The Missing Person (7 page)

Whether I really thought the paintings were extraordinary was beside the point; I wanted Michael to think so. I knew him well enough to tell him what he needed to hear.

I made a photocopy of the picture and left the library. It was almost noon, and at the coffee shop across the street I ordered a chicken burrito with green chile and listened to the fresh-faced students at the table next to mine debate the various merits, as hangover remedies, of bacon and eggs, French fries, and Tabasco sauce. On the other side of me a pointyfaced girl in a peasant skirt was writing furiously in a cloth-bound journal.

Outside, traffic moved sluggishly from block to block and light to light. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest was jaywalking in between the cars, lightly brushing their hoods and trunks and fenders as she passed; it looked like some ritual benediction, her head canted to one side and a dreamy laxness in her gait. Traffic was slow but it had not in fact stopped, and people were honking. Still, she kept to her serene, peculiar route, and when she got to my side of the street I realized it was Irina.

I ran outside and caught her by her arm, and she said, “Sister of Wylie!”

“Hi,” I said.

“I am so sorry to tell you I have forgotten your name,” she said.

“That's okay. It's Lynn. I'm having lunch, would you like to join me?”

“But I couldn't impose.”

“Please. It's my treat.”

“I would like to, then.”

Inside, she sat down at my table and immediately started nursing the baby, who pulled at her nipple with loud, aggravated sucking sounds. The hungover students, repulsed, cleared their trays in a hurry. I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke, at her request, and brought them to the table.

“So, Irina. How's everything going? Have you seen Wylie?”

She shook her head and looked as if she were about to say more, but then became distracted by the cheeseburger. She ate faster than anybody I'd ever seen. Her round, pretty face shone with sweat and happiness, and she kept nodding rhythmically as she chewed. In between bites she licked the juice from all her fingers in turn. The baby also seemed happier, sucking quietly, one little hand curving around her exposed breast. Irina put her hand on the back of the baby's head. I finished the rest of my burrito and asked if she wanted dessert.

“Oh, no thank you! But I would happily eat one of those burritos.”

So I watched her demolish a whole other plate of food, nodding and smiling at me all the while. Her appetite was both impressive and off-putting, like an Olympic event you weren't sure should actually be a sport. The baby went to sleep, and Irina tucked her breast back into her dress and kept eating. At the end of the burrito I held my breath, but she just picked up the Coke and leaned back, sipping on it with a contented air.

“Ever since I had my baby I can't stop eating,” she said. “I think I am afraid she won't be nourished enough.”

“She looks pretty happy,” I said. In fact the baby's head was lolling out of the sling, heavy-lidded and drowsing, silvery strands of drool gathering at the corners of her mouth and fluttering gently as she breathed.

“Yes,” Irina said, and belched. A few strands of her brown hair were stuck to her cheeks with sweat. “You know, when I was a little girl, I never knew there were things like this in the world, like cheeseburgers and burritos. No one ever told me that these things existed. But I think that somehow I knew. Because how else could I have come here, on a sunny day in June, to be sitting with you and eating such a wonderful lunch?”

I laughed. “That's a good question.”

“I think so. Thank you for the food.”

I told her she was welcome, and asked how she'd gotten to Albuquerque in the first place. I'd assumed she was a student, but then she told me her entire life story, slowly, while sipping her first Coke and then another. She'd grown up in Germany, then France, then Ireland. Her father was a doctor and her mother an artist, and they'd fled Prague in 1968, swearing they'd never go back. Which they didn't; but neither did they settle anywhere else, and instead they kept shuttling their growing family—Irina was the youngest by far of six and, she suspected, an accident—from country to country, language to language. They turned whatever city they were inhabiting into a little country of their own devising, speaking their own private language, with layers of jokes and family references that grew over the years into a kind of insular dialect. Irina's older siblings eventually rebelled. One married an Irish woman and settled in Dublin, refusing to speak even a word of Czech; his children were named Patrick and Siobhan. Another brother went back to the Czech Republic and swore that it was the only place he could ever live, though he'd never lived there before.

