Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

My mother looked at me, her only surviving and previously not-prone-to-weeping daughter now all wet-faced with this man in a poorly cut suit, and she put her hand out to him and said, Ruby’s mother; I’m Ruby’s mother , and he shook it, then Mother got up as if that was the last thing she had to do and she left and didn’t tell me where she was going and I didn’t care where she was going because I was in a more human state — I was making sense to myself — I was making sense to this man and we were making sense to each other. We went to a diner and tried to eat but couldn’t, so we mostly sat in silence and a woman came around refilling our coffee to a constant brim and we just held each other’s hands and we seemed to know something that we had not previously known.

In that dark autumn and even darker winter we kept meeting for coffee, meeting in parks and plazas and diners and having long hugs and before this I had not been the type of person to want to hug a person, but now I didn’t even think of who I had previously been and what I had previously done because now the only thing that made sense was our shaking chests pressed together because when we were together we were alive and human in a way we had not found in other parts of life, and we would spend hours sitting on benches in cold parks until it got dark and we would go and eat something together and we did this many days in a row, then after a few months we went to his apartment while it was snowing and we fucked like our lives depended on it, like every life on the planet depended on it, like the concept of death depended on it, like the state of being a human, and being alive, in general, depended on our fucking. And this went on for a while and I became a haver-of-authentic-emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go out to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper like a grown woman without thinking of the sentence I am being a grown woman, eating off a plate, and reading the news , because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just was instead of a person who was almost.

For a year or so I thought that was how it would always be, that I had achieved some plane of existence that was better than the one I’d been on previously and there was no going back, but I was wrong and there was going back and I went back, I went back and forth, and forth and back again—

I would sometimes think of my husband smiling and the thought of him smiling would make me smile but hours later I would think of my husband again and I wouldn’t smile — I’d think, Husband, what do you think you’re smiling for, there’s nothing to smile about , and I would think that wasn’t the kind of thought that I wanted to have, but I had had it, and then I couldn’t think of my husband smiling anymore because every time I thought of him he was frowning a pissed-off frown and later I would think, Husband, please smile again , and sometimes, after a while, the thought of my husband would smile again and I would think, Oh, good, we’re fine, we are human, we love each other like adults should, we are grown people. And this went on for some time and sometimes it was easier to keep the thought of my husband smiling and sometimes it was harder to keep the thought of my husband smiling. As the years went on I sometimes could have sworn that the existence of my husband and the whole complicated mess of him in my life was everything that was wrong with being alive and if I only extracted myself from him everything might go back to making sense the way it had when we had been new to each other. If he was no longer a part of my life then the fact that he was no longer a part of my life would be new and maybe the newness was what had made me make sense to myself — not him, another human, just fallible and breakable and not capable of creating redemption — because that’s the thing: people can’t really redeem people and I don’t know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has — because we all have them and there is a part of every human brain that just can’t bear and be, can’t sit up straight, can’t look you in the eye, can’t sit through time ticking, can’t eat a sandwich off a plate, can’t read the newspaper, can’t put on clothes and go somewhere, can’t be married, can’t keep looking at the same person every day and being looked at by the same person every day without wanting to make him swallow a tiny bomb and set that bomb off and make him disappear, go back in time and never get near this man who is looking at you and living with you and being so happy to just love and be loved and we all sometimes want to walk away like it never happened.

Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love — and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria — and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame — and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness, a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.

But my husband before he was Husband, being around him did, for a while, make me forget about my wildebeest. We walked around the city holding hands and we did a good deal of reflexive smiling and we often kissed and it felt like drugs that are too strong to legally exist outside of a body and there was that night the professor who became my husband smiled at me in the dark and I could see the pale white glow of his teeth and I thought there would never be anything better than seeing the pale white glow of his teeth through the dark on this night after we decided to get married and for at least a few minutes it made perfect sense and I believed that he had redeemed me and in a way he had and he did — but I don’t know why the wildebeests kept coming back, throwing all their angry weight around and making all those sweet, human, cracked-open, genuine, well-adjusted feelings go away, but they did go away — why did they go away? — I would like them not to go away and I would like to go back to being or feeling redeemed by him, by the white glow of his teeth in the dark, by our skin against each other— What are you thinking? he asked me that night with his teeth, and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said, Oh, nothing, just how I love you , and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving — and I could be her — couldn’t I? Couldn’t I?