Free Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

don’t you just leave the mate? I mean really leave him, not just the country he’s in.
    Something is wrong with me , I said, smiling slack and champagne drunk.
    What I meant was I knew I had to do something that I didn’t know how to do, which was leaving the adult way, the grown-up way, stating the problem, filling out the paperwork, doing all those adult things, but I knew that wasn’t the whole problem, that I didn’t just want a divorce from my husband, but a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history; I was being pushed by currents, by unseen things, memories and imaginations and fears swirled together—this was one of those things you figure out years later but it’s not the kind of thing you can explain to an almost-stranger in a broom closet while you’re mostly drunk and you barely know where you are or why you are there or why some people can smell secrets.
    Nothing is wrong with you, sugar , Jaye said, and I knew she thought that was true, but she didn’t know about that wildebeest that lived in me and told me to leave that perfectly nice apartment and absolutely suitable job and routines and husband who didn’t do anything completely awful—and I felt that the wildebeest was right and I didn’t know why and even though a wildebeest isn’t the kind of animal that will attack, it can throw all its beastly pounds and heavy bones at anything that attacks it or stands in its way, so I took that also into account. One should never provoke or disobey a wildebeest, so I did leave, and it seems the wildebeest was what was wrong with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure of what was wrong with the wildebeest.

 
    15
    Jaye told me where to be and when to be there, so I did what she said. I got there early and waited for twenty minutes, then she splashed into the park: gold heels, a tangle of necklaces, bangles, earrings, a purple minidress struggling over her thighs.
    Hello, my sunshine-doll-face-love!
    Hi, Jaye.
    So, last day in Welly, my little world traveler. I hope you won’t forget the little people here in Wellywood.
    She peck-kissed both sides of my face.
    I smiled dumbly at her and she kept talking, telling me everything we had to do and see in the few hours before my ferry left. We walked into a bakery with tiny white tiles on the floor and a ceiling fan that was barely moving.
    This place is run by a bunch of queers and queens and they make the best apricot slice in the whole fucking goddamn world. Can’t even smell one without gaining a thousand bloody kilos.
    She ordered an apricot slice and a drag queen handed it to Jaye wrapped in hot-pink wax paper. She took huge bites as we walked down the sidewalk, crumbs caked to her makeup.
    I decided then that I was in love with Jaye—not a romantic love or a friendship one or a sexual one—it’s some other kind that is clean and plain and harmless. It is a love made of an inaudible noise, like the noise that comes out of those whistles that only dogs can hear, or those little plastic things that people put on their cars so deer will hear them and get off the highway. But there is nothing to be done about the inaudible noise. It’s just something that is.
    And you’re going where next?
    Golden Bay. To that poet’s farm.
    Oh for fuck’s sake.
    What?
    It’s just—you know, there’s nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. Tourists are always coming here shitting themselves over nature—oh, it’s so beautiful oh, there’s no pollution, oh, goblins and hobbits and some such—but it’s not a bloody magic show! It’s not a movie. What’s going to happen out there is you’ll see a fuckload of possums and you’ll be bored off your rocker. You can’t just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person.
    I know , I said, because I had lost track of the hope I’d ever had to become a better person. I know it’s not a movie. I just want to be alone.
    I just don’t see what’s wrong with