The Missing Person

Fourteen

At midnight, there were more people in Wylie’s apartment than I’d seen since that first, partylike meeting, and the same atmosphere was building. Some people were drunk or at least tipsy, and Berto greeted me with an uncharacteristic hug, his breath sweet with beer. From what he and Stan said, I knew Angus had been out drinking with them, but it didn’t show. His posture was as straight as ever, and when I came in, alone— after our little excursion, I’d gone back to my mother’s and Wylie had taken off somewhere on foot — he only winked. I sat down on the sleeping bags next to Sledge, who was gazing balefully around the room.

There were at least ten people I didn’t recognize, all wearing hiking clothes; some had clipboards and milled around with what looked to me like a false air of efficiency. One of them cornered Wylie, just as a young woman with a long braid and a red T-shirt sat down next to me, smiling brightly.

“I haven’t seen you before,” she said. “Would you like to be on our mailing list?”

I looked at her. “Um, I’m just Wylie’s sister,” I said. She nodded, still beaming, and held out her hand.

“I’m Panther,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m the media coordinator. Would you like to sign our petition?”

“Sure,” I said. I scribbled my name without even bothering to read the sheet, distracted by Wylie, whose quiet conversation had turned into an argument.

“We’ve put a lot of work into this,” he was saying, “and you won’t even listen to my position paper?”

“Because that’s not how you deal with the media,” the other guy said, exasperated. “Because there are proven ways to conduct effective activism. Because antics like draining pools detract from those of us making real change.”

Wylie got right in his face, the toad-killer look back in his eyes.

“What do you call real? Sitting in a tree again? Helping suburban moms master recycling techniques? Giving inspirational talks to schoolchildren about saving the cute little animals of the forest?”

“Damn,” Panther said quietly, next to me.

“Nothing ever changes. Go sell some more greeting cards.”

“Those were postcards,” the other guy said, “and they raised money for overhead.”

“Get out of here,” Wylie said.

Stan and Berto were staring at the ground. Angus was watching, avidly and without distress, as if it were a gripping scene from a movie. Irina, standing in the bedroom doorway with Psyche in the ever-present sling, went over to Wylie and touched his arm. It was the first time I noticed the way she looked at him — as if he were a hero whose most sterling qualities she alone appreciated. She stood on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear, and he shook his head and folded his skinny arms.

“Let’s go,” the other guy said. “This is bullshit.”

“But you were supposed to help us with the media, man,” Berto said.

“Wylie doesn’t think you need any help,” he said. All the strangers filed out behind him, with their clipboards and backpacks and water bottles, and some of them, I noticed, looked like they regretted leaving the party.

When they were gone Wylie pulled a folded piece of paper out of the back pocket of his dirty jeans. “I’ve written our position paper,” he said very quietly.

“Go ahead,” Angus said.

Wylie read like a kid giving a book report, forgetting to pause at commas and periods, assuming he’d used any to begin with. “We are creating a wilderness refuge. What is the nature of a wilderness refuge? We think of it as a place where animals are guaranteed a livable habitat, but this guarantee is all too limited in scope. It is the habitat itself that requires a refuge from the constantly encroaching structures of civilization. We must develop a form of resistance to these structures. We must be willing to imagine an alternate world.” As he read, I closed my eyes and remembered those middle-of-the-night e-mails; their tone seemed different to me now, less ranting than lonely. I bet he wished I were still in New York, the conveniently silent recipient of his ideas.

“Do we save wilderness so that humans can enjoy it, aesthetically or otherwise? This way of thinking leads to shallow, insincere, and manipulative forms of conservation. Trees left uncut by the highway while behind them denuded, clear-cut land extends for miles. Farmed salmon dyed pink to mimic the flesh of wild fish that have been harvested to extinction. These pretenses allow us to believe that we are not destroying the world in which we live. But we do not save wilderness for our own sakes; we save it for its own. Because ethics are real, and once they are acknowledged they must be pursued to their logical ends.”

