Nobody Is Ever Missing (10 page)

Thank you. Tell me a nightmare you had as a child.

That I’d grow so big overnight that I wouldn’t be able to leave my room.

Thank you. Please explain the feeling of love.

Someone holding you by the wrist.

Thank you. What is your happiest memory as an adult?

The summer after Ruby died, being at the park with my husband. The light. We smiled.

Thank you. What do you believe happens when we die?

And I understood that you were supposed to say the first thing that came to mind but nothing actually came to mind in that moment and in fact everything seemed to slip out of mind, and all I could think of was a desert, a canyon, and that didn’t seem to have much to do with anything—

What do you believe happens when we die?

More silence.

What do you believe happens when we die?

A desert, a canyon.

Thank you. What is your fondest childhood memory?

Ruby’s tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France. It was also my birthday party. We didn’t know her exact birthday, but we guessed it could be maybe the same day as mine.

Thank you. What do you know for sure?

I don’t know anything for sure.

Thank you. What is your greatest fear?

I wanted to ask, what exactly did he mean by greatest—largest, most ferocious, grandest, most grandiose, most impossible—but I knew that the content of the questions wasn’t supposed to matter and the content of my answers also didn’t matter, because they were just studying the way a brain moves, how but not exactly where it goes.

What is your greatest fear?

I did everything wrong.

Thank you. What is the point of love?

To distract us.

Thank you. Is there an afterlife?

The questions kept coming like normal on this last day (for me) of the study and I went to the lab for more blood work and I smiled at the nurse when she smiled at me and I drank the blue liquid, then went to the dark room and I loved the dark room, but when the man asked,
What is the value of travel?
and
What is the most memorable place you have ever visited?
, I wondered for a moment if they knew something about my plans to leave the next week and I began to wonder, again, if my husband was in on all this—and I worried he knew I had the ticket for the next week and I wondered if he’d try to stop me—whether he’d somehow lock me in the apartment or show up at the gate or buy a ticket for the seat next to mine—this is how it would have gone in the soaps, I knew, overturned chairs, screamed names and vengeance and maybe a curse and often a window punched through and often blood and often a hospital, and in the hospital there’d be one kind moment between two lovely, loving people before the IVs were ripped out and beeping monitors went flat, a doctor, a
Clear!
, a jolt, but that was for television, for fiction, an exaggeration of what the rest of life was and I remembered my mother watching the soaps, this yellow-tinted memory of my mother behind a cloud of smoke, Ruby sitting at her feet, a forgotten bowl of cereal now lukewarm mush there in their real life, which they weren’t a part of in that moment, but now I couldn’t remember if this was a memory or a photograph or a total invention because I’d asked my mother once what soap she’d followed in the eighties and she said she hadn’t and didn’t know what I was talking about and maybe she was right, but I think she was wrong, and I think that’s the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your life.

When I got home after that last day after the study I had an urge to look through my husband’s files extensively, an urge I’d been repeatedly having and repeatedly suffocating because I knew it wasn’t nice to snoop around like that. When I finally gave in I actually had no clear idea of what I was even looking for, but I told myself that it didn’t matter what I was looking for because the urge was large and serious and it was best just to get out of its way, so I did and I found his mother’s death certificate and it didn’t say
suicide
in the cause-of-death box, it said
accidental
, and my chest went warm for a moment because my first thought was that my husband had lied so that he could say he’d felt what I’d felt, that he knew what it was like to see a person lose herself to herself, that he’d created a fiction so he could get near the stuff of life that I was in. And if he had lied then what a horrible thing to spend such a long time lying about and what a sick thing to do—but what had probably happened, I assured myself, was that the person who filled out this certificate couldn’t find the ability to write the word
suicide
in that box because some people just can’t stand to live in a world where people sometimes take themselves out of it by choice and some people need to live in a world where suicides are all some kind of
misunderstanding
, some kind of
accident
, some lie that needs correcting and this reminded me of how at the end of my last morning at the clinic someone had said,
See you next week?
And I said,
Yes
. And I knew I was lying but that someone didn’t know I was lying unless that someone knew enough about me now to know when I was lying and if that someone did know that much they still lied right back to me by saying,
Take care
, and that was kind of whoever it was, to let us go on living in a little fiction; sometimes I think I don’t get enough of that in life, though other times I think I might get more than my fair share.

