Free Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey Page B

his home and we were his most anticipated guests and that was a nice feeling, the feeling of being in someone’s home just by being alive on a Tuesday.
    There was a bar on the ferry because whenever people are testing gravity (in planes or ships or from great heights) something has to happen to diffuse the tension of being a human and breakable, of knowing no one gets to see all the spaces and times they would like to see in this life. Everyone at the bar had the same bitter, dumb look in their eye. The ocean rocked us.
    I took the last stool, beside a man who was finishing a beer. He put down his glass, wiped his mouth, looked over his sleeve at me, and nodded a nothing nod, which was good because I didn’t want to deal with a something nod. I wanted to deal with the ocean because the ocean was making the ferry sway, making liquid slosh out of all the pints held in nervy hands. I put my hand on the bar and into a puddle of something, wiped it on my leg, then put my needing eyes on the bartender and she came over, a porcelain-faced woman, a tender tender. She poured beers so gracefully that it seemed like a dance and she brought the beers to the nothing-nod man and me without any questions or mentions of money because that is what a tender thing she was.
    I will go on loving her for the rest of my life.
    I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything’s, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is—a big hole full of things chewing each other—and it’s odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they’re really after as they stare—that ferocious pulse under all things placid.

 
    16
    I got into the car even though it was exactly the kind of car they say to avoid. Doors all dented. A long-haired, bearded driver with a cigarette pinched in his thin lips. This looked like the beginning of a porno or slasher movie and I didn’t want to be slashed or porned, but I did need to get about a hundred miles west of this parking lot and the sun was nearly setting and this car was the only one making an offer and I have always been unable to decline anyone’s offer of almost anything.
    Where you edded?
    He was shirtless and had a body that suggested he lived on a cliff and the only way to get home was to climb it.
    Takaka?
    I was never sure how to pronounce it, which ka got the emphasis.
    ’Swearum edded. Get in.
    He moved boxes of beer from the passenger seat to the back, which was piled with duffel bags of I don’t know what. He wore sunglasses, a big, utilitarian pair that wasn’t designed in this decade or even the decade before this one. I ducked into the passenger seat and hugged my backpack like an airplane flotation device. Reggae music loud, windows down, cigarette smoke ribboning around the car, then shooting out the window like it was late for something.
    After a few minutes the man started to shout over the music in my general direction. He was saying things in varying tones, maybe telling me a story about the bridge we were driving over or the fields we were driving toward. His voice sounded like vinyl played backward. I understood nothing. I said, Yeah, yeah , and nodded my head and raised my eyebrows when he raised his eyebrows and said, Oh . Sometimes he would laugh and turn his head to see if I was laughing and of course I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed, then I stopped laughing.
    He turned the music up, lit another cigarette, and opened a beer as we drove up a mountain, making hairpin turns