When Irina was eighteen, she planned on studying accounting at a local university. But one day she was sitting with her parents in London, where they now lived, and watching the BBC, a nature special called
Deserts of the World.

The camera traveled to Africa, then to Asia, and finally to the American Southwest. It flew over the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona like a bird. It blew, seemingly on the wind, to White Sands, New Mexico, over miles of glistening white dunes, shifting and forming, the sunset pink and explosive. “What . . . is . . . this . . . place?” Irina said to herself—and she whispered it to me across the table, slow and sibilant, hissing like a fanatic sharing a secret code. “And so I came here,” she said.

“Because of something you saw on TV.”

“Because I fell in love.”

“With a place,” I said, though I meant it as a question, whose answer might encompass her baby. But she just nodded, smiling widely. Her expression was exactly that of a freshly married woman who'd just described how she met her husband. It seemed both ridiculous and plausible to me that she could have moved across the world for the reasons she'd given. All these people—these friends of Wylie's, and Wylie himself—were motivated by such strange, off-kilter passions. They seemed to do things—leave home, draw plumbing diagrams, move to Albuquerque, New Mexico—just to feel the sway of those passions on their bodies, for the sake of surrendering to them. Irina's face was flushed, her smile generous. And then the baby woke up.

Psyche scrunched her face up and howled until we left the coffee shop and strolled through the streets, empty and hushed in the afternoon heat. I realized that we were heading in the general direction of Wylie's place. My take-charge mood apparently had been left behind at the library, and instead of barging in and asking everybody where Wylie was or how I could find him, I decided to stick with Irina for a while and see if I couldn't figure it out myself. She bent her head and sang a delicate little song to her baby in what I imagined was Czech. In the resplendent sunshine, with her falling hair and radiant cheeks, she looked like a sacred painting. I thought about the picture of Eva Kent in my pocket, her rigid posture and massive belly and burning cigarette—a motherhood that seemed totally unrelated to this one. I wondered how my father had ever come across her or her paintings in the first place, and what had happened to her baby.

Irina had a key. Inside, the shades were drawn and the air was still and close but actually fairly cool. In the kitchen, above the sink, was strung a little clothesline, with cloth diapers, cloth kitchen towels, and plastic bags washed and hung up to dry. It was seriously advanced recycling. Sledge, the skinny brown dog, was curled up in a corner, snoring.

“Thank you so much for my lunch,” Irina said. “I think, if it is not too rude, I may go lie down a little while with the baby now. You can wait here for him if you would like.”

“Wylie's coming here?”

“I mean Angus.”

“I'm not waiting for
him,
” I said quickly, and blushed horribly. Irina smiled and went into the back room off the kitchen as I stood there feeling stupid in every way.

There wasn't any furniture, so I sat on the floor. The apartment was very quiet. I could hear my own breathing, along with the dog's. Then he made a deep sighing noise that wasn't a sigh; a horrid stench overtook the room, and I hurried outside onto the landing, looking at the street full of falling-down student housing, lawns of sheer dirt, trash on porches, tape on windows. Lacking a cigarette or a magazine or anything to help pass the time, I pulled the photograph out of my pocket and examined Eva Kent's scalpy part and thick fingers. She wasn't wearing a wedding ring.

Then I heard whistling and someone calling my name. Angus came sauntering down the street, his red hair sticking up, his back straight, his shoulders broad and muscular, his grin showing all his teeth. He was wearing yet another decomposing shirt. The instant I saw him, I knew that we'd be sleeping together again; it was a foregone conclusion. “A woman has needs” was actually the very first thought that went through my mind. I sighed. It was getting to be a very weird summer.

He stopped at the base of the landing and squinted up at me. He was still grinning, and it seemed to be genuine. “I'm so happy to see you,” he said. “I think you have my hat.”

Six

After I told Angus that Irina was sleeping, he crouched down beside me and asked if I'd been drinking my water.

