Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Oh, the minding. To mind my hands. Okay.

  This kept happening, this thing where I didn’t know what a person speaking in English was saying. It felt rude to keep asking what someone said only to figure it out and repeat the word back in my accent but I didn’t know another way to deal with this problem, so this was how I dealt with it.

  Sorry, I said.

  Amos left to deal with one of the animals so I finished chopping the carrots without any damage to any part of my hand or self, then I chopped the broccoli and peppers and potatoes and put oil and salt on the chopped vegetables and put them in the oven and waited awhile, then took them out, but the problem with this was I wasn’t minding the oven like Amos had said I should do—Mind the oven, he said, it’s shit—and I agreed now, it was shit, because it had blackened one corner of the pan of vegetables; but I had been thinking about my husband and how we would likely, very likely, almost certainly, practically absolutely, not see each other for a long time or ever and even if we did it would never be the same and so, in this way, we were both dead to each other, alive only in shape-shifting memory, but dead in every other way. And because I was still thinking about my half-dead husband as I took the half-burned vegetables out of the oven, I just scraped them all into a big bowl instead of taking the burned ones out first because I was trying to count how many days it had been since my husband and I had died to each other instead of looking at the charcoaled broccoli and carrots and realizing they weren’t the kind of thing that people liked to eat. I tried to pick the burned ones from the bowl but I didn’t get many of them because I didn’t make much of an effort, and even though I was taking the burned ones out because they weren’t edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes.

  31

  I want to watch that video you showed me once of the twin babies saying the same syllable to each other over and over and over. I want to watch that because we both know that’s all life is, really, that’s all it is. We’re all twins and clones and remakes of each other; we’re all pairs unpaired; we’re all speaking the same repeated syllable at each other and why is it that I have to go running off into a twinless solitude? What is inside this solitude but me, saying the same syllable to myself over and over and over, trying to make sense of it, trying to rearrange it. Husband, if I was actually speaking to you I’d tell you about the baby Grand Emperor penguin who swam two thousand miles accidentally and ended up on a beach near Wellington, a long accident, a wrong turn. They said he ate sand and driftwood, for lack of knowing what to eat, where he was, what he needed, why he’d swum two thousand miles away from the other penguins, but I’m still wondering about the months he spent swimming alone. Maybe sharks swam past him. Maybe schools of tiny white fish nipped at his feet, grew disinterested, swam on. Maybe grey whales rose beneath his tininess, a single bulging whale eye as large as his head as he swam through the blue daytime ocean and the navy storming ocean and the cold black ocean under a moon or a half-moon or no moon at all, and each night above him a different moon was there, and the moon’s slow wink was all for him, for his solitude, for his perseverance, for the constant plane of water, water, water, and no one who loved him and nothing he knew and no others to swim with at all. What was he but a pair unpaired, living away from the other penguins’ cold huddle? Enough with my ridiculous metaphor. Maybe it is time for me to be clear, or let me be clearer than I have yet been: I didn’t leave you to become someone else’s something, someone else’s twin to talk to, someone else’s clone to mirror, someone else’s anything. It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone. I am gone but not so gone that there is no possibility of me coming back, though maybe I have gone out far enough now that you are preparing for a future without this particular wife—so, Husband, if this is so, please keep in mind you are still legally obligated to me, written like a law into my life, and we cannot remove ourselves from each other so easily, with such impulse, or, at least, this is somewhat true. I, you should know, left without a particular reason, though I may have a few nonparticular reasons—unnamable feelings and unnamable secrets and un-understandable feelings, feelings about secrets and feelings about facts and feelings about feelings, and since they are all un-understandable can we call them derstandable feelings? Why was it that we grew to derstand each other? Where did that derstanding come from and why couldn’t we pry ourselves away from it and why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other’s vicinity? And is there any possibility that we could become, again, the kind of people who have a future instead of just a past and could we reach some kind of clearing in that future, some grassy patch of many-years-from-now where we are just fine being just fine? Maybe we could decide to get a dog or a child or just a good bottle of wine and maybe we’ll sit at a sidewalk café, sipping it, sipping our lack of responsibilities, watching mothers bumble by lugging their children and babies and unhelpful dogs, all the weight and moan of their decisions hanging on them and asking, always asking for more, to be fed, to be watched, to be loved, and if we must be either children people or dog people, I will say that it makes me feel the least unwell to believe that we could become dog people, not children people, in that distant patch of grassy future. Because I believe we can follow the simple repeated emotion of a dog, the predictable needs of a dog, the gentle forgetfulness of a dog—and you may have wanted children in the past and I may have wanted to want children in the past and maybe you only wanted to want but disguised that wanting to want as simple wanting, and perhaps I just wanted children but couldn’t manage to admit it as anything other than a wanting of a want because I feared the burden of a plain want, the frightening possibility of a desire, of a desire that would not necessarily be met or the possibility of that desire being met unpeacefully—but no matter now, that was some fork in the hypothetical road we didn’t take and now we can stay here in this unwanting, this past-our-timeness, this future and its disintegrating idea of the past. I am still sometimes hopeful that I could someday try to generate a desire to raise a dog, to meet the repeated needs of a dog, the simple dogness of dogs, all the qualities of dogs that they do not share with babies, those pre-people people and all their warm, slimy wanting and their embarrassingly exaggerated needs, their screaming red-faced hunger and their bloody-murder nap-needing, and how those needs are just the same as ours, only magnified and reflected back at us—and do you know what? Some people are not the kind of people who can stand those kinds of things, magnified and reflected things, warm, slimy, needing tiny-people things. Some people just prefer dogs. Husband, I know as well as you that all my metaphors have turned bizarre, but what I need to say is there is a future and I am in it. There may be a tomorrow when I might come home and maybe it won’t be too late for me to become the kind of woman who doesn’t feel her life is irrevocably complicated, and maybe I can slowly forget what happened to my brain, where it went and why I couldn’t find it and why you couldn’t find it either. But if I never come home, Husband, please know I still have many of the same senses of belonging to you. I still have a little ring around my brain like a diamond one or a Saturn one or the kind that bathwater leaves. I am asking you, I know, to suffer, to stand very still and feel as little as possible.

