The Missing Person

Four

Life at my mother’s house settled into a shaky routine, the tenuous reestablishment of an adult child come back home. It didn’t feel right, but it didn’t feel exactly wrong, either. In the mornings as I slept my mother left me notes, assigning me various chores — defrost the fridge, take out the trash — that I consistently ignored. She came and went day and night, to work and to go bowling or to the movies with David Michaelson, like some roommate I’d found through a classified ad. Neither of us mentioned his wife.

Daytime television kept me sane. During the long, bright days I closed the curtains and lay on the couch, eating ice cream and learning about celebrities’ drug recovery programs, also their wedding plans, decorating styles, and diets. Sometimes I fell asleep to the Weather Channel, the calm swaths of cold fronts in the Rockies, the monotony of drought in the Southwest.

One evening, when my mother came home from work, I turned off the television and brought out Eva Kent’s two paintings.

“Were you going through my room?” she asked.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I just wanted to see some of the old things again.”

She shrugged. “I don’t care for those paintings.”

“I like them. I think they’re pretty good, actually.”

We both glanced at the paintings — I’d set them against the living-room wall — as if they might have something to contribute to the conversation.

My mother raised one eyebrow, briefly. I could tell she put stock in my judgment, even though it contradicted her own, which was touching, if probably a mistake.

“Well,” she said, “you would know.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Oh, your father came home with them one day. My birthday present, I think.”

I was surprised to hear this, and couldn’t remember it happening. Then again, if he’d given them to her around the time they were painted, I would’ve been a baby. Still, my father always gave abstract and wildly impersonal presents: board games, magazine subscriptions, T-shirts. The popularization of the gift certificate was the best thing that ever happened to him, birthday-wise.

“Probably his secretary picked them out for him,” she went on. “I hated them all along, to be honest with you. Those naked, unhappy-looking people. And what’s happening in that second painting, with the woman lying on the man’s lap? I don’t even want to know. But I didn’t want to hurt your father’s feelings, so up they went.”

“Do you know anything about her? Eva Kent, I mean.”

She studied my face for a moment. “The artist? Why are you so interested in her all of a sudden? You never showed one bit of interest in those paintings before.”

“I have more training now,” I said. “I, um, know things.”

This shut her up. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.” Then she went into the kitchen and changed the subject. “What about Wylie? Have you made any progress on figuring out where he is?”

“Well,” I said, and sighed. “I’ve decided that progress is a lie.”

She came out of the kitchen to pick up my ice-cream bowl and carry it back in there, a gesture I interpreted as laden with reproach.

“Don’t do that, I’ll take care of it.”

“You will?” she said.

“Eventually.”

She picked the bowl up anyway, and I followed her to the sink, where she started scrubbing away as if at years of accumulated dirt. Still in her work clothes, a navy-blue skirt and a light-blue blouse with short sleeves, she looked like the head attendant on an exhausting flight. The flesh of her arms bounced and shook a little as she washed.

I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer.

“Lynnie,” she said.

“The thing is, Mom, if you’re so desperate to find Wylie, why don’t you look for him yourself?”

She set the bowl gently in the drainer and turned around, water from the sink stretching across her abdomen, like a smile or a scar. “Do you think I haven’t?” she said.

So in the morning I set off again in the Caprice, the radio turned up loud, and drove through the sun-addled streets. The city looked criminal: dust blew across the windshield, men leered at me from corners and from behind the wheels of their pickups, working girls paced beneath the bleached neon signs of fleabag motels. The Sandias were brown in the distance. The houses were brown. The highways were brown. Everything was brown. The car’s wheezing air-conditioning blew a stream of tepid air over my right shoulder. I was sweating and cursing by the time I pulled up at Wylie’s place.

No one answered my knock. I sat down in a slice of shade on the landing outside his door and waited for someone to come back. A stray dog ambled down the block, head down, marking its territory here and there in the brown lawns. In this neighborhood dirt and weeds were fighting a winning battle against all grass. The dog lifted its head, sniffed the air, and looked at me.