“I know enough to drink water,” I said. My voice sounded surly to my own ears. “That was just a one-time thing.”

“All right.”

“It could happen to anybody.”

“It happened to
you,
” he pointed out, raising his red eyebrows. I frowned at him, and he shrugged.

Across the street, a couple of young guys came out from one of the dilapidated houses, one sitting down on their porch, the other leaning back into the shade cast by a large pine tree. They opened cans of beer and lit cigarettes, and the smell of smoke wafted across the street to where we were sitting. It seemed like pretty early in the day to be drinking, though I was hardly one to talk.

“And now I find you sitting out here,” Angus said, “baking in the sun once again, without any sign of water, or even the protection that you yourself pointed out to me is so important. By which I mean a hat.”

“First of all, I'm sitting in the shade. Second of all, the inside of that apartment reeks from your disgusting pet. And third of all, it's really none of your business.”

“My disgusting pet?”

“That gassy dog.”

“Oh, the dog,” he said, and waved his hand dismissively. “That isn't a pet. He just lives with us. Pets are little slaves we maintain to convince ourselves that we can be kind to animals, while every other part of our lifestyle promotes the extinction of animal life. You know what's the most disgusting part of this pet mythology? Paying hundreds of dollars for a purebred while thousands of strays are killed every year in pounds. Anyway, Sledge can come and go as he pleases.”

“But you feed the dog,” I said, “and he's living in your apartment. Isn't he your pet in practice, if not in theory?”

He threw back his head and laughed generously, showing the diminishing spray of freckles down his pale neck. “You're sharp,” he said, “and I like that. You stand outside of things, and observe them, and form rapid judgments. I like that too.”

This didn't exactly strike me as a compliment. I felt tired then, and annoyed with myself. “It's just . . .” I said, my voice dwindling. He leaned closer to hear me, and I could feel, beneath the general heat of the air, the more specific warmth generated by the closeness of his skin to mine. “You know, I keep looking for Wylie, and he won't talk to me, and I don't know why. I'm sorry.”

Angus stood up and pulled me to my feet. We stood there for a second, holding hands, mirrored, swaying a little. “Don't apologize for anything,” he said.

Inside the apartment, Irina was up and nursing the baby again. Angus went to the kitchen and poured water into his Nalgene bottle, which he handed to me and stared until I drank. Then he nodded—pleased with himself, it seemed— and turned to Irina. “Who's coming today?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “Stan and Berto for sure. I don't know about Wylie.”

“No one ever knows about Wylie,” Angus said, and winked at me. “Maybe he'll be at the thing tonight. Do you have the maps?”

“Yes, hold on.” Irina reached into the sling, somewhere underneath her baby's butt, and pulled out a folded, creased piece of paper.

“What's going on?” I asked, and was conspicuously ignored. Sledge came over and sadly licked my ankle. I found a shallow dish in the kitchen and gave him some water, which he drank in great sloppy mouthfuls. Then I spent a while nosing through the cupboards, which were stocked with neatly labeled plastic containers: rice, dried beans, lentils, oatmeal. There was enough food to keep a group going for weeks, as long as they didn't mind eating the bomb-shelter diet. I remembered Wylie badgering our dad for more Nilla wafers when we were hiking, which in an attempt to guarantee good behavior were withheld until the last possible moment. I guessed he'd put Nilla wafers behind him by now.

I wandered into the bedroom, where Irina had been napping. At least this room held ordinary signs of habitation. A single cot draped with a sleeping bag sat against the back wall, underneath a window whose blinds were drawn. On the foot was a supply of cloth diapers, a jar of talcum powder, a box of baby wipes. The air smelled of baby: part dirty diaper, part No More Tears shampoo. I pulled up the blinds and looked into the backyard of another apartment complex, where a motorcycle was leaning on a rusty kickstand underneath a green archway that made it look like some kind of shrine; morning glories composed the arch, their blossoms twisted and closed, all the vines sagging in the afternoon heat, everything drooping and listless and dry. I turned from the window and opened the closet, which was empty. There were no pictures anywhere on the walls, no clothes thrown in the closet or on the floor, no tracts or manifestos, even. Aside from the traces of Irina and Psyche the apartment was desiccated, stripped of the invisible currents that people bring to a place they live. It was clear that Wylie didn't live here anymore—at least not in the way that I defined living.