19

I sat on a curb in Takaka for a long time, trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.

Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted. I didn’t want to want anything; I wanted to want everything. I wanted to want a regular life: the usual husband, the usual apartment, the usual streets, sidewalks, noises, and so on. But I had left it. I had gone elsewhere. That was the right decision, I believed, except when I didn’t, which was both often and rarely.

I sat on the curb in Takaka and thought these things.

A tremendous amount of my brain was filled with noticing new things out here where nothing was familiar: buildings, types of cars, types of people, accents, plants, packaged-food items. Before I left my brain never had to register my bedroom, my husband, mailbox, apple core, alarm clock, walls. My brain just said, “___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___,” to those things, because a brain lets you keep going, keep not seeing your same walls, underwear, husband, doorknobs, ceiling, husband, husband. A brain can be merciful in this way: sparing you the monotony of those monotonies, their pitiful cozy. A brain lets all the bore-filled days shrink like drying sponges until they’re hard and ungiving.

At the same time, I missed my ceiling. I missed how the drywall by the bathroom was uneven. I missed hearing the door open, hearing the door close, knowing a familiar body was in the other room, moving around, going about itself.

I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I’d ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems. I left the library after some time and I thought I should maybe bring some groceries or something to Werner’s and I tried to determine if I should hitch again, but I didn’t want to explain myself to anyone and I thought if I heard someone call me brave one more time I might rip off my own thumb and not even bother to stop the blood from staining their upholstery.

I bought some pears and cashews and canned beans while thinking about whether a person could be physically capable of tearing off their own thumb and the specifics of that thought kept me company on the long walk to Werner’s place. When I found him standing shirtless in his side yard, I was holding the scrap of paper he’d written his address on that night in New York, so I let my backpack thud off me and I handed the scrap of paper to him for lack of anything else to do with it.

Ah, yes. That’s where we are.

He smiled and I smiled, but only a very little.

So you’re here
, Werner said. I could tell he meant he hadn’t actually expected me to come. Maybe I should have felt a bit of shame or a bit of awkwardness, but I did not, for some reason, because I had some rare confidence in being here, that this was the right place for me to be for an indefinite amount of time, that this was the place where I could maybe make sense to myself.

Well, I should show you around, at least
, he said, like I’d just won something he didn’t want to give away.

His place was a series of small wooden cabins and recycled trailers connected by unevenly cut doors he had to duck a little to get through. He’d built these semi-ruins himself, a constant project over the last twentysomething years he’d been out here. It’s probably a good distraction from living alone, something to schedule a day around, something to give urgency to the unurgent weeks: rusted hinges, peeling caulk, a leak, more peeling, more rust, more leaks—the circular requirements of shelter. He kept the kitchen stocked as if he was waiting for the world to end—a pantry packed with cans, an extra freezer just for cuts of meat and flour sacks. In my bedroom and the living room, he’d raised the trailer ceilings using wooden planks, salvaged windowpanes, and bubble wrap. It brought in a grassy, greenhouse kind of light, but the room still smelled like animal and mildew.

The brain needs space to breathe
, he said.

It’s nice. There is a lot of air here
, I said. Dead bugs lounged on dust pillows in the corner. Gnats buzzed.

We’ll have tea at six
, he said before he left me in my shed-room, and I was thankful that he didn’t try to make sure I was okay, and he didn’t ask if I needed anything, and he didn’t thank me for bringing those groceries, and this was probably why I was here: that this was one of those places I could go that just didn’t count toward anything, time I could be alone and alone with being alone and Werner knew or understood that or maybe he didn’t understand but it didn’t matter if he knew it or not because whether or not he knew, I believed it was understood.

*   *   *

You decided against bringing the family.

What family?
I asked. We were having dinner on the porch that faced the ravine, where we always had dinner, the only time we sat to eat a meal.

Well
, he said, head tilted and chewing meat,
I just supposed that you had one. You seem like a part of that kind of machine.

I don’t really have a family
, I said.

Well, that would explain why your family isn’t here, if they are not in existence.