When we were kids Wylie and I had a dog named Sycamore — Syc for short, which my parents thought was funny— that we took on hikes in the Sandias with my father. Hiking was our main activity together. During the week he got home too late for us to see him much, but on Saturdays or Sundays my mother would send the three of us packing so she could clean up or chat with her friends or talk to her mother on the phone. My father always wore the same thing, brown shorts and those too-high socks and a broad-brimmed hat, and he almost always took us on the same trail. It led to a cave, where we ate a lunch he’d carried for us in his knapsack. Sometimes he invited a friend, another scientist from work, and they’d walk too fast, talking shop and ignoring me and Wylie until we turned on each other and had to be yelled at. Other times, though, alone, he’d talk about his own childhood in Chicago, a place that sounded dramatic and foreign to me, with snowdrifts higher than I was and hot dogs as long as my arm. For years I dreamed about going there in winter to skate on the streets to my father’s school, the way he’d done when he was a kid.

On one of our hikes, Syc came bounding back onto the trail, his tail wagging like crazy, with something in his mouth. My father bent down, sweat loosening his glasses from the bridge of his nose, and said his name softly. Syc just stood there, wagging. My father gently pried his jaws apart and a pale-gray rabbit dropped onto the ground, shiny ropes of dog saliva coating his fur. Wylie and I stood there looking at it. Then my father put the rabbit behind a tree and shooed Syc away. Wylie asked to keep it, but my dad said no, so he pouted all the way home. But I’d seen what Wylie didn’t: that the rabbit just lay there, stiff, on the ground.

The shade had widened over the landing. In front of me, the stray dog snapped up a piece of garbage in somebody’s yard, seemed dubious about it, then moved on. I watched it leave, shaking my head at myself. It had been over ten years since I’d gone on a hike of any kind. But if your brother held wilderness all-important in an overly civilized world, why on earth wait for him at an apartment building? Why would you, unless you didn’t really want to find him in the first place? I decided I was an idiot and got back into the car.

I could remember only that one trail, which started in the western foothills by a water reservoir, a round white container that always looked to me like an oversized aspirin the mountain was trying, year after year, to swallow. At the trailhead, two mountain bikers in fluorescent gear were squirting energy food from tubes into their mouths. It was a weekday afternoon, and aside from a single jogger far ahead up the trail, there was no one else around: just the sky and the sun and the arid ground, with dry husks of burnt-out cactus making the skeleton shapes of bushes.

I started walking. Where the dusty foothills pulled steeply upwards into a bit more greenery, I saw the jogger disappear around a bend. Now there was really no one around. Gradually the trail took on a malevolent air. The dead cacti rustled and whispered; invisible animals scurried underneath. Fifteen minutes later I was exhausted. I could walk for hours on city blocks in high-heeled boots, but a quick stroll at Albuquerque elevation was killing me.

On a rock barely shaded by a juniper tree, I sat down and wiped my forehead with my T-shirt. “I hate being hot,” I said out loud. I hated being thirsty, too. I vaguely recalled there was some kind of stream on this trail, although maybe you weren’t supposed to drink from it because of the bacteria. Or was that somewhere else? I was ignorant; my feet hurt. I thought about Wylie spending weeks at a time in the mountains, philosophizing or thinking or whatever it was that he did out here, and felt a profound wash of affection, even gratitude, for the attributes of civilized life, for apartments and stoplights and magazines and the steam that issued from manholes on the streets of New York.

But none of that was within my reach just now, so I stood up again. Somewhere up ahead was the cave where Wylie and I used to pretend, over lunch, that we were prehistoric man, if prehistoric man had had access to peanut-butter sandwiches and Nilla wafers. My father often began those hikes with a distant, preoccupied air, speaking about current events and the weather as if we were strangers he’d just happened to fall in step with; but gradually he’d relax into his more fatherly self, telling stories and jokes, every once in a while ruffling Wylie’s hair. I always thought that it took him a while to get used to his family again, not because he didn’t like us but because during the week, when he was at work, he just didn’t think about us that much. We weren’t the central focus of his life, and he was capable of forgetting us. When he died I thought: if he’d cared a little more, he would have fought harder to stay.

Birds muttered in the low bushes by the side of the trail. The sun shone on the back of my neck, the heat a pressure as real and finite as an iron flat on your skin. My shoes were covered in brown dust. I climbed up through rocky crags, heading up switchbacks, turning back and forth like a goat. I kept thinking the cave would be around the next corner, but it never was. On another rock I rested again, this time looking back toward the city, flat and undistinguished below me: the gray acreage of parking lots, the beige hulks of new malls, the streets hectic with tiny cars. In the distance I could see the small peak of Mount Taylor, floating in the desert like an island rising from a brown sea. My throat and feet and neck were dry and sore and sunburned, respectively.