I listened carefully to this speech. Earlier in the summer I’d seen Wylie and the rest as operating under the sway of irrational passions, but by now my feelings had changed. I even understood their dissatisfaction with the larger group. They were after something bigger than greeting cards and media coordination. Most activism seems crazy at the beginning; any position that imagines changing the status quo contains an element of the fantastic. I thought of what Irina had said, the first night I’d met her: “Just people who want to be living differently.”

“Ordinarily such an act of creation has been the province of the federal government but we see no reason why this power should be held in the hands of civil servants rather than ordinary and enlightened citizens. We see no reason why ‘refuge’ should be a bureaucratic label rather than a political act. Therefore as of today we are making the mountains into a wilderness refuge. The place itself is a refugee from humans; the place itself, not one endangered species or tree or habitat. The fact that this act will be temporary makes it no less meaningful. The wilderness needs a refuge.”

Heads bowed, coughing slightly, we waited to see if this was in fact the end of the paper.

“That’s it,” Wylie muttered.

Irina clapped madly and everyone else joined in, making Wylie blush. Blushing was epidemic among this crowd. The saying “his heart is in the right place” ran through my mind, as if I could picture it, visible through his chest, his young, still-beating heart.

Stan and Berto took off on bicycles, their muscled legs pumping. Wylie got the keys from me and drove the Caprice with Angus next to him up front and me and Irina in the back, with Psyche in the sling murmuring commentary. “Guala guala,” she said to the window. I spoke her name, and she turned to me and said the same thing. She had some kind of rash across her face, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Angus kept looking back over his freckled shoulder to check on me and smile, which I found nice at first and then kind of annoying. After a while I stared out the window at the rows of subdivisions, the bright hulks of shopping malls and cineplexes, the great arcs of overpasses. As we approached one, I saw two shadows moving beneath a light up there, a movement that for a second resolved itself: teenage boys staring down at traffic, holding rocks in their hands.

After twenty minutes or so, Wylie turned onto a road that was dark and wooded, lacking in neon and traffic. We passed a church with a bright white sign: THIS IS A C H C H. WHAT’S MISSING? U R. Psyche began to fuss, and Irina jiggled her on her knee and then nursed her until she quieted. Nobody was saying anything, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was there or because they were preparing themselves for what was about to happen.

The road started winding up the crest of the mountain, signs for picnic spots and fire-danger warnings posted alongside the asphalt. We hadn’t seen a single car since turning off. I wondered how Stan and Berto were supposed to ride their bikes all the way up here after drinking for hours, and began to doubt that the plan would come off. I felt sorry for Wylie, actually, all his philosophy and passion dissipated into this midnight drive. Then he pulled onto the shoulder and parked.

“Wylie and I are disabling the tram,” Angus said after we all got out. “Stan and Berto are working on it from the bottom. On the way down we’ll close the road. You guys are lookouts.”

“Lookouts?” I said. “That’s it?”

“Lynn,” Irina said softly, smiling her pretty, calming smile. “It’s okay.”

“But it seems so sexist. Men do the big stuff, and women just stand around.”

Angus winked at me. “Can you wrestle a steel cable? Or drag a log across a road?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Then you’re the lookout.”

I put my hands on my hips and watched as Angus and Wylie disappeared into the darkness.

Irina didn’t seem to feel slighted in the least and sat down on the Caprice’s massive hood while managing to keep the sling in place around her chest. Nothing fazed her, I realized, nothing would ever faze her, a fact that annoyed me very much. I set off walking after Angus and my brother. It was almost cold up here at the top of the mountain, and I crossed my arms against my chest. Pine branches were scraping against each other in the wind. I thought I heard an owl hoot, although given what I knew about owls, it could as easily have been a distant car horn. Beneath the trees it was very dark, but as I followed the trail that led to the tram, I heard a crash and scuffle that was almost certainly the sound of vandalism and moved in that direction.

