Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Where you edded?

  He was shirtless and had a body that suggested he lived on a cliff and the only way to get home was to climb it.

  Takaka?

  I was never sure how to pronounce it, which ka got the emphasis.

  ’Swearum edded. Get in.

  He moved boxes of beer from the passenger seat to the back, which was piled with duffel bags of I don’t know what. He wore sunglasses, a big, utilitarian pair that wasn’t designed in this decade or even the decade before this one. I ducked into the passenger seat and hugged my backpack like an airplane flotation device. Reggae music loud, windows down, cigarette smoke ribboning around the car, then shooting out the window like it was late for something.

  After a few minutes the man started to shout over the music in my general direction. He was saying things in varying tones, maybe telling me a story about the bridge we were driving over or the fields we were driving toward. His voice sounded like vinyl played backward. I understood nothing. I said, Yeah, yeah, and nodded my head and raised my eyebrows when he raised his eyebrows and said, Oh. Sometimes he would laugh and turn his head to see if I was laughing and of course I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed, then I stopped laughing.

  He turned the music up, lit another cigarette, and opened a beer as we drove up a mountain, making hairpin turns at unadvisable speeds. My organs let me know how much they disapproved of where I was sitting—I couldn’t remember why I had ever wanted to go anywhere at all.

  We reached the top and the view was not spectacular. A curve of unremarkable green under a faint grey fog. He turned down the music and pulled the car over.

  At’s Ozzie, terr, see?

  He pointed at a man sitting under a tree and eating something out of his hands. A motorbike leaned against the trunk.

  Say yer my wife, you keen?

  Sorry?

  At’s my mate Ozzie there and I’m keen to take the piss out of him. Ya keen? Haven’t got to do much—maybe lemme put my arm round you or something.

  All right, I said, hoping I hadn’t agreed to anything disagreeable.

  He got out of the car and I got out of the car and we walked over to Ozzie. Ozzie and the man talked fast in grumbles and smacked each other’s back. Ozzie called him Judas.

  Who’s ’at here?

  ’Atsma wife, Annie, here.

  Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair.

  Aye, Judas, ya crazy fucker, Ozzie said. Aye, ya fucker, ya crazy fucker. D’you go out on the piss and wake up hitched, then? Ya crazy fucker!

  I shrugged.

  A stubby for the missus? How’d the little wifey like a beer, eh?

  Oh, that’s okay, I said, but Ozzie was already handing me a squat, amber bottle and pulling two more out of a small cooler attached to his motorbike.

  Let me, Judas said, popping my bottle’s cap with a lighter.

  Judas and Ozzie made more noises that seemed to be words about some piece of machinery that Ozzie owned, something that Judas apparently had repaired or broken—their sentences half grumble and all slang. I looked down the neck of my beer and noticed that a dead bee was floating in it but kept drinking. Up the road at an abandoned-looking petrol station a man was dancing in the doorway to staticky music. The dancing man wore overalls and a little hat and moved his arms close to his body like he was running, but he wasn’t going anywhere. A woman was laughing somewhere, but I couldn’t tell if she was being entertained or tortured. A yellow pay-phone box was there, too, so I considered what would happen if I went over there and picked up the phone and called my husband, my actual husband, who, I knew, had supposedly lost any interest in where I was or where I was going or who I was getting married to out here in tomorrow, and just then my fake husband put a thick arm around me and as he pulled me closer, his fingers caught on a flimsy string of beads I was wearing, something one of Dillon’s hippies had strung on me with no uncertain ceremony, and all the beads went scattering into the dirt. Ozzie howled.

  Wee cracker of a lad you picked up here, wifey!

  Ozzie went down to pinch up the little white and blue beads. Judas stared at me for a moment longer than I thought made sense.

  Fuckin’ hell, Annie. Sorry. Then he went to his knees, racing to collect them as if I was keeping time.

