Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Elly, I am not yet sure what to do with you or myself, if there is still a context in which we can exist. You have complicated all the contexts in which we had formerly existed, Elyria, you have tested their outer reaches. There are limits to what a man can stand, to how much being treated unlike a husband he can take before he is, in fact, no longer a husband, no longer willing to be the half of the life that he had thought he was living in.

  I was listening to him as carefully as I could, still taking his words into my hands and folding them into smooth rectangles and putting them in a neat stack beside me. And now my husband had told me what my next chore would be, that after I was sent back to New York there would be this letter and that seemed nice, having instructions, directions, maybe even a list with open boxes for checking and I could go check, check, check, done, done, done, and be back in my life or its vague approximation. After he told me about the letter he said that he couldn’t talk anymore because he needed to go, but it was clear in the way that he spoke that he didn’t actually need to, he just wanted to, though I may not be the kind of person who can be relied upon to make a distinction between wants and needs, and I may not be a person who can parse any space between needing and wanting or even wanting and being compelled or being compelled and being swallowed whole by something, picked up and taken away by something like a desire, something like a need, something like a compulsion. But I knew that what my husband meant when he said that he needed to go was that he wanted to hang up the phone and pour himself a glass of gin if the hour was appropriate or even if the hour was inappropriate and he wanted to go sit in his chair, his favorite chair—the beige one with the stain on the left arm—and he wanted to put on one of his mother’s records, that unlabeled one that he’d never heard when he was a child but it was still one that she had owned, had probably paid money for or was given at some point, this recording of a string quartet performing something just morose enough for everyday listening, and the composer had always been unknown because the tune was unfamiliar and the original sleeve had been lost and replaced by a fold of plain cardboard, and as he sat in his chair and listened to this record for the thousandth time as he held the night’s first glass of gin, he would keep the tempo of the quartet by swinging his head so slightly to the right (with his eyes closed), then back to center, then throw his chin up (still with his eyes closed), then back to center and to the right again, center, and up again, center, eyes closed and right, center, and up, center, still with shut eyes and right, center, up, center, and he would do this for hours, eyes always closed, as the record played and ended, and he’d turn it to the B side then to the A side again and the B and the A and this, I knew, was what he meant by I need to go, Elyria; he meant he had to go into the place where he went when I became too much for him, the place where he conducted music played by men or women who were (maybe) long-since dead, men or women who he’d only known as violins, a viola, a cello, men or women who had therefore, essentially, always been dead to him, alive only in the recorded shadow of once-vibrating strings, alive only when the record spun, but somehow his mother was in that record, I knew, and that’s why he had to play it, that’s why he had to conduct it, that’s why he had to be a conductor to that music, that energy, her energy, that last crackly, rotating bit of his mother that existed and my husband conducted those songs, also, because I was too much for him to conduct and for that I would like to apologize, that I had always been the wrong watt for my husband, that I was always tripping his circuit, that I was never something he could quite carry.

  The nurse took the cordless phone out of my hand and walked out without any kind of explanation and the door audibly locked behind her and I was just left with myself behind that locked door and even though this wasn’t a particularly nice place that I was in, I decided or perhaps just felt then that I wanted this exact moment to stay awhile longer than any other moment. I said to myself, Moment, you should stay, you should stay even though I know you can’t and wouldn’t even if you could, and I wanted this, I now realize, because I loved the limits I had in that moment—the edges of my hospital bed and the hideous walls of that room and the door and the lock in the door and the country that was keeping me and the knowledge that a psychiatrist was steadily marching toward me, that he was going to ask me questions and record my answers and he was going to watch how my eyes moved and when and watch where I put my hands and how, and all these little things were going to be recorded, flattened out onto a sheet of paper that would tell the embassy and the immigration agents and Homeland Security and my waiting husband exactly what I was and why I was what I was, and I loved that these were the cozy limits of my little life, in the limit of this moment, in the antiseptic huddle of the hospital room, in the blurry cocoon around me that everyone was calling the world, this moment—well, I wanted it to stay, just like that April day, the first spring since Ruby had split herself open on the brick courtyard, and the first spring since I had met the professor who would become my husband, when he and I were in a park, lying on a quilt he told me his mother had made and for the first time since I’d met him he smiled when he talked about his mother, and the professor and I were in the park and lying on our sides on that quilt and holding hands and looking in each other’s eyes and both of our hearts were making themselves known to us as highly functional organs—beating like the strongest and most patriotic of soldiers leading the march of our little lives—and so the professor and I were the most in love that two people could ever be because we had been united by the loss we had in common and despite this or because of this we had allowed ourselves to fall in love during that all-time darkest autumn, but then the snow had come and gone and the ground had dried and trees had leaves again and we were finally there in the middle of it again, staring at the impossibility of spring, again it was spring, and staring at the impossibility of being so alive and being so awake with someone else and the professor, staring at me in this yellow moment, decided to say something someone long dead had said or written: he said, Moment, stay; and I said, What?, and he said, It’s something Virginia Woolf wrote: Moment, stay because you are so fair, or something like that, and I said, So this is how you feel? How Virginia Woolf already felt?, and he said, Yes, and what I felt then was partially agreement with him because, yes, I was also in love and wanted to stay in it, but also a kind of sadness, a kind of anger, a kind of disappointment, because as soon as he had asked that moment to stay, it was gone.

