Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Eventually I was hiking again and the trail ended at a paved road and after some time a woman driving a blue van stopped and rolled down her window.

  Put it in the back but not on this side, the other side, no, the other side, because he’s right there, so go around.

  I hadn’t even had my thumb out and I didn’t know who he was or what she meant, but I went to the other side and put my pack in the backseat and it turned out that he was a baby, sleeping, strapped into a plastic cradle.

  It’s very dangerous what you’re doing, very stupid. People come here and think this is a country where everyone is nice and good but everyone isn’t always nice and good and there are women who get raped and murdered every day, every day, and today might not be the day where everything is so different. So think about that. Think about what you’re doing.

  I nodded. I said I would think about it, but it was still too early in the day to think about it. She had pretty dark hair. I guessed she was Argentinean.

  It just isn’t safe to be a woman or girl anywhere anymore. Remember dignities? Well, people misplaced their dignities. Everything is changing. Why is everything changing like that? I don’t even know. I just don’t know. When I was your age I hitched all over the place, but now—God, I don’t know what’s happened to people, but they’ve gone bad, turned sour, all of them.

  I said I would be careful and she dropped me off in a big parking lot in Ostend. She said, Stay away from those bloody blokes.

  I said I would, but I didn’t, and a bloke stopped and I got in his bright green camper van.

  He said, Mortis.

  I said, Mortis?

  He said, No, Mortis.

  Mortis? I asked again, but he said, No.

  I said, I’m Elyria, then we didn’t talk anymore.

  Mortis sounded like he was maybe Swiss or something and he drove me to the same place he was going, a small and almost empty beach, without raping or killing me, which I appreciated, and when we got out of his van he said, Take the care, and I said, Take even more, and pretended like that was the way people spoke in this world because what difference did it make? Who would care if they knew I went around impersonating persons?

  I put down my backpack in the sand and noticed a man and a girl in a green swimsuit making a sand castle near the ocean. Farther down the beach there was a woman and past her there was no one and for some reason I thought about the night that I burned those vegetables and how I told Amos and Luna if they got some burned ones on their plates it was all right but they didn’t have to eat them, unless they wanted to, because the burned ones do taste okay, but the unburned ones taste better and are also much easier to chew. I walked toward the ocean, my brain somehow calm and empty, sick of itself, taking a sick day.

  I waded calf-deep into the water and just looked at the horizon, the ocean curve, and I had an almost ideal moment. I crouched down and put my arms into the water and I felt, actually, peaceful. I huddled against my knees like a child and I closed my eyes awhile and just was.

  I started to push myself farther out into the sea, but something fleshy moved over my feet, against my shins and there was a small splash not made by me and I felt a strange electric sensation in my forearm and I raised my arm out of the water and it didn’t look right, somehow, but had changed too quickly for me to register what was wrong: there was an addition to my arm, to my forearm, specifically, something poking through the top of it—a dark grey point like the tip of a knife and when I looked at the underside of my arm I saw the rest of it, this metal-looking thing, like a piece of sawing machinery, some kind of hardware, a lost part, but I was in the ocean where hardware pieces are not usually lost and not usually impaling a person’s arm.

  I was still staring when a rush of blood came out and began dripping into the water and I thought of what that nurse had said so many months ago: that blood is hazardous waste and it must be carefully disposed of and I didn’t want my hazardous waste to contribute to the hazardous waste that was already in the ocean so I began walking toward the beach but when I got to the shore I was bleeding in a way a person might call heavily, and it was only then I felt my head getting light and my limbs going loose in their sockets and I knew I needed to do something about my sudden condition, and, as if I’d figured out a riddle, I realized this hardware had belonged to a stingray, his stinger, and I opened my mouth in that way you do when you figure something out (Oh, a stingray!), when chaos turns to order. But the blood was rushing out thicker now and the man who had been building the sand castle with the girl had noticed this hazardous-waste issue I was having and was running toward me and shouting, and it was only then that I felt a tremendous amount of pain, which radiated from that stingray stinger (What are those things called?) and at this point I was maybe screaming, jolty and uncontrollable, as if my screams were coming out accidentally, like hiccups. The man picked me up and ran toward the parking lot and I saw Mortis (Oh, I remember you, Mortis, there you are) and Mortis had my backpack and was running very calmly, like a good athlete, and in the parking lot I saw the little girl eating an orange Popsicle, and it was melted across her face and arm but when she saw her father she dropped the Popsicle and began shaking her hands and stomping her feet and making a tantrum against this—and who could disagree with her? It is plainly unpleasant to see your father smeared with some stranger’s hazardous waste and I remember her whimpering in the backseat as we sped up the road and she kept asking, Papa, what’s going to happen to her? What’s going to happen? And Papa didn’t answer for the first few times and I thought, Good job, Papa, let her keep living in suspense. But eventually Papa did answer and he said, I don’t know, honey, and she stopped asking and stopped whimpering or maybe this is when I finally passed out, but before I did I realized I had witnessed the moment when this girl found out that nobody (not even Papa) knows what’s going to happen to her or him or anyone and that’s called Dramatic Tension and that’s called the Suspense of Life and that’s called Being Alive.

