Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

I haven’t thought about what’s next … It’s just being here, alone.

But you’re not alone here, Elyria. I was alone before you got here but not now — and really, you’re one of those people who needs people. You’re not meant to be alone.

I wanted to throw a plate at his face, but I did not throw a plate or a whole stack of plates at his face. I said, Oh, I don’t know about that , and I looked at my feet and I poured half a cup of hot tea down my throat.

No, you are not a happy person alone, I can tell. You come to a country where you could be alone in four thousand ways, yet you choose to have company, to go to the one place you know a person will be.

I need to finish something in the garden , I said, and I left and I went down to the garden and I walked in circles and realized I had nothing to do there so I hiked up to the highway and went to town and sat on a bench reading the Katherine Mansfield stories that I’d borrowed from Werner (who couldn’t make me leave, couldn’t make me) and I read until it was dark because I didn’t want to talk about plans with Werner and I didn’t want to think about plans by myself because I didn’t have any and wouldn’t make any because there weren’t any to be made — I was here. I was staying here. I wasn’t leaving. There was no reason to leave. So I put my brain elsewhere and when it got dark I realized that all the bars and cafés were full of people who had been becoming more and more exuberant and loud and drunk, and I looked through a window into one and there were people dancing against each other and smiling and drinking and they were all wearing Santa hats: women wearing Santa hats, old men in Santa hats, flimsy-legged boys with thick dreadlocks wearing Santa hats, and why did they want to impersonate someone who only gives and disappears? What did they have to give each other?

On the porch of one of the quiet cafés there was a woman with a long grey braid at a table by herself. Seeing her alone made me wonder if Jaye was alone with her family, if she had one of those families that being with is worse than being alone and maybe that was why she had invited me to her home for Christmas, to have an ally in that fight. I felt a slice of guilt, ate and digested it, then forgot about Jaye. I went up and ordered a beer from the window and I sat at a table near the woman with the grey braid and she looked over at me and smiled and said, It’s Christmas again, my dear. Where does the time go? And she looked up at the tree branches but the tree branches did not answer her, but if they had they would have said that time goes to sleep, it goes insane, it goes on vacation, it goes to Milwaukee, it goes and goes and goes and keeps going, going, gone. Or maybe time is more like a person walking down a street carrying two grocery bags and a grate gives way and that person and their groceries fall to the bottom of the sewer, suddenly elsewhere, suddenly a bloody mess with eggs cracked and splattered and milk spilled because everyone walks around thinking nothing is going to happen right up to the moment when something does happen, just like time, how it’s here one minute and we don’t notice it till it’s gone — no, it’s not like that, I would tell the tree branches if I was the type of person who talked to tree branches or imagined a monologue for a tree’s branches — no, time is a thing that is always almost a thing that is never here and never gone and never yours and never anyone’s and we’re all trying to get a hand clutched tight around time and no one ever will, so can’t we call a truce, now, Time? I am not asking, I am just saying — I’m calling a truce with time. Truce.

* * *

When I got back to Werner’s, so late it was early, all the lights were out and I knew Werner probably didn’t know if I was home or not and probably didn’t care and so I said, See? I’m fine here. It’s like I’m not even here— And I was talking to Werner but he didn’t hear because he wasn’t there, wasn’t listening, but I was actually talking to myself, or to my whole life but my whole life wasn’t listening to me either and my whole life, at that moment, was a garden with no wildebeest tracks in it, not yet, but there was a wildebeest in the forest nearby, I knew, and if I left this calm place I wouldn’t be safe and I just needed to figure out a way to explain this to Werner without really explaining it to Werner, because I’d be fine if I could keep staying here, still and goal-less and husbandless and pastless and peopleless, because when I was here I was both here and not here — I was a person made of things that were fine, no wildebeests, just tomato plants and pumpkin vines and mulch made of seaweed and dirt, a pure piece of earth.

The next morning I didn’t mean to say what I said to Werner at breakfast, and I don’t even know why I was talking, but now I believe that everyone actually does say what they want to say, even when they say, That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I meant to say. A person can only say things that are already in there, waiting for a way out, animals grown sick of fences, and I later wondered if my wildebeest had grown sick of its fence and was ready to migrate even though I wasn’t, but my wildebeest didn’t listen to me, didn’t care what I wanted or what I thought I wanted because the wildebeest was above want, is still above want, is the heaviest thing in me, the thing that still makes all too many choices— That morning I said a phrase I didn’t think I could say anymore:

My husband —

And I paused, inhaled deep, realized I hadn’t spoken those words in a month or more, and recognized a certain look on Werner’s face, a look I had seen on the faces of certain other men when I first mentioned my husband—

… told me that you sleep more just before and just after making important progress in your work, creatively, I mean, your creative work.

We didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

He’s a mathematician , I said.

You said you didn’t have a husband.

I only said I didn’t have a family.

Werner nodded as if I had just told him the punch line to a riddle. We were holding mugs of tea too hot to drink. I held mine close so the steam put sweat on my face.

What does your husband think about you staying in the center of no place at all with an old man you’ve only met once?

He was smiling as if this was another part of the riddle, but I knew the answer to this wasn’t going to make me look like a particularly nice person. Possibly it was too late for niceness. I started to say something but wasn’t sure what to say, so I shut my lips again and I nodded and tried to smile a little. A husband — ha.

He actually doesn’t know exactly where I am.

Where does this husband believe his wife has gone?

It isn’t exactly clear , I said.

And how long will this wife let this husband be uncertain of her whereabouts?

I’ve been trying to understand a way to understand that.

Werner tilted his head to the side like there was some nice music playing.

Oh, Miss Elyria. Whatever has gotten into a person like you? Whatever is it that makes a person do a thing like this?

There was no way to answer that question and I’m not the kind of person who tries to explain a thing that has no explanation so I went to the garden and I pulled things out of it, until I could feel the sun putting color on my scalp, until the muscles in my back were twitching in little fits, until the weeds were all wilted in a heap, and all I could think was how there would be more weeds tomorrow and wouldn’t it be easier for the world if everything just stayed still, just stopped growing altogether? Maybe it would, but we won’t do that, we won’t stop, plants don’t, people don’t, we keep showing up and living and trying to do something and dying and what was it that all these vines and leaves were struggling toward year after century after eternity? Because, really, they would be strangled dead by another weed or else scorched to death or frozen to death or eaten by possums or bugs or people. And I also wondered what it was that had gotten into me, or a person like me, and I wondered what it was that made me do these things, leave my life so abruptly, and I didn’t know then what it was because I couldn’t know then what I was and I barely know now what it was or still is that made me leave. I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I’ve discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this — I’m not a brain-machine fixer, I’m just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.