Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

This place is run by a bunch of queers and queens and they make the best apricot slice in the whole fucking goddamn world. Can’t even smell one without gaining a thousand bloody kilos.

She ordered an apricot slice and a drag queen handed it to Jaye wrapped in hot-pink wax paper. She took huge bites as we walked down the sidewalk, crumbs caked to her makeup.

I decided then that I was in love with Jaye — not a romantic love or a friendship one or a sexual one — it’s some other kind that is clean and plain and harmless. It is a love made of an inaudible noise, like the noise that comes out of those whistles that only dogs can hear, or those little plastic things that people put on their cars so deer will hear them and get off the highway. But there is nothing to be done about the inaudible noise. It’s just something that is.

And you’re going where next?

Golden Bay. To that poet’s farm.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

What?

It’s just — you know, there’s nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. Tourists are always coming here shitting themselves over nature — oh, it’s so beautiful oh, there’s no pollution, oh, goblins and hobbits and some such — but it’s not a bloody magic show! It’s not a movie. What’s going to happen out there is you’ll see a fuckload of possums and you’ll be bored off your rocker. You can’t just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person.

I know , I said, because I had lost track of the hope I’d ever had to become a better person. I know it’s not a movie. I just want to be alone.

I just don’t see what’s wrong with Wellington — you could stay here and do catering gigs, maybe meet a bloke or two — that’ll get your mind off hubby, won’t it?

The plan has been to go to Werner’s. That’s the plan.

Then what?

I don’t know. I’ll just be there.

For Christmas?

I shrugged. It was hard for me to imagine Christmas happening in the summer after almost three decades of Christmas in the cold. Maybe Christmas didn’t exist this year.

You should come up to Napier and see me and the fam. Mum has a humongous place up there and it’s always packed with weirdos and orphans for the holidays. You’ll fit right in, love, a proper holiday with a proper dysfunctional family.

I hugged Jaye, falling into her hulking body. She patted my head.

Oh, honey, you are such a mess.

I’m fine , I said. I’ll be fine.

Sure you will.

Jaye held my hand and I heard the inaudible noise and it turned into a color and that shade soaked into everything and my whole life was much nicer for those few minutes, then the sidewalk ended and we reached a huge hill with a hole cut through the center that cars were driving through.

You know I hate dirt, but I wanted to show you this trail so you know we have a little bit of nature here in Wellington , she said, pointing to a trailhead. You go ahead and have a wee tramp if you like — I’ll take the bus to meet you up top.

When she told me she thought I’d want a little hike, I realized that a few minutes alone was exactly what I needed, something to make it possible for me to deal with the potency of the inaudible noise and of course Jaye would know that because all my real feelings and wants traveled in the inaudible noise, this current between us, so she could know things about me before I even knew things about me — this was what the inaudible noise could do. The trail was dark and had a thick, wooden smell in it. The trees were mythically large and sometimes looked more like art than life. Halfway up the hill I saw a man with a sack-belly hanging over red basketball shorts. He was leaning against a boulder, his face buried in the crook of his elbow as he was breathing heavily, like something terrible was happening inside his body.

Are you okay?

He gasped and stood up straight.

I’m fine , he said, but he didn’t sound fine.

I heard something moving in the leaves.

I can get you help— Do you have a phone? I can go call someone for you. I have a friend at the top and—

I’m fine , he said, but sweat was rushing off his face. You can just leave me alone. I’m fine.

It was only then I noticed a younger man crouched on the ground beside the boulder. There was dirt on his face and he was sweating, too. His mouth made some kind of smile and his eyes spun as if he was a toy designed to look that way. I kept hiking up.

My love-face-darlin’-sweet-pea! Jaye arched her back around the bench at the bus stop. So did you have a lovely time with the nature? Did you eat bugs and see the birds fucking the bees and all that fabulous shit?

I decided not to tell Jaye about the men. We stared down at the white houses and the blue ocean licking the rocky coast.

After Jaye walked me to the ferry station she insisted, again, that I come up to Napier because she had gotten Christmas and New Year’s off this time—

You have to suck a lot of dick for that, I can tell you, but there’s no shame in it , she said. I get what I want. They get what they want. Who can tell who is getting used?

She laughed that thick, syrupy laugh that seemed to rise up from her toes, like every cell of her body was making a tiny, deep laugh and they were all adding up.

So, I’ll see you for Christmas? New Year’s?

I’ll try.

You won’t try; you’ll be there , she said, and I was mostly certain that she was wrong.

* * *

Over the loudspeaker the ferry captain said, Good afternoon, all! Welcome to Tuesday afternoon! Tuesday! All day it’ll be Tuesday, all afternoon, make no mistake! I felt like Tuesday afternoon was his home and we were his most anticipated guests and that was a nice feeling, the feeling of being in someone’s home just by being alive on a Tuesday.

There was a bar on the ferry because whenever people are testing gravity (in planes or ships or from great heights) something has to happen to diffuse the tension of being a human and breakable, of knowing no one gets to see all the spaces and times they would like to see in this life. Everyone at the bar had the same bitter, dumb look in their eye. The ocean rocked us.

I took the last stool, beside a man who was finishing a beer. He put down his glass, wiped his mouth, looked over his sleeve at me, and nodded a nothing nod, which was good because I didn’t want to deal with a something nod. I wanted to deal with the ocean because the ocean was making the ferry sway, making liquid slosh out of all the pints held in nervy hands. I put my hand on the bar and into a puddle of something, wiped it on my leg, then put my needing eyes on the bartender and she came over, a porcelain-faced woman, a tender tender. She poured beers so gracefully that it seemed like a dance and she brought the beers to the nothing-nod man and me without any questions or mentions of money because that is what a tender thing she was.

I will go on loving her for the rest of my life.

I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything’s, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is — a big hole full of things chewing each other — and it’s odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they’re really after as they stare — that ferocious pulse under all things placid.