Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Maybe I would let go of him and he would step away and look in my general direction but not my direct direction, not right at my absurd self, his missing wife limped home to repent. Maybe he’d have cut his hair in a new shape or maybe his eyes wouldn’t be the same grassy green anymore, maybe they’d turned a hunter shade, a color used in camouflage. He’d probably stand all rigid, like he was balancing a teacup full of fire on his head, and past him I would see our living room and the window we used to smoke out of when we were younger and still in love and everything still seemed possible so we could destroy our lungs a little, we could hold fire in our fingers, dare our bodies, and past the window the light and the sky would say it might soon rain but it hadn’t yet. I would want to say I was sorry but I would know that word was too small for what I’d done and I wasn’t sorry, not exactly, or maybe I would generate some kind of confidence and walk into the apartment and my husband would close the front door and turn and lean back against it. I imagined that familiar thud after unlatching my backpack and I imagined what I might say right then, in that silent moment just after the thud, and maybe I’d stand up straighter and make my tired eyes more open and try to really see my husband and try to really say something to him, give him something of myself, an explanation, some balm for the burn of now, but I knew I wouldn’t do any of this because there was a paralysis between us and a weariness in the way he looked at me and an unfamiliarity about his eyes—what were they anymore and why had they become this other thing?

  In the present I was still standing at my husband’s door, and for a moment I wondered if I was standing at the wrong door, if I was thinking of the wrong man, not a husband but some stranger, some neighbor I’d never met and I wondered how much of a difference there was between a husband and a stranger. Stranger plus time equals husband. Husband divided by time equals stranger. Husband and wife—which does not belong? Wife plus door equals what? But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer.

  To the husband mirage I said, What if we both stayed here and said absolutely nothing to each other for a year and see how we feel after that?

  Maybe that wasn’t the worst idea anyone had ever had, and maybe if we could say nothing at all for a year or some other considerable length of time, maybe that would be a way to excavate the marriage, air it out, dump it out of itself and show us if anything at all was even left in it. I imagined what that would be like, us both drinking tea or eating dinner or getting dressed or undressed or dressed again or standing, both of us, by the door putting our shoes on, but we wouldn’t tick out our thoughts at the other, wouldn’t need to ask the other anything, wouldn’t need to keep this dialogue still running down the page of us, and most importantly we wouldn’t need to feel any guilt for the silence that had grown like mold on a bathroom wall we’d sometimes halfheartedly scrub at but never commit to eradicating, because, if we had agreed to this year of silence, the mold would no longer be something we needed to clean but rather evidence of our evolution, our superiority to the basic cleanings other people had to do, almost a performance piece, that mold, that silence, a living thing we were just letting live, not something we wanted to contain or talk over or bleach dead—that mold would just be something that needed nothing, and I looked at my husband in that memory and I thought of the metaphorical mold and I knew right then there was little to nothing left between us and what had been keeping us together for so long was the rich and wild memory of how there had been so much, those past moments so nice we’d asked them to stay and now they’d all left, because moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

  I kept standing there at the door thinking through all the possible ways I could make us make do with what we’d made or what I’d made, the mess, I mean, but I didn’t knock on my husband’s door and I wondered if it would be possible for my husband to shoot me with a microscopic bullet that would make me make sense again, a bullet that could send the proper wants through my body: the want to be in this nice apartment with this reliable, honest man who had paid bills and who came home and did the things he’d said he’d do and sometimes more, and the want to have a family because it was time for me to continue the march of people that I belonged to and this was what we had been building our life toward, my husband had once said, and I didn’t know how to agree or disagree. Maybe this little bullet could also make me want to live this life that was by so many standards quite nice because we had a home and jobs and money in our bank accounts and a loaf of bread in the kitchen and good knives with sturdy handles and nice appliances and rings on our hands and we lived in a city where someone would always be willing to make you an egg sandwich despite the hour or the holiday, and we had a comfortable green couch and a record player and a decent collection of records and plenty of books and we had crown molding in our home and we had a view of treetops, and we had decently functioning bodies with lungs that could wind us and hearts pumping us and mouths that had all the regular, slimy teeth and none of the false ones, and we had genetic code that had grown us both into a respectable height and shape and I had a lot of blue dresses and black boots and he looked so nice in off-white linen shirts, as if he had been a cloud in a past life.

  I should want this, I thought, but all I wanted was to wish that I even wanted to want this and if I was being honest with myself, which I sometimes was, I didn’t even want to want to wish.

  Look—here I am. I’m still here. I’m right where you left me, the mirage of my husband said to me in my mind.

  I know, I thought.

  What? the husband mirage said.

  I said I know, I didn’t really say, I know you’re still here.

  The letter, my husband mirage said, and I remembered the letter and how I’d been looking forward to having instructions giving me a single choice, an unmovable logic.

