Nobody Is Ever Missing (23 page)
The rain gave up and left and I wrung my hair out over one shoulder, then found a bench on the Brooklyn end of the bridge and I tried to hug some of the water out of my clothes and I took my shoes off and took off my socks and twisted the rain out of them and put them back on anyway because the other socks I’d brought with me weren’t any drier and as I was doing this a woman under an umbrella walked up and held out a few tissues she’d pulled from a plastic pouch. I said thank you and she said nothing and when I took them they turned to slime, sopped with the rain on my hands. She put the whole plastic pouch on the bench beside me and walked away wordless, so I watched her go, watched all of her goodness and empathy get away from me. I wondered why my husband couldn’t have just been all bad. Why couldn’t he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus? And I still wanted my black moment for it all, and I was still waiting on that black moment, still felt I was owed it, a little funeral for the us we’d been. I needed to stop wanting that impossible funeral, needed to leave that want like dogs must leave what their owners tell them to leave—I was something like a dog I owned. I had to tell myself to
leave it
, to
shut up
, had to take myself on a walk and feed myself and had to stare at myself and try to figure out what myself was feeling or needing.
By the time I started walking again the sky was going dim and the air became this nice blanket tucking us in, telling us to sleep well, sleep tight. I followed a broad, busy street where the bridge ended and I almost reflexively stuck my thumb out but I got the impression that this wasn’t the kind of thing a person should do in New York so I didn’t. Some sirens were screaming over and over, fire trucks and police cars and ambulances, those urgent noises that remind us that someone is always burning or breaking a law or having their body give up and if it is not you yet who is burning or breaking or falling apart, then you can be sure that it soon will be, that soon the sirens will come for you but you will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay, and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.
Outside a grocery store a man was handing out flyers that said
Do You Suffer from Chronic PAIN?
And the word
pain
took up a third of the page and the man was saying,
We got the best deals on massaging the deep tissue. Massage therapies. Massage therapies.
I passed him quickly and when he tried to hand me a flyer I pretended as if I couldn’t see him even though he was impossible to ignore, this huge, pale man wearing an orange traffic vest, a wild grey-and-white beard, thick glasses.
Are you in pain?
he asked and I smiled. It made me smile. I don’t know why it made me smile.
The sun was all gone now, the city left to light itself. I walked through a dark neighborhood with narrow streets and wide trees. I walked behind a tall, dense man who walked as if he was the president of a country called Life and it seemed to me that if I could be associated with him, somehow, I would be safe, so I followed him without wondering where he might be going, followed him like baby ducks will follow anything that will lead them, an alligator, a small goat, an electric toy car. I dreaded the moment he would go inside his house or any other place he might go where I couldn’t, but that never happened because after I had followed him a mile or so he stopped and turned and said,
Who the fuck you doing this for?
My voice was an ice cube stuck in my throat. I waited. We stared. It melted. I said,
No one.
The fuck you are. You following me, bitch? You think you’re just going to follow me?
I don’t know where I am going
, I said and I was shaking and he was the opposite of shaking and he took a step back, inhaled slow, and I saw a diner across the street, a twenty-four-hour sign beaming and I decided to cross the middle of the street and just leave him alone because he now seemed to not be a good person for me to be following.
You tell your man I had enough of his shit
, he yelled.
I had enough, you got me?
Okay
, I said, but I said it so quietly that no one could hear it but me.
If I see your fucking face again, it’s gonna be personal
, he said, his voice getting softer, getting personal.
You tell your man. You tell him that.
So I did—I invented a little man in my head and I told him,
It’s going to be personal
. I think he understood. Everything is personal.
Not many people were in the diner and a waitress smiled at me in a way I had not seen anyone smile in a long time and she said,
Sit wherever you like, I’ll be with you in just a minute
. I ordered a plate of something that came with everything and when
HELLO My name is BELINDA
asked me if she could bring me anything else I said,
Yes
, and she said,
What’s that?
And I said,
What?
And she said,
Anything else?
And I thought for a second and said,
Coffee
, and this seemed to explain something to her, this desire for a cup of coffee at some hour that must have been close to midnight, and so BELINDA smiled and said,
All right, sweetie
.
I spent the next memorable portion of my life watching the rippled surface of my coffee quiver and I knew with an increasing intensity that everyone on this planet is also always shaking ever so slightly all the time, that the earth shakes us by shifting and settling its stone self, and the machines we’ve made, they also shake us, the air conditioners and eighteen-wheelers and marriages and electric generators and the people who dance with so much stomping and the wrecking balls and the bulldozers and the cars that go so fast and hit other cars and animals and the radio signals and the lives around us that run at a frequency that interferes with our own frequencies. We do not notice any of this shaking until we do notice but most people will be able to forget it for a while until they notice again but I cannot stop seeing how the earth and everything on it is ever and ever shaking, all the time, the plant stems breaking through the sidewalk and the steel beams and the skyscrapers and the people who think they are sitting perfectly still, and I can’t seem to stop seeing everything quivering all the time, husbands sitting in armchairs and chalkboards and brick courtyards and the tops of trees you can see from the windows and good knives and linen shirts, and being unable to unsee the little shake that is everywhere has made it too difficult for me to go about life in the way that other people seem to be able to go about it, people ordering lunch in a deli and old ladies wearing too many coats and the policemen on smoke breaks and teenagers with secrets and smiles and the birds that just fly and are, and the leashed dogs, walking leashed in the streets, tethered to their owners, happily tethered forever. No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without my voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks to Jin Auh, Eric Chinski, Emily Bell, and everyone at FSG and the Wylie Agency who helped turn this manuscript into a book. I’m also grateful to the editors who encouraged and published early excerpts: Cal Morgan at Harper Perennial; Dave Eggers, Chelsea Hogue, and Jordan Bass at
McSweeney’s Quarterly
; Alban Fisher at
trnsfr
; Brandon Hobson at
elimae
; Natalie Eilbert and Jillian Kuzma at
The Atlas Review
. I am forever humbled and grateful for the support the New York Foundation for the Arts offered me during the completion of this work.
These fine people—Sean Brennan, Kendra Grant Malone, Danny Wallace, Sara Richardson, Sasha Fletcher, Peter Musante, Summer Shapiro, and Filip Tejchman—need to be thanked for so many things in the past, present, and future. And, for lovingly tolerating the writer at your dinner table, a sort of entertaining misfortune, I’d like to offer a grateful apology to my family—blood, lagniappe, and chosen—especially to my past and present collaborators at 3B, who helped me build a room of my own.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Catherine Lacey
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lacey, Catherine, 1985–
Nobody is ever missing: a novel / Catherine Lacey.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-53449-3 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-374-71128-3 (ebook)
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Desertion and non-support—Fiction. 3. Families—Fiction. 4. New Zealand—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.A335N63 2014
813'.6—dc23
2013041343