Absence

1

“We were sitting right here, eating dinner, like always, and she just . . .” The husband held up a closed fist and then opened it, fingers splayed wide.

“Popped?” Harvey Ellis suggested.

“Yeah, exactly,” the husband agreed. “She disappeared into thin air, no time for goodbyes, no nothing. There was just that noise you hear, then gone. God—what am I going to do?”

The husband put his head in his hands, the shock apparently starting to metastasize into grief. Apparently.

Harvey looked around. He could see into the kitchen, the TV room, and down a dim hall. All shabby; furniture covered with magazines and dishes and dust. The dining room where they stood, on the other hand, was pristine. Floors scrubbed, table set with a fresh, white cloth. Picture of husband and missing wife smiling at him from the mantel.

“Well, Mr., uh”—Harvey checked his notes—“Bartholomew. My deepest condolences on your loss. If everything checks out, I’ll get the paperwork going, so the IRS can send you your remainder benefit.”

The husband nodded, but couldn’t help but ask, voice deadpan, “Checks out?”

“Yup,” Harvey said. He pulled out a boxy, handheld device, with buttons and a little gray screen. He unspooled a cord wrapped around an oblong metallic rod, connected the two. “Soon as this beeps, I’ll finish filling out your wife’s Certificate of Absence.”

“What is that thing?” the husband said, shying away as Harvey waved the rod over the dining table.

“This here’s bleeding-edge science. Out of Sweden, I think. An Ulbay Itshay Radiation Detector, they call it.” Harvey added a flourish to his waving. “Picks up the signature left in the cosmic microwave background whenever someone pops. Makes my job a lot easier, let me tell you!”

“Oh. How long does the signature last?”

There it was: regret, metastasizing into panic.

“When did you say your wife popped?”

The husband edged toward the kitchen, trying to look confused and absentminded. Harvey edged too. “A few hours at least. But, I don’t know . . . it could have been yesterday . . . I’ve been in such a state of shock . . .”

Harvey set his gizmo down on the table.

“No beep,” he said.

There was a flurry of motion—and violence. The husband dashed into the kitchen, maybe going for a back door or a steak knife. Harvey tackled him, and they both went down, hitting the floor with a painful thump. There they struggled, half wrestling, half striking and clawing. Harvey had the height; the husband had the weight. Harvey had a little training on how to handle hostile calls without a gun. The husband had desperation, which flared but burned out fast. For a moment, they were locked in a scrabbling stalemate. Then Harvey kicked out with one leg and found purchase on the plywood cabinetry. With that leverage, he flipped the husband over and cuffed his hands behind his back.

“You really should’ve cleaned the whole house,” Harvey said, panting. “One room sparkling while the rest are trashed? Dead giveaway that you’ve cleaned up blood spatter or drag marks. I know people have a poor opinion of Depop cops, but we aren’t that stupid. So, where’d you hide her body?”

The husband thrashed in the cuffs for a minute, then gave up, rested his red face on shiny linoleum.

“Buried,” he said, sounding empty. “Out in an abandoned field, two counties over. I made her a coffin and everything.”

“Wow, that’s love right there,” Harvey said.

“She prayed for it, every day!” The husband was crying now. “She believed in a Life After, and she was sure it was heaven. But years passed, and it just wouldn’t take her. I couldn’t bear to live like that, with her just . . . waiting, letting our life fall apart because she was sure it was almost her turn.”

“So, what, you figured you’d cut to the chase?”

The husband gave an angry sob. “If she was right about where we go, I saved her a lot of waiting. If she was wrong, I spared her from . . . whatever it is.”

“Spared her, huh?” Harvey almost laughed at the sad, twisted logic. “We’ll see if the judge sees it that way. Mr. Bartholomew, you’re under arrest for murder and for filing a fraudulent claim of Absentia. Anything you say can and will, blah blah blah. I hope you find spending the remainder of your time in jail more bearable than living with your wife.”

“Fuck you!” the husband spat. “You don’t know anything!”

“I know how to recognize a graphing calculator plugged into a vibrator,” Harvey said. “That’s more than you.”

The husband made a choking sort of noise that turned into a manic laugh.

“You like what you do? Like catching people up, feeling real smart? Running around figuring out who’s gone and who’s dead? You think it matters? We’ll all be one or the other soon enough. I just wanted to live what life I had left. What you do isn’t even living. So fuck. You. Fu—”

The husband shivered, and was suddenly gone. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum he left, sounding a huffing little pop. Harvey’s cuffs clattered to the floor.

Harvey stared at the cuffs, his heart pounding. He sat down at the husband’s clean-clothed table, feeling light and heavy at the same time. After a few minutes, he opened his notebook, tore out the Provisional Certificate of Absence he’d started for the wife, began filling out a new one for the husband.

“Well, shit,” he said eventually, to the empty dining room. “What are the odds?”

But the odds, Harvey knew, were getting better all the time.

