The Missing Person

by Alix Ohlin

  “You want to scare people, all you need is the appearance of a weapon,” he said. A universal wisdom, apparently, since Angus had said the same thing. I just shrugged. He went around to the back of the sedan and told me to open the trunk, which I did.

  “What’s all this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not my car,” I said.

  “Where’d you get it from, then?”

  “A friend of ours.”

  By this time Irina was completely hysterical, and Wylie wasn’t in much better shape. I had a dreary, dazed feeling that things were going from bad to worse, which was confirmed by the officer’s reaction when he looked in the trunk.

  “Jesus,” he said. “We’ll take that baby to a doctor, and then you people are going to answer some questions.”

  We wound up with a police escort to the hospital. The building had power, and coming into its stark fluorescence made us all blink like moles. An orderly or a nurse—someone wearing pink scrubs and carrying a chart—took one look at Irina and Psyche and said, “Come with me.” Wylie and I filled out the paperwork, and he kept trying to persuade the desk clerk that he should be allowed to go back and check on his friend and her baby.

  The cops wanted to question us but were constantly interrupted by urgent calls on their radios. From the unending crackle of the dispatcher and the frantic repetition of police codes, I could tell that the city was verging on chaos.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I told the nicer officer. “We’ll be here for a while if you want to come back.” His partner shot me a dirty look. “We haven’t done anything,” I said, but he looked completely unconvinced.

  The officers argued briefly, over the radio and with each other, then wrote Wylie a ticket for reckless driving. He started to protest, but then thought better of it, and the police left, promising they’d be back.

  Outside the electric doors of the hospital the city stayed dark. A man came in leaning on another man’s shoulder, moaning that his leg was broken. In the waiting area a woman in a flowered dress held her son’s head in her lap and her daughter sat next to them, squinting intently at a hand-held video game that beeped and sang as she played it. A short man in his forties, who I guessed was her husband, stood at the counter explaining their situation to a young receptionist.

  “We can’t afford to buy my mom’s insulin from the pharmacy,” he was saying, his hands palms-up on the counter. “We got no health insurance and the guy in the South Valley only charges five dollars.”

  “You buy illegal medication, you take your life in your hands,” the receptionist said. She didn’t look much older than seventeen, and on her bare shoulder was a small, elegant tattoo of a woman’s face.

  “Five dollars,” the man said. “Instead of like fifty.”

  “Some guy tells you it’s insulin, and you believe him?” she said. “You can’t trust these people.” She shook her long, shiny hair, dismissing him, and picked up the phone. The man watched her for a moment, then walked slowly back to his family.

  In the corner a man in a red suit was shaking, as if being constantly electrocuted; his suit buttons rattled against the plastic chair, and every once in a while he shouted out random obscenities. A couple of homeless people sat wrapped in layers of clothes and blankets, and there were several families with young children and a man with a cut on his forehead who apparently spoke neither English nor Spanish and couldn’t understand the receptionist. It was the county hospital, and everyone in the room seemed used to waiting a long time for any kind of service at all.

  Wylie came back shaking his head. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said. He looked like hell. Dust ringed his eyes and striped his cheeks; his face was all dark circles and hollows, his nose and cheekbones jutting out.

  “We’ll just have to wait,” I said, and tried to smile.

  “I didn’t know you could shoot a gun.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to.”

  “What was it, a BB gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you know it was there?”

  “I know a few things.”

  He nodded. “I guess so,” he said.

  Time passed and passed, and then it was two in the morning. I drank three Cokes and felt brittle and jittery and wide awake. The man in the red suit let loose an elaborate string of swear words, beaded with shrieks and gasps, and the mother covered the ears of her sleeping son with the palms of her hands. Two young white junkies walked in—a boy and girl, impossibly skinny, wrapped in blankets, the visible swatches of their pale skin festooned with sores and scabs—and asked the receptionist about a friend of theirs named Buster. A doctor came out and informed the man whose mother had taken illegal insulin that she’d be all right. After the doctor left, he sat down, put his head in his hands, and was wracked by three or four dry, heaving sobs. Then he looked up at his wife and children, and his face was perfectly calm.

  The doors to the ER hissed open, and the same cops walked up to us. “Did you think we’d forgotten about you?” the mean one said. He was gray-faced and smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. He held out his hand, and I thought the gesture was curiously graceful, almost chivalrous, until he gripped my wrist, hard.

  “You’re coming with us,” he said, jerking me to my feet.

  “What?” I said. The other cop was talking to Wylie, who was telling him that we hadn’t heard about Irina and the baby yet and had to stay at the hospital.

  “Hey, lady, focus on me,” my cop said. “You and I are talking here.”

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “We need to ask you a few questions about that car of yours.”

  “Gerald’s car?” I said. “Is this about taking Gerald’s car?”

  “Are you telling me the car’s stolen?”

  “Well, he can have it back now,” I said.

