The Missing Person

One

Days started in Brooklyn with bright, compromised light. I’d been sleeping late. In the mornings, the blinds sending geometric stripes across the sheets, I kept willing myself to wake up, then slept again, fifteen minutes each time. Construction and conversation, dogs barking their greetings, the irritated beeping of vehicles in reverse — none of it could get me out of bed. By the time I got up, it seemed too late to bother doing anything; the day was almost gone. This was a problem I’d been having.

The phone rang early in the morning, early in June.

“Lynn,” my mother said. She was panting slightly, as if she’d been running to the phone, though hadn’t she placed the call? “I didn’t think you’d be home. You’re always at the library, or teaching, I thought.”

“I almost always am,” I said, pulling back the covers and pushing myself finally out of bed. I opened the blinds and looked out through the grate. Across the street from me, between the pet store and the souvlaki place, was a psychic’s office. A neon crystal ball — blue pedestal, red base, under a pair of cajoling hands — stayed lit in the window twenty-four hours a day. The psychic herself was a stocky woman with long frizzy hair, given to flowery housecoats and red lipstick. I sometimes watched her sit in the window drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, gazing out at the street. I never saw anybody go in there. What did she do all day, and how did she survive? I’d lived across from her for three years, ever since I started graduate school, but still I often asked myself these pressing questions.

“Lynn,” my mother said again. “So what do you think I should do?”

“About what?”

“I’ve been talking,” she said. “By convention, on the telephone, one person talks while the other listens. People have agreed that this is the best way to approach it. Do you have a different idea?”

“Sorry. My attention must have drifted there for a minute. I just got up.”

“It’s ten o’clock!”

“I was up late, um, studying.”

“I’ve been up for hours. I couldn’t sleep. I’m worried about Wylie, and I thought, I’ll call Lynn, she always knows how to handle him, she can communicate, and now you’re not even listening.”

“What’s wrong with Wylie?”

“He cut off his phone. He lives like a monk and weighs about as much as a tin can. An empty tin can. Not only that— he won’t speak to me. I have one child who won’t speak to me in person and another who won’t listen to me on the phone.”

“I’m listening.”

This she ignored. “I want you to come home.”

“To Albuquerque?” I gave a shudder I hoped was inaudible and went into the kitchen to make coffee, cradling the phone against my shoulder.

“Don’t take that tone,” my mother said. She seemed to have heard the shudder, which was an uncanny ability of hers.

“What tone is that?”

“The I’m-too-good-for-Albuquerque tone. You’ve had it ever since you moved to New York.”

“I hated Albuquerque just as much when I still lived there.”

“I don’t know why. You’re just like Wylie, do you know that? You have all these objections that don’t even make sense.”

“Mom,” I said, “I feel like we’re not actually getting anywhere in this conversation.” Across the street the psychic entered the window and stood with her arms folded, a cigarette tense between her fingers. The souvlaki guy, passing by her window, waved good morning. With slow elegance she raised her eyebrows and blew a perfect smoke ring, and he laughed.

“It’s those eco-freaks,” my mother said plaintively. “Wylie’s friends. They’ve turned him against me. He won’t call, won’t come over for dinner. He says he’s breaking away. He says I’m too complicit, but I don’t think it’s complicit to cook him a hot meal. I don’t even know what I’m complicit in, do you?”

“I’m not sure. The dominant paradigm?”

“I’m a travel agent,” my mother said, “not a paradigm.” Sorrow and annoyance chimed together in her voice, a mother’s chord.

“I know,” I told her. We observed a moment of silence. Afterwards a gentle plastic rattle came through on the line, the sound of my mother’s short manicured nails against her keyboard, and I realized she was calling from work.

“I’m booking you a ticket. We have some great deals through Minneapolis.”

“Don’t do that, Mom.”

“I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“No,” I said.

“What did I just say? We’ve got great deals. Minneapolis is desperate for flights. They’ll do anything. They’ll pay you to fly there, practically. Listen, I’m pressing a button. I’m confirming. I’ll e-mail you the reservation.”

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“You’re coming home.”