Back in the living room, Angus and Irina were sitting cross-legged on the floor, examining maps and muttering like spies.

“Are they metal or plastic?”

“Metal.”

“Pop-ups or shrub?”

“Pop-ups.”

This went on for some time. I stood behind Angus and peered over his curved back at a diagram that showed a long pipe with a spring curling around it, housed in some larger casing. The parts weren't labeled, and I had no idea whether the thing was a carburetor or a bomb.

“What's the earliest we can go?” Angus said.

“Gerald would know.”

“Who
is
Gerald, exactly?” I said.

“A friend of ours,” Irina said. She was crouching on the floor with her bent knees splayed out to either side, the baby asleep on her chest, her face inexplicably radiant. I couldn't believe she was actually comfortable.

“Stan and Berto were supposed to be here already with his information,” Angus said.

“Who are Stan and Berto?” I said.

“Friends of ours,” Irina answered sweetly.

I sighed. “You guys have a lot of friends.”

Without saying anything Angus reached behind his back and wrapped his hand around the bare skin of my right ankle. It was so quick that I actually gasped a little bit. I could feel his dry palm, even the calluses, and as he peered over his shoulder I met his light-blue eyes. Then he broke into another wide smile and said, “We're friendly people.”

The door opened and two guys walked in without knocking or even saying hello. They both looked familiar, so I must have seen them at the meeting. One looked like a wide receiver, with a muscular hairy chest he was flaunting under a tight white tank top. The other was short and older, a gaunt, gray-faced man whose shorts hung slackly on his skinny hips.

I stepped in front of Angus and Irina and stuck out my hand. “Hi, how's it going? I'm Lynn.”

“Stan,” said the wide receiver. “This is Berto.”

“Yo,” said Berto.

Stan set a backpack down on the floor and pulled out a plastic bag. “Supplies,” he said.

These turned out to be peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, which Stan offered around in a cursory manner before he and Berto devoured them. Aside from Psyche, Sledge, and me, everyone was huddled around the diagram, nodding.

“Gerald says earliest tee-off is ten-fifteen,” Berto said. “Get it?”

“Right.”

“I still think we need to have a name,” Berto said. “I was talking about this to some other people at the meeting, and they agreed with me.”

“Go work with them, then,” Stan said, and when Berto scowled at him, he scowled back. “The name doesn't matter.”

“Can't claim responsibility if we don't got a name.”

“We don't need to claim responsibility.”

“They'll think it's just a bunch of fucking kids.”

“Maybe we are a bunch of fucking kids,” Angus said.

“That's bullshit,” Berto said angrily. “And not all of us are kids, man.” He reached into the bag and took another sandwich, shaking his head.

“No name, no claims,” Angus said decisively. “Nothing matters but the action itself.”

“What about, like, Citizens for Environmental Action? CEA,” Berto mused, waving his sandwich in the air.

“Berto, let the name go.”

“You're right, it's kind of bland. Okay, what about Earth Now? Kind of like Earth First, but different.”

“Tell me what you guys are planning,” I said.

“Excuse us,” Angus said. He stood up and pulled me by the elbow into the kitchen. My back was against the fridge, and his face loomed close to mine: his red hair, his pale skin, all those freckles. “Do you understand that I'm doing you a favor?” he whispered.

“No,” I whispered back.

“Wylie will be here, okay? He'll be with us tonight. So just tag along with the crowd.”

“I'm more of a loner, generally speaking.”

“Try,” he said.