  The man in the red suit yelled, “That’s right, motherfucker!” and I glanced at him, grateful for his support. Everybody was watching. Wylie and his cop were undergoing the same talk and the same dance, face to face. The next thing I knew, we were being marched outside to the patrol car, my cop gripping my elbow and reciting my rights, his posture again almost chivalrous. The night air blew a current of exhaust from somewhere in the invisible city. In the intersection below us a cop had set up a spotlight and was directing traffic, his white gloves lit eerily in its glow. Without electricity the darkness took on new gradations of gray, navy, and mauve.

  At the police station they led us into different rooms for questioning. My cop kept talking about “materials” in the trunk, which I didn’t know anything about and couldn’t get them to explain. He wanted to know what we’d been doing all night, and I didn’t want to say. Keeping my mouth shut was remarkably easy, and the cop became incensed, yelling at me and pounding his fist on the table. I didn’t think that anyone who smoked as much as he evidently did could stand to be that angry without risking a heart attack. I looked down at the ground, feeling like a kid in high-school detention.

  “All right,” he finally said. “I’ll let you stew in a cell for a while. That should change your mind.”

  The cell was jam-packed, with hardly enough room for me to squeeze in, but everyone ignored me except a prostitute with long red nails and a purple leather miniskirt. She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, and told me that her friend had OD’d in a motel room on Central but was going to pull through, maybe.

  “Tonight’s gone all crazy,” she said. In her high-heeled boots and teased-up hair she towered over me. “The whole city got no lights, and I’m like, what the fuck is this?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  “I mean, what the fuck is this?”

  A woman in the cell gave a high-pitched moan, and Psyche’s face flashed in front of me then, red and twisted. I hoped desperately that she was all right.

  Still muttering, the hooker flicked her cigarette across the floor, where it skipped over the concrete like a stone on a lake. Then
she stamped her high-heeled foot in a fit of petulance and said, “Fucking Albuquerque. City can’t do anything right.”

  The cell stank of urine and body odor and smoke. As the sugar high from my Cokes wore off, crashing me into exhaustion, I started to reconsider my high-minded position. So what if the police found out where Wylie and Irina and I had been? We’d left before the main event anyway. But saying anything about this would amount to turning in Stan and Berto— and Angus. I couldn’t do it. Gerald, maybe, but not the others.

  Another cop came into the holding area and called my name. Tall and thin, he had a neatly trimmed mustache and carried himself with an air of gravitas.

  “I’m Lieutenant Duran,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble, missy.”

  I looked at him, not believing that anybody still used the word “missy.” It was one more element of the evening that I couldn’t believe. It was three in the morning, and my patience for everything was wearing thin.

  He guided me by the elbow and led me upstairs to a plain, windowless room. On the table were clear plastic Ziploc bags filled with wrenches, cutters, and handsaws, all the usual apparatus of vandalism. The whole world was swimming into the surreal. I wondered where Wylie was, how they were treating him and what he was saying, when we could leave.

  “Explain,” the lieutenant said.

  “Explain what?”

  “What you were planning on doing with all these items.”

  “What, the stuff in the bags?” I said. “That’s not mine. I have no idea what those things are.”

  “We found these items in the vehicle you were driving, so you’d better start explaining.”

  “Right, but what I’m trying to tell you is that those things aren’t mine. Whatever they are. Just like the car, right? The car isn’t mine, and neither is this stuff.”

  The lieutenant pulled me over to the table, roughly, and I tried to focus on the items in the bags. I felt like I was looking at some child’s science experiment, a carefully designed project whose point was nonetheless obscure. I could see blueprints showing what looked like pipes and tubes and valves, everything that controlled the heating and circulation. A switch flicked in my head. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning: HVAC. That, not “ache back,” was what Angus had said to Gerald. Near the top of the blueprints I saw the name Sunrise Casino. There was also a brochure for the Shangri-la golf course, the site I’d passed so many times on my drives to and from Santa Fe. Feeling Lieutenant Duran watching me, I closed my eyes and contemplated a number of possibilities that made me feel light-headed.

  “I think I’d better call a lawyer,” I said.

  There was only one lawyer I knew in Albuquerque. From a pay phone in the hallway I called my mother’s condo. On the fourth ring she answered, her voice groggy and slurred.

  “Mom,” I said, “is David there?”

  They came and got me from the holding cell an hour later. Practically delirious with fatigue, I’d had to struggle to keep myself from falling asleep with my head against the hooker’s shoulder, not that she seemed to mind. I was brought to another windowless room, where David Michaelson and my mother were sitting in two folding chairs behind a table. She looked as tired as I’d ever seen her, and I wanted to take her away from this place immediately. David, on the other hand, was spry and alert, erect in his chair. He was wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots and eating a Milky Way bar, snapping off pieces cleanly with his teeth.

  Wylie was led in, his arm gripped by a grim-faced cop. My mother wouldn’t meet our eyes; she just kept looking at David as if she hoped that he’d step in and fix the whole situation. I was looking at him the same way. Wylie was staring at either the floor or his duct-taped shoes.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said to David.

  “Well, a client’s a client, that’s what I like to say,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll need a room to consult,” he told the cops. He looked down at his half-finished Milky Way, then closed the wrapper around it and stowed it in his pocket with an expression of regret.