  I took this moment to go to the pay phone and I called my husband despite all the reasons I had not to do that—I thought hearing him hear my voice would help me become a more accurate version of myself, that I might be able to understand who I was being if my husband could hear what I sounded like right then and reflect it back at me, and I thought I was ready to hear him and I thought he might have been ready to hear me, and I called for other reasons, too. An idle moment. A faked marriage with a stranger. The grey swamp between the day I left and where I was now. But instead of my husband, I just got some stale filler.

  The number you have just dialed—

  Not even a recorded version of his.

  —is not available.

  Just those machined words.

  Please leave a message—

  That metal woman.

  Leave.

  Please.

  17

  The second thing they tell you about hitchhiking is never accept invitations home for tea because tea really means dinner and dinner really means sex and sex really means they’re going to kill you.

  What’s for tea, wifey? Ozzie asked as I came back from the pay phone.

  Aye, there, she’s my wifey, not yours! I’ve got a freezer to the lid with snappers if you’re keen.

  I’m keen, I said, thinking, What else could I be?

  While he was frying the snappers, a splash of oil burned Ozzie’s arm, but he just laughed a fat, heavy one and said, Good as gold, goodasgold, goodasgold. He showed me a few scars on his arms and a long, brutal one running down the side of his knee. This one’ll be a beaut, he said, admiring the blister island filling with juice from somewhere deep inside him.

  Judas had an old couch on his porch where we ate sitting in a row, but at first the plates were too hot to set on our bare knees, so we had to hold them by the edges, and the fish was too hot to eat so we just stared, a strange meditation, like this was our offering—slain, fried fish for some kind of god. After we ate, Ozzie and Judas went behind the house to deal with the machine they had been talking about earlier.

  Be a good wifey, Judas said, kissing the top of my head. We’ll be out in the back with the beast. Judas was still wearing his sunglasses and I realized I still hadn’t seen my temporary husband’s eyes.

  Ozzie laughed. Aye, the beast! He punched Judas’s arm.

  I sat on the couch mostly asleep with my eyes open, thinking of nighttime ocean, listening to the black mumble of it out there. For a while I heard metal hitting metal, slowly at first then faster and faster, then a kind of sawing noise, then it all went away. Everything got quiet and I couldn’t even hear Ozzie or Judas speaking. I wondered where they’d gone, what their mouths were doing if not filled with beer or barking at each other. The ocean kept mumbling.

  The next morning I woke on that ratty sofa and went to find Judas and Ozzie asleep in the house on couches in front of a muted television. There was a close-up of a man in drenched white clothes, standing on a field, shaking fists above his head of bared teeth.

  I’m leaving, I said.

  Ozzie snored.

  I’m leaving now, Judas … This is your wife. And I’m leaving.

  I put my hands on my hips and spoke in Annie’s voice.

  I am leaving because I want a divorce. In fact, we’re already divorced because I called a midnight lawyer and signed your name.

  Judas didn’t move. His mouth gaped like a slit in a fish belly and I saw his lip suck slightly in, then out again.

  It’s over! Over, over, over! Please do not attempt to contact me.

  I went back out to the porch, swung my backpack on, walked out the side door and up the dirt path to th
e road. I was angry. I didn’t know why I was angry but I knew that I was angry and I hadn’t felt anger in so long it hit me harder, like coffee after weeks without, and this was the morning I wondered if all this aloneness was starting to sour me somehow, if I was becoming an increasingly ridiculous person—ridiculous for faking a twelve-hour marriage, faking a one-minute divorce, for leaving my real home and real husband, ridiculous for even thinking that leaving was ridiculous, because this was the decision that I had made because I am a person and people make decisions—yeses and noes—it’s supposed to be like that.

  A postman’s truck had come up the road and stopped a few meters from me, so I walked over and got in. The postman had his hand on the door handle. He was frowning.

  Where am I?

  I hadn’t meant to say that aloud. It was just what I was thinking.

  Just east of Takaka. At the foot of Marble Mountain, the postman said. He let his hand drop off the handle and stopped frowning, as if he was happy to be reminded of where he was.

  I didn’t think Marble Mountain existed.

  I suppose it doesn’t. That’s just what people call it. It’s not even a mountain. Just a big hill.

  Isn’t it also a song? Or a made-up place?

