Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

Did he abuse you physically?

My mouth wouldn’t let my brain move it.

Elyria, I cannot take your lack of explanation as an explanation, you know. I must only report what you confirm to be the truth or tell me is the truth. If you cannot say or confirm that your husband abused you or did not abuse you, I cannot just take what I believe you may be implying by your silence and put that down. I can only write down that you refused to answer the question, do you understand?

Yes.

Perhaps we should just come back to that one later—

I sat up and again looked at the picture of the man who owned the ocean and wished I could please become him now, pinch my nose, close my eyes, and jump into some other life.

I thought of my husband sitting in his chair, his legs crossed, his arms crossed, his voice saying, Typical, Elyria. It’s incredible how much you can forget. Over the years there had often been things that I would forget and he would remember, memories and information that my husband had archived — things I had done, he had done, words I had said, he had said, verbatim sentences he could remember spoken by himself or others or me, things we’d seen or done or places we’d been, verbatim places, verbatim people, exactly precisely factually factual things he could remember that I could not or could not quite, completely, remember. So my husband was this constant fact-checker of my life and the idea of him making things up, intentionally or not, had occurred to me, that maybe many of the things he had told me had happened, had, perhaps, never happened—

Elyria, when did it occur to you that you wanted to leave your husband?

I don’t remember , I said, and my voice did not sound true even to myself because I did remember the day I decided to leave, a Tuesday afternoon walking down Broadway — I watched an old woman in a crosswalk and I knew.

Thomas inhaled and flipped through a few pages on his clipboard.

Do you ever have thoughts about harming your husband?

No.

Harming others?

No.

Do you ever think about harming yourself?

No.

Do you ever think of suicide?

Memories sometimes move into a word or a phrase and you’ll never think of that word or phrase or that feeling or color without thinking of the other side, the things you store in it, and under the word suicide was a cave called Ruby, and it had become impossible for me to tell anyone what I thought of when I thought of the word suicide because so many thoughts lit up in my brain, lifetimes of thought, and anytime I heard that word I always remembered the end of Ruby, the little knot tied at the end of us. But this, I knew, was not what Thomas meant, when he asked me if I ever thought of suicide.

So I said, No , without pausing.

Elyria, I’d like to now begin another assessment. Please answer the questions as fully as you can, all right? Okay. Are you experiencing problems with falling or staying asleep?

No.

Do you ever feel frightened or uneasy for no discernible reason?

Sometimes.

How often?

I don’t know how often. Doesn’t everyone feel like that sometimes?

Are you having trouble concentrating?

On what?

On anything.

Sure.

Thomas waited for me to continue, to explain myself, but I didn’t want to look back at him or explain myself because I knew that everyone who was alive had trouble concentrating on life and I knew that he, somewhere in him, knew that, too, that really being alive, being pushed around the world by whatever was in your brain, and having feet, walking on your feet, having a freedom that is always limited to how free your body is, all that was too much to concentrate on and so no one concentrated on it too often or too easily and we all have trouble concentrating on it, on everything.

Do you feel irritable or jumpy?

Both, I thought, and No , I said.

Do you feel detached or estranged from yourself and/or others?

Often, I thought, and No , I said.

Do you ever feel that you are reexperiencing a difficult part of your past?

And I thought about that sentence and the reality behind it and I thought, Well, yes, Thomas, of course, isn’t that the problem with memories, Thomas? You should know, Thomas, you’re a professional in the way the mind works. But I said, No, not really. Not that I can remember.

Has anything happened to you that you don’t want to talk or think about?

What kind of question is that? I thought, and I said, What kind of question is that?

For instance, were there any places in New York that you found yourself unable to visit without feeling distressed?

I remembered walking long blocks just to avoid those places, distressing buildings, distressing shadows made by the light through the trees, the pinch in my throat I had when I passed the gates on the east side of the campus and that diner that had been Ruby’s diner that my husband still went to some nights, where he still ate his Reubens and his spaghetti ( Who gets spaghetti at a diner? ) like nothing had happened, like Ruby had never been there, eating BLTs and staring at the cars going down Amsterdam, the sirens singing to and from the hospital.

More questions came and they melted together— Did you experience or witness anything that was disturbing or made you afraid for your life? Any upsetting situation? When you think about the future, do you get a sense that it will be shortened for some unknown reason? Do you ever experience unwanted memories?

And my wildebeest was telling me that all memories are unwanted, but I was saying something else, trying to give Thomas an answer that reflected my humanness and not my wildebeest and maybe also a plank of sanity, but sometimes I’d speak, stop, stare somewhere, forget what was happening, try to try to try to remember—

Elyria, we do appreciate your cooperation with the assessment, and everything will be—

I’ve been locked in this room for I don’t even know how long—

You’ve been here for less than a day. You were treated for a severe injury from a stingray and found to be overstaying your visa and now you are undergoing a psychological assessment and a post-traumatic-stress assessment. It’s all very straightforward, in fact. It’s all very simple.

He looked offended and annoyed. I wondered what this trauma was that I was supposedly post.

Your husband believes you may be potentially mentally unstable and we take those claims seriously. We’re careful not to knowingly expose the public to someone who might not have all their wits about them—

I stared at the ceiling and knew there was nowhere I could go without being found.

Excluding your immigration status, have you been involved in any illegal activities during your time in New Zealand?

No.

Are you sure?

I’m sure , I said, but I knew I wasn’t sure because memories and realities and facts and dreams had all become less distinct from one another and when I looked back on things I had done I wasn’t convinced that I had done any of it and when I made a mental list of things I had not done I couldn’t put anything on it and I knew the wildebeest in me was a heavy desire to destroy something without the actual ability to destroy something and maybe Thomas could also see my tiny, smiling hit man, that smug motherfucker sitting in the center of me, and in that moment I could think of all kinds of things I would rather be: a string-bean plant or a possum who just wanted to crawl and eat, instead of being a person who can’t seem to find a way to comfortably live or be in this world, but I didn’t want to find a way out of this life or into some other life. I didn’t want to lust after anything. I didn’t want to love anything. I was not a person but just some evidence of myself.