  The mirage of my husband closed his mirage door and I stood for a moment at his real door and I knew that I knew what I should be doing and I knew how to do it and I knew it had to happen now, so I took the stairs down but stopped on the fourth-floor landing to look through the smoggy window facing the courtyard, and some amount of humanness squeezed through me and wetted my face and coursed through my body and made me shake so slightly I wondered what my husband was doing right then and I wondered what he’d ever do now that we’d both have to do things in this new kind of without, the kind of without that was final, the kind that meant there would be no apologies, no forgiveness, and now we’d each have to go about the slug of waking, bathing, eating, without the other as a witness, this person we’d split so much of our lives with, a person who housed entire armies of information about the other and who, I wondered, who would we thumb over our pasts with and who would notice how golden my husband’s pale skin became in the lamplight in his office so late at night when his mind would move chalk sticks across, across, across, creating problems and solutions and problems and solutions and if there was no one to notice these things about my husband would my husband even exist anymore? And where would all the me that he had housed in himself go if I wasn’t there to be with him and see what he kept of me in him, and did the versions of each of us that we had crafted so exactly and precisely for the other person, did those versions just evaporate, just die, just disappear, just fall out of a building somewhere in each of our brains and if they did then why didn’t we get to have funerals for them? I loved the he that he was to me. I loved him and he is dead and I want a black moment for that man. Give me a black moment for that.

  40

  The doorman who’d let me slip by was gone and Ray was there as I opened the stairwell door—

  Mrs. Riley, no one was ’sposed to let you up there.

  Ray still had that immovable mass of black hair and the
one blond eyebrow and the one set of blond eyelashes, a thing that turned this broad, dense man into a kind of puppy.

  Did the new guy give the letter to you? He was ’sposed to.

  Yeah, I got it, I said.

  Ray got a set of keys from the desk. The little TV was still on, a weathergirl in front of a map, her arm moving in a slow karate chop.

  I should take you to the basement, then. Right? Get your stuff?

  Sure, I said, and I tried to smile and seem grateful.

  We got into the elevator and when it opened in the basement Ray held an arm in front of the door and looked toward me to signal he was letting me off first, but he looked above my head instead of at my face and I realized Ray probably wouldn’t look at me because he must have thought I was a bad thing, even though he had said Good morning! to me so many times and so sincerely and asked How ya doin’, Elly? and even bothered to listen to and maybe care about how I was doing and often he had carried my groceries when I came stumbling into the lobby and once he even took the elevator with me all the way up to my apartment because I had been sick and didn’t look well and Ray had noticed and done something about it and despite all that history, Ray could now not even look at me, wouldn’t even just gently once look. To Ray I was just a chore now, just a thing that he had to endure; to him I had smacked the humanness from myself.

  Ray stacked my boxes and two chairs and little table on a rolling pallet and pushed the pallet to the freight elevator, and in the lobby he unloaded everything from the pallet and stacked it in the vestibule beside a bench I hadn’t ever noticed before, since this lobby wasn’t a place where I had ever waited, just a place I had passed through in that part of the past when I knew where I was going, where I should be, and what I should do. When Ray was done he didn’t say anything, just rolled the pallet away, and left me and my things like he was leaving anyone and anything and he was, because objects are just slow events and people are just slow events and Ray was done with the part of his life that I would be in and from here on out I was a stranger to him and even if I saw him on some sidewalk someday and had an impulse to say Good morning, he would not see me and he would not say anything and he would not look in my eyes because to him there would be nothing there to see.

  I sat on the lobby’s bench for a while and had nowhere to go and I wondered if there was a number I could call for a Man with a Van who might double as a therapist or priest or someone who could just tell me what to do with myself, someone who could take me and my furniture and boxes of life stuff to another part of the world or the city and tell me what to do in it, someone who knew a wide, clear place where I could start over. I wondered if there was such a thing as a Life Re-creation Specialist but I was mostly certain that if I was to look in the yellow pages for such a thing I’d only discover that it did not or did not yet exist—it would be up to me to find a new place in the world for my self and life and it seems that everyone else who was living or dead knew that you can only make those kinds of decisions for yourself and no one else can make them for you, and that there was probably something potentially very wrong with the woman who had a hard time just choosing anything to do with her whole entire self.

  After some time, something like an hour or hours, Ray came over and told me that I couldn’t just sit in the lobby all day now that I didn’t live here anymore. He generated some kind of pity and asked, Don’t you have anywhere to go? He seemed almost sincerely concerned about where I could possibly ever go and I surprised myself when I said, Yes, I do have somewhere to go, and I said it in a fed-up way, and again it was my voice, not my brain or body telling me how I felt and this was news to myself because being fed up wasn’t what I thought I was. I have plenty of places to go, I said, and I stopped looking at Ray and dug through my backpack and took only the things that were the most necessary (toothbrush, papers from immigration, little wooden camel Jaye had given me, socks, passport, underwear, a shirt) and I put them in a small canvas bag that seemed now preferable to the lug and labor of a backpack. I considered looking through the boxes for something else I might need like shoes that were more functional or clean pants but it wasn’t worth the trouble of having to push past the blue dresses and think of my husband taking things off their hangers and folding them and putting them in these boxes. A happy UPS man walked into the lobby, he and his shorts and his smile and his name sewn on his shirt, and Ray chatted with him, happy to talk to someone who was who he was expected to be, who came and did and went just like that.

