Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Are you okay? I said.

  Are you okay? he said, then we both said nothing, and he turned and ran down the block, crawled under a bush on the edge of a garden. It shook as he went through it and then it stopped shaking and I waited for the sound of a door shutting or to see a light in the house turn on or to hear some voice, some sense that he was okay, but there was nothing and there was a possibility that someone might later slice him out of existence and even though I knew that he wouldn’t be fine forever, I wanted to have a sense of his security right then, and I knew it would be a false sense of security, but at least it would be a sense of security, but I kept walking toward the ocean, trying to remind myself that before I had seen the boy he had been existing just fine without my worry and I turned a corner and the midnight ocean was there, all sudden and massive. The coast was all smooth, grey oval rocks and I trudged through it to get closer to the ocean, overcome by the sound of it, the blue-grey arc where it met the navy sky. The ocean sighed and moaned and sighed. I sat down, the weight of my pack burrowing me slightly into the rocks, and I listened to the ocean’s sighs and thought of my husband’s sighs, his tiny sighs and the story he once told me of the year he spent religious while he was working for a nonprofit that tried to feed and clothe the shoeless, ball-bellied, sunken-eyed children of far-off countries.

  A seagull walked up and looked at me as if we had known each other for years so I should know exactly what he was thinking and I’d never seen a seagull out walking in the dark, but then the seagull limped away. I found myself floating in and out of weary midparalysis, and all I could see was the dark sky and the flutter of my own eyelids, a fleshy curtain slipping down; I had half-seen dreams of my husband and the seagull, their souls shifting in and out of each other’s body—sometimes my husband was inside a seagull and sometimes a seagull was inside my husband—and this went on for a while until I reached some kind of legal limit for this kind of thing, according to the man who woke me up, a morning sky behind him, this man who seemed smaller than my backpack—he was saying, Good morning, good morning, good morning, as loud as it seemed he could, so I woke up looking at this stranger wishing me a good morning, but I knew he didn’t want me to have a particularly good morning—he wanted me to collect myself, get myself together, show him my passport, stand up, yes, stand up now, thank you.

  Have you been taking drugs? You been out on the piss?

  Nope. No drugs, I said.

  Then have you been on the piss—have you been drinking heavily?

  Not even lightly.

  You came here by yourself?

  (And when the cop said by yourself, I remembered that day many months before when I got on a bus in Brooklyn heading to a city beach alone on a grey Tuesday, and when I asked the bus driver if this bus was going to the beach he had said, You’re going to the beach by yourself?, and he said it in a laughing, disbelieving voice and I felt small and silly and lost, though I wasn’t lost—I was just in Brooklyn on my way to Queens, a surmountable distance from my apartment and everything in it. You want to go to the beach? The beach? the bus driver asked. Today? By yourself? And I said, Yeah, and he said, Why you going to the beach all on your own? What you can do on a beach by yourself? And I said something, explained myself. This lady’s going to the beach by herself, he said to a woman getting on the bus, but she didn’t say anything, just dropped her money into the thing that eats it.)

  But this little policeman was less amused by my by-myself-ness and he just asked for my passport and he looked at it and me and said I shouldn’t sleep in public—it’s just not safe—and I thought he was deeply concerned, that he cared deeply and loved all of humanity, this cop, but that probably wasn’t true and I wondered why some people combinations create inaudible noises and others don’t and the cop walked away like I was nothing, nothing at all, just some harmless, lost small animal with a passport.

  26

  I found a pay phone and called the number and I expected it just to ring and ring like last time, to realize that I might never find Jaye again, or that she might have given me a fake number, or that I’d have to find some other way to get back to that inaudible noise, which I could no longer generate just by thinking of Jaye, but then Jaye’s voice smashed through, and she said I’d called just in time, and where was I, and she told me to stay right there, so I did. She drove up in a tiny silver car with the roof folded back and her hair tied up in a yellow scarf, and I thought, for a moment, I’d be just fine forever.

  She drove fast along a road that curved with the ocean and she spoke words I couldn’t hear over the engine whirring and the ocean groaning, and I wanted to tell Jaye about the inaudible noise but there was no good way to explain it without shedding too much light on the inaudible noise, overexposing it, bleaching it white and lifeless, so I closed my eyes and leaned back and the salty air filled up my head and covered my face like the gentle hands of every person in the world who was in love with anyone, and I felt my joints loosen and the strain of my beach sleep melt away.

  We’re going back to Wellywood, she said, because she’d changed her mind about spending New Year’s with her ballistic family—and can you believe my mother still calls me Jared? Who’s Jared? I don’t know any fucking Jared, Jaye said, and I didn’t know any fucking Jared either and I understood she didn’t want to think of the way the past was packed into that name, the he she’d been born in—and I could not blame her and I did not blame her and I understood, somehow, something I knew I couldn’t really understand. Jaye put on music and belted along to it and I sat silent and still.

