Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

While everyone slept I packed and left — down the pebbled path and through the field where the cows all swayed in their standing sleep. I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling — a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.

After I’d been hiking awhile I realized I was no longer hiking, but lying on my back on the side of the trail; I couldn’t tell how long I had been there. My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don’t have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn’t know what else to do with. I thought of that woman who worked at a library I had been in at some point, and how she had these false teeth that had come unstuck in her mouth and were bouncing around in there as she spoke, and I wondered what that woman had in her mind that made her fake teeth move like that, refuse to stay put. Maybe her mind was a puppy. Maybe her mind was a puppy that had been drinking soda and chewing on a straw someone had been snorting drugs through and as I realized this I revised my feelings about the wobble-toothed woman because even though her dentures had looked as if they might wobble their way out of her mouth and bite their way across her face, down her neck to her shoulder, down her arm, make a leap off her hand, land on me, and gnaw me into parts — no, I didn’t pity her anymore and I wasn’t disturbed anymore and I didn’t feel threatened — I thought, what a lucky woman she is to have a drugged-up puppy for a mind and I was momentarily happy for that woman and her irrevocably wrinkled face and there just was no revoking the time she’d been through because the things she’d done to herself and the things that had been done to her would always be the things she did or had done.

Still on the ground of this trail I wobbled into that comalike middle ground between waking and sleeping and my thoughts turned off and I said, Goodbye, thoughts, goodbye, goodbye . I was filled with sounds instead of thoughts, the wind combing through the tree branches. The crunch and crackle of the deader parts of the woods. The twitch of the parts that may have been more alive. And I know now that it still isn’t clear where I am in the spectrum of living and not living, but I am not and never was the kind of woman who romanticizes natural noises just because they come from nature because tumors and poisons and tornadoes are also natural — not the things you want to romanticize — that’s for fiction, the fake, the imaginary — put the romanticizing there, I thought, not on the dirt and fire of life.

Eventually I was hiking again and the trail ended at a paved road and after some time a woman driving a blue van stopped and rolled down her window.

Put it in the back but not on this side, the other side, no, the other side, because he’s right there, so go around.

I hadn’t even had my thumb out and I didn’t know who he was or what she meant, but I went to the other side and put my pack in the backseat and it turned out that he was a baby, sleeping, strapped into a plastic cradle.

It’s very dangerous what you’re doing, very stupid. People come here and think this is a country where everyone is nice and good but everyone isn’t always nice and good and there are women who get raped and murdered every day, every day, and today might not be the day where everything is so different. So think about that. Think about what you’re doing.

I nodded. I said I would think about it, but it was still too early in the day to think about it. She had pretty dark hair. I guessed she was Argentinean.

It just isn’t safe to be a woman or girl anywhere anymore. Remember dignities? Well, people misplaced their dignities. Everything is changing. Why is everything changing like that? I don’t even know. I just don’t know. When I was your age I hitched all over the place, but now — God, I don’t know what’s happened to people, but they’ve gone bad, turned sour, all of them.

I said I would be careful and she dropped me off in a big parking lot in Ostend. She said, Stay away from those bloody blokes.

I said I would, but I didn’t, and a bloke stopped and I got in his bright green camper van.

He said, Mortis .

I said, Mortis?

He said, No, Mortis .

Mortis? I asked again, but he said, No.

I said, I’m Elyria , then we didn’t talk anymore.

Mortis sounded like he was maybe Swiss or something and he drove me to the same place he was going, a small and almost empty beach, without raping or killing me, which I appreciated, and when we got out of his van he said, Take the care , and I said, Take even more , and pretended like that was the way people spoke in this world because what difference did it make? Who would care if they knew I went around impersonating persons?

I put down my backpack in the sand and noticed a man and a girl in a green swimsuit making a sand castle near the ocean. Farther down the beach there was a woman and past her there was no one and for some reason I thought about the night that I burned those vegetables and how I told Amos and Luna if they got some burned ones on their plates it was all right but they didn’t have to eat them, unless they wanted to, because the burned ones do taste okay, but the unburned ones taste better and are also much easier to chew. I walked toward the ocean, my brain somehow calm and empty, sick of itself, taking a sick day.

I waded calf-deep into the water and just looked at the horizon, the ocean curve, and I had an almost ideal moment. I crouched down and put my arms into the water and I felt, actually, peaceful. I huddled against my knees like a child and I closed my eyes awhile and just was.

I started to push myself farther out into the sea, but something fleshy moved over my feet, against my shins and there was a small splash not made by me and I felt a strange electric sensation in my forearm and I raised my arm out of the water and it didn’t look right, somehow, but had changed too quickly for me to register what was wrong: there was an addition to my arm, to my forearm, specifically, something poking through the top of it — a dark grey point like the tip of a knife and when I looked at the underside of my arm I saw the rest of it, this metal-looking thing, like a piece of sawing machinery, some kind of hardware, a lost part, but I was in the ocean where hardware pieces are not usually lost and not usually impaling a person’s arm.

I was still staring when a rush of blood came out and began dripping into the water and I thought of what that nurse had said so many months ago: that blood is hazardous waste and it must be carefully disposed of and I didn’t want my hazardous waste to contribute to the hazardous waste that was already in the ocean so I began walking toward the beach but when I got to the shore I was bleeding in a way a person might call heavily, and it was only then I felt my head getting light and my limbs going loose in their sockets and I knew I needed to do something about my sudden condition, and, as if I’d figured out a riddle, I realized this hardware had belonged to a stingray, his stinger, and I opened my mouth in that way you do when you figure something out ( Oh, a stingray! ), when chaos turns to order. But the blood was rushing out thicker now and the man who had been building the sand castle with the girl had noticed this hazardous-waste issue I was having and was running toward me and shouting, and it was only then that I felt a tremendous amount of pain, which radiated from that stingray stinger ( What are those things called? ) and at this point I was maybe screaming, jolty and uncontrollable, as if my screams were coming out accidentally, like hiccups. The man picked me up and ran toward the parking lot and I saw Mortis ( Oh, I remember you, Mortis, there you are ) and Mortis had my backpack and was running very calmly, like a good athlete, and in the parking lot I saw the little girl eating an orange Popsicle, and it was melted across her face and arm but when she saw her father she dropped the Popsicle and began shaking her hands and stomping her feet and making a tantrum against this — and who could disagree with her? It is plainly unpleasant to see your father smeared with some stranger’s hazardous waste and I remember her whimpering in the backseat as we sped up the road and she kept asking, Papa, what’s going to happen to her? What’s going to happen? And Papa didn’t answer for the first few times and I thought, Good job, Papa, let her keep living in suspense . But eventually Papa did answer and he said, I don’t know, honey , and she stopped asking and stopped whimpering or maybe this is when I finally passed out, but before I did I realized I had witnessed the moment when this girl found out that nobody (not even Papa) knows what’s going to happen to her or him or anyone and that’s called Dramatic Tension and that’s called the Suspense of Life and that’s called Being Alive.