  34

  I woke up in a small, green room.

  A TV was hanging from the ceiling in the corner with a plastic fern hanging under it. I heard a texture of clicks and beeps. One framed picture was on the wall: a man on a sailboat looking at the ocean like it belonged to him, like he’d spent his whole life earning enough money to buy the ocean and now he had it and he was pleased with himself.

  In the door there was a small, narrow window for seeing small, narrow things. A woman came in and smiled at me.

  Good morning, Elyria. I’m Mrs. Harper. I work for the embassy.

  She stared at me and seemed to be waiting on something.

  How are you feeling this morning?

  A word—I needed a word—Fine, I said, a reflex.

  The woman showed me some documents, showed me my own passport, and seemed concerned and proud at the same time, like she had just played a hundred-point word in what was supposed to be a friendly game of Scrabble. She read something to me about a law or a bill or an act or an act of God, something—some kind of treatment that had been given or would be given—but all the light and sounds were still blurred. She put a pen in my hand and a clipboard under the pen.

  Oh, sorry. Here—you don’t usually use that arm, do you?

  My right hand and forearm were covered in gauze and once I saw it I felt it, felt my muscles shuddering, felt the bones in my arm humming, the flesh bright and hot. The woman was trying to wrap my stiff left hand around this pen and it felt extremely possible that my whole life had happened and now I was at the end of it, signing something away, my craggle hand and drumless ears and drooping eyes all nearly gone. My signature looked like kindergarten scratch.

  She said something about customs and a visa, a penalty, deportation, but I didn’t hear the full sentences until she mentioned my husband—

  He’s being kept up-to-date and has paid for your transportation and medical costs. Due to your history, we have decided to conduct an additional mental health assessment. This
is for Homeland Security to use to calculate any risk factors of your repatriation.

  I felt myself waking up a little more. Sound started sounding like sound again. I smiled at the painting of the man who had bought the ocean and thought of Mortis. I wondered what happened to Mortis. I enjoyed the word repatriation.

  Dr. Williamson will be in shortly. Best of luck, she said, but I knew she didn’t even wish me the second best or the third or any kind of luck in the top ten of luck or anywhere near it. When she closed the door, I heard the lock click.

  35

  A nurse came in.

  Mrs. Riley, Charles is on the phone.

  Charles?

  Yes. Charles.

  She said this like I should absolutely know who Charles was and I could have no possible excuse for not knowing who Charles was and that even the word Charles should have carried a serious meaning to me and I should have already known this meaning and if I did not know what Charles meant there was something severely wrong with me.

  Your husband, she said. He’s on the phone.

  My husband, I said. His name could have been Charles, I thought, yes, I was mostly sure that Charles was the word that people who were not his wife called my husband since they couldn’t call him Husband because none of them were his wife.

  What does Charles say?

  He wants to speak with you, she said.

  Me?

  She just looked this time, saying nothing, like I’d had three shots to get this right and they were up.

  Okay, I said. I’ll talk.

  And so I talked.

  And also he talked.

  And we were talking.

  We were having a talk.

