Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  19

  I sat on a curb in Takaka for a long time, trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.

  Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted. I didn’t want to want anything; I wanted to want everything. I wanted to want a regular life: the usual husband, the usual apartment, the usual streets, sidewalks, noises, and so on. But I had left it. I had gone elsewhere. That was the right decision, I believed, except when I didn’t, which was both often and rarely.

  I sat on the curb in Takaka and thought these things.

  A tremendous amount of my brain was filled with noticing new things out here where nothing was familiar: buildings, types of cars, types of people, accents, plants, packaged-food items. Before I left my brain never had to register my bedroom, my husband, mailbox, apple core, alarm clock, walls. My brain just said, “___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___,” to those things, because a brain lets you keep going, keep not seeing your same walls, underwear, husband, doorknobs, ceiling, husband, husband. A brain can be merciful in this way: sparing you the monotony of those monotonies, their pitiful cozy. A brain lets all the bore-filled days shrink like drying sponges until they’re hard and ungiving.

  At the same time, I missed my ceiling. I missed how the drywall by the bathroom was uneven. I missed hearing the door open, hearing the door close, knowing a familiar body was in the other room, moving around, going about itself.

  I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I’d ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems. I left the library after some time and I thought I should maybe bring some groceries or something to Werner’s and I tried to determine if I should hitch again, but I didn’t want to explain myself to anyone and I thought if I heard someone call me brave one more time I might rip off my own thumb and not even bother to stop the blood from staining their upholstery.

  I bought some pears and cashews and canned beans while thinking about whether a person could be physically capable of tearing off their own thumb and the specifics of that thought kept me company on the long walk to Werner’s place. When I found him standing shirtless in his side yard, I was holding the scrap of paper he’d written his address on that night in New York, so I let my backpack thud off me and I handed the scrap of paper to him for lack of anything else to do with it.

  Ah, yes. That’s where we are.

  He smiled and I smiled, but only a very little.

  So you’re here, Werner said. I could tell he meant he hadn’t actually expected me to come. Maybe I should have felt a bit of shame or a bit of awkwardness, but I did not, for some reason, because I had some rare confidence in being here, that this was the right place for me to be for an indefinite amount of time, that this was the place where I could maybe make sense to myself.

  Well, I should show you around, at least, he said, like I’d just won something he didn’t want to give away.

  His place was a series of small wooden cabins and recycled trailers connected by unevenly cut doors he had to duck a little to get through. He’d built these semi-ruins himself, a constant project over the last twentysomething years he’d been out here. It’s probably a good distraction from living alone, something to schedule a day around, something to give urgency to the unurgent weeks: rusted hinges, peeling caulk, a leak, more peeling, more rust, more leaks—the circular requirements of shelter. He kept the kitchen stocked as if he was waiting for the world to end—a pantry packed with cans, an extra freezer just for cuts of meat and flour sacks. In my bedroom and the living room, he’d raised the trailer ceilings using wooden planks, salvaged windowpanes, and bubble wrap. It brought in a grassy, greenhouse kind of light, but the room still smelled like animal and mildew.

  The brain needs space to breathe, he said.

  It’s nice. There is a lot of air here, I said. Dead bugs lounged on dust pillows in the corner. Gnats buzzed.

  We’ll have tea at six, he said before he left me in my shed-room, and I was thankful that he didn’t try to make sure I was okay, and he didn’t ask if I needed anything, and he didn’t thank me for bringing those groceries, and this was probably why I was here: that this was one of those places I could go that just didn’t count toward anything, time I could be alone and alone with being alone and Werner knew or understood that or maybe he didn’t understand but it didn’t matter if he knew it or not because whether or not he knew, I believed it was understood.

  * * *

  You decided against bringing the family.

  What family? I asked. We were having dinner on the porch that faced the ravine, where we always had dinner, the only time we sat to eat a meal.

  Well, he said, head tilted and chewing meat, I just supposed that you had one. You seem like a part of that kind of machine.

  I don’t really have a family, I said.

  Well, that would explain why your family isn’t here, if they are not in existence.

  Werner put his knife down on his dinner plate. I knew he would explain himself in this way, too, that he was without family.

  Did you know that lambs lie down to be slaughtered? he asked. Such sad little creatures they are. So hopeless.