2

Harvey worked the night shift, which meant he only handled a few cases a week—for now. Not that people didn’t pop in their sleep; they did, but usually those reports didn’t come in until morning. Harvey was always surprised by how easily people slept through the disappearance of someone they shared their bed with, not waking when that warm body turned to cold emptiness between the sheets.

The cases that did ring Harvey’s phone during the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift were an eclectic mix: dance partners vanishing from nightclubs, guests suddenly missing from dinner parties, other night shifters popping from behind security guard desks and convenience store counters, cars found abandoned on the highway.

“Spontaneous Human Absence” the experts called it now, or—even more euphemistically—“Gradual Depopulation,” “Depop” for short. Everyone, including Harvey, hated both terms. For one, “Depop” had cemented “pop” as distasteful but unavoidable slang for the event. For two, neither “Depop” nor “Absence” implied anything about the event itself. People wanted to be able to say that Absentees ascended or passed through or were taken—depending on their preferred religious doctrine, conspiracy theory, or headcanon fantasy. They wanted a term with some agency or directionality or finality to it. But the stats and the science couldn’t provide them that. All science was sure of was that they were Absent, and that they popped.

Worse, the terminology was agnostic as to cause or result or anything beyond the change in the total population. “Cause” meaning the why of it all. “Result” meaning where the Absent went. Nor could the demographers who discovered Gradual Depop answer the other big W on everyone’s mind: When is it going to happen to me?

Harvey’s job—the paperwork—was pretty thankless. Loved ones of the recently Absent didn’t like being interrogated instead of comforted, didn’t understand why the government had to be so fastidious about sorting fact from fraud. People who called in the popping of strangers, on the other hand, didn’t like having their whole night derailed by some fed bureaucrat—not when they’d rather be drinking off the shock of what they’d witnessed.

So Harvey was glad for the relatively light caseload the night shift provided him. His phone would ring, he’d take notes, he’d bus or bike to the scene, take more notes, fill out the Provisional Cert or begin the arduous process of establishing an ID for tracking down next of kin. If he had any doubts, the Ongoing Investigations team would take up the rest—monitoring for Absentee credit card purchases or social media posts, uploading their photo into the Global Absentee Facial Recognition Database, running dental on bodies that turned up in area morgues.

Occasionally Harvey got cases that just felt wrong. Not the public pops with disinterested witnesses and CCTV proof, but private ones, where the ones reporting were also the beneficiaries. Even most of those were fine—just sad, with extra paperwork. But sometimes you got a Mr. Bartholomew, the husband. Or a Ms. Nguyen, single mother of two, then one. Or a Mr. Evert, widower and caretaker, whose dementia-afflicted mother-in-law did not, in fact, vanish while Mr. Evert drove her to a college baseball game, but was put on a bus to Sacramento and found dead of exposure three weeks later.

On those very occasional occasions Harvey would pull out the bullshit detector he’d fashioned, look for the fearful twitch of their eyes. If that didn’t get a reaction, he’d ask the neighbors to characterize the family dynamic, or stake out their house the night their remainder benefit check came in. Watching to see if there was satisfaction mixed in with their relief.

And on those blessed nights when no calls came in, Harvey sat in his apartment and read everything he could about Depop: scantly evidenced scientific articles and jargon-filled philosophical monographs, reports on cult activity and conspiracy manifestos, Age of Absence culture writing and social media discourse. Not that he expected to find answers; that ghost ship had sailed. But what else was there to be interested in? It wasn’t that he was obsessed, Harvey told himself, he just had a high slack job and a professional obligation to educate himself while on the clock.

The other way Harvey passed the witching hours was by running the numbers. He tallied the cases he worked, collated missing persons reports, tracked unused telephone numbers and money left stranded in bank accounts. He looked for those Absent who fell through the cracks of government and platform surveillance.

It was all too easy to pop without anyone noticing. Millions now traveled in pairs, lived with roommates, used check-in apps, performed fastidious best-practice rituals to ensure that if they did pop there would be proof of their Absence. Countless others, however, had responded to the times by dropping out, going off-grid, trying to get away from tracking or the “social vector” some conspiracists believed connected Absentees.

The impossible goal was to get an accurate tally of how many people were popping and how fast. Extra credit for tracking who was popping and under what circumstances, just in case there actually was signal in all that noise. The states tried to keep count, but the best numbers were collected by networks of academics and amateur demographers. Harvey had taken it upon himself to liaise with these researchers, informally.

Harvey was proud of the work he and his little cell of Depop trackers did on their Discord server, logging confirmed Absences from the greater Kansas City area. They had one of the tightest interquartile ranges in the Midwest. Their debates over how to model Depop kept Harvey occupied through the long nights of waiting for his phone to ring.

And when the phone did ring, and he went to face the intimate aftermath of a human being vanishing without warning or consent, Harvey got to return to his desk and log the pop in his personal spreadsheet—the most extraordinary, senseless event society had ever experienced transformed into mundane, sensible statistics.