  Could be.

  I put my hands in my lap.

  Listen, he said, I wasn’t actually stopping to pick you up. I have to make a drop here, make a delivery.

  No cars had driven by and I thought it might have been too early to get a ride from anyone but him, and while I was sitting there thinking this the postman got out, moved something out of the back of the truck, and I stopped thinking and instead watched a bird in a tree. She was moving her head up and down as if agreeing with the morning.

  The postman got back into the truck and said he’d take me to town, so he did and when he let me out in a parking lot on a street that seemed to be the entirety of Takaka, I stood still for a moment and smiled at the postman while I thought of that bloody stingray I’d seen when I was on the ferry and I wondered if it was just another dead thing in the ocean now, sinking to the bottom, and the postman drove away slowly, as if he wasn’t sure if it was all right to leave me unattended, like I could explode or get kidnapped.

  18

  It was my last session at the clinic when I began to wonder if my husband was in on it, somehow—the questions, electrodes, blue liquid—if maybe he was on the other side of a mirrored window somewhere, but I didn’t remember any mirrored windows, so maybe it was more subtle, maybe he had a lab technician or the lead scientist or the whole team on his side, and it was everyone versus me, an undetectable war against an un-understandable wife, a Trojan horse—this study I’d volunteered for, for the sake of science, a discovery, for the sake of a slightly better understanding of the mess of all minds.

  At my last session the man with the black hair and large, soft hands was sliding the cold jelly and electrodes on my scalp as usual. We watched the monitor and he’d move one electrode, trying to get the right feedback, but another one would go off (Oh, drat) and the little digits flashing didn’t mean anything to me, but one of them would switch from maybe a 2 to a 0 (Oh, drat) and he’d worm his fingers through my hair, all matted with the jelly, and push the electrode and I’d feel something shift that was tiny and cool, like the ice-cold foot of a fly (Oh, drat), and I looked up at the man with the black hair and the large, soft hands and tried to estimate how well he could lie and whether this whole study was just a long search for what part of me was missing. What had once seemed completely impersonal and routine now seemed invasive and insane—grotesque in how close it let people get into my brain. But, no, of course not, of course not of course not ofcoursenot. This was a study, not a plot. I had signed a form months ago that said this was a study and they weren’t going to use any of this information in any way that would hurt me and even I would not have access to the information they took and it would all be anonymous and the lab technicians had also taken oaths, I’m sure, and it was all for science, not for my husband, and this was a prestigious university and prestigious people were a part of this work and everyone was playing by the rules and my husband was not a part of it, not in on it, not even close to it and I had no real reason to think that he would or could be because he was also a prestigious person, wasn’t he, with his thin hair and serious eyes and chalkboard and the dedication he had to numbers, to finding something that was somehow narrowly hidden in them, and he knew that thing was there, somewhere, in the numbers and similarly I knew (or thought I knew) that something was hidden in my husband and I, too, had to find it, had been looking for it, had wondered if somehow something of Ruby was hidden in him, somehow, if she was folded into him by accident.

  Are you ready?

  The soft-handed, black-haired man was behind the window (just clear, no mirror) and speaking through the microphone to me.

  Yes, I said.

  Would you like me to read the rules of the study again?

  No, thank you.

  All right. We’ll begin. What is your earliest memory?

  Fireflies, I said, because you were supposed to say whatever came to mind first, no matter what it was, but if it was just one word they would ask the same question again—

  What is your earliest memory?

  The day my mother brought Ruby home. She was two. I was also two. I don’t know if I actually remember this or if I just remember a photograph of this, and my mother was tan and happy looking, like she’d been on vacation, which she had just before picking up Ruby at the orphanage, and she was holding Ruby on her hip and she was smiling but the pictures of my mother bringing me home from the hospital two years before looked like someone had just beaten her up and handed her a baby.

  Thank you. Tell me a nightmare you had as a child.

  That I’d grow so big overnight that I wouldn’t be able to leave my room.

  Thank you. Please explain the feeling of love.

  Someone holding you by the wrist.

  Thank you. What is your happiest memory as an adult?