Outside, summer heat was putting pressure on the day. My super, Guhan, stood by the door rifling through the building’s garbage cans, sweat inking a line down the back of his Yankees T-shirt. He was very nosy and went through everybody’s garbage, supposedly to make sure all the right paper got recycled. When he saw me he grunted. Originally he’d helped my old roommate — a dark-haired, six-foot-tall Swiss woman from my art history program — get a rent-stabilized apartment in the building. I moved in; then Suzanne finished her dissertation on a little-known Swiss surrealist and went back to Bern. For months afterwards Guhan kept asking me when she was coming back. Now he just sighed, eternally disappointed by what was left.

The street smelled of coffee in paper cups, car exhaust, perfume that had just been sprayed too strongly in the privacy of apartments, dog turds baking in the sun. I crossed the street and passed the psychic, gone now, and the pet store, where mangy kittens lay curled in the window in sad, scruffy balls. I bought a coffee and a paper to read on the subway. All the news involved natural disasters in faraway places: earthquakes, droughts, fires, floods.

A man wearing fake breasts under a black dress came on the train and sang a Spanish song while shaking his hips and holding his palm out for money, which nobody gave.

The woman beside me, middle-aged, short-haired, and suited, fell asleep, her tired face smearing makeup against my shoulder.

I thought about Wylie, my baby brother, fat and jolly when he was little, tall and bony and righteous now. Our father had died two years ago, when his heart suddenly failed him; it was quick and painless, the doctor said. I went home for the funeral and stood with my mother and brother at the grave-side, thinking that these were the most appropriate words for death I could imagine: “heart” and “failure.” Ever since then, Wylie’d been getting both thinner and more radical. These days he was some kind of environmental crusader, a haranguing activist with a philosophical bent. He supposedly was finishing his biology degree at UNM, but only registered for one class a semester. My mother often said he took after my father, who was a scientist; but my father had a Ph.D. and a job at a lab, whereas Wylie was twenty-four and years away from any degree at all. Instead of doing course work, he devoted his time to writing his undergraduate thesis, a massive opus “about all of nature,” as my mother told me on the phone when I asked why it was taking so long. The opus seemed to have more to do with ideology than biology, and sometimes he sent me chunks of it by e-mail, in the middle of the night, after too much beer: The desert is deconstruction in practice, not theory; an experience that dismantles the border of the self and defies the human (frequently but not always male) sense of authorship, the idea that people create their own reality. In this Derridean context we can locate a species of alternative to the institutional structures of civilization. Not by fixing but by decentering us, wilderness puts us in our place in the world. It is a narrative that cannot be controlled by the participant.

Usually I didn’t make it much further than that. In my head Wylie was still a tousle-haired geek of around fourteen, camping out in a teepee in the backyard and building that science project where the volcano erupts. There was no way I could take him seriously. “Lynnie,” he wrote at the beginning of one of his messages, “I showed this section to Mom, and she said, ‘Have you ever thought about going to law school?’”

By the time I got to school it was past noon. Summer students with fluorescent hair and bad posture sat smoking on the concrete steps of the art building, where optimistic pigeons kept pecking at the discarded butts and dropping them, pecking and dropping, never learning their lesson. Inside, the hallways were almost empty, the classrooms silent and offices closed, my steps echoing against the linoleum. Bright shreds of posters on the bulletin boards publicized outdated events. I could hear a girl’s shrill giggle around a corner, fading as she walked away.

In Michael’s office there was yet another girl, this one young, very pretty, and Japanese, in a red miniskirt and matching high heels.

“But you don’t understand the pressure I’m under,” she was saying. “If I don’t get an A my parents will kill me, seriously kill me!”

“I have to admit that I doubt your life is in danger,” Michael said, his voice a low rumble, audibly amused.

“But everything will be ruined, and it will all be your fault! Who do you think you are?” the girl said, hysteria rising into her voice.

“It’s my job to grade your work.”

“You’re the teacher,” she said squeakily, “not God.”

Michael’s voice dipped even lower, practiced and reconciling, soft as felt. I stepped into the doorway and coughed loudly. It was a little phlegmier, actually, than I’d meant it to be. The girl barely glanced up, but Michael smiled broadly, lines creasing deeply around his eyes, his looks as excellent as ever. He was my advisor. He was married. We’d flirted my first year in grad school, slept together my second, broken up my third. It was something he did; I knew this now.

“Lynn. Give me two minutes.”

