The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Howard

Nearly two decades later he remains at large and I miss my family like phantom limbs. Their absence in my life, the tragedy of their fates and the pain they must have suffered is a constant ringing in my ears, a taste in my mouth, an itch on my skin. It’s everywhere, always, and I can’t make it go away. Time hasn’t healed this wound but made it worse, turned the skin around the original cut necrotic.

He said that fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth.

So ask me again. Am I the girl who . . . ? Because this time—these days—I’ll tell you the truth: no, but I was. I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man. Now I am the woman who is going to catch him.

Why had they done nothing with this, their one wild and precious life? Why didn’t they desperately want anything? Why didn’t they have dreams and adventures and wishes and goals? I didn’t know anything about their desires, that was the problem. Without that missing piece, it was hard for my parents to live as fully formed people in my mind. But recently I’ve started to wonder if they wanted nothing because they already had it, if our family life was their dream.

Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.

There was an especially acute heartbreak in having secured the job you’d dreamed of having for more than half your life only to discover that, firstly, it was nothing like you’d imagined it would be and then that, secondly, it had never really been your dream job at all.

I’m obsessed with descriptions of grief. I collect them, literally. I copy them down into a notebook. My motto: no poem, personal essay, or misery memoir left behind. “It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes.” Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Letters.

These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.”