Werner put his knife down on his dinner plate. I knew he would explain himself in this way, too, that he was without family.

Did you know that lambs lie down to be slaughtered?
he asked.
Such sad little creatures they are. So hopeless.

His sheer hair fluttered. I looked down at the ravine then up at the sky morphing into blues and purples. I have recalled this night often, sometimes daily, in the years since I left New Zealand, but I still do not know why it is this moment that I remember so clearly—sky, Werner, knife on plate, talk of how lambs die—instead of one of the louder, more eventful ones. Some of the loudest and most eventful events that happened there are still foggy, half-ruined slide shows, the images unfocused, a fleshy thumb obscuring some key thing or person. But that night it seemed I had reached some indescribable reason, and the wildebeest sulked away, and I made some sense to myself and I wouldn’t say I was happy or even content, but I had emptied myself of something and was just there.

I eat them for the sake of this pity
, Werner said, pushing this dripping bite into his mouth.

What makes them lie down?

Pardon?

I mean, why do they give up so easily?

Werner put another bite of animal in his mouth and chewed.

They are not giving up
, he said.
They are just being polite.

He smiled, then turned back to face the ravine.

I crossed my feet at the ankles, then bent one leg over the other. Something that sounded like a bucket of nails being poured on the tin roof happened, then it went away.

Possums
, he said, nodding toward where the noise had come from.

20

The front desk sent flowers and a balloon and a stuffed bear—the string noosed around his neck.

My husband and I watched telenovelas and every few minutes he would translate a good line, though it was obvious what was going on. There were lovers and there were enemies and sometimes you couldn’t tell them apart but it hardly mattered. Men tossed their heads around when they spoke. Old ladies cast spells. Doll-perfect women with angry black hair stomped in heels and demanded and demanded and demanded.

And I, like my husband, would rather watch someone else be angry than go through the trouble of my own, so while we watched the women spit and choke each other and the men shout and rub their temples, we felt our own anger dissolve or go numb. We had been angry that the other was angry and even angrier that we were experiencing anger—it was our honeymoon and if we were not exempt from pain now, we might never be.

The pain we were not exempt from had been made visible in the cast around my arm, which was fixing my wrist, maybe, but not us, this cast which was put on at the clinic I’d been carried to after falling down fifteen marble stairs outside our hotel: a twisted ankle, scraped knees, a broken wrist, a bruise, and a gash across my cheek. (
She fell down the stairs
, he said,
I fell down the stairs
, I said, and isn’t that what people say has happened when that is exactly what hasn’t happened?) In fact, I
had
fallen down the stairs as we were arguing, or as we were trying not to argue and failing deeply. We had just checked in to this hotel, smiling and overpronouncing
gracias
and
bueno
and when the clerk had cooed,
Oh, the honeymoon suite!
, my husband put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me and I don’t know exactly why, but I looked at my husband and pretended I had no idea what was going on, and he said,
What was that all about?
And I said,
What?
And he said,
Back there at reception—your, I don’t know, your attitude, it’s just not like you—
and this took us into a conversation about attitudes and about what I was usually
like
, and this conversation tried its best not to be an argument, and we tried our best to be the sweet, sense-making people we had mostly been up to this moment, through the all-smiles, all-talking, all-consuming wave of the wedding, but this discussion of attitudes eventually fell into the argument category and we argued up the elevator, into the honeymoon suite, through the bathroom door, back into the hallway, back down the elevator, through the lobby, and back outside the hotel and I got a little distracted by this obscenely attractive Spanish woman walking beside us as my husband was saying,
Elyria, it’s like this, you have two options—
and I was thinking,
Fuck you so
much, Husband, it’s not like that and I have a lot more than two options
—and this was what was in my head when I missed that first step and began the tumble, which just seemed so deeply appropriate, such a good end to our argument about attitudes and the two options I supposedly had and what I was usually
like
. And after the fall as I was splayed and shocked at the bottom of the stairs, a sturdy bellhop was the first to reach me—
Señorita, señorita
—and my husband was the second person to reach me, but it was too late because the bellhop was already scooping me up and carrying me the few blocks to the little clinic and all my husband could do was trail along behind us, he and his
It’s like this
and his
You have two options
.