I checked my mail in the department office, and by the time I came back the girl was promising to rewrite her paper over the course of the summer — making it the most “A-worthy” paper, she swore, he’d ever read — and away she went, tottering delicately on her heels.

“So,” he said. “How are you?”

“Good.” I sat down, pulling a pen and notebook out of my bag as if I expected a serious discussion, which I didn’t. The pages were filled with absurd scholarship in my messy handwriting, copied-out quotations from famous critics, notes on the sexual proclivities of obscure artists, reading lists of books I never consulted. It was a documented history of wasted time.

“How are you, really?”

“Really good.”

He smiled again. It seemed unfair that he was still so handsome. He crossed behind me and closed the door, then came back to face me. “I don’t suppose you have anything for me,” he said.

“You want gifts? If I’d known bribery would get me a degree, I wouldn’t have bothered to sleep with you.”

He didn’t laugh. He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and black jeans and a silver bracelet on his left wrist which he twisted around and around while he looked at me. “A chapter. Part of a chapter. An abstract for a chapter. An idea. A glimmer of an idea that might eventually, in the fullness of time, become something more.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t bring any of those.” I looked over his shoulder at the window. Students bent practically double under the weight of backpacks portaged across the quad. Rangy dark squirrels rummaged for snacks in the trees. As I watched, a gust of wind freed sheets of paper from the trash and skipped them like stones across the pavement.

“I am concerned,” Michael said softly, “about your progress in the program.”

“Yeah, well. . I guess it’s been kind of a slow semester.”

“It’s been a slow year, Lynn. You haven’t done anything, so far as I can tell, for at least a year. Quite possibly two. When are you going to take your exams? What’s going on with this?” He opened a file folder on his desk — my dossier, I guessed, wondering what other information he kept in there — and held up a piece of paper, my supposed abstract of my supposed research for my supposed dissertation. We’d written it together one night in bed in my apartment, the laptop battery toasting my thigh, Michael’s arms circling me from behind, his index fingers tapping with aggravating slowness on the keys. The abstract, and his endorsement of it, had gotten me the year of fellowship support I was living on now. I could tell that he was going to read it out loud.

“Please don’t start reading it out loud,” I said.

He peered at it as if he hadn’t written it. “The Secret Modernists: Cultural Production and Practice in Women Artists, 1965 to 1980.” He looked up. “Have you looked at those Eleanor Antin papers I was telling you about? Did you go to Philadelphia to see that show?” Then, after I didn’t answer: “You know, Lynn, I’ve always thought this was an excellent topic. You have an opportunity here to do something potentially explosive. But if you sit on it for too long, somebody else will beat you to it.”

I’d heard this speech before, though I couldn’t remember where the idea had even come from originally, whether it was mine or his. The dissertation supposedly would re-evaluate the feminist art movement in modernist terms, arguing that even though the artists themselves rejected traditional barometers of quality, the work itself could nonetheless be evaluated and prized according to those terms. It was the perfect approach, Michael once said, one that dismantled previous criticism while elevating provocative work; it could push buttons, make enemies, resurrect careers. And, if nothing else, I did like the art of that period, which was populated by high-concept performances and fervent politics, women parading around naked in galleries, issuing manifestos, painting with their menstrual blood. I liked the physical and emotional extremity of it, the willingness of the artists to put their blood and guts, their pain and pleasure, on full display. My dissertation was going to make the case for the aesthetic value of this art, as opposed to its historical significance; I would use my skills as an art historian to situate this work in a broader context and, at the same time, situate myself in the job market. That was Michael’s plan, and clear enough to me; I just hadn’t gotten around to following it.

He was watching me, and I shrugged. His computer hummed its same monotonous song, and his office smelled of the pear soap he used at home. I didn’t say anything. His area was contemporary art, his office littered with catalogs and announcements and letters and slides. He wrote for all the magazines and went to all the shows. That first year in graduate school, I believed that he was going to teach me something important, not only about art but also about how to live in the world as a sophisticated person. I’d felt my life, and myself, changing under his gaze. But it didn’t last.

“Your grant runs through the end of the summer,” Michael said. “You can take these next few months and then — well, make up your mind. Decide whether you’re going to put out or get out.”

