23
He said the night terrors had never happened before me and I could never decide if that was comforting or not comforting, if it meant I brought the worst out in him or if it just meant that the majority of my husband was a mostly nice thing—and maybe the realest part of my husband was unaffiliated with the screaming, violent version that shook us both awake some nights. Still, I couldn’t forget that there was a distinct possibility that it was me and the way I handled or not quite handled my wifehood that had unhinged this part of him. I had disrupted him. I was the catalyst that began the bad in his life, and I would continue to be a long series of disruptions to him and I was always going to bring out his ugliest side, and my sleeping beside him would always stop him from being able to really sleep.
In the early months the night terrors just made sleeping a kind of roulette and there was something perversely satisfying about waking up to his frayed screaming (when life seemed more like a soap opera and less like a life) but that was before the choking began, before the nights his hands would creep across my collarbone and tighten around my neck, and though it usually only took a few small hits to his chest or face to make him stop, a few nights I had to hit him harder than what seemed safe and though he never shut my trachea long enough for me to pass out he sometimes came close, pressing down for a moment, a wink in my throat. When he slipped out of a terror, eyes still shut and jaw slack, he’d fall limp back to his side of the bed and sometimes he’d go immediately back to sleep, and on those nights I’d get out of bed, shaking with adrenaline, and go to the living room couch with my neck bent against the armrest, chin on chest, mind on husband, eyes on window, waiting for some kind of sign, some kind of evidence, some kind of kindness or understanding to tell me, Self, it is all fine and okay. Close your eyes. Tomorrow it will all be fine. But I never have been the kind to keep a back-stock of that kind of kindness, the way that other people do, taking care of themselves and others, being ready to forgive.
Other nights, my husband would stay awake and we’d play out the same script:
Did it happen?
Yes.
Elly, my God, Elly, I’m so sorry. Elyria.
And he’d wrap over me and my throat would feel rug burned where he’d twisted the skin.
Elly, talk to me.
But what was there to talk about? What could I say? I had seen how a corner of my husband wanted to stop all the air in me.
Go back to sleep, I’d say.
What was it like this time?
The same.
Did I hurt you?
No. Let’s go back to sleep.
This looks like it hurt, Elly.
He’d drag a limp finger over the red lines his hands had left.
I’m fine. We’re fine.
And he’d keep staring, waiting for me to say what I knew he needed to hear, something I said so much I wondered why he didn’t just say it for me after a while.
I’d say, I know you didn’t mean to.
I knew that he didn’t mean to, or I think I knew he didn’t mean to, or it was better to believe that he didn’t mean to, but I wondered how I knew, for certain, that he didn’t mean to, or if a more accurate thing to say would be that I trusted that he didn’t mean to, but if I actually did trust that he didn’t mean to, I should have just said that I knew he didn’t mean to, which I obviously didn’t know for certain since I would stay awake for the rest of the night wondering how I could know, for certain, that he didn’t mean to, and what did my lack of certainty mean about how much I trusted or did not trust my husband, about how well or not well our marriage was going, the possibility that we each wanted to cause severe damage to the other, and there was the fact that the only way I could defend my husband’s night terrors was to believe that they were an entirely separate phenomenon from him, but I also knew that was incredibly unlikely or actually impossible because my husband was mostly his mind and I believed his mind was what made the night terrors happen. And it’s still unclear to me why a person has abilities that they do not want to have, why a person feels things that person doesn’t want to feel and why that person doesn’t feel things that person does want to feel, and why a person falls out of love when being in love was such a good thing to be in, and why a person makes loud and clumsy attempts at midnight to kill the life one could reasonably expect that person to want to preserve.
So after I said, as I always said, that I knew my husband didn’t mean to scream and choke me in his sleep (except without saying the words scream or choke because hearing those words was almost worse than him actually doing those things) we’d lie awake awhile, each pretending to be asleep or almost asleep but we’d always stay up, slipping in and out of sleep for all those hours, each of us moving as little as possible, trying to breathe like we were deeply content, like it would be easy to go back to sleep as soon as we were truly ready, as soon as we were prepared to will ourselves back into the shut-lid place where those terrors lived. But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we’d be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.
Then there was that night when we were arguing about something that didn’t matter, something that can be summarized as I Believe You Are a Little More Despicable Than Me, and my husband wasn’t listening to me and I wasn’t listening to my husband but we were making our arguments at the same time in low voices, and I picked up the glass of neat bourbon that he’d bought for me like this was a date instead of what it was: a married couple’s attempt to pretend to be in a marriage that was the kind of marriage where we went out on things like dates, but instead became a married couple’s chance to argue, as discreetly as possible, in public, and I picked up that glass of bourbon that he’d bought for me and I started to lift it to my mouth before I thought of splashing it into my husband’s face, but I didn’t want to do that—I didn’t want to give or do anything to my husband because I didn’t want to acknowledge that my husband was even a person in my life, so I poured the glass of bourbon onto the table and when I poured it onto the table I didn’t mean to say that it wasn’t nice of him to have bought it for me and I didn’t mean to say that it didn’t taste good or that I was already drunk enough; what I meant was I am a liquid and he is a solid and the universe is expanding and here we go flying away from each other like matter always does, spinning and spilling off the edge of our table and onto our laps.