  36

  Here’s the thing, I said to the memory of my husband, that hologram—here is the thing:

  We don’t get to stay in moments and that should not be news to you. We are both familiar with the concept of time, the awful math of it, how our history always gets larger, less understandable, overweight, overworked, over and over, and memories get misfiled and complicate feelings for no good reason and some people seem more able to deal with this, to keep their histories clean and well ordered but I still don’t understand why we came unstuck from those moments we wanted to stay and why the moments we wanted to forget still haunt us.

  Maybe it’s a kind of math we can’t do, something we failed, and when I think about you now I can’t think about you straight—it’s like you’ve turned into a color or a sound, like a whole orchestra warming up with the first violin doing one thing and second violin doing another and violin five doing whatever and violin seven doing nothing and cellos and drums and flutes all scribbling, no harmony, no pattern, no sense, no order. I don’t even know what I’m talking about or thinking about or whether I am talking or thinking, and maybe if I was a sound or a color I wouldn’t be a sound or a color, I’d be a wildebeest except that’s not true because I am a wildebeest. I am part wildebeest. Of course you’d say, That’s not true, you’re not a wildebeest, and you’d try to console me: We all have darkness, you’d say; but I know mine is darker and that it hides a whole herd of rabid wildebeests and I’m not like you, Husband, there’s no light switch in my darkness because my darkness is a midnigh
t savanna on a moonless, starless night and all my wildebeests are running at a full, dumb speed but I couldn’t even tell you this if I tried because we haven’t really spoken in years, which is why I have put a distance of space and time between us, to make our silence make sense. Even if you picked up this unwritten letter and read it you couldn’t actually read it because it doesn’t exist because the wildebeests ate it and I’m sorry, but I’d still like to know:

  Are you sleeping these nights?

  Is your life livable?

  Do you eat—do you eat anything at all?

  Do you believe anyone cares if you are alive at the end of the day?

  And where did our want go?

  And who set fire to our wanting?

  And who invented want and why?

  Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn’t fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it’s gone. And, yes, I know that this will always be our intolerable problem, one of those things we slowly go grey over, so forget it—forget what I was asking or saying and let me just ask you this: If you could hire a think tank to figure out what happened to us, would you do it? You’d think after all these months I’ve spent thinking about what we were and what we became that I’d have some kind of clue but I don’t have any. Do you have one? Could I see it? Could I borrow it? Or is this the kind of game where you keep all the clues to yourself until the game is over and someone opens the envelope and it says: It was the husband, in the office, with the chalkboard (which is funny because we were all so sure that it was the wife, in the kitchen, with the chef’s knife).

  Sometimes I remember that afternoon you asked me to teach you how to hold a baby and put it into a crib because you didn’t know how to do this and I did know and you thought that you’d someday need this knowledge, this tiny skill, and even though I knew you’d most likely never need to know how, I still taught you.

  You place a baby the same way you place a blame: put it down slowly—after careful deliberation—of where to place it—and cradle the head—and mind the neck.

  37

  Another nurse came in and recorded my temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate and she seemed unimpressed with the way my heart was flexing and the numbers on the thermometer. She put a wooden plank on my tongue, peered into my throat, removed the plank, and tossed it into the trash. She shined a little light in my eyes and into my ears and up my nostrils, again seeming annoyed when she found nothing of consequence in me.

  Time to change this, too, isn’t it?

  She started unwrapping the gauze and it appeared gradually more red than white and she peeled back a long flap of blood-soaked cotton. A slimy, red wound dimpled the center of my forearm. She sopped up streaks of blood, then said, This is going to sting a little, and poured something into that red dimple which fizzed, but I didn’t feel it. She held my wrist as she wiped off the underside of the wound then rewrapped the whole thing.

  There we go, she said, smiling. She made eye contact for longer than I felt was natural or appropriate. You’re lucky—a couple millimeters one way and you would have bled to death.

  She said the psychiatrist would be in soon and I tried to retain some dignity even though she knew that it had become necessary to have a psychiatrist come to assess my mental situation, but then I remembered that I didn’t have any dignity to retain, not since she had measured my heart and seen all my bleeding and examined every entry there was into the slimy middle of my skull.

  Later the psychiatrist showed up: a bald man with delicate, wire-frame glasses pinched low on his bulbous nose, a thin bird on a thick gnarl. He wore a lighter grey shirt under a darker grey cardigan, and darker grey pants. He had little wisps of pale hair hanging off the sides of his head, the last spring leaves of him.