“Not to criticize,” I said, “but do you think that’s the best choice of words?”

He sighed. “Look, Lynn, you might not believe this, but I’m only trying to help.”

“Oh, you’re a big help,” I said. “You’re massive. You’re huge.”

I could barely hear him saying good-bye as I walked out of the office and down the hall. All professors sleep with students, and then with other ones, and nobody is surprised. I wasn’t surprised myself. It was amazing how unhelpful, in the end, lack of surprise could be.

On I went through the building’s pale hallways. Other people in my program had finagled research opportunities in quaint medieval libraries or internships in plushly air-conditioned museums. Everybody was gone for the summer, and soon Michael would be off to Europe or California or Asia or wherever he was heading with his wife, who was a professor in the anthropology department. The two of them were always jetting off to deliver papers or consultations in exotic locales. I’d met Marianna several times at departmental functions. She was a stoop-shouldered woman given to scarves and shawls and wraps, anything soft to bundle around her angular body — whether to accentuate or to disguise it, I never could decide. I knew she knew who I was. She never gave sign of it, though, only smiled and talked politely about Santa Fe. When anybody in New York heard I was from New Mexico they talked politely about Santa Fe’s galleries and restaurants, its clear light, the pink mountains. The rest of the state was invisible to these people. “I’m from Albuquerque,” I’d say, and they’d smile, picturing the airport. In my head I saw Albuquerque’s potholed streets and sweeping neon strips, and smiled too, glad to be gone.

“Lynn,” Wylie had written recently with digital urgency, another late-night message. “What if we aren’t moving forwards in time? I have decided that progress is a lie.”

During my first year of graduate school Wylie came to visit me in New York: his first, and only, visit to the city. He came off the plane stinking of sweat and pot smoke. My mother had given me orders to take him to the Metropolitan Museum and to a Broadway play. I left him at home one day while I went to the library and when I got back he and Suzanne were drinking tequila in the tiny living room with some Salvadoran waiters he’d met while taking a nap in the park. He never made it to the Met; but for weeks after he left, the phone would ring in the middle of the night, and someone would ask for my brother in Spanish, the sounds of a party ringing and dancing in the background.

I took the subway back to Brooklyn, where the world was overcast and no light glinted on the steel cages pulled down over the closed businesses of my street. The smell of exhaust and food being cooked in the Portuguese restaurant down the block rose and stalled in the air. At home I devoted some serious scholarly time to reading People magazine.

Past midnight, I’d just fallen asleep when the buzzer rang— a loud, old-fashioned buzz that always made me think of fire drills.

Michael came in wearing art-party clothes and an expression of drunken concern. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said, then lay down on the bed, his arm with its silver bracelet flung across my pillow.

“Where’s Marianna?”

“Chicago. No, San Francisco. Are you all right? You seemed depressed today.”

“I have a melancholy temperament,” I said.

“I like your temperament.”

I sat down on the bed and allowed him to hold my hand. This happened once in a while. He’d show up late at night, reeking sweetly of gallery wine and acting sentimental; in the morning, he was still married and we were still broken up.

“And you wonder why I’m confused,” I said afterwards. A yellow line of streetlight poked through the window grate. I could hear the distant crash of traffic. There was no response; he was already asleep. I lay awake for quite a while, picturing a life in which Marianna fell madly in love with one of her students and moved to Prague or Berkeley or somewhere, and I moved into their enormous apartment on the Upper West Side with Hudson River views and book-lined rooms and copper pans hanging over the stove. Then the idea of me living in a place like that made me laugh, and then time passed, until finally it was morning.

He never disappeared in the early hours, like men do in movies. Instead he had to be prodded out of bed and served coffee. He even asked for eggs.

“I don’t make eggs,” I said. “Who do you think I am?”

He laughed, both hands around his coffee cup. No wedding ring, but Marianna didn’t wear one either. They had some kind of agreement.

“Okay, no eggs.” He stretched, running his hands through his shaggy black hair. His glance took in my tiny living room, and the former closets that passed for bedrooms, with something I took for nostalgia. “I’m going to France,” he said. “Want to come?”

“What are you talking about?”

I stood at the window and watched the psychic sit at a table in her window, reach down, and then set something in front of her on the table, staring at it intently. Tarot cards, I thought, or runes. She started to move one hand over the other, rhythmically, as if performing some incantation. After a second I realized that she was painting her nails.