  * * *

  I wish I could understand what happened the few days we spent at her apartment in Wellington, but the short of it is that the inaudible noise was slowly overtaken by the minor chord so I avoided Jaye so I could avoid the minor chord and I spent long days out wandering the city, sneaking in late, sneaking out early, and on New Year’s Eve I lied and said I felt sick so I needed to stay in—but the next day she caught me coming home in the afternoon—Happy New Year, love! So you’re feeling better then? Got a little fresh air, did ya?—and I knew I wasn’t her love and nothing was new about this year because it had shown up just like all the rest of them and there was something sick and strange about how she was acting as if everything was fine and maybe to her it was, because maybe she’d never heard the inaudible noise and didn’t miss it like I did and didn’t notice the minor chord—she told me she had a surprise outing planned for us and it was time to go and I dreaded what it would be, how she might surprise me. The minor chord was playing softly but increasingly unsoftly in the background as we took a bus and walked through the concrete part of the city and we ended up on an outdoor basketball court where a small crowd had gathered and some women and men made excited noises at Jaye and threw arms around her and my name was said and repeated at me—This is Elyria—This is Elyria—And this is Elyria—and I wanted to be anyone else but I wasn’t anyone else and then it was time, someone said, and everyone sat down on the concrete court and four people dressed like vintage clowns came in, two in a shopping cart, one pushing the shopping cart, one sort of rolling across the ground and they began a sort of presentation of themselves, a routine that hinged on the humor of how sometimes some people do things incorrectly, and Jaye was laughing her hearty laugh and I didn’t understand why everyone was laughing as if they’d never be dead and I wondered why no one else could hear the harshness and hugeness of the minor chord and I tried to put myself elsewhere, to slip into a kind of open-eyed sleep, and I may have accomplished that because I have no memory of how the rest of the clown show went, just that the ending involved a pot of some kind of gruel, some kind of oatmeal goop, and the climax of this entire show involved the clowns serving us bowls of this gruel, their eyes all huge, their mouths hanging open in awe of themselves, and one of them tried to hand me a bowl of this goop and I didn’t want it, and Jaye was looking at me and the clown was looking at me and the clown took my hand and put it around the bowl and p
ut a spoon in the other hand and mimed eating as if to say that was what I should do and I didn’t want to do that but Jaye was eating her goop and laughing and saying, Oh, eat it, love, it’s just terrible, so terrible it’s great, and no accidental missile was hitting the city and putting an end to this, so I put the goop bowl on the court and got up and left and Jaye said, Love? Love? She said love like a question and I said, I’m not feeling so well, and she said, Oh, love, she said love like the name of a dog that had just done something bad, and when Jaye got home she didn’t ask me if I was okay because I was locked in the guest room and I woke up early and left with my pack on before she woke up. I did this because I knew the inaudible noise was gone and I knew I wasn’t part of the kind of people that can eat a clown’s gruel and the wildebeest was throwing its weight around in me and I was trying not to get too beat up by the wildebeest.

  Eventually it was night and I walked and I ended up in a pub, and the room, I realized, was crowded with people who all seemed to know and love each other and they also knew that they didn’t know or love me and probably never would. I looked at my feet and noticed how the months-long heat of moving had melted the soles down, and I knew that the disrepair of my shoes gave something away about me—but I was always doing this, wearing shoes until they had been burned down to barely anything and I remembered that day at my mother’s house years ago when she had tried to get me to take an old pair of Ruby’s sneakers, a pair of light blue ones that she didn’t think Ruby had ever worn—They’re still in the box—and I hadn’t understood then that all she was offering me was a pair of shoes because my shoes were barely the approximation of shoes, just these worn-out, five-year-old Sambas that I’d kept not throwing out though they clearly needed to be thrown out—but that afternoon I’d said, No, no thanks, I’m okay, because I wasn’t okay about borrowing shoes I could never return to Ruby and I couldn’t put my feet where her feet should be and also I was nauseous over the fact that I had even been given that option, of putting my feet where the feet of my mother’s dead daughter should be, because I knew that I was her other dead daughter, just not her favorite dead daughter—They’ll just go to waste, she said, and How does your husband let you leave the house like that? What other option do you have?—but I took the other option (You have two options, he had said, two options) and the option I took was living with what I had, which, sure, wasn’t an indication that I could take care of myself, and these heavily damaged and barely useful shoes made it clear that I needed help, that my feet were in need, that I needed a better shoe option, that I needed a better option, that I needed to get it together, to get a life together, to get myself together, to get myself. I hadn’t gotten myself in a while and I maybe wasn’t going to get myself, it seemed, because my self had been, somehow, ungotten or forgotten or not getting it, whatever it was, or is, or had been, or would be that I didn’t get.

  As I sat at the bar and I began to have the feeling I was a tin of dog food errantly placed on the exotic-fruit aisle with the tinned lychees and pineapple tidbits and I also knew that I was not a tin of dog food because a tin of dog food would have the luxury to simply be its dense and nothing self, and a tin of dog food wouldn’t push and wish against its tinned-ness, wouldn’t need to get anything.

