Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Can you tell me a little more about that?

  I don’t really have anything to add to it. Stress is stress. You just deal with it.

  I box, sometimes, to relieve stress. It feels good to hit things sometimes, you know? We all have a little anger to let out.

  Okay.

  So, do you do anything like that? Is there anything that’s like boxing to you?

  No. I’d just rather be alone.

  Thomas made a few notes and I wondered if he was waiting for me to confess something strange, to say, Yes, Thomas, in fact I like to kill whole forests of small animals to relieve stress; that’s a lot like boxing I suppose, Thomas, you see—you and I are not so dissimilar from each other, now are we? I made my face smile a little, like I was calm, like I was fine.

  Do you miss your husband?

  I don’t think about it all that much.

  So it’s the same as stress relief for you: isolation. You isolate to avoid missing him.

  No.

  What is it then?

  I just don’t miss him.

  Did it occur to you that you should have told your husband where you were going?

  I don’t remember.

  What would it be like if you returned to your husband?

  The same, I guess.

  What do you mean by that?

  We would just go to our jobs and live in our apartment and all the same stuff we used to do.

  Did your husband ever do you any harm when you lived with him?

  No. Nothing like that, I said. But wasn’t it? I asked my silent head. Wasn’t it something like that? Wasn’t there something so brutal about our silences, something so acidic, something mutually abusive about the way we just had our lives so silently folded together? No, it was nothing like that. Nothing like that. But wasn’t it something like brutality, like congealed blood, like a bruised face, a broken limb that won’t heal—wasn’t it something like that because it was in his sleep that the silent violence between us was finally cut loose, the want we had to destroy ourselves or each other came out then, a pot of soup left to boil too long, bubbling over, scorching the pot, filling the house with smoke.

  Did he abuse you emotionally?

  I thought for a second and said, I don’t know.

  I thought of the little redhead girl from the bus months earlier and I wondered what had happened to her and what she had meant by saying she was from a nebula and I wondered if she was all right and I wondered if I had misremembered this and she had never said such a thing and maybe that was why I was here, because I had seen so many mirages and believed them to be true and people had noticed, maybe, people had seen me standing shoeless in sheep meadows talking to no one, maybe, looking into no one’s eyes, listening to nothing and answering it and isn’t that the thing about these kinds of things: you never know for sure if what you see and hear is what other people see and hear, and Thomas stepped into my thought—

  Did he abuse you physically?

  And I wondered why I couldn’t just say, No, he did not abuse me, my husband did not abuse me, and move on to the next question. Maybe it was because we both knew that nearly a majority of women had been, most likely, abused or assaulted or molested or whatever, and any woman who had not yet been abused or assaulted or molested or whatever should just wait, just give it a day or a year or a week or so because most likely it was going to happen to her, yes, one day she would wake up and think it was a day like any other day and by the time she fell asleep it wouldn’t be that kind of day anymore, and if this never happened, if she somehow was still a member of the unabused, unassaulted, unmolested few, then she should always remember that hands that could and would assault a woman were prevalent and nearly unavoidable. There was a sense of not if but when, and I felt that sense while Thomas looked at me, expecting, it seemed, for me to say, He did—I was—this is why I left, I am one of those women who can do nothing but run, but I knew so surely, or at least almost surely, that my husband didn’t or almost didn’t or didn’t quite, didn’t really, didn’t consciously, but I almost wished that he had abused me—abused me in a waking, daylight, intentional way—so that my leaving would make a little more sense to myself and the rest of the world.

  Did he abuse you physically?

  My mouth wouldn’t let my brain move it.

  Elyria, I cannot take your lack of explanation as an explanation, you know. I must only report what you confirm to be the truth or tell me is the truth. If you cannot say or confirm that your husband abused you or did not abuse you, I cannot just take what I believe you may be implying by your silence and put that down. I can only write down that you refused to answer the question, do you understand?

  Yes.

  Perhaps we should just come back to that one later—

  I sat up and again looked at the picture of the man who owned the ocean and wished I could please become him now, pinch my nose, close my eyes, and jump into some other life.

  I thought of my husband sitting in his chair, his legs crossed, his arms crossed, his voice saying, Typical, Elyria. It’s incredible how much you can forget. Over the years there had often been things that I would forget and he would remember, memories and information that my husband had archived—things I had done, he had done, words I had said, he had said, verbatim sentences he could remember spoken by himself or others or me, things we’d seen or done or places we’d been, verbatim places, verbatim people, exactly precisely factually factual things he could remember that I could not or could not quite, completely, remember. So my husband was this constant fact-checker of my life and the idea of him making things up, intentionally or not, had occurred to me, that maybe many of the things he had told me had happened, had, perhaps, never happened—

  Elyria, when did it occur to you that you wanted to leave your husband?

  I don’t remember, I said, and my voice did not sound true even to myself because I did remember the day I decided to leave, a Tuesday afternoon walking down Broadway—I watched an old woman in a crosswalk and I knew.

  Thomas inhaled and flipped through a few pages on his clipboard.

  Do you ever have thoughts about harming your husband?

  No.

  Harming others?

