially incriminated my own awkward teenaged self. After I graduated from high school and left home, this attitude mellowed, and I might even have got around to asking him about his work. Now there seemed no point. Yet it pleased me to think of him living on in the screen's digital glow, almost as much as the yellowing copy of the book itself in the stacks.

At noon I headed downtown to my mother's office. Around me sunlight glinted off lowrider fenders, cholos staring out from behind the steering wheels, their music pounding down the streets. Farther west, slender shadows bordered the boxy, old-fashioned buildings of the tiny business district.

Inside Worldwide Travel, the air was conditioned to a glacial level, and I had to stand still for a second just to readjust. Sweat cooled to ice on my skin. My mother was in her office explaining something to a large, burly man with an equally burly mustache. I sat down in the carpeted lobby underneath a poster of Greece, a bone-white beach against the turquoise Aegean, and waited for her to finish with her customer. I could hear their voices but not what they were saying. Francie Garcia, my mother's partner, sat talking on the phone behind the glass door of her office. Other phones rang distantly, were answered, rang again.

Francie came rushing out, jiggling car keys and smiling mechanically at the top of my head. “Someone will be with you in a moment,” she said, and then, “Lynn!”

“Francie, how are you?”

She smiled. She was in her late forties but looked younger, with long, curly hair and circles under her eyes. For reasons I never understood she always wore bright blue eye shadow.

“Well, I'll tell you, honey,” she said, shaking her head and tucking the keys into her large black purse. “At least I have my health.” She said this all the time.

“That's good, Francie.”

“And how's life in the big city?”

“It's all right.”

“You should come by and see Luis while you're here. He'd love to hear all about New York.” Luis was her son, and around my age. During high school we'd had one disastrous, parentally induced date. “He'd love to see you.”

“How is Luis? Is he married?” This was how I pictured everyone I knew from high school who'd stayed in Albuquerque: living in a prefab house in one of the new West Mesa suburbs, with a brood of children playing on a swing set stuck crookedly into the rock lawn. It was unfair to generalize, but on the other hand, it was generally true.

Francie threw me a sideways look. “Luis? No. I don't think he'll ever settle down.”

I wondered what not settling down implied about someone who'd lived in the same town, surrounded by his entire family, for his entire life.

“Listen, honey, your mom's waiting for you with her friend, so I'll let you go.” She kissed me on the cheek and left.

I went behind the counter to my mother's office, asking myself what Francie meant by “friend.” Then, in the moment before she stood up, I saw her blush and knew the answer.

“Lynnie,” she said, “you remember David Michaelson.”

The burly man turned and smiled at me under his mustache. He was wearing a navy-blue suit whose jacket sported Western piping and pockets. He also had on cowboy boots, and it was the boots, for some reason, I remembered first. Before my father died we used to live next door to the Michaelsons. Their two boys, younger than Wylie and me, were sports stars of some kind.