Free The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin

that’s not what you meant. Go on.”
    â€œI meant going to a cocktail lounge. Drinking martinis.”
    â€œWhy would you think that?”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œNot 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.
    â€œSo,” I said. “Did you grow up in Albuquerque?”
    He shot me an amused look. “No, I’m from Brooklyn,” he said. “Flatbush Avenue.”
    â€œYou’re kidding.”
    â€œI am not.”
    â€œSo how’d you wind up out here?”
    â€œYou say that as if there’s something wrong with Albuquerque.”
    â€œThere’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just the middle of nowhere, that’s all.”
    â€œI happen to like nowhere,” he said. “Besides, I found work here.”
    â€œWhich is?”
    â€œI’m a plumber. I work for Plumbarama.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œToilets, 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.”
    â€œAs it were.”
    â€œBut 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