  No.

  Do you ever think about harming yourself?

  No.

  Do you ever think of suicide?

  Memories sometimes move into a word or a phrase and you’ll never think of that word or phrase or that feeling or color without thinking of the other side, the things you store in it, and under the word suicide was a cave called Ruby, and it had become impossible for me to tell anyone what I thought of when I thought of the word suicide because so many thoughts lit up in my brain, lifetimes of thought, and anytime I heard that word I always remembered the end of Ruby, the little knot tied at the end of us. But this, I knew, was not what Thomas meant, when he asked me if I ever thought of suicide.

  So I said, No, without pausing.

  Elyria, I’d like to now begin another assessment. Please answer the questions as fully as you can, all right? Okay. Are you experiencing problems with falling or staying asleep?

  No.

  Do you ever feel frightened or uneasy for no discernible reason?

  Sometimes.

  How often?

  I don’t know how often. Doesn’t everyone feel like that sometimes?

  Are you having trouble concentrating?

  On what?

  On anything.

  Sure.

  Thomas waited for me to continue, to explain myself, but I didn’t want to look back at him or explain myself because I knew that everyone who was alive had trouble concentrating on life and I knew that he, somewhere in him, knew that, too, that really being alive, being pushed around the world by whatever was in your brain, and having feet, walking on your feet, having a freedom that is always limited to how free your body is, all that was too much to concentrate on and so no one concentrated on it too often or too easily and we all have trouble con
centrating on it, on everything.

  Do you feel irritable or jumpy?

  Both, I thought, and No, I said.

  Do you feel detached or estranged from yourself and/or others?

  Often, I thought, and No, I said.

  Do you ever feel that you are reexperiencing a difficult part of your past?

  And I thought about that sentence and the reality behind it and I thought, Well, yes, Thomas, of course, isn’t that the problem with memories, Thomas? You should know, Thomas, you’re a professional in the way the mind works. But I said, No, not really. Not that I can remember.

  Has anything happened to you that you don’t want to talk or think about?

  What kind of question is that? I thought, and I said, What kind of question is that?

  For instance, were there any places in New York that you found yourself unable to visit without feeling distressed?

  I remembered walking long blocks just to avoid those places, distressing buildings, distressing shadows made by the light through the trees, the pinch in my throat I had when I passed the gates on the east side of the campus and that diner that had been Ruby’s diner that my husband still went to some nights, where he still ate his Reubens and his spaghetti (Who gets spaghetti at a diner?) like nothing had happened, like Ruby had never been there, eating BLTs and staring at the cars going down Amsterdam, the sirens singing to and from the hospital.

  More questions came and they melted together—Did you experience or witness anything that was disturbing or made you afraid for your life? Any upsetting situation? When you think about the future, do you get a sense that it will be shortened for some unknown reason? Do you ever experience unwanted memories?

  And my wildebeest was telling me that all memories are unwanted, but I was saying something else, trying to give Thomas an answer that reflected my humanness and not my wildebeest and maybe also a plank of sanity, but sometimes I’d speak, stop, stare somewhere, forget what was happening, try to try to try to remember—

  Elyria, we do appreciate your cooperation with the assessment, and everything will be—

  I’ve been locked in this room for I don’t even know how long—

  You’ve been here for less than a day. You were treated for a severe injury from a stingray and found to be overstaying your visa and now you are undergoing a psychological assessment and a post-traumatic-stress assessment. It’s all very straightforward, in fact. It’s all very simple.

  He looked offended and annoyed. I wondered what this trauma was that I was supposedly post.

  Your husband believes you may be potentially mentally unstable and we take those claims seriously. We’re careful not to knowingly expose the public to someone who might not have all their wits about them—

  I stared at the ceiling and knew there was nowhere I could go without being found.

  Excluding your immigration status, have you been involved in any illegal activities during your time in New Zealand?

  No.

  Are you sure?

  I’m sure, I said, but I knew I wasn’t sure because memories and realities and facts and dreams had all become less distinct from one another and when I looked back on things I had done I wasn’t convinced that I had done any of it and when I made a mental list of things I had not done I couldn’t put anything on it and I knew the wildebeest in me was a heavy desire to destroy something without the actual ability to destroy something and maybe Thomas could also see my tiny, smiling hit man, that smug motherfucker sitting in the center of me, and in that moment I could think of all kinds of things I would rather be: a string-bean plant or a possum who just wanted to crawl and eat, instead of being a person who can’t seem to find a way to comfortably live or be in this world, but I didn’t want to find a way out of this life or into some other life. I didn’t want to lust after anything. I didn’t want to love anything. I was not a person but just some evidence of myself.

  38

  I was staring out my little hospital window, trying to have a significant moment, trying to realize something, to feel real. I waited, patient, but no realizations came. Nothing felt real. A deep sense of unreality came over me until, finally, a half realization came and it was this: unreality was the only reality that I had and all I could do was believe that it was enough, that unreality was close enough to reality, that reality was unreality’s last name, and making do with unreality was maybe the best I could do.