“It’ll cheer you up. Maybe get you excited about work again. In two weeks. I’ve got an extra ticket.”

“Marianna’s ticket.”

“She has to go to Venezuela instead.”

“You want me to go to France using your wife’s ticket.”

“I want to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris with a man whose company, based on recent evidence, I’m fairly sure you enjoy.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.”

“That’s what I like to think,” he said. “So you’re coming?”

“I’ll think about it.”

And I did. I lounged around my apartment for those two weeks, committing several issues of People to memory and thinking about the two of us holding hands as we walked along the Seine by moonlight, et cetera. Then I thought about Melinda, the visiting assistant professor from Costa Rica whose year-long appointment in our department had precipitated our breakup and who I guessed had gone back home. I also thought about New Mexico, the blank astringency of the air and the bleak sunny streets sprawling with gas stations and chain restaurants. Finally I thought about my brother and his fervent midnight e-mails demanding, “How do we live decently in an indecent world?” It was true that I hadn’t received any messages for a while, but knowing Wylie, he was probably just too busy writing his manifesto or picketing butcher shops or getting drunk with waiters or whatever else he did with his time.

In the end, I told Michael I’d meet him at his apartment— I wanted to picture him there, petty in my revenge, waiting for me—and boarded a plane to Albuquerque instead.

Long hours afterwards I stepped into the hushed boredom of the small, clean airport. My mother stood by the gate wearing a blue sundress, her hair clipped and neat; she was smiling broadly, as she always did when she’d gotten her way.

“How was the flight?”

“Fine.”

“How was Minneapolis?”

“I only connected there.”

“But was it efficient?”

“My flight was on time.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “They’re very efficient in Minneapolis. I think it’s the cold weather. They have no distractions like we do here.”

“It’s June, Mom,” I said.

We walked through the uncrowded hallways alongside men in cowboy hats and boots embracing their children and wives, their tight jeans cinched even tighter at the hips with large-buckled belts. Passing the airport restaurant, I smelled green-chile stew. I felt like I was on a different planet, in a separate, contrived dimension; a place created for vacations. The air outside was cool and dry, the lights of Albuquerque gleaming on a miniature scale against the blackness of the desert. Everything seemed very small. My mother drove through the familiar streets, past the gaudy neon, the Pop ’n’ Taco, the Sirloin Stockade, then the brown shadows of adobe houses. Pink rays of cosmos and tall, nodding sunflowers bloomed in the yards. Everything was exactly the same, shabby and plain, as if I’d never moved away, as if New York were only a dream I’d had, an ongoing dream every night for years.

Lynn: We cannot return to the elemental things. There is no way to go back. But how to move forward when so much has been lost? How can we even think about the future when we are burdened by such an oppressive past and pessimistic present?

“Did you tell Wylie I was coming?”

“How could I tell him?” my mother said. “He has no phone, he’s never at home, and God help the person who tries to get a straight answer from one of his so-called friends.”

We pulled up to her small condo. She lived alone now, in a two-bedroom place, having moved out of the house where I grew up, in the Northeast Heights, within a couple months after my father died. Sitting in the living room, I waited for her to say more about Wylie, to deliver my marching orders. But now that I was finally home she didn’t seem to be in any rush. I closed my eyes — it was midnight in New York — as she puttered in the kitchen. The sounds of her movements were like my native language, the first I’d ever heard and learned: the hiss of water, her footfalls on a tile floor, a drawer being pulled out, spoons clinking against ceramic cups.

Her house was clean and spare. Unlike in my apartment, there were no stacks of anything anywhere, not a mote of apparent dust. On the white mantel above the fireplace she had arranged her collection of artifacts: Hopi kachinas, a storyteller doll, a bowl from Acoma. I thought about Wylie’s contempt for the material world. Lynn: We purchase our crumbling senses of self at the store, then try to mend the body politic with items advertised at attractive discounts during the President’s Day Sale. I sat there on the couch, my eyes still closed. Cicadas pulsed outside.

My mother came out of the kitchen and brought me a glass of water, touching me on the shoulder. “You’re falling asleep,” she said, and I realized she was right.