  32

  Even though the air was cooling daily and the sun was setting earlier than it once had, the linen-tunic people still went without shoes and still slept in a thin-walled yurt, and I imagined they slept in a pile the way that puppies or kittens sleep, but I slept in the metal caravan the way a sardine would if sardines came canned individually. It was apparent that a unity had happened between the linen tunics and Amos and Luna, and I was not a part of that unity, that community of people all enjoying, respecting, supporting each other. They would linger over dinner at night, eat lunch together outside instead of swallowing aspirin washed down with goat’s milk like I did. I’d been given, or volunteered for, or just always did the jobs that I could do alone—sea
rching out the eggs in the kiwi orchard, making dinner for everyone while they built that barn together, holding the ladder steady while another climbed, while they chanted one-two-three-and-go before raising the barn’s frame or things like that. And though I had noticed that I was separate from this pseudofamily I did not see a problem with it and I thought no one else saw a problem with it and I thought that probably meant that there was no problem with it, but that all changed one afternoon when Amos asked if he could speak to me for a minute and he didn’t wait for me to answer him and he didn’t speak for just a minute, he spoke for several of them and he spoke like fathers in television shows speak when they have something simple that they want to explain in a complicated way in order to seem enigmatic, maybe, in order to seem to be the keeper of some sort of wisdom only bestowed upon a man of a certain age and he told me something about biodynamics or permaculture or something, how the system relies on a total cooperation or integration or some other gration.

  You know, we’re trying to create a full community here—this is important to us. And we can respect your privacy, you know, I get that, but we really do need you to participate in our ecosystem, Elyria. Can you do that?

  And I didn’t say anything for a moment and Amos was doing this look my husband used to do sometimes, this look that was a cross between pity and doing long division in his head, so I mirrored that long-division-pity back at him and Amos finally said, Do you think you could be a part of our ecosystem? And the voice of a teenage girl came up in me, silently, and asked, How am I supposed to know? and it was the voice of that girl in the episode of the soap opera when she gets arrested and the cop asks her, What’s a girl like you doing getting arrested?, and she says, How am I supposed to know? in the same annoyed, indignant way I’d just heard it in my head and I realized that those must have been what my feelings were—annoyed, indignant—and I couldn’t feel them, but I could hear them, so maybe I was something like that boy I’d gone to high school with who had been born without fully functioning nerves, who had fingers and hands covered in cuts and burns because he loved to cook but didn’t really understand a knife or a flame, that boy who all the other boys teased because he couldn’t have a real penis if he didn’t have the feelings that came with it, so he wasn’t a man because he didn’t know the difference between pain and pleasure, and that boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.