  I’d had a similar nonrealization of unreality before, I remembered, in the dressing room at the church where I got married, and my mother had walked in with a droop in her eyes and a curl in her voice, already sloshy before the ceremony began.

  You two make a lovey brood and grime, she’d said, too proud or oblivious to correct herself. What’s the rules about the bride mother seeing the groom man? Huh? Well, I don’t know what it is, but I did. I mean, your groom man. Saw him. Handsome one he is. A lovey grime, I mean—a lovey broom.

  Mostly she could keep her drunkenness a low rumble instead of a crash and for that subtlety I was thankful, the mauve of the problem, the lovey grime. I looked at my mother and felt the jitter and pulse of her life and remembered that I had slipped into this world through her body and how that meant something, how that told me something about the kinds of accidents I was going to make because she was the only start I’d ever get.

  Anyway, she said, ’stime for you to get married. Marriage! All right.

  My husband and I had decided against bridesmaids and groomsmen or, rather, had just realized we didn’t know anyone who would be those people for us. The audience was just a few pews. His family and mine, terse smiles. The grandmothers were politely crying, but no one else seemed to have a feeling. His mother’s absence was the largest presence, and his stepmother kept touching her hair and looking around, as if she was afraid someone might steal it off her head. My parents sat with enough space between them to put two or three children.

  We said vows. An organ organed. We turned and walked out.

  And as I stood in my hospital room, I tried to bring up some nice memories of my husband, to wash myself in that kind of nostalgia, in the airbrushed tenderness of memories that have been refined and pared down and shaved into almost nothing, just the image of a nice man doing something nice, detaching it from the irrevocable mess between us. Nurses came in and out of the room over the next day or so with smiles or no smiles or news or no news or gelatinous, compartmentalized foodstuffs, and one nurse reminded me that I had been lucky, so lucky that I hadn’t bled to death, but another told me my wound had never been so serious, that it would heal just fine, and someone read something aloud about being exported or imported or deported—my removal, my soon-to-be elsewhere, and I wondered why I seemed to be having a hard time filing my life away in an organized system, why I was putting decades-old stories in the same folders as last week, last year, the files containing my husband shuffled in with Ruby, my father, and whomever else, whatever else—and where did anything belong anymore and could I ever sort myself out and if I could, then when and how, and if I did—then what?

  Someone came in with breakfast—peeled egg, leaking tomato, potato tangle, butter-stamped toast—and this must have meant that night had turned to morning again, and maybe I had slept through it or if I hadn’t slept I had at least sunk into a kind of trance, most likely, because I didn’t have a memory of opening my eyes, but it was morning and I ate the egg in a single mouthful, yolk chalky in my throat, cheeks crowded with soft, white shards.

  Two female cops with dense hair and dense faces, broadly drawn women, escorted me out of the hospital room and I enjoyed the walk down the hallway and its bluish light and the way that all the nurses and doctors tried to look at the spectacle of us without looking at the spectacle of us, tried to see the small woman being escorted by cops, and I loved how ugly the light was and I loved the little flicker of eyes that I would sometimes catch and I loved that I was out of that moss-green room. And I wanted this moment to stay because I wanted to just w
alk and walk, flanked by two cops with a specific destination, and I wanted to just be on the way somewhere, I wanted to be on the way forever without ever getting there because that was what I really wanted, maybe, to go and go and keep leaving and leave and leave and go and leave and be going and never arrive.

  I don’t remember a single sound or sight of the flight, all I remember is the descent, the thud and skid of us on the runway and how, when I woke up, all the large drama of my trip now seemed small and shiny, like a collectible figurine, a pathetic chipped-horn goat made of crystal.

  39

  Ask Ray to take you to our storage unit in the basement. In a clearly marked area you’ll find what is yours, including but not limited to your clothing (all laundered), your books, all the art that belonged to you, your lamps, the two chairs and one side table that belonged to Ruby, that rug you bought in Spain, your toiletries, a box of stale muesli, every bobby pin and hair elastic I could find, that licorice tea that you loved and I hated, the keys to the apartment that are now useless because I changed all the locks, and a paper bag containing all the strands of your hair combed from the carpet and fished out of the couch and swept out of corners and pulled from the bathtub drain. There is no more of you in my apartment. There is no reason for you to even take the elevator to my floor, so please do not attempt to do this. You need to take all of the boxes, all at once. I do not wish to see you. I do not wish to ever hear from or see you again. Regards.

  I looked up from the letter to the doorman (not Ray, a new one) but he was watching a shoe-box-sized television and maybe he didn’t know that I was an unwelcome substance in this building, that I had made my husband into a person he did not want to be, but it seemed this doorman didn’t know any of this so I went to the elevator and I got off on the tenth floor like I used to do every day without thinking.

  I stood at my door, now just my husband’s door, and I thought about knocking and what would happen if I did and he was home and he opened his door and saw me here. He might just nod and his eyes might tremble and possibly I’d reflexively put my arms around my husband, though I wouldn’t be sure if he was my husband anymore and I would press my bones against his and feel the slight slope of his waist and feel the knotted muscles on his upper back and I would notice how lightly he was holding me, as if I was covered in fine thorns.