He bent down and kissed me then, gentle and unhurried, for a period of several minutes. I put up zero resistance. For some reason, the word “consent” rose over and over in the back of my mind, but I saw it as more substance than word: something liquid pouring over me, hot and wet, capillaries opened, skin flushed. Behind my eyelids the world turned red.

Afterwards, the group went on making their plans, although they apparently were keeping them vague in my presence. I was still curious but didn't ask any questions. The sandwiches finished, Berto went into the kitchen and rinsed out the plastic bag, then hung it up to dry. Looking around, I counted the sleeping bags rolled against the walls—four, including the one on the cot—and realized they were all living here. Beyond the occasional backpack and Irina's baby supplies, none of them had any belongings to speak of. It was bizarre and impressive at the same time. Most people know that we shouldn't live as wastefully as we do, but could never change their lives as drastically as these guys had. Irina was right: they were living differently.

I cleared a space on the counter and listened. Berto continued to obsess over names and was repeatedly, uselessly shushed. Irina sang low-voiced songs to her baby and nodded in agreement, though rarely was it clear about what. In the dark room—most of the light came through the bedroom blinds I'd opened—time stretched itself out, slowly.

Stan and Angus were talking about water: the dearth of it around the globe, our reckless overindulgence in it as consumers, its diversion by financial interests. The government encouraged individual citizens to reduce their residential water use while giving tax breaks to corporations whose water use was massive in comparison. We were groundwater overdrafting, taking more out of our water account than we had. In China the water table was dropping by a meter a year. The Nile Valley was drying up. The Athabasca Glacier was receding. The Aral Sea was gone. The Ogallala Aquifer that extended through the West had been overpumped for decades. Half the world's wetlands had been destroyed in the last century. The Yangtze, Ganges, and Colorado rivers rarely flowed all the way to the sea because of upstream withdrawals. Pollution was decimating freshwater fish species, twenty percent of which were endangered or extinct, and causing at least five million human deaths a year from disease. The world was rife with appalling scarcity, and people unwilling to face it.

These two had an array of statistics, and a familiarity with geography, that far exceeded mine, as well as a kind of fervor I'd seldom encountered after sophomore year of college. When Stan said that people were guilty of cynical and craven acts, he glanced at me, and I almost flinched; but then he looked back at Angus and went on to say that they planted desert shrubbery while insisting on hour-long showers every day. Soon everything would be ruined—most things already were ruined—and it was all our own fault.

“The world is going down the drain,” Angus said, and laughed. But as they talked on and on, Stan flexed his significant arm muscles as if he wanted to pummel some sense into each water delinquent, one at a time. He predicted there was going to be a war over water. He said there
ought
to be.

Who knows how long we sat there? The conversation was circular; Irina's songs never ended; the dog whimpered and chased something in his sleep. Then my brother walked into the apartment—panting, flushed, bent beneath the weight of a massive backpack, carrying two six-packs of beer under each of his scrawny arms—and everybody fell quiet.

Without acknowledging anyone, Wylie set the beer down on the floor and slipped out of the backpack, which hit the floor with a clank of metal. Pine needles and other leaflike matter nested in his hair. He was wearing the same camp T-shirt he had on the night before, and smelled bad even from where I sat.

“I brought beer,” he said.

“Where'd you get all that, man?” Berto said.

“Stole it from some frat boys,” Wylie said, grinning, “then ran like hell.”

“Excellent!” Berto stood up to give him a high five, and the tension in the room visibly dissipated. Everybody started drinking, including Irina and me. After a terse hello, Wylie acted as if I weren't there at all. Every once in a while Angus came over and put his arm around me or touched my shoulder, and I watched for my brother's reaction, but there wasn't one.

“Hey, Wylie, what do you think about this list of names I've got?” Berto asked, and they immediately plunged into a deep discussion of semantics and philosophical resonance and educational or promotional value. Irina and Stan disappeared and eventually came back with a bag of apples, a round of cheese, and several loaves of bread. The food wasn't bagged, and I didn't ask where it had come from.

As I was eating, Angus brought me another beer. “You're biting your lip,” he said.