Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

Ray stacked my boxes and two chairs and little table on a rolling pallet and pushed the pallet to the freight elevator, and in the lobby he unloaded everything from the pallet and stacked it in the vestibule beside a bench I hadn’t ever noticed before, since this lobby wasn’t a place where I had ever waited, just a place I had passed through in that part of the past when I knew where I was going, where I should be, and what I should do. When Ray was done he didn’t say anything, just rolled the pallet away, and left me and my things like he was leaving anyone and anything and he was, because objects are just slow events and people are just slow events and Ray was done with the part of his life that I would be in and from here on out I was a stranger to him and even if I saw him on some sidewalk someday and had an impulse to say Good morning , he would not see me and he would not say anything and he would not look in my eyes because to him there would be nothing there to see.

I sat on the lobby’s bench for a while and had nowhere to go and I wondered if there was a number I could call for a Man with a Van who might double as a therapist or priest or someone who could just tell me what to do with myself, someone who could take me and my furniture and boxes of life stuff to another part of the world or the city and tell me what to do in it, someone who knew a wide, clear place where I could start over. I wondered if there was such a thing as a Life Re-creation Specialist but I was mostly certain that if I was to look in the yellow pages for such a thing I’d only discover that it did not or did not yet exist — it would be up to me to find a new place in the world for my self and life and it seems that everyone else who was living or dead knew that you can only make those kinds of decisions for yourself and no one else can make them for you, and that there was probably something potentially very wrong with the woman who had a hard time just choosing anything to do with her whole entire self.

After some time, something like an hour or hours, Ray came over and told me that I couldn’t just sit in the lobby all day now that I didn’t live here anymore. He generated some kind of pity and asked, Don’t you have anywhere to go? He seemed almost sincerely concerned about where I could possibly ever go and I surprised myself when I said, Yes, I do have somewhere to go , and I said it in a fed-up way, and again it was my voice, not my brain or body telling me how I felt and this was news to myself because being fed up wasn’t what I thought I was. I have plenty of places to go , I said, and I stopped looking at Ray and dug through my backpack and took only the things that were the most necessary (toothbrush, papers from immigration, little wooden camel Jaye had given me, socks, passport, underwear, a shirt) and I put them in a small canvas bag that seemed now preferable to the lug and labor of a backpack. I considered looking through the boxes for something else I might need like shoes that were more functional or clean pants but it wasn’t worth the trouble of having to push past the blue dresses and think of my husband taking things off their hangers and folding them and putting them in these boxes. A happy UPS man walked into the lobby, he and his shorts and his smile and his name sewn on his shirt, and Ray chatted with him, happy to talk to someone who was who he was expected to be, who came and did and went just like that.

While Ray spoke and joked with the UPS man I walked out of the lobby and immediately regretted telling Ray that I had a place to go because, in fact, I did not have a place to go and that was exactly where I was going. I made it to the end of the block before Ray started yelling after me about all the things I’d left in his lobby, so I turned the corner onto Broadway and sprinted toward the train and I don’t know if Ray was running after me or not, because I did not look because I was too busy running as a way of saying, Fuck you, everything, fuck all of the things forever because I am free, so free , but also I knew that I wasn’t free, because running from something isn’t freedom, it’s just a way to flee, and, sure, the day was what a person talking to another person would call beautiful, but I immediately took it for granted, felt the earth owed me this one warm favor.

In the subway station I jumped the turnstile as if that was how I’d always gotten around and I bolted into a waiting car just as the doors closed and we went and no one cared and I looked at all the people around me, staring off, headphones plugging ears, some sleeping or almost sleeping, and no one cared — oh, how no one cared — oh, how I loved how no one cared.

Standing in front of me was a man with a bald spot, a sign I could trust this man because he, too, knew loss. I stared at his little bit of naked scalp, how tender, how shining, how close it was to his brain, his whole entire self. After some time he got off the train, so I got off the train, too, and I trailed behind the full moon his scalp was and when I lost track of him in a push of postwork people that was fine — we always knew it would end like this, that it would have to end somehow.

I watched my feet moving across the sidewalk and realized my shoes were at the brink of giving up on me and the rest of the world: the lace tips frayed, seams strained, a little mouth opening on one toe as if gasping for air or like it was trying to whisper, Enough, enough, haven’t you figured out that there is nowhere better or worse to go and other people put up with this fact and you, for some sickness, do not, and will you stop trying to see a meaning in everything, in anything, and will you stop wishing you could have come close to any sheep in New Zealand just so you could touch the animal who filled the world with wool and will you stop talking to your own shoes and imagining them talking back at you? I did not particularly like listening to my shoes speak to me. They did not have anything useful to say.

As I walked down the West Side Highway, cars shushing beside me like an ill ocean, I heard heavy steps, then a man’s voice— You one sexy-ass bitch —spoken so low I wondered if I was supposed to hear him or if it was a note to his sexy-ass self and then the man was to my left, and he looked over his shoulder at me before speeding up, his eyes scanning the crowd ahead of him, looking for other sexy-ass bitches. On a bench a man in ripped grey clothes with plastic bags on his feet was asking anyone if they had fifty cents— It’s just fifty cents, it’s only fifty cents —but when I passed he stopped asking and he gave me a look I’d never gotten before and I took that look and put a frame around it and hung it up in me. Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I’d look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

I kept wandering through all these dirty, winding streets and all my thoughts and observations were immediately self-destructing, not a single memory made, and then I noticed that the sky had produced clouds that would have made a person believe in God if they were susceptible to believing in God but all they did to me was make me wonder if it had been a good idea to start walking across the bridge toward Brooklyn because it seemed that considerably less people were out here than usual, like everyone knew something was about to happen but I didn’t and those God clouds got fat and dark and let their rain come down onto the bridge and the river below went stucco textured and my body and my canvas bag quickly looked as if we’d just stepped out of the ocean, some sea monster in the wrong place. The few others on the bridge were smug and safe under umbrellas and it was clearer to me than it had ever been that all there is on earth is the eternal now and nothing else. I had heard, in the past, lots of people say that, say that nothing exists except the present moment, that nothing has ever happened, that no one is here or not here, that no object is more than its action in a moment, and if all this business about the present moment is true, and I am still inclined to believe that it is true, then all I was at that moment was a set of senses held captive in a wet body in wet clothes in the piss of a cloud, stranded on the center of a bridge and I was just that and nothing else, and the past, the recent past, and the less recent past were not a part of me, just something gathered around me, an audience for what I would do next.