This put an end to whatever we were fighting about.
We stared into the puddle of nice bourbon, a round, amber shimmer, and we looked up and around the bar to see if anyone had seen me do this and we tried to laugh a little about it and I told my husband that I would write this into one of the episodes of the soap opera someday and he kept laughing for a beat but then he stopped laughing—
You would do that?
I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he’d like to become part of a story, any story.
Yeah, of course.
You would take something of ours and turn it into a scene?
I’d exaggerate it, of course. It wouldn’t be the same.
What do you mean?
It would have to be so much more dramatic to make it onto the show. I mean, to those characters a twelve-dollar glass of bourbon is nothing—someone would have to pour a really good bottle of Scotch on the table. Something rare.
I guess so, he said.
As we walked home that night smelling like the bourbon that had drizzled onto our knees, I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love and I also knew that the song that my husband was, the song I had forgotten, was not only forgotten but no longer existed, that there had only been one record of it and it had been melted down and turned into something else and only one person knew how to sing it and that person was long since dead. My husband and I were no longer the people that fit easily into each other’s life, but we suggested
those people, and this was why I would often catch him looking at me as if I merely looked familiar to him. We did not exist, the we we thought we’d always be.
24
On the ferry back to the North Island I sat at the bar because the tender tender was there and I tried to not be disappointed that she didn’t seem to remember me. I read Mrs. Bridge again, or, rather, just moved my eyes over the words and wondered where I was going or what I should do now or how I was going to find a way to disappear my wildebeest. I thought of the first time I saw the tender tender and remembered the halo of the inaudible noise I heard back then and I felt compelled by it, but also suspicious of it, and there was a dissonance, between the inaudible noise and the suspicion, a long chord in a minor key. I didn’t know if I would call Jaye or not call Jaye, if going to Napier would be worth the trouble, if anywhere was worth the trouble. I watched the tender tender moving around, pouring pints and prying caps until she leaned down on the bar, head propped in hands, to watch a staticky TV. A police rendering of a woman was on the screen, then a second and a third version, each with slight variations, the different ways that witnesses had remembered her. Her eyes slightly larger in this one; a longer nose in that. There were no photographs of her, the television said—this woman had avoided photographs her whole life.
You know what she did, don’t you?
She kill somebody? the man said.
Tried to, the tender tender said. Tried to kill her husband. Killed her little girl’s pet rabbit and set the neighbor’s house on fire.
She did, did she?
Aye, she did. She left her husband tied up and covered with rabbit blood.
Someone said once that they’d never heard of a crime they couldn’t imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn’t such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn’t not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn’t want to do that and I didn’t know how to do that and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that—
A man sitting beside me leaned over and said, Ya travelin’?
It took me a second to get back into this place, this boat where I was floating between islands and not setting a house on fire and smearing a person with blood, but I somehow said, Yes, I am.
The man was somewhere between attractive and haggard, like he’d been a stunt double for a classic movie star but had been beaten up a few too many times.
I saw you get outta a car by the station—hitching?
I didn’t like that he’d made a dotted line between the person I’d been an hour ago and the person I was now.
Yeah, have been, I said.
American?
Yeah.
I’ll tell you something—and I don’t say this to upset you, just to make you think—there was this American girl here about this time last year and she’d been hitching about, getting from here to there, you know. Maybe it had been a few months of this and she’d been doing just fine until this bloke picked her up round Christchurch and he chopped her up into about fifty-five pieces and left her all over the country.
He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. We both watched the tender tender, our patron saint.
All right, I said. Well. Thanks for letting me know.
I don’t say it to make you stop what you’re doing, but just so you know it’s not the smartest thing you could do and you should watch out—you know, think about what you’re doing. Don’t get into the car with someone who looks like they might be able to chop you up.
No one can make decisions based on hypothetical knife skills, I didn’t say.
You Americans are always saying how you come here and don’t want to leave but I don’t think you mean dead and chopped up, you know? That’s not what you mean.
I’d never said anything about not leaving.
The tender tender came over, looked at my glass, and looked at me and that was all she needed to know to fill it to the rim again and, oh, dear God, I will love her every day for the rest of forever.