I gave myself ten more minutes and finally reached the cave, though it was less the cave of my memory than a rocky overhang with the remains of a fire below it, charred rocks, scattered trash and paper, old beer cans and condom wrappers. It was a ready-made antidote for childhood nostalgia. I sat down in the shade, leaned my head against the rocky wall, and passed out.

When I opened my eyes the jogger I’d seen earlier was standing over me holding out a bottle of water. It was Angus Beam. I was almost positive I was dreaming. His skin shone thickly with sweat. He was wearing a light-blue T-shirt that was soaked and translucent, sweatpants, combat boots, and a Panama hat. His arms and neck were the color of persimmons.

“Drink this,” he said.

I grabbed the bottle and drank almost half of it, undeterred by its weird taste, which was both chemical and citrusy. A layer of dust had somehow settled on my tongue as I slept.

He crouched next to me, balancing lightly on his heels, and squinted at my face. “You look terrible.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Walking around,” he said. “Wearing a hat and carrying water. Which is more than I can say for some people.”

“Don’t start.”

“Water is the key to life here in the arid Southwest.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Without it we’d all perish.”

“I said I know,” I said. “Can I have some more?”

I felt nauseous and stupid and annoyed. Every time I looked for Wylie, I wound up with this character instead. He took a folded handkerchief out of his pocket, dampened it with water, and gently wiped my forehead and cheeks. “Can you walk? Otherwise I’ll carry you.”

“Don’t even think about it.” I stood up and immediately sat down again. My calves were knotted and cramped, and some floating squares of color — red, blue, green, purple— hovered weirdly in my field of vision. When I pressed a hand to my face, one was hot and the other ice cold, but for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.

“Let me help you,” he said.

It took twice as long to get back down the trail as it did to climb up. I leaned heavily against his shoulder and stopped often to drink water, and by the time we got to the trailhead I was feeling almost normal. The sun was lower now, drooping densely in the flat sky, and hikers with dogs and children spilled from their cars in the parking lot. I could see far below us the sparkle of traffic on the highway. I had no idea how long I’d been on the trail. Without saying anything Angus steered me to the Caprice, took the keys I offered, opened the door, and sat me down in the driver’s seat. Then he leaned against the door and asked if I was all right to drive. Suddenly his smell hit me: the stinky pheronomic nastiness of male sweat, plus that chemical odor I’d noticed before, and, on top of that, a general odor that was strangely but recognizably clean. It was impossible, but he smelled like water.

“I think so,” I said. “Where’s your car?”

“I walked.”

“From Wylie’s apartment?”

“As modes of transportation go, it’s both safe and reliable,” he said. “Listen, would you care for a drink?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, and smiled. Under the brim of his hat, sweat was gathering in drops and preparing to trickle down his face.

“So you want to get a drink,” I said slowly. “Right now.”

He reached into the car and placed his hand flat against my forehead.

“You’re sure you’re all right to drive?”

I glared at him, and he grinned widely, his teeth gleaming against his dusty skin, and then sprang away from the door with a light, quick step. A millisecond later, it seemed, he was sitting on the passenger side.

The streets were crowded with traffic, and I rolled down the windows and sighed, asking myself what the hell I was doing. Angus gave me occasional directions and fiddled constantly with the radio, listening to ten seconds or less of every single song, ten words or less of talk. It was basically the most annoying thing ever. I kept glaring at him, which only made him laugh. This went on for fifteen minutes as mothers in minivans cut me off, truckers barreled down on top of me, and packs of teenage girls stared at us and giggled for no reason that I could see. I was sweating a lot and hating it. Finally Angus reached behind him into the backseat of the car, leaning far over to rummage around on the floor, his sweatpanted butt perilously close to my shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He turned around clutching a fistful of cassette tapes in his hands and sorted through them quickly before sticking one in.

I heard strings.

“The sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra,” Angus said. “They’ve always been a favorite of mine.”

“Is that right?”

“It is. Take this left on Indian School, please.”