  While Ray spoke and joked with the UPS man I walked out of the lobby and immediately regretted telling Ray that I had a place to go because, in fact, I did not have a place to go and that was exactly where I was going. I made it to the end of the block before Ray started yelling after me about all the things I’d left in his lobby, so I turned the corner onto Broadway and sprinted toward the train and I don’t know if Ray was running after me or not, because I did not look because I was too busy running as a way of saying, Fuck you, everything, fuck all of the things forever because I am free, so free, but also I knew that I wasn’t free, because running from something isn’t freedom, it’s just a way to flee, and, sure, the day was what a person talking to another person would call beautiful, but I immediately took it for granted, felt the earth owed me this one warm favor.

  In the subway station I jumped the turnstile as if that was how I’d always gotten around and I bolted into a waiting car just as the doors closed and we went and no one cared and I looked at all the people around me, staring off, headphones plugging ears, some sleeping or almost sleeping, and no one cared—oh, how no one cared—oh, how I loved how no one cared.

  Standing in front of me was a man with a bald spot, a sign I could trust this man because he, too, knew loss. I stared at his little bit of naked scalp, how tender, how shining, how close it was to his brain, his whole entire self. After some time he got off the train, so I got off the train, too, and I trailed behind the full moon his scalp was and when I lost track of him in a push of postwork people that was fine—we always knew it would end like this, that it would have to end somehow.

  I watched my feet moving across the sidewalk and realized my shoes were at the brink of giving up on me and the rest of the world: the lace tips frayed, seams strained, a little mouth opening on one toe as if gasping for air or like it was trying to whisper, Enough, enough, haven’t you figured out that there is nowhere better or worse to go and other people put up with this fact and you, for some sickness, do not, and will you stop trying to see a meaning in everything, in anything, and will you stop wishing you could have come close to any sheep in New Zealand just so you could touch the animal who filled the world with wool and will you stop talking to your own shoes and imagining them talking back at you? I did not particularly like listening to my shoes speak to me. They did not have anything useful to say.

  As I walked down the West Side Highway, cars shushing beside me like an ill ocean, I heard heavy steps, then a man’s voice—You one sexy-ass bitch—spoken so low I wondered if I was supposed to hear him or if it was a note to his sexy-ass self and then the man was to my left, and he looked over his shoulder at me before speeding up, his eyes scanning the crowd ahead of him, looking for other sexy-ass bitches. On a bench a man in ripped grey clothes with plastic bags on his feet was asking anyone if they had fifty cents—It’s just fifty cents, it’s only fifty cents—but when I passed he stopped asking and he gave me a look I’d never gotten before and I took that look and put a frame around it and hung it up in me. Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I’d look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

  I kept wandering through all these dirty, winding streets and all my thoughts and observations were immediately self-dest
ructing, not a single memory made, and then I noticed that the sky had produced clouds that would have made a person believe in God if they were susceptible to believing in God but all they did to me was make me wonder if it had been a good idea to start walking across the bridge toward Brooklyn because it seemed that considerably less people were out here than usual, like everyone knew something was about to happen but I didn’t and those God clouds got fat and dark and let their rain come down onto the bridge and the river below went stucco textured and my body and my canvas bag quickly looked as if we’d just stepped out of the ocean, some sea monster in the wrong place. The few others on the bridge were smug and safe under umbrellas and it was clearer to me than it had ever been that all there is on earth is the eternal now and nothing else. I had heard, in the past, lots of people say that, say that nothing exists except the present moment, that nothing has ever happened, that no one is here or not here, that no object is more than its action in a moment, and if all this business about the present moment is true, and I am still inclined to believe that it is true, then all I was at that moment was a set of senses held captive in a wet body in wet clothes in the piss of a cloud, stranded on the center of a bridge and I was just that and nothing else, and the past, the recent past, and the less recent past were not a part of me, just something gathered around me, an audience for what I would do next.

  The rain gave up and left and I wrung my hair out over one shoulder, then found a bench on the Brooklyn end of the bridge and I tried to hug some of the water out of my clothes and I took my shoes off and took off my socks and twisted the rain out of them and put them back on anyway because the other socks I’d brought with me weren’t any drier and as I was doing this a woman under an umbrella walked up and held out a few tissues she’d pulled from a plastic pouch. I said thank you and she said nothing and when I took them they turned to slime, sopped with the rain on my hands. She put the whole plastic pouch on the bench beside me and walked away wordless, so I watched her go, watched all of her goodness and empathy get away from me. I wondered why my husband couldn’t have just been all bad. Why couldn’t he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus? And I still wanted my black moment for it all, and I was still waiting on that black moment, still felt I was owed it, a little funeral for the us we’d been. I needed to stop wanting that impossible funeral, needed to leave that want like dogs must leave what their owners tell them to leave—I was something like a dog I owned. I had to tell myself to leave it, to shut up, had to take myself on a walk and feed myself and had to stare at myself and try to figure out what myself was feeling or needing.