The Missing Person (23 page)

“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.”

“You would,” another nurse said, and they both laughed.

I sat there in the lounge rubbing my face. There was a rattling sound by the doors that made me look up. Behind the glass I saw as in a dream the tousled red hair of Angus Beam.

I stood up and went outside, the city's apartment buildings and offices and traffic glittering in the morning sun, the slight coolness in the air hinting at fall. August was ending, the summer was ending, everything was ending.

“I thought we should have one last cocktail,” Angus said.

“It's like seven o'clock in the morning or something.”

“I know,” he said. “But I'm leaving.”

We looked at each other. His freckles seemed to multiply before my eyes. I'd forgotten how blue his eyes were, how white his smile. “Let me guess,” I said. “Bisbee, Arizona.”

“How'd you know?” he said, and grinned.

We walked down the unscenic driveway toward the parking lot, the sun glinting off the fenders of cars. In the distance I could hear traffic and planes, the city awakening.

“I'm leaving too,” I said. “Going back to New York.”

It sounded as if I were saying it just because he was leaving, but I wasn't. I hadn't realized that I was going back to face Michael, school, the fortune-teller across the street, but once I said it I knew it was true. I was never going to be the kind of person I'd thought Michael could make me—art-world sophisticate, graduate-school operator, easy, slick sharer in romantic affairs—but that didn't mean that I could just abandon the city and everything I'd started there.

Angus and I sat down on a bench located on a cement island next to the parking lot. Judging from the quantity of cigarette butts scattered on the ground, this was where the smokers from the hospital congregated. I tried to think of what to say to him, about sex and emotion and about how all touch means something, even if that something is not exactly love.

He held my hand. “How's Psyche?”

“She's in intensive care,” I said. “She has an upper respiratory infection and smoke inhalation and I'm not even sure what else.”

“That sounds bad.”

“It is bad,” I said.

He blew a soft sigh from between his lips.

I leaned against his shoulder and closed my eyes. I felt like I could sit there forever, in a moment without past or future, the bright light warming my eyelids. “You were going to rob the casino, weren't you?” I said. “While the lights were out. I heard you talking about the ventilation system. HVAC.”

“Could be,” he said.

“Why?”

“For the money.”

“Angus.”

“Well, okay,” he said. “Theoretically speaking, a lot of money could prevent the development of the Shangri-la golf course. There's a lot of state requirements that a golf course has to meet. Impact statements have to pass. Zoning and regulations. A lot of officials have to approve various permits and licenses. And officials, you know, are susceptible.”

“You're kidding. That would never work.”

“You're probably right.”

“It's a good thing you didn't go ahead with it.”

“Yeah,” he said, “a good thing.”

The tone of his voice made me open my eyes, and he was looking away. I knew they'd gone ahead and done it anyway, and that at the beginning of the summer I would've said it was ridiculous and reckless and stupid and wrong, and that now I wasn't so sure. I thought of all the times I'd driven past that sign, the pure bare bones of the land beneath it, of the way the world looked when the lights of Albuquerque went dark. The sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra slid into my head.
Night and
day, you are the one. Only you beneath the moon and under
the sun.
“I can't believe you did it,” I said. “You're completely insane. Out of your mind.”

Angus laughed. “And you're funny,” he said. “You stand outside of things, and hold people to standards you're allowed to change at any time. I like that about you.”

It was the least charming compliment I'd ever received, and it made me smile.

“You're completely insane,” I said again.

“I know it,” he said. “Shut your eyes.” He pushed gently on my shoulder until I was sitting upright, not touching him, then kissed me on the mouth.

The color of the sun behind my eyelids mingled, in my mind, with the redness of his hair and the flush of his skin, and with the memory of my blood rushing as we moved together. And I waited even longer than I had to before opening my eyes, to be sure that he was gone.

When I got back to the ER, a horrible shriek was coming down a hallway, a woman sobbing and shouting unintelligibly. The nurses at reception were acting as if nothing was happening while family members in the waiting area whispered and exchanged panicked looks as they tried to guess whether the voice was one of their own. To me it sounded like Irina.

I ran down the hallway to an open door. The shrieks were piercing and Czech. Irina was sitting up in bed wailing and banging her fists against the mattress on either side of her body, her round, pretty face twisted and splotchy, and her body wasted and frail. Wylie was standing beside her, trying helplessly to catch her fists as she flailed away. A doctor was looking on with an expression of detachment that unnerved me. The only person whose head turned when I came in was my mother, who was crying. She took my arm and led me out into the green hallway.

“They couldn't save Psyche,” she said, and I started crying too.

After death, a great numbness, like a coat of ice over a pond. My mother and I made room in the condo for Irina and Wylie to move in. They stayed in the room I'd been using, and I slept on the couch in the living room. The days that followed, for all their grief and horror and shock, resembled my childhood more than any in recent years: living again in a house full of people, eating meals and doing dishes together, maneuvering around one another for showers. Irina was a shadow of herself, and we all thought, Wylie especially, that she would not survive the loss. He was with her every second, holding her hand and looking at her, as if the fact of being
seen
would somehow keep her alive. And maybe he was right; she did not die.

On a brutally hot afternoon Psyche was buried in the same cemetery that held my father. My mother had made all the arrangements, and the four of us stood under a tent as the unfathomably small casket was lowered into the ground. So far as I knew, Stan and Berto and Angus and Gerald weren't even aware of what had happened. Irina's eyes looked dead in their sockets. The earth was dry and cracked, and a breeze blew sandy grit into our faces. Except for the priest, nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.