The sweet sounds seemed to calm him down, and he sat looking out the window and mouthing the words. Two crooned songs later I pulled up at a motor lodge on a deserted strip of road. On the sepia-colored sign was a neon martini glass and the word “Cocktails” in a flowing script.

Angus leapt out of the car and opened the door to the cocktail lounge. Inside, through the gloomy dark, I could just make out booths with cracked red vinyl and tables made of dark pressed wood that was supposed to resemble mahogany. It looked like the set of a canceled TV show.

The waitress, a woman in her forties with a devastated face, sat smoking a cigarette on a stool at the bar. She wore a black miniskirt and beige panty hose with no shoes, and she was the only person there. We slid into a booth so small that my knees were touching Angus’s. I shifted around and crossed my legs. Angus leaned back and ran his hands approvingly over the vinyl. “I think I’m going to have a martini,” he said. “Would you like a martini?”

“Okay.”

“Jeanine,” he called to the waitress, who had not gotten up. “We’d like two martinis here.”

“Vodka or gin,” said Jeanine, stubbing out her cigarette with what appeared to be total exhaustion. She reached down past the ashtray to where her shoes — black flats — were sitting on the bar, then pulled them on with a grimace.

“Gin, of course,” Angus said. “And a big glass of water for my friend here,” he added, smiling at me. “You know, gin is the canonical martini. If I wanted a vodka martini I’d say a vodka martini. To distinguish it from the standard version, right?”

“Olives or a twist,” said Jeanine.

“Olives!” he said. “Olives, definitely.”

“Me too,” I said.

Jeanine nodded and set to work behind the bar.

Angus Beam would not stop smiling. He leaned forward, putting both his freckled hands palms down on the table. His fingernails were ragged and chapped around the edges.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re smiling like there’s something funny.”

“I’m smiling,” he said, “because I’m happy.”

To this I had nothing to say. Jeanine brought the drinks in small plastic glasses, two tiny dark olives, shriveled as raisins, speared on each toothpick.

“I didn’t think you’d do this kind of thing,” I said.

“What, go on a date? I just had the impulse. I’m an impulsive person.”

“This is a date?”

“Well. Never mind, if that’s not what you meant. Go on.”

“I meant going to a cocktail lounge. Drinking martinis.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I picture you and your friends in some kind of outdoor hut, drinking naturally refined alcohol that comes from, like, hemp or something.”

His eyes widened. “They can do that?”

“Not as far as I know, but I’m not the expert here.”

He winked and mouthed both olives off the toothpick at once. “Listen,” he said, chewing, “I think our world is an ungodly mess. That we live in a society overwhelmed by its own poisonous excesses. That people who don’t see the truth of this are blind or stupid or both. But a world in which a man can drink a martini with a beautiful woman on a sunny afternoon — well, that’s a world with some redeeming qualities.”

I rolled my eyes. “I guess I’ll drink to that,” I said. We clinked glasses and I raised mine to my lips. As I tipped it back the toothpick fell forward and I splashed gin down my chin and the front of my shirt. I flushed deeply and dabbed myself with a napkin. Angus noticed, but pretended not to, and I liked him for it.

When I finally got some gin down it filled me with a kind of gorgeous, beneficial warmth, as if I’d been cold without knowing it for days. The room dimmed then, and yellow light flickered in some plastic sconces on the wall. From some crevice of the lounge, music began to play, another crooning torch song, this time by a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be Jeanine, sitting on her stool by the bar, her lips against a microphone connected to a karaoke machine. She stared at our booth and sang in a tuneless, gravelly voice:

I met a man in a hotel bar

He was in from out of town

He said I was cute

I thought he was quirky

He took me out for dinner

And fed me tangerines

He took me for all I had

And left me in Albuquerque.

At the end of the song she nodded and stood up, and we clapped. Into the microphone she murmured quietly, “The lyrics are my own.”

We drank one round and ordered another. We were still the only patrons.

“So,” I said. “Did you grow up in Albuquerque?”

He shot me an amused look. “No, I’m from Brooklyn,” he said. “Flatbush Avenue.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not.”

“So how’d you wind up out here?”

“You say that as if there’s something wrong with Albuquerque.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just the middle of nowhere, that’s all.”

“I happen to like nowhere,” he said. “Besides, I found work here.”

“Which is?”

“I’m a plumber. I work for Plumbarama.”