  It’s often better if we’re on a first-name basis, Elyria. Is it all right if I call you Elyria?

  Sure, I said, thinking of how I’d always be sitting under that word, my name, the terminal noise of me.

  My name is Thomas.

  He didn’t have a nice-to-meet-you look on his face but something more like a jeweler looking for authenticity.

  First, Elyria—and I hope you don’t take this too personally—I will need to assess your intellectual ability. This is merely a formality to confirm you are fit to complete the next survey I’ll administer about how you’ve been feeling lately. Are you ready for part one?

  I sat up a little, tried to make myself look kind and safe and trustworthy, a Labrador of a person. I said, I’m ready, and he gave me a short, yellow pencil and a clipboard pinching one sheet of paper with math and logic problems.

  Please take as long as you need, Elyria. There’s no rush.

  The assessment was just a few basic math problems like nine divided by three and four times five and other lines like this, problems that weren’t really problems at all, problems that were so simple they made my life problems seem unbearably complex. There were a few picture ones, too: A fish, a dog, a hammer—which does not belong? An apple, a tree, a helicopter—which does not belong? Still, I answered them all slowly, deliberately, making sure to match the seriousness with which this test had been given to me. All moments forever had led me to this moment with these equations and this drawing of a happy, slobbering dog, knowing the answers instantly, looking at the problems again, knowing the same answers, reading them again and trying to imagine if there was any possible way that I might be wrong, but each time I always came back to my first thought and after I had written my nine answers to the nine problems I felt a little exuberance because I knew at least nine things in this world to be just so plainly true, limbless facts. I wished, for a moment, that I had become a mathematician or an accountant or a factory worker so I could just have part of my day be full of NO or YES, ONE MILLION or TWO MILLION, or SAME, SAME, SAME, SAME. But instead I had this life that was populated with so many MAYBEs or ALMOSTs or PERHAPSes or I DON’T KNOWs that I felt that I was swimming or drowning or boiling in them, but here, in this quiet moment when I had finished the intellectual assessment but had not yet handed it back I tried to flatten my life out into a similar format:

  Husband times silence equals another country.

  Ruby times brick courtyard equals negative Ruby.

  Seashore, sister, seagull—which does not belong?

  But my life, anyone’s life, any life like a real life, any life that is humanlike—it can’t be turned into questions like that. I handed the clipboard back to Thomas and he looked down at it and moved a finger down the right side of the paper, pausing for a second on each number and letter and he nodded and looked at me.

  All right, that wasn’t so bad, now was it?

  No, I said. (Was I supposed to answer that question? It was not clear.)

  Thomas smiled a mouthful of tiny teeth and took off his glasses.

  And how are you feeling today, Elyria?

  I took a quick inventory of myself and found that everything was here and in more or less working order. My brain was functioning. My body was not crushed into a pudding. And, yes, I was somewhat trapped in this hospital room with my arm under all this gauze and all these painkillers in my veins, but that was, in its own way, somewhat enjoyable even though I had so many complicated and not-completely-all-right feelings under that enjoyment—because I knew I was enjoying something that I also knew, on some level, was just not meant to be enjoyed—

  Fine, I said. I’m okay.

  Just okay?

  Yep. Fine.

  Good, good. That’s good. So you’re not in too much pain.

  I nodded.

  The nurses here are quite nice, a
ren’t they?

  Sure.

  So, Elyria, let me just confirm a few things with you. I’ve been given a bit of information and I just want to confirm that it’s all correct. Tell me if anything sounds incorrect, all right?

  Okay.

  You earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard. You’ve been employed as a staff writer for CBS for five years. You married Charles Riley, six years ago. You’ve had no major health problems. You’re not in any debt. You’ve always filed your taxes on time. You were not taking any prescribed medications before you left the States. You lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a building owned by Columbia University where your husband earned tenure a year ago as an associate professor in the mathematics department. Is this all correct?

  Yes. It sounds right.

  Now, you see, Elyria, what I just described sounds like a pretty decent life you had going on there, so you can see how other people might be confused about why you decided to just pick up and leave like you did without even telling your husband where you went. That’s rather odd, isn’t it?

  I looked at him as if he was some object in a museum that I was not particularly interested in.

  It’s confusing to people, Thomas said, why you might just get up and leave everything.

  Yes, I said, nodding and smiling just a little. I know.

  Elyria, are you trying to avoid talking about why you left?

  No.

  No?

  I don’t have anything to say about it.

  You’re putting up quite a resistance to talking about it, though. Why is that?

  I don’t know.

  You don’t need to have your guard up, Elyria.

  I don’t have a guard up.

  You seem a little guarded.

  No, I don’t.

  How do you deal with stress?

  I don’t know. I read, I guess. Something alone.