The last time I’d ridden the tram was with my family, when I was a teenager, and an old college friend of my father’s was visiting. The only time anyone from Albuquerque takes the tram is with out-of-town friends. Mr. Dennison was tall, thin, and youthful, with curly black hair and a bizarre penchant for Adidas shorts and Hawaiian shirts. But it wasn’t his clothes that bothered me. I was convinced he was looking at me inappropriately. I was fifteen and had just figured out that men were capable of and even prone to such behavior. I slouched against the glass as the tram ascended and my father pointed out various features of the steeply inclined landscape, the hay-colored sprays of cactus and stark, strong blooms of century plants. My mother and Wylie stood on the other side of the car, both facing out the window: Wylie with his nose pressed up against the glass, leaving smudge marks, and my mother behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Mr. Dennison kept glancing over at me and smiling with a friendly zeal that I found highly suspicious. “This is spectacular!” he said to my father, still smiling at me. My father just nodded and kept on listing species of cactus; he’d memorized all their names when he moved to New Mexico and never missed a chance to demonstrate this feat of botanical knowledge. Once we got to the top I took off on a walk, abandoning everybody else, and soon was standing in the pine trees, alone — fists clenched in anger, disoriented, wanting to make some kind of gesture or point — and lost. I was filled with wordless rage toward my parents, and especially my father, for not noticing what was going on.

I wondered now what my father thought I was doing, tramping off like that. Maybe he saw it as just another blind, teenage rage — which in a way, I guessed, it was. Probably I was as strange to him as he was to me. Anyway, I would never know if it had even registered on him at all. I kept walking for a few minutes, feeling my way in the dark, thinking I was getting closer, until I realized that once again I was lost. I had no idea where Wylie or Angus or the tram might be. Then the owl hooted again, twice, insistently. It was a car horn.

I turned around and started back, climbing upward, and before long I saw the car’s headlights flash on and off, showing me where to go. By the time I got there, everybody was standing around, looking superior and amused.

“Don’t say a word,” I warned them, and they didn’t.

Wylie pulled into a rest area toward the bottom of the crest road and parked, Stan and Berto promptly emerging from the trees with their bicycles. Irina unclipped their front wheels and started stowing them away in the trunk, so I helped her as the men walked off into the forest. When we locked the car and followed, I could hear rustling and voices but couldn’t see a thing. Then Irina pressed a flashlight into my hand. “I’m going to wait here in the car until you come back,” she said.

“Where am I going?”

“They have something to show you,” she said.

By the anemic light I could make out four silhouettes far ahead of us. I beamed it directly on Wylie, who looked back at me, startled and wide-eyed as a deer.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

I hurried toward them, but Wylie was gone — his disappearance nearly instant and complete. I stood still, breathing hard, beaming the flashlight around until it lit on Angus, who was leaning against a tree trunk, watching me stumble around.

“How are you with small spaces?” he said.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

He was next to me then, taking the flashlight out of my hand and inserting his own hot, dry palm instead. He pointed the beam at a boulder ten steps in front of us, and I could see a hole in the ground with fresh dirt at the edges. “Down,” he said. “About six feet. Then you’ll walk a few steps, then go down again. I’ll be right behind you.”

“You have got to be kidding.”

He laughed. “Your lack of courage is very honest.” Then he pushed me forward.

Just below the lip of the entrance I could feel a horizontal bar, the top rung of a ladder.

“Don’t bother looking down,” Angus said, switching off the flashlight. For some reason I closed my eyes, as if that would be more comforting than the darkness of the forest.

“Six steps,” he said. “Then dirt.”

He was right. At the bottom of the ladder I stepped away and he came down after me, then we went farther down and moved along a cramped dirt tunnel into a space large enough to stand up in. A propane lamp sat on the open seat of a folding chair, Stan and Berto on the ground next to it, giggling and drinking beer. The air was cool and oddly fresh, fragrant with earth.

It was a room of dirt. Lining the walls were plastic bottles, dried food in pouches, garbage bags, and a bulletin board with a diagram of the tunnel system and a small Chamber of Commerce poster. A red sun was setting over a brown, cracked landscape below cursive blue lettering: SPEND THE SUMMER IN BISBEE, ARIZONA.

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.