We kept on rising, eating, and sleeping through the final days of August. It looked like life but wasn't, really. The Sunrise Casino reported a substantial theft, and the Shangri-la golf course was put on hold pending environmental review. David Michaelson managed to persuade the police that Wylie, Irina, and I bore no responsibility for any materials in the car we'd borrowed; what Gerald told them, I didn't know and didn't care to ask. I recovered the Caprice and took it in to be repaired. When my mother went back to work, I asked her to book me a plane ticket to New York, and she did.

I wrapped Eva Kent's paintings in bubble wrap and brown paper, and arranged to ship them back to my apartment. I wanted to hang them there, as a reminder of the desert, the summer, and, most of all, my father.

As I was finishing the packing, I decided to call Harold Wallace, who picked up the phone on the second ring and sounded happy enough to hear from me. “I'm taking the paintings back to New York,” I told him.

“Going to write that little paper of yours?” he said.

“My
dissertation,
” I said, offended until I remembered that I hadn't exactly behaved like a paragon of art-historical scholarship around him. Then I sighed. “I'm not sure it'll be about Eva, but I am going to write it.”

“Well, you know I'm not really retired,” Harold said. “I still represent a select group of wonderful artists. You may want to take a look sometime.”

“Thanks,” I said. There was a silence on the line, in which I imagined him slipping into one of his reveries, in his white living room. “Listen, I saw Eva.” Harold still said nothing. I thought about telling him about Lincoln and our conversation about his father, but what would be the point? “I won't go see her again,” I added. “Or bother any of you. I just wanted to tell you, well, that I really do love her work.” I waited for a long couple seconds, wondering if Harold was even there, until he spoke.

“Me, too,” he said.

Throughout all this time, Wylie and Irina stayed in their room most of the day and night. They were both losing weight, their clothes seeming to grow larger and larger. I was afraid for both of them, and yet I didn't know what to say that could make them feel any better.

In my dreams, Psyche burbled and sang and waved her fat, sweet arms, and then there were crashes and screams and cars careening off slick roads into the chaos of an unlit night. Waking in tears, I tried not to imagine what Irina dreamed about, or thought when she awoke.

I missed Angus, his quick smile, his skin, how happy he always was to see me. I wished I could have stayed with him forever in a world without New York or Bisbee, without consequence or regret; a world of cheap motels, cable television, gin, and sex. I tried to picture what he was doing now, where he was, who he was with. Lying in bed one early morning, just past six, I asked myself what seemed like the most important question: how does anyone get used to the ends of things?

I got up and took a cup of coffee outside. The days that week had been hot and windless, but in the early hours the air was cool, almost chill. I decided to go for a drive. The streets were still empty, and the first chile-roasting stands were setting up along the major boulevards. Everything looked washed out and pale, under a kind of brown cloud, and fighter jets from the base boomed overhead, two by two.

I pulled up in front of the Michaelsons' house. Since my last visit, the people who lived in our old house had painted the shutters purple and added a stained-glass dragonfly to the display of butterflies on the front wall. A few tiny humming-birds were dive-bombing the red sections of the dragonfly, thinking they might find sustenance there. David came out wearing a blue bathrobe and leather slippers. His hair was a mess. He bent down stiffly to pick up the newspaper lying folded on his front lawn. As he straightened up, he saw me sitting there in the car, lifted a hand, and waved.

I got out and started up the walk.

He stood there without looking down at the paper, which impressed me; most people can't just stand in one place and watch somebody walk up to them. He didn't move a muscle. Beside him, in the unmanicured front yard, a prickly pear cactus spread thick and purple with fruit that was starting to rot. Another pair of fighter jets came roaring overhead and disappeared into the cloudless horizon.

“How's your mom?” David said once I was standing in front of him.

“She's all right, I guess,” I said, noticing there were circles beneath his eyes. I'd assumed that she saw him during the day, or at the very least spoke to him on the phone. “You haven't talked to her?”

“She said she needed some time with her family.”

Nestled somewhere inside the prickly pear an insect was buzzing angrily. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. “Aren't you her family too?”

David looked surprised and amused. “Ha,” he said. His robe was falling open in the front, revealing thick chest hair. He stuck the newspaper under his arm and readjusted the robe.

“I came to say I'm leaving,” I said.

“Is that so,” he said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Well,” he said, “don't be a stranger.” He laid a hand lightly on my arm, a brief but deliberate touch, then stepped back inside his house.

When I got back to the condo, my mother was drinking coffee in her neatly pressed work clothes. She smiled when she saw me, a haggard, joyless smile.

I sat down at the table opposite her and watched her make toast. “I just got back from David's.”

My mother, applying butter to her toast with a knife designed specifically for that purpose, seemed intent on spreading it to a scientific degree of evenness. Her face was still frozen in a dazed smile that looked even more bereft than the contorted features of grief.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you.”

“How come you haven't been talking to him? You can't just act like he doesn't exist.”

She sat down and started to eat, taking small, neat bites that reminded me of somebody, although I couldn't at first place it. Then I realized: it was David. I watched as she chewed, swallowed, and sipped coffee.

“I've been busy,” she finally said.

I made a snorting sound and contemplated that dazed smile, wondering if she'd had that same expression in the aftermath of my father's death. But of all those days and weeks I could remember nothing at all.

Wylie came out of the bedroom, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down next to me at the table. Hairs from his long braid were frizzing all around his head, golden in the morning light. He looked older and terribly, wrongly thinner.