  His sheer hair fluttered. I looked down at the ravine then up at the sky morphing into blues and purples. I have recalled this night often, sometimes daily, in the years since I left New Zealand, but I still do not know why it is this moment that I remember so clearly—sky, Werner, knife on plate, talk of how lambs die—instead of one of the louder, more eventful ones. Some of the loudest and most eventful events that happened there are still foggy, half-ruined slide shows, the images unfocused, a fleshy thumb obscuring some key thing or person. But that night it seemed I had reached some indescribable reason, and the wildebeest sulked away, and I made some sense to myself and I wouldn’t say I was happy or even content, but I had emptied myself of something and was just there.

  I eat them for the sake of this pity, Werner said, pushing this dripping bite into his mouth.

  What makes them lie down?

  Pardon?

  I mean, why do they give up so easily?

  Werner put another bite of animal in his mouth and chewed.

  They are not giving up, he said. They are just being polite.

  He smiled, then turned back to face the ravine.

  I crossed my feet at the ankles, then bent one leg over the other. Something that sounded like a bucket of nails being poured on the tin roof happened, then it went away.

  Possums, he said, nodding toward where the noise had come from.

  20

  The front desk sent flowers and a balloon and a stuffed bear—the string noosed around his neck.

  My husband and I watched telenovelas and every few minutes he would translate a good line, though it was obvious what was going on. There were lovers and there were enemies and sometimes you couldn’t tell them apart but it hardly mattered. Men tossed their heads around when they spoke. Old ladies cast spells. Doll-perfect women with angry black hair stomped in heels and demanded and demanded and demanded.

  And I, like my husband, would rather watch someone else be angry than go through the trouble of my own, so while we watched the women spit and choke each other and the men shout and rub their temples, we felt our own anger dissolve or go numb. We had been angry that the other was angry and even angrier that we were experiencing anger—it was our honeymoon and if we were not exempt from pain now, we might never be.

  The pain we were not exempt from had been made visible in the cast around my arm, which was fixing my wrist, maybe, but not us, this cast which was put on at the clinic I’d been carried to after falling down fifteen marble stairs outside our hotel: a twisted ankle, scraped knees, a broken wrist, a bruise, and a gash across my cheek. (She fell down the stairs, he said,
I fell down the stairs, I said, and isn’t that what people say has happened when that is exactly what hasn’t happened?) In fact, I had fallen down the stairs as we were arguing, or as we were trying not to argue and failing deeply. We had just checked in to this hotel, smiling and overpronouncing gracias and bueno and when the clerk had cooed, Oh, the honeymoon suite!, my husband put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me and I don’t know exactly why, but I looked at my husband and pretended I had no idea what was going on, and he said, What was that all about? And I said, What? And he said, Back there at reception—your, I don’t know, your attitude, it’s just not like you—and this took us into a conversation about attitudes and about what I was usually like, and this conversation tried its best not to be an argument, and we tried our best to be the sweet, sense-making people we had mostly been up to this moment, through the all-smiles, all-talking, all-consuming wave of the wedding, but this discussion of attitudes eventually fell into the argument category and we argued up the elevator, into the honeymoon suite, through the bathroom door, back into the hallway, back down the elevator, through the lobby, and back outside the hotel and I got a little distracted by this obscenely attractive Spanish woman walking beside us as my husband was saying, Elyria, it’s like this, you have two options—and I was thinking, Fuck you so much, Husband, it’s not like that and I have a lot more than two options—and this was what was in my head when I missed that first step and began the tumble, which just seemed so deeply appropriate, such a good end to our argument about attitudes and the two options I supposedly had and what I was usually like. And after the fall as I was splayed and shocked at the bottom of the stairs, a sturdy bellhop was the first to reach me—Señorita, señorita—and my husband was the second person to reach me, but it was too late because the bellhop was already scooping me up and carrying me the few blocks to the little clinic and all my husband could do was trail along behind us, he and his It’s like this and his You have two options.

  * * *

  That night, what was supposed to be a romantic dinner became a silent dinner.

  I stared, nauseated, at the paella, which seemed putrid, spoiled. I ran the edge of a fork along a gaping mussel shell stabbed in the rice, and I considered picking up a knife for no good reason, but I did not pick up the knife because I knew I would have likely been unable not to stab the ciabatta out of its stupid basket and fling it across the restaurant, so I didn’t pick up the knife because I knew that throwing anything during the middle of a romantic-turned-silent dinner was not appropriate and would create more problems than the satisfaction of stabbing and throwing something would have given.

  My husband was staring at me with this brand-new look of his, one I had never seen before but would see much more of in the future; he was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn’t working quite like it should, like he’d found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate.