  The summer after Ruby died, being at the park with my husband. The light. We smiled.

  Thank you. What do you believe happens when we die?

  And I understood that you were supposed to say the first thing that came to mind but nothing actually came to mind in that moment and in fact everything seemed to slip out of mind, and all I could think of was a desert, a canyon, and that didn’t seem to have much to do with anything—

  What do you believe happens when we die?

  More silence.

  What do you believe happens when we die?

  A desert, a canyon.

  Thank you. What is your fondest childhood memory?

  Ruby’s tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France. It was also my birthday party. We didn’t know her exact birthday, but we guessed it could be maybe the same day as mine.

  Thank you. What do you know for sure?

  I don’t know anything for sure.

  Thank you. What is your greatest fear?

  I wanted to ask, what exactly did he mean by greatest—largest, most ferocious, grandest, most grandiose, most impossible—but I knew that the content of the questions wasn’t supposed to matter and the content of my answers also didn’t matter, because they were just studying the way a brain moves, how but not exactly where it goes.

  What is your greatest fear?

  I did everything wrong.

  Thank you. What is the point of love?

  To distract us.

  Thank you. Is there an afterlife?

  The questions kept coming like normal on this last day (for me) of the study and I went to the lab for more blood work and I smiled at the nurse when she smiled at me and I drank the blue liquid, then went to the dark room and I loved the dark room, but when the man asked, What is the value of travel? and What is the most memorable place you have ever visited?, I wondered for a moment if the
y knew something about my plans to leave the next week and I began to wonder, again, if my husband was in on all this—and I worried he knew I had the ticket for the next week and I wondered if he’d try to stop me—whether he’d somehow lock me in the apartment or show up at the gate or buy a ticket for the seat next to mine—this is how it would have gone in the soaps, I knew, overturned chairs, screamed names and vengeance and maybe a curse and often a window punched through and often blood and often a hospital, and in the hospital there’d be one kind moment between two lovely, loving people before the IVs were ripped out and beeping monitors went flat, a doctor, a Clear!, a jolt, but that was for television, for fiction, an exaggeration of what the rest of life was and I remembered my mother watching the soaps, this yellow-tinted memory of my mother behind a cloud of smoke, Ruby sitting at her feet, a forgotten bowl of cereal now lukewarm mush there in their real life, which they weren’t a part of in that moment, but now I couldn’t remember if this was a memory or a photograph or a total invention because I’d asked my mother once what soap she’d followed in the eighties and she said she hadn’t and didn’t know what I was talking about and maybe she was right, but I think she was wrong, and I think that’s the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your life.

  When I got home after that last day after the study I had an urge to look through my husband’s files extensively, an urge I’d been repeatedly having and repeatedly suffocating because I knew it wasn’t nice to snoop around like that. When I finally gave in I actually had no clear idea of what I was even looking for, but I told myself that it didn’t matter what I was looking for because the urge was large and serious and it was best just to get out of its way, so I did and I found his mother’s death certificate and it didn’t say suicide in the cause-of-death box, it said accidental, and my chest went warm for a moment because my first thought was that my husband had lied so that he could say he’d felt what I’d felt, that he knew what it was like to see a person lose herself to herself, that he’d created a fiction so he could get near the stuff of life that I was in. And if he had lied then what a horrible thing to spend such a long time lying about and what a sick thing to do—but what had probably happened, I assured myself, was that the person who filled out this certificate couldn’t find the ability to write the word suicide in that box because some people just can’t stand to live in a world where people sometimes take themselves out of it by choice and some people need to live in a world where suicides are all some kind of misunderstanding, some kind of accident, some lie that needs correcting and this reminded me of how at the end of my last morning at the clinic someone had said, See you next week? And I said, Yes. And I knew I was lying but that someone didn’t know I was lying unless that someone knew enough about me now to know when I was lying and if that someone did know that much they still lied right back to me by saying, Take care, and that was kind of whoever it was, to let us go on living in a little fiction; sometimes I think I don’t get enough of that in life, though other times I think I might get more than my fair share.