“You fix toilets?” I looked at his fingers grasping the stem of his glass, at the dirt underneath the fingernails, and thought about that odor that surrounded him constantly: the smell of chemicals and ammonia and water.

“Toilets, sometimes, yes. Also sinks, bathtubs, washing machines, drainage systems, septic tanks. Nothing functions without plumbing. Nothing goes forward without leaving waste behind. Plumbing is the circulatory system of the civilized world. It allows us to forget our dirt, our shit and stink. It allows us to pretend. Wash our hands of it, as it were.”

“As it were.”

“But everything in this world has its price, even cleanliness. We can’t continue to pump our waste into the waterways without figuring out how to recirculate and clean it. We can’t allow First World nations to monopolize gluttonous quantities of water while Third World countries suffer for lack of it. If we don’t deal with plumbing, then we aren’t confronting the basic reality of our own presence here.”

This made a certain kind of sense, I thought, although it might’ve been due to the gin. “You think about this stuff a lot, don’t you?” I said.

“I guess so. I have time, while I’m unclogging somebody’s sink, to consider the larger implications.”

“So how does being a plumber fit in with all your group activities?”

“It’s all connected.” He opened his wallet and withdrew a folded piece of paper, an intricate, hand-drawn diagram, rather beautiful, of pipes and arrows overlaid in a complex geometry. There were tanks and tubes and valves and other mechanical forms that I couldn’t begin to identify, each labeled with neat, tiny letters going down the alphabet.

“What is it?”

“It’s the future of plumbing,” he said, and his eyes held mine in a brief, electric moment before he went on. “Citywide composting toilets. Gray-water usage and flow constrictor fittings and pipes made of recycled plastic. A quasi-steady state system that will restore logic to the human component of the hydrologic cycle. In twenty years, when the Beam model is fully implemented, our current plumbing equipment will seem as grotesque and outdated as the shit-filled streets of the Middle Ages.”

“Wow,” I said.

He nodded and put the paper away. Round three followed with reassuring speed. Jeanine sang a couple more numbers. Angus talked about the ideology of plumbing and ran his hands through his red hair until it was poking out all over. I felt the gin coursing through my veins. At some point — who knows when? — he stood up and threw some loose bills on the table, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to my feet. We waved good-bye to Jeanine and then we were standing in the parking lot of the motor lodge, next to a red pickup truck, kissing like crazy.

Things were soft and warm and endless. The moon shone somewhere behind my right eye. I leaned back against the body of the truck and pulled him toward me until his hips ground against mine. I felt a crucial need to be naked. In the shadowy air of room 102, comforter thrown to the carpeted floor, thin sheets slippery against my skin, I ran my hands over his warm shoulder muscles and down to the small of his back; he touched me everywhere. We had sex, passed out, woke up, had sex again.

When I woke up the second time it was only midnight. This seemed implausible, even shocking, but I guessed that when you start drinking in the afternoon, you open up a lot of extra time in the evening. I peered through the blinds at the parking lot, my stomach quivering and uneasy. A low, lumbering shape I hoped was a raccoon was nosing around the trash can by the ice machine. Music was playing distantly. Angus Beam lay with his cheek pressed into the pillow, his face crumpled and red, snoring lightly, one freckled arm flung over the side of the bed, the fingers grazing the floor. His skin glowed in the dim light like a Renaissance nude’s. His smell was on my skin.

I was in the car before it occurred to me that I was still drunk and shouldn’t be driving. The city streets were wide and empty, though, the white lines like arrows directing me home, and I floated above it all, directing the car from a great and mighty distance, like a ship in space. I was home and in bed in what seemed like no time at all, and fell into unsettling, science-fiction dreams stippled with images so bright they almost woke me up. In one, my father came back to us, older, silver-haired, and confessed that he hadn’t died at all; in another, the sun turned from yellow to red, an apocalyptic event signaling environmental catastrophe, and cascaded down toward the earth where, just before impact, it became the red hair of Angus Beam.

My bladder woke me at four-fifteen. I went to the kitchen to down some more water and was leaning against the counter drinking when I heard noises outside, and for a second I just waited, my stomach trembling. Sidling up to the living-room window, I could see a figure in the driveway beneath the jaundiced rays cast by a streetlight. My brother was standing there in the dark, bent under the open hood of the Caprice.