Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

I’m depressed , she said, and I’m thinking of my mother.

You mean the one you don’t know?

Yes, the one I don’t know.

What about her?

I saw something lower in Ruby’s face, something drain out of her.

What about her? she repeated, squinting.

I tried to look at Ruby with some kind of tenderness but I think it came out as condescension and I couldn’t feel my face, I couldn’t feel my face wrapped around my head, and I couldn’t feel the muscles in it and make them move in the right way. I was trapped in my body and Ruby was trapped in her body and we’d always been trying to bridge the difference between our bodies, atone for the fact that we were supposed to be family but we weren’t, not really, but we had to try anyway, try forever over and over again to find the way that we were related.

I think my mother ate a lot of pork , Ruby finally said, while she was pregnant with me .

We’d both been staring out the window and into an apartment across the street. A woman in a peach dress was pacing, pointing a remote control at some unseen device.

I sometimes get this way, Elly, it’s like someone else is in my brain, telling me what to do. I go out. I buy a pound of bacon. I come home and eat the whole thing. I feel like I can hear her voice. I know it’s stupid, it’s crazy, it’s whatever, but it’s how I feel — I really hear it.

Her expression was broad and placid, like an ocean while no wind is blowing, and a few months later Ruby did not exist anymore, and years later I was standing on a sidewalk in another country, thinking of that moment, still trying to find a feeling about it and trying to find a feeling about these wrecked cars — afraid or amazed? I wandered away from the cars as a crowd grew. An ambulance was singing. I walked with the setting sun at my back, hoping to find the ocean. I thought of Ruby and the dust that danced in light beaming from the window. She curled around her belly packed full of dead pig, packed full of the need she had to hear her mother’s voice.

I had barely spoken all day, but I couldn’t tell whether I missed that flank of myself, my voice, and I thought of the inaudible noise and when I thought of it, it was there, and it filled the vacuum left by my voice and I wondered if the shadow of the inaudible noise was the same thing as the inaudible noise itself, if I actually needed to be near Jaye for it to last or if it could exist without her, if it could live entirely in the memory of her, or if, instead, I needed direct exposure to Jaye to keep generating it, a vitamin-D kind of thing — and the sun went down and there was nowhere for me to be: no destination, no stranger offering a home or car and there was no way for anyone to reach me, to find me, to call me, to tell me anything, and I was fully alone, leashed within my utter self. The ocean mumbled somewhere east of me, and I could hear it but I couldn’t see it, that black ocean floating in the black air, whispering salt into any open ear. On a street corner, a child was standing like a sad statue, staring off, and as I got closer to him I began to distinctly feel worry — where did he belong and who did he belong to and what would happen to him if he had been forgotten or misplaced, if he wandered like a stray animal through alleyways and under highway bridges and along creekbeds on the edge of town? When I came closer to him a smile flickered on his face, small muscles twitching, like a lightbulb shorting out. He was holding what I thought was a juice box but it turned out to be a pack of cigarettes.

Are you okay? I said.

Are you okay? he said, then we both said nothing, and he turned and ran down the block, crawled under a bush on the edge of a garden. It shook as he went through it and then it stopped shaking and I waited for the sound of a door shutting or to see a light in the house turn on or to hear some voice, some sense that he was okay, but there was nothing and there was a possibility that someone might later slice him out of existence and even though I knew that he wouldn’t be fine forever, I wanted to have a sense of his security right then, and I knew it would be a false sense of security, but at least it would be a sense of security, but I kept walking toward the ocean, trying to remind myself that before I had seen the boy he had been existing just fine without my worry and I turned a corner and the midnight ocean was there, all sudden and massive. The coast was all smooth, grey oval rocks and I trudged through it to get closer to the ocean, overcome by the sound of it, the blue-grey arc where it met the navy sky. The ocean sighed and moaned and sighed. I sat down, the weight of my pack burrowing me slightly into the rocks, and I listened to the ocean’s sighs and thought of my husband’s sighs, his tiny sighs and the story he once told me of the year he spent religious while he was working for a nonprofit that tried to feed and clothe the shoeless, ball-bellied, sunken-eyed children of far-off countries.

A seagull walked up and looked at me as if we had known each other for years so I should know exactly what he was thinking and I’d never seen a seagull out walking in the dark, but then the seagull limped away. I found myself floating in and out of weary midparalysis, and all I could see was the dark sky and the flutter of my own eyelids, a fleshy curtain slipping down; I had half-seen dreams of my husband and the seagull, their souls shifting in and out of each other’s body — sometimes my husband was inside a seagull and sometimes a seagull was inside my husband — and this went on for a while until I reached some kind of legal limit for this kind of thing, according to the man who woke me up, a morning sky behind him, this man who seemed smaller than my backpack — he was saying, Good morning, good morning, good morning , as loud as it seemed he could, so I woke up looking at this stranger wishing me a good morning, but I knew he didn’t want me to have a particularly good morning — he wanted me to collect myself, get myself together, show him my passport, stand up, yes, stand up now, thank you.

Have you been taking drugs? You been out on the piss?

Nope. No drugs , I said.

Then have you been on the piss — have you been drinking heavily?

Not even lightly.

You came here by yourself?

(And when the cop said by yourself , I remembered that day many months before when I got on a bus in Brooklyn heading to a city beach alone on a grey Tuesday, and when I asked the bus driver if this bus was going to the beach he had said, You’re going to the beach by yourself? , and he said it in a laughing, disbelieving voice and I felt small and silly and lost, though I wasn’t lost — I was just in Brooklyn on my way to Queens, a surmountable distance from my apartment and everything in it. You want to go to the beach? The beach? the bus driver asked. Today? By yourself? And I said, Yeah , and he said, Why you going to the beach all on your own? What you can do on a beach by yourself? And I said something, explained myself. This lady’s going to the beach by herself , he said to a woman getting on the bus, but she didn’t say anything, just dropped her money into the thing that eats it.)

But this little policeman was less amused by my by-myself-ness and he just asked for my passport and he looked at it and me and said I shouldn’t sleep in public — it’s just not safe — and I thought he was deeply concerned, that he cared deeply and loved all of humanity, this cop, but that probably wasn’t true and I wondered why some people combinations create inaudible noises and others don’t and the cop walked away like I was nothing, nothing at all, just some harmless, lost small animal with a passport.