Free The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin Page A

this stuff a lot, don’t you?” I said.
    â€œI guess so. I have time, while I’m unclogging somebody’s sink, to consider the larger implications.”
    â€œSo how does being a plumber fit in with all your group activities?”
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œIt’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 In twenty years, when the Beam model is fully implemented, our current plumbing equipment will seem as grotesque and outdated as the shit-filled streets of the Middle Ages.”
    â€œWow,” 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