  “You can use this one, but she won’t be allowed in with you,” one of the cops said, nodding at my mother.

  “I’m their mother,” she explained, not in the proudest tone I’d ever heard.

  The cop shrugged, and without raising his head—or his voice, for that matter—Wylie asked her to go to the hospital and check on Irina and Psyche.

  “Those your girlfriends, son?” the cop said. “They mixed up in this too?”

  Wylie scowled and didn’t answer.

  An officer was summoned to drive my mother to the hospital. David Michaelson kissed her gently on the cheek and looked her straight in the eye. “We’ll be over there in a New York minute,” he said, then winked at me. “Right?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  After our mother left, David offered us the rest of his candy bar. Sitting across the table from him, Wylie and I shook our heads. I felt about ten years old. With his head deeply bowed, Wylie looked to me like someone about to be hanged.

  “So, kids,” David said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, from the first of it to the last.”

  I stared at him blankly. When was the first of it? Was it Wylie’s e-mails, his long-winded manifestos, his disappearance into the dumpsters and mountains? Or was it the second I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque, into its thin desert air, the smell and sun of it, the sweetly irresistible, scab-picking pain of home? It was impossible to answer the question.

  “Answer the goddamn question,” David said.

  “Wylie, you start,” I said.

  He shifted in his seat, never looking up, and muttered, “Fuck off. You called him, you talk to him.”

  “Who else did you want me to call? Your buddy Gerald?”

  “Who’s Gerald?” David said.

  “This is all your fault,” Wylie said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “It was your idea to take the car. We could’ve waited to go to the hospital.”

  “You stole a car?” David said.

  “We couldn’t wait to go to the hospital. You know that. For God’s sake, Wylie, grow the fuck up.”

  “You grow up.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  David stood up. “You all don’t seem especially eager to discuss your situation with me,” he said, turning to the door. “In which case, I’ll be going.”

  “Wait,” I said, looking at Wylie and then at him. “Please stay.”

  In the end I told him the entire story, at least as I saw it, and it took a long time. David reached into his back pocket—I expected another Milky Way—and pulled out a small notebook in which he took careful notes, every once in a while stroking his mustache. Eventually he brought out the leftover candy bar and finished it, sitting there chewing amiably, as though he couldn’t think of any better place to be in the middle of the night than at the police station, listening to his mistress’s children describe a summer’s worth of antics. I thought that he knew I owed him, which irked me very much. But it was also true.

  After I was done, Wylie gave his version of events, filling in a few details. If he knew more than I did about Angus and Gerald’s plans—the blueprints in the car, the Shangri-la—he didn’t let on, and I believed him.

  After posting our bail, David drove us to the hospital, where our mother was waiting in the lounge along with a new set of deranged, uncomfortable-looking people. She looked at Wylie and me with an expression I couldn’t identify.

  “Any news?” David asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Can I see them?” Wylie said.

  “They said not yet.”

  When David asked if she cared for a soda, jiggling the change in his pocket, she looked at him as if he’d just offered her some crack cocaine. “Why don’t you go home, David?”

  “I don’t mind staying.”

  “You don’t
need to,” she said. “It’s late.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She pressed her hand against his. “I know you don’t.”

  He shrugged and ambled out, his shoulders round and slumped, and seeing this dismissal made me feel sorry for him for the first time.

  My mother sat quietly reading a magazine, every once in a while politely covering her mouth during a yawn. I kept waiting for her to explode, but she didn’t. Wylie wandered outside. When I followed him out there, I found him just finishing smoking a joint with one of the blanket-wrapped junkies, who wandered off when I walked up.

  “Where do you think Angus is?”

  “Is that all you can think about?”

  “I have room in my head for more than one person,” I said.

  The sky was paling, slowly but surely, its murky black ceding to blue, the city around us still without power. My mother emerged from the hospital and stood next to us, not saying anything. There was a dismal silence. Then Wylie started crying, his shoulders shaking as he just stood there. She had to reach up to put her arm around his shoulder. Across the thoroughfare in front of us, three bulky shapes drifted along, and I realized it was the skinny, blanket-wrapped junkies, reunited, I guessed, with their friend Buster. The three of us watched the three of them, not talking, just waiting together to see what the day would bring. In time the edge of the sky took on a puzzling cast, swollen with color like a bruise, and I was so tired I didn’t realize at first that it was the sun, rising.

  Twenty-Two

  I woke with a start. I’d fallen asleep on my side, lying across two orange plastic chairs, with an ache down my side corresponding to their contours. My mother and brother were nowhere to be seen. Outside the clear sliding doors of the ER I could see the gentle brilliance of early-morning sun. New nurses were coming on duty, busily chatting about the craziness of the blackout. From what they were saying nobody suspected that the fire, by now extinguished, had been started on purpose; the group’s most successful gesture, I thought, was also the one that everybody took for an accident.

  “But did you see all the stars?” a nurse said. “I wish the lights would go out more often.”