  I believe I could do that, I said to Amos and he smiled, so I smiled a little and I was glad I had pretended to be better than I was because it would make it easier to leave because I knew I couldn’t live up to this pretend person I had made up and presented to Amos and it was nearly autumn now so maybe something needed to die, something needed to change, and at the same time I knew I didn’t know what would happen next, what would die or change, and I understood that I had little to no control over what would die or change next but I had a kind of calmness that was actually just exhaustion and I also had the house to myself for a least an hour since Amos had to go teach that permaculture workshop and Luna had taken the arthritic dog to the vet and what I wanted, impossibly, was for the professor to be there with me in this house, and I wanted him to be there because that early version of the man who became my husband wouldn’t say anything to me about how long it had been since we had died to each other and he wouldn’t say anything about how unfairly I had disappeared and he wouldn’t tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you can let your feelings choose you—because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn’t have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn’t have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can’t really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.

  I stepped lightly into Amos’s office where he had an off-limits computer and I went to the university’s website and I went to the mathematics department page and I tried to load one of my husband’s lectures. I had never watched them because there had never been a reason to watch them back when my husband was sitting so calmly in my real life, when we inhabited each other’s space like we were long-owned pieces of clothing, forgotten and familiar on our bodies. I found a lecture from last April and I opened it, but only the first image would load, a fuzzy still, a poor rendering of my memory’s memory, but the blur made him look younger, I realized, and maybe this was what my husband was like in the decade before we met. His oldest friends always said he looked the same as he had at college graduation but I knew his face closely enough to know that wasn’t true—I knew I had missed so many delicate years of his life and the man I had married was the hard remainder; I had missed years of innocent longing and late nights and odd jobs and girlfriends who were now mothers of someone else’s children. I had missed wrinkleless eyes and his hair before the grey ones crept in and his mouth before it had said I love you to other people, shadowy other women I never knew, would never know. All those selves my husband practiced in the decade before me felt unfair because my past didn’t have any of those secret selves because everyone’s childhood and adolescence are more or less the same, dear struggle, and my husband had seen me change from an old child to a young adult and I didn’t have a past like he did—I didn’t have a smoother version of me tucked away in other people’s memories.

  And after I had deleted my history on Amos’s computer I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will. It doesn’t seem like much now, but realizations rarely do, I suppose, those bright moments when you can finally see something that had been there all along. This wasn’t a commodifiable realization, the kind of thing in college essays or inspirational books or the hardbound journals of gentle ladies. There was no ah, no ha, no relaxation or humor folded into this realization. There was just something real in my head—a rescue boat in a sea where there was no one left to save.

  33

  While everyone slept I packed and left—down the pebbled path and through the field where the cows all swayed in their standing sleep. I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling—a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.

  After I’d been hiking awhile I realized I was no longer hiking, but lying on my back on the side of the trail; I couldn’t tell how long I had been there. My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don’t have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all
this mind and body stuff that I didn’t know what else to do with. I thought of that woman who worked at a library I had been in at some point, and how she had these false teeth that had come unstuck in her mouth and were bouncing around in there as she spoke, and I wondered what that woman had in her mind that made her fake teeth move like that, refuse to stay put. Maybe her mind was a puppy. Maybe her mind was a puppy that had been drinking soda and chewing on a straw someone had been snorting drugs through and as I realized this I revised my feelings about the wobble-toothed woman because even though her dentures had looked as if they might wobble their way out of her mouth and bite their way across her face, down her neck to her shoulder, down her arm, make a leap off her hand, land on me, and gnaw me into parts—no, I didn’t pity her anymore and I wasn’t disturbed anymore and I didn’t feel threatened—I thought, what a lucky woman she is to have a drugged-up puppy for a mind and I was momentarily happy for that woman and her irrevocably wrinkled face and there just was no revoking the time she’d been through because the things she’d done to herself and the things that had been done to her would always be the things she did or had done.

  Still on the ground of this trail I wobbled into that comalike middle ground between waking and sleeping and my thoughts turned off and I said, Goodbye, thoughts, goodbye, goodbye. I was filled with sounds instead of thoughts, the wind combing through the tree branches. The crunch and crackle of the deader parts of the woods. The twitch of the parts that may have been more alive. And I know now that it still isn’t clear where I am in the spectrum of living and not living, but I am not and never was the kind of woman who romanticizes natural noises just because they come from nature because tumors and poisons and tornadoes are also natural—not the things you want to romanticize—that’s for fiction, the fake, the imaginary—put the romanticizing there, I thought, not on the dirt and fire of life.