  Two women came up and put a plastic crown on the head of an oval-faced man standing near me at the bar. It was his birthday, it seemed, because the little crown had Happy Birthday written in purple cursive on it and even though every person who could read the crown was probably not the one having the birthday, something was still understood. What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem and I shifted slightly down the bar, toward a wall, to make room for all the people who cared that the oval-headed man had been born, then sitting at the bar seemed like a sad, pathetic place to sit. I couldn’t remember why coming to a bar was the choice that I had made, a clearly foolish, desperate, sad-looking choice, and I accidentally made eye contact with a man hunched over his arms on the other end of the bar and his eyes said something to me, asked me something people are always silently asking in these kinds of places and I wanted to scream at him, Don’t bother, but I just tilted my head to the wall and mouthed those words to myself, hoping he’d somehow get the signal.

  27

  Cars went, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was, so I stood a considerable distance from the highway, backpack still on, a little shrub at my feet, and it seemed the shrub, too, had slept in a stranger’s backyard last night, and we stood by the highway both looking as if we’d been left here by accident, as if we were waiting for someone to remember us and come back and take us home, and I noticed the elaborate story I’d made for this little plant and wondered if I was just projecting a story of myself onto him, but the shrub and I just stood there, vague and waiting, until a car came and took me some miles from where I’d been and I stood, again, alone, listening to the ocean falling over itself, hitting rocks, and I thought about going to the beach to have an idealistic moment with the ocean, but all the romance of travel had shriveled and now the ocean wasn’t such a thing to me; I was just trying to get somewhere, and later some bloke dropped me off in a little town, by a park that was in a neighborhood where people who don’t go to parks live, a neighborhood where people who do go to parks wouldn’t want to go. There was a monument by the entrance with some benches surrounding it. After a while two people walked up and sat on the ledge of the monument. They were dressed in identical outfits—school uniforms—white polo shirts and navy pants. They began kissing. One person was a boy with shaggy blond hair and the other was a girl with short black hair. They kissed rhythmically, their mouths the only point of contact, and I ignored them, or not quite ignored them but started reading a book, and while I looked at the book I started thinking of when I wore school uniforms and went with my boyfriend to a park to kiss in the spot where we thought no one would notice, except for that one woman who noticed that one time as she was passing in her hot-pink jogging outfit, the woman who said, Ah, young love!, in a tone that was not entirely unkind, and I thought it wasn’t kind to make us conscious of our youth and our then-uncomplicated love. I stared at my book, moving my eyes across the letters and thinking of that woman, of Ah, young love! and of her hot-pink jogging suit and of the wet smirk on that boyfriend’s face as she speed-walked away. The two uniformed people were still kissing, diligently nodding their faces together at a steady tempo.

  I stayed in that park until the sun went down and then I stayed longer. I found a bench not near a streetlight and did something like sleep for some hours. In the middle of the night I found a jar in a trash bin and I pissed in it and then I placed the jar back in the trash bin and I know that may seem a little ridiculous, but I thought it gave sleeping in a park just a shred of dignity if I didn’t pee right into the dirt like an animal, that if I could contain my own waste then I was somehow a person on an adventure, not a person with limited options and limited means and possibly dwindling sanity.

  In the morning, there were birds. There were birds here just like there are birds anywhere.

  28

  Sometimes, I realized, many emotions sit on a face, at odds: a lip curl, a neck tilt, an echo in an eye. This was clear when the shed door opened and a woman was there and she didn’t seem too surprised by me being there, slumped sideways and using a wad of garden gloves as a pillow and I squinted from the sudden light and she said, Oh, dear, and she seemed happy and annoyed at the same time, pinched brow, tiny smile, her eyes doing something else entirely.

  Well, good morning, she said, and I said something and she said, Is everything all right?

  (And everything was not all right because I had been wandering for days or weeks, unsure of where I was going, eating from trash bins, being alone, the way Werner said I wasn’t meant to be, and I would show him, I thought, except I’d s
how him without actually showing him, because he wouldn’t see me sleeping in sheds and under grapevines in pitch-black vineyards because I’d done that all alone, waiting for daylight, waiting for an idea of what to do with myself, wondering if this kind of aloneness was what I really wanted—)

  I’m all right, I said, but she didn’t say anything else and I realized she was waiting on more of an explanation, but all my explanations seemed to be at odds with my mouth, were on strike, had called in sick, or maybe never existed and I felt like crucial organs had taken off in the middle of the night, like my kidneys had crawled up my body and out my ears and left two small sandbags in their place and all my lymph nodes had been burned into charcoal lumps—

  I was walking and got lost, I finally said. It was dark. I’m sorry.

  No reason to apologize, dear, it happens to the best of us.

  It does not, I thought but did not say, because I knew I was not a part of the best of us, and these kinds of things did not happen to the best of us, just to some of us in extremely rare cases when a person forgets how to reach any reasonable wing of herself, but I wasn’t going to go correcting this woman (Ruth, she said, putting her hand out to help me up) because I knew, at least, that telling a stranger that you couldn’t reach any reasonable wing of yourself just wasn’t a pleasant or helpful thing to say, not a good first impression, not a thing to say in daylight.