  I looked at him, extremely silent, and I wanted to say, Husband, I dare you, I dare you to—but I didn’t know what I was daring him to do, just that I was daring him—I dare you, I dare you—and I wondered about how many other sides of him I had not yet seen and that was exciting in a way and terrifying in a way and I didn’t want to feel both excited and terrified right then—I just wanted to feel calm, to feel like a sedated animal on a honeymoon, or to feel like a drunk and beautiful Spanish woman, but I was not drunk or beautiful or Spanish and I wondered if there was a side of my husband who wanted to demolish me, who wanted to turn me into a fine dust, who would bring his solid hands against my throat, who would rend my muscles from the bone without a flinch, in a moment of passion, if he had that kind of passion in him, if that kind of passion was quietly growing in him like an undiscovered tumor. And if so, did I have that tumor, too? Was there some part of me that would rip his arm off his body if I was given the chance and ability? And if I did have that part of me would it be the kind of thing that just healed on its own? Was it a broken-rib thing? The kind of thing you can’t do a damn thing about but try not to cough or laugh for a few months? Maybe I should try to just hold still for a year or so, I thought, and this feeling would mend itself—unless this wasn’t a broken-rib kind of thing but more like an internal-bleeding kind of thing and maybe this bleeding was going to rot us from the inside, hot blood swishing around into corners of us that it should never be. Or maybe it was nothing and I was overreacting and I should just be who I was expected to be—be the senseful and just fine and reliable woman who had fallen in love with my husband and whom my husband had fallen in love with—I could be her, I thought, and I inhaled and exhaled and was pretty sure that it was all just fine.

  Is everything okay? Aren’t you hungry?

  He looked at me hard in the eye, the way an optometrist would.

  21

  On occasion, Werner said as we watched the color drain from the sky on one of those repeated nights, I consider three possibilities for the world. One, the women have it worse. Two, the men have it worse. Or three, everyone has it equally bad.

  This was a few weeks into my stay at Werner’s. We had established a safe routine of staying out of each other’s way, though sometimes we’d end up standing in the kitchen at the same time having tea and toast, not speaking. Once he brought in a few clippings of lemon verbena, put them on the kitchen table, and said, It’s lemon verbena, and I just nodded. After I’d done to the garden what I could do to the garden I’d go walk in the woods or hitchhike to town to release the impulse to buy something, to have a coffee or a beer or to consider going but never actually go to the library to send an email to my husband, to let him know I was fine and not to worry, not to bother worrying because there was nothing to worry about anymore and I was fine with my new, tiny life of just a few words and a few people and plants.

  And, Werner continued, it is not often that I have a female mind to consult about these possibilities and so, I bring this question to your attention, if you will attend it.

  Men have it worse … women have it worse … or no one has it worse?

  These are the options we can consider. This is my ridiculous game for us to speak of, here, as we view the ravine.

  We should establish categories, I said, and assign points to each category depending on how important that category is to overall life happiness. There should be a winner for each one. We should keep score.

  That seems fair.

  After debating and assigning points, then tallying them up while the possums scrambled in the darkness around us, we agreed that men had it better.

  * * *

  Weeks vanished. In the garden I was a thing with a particular use: pumpkin-vine waterer, bean-stalk trimmer, tomato-root coverer. I was suddenly essential. The pumpkins would shrivel without me. The tomatoes would die of thirst. The summer would have sunned them dead.

  After dinner I read or did nothing and sometimes in the morning I swam in the muddy bay, backstroking to nowhere and coming back to where I’d started. At night I slept on a thin, knotty mattress and had dreams that were never about operating a dishwasher. And I began to believe that you could exchange your life, send it back for a different model, and I knew that wasn’t really true but I also knew that it wasn’t, here, entirely untrue.

  And I did not fold fitted sheets or meet deadlines or go to the grocery store or do our taxes or call 1-800 numbers to complain. I did not wear electrodes or answer questions.

  I did not hear my husband opening the front door or closing the front door.

  And I did not feel guilt; I did not feel guilty; I forgot all the things that could have caused any warm ounce of that feeling.

  * * *

  Werner was standing in the kitchen struggling with the lid on a jar of orange marmalad
e, his face compressing and filling with blood. He looked up and put the jar on the counter, scraped something out of the sink, and tossed it out the window. The population of flies seemed to have tripled overnight and they circulated in the kitchen, more active and audible than usual; when I tried to brush one away, it would stay, indignant, on my skin or fly a tiny circle and return to the same spot.

  I picked up the marmalade and opened it with a pop. We stood and ate jagged slices of toast with the marmalade and Werner didn’t say anything about how I had opened the jar, but as I was about to head back down to the garden Werner broke the silence, saying, You are a strange creature. A curd of orange marmalade was on his chin. I focused on the curd of marmalade.