  We were putting information toward each other and we were doing this as casually as we could pretend to be doing this because it had been a long time since we had done this and we were out of practice and it was obvious to us, obvious that we were unused to each other, but the main problem I had with this talk was that my husband had put his voice on crookedly—he was wearing it incorrectly, was oriented to it in an ugly way and it hurt to listen to him speak like this in the same way that it hurts to look at someone’s bloodied mouth when it is talking and thickened red dribbles out or maybe a tooth—listening to my husband also hurt in the same way that I can barely look at a person with any kind of tumor growing on their face, an ear folded under a pus-filled bulb or a nose swollen into a rubber ball, and this is why it took all the energy I had just to listen to him talk to me in his crooked voice, that voice that sounded wrenched out of his mouth, like a molar being slowly twisted from gums with the nerves dangling, but, Hello, he said, and How are you? he said, and I said, Good, and we knew that wasn’t really true and he said, I’m good, too, even though it was also obvious he was not good or even close, but regardless of all that ungoodness he talked for a while and I made some noises equivalent to an absently nodding head, but after a few minutes of this he asked, Are you even listening to me? It’s been months and can’t you even listen to me? Is that so much to ask? Is it so much to ask you just to fucking listen to me for once? And I knew listening to him was important, so I tried my best to listen, to take his words in and fold them in the correct fashion, to make a smooth, warm stack of his words, a just-laundered-white-socks-and-white-towels kind of stack, a bleached-and-tumble-dried stack that I could look at and say, yes, I had completed this chore, this thing of life that needed doing: hearing my husband’s complaints, his current ones. So I let it be painful; I let the hurting just be a thing that was there instead of a thing I was feeling. I told my husband, It’s just a lot, to listen, to hear you right now. I am—I am overwhelmed, a little. I am a little overwhelmed. And my husband said, Yes, I understand that, but I don’t think he did understand it or even that it could be understood, what my life was like at that point and why it was overwhelming me. The moss-green hospital room and the locked door and a person from the embassy telling me I was illegal and needed to be psychologically assessed and that little painting of the man who owned the ocean reminding me that I didn’t own anything at all just then, not even the freedom I’d once had and not even a glass of ocean water and here was my husband’s voice asking if I was being treated well, if the immigration officers were being fair and decent and if the nurses and doctors were being kind and polite and I wanted to answer him with something true, to tell him something specific so he would know that I was listening and answering, making a real effort, and as I thought of what to say I looked through the narrow window in the locked door and saw a nurse put her hand on her lower back, twist so slightly to the right, and the way she did this reminded me of the tender tender at the bar on the ferry from Picton to Wellington and how the tender tender had been so very tender in the way she had slid cold pints into everyone’s hands and how her movements, pulling on the taps, turning on tiptoe back toward me, the straight-backed grace she had as she leaned down to rest her head in beer-wet hands, and I thought of that tender tender and the possible world that she had suggested just by existing the way that she had, the possible life she had hinted toward, and there was a glimmer of the tender tender in the nurse as she pressed her spread fingers against her back and because of this balmy memory I felt a passing niceness, and I told my husband they were treating me very well at the hospital, that everyone here was being professional and kind, though, in fact, no one had treated me at all yet and I had only spoken to that nurse with the phone and Mrs. Harper from the embassy, who hadn’t been particularly kind but at least had seemed, in a way, professional, since her profession seemed to be making people aware of the bad things that they had done. My husband apologized for having to make me go through with the assessment, but it seemed to him that this would be the only way for my return to be a safe one, telling the immigration officers that I was potentially a risk to myself and others was the only safe thing for me, and he knew, he said, that I wasn’t within myself anymore and I needed to be found, but, he said, I know you’re not really a risk to yourself or others, Elly, I know that you’re not, you know—dangerous—you know that, right? That is what he actually, honestly asked me: if I knew that he knew that I wasn’t a risk to myself or others, which, I believed, overlooked the fact that I had been locked in a small, green hospital room and told I needed a psychological assessment, that I was a highly suspect person and that I would need to be mentally and emotionally assessed, that an inventory needed to be taken because they weren’t entirely sure if everything that was supposed to be in me was still in me, and all this was telling me in many ways that I was, in fact, a risk of some sort, that I had been putting a part of my life or the lives of others at risk because immigration officers don’t go locking unrisky people into hospital rooms and mental health assessments are not conducted on those who are just calm, sweet darling things and These are not the things we do to people who are not a risk to something, Husband, I thought but did not say. I was a risk. And my husband knew that. And he also knew that I knew that. I knew, also, I was a risk to his life, and even though I wanted to ask him if he knew that, I didn’t ask him that because I already knew the answer, regardless of what he would say, so I breathed in as best as I could and I tried to keep listening to my husband’s crooked, tumor-y, pus-filled, and nearly bursting voice. And I did not want to admit this then but I can admit it now and will: I wanted to be responsible for destroying a small-to-medium-sized part of him, and this was a somewhat-sick and somewhat-normal thing, I think, everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them, though not everyone can see that ugly want sleeping under the blankets of love and affection and secure attachment that we try to smother that ugly want with and even fewer people will allow that want to become an action, to take any kind of pleasure in seeing the destroying done. Everyone wants to be needed so badly that if we were to withhold ourselves from that person who needs us so, we would leave them so empty of their need they’d become completely irrelevant to the world, unable to go on
in a normal, functional, just-fine, forward-moving fashion, and the short of it was this: my husband was a mess, and even though I knew I was also a mess, I also knew he was messier, at least in some ways, and I realized I no longer had any interest in taking responsibility for him, the crumple and grunt of him, my husband, this life I had wedded and welded myself to—he and the way he was and the way he wanted me to be. My husband said something to me about the poor choices I had made but I already knew that I had made a poor choice or series of choices. My choices were poor, they were broke, they were bankrupt of all value to other people. My choices were only of any value to me and that value, I was coming to find, was also highly debatable, now that I was sitting stiff and still dressed on a hospital bed, waiting for someone to fully analyze my internal, unseeable being and I knew so certainly they would just say what I already knew—that there had been no discernible or obvious reason behind anything that I had done—leaving my husband without a word and wandering this country for so long. I was just out here, all huddled in my nothing. I could only explain all my poor choices by saying that I had a general feeling of needing to leave, of needing to be the first to go, of needing to barricade myself from living life the way everyone else seemed to be living it, the way that seemed obvious, intuitive, clear and easy, and easy and clear to everyone who was not me, to everyone who was on the other side of this place called I.

  Nothing is clear or easy to me anymore, I said to my husband, and he told me, still in that malformed voice, that he had something important to tell me. He said he would leave a letter with the doorman of his (not our) building, and that letter would tell me what I was supposed to do, it would outline what remained of the life I’d left, and what of it I could still claim. He breathed in and balanced his voice on what seemed to be the last stable edge of himself.