25
For at least an hour I just walked up and down the same few blocks in Wellington, thinking about hitching up to Napier to see Jaye, and when I thought of Jaye I would hear the inaudible noise but then the minor chord would start and the dissonance would begin and I would walk back the other way, think of calling Dillon or going to a hostel, and the inaudible noise would gain volume over the minor chord, and I would decide against Dillon or a hostel, then start walking toward the highway again until the minor chord came back, and this went and went for a while, my pacing—noise, chord, dissonance, noise—but finally my thumb caught a car before my mind could change and when I got to Napier I got out of the car downtown and I found a pay phone and called the number Jaye had given me so many weeks earlier. It rang and rang and no one answered and nothing happened so I hung up and watched the passing cars. They went by slowly, calmly, all stopping at the stop sign, taking their turn to do what they should do until one car sped past the stop sign and hit another car in the intersection and that car tried to swerve but jumped a curb and ran into a building and a window shattered right out of it. A man started shouting, then ran up to the pay phone and dialed and yelled and I started thinking about the time that Ruby called me in the middle of the day to ask me to come over to her apartment and when I got there she was frying bacon, frying it one slice at a time, putting it on a plate then sitting and eating it, then getting up and frying another slice. She finished a whole package that afternoon and I didn’t know whether to be amazed or afraid, amazed or afraid—I couldn’t choose which to be and neither one was happening naturally and what was I to make of it, all this bacon eating? The other car had spun a circle and was now hip to hip with a parked car, squeezed together like a picture of friends. Steam or smoke leaked from the car hood, and was I amazed or afraid? I couldn’t get a grasp on a feeling and I kept thinking of Ruby putting slick slices of bacon in her mouth. Her eyes seemed foggy and far-off and I remembered that she had endured a childhood not unlike mine but also very unlike mine, this woman who was my sister, but only legally, this person who’d emerged on the other side of the world, the product of some strangers’ bodies, this woman with whom I’d endured the same parents—who was she? Bacon turned itself into her body, thickened her blood with lipids.
I’m depressed, she said, and I’m thinking of my mother.
You mean the one you don’t know?
Yes, the one I don’t know.
What about her?
I saw something lower in Ruby’s face, something drain out of her.
What about her? she repeated, squinting.
I tried to look at Ruby with some kind of tenderness but I think it came out as condescension and I couldn’t feel my face, I couldn’t feel my face wrapped around my head, and I couldn’t feel the muscles in it and make them move in the right way. I was trapped in my body and Ruby was trapped in her body and we’d always been trying to bridge the difference between our bodies, atone for the fact that we were supposed to be family but we weren’t, not really, but we had to try anyway, try forever over and over again to find the way that we were related.
I think my mother ate a lot of pork, Ruby finally said, while she was pregnant with me.
We’d both been staring out the window and into an apartment across the street. A woman in a peach dress was pacing, pointing a remote control at some unseen device.
I sometimes get thi
s way, Elly, it’s like someone else is in my brain, telling me what to do. I go out. I buy a pound of bacon. I come home and eat the whole thing. I feel like I can hear her voice. I know it’s stupid, it’s crazy, it’s whatever, but it’s how I feel—I really hear it.
Her expression was broad and placid, like an ocean while no wind is blowing, and a few months later Ruby did not exist anymore, and years later I was standing on a sidewalk in another country, thinking of that moment, still trying to find a feeling about it and trying to find a feeling about these wrecked cars—afraid or amazed? I wandered away from the cars as a crowd grew. An ambulance was singing. I walked with the setting sun at my back, hoping to find the ocean. I thought of Ruby and the dust that danced in light beaming from the window. She curled around her belly packed full of dead pig, packed full of the need she had to hear her mother’s voice.
I had barely spoken all day, but I couldn’t tell whether I missed that flank of myself, my voice, and I thought of the inaudible noise and when I thought of it, it was there, and it filled the vacuum left by my voice and I wondered if the shadow of the inaudible noise was the same thing as the inaudible noise itself, if I actually needed to be near Jaye for it to last or if it could exist without her, if it could live entirely in the memory of her, or if, instead, I needed direct exposure to Jaye to keep generating it, a vitamin-D kind of thing—and the sun went down and there was nowhere for me to be: no destination, no stranger offering a home or car and there was no way for anyone to reach me, to find me, to call me, to tell me anything, and I was fully alone, leashed within my utter self. The ocean mumbled somewhere east of me, and I could hear it but I couldn’t see it, that black ocean floating in the black air, whispering salt into any open ear. On a street corner, a child was standing like a sad statue, staring off, and as I got closer to him I began to distinctly feel worry—where did he belong and who did he belong to and what would happen to him if he had been forgotten or misplaced, if he wandered like a stray animal through alleyways and under highway bridges and along creekbeds on the edge of town? When I came closer to him a smile flickered on his face, small muscles twitching, like a lightbulb shorting out. He was holding what I thought was a juice box but it turned out to be a pack of cigarettes.
Nobody Is Ever Missing Page 10
