Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

I found a pay phone and called the number and I expected it just to ring and ring like last time, to realize that I might never find Jaye again, or that she might have given me a fake number, or that I’d have to find some other way to get back to that inaudible noise, which I could no longer generate just by thinking of Jaye, but then Jaye’s voice smashed through, and she said I’d called just in time, and where was I, and she told me to stay right there, so I did. She drove up in a tiny silver car with the roof folded back and her hair tied up in a yellow scarf, and I thought, for a moment, I’d be just fine forever.

She drove fast along a road that curved with the ocean and she spoke words I couldn’t hear over the engine whirring and the ocean groaning, and I wanted to tell Jaye about the inaudible noise but there was no good way to explain it without shedding too much light on the inaudible noise, overexposing it, bleaching it white and lifeless, so I closed my eyes and leaned back and the salty air filled up my head and covered my face like the gentle hands of every person in the world who was in love with anyone, and I felt my joints loosen and the strain of my beach sleep melt away.

We’re going back to Wellywood , she said, because she’d changed her mind about spending New Year’s with her ballistic family— and can you believe my mother still calls me Jared? Who’s Jared? I don’t know any fucking Jared , Jaye said, and I didn’t know any fucking Jared either and I understood she didn’t want to think of the way the past was packed into that name, the he she’d been born in — and I could not blame her and I did not blame her and I understood, somehow, something I knew I couldn’t really understand. Jaye put on music and belted along to it and I sat silent and still.

* * *

I wish I could understand what happened the few days we spent at her apartment in Wellington, but the short of it is that the inaudible noise was slowly overtaken by the minor chord so I avoided Jaye so I could avoid the minor chord and I spent long days out wandering the city, sneaking in late, sneaking out early, and on New Year’s Eve I lied and said I felt sick so I needed to stay in — but the next day she caught me coming home in the afternoon— Happy New Year, love! So you’re feeling better then? Got a little fresh air, did ya? — and I knew I wasn’t her love and nothing was new about this year because it had shown up just like all the rest of them and there was something sick and strange about how she was acting as if everything was fine and maybe to her it was, because maybe she’d never heard the inaudible noise and didn’t miss it like I did and didn’t notice the minor chord — she told me she had a surprise outing planned for us and it was time to go and I dreaded what it would be, how she might surprise me. The minor chord was playing softly but increasingly unsoftly in the background as we took a bus and walked through the concrete part of the city and we ended up on an outdoor basketball court where a small crowd had gathered and some women and men made excited noises at Jaye and threw arms around her and my name was said and repeated at me— This is Elyria — This is Elyria — And this is Elyria —and I wanted to be anyone else but I wasn’t anyone else and then it was time , someone said, and everyone sat down on the concrete court and four people dressed like vintage clowns came in, two in a shopping cart, one pushing the shopping cart, one sort of rolling across the ground and they began a sort of presentation of themselves, a routine that hinged on the humor of how sometimes some people do things incorrectly, and Jaye was laughing her hearty laugh and I didn’t understand why everyone was laughing as if they’d never be dead and I wondered why no one else could hear the harshness and hugeness of the minor chord and I tried to put myself elsewhere, to slip into a kind of open-eyed sleep, and I may have accomplished that because I have no memory of how the rest of the clown show went, just that the ending involved a pot of some kind of gruel, some kind of oatmeal goop, and the climax of this entire show involved the clowns serving us bowls of this gruel, their eyes all huge, their mouths hanging open in awe of themselves, and one of them tried to hand me a bowl of this goop and I didn’t want it, and Jaye was looking at me and the clown was looking at me and the clown took my hand and put it around the bowl and put a spoon in the other hand and mimed eating as if to say that was what I should do and I didn’t want to do that but Jaye was eating her goop and laughing and saying, Oh, eat it, love, it’s just terrible, so terrible it’s great , and no accidental missile was hitting the city and putting an end to this, so I put the goop bowl on the court and got up and left and Jaye said, Love? Love? She said love like a question and I said, I’m not feeling so well , and she said, Oh, love , she said love like the name of a dog that had just done something bad, and when Jaye got home she didn’t ask me if I was okay because I was locked in the guest room and I woke up early and left with my pack on before she woke up. I did this because I knew the inaudible noise was gone and I knew I wasn’t part of the kind of people that can eat a clown’s gruel and the wildebeest was throwing its weight around in me and I was trying not to get too beat up by the wildebeest.

Eventually it was night and I walked and I ended up in a pub, and the room, I realized, was crowded with people who all seemed to know and love each other and they also knew that they didn’t know or love me and probably never would. I looked at my feet and noticed how the months-long heat of moving had melted the soles down, and I knew that the disrepair of my shoes gave something away about me — but I was always doing this, wearing shoes until they had been burned down to barely anything and I remembered that day at my mother’s house years ago when she had tried to get me to take an old pair of Ruby’s sneakers, a pair of light blue ones that she didn’t think Ruby had ever worn— They’re still in the box —and I hadn’t understood then that all she was offering me was a pair of shoes because my shoes were barely the approximation of shoes, just these worn-out, five-year-old Sambas that I’d kept not throwing out though they clearly needed to be thrown out — but that afternoon I’d said, No, no thanks, I’m okay , because I wasn’t okay about borrowing shoes I could never return to Ruby and I couldn’t put my feet where her feet should be and also I was nauseous over the fact that I had even been given that option, of putting my feet where the feet of my mother’s dead daughter should be, because I knew that I was her other dead daughter, just not her favorite dead daughter— They’ll just go to waste , she said, and How does your husband let you leave the house like that? What other option do you have? — but I took the other option ( You have two options , he had said, two options ) and the option I took was living with what I had, which, sure, wasn’t an indication that I could take care of myself, and these heavily damaged and barely useful shoes made it clear that I needed help, that my feet were in need, that I needed a better shoe option, that I needed a better option, that I needed to get it together, to get a life together, to get myself together, to get myself. I hadn’t gotten myself in a while and I maybe wasn’t going to get myself, it seemed, because my self had been, somehow, ungotten or forgotten or not getting it, whatever it was, or is, or had been, or would be that I didn’t get.