Worse Than Myself

by Adam Golaski

  She didn’t cover herself, as I would’ve. Nor did David panic. He dashed for the light switch and I ran, a flash burning across the yard. I burned through the little forest, through the muck and wet, stopped for a breath only when I at last stood in my kitchen. And though the kitchen was cool I could not get cool, I sweated and my abdomen turned, I felt my intestines working feverishly to expel some rotten thing I’d consumed. At the kitchen table, I put my hands palm-down, tried to push the table into the linoleum. I could imagine pouring a vodka, but I could not get up from where I sat until

  I heard a noise from the bedroom upstairs; a noise like an animal crashing through a forest.

  As complex as the sound was, it did not last. But it had been real and real enough to move me from my seat, bare feet sticking to the floor, wet pant-cuffs stiffly shifting with each step I took, up, upstairs to the bedroom. I opened the door.

  My husband, Brian, lay asleep, naked and uncovered, his penis semi-erect and wet—it glistened as it had the night before. Beside him, on my side of the bed, was a deer. (All our bedclothes on the floor in a heap at the foot of the bed.) I squinted in the dim-lit room. A doe, that’s what they’re called, lay on her side, peacefully, I supposed, sleeping. Eyes shut, belly (flank) rising up and down as she breathed, a doe, and from between her hind legs a slick trail to Brian that would dry white and stain.

  I clapped my hands together once. The doe started, her head rose quick from my pillow, her legs, too. Brian stirred, but did not wake. She was awake, though. The doe scrambled upright, stood ridiculously on my bed, caused the mattress to sink deep where I usually slept so lightly. Brian woke when she trotted off the bed onto the hardwood floor. The noise her hooves made—

  Brian shouted, then he shouted my name, “Janie!” and yelled, “Look out!” as if I might not have noticed the deer, as if he was surprised we were all there.

  I ran at her. She dodged my attack with ease, her reflexes fast and natural. My wet pants tripped me up, they were loose on me and heavy, so I stepped out of them, free now half-naked.

  I ran out of the bedroom, after the doe. She stumbled in the hallway, her big body crashed into the wall (the plaster cracked), and I caught up enough to give her a big push: I put my hands on her rump and shoved and she stumbled forward, toward the stairs, and at the top step she lost her balance, crashed down the stairs and collapsed, a disaster in our living room, broken legs, more than that, probably. She writhed, turned her head up—I glared down from the top step. She mewled, pitifully, and I felt sorry for her, a dumb animal.

  And yet, she had tricked me, lured me into the woods she knew so well, saw me lost and double-backed. So, perhaps not so dumb, not so dumb as Brian, wrecker-of-cars, foolish enough to keep a dreadful job and to fall asleep with his girl-animal, when he must have known I wouldn’t be lost forever.

  Brian stood in the doorway of our bedroom. He wore only his slippers. His thick, dark hair was matted, pushed flat. He held out his arms and said, “That was terrible, how horrifying, are you okay? I just can’t believe, I just don’t know how she got in. Oh, Janie.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I shouted.

  And then I said, “Brian.”

  And I said, “You will drag her carcass out. You will put her carcass in the car you’ve rented. You will leave, and you will never come back.”

  Brian wanted to explain but instead told me about a girl he dated when he was in high school. I said nothing. He told me he needed clothes. I said, “You’re perfect the way you are.” His pitiful, pale, naked butt exposed, he followed his girlfriend down the stairs.

  [for Jaime Corbacho]

  THE DEMON

  A pair a pair of lips. A set full, soft-peaked. When kissed a hard tongue emerges. A set high-peaked, bright red; perpetually chapped and waxy with Carmex.

  “I’m out.”

  “—.”

  “What are they?”

  “Export A.”

  “Now you have to smoke like Sartre?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Matches?”

  “Here.”

  —

  “Did you hear about the Solar Temple cult?”

  “Like, ‘The Saint’?”

  “?”

  “Simon Templar.”

  “I’m not—is that a joke?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Mass suicide. Only everyone didn’t go willingly. People were shot with plastic bags on their heads. They used garbage bags filled with gasoline to blow up these chalets in Switzerland where cult members were meeting. Look. I’m shaking all over.”

  “You are—”

  “I need another.”

  “Take it.”

  “So they— So they were forced to die. Kids too.”

  “Damn.”

  “They were led by this guy, Luc Jouret. He had pictures of Jesus Christ with his face painted in. Nailed to the front door of one of the chalets was a sack with a tape in it, with him raving about the sky and the way the planets were coming together.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Yeah, I mean, well— You know. Like all religions, it was just a scam for money. These people turned over their accounts and he didn’t kill himself. He has property all over.”

  “Oh.”

  “You look— You look disappointed.”

  “Kind of takes away from the—I don’t know—from the weird religion.”

  “There was a room full of corpses. What else do you need?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shit. Look at me. I gotta go.”

  “What? No. Chad, you said you’d stay. You said you wouldn’t, tonight.”

  “I can’t stay still. I gotta go.”

  “Have another whiskey with me. That’ll settle you.”

  “It won’t. But I will. Another smoke? And one for the road?”

  “I’ll buy more tonight.”

  “No. Just the two. These’re expensive.”

  “I know what—chalices of blood. Candles made from human fat. Demons. Despair. Depravity.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Weird religion. The cult. It should have been really weird.”

  “They had a pentagram.”

  “My boyfriend in high school had a pentagram tattooed on his arm.”

  “You’re fucked up.”

  “Tell me about something mysterious.”

  “Like, my drink is gone and I’m going.”

  “Come on.”

  “No. I need to go.”

  “Will you come back tonight?”

  “Maybe,” Chad says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Kiss me.”

  A fleck of tobacco on a pair of soft lips. Fine, transparent hairs, like a mist. A pair of lips a raspberry popsicle. A fleck of skin.

  October 28th, 1994, late. Our invitation—an elegant invitation—a thick, folded rectangle of paper, the invite and directions drawn in careful calligraphy. Glued to the front of the invitation a dry oak leaf, now cracked, missing points, as the invite has been read and is being reread by James. James says, “Our right should be soon.”

  I’m driving my father’s car. Chad is in the back—he prefers the backseat, where he can recline. He’s unbuckled, head at an uncomfortable angle against a leather arm rest. “I can’t believe you won’t let me smoke,” he says. James and I say, “Shut up,” and I add: “Make sure you don’t get make-up in the leather.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Turn here,” James says.

  I turn the car off the two-lane onto a narrow road—even darker, I think, than the two-lane. “I can’t believe there aren’t any streetlights,” I say.

  Chad says, “Change the tape. Change the tape. We’ve heard this.”

  James yanks the cassette and puts on another.

  “What’s this shit?” Chad says. “Put on Jane’s.”

  I say, “That, we’ve heard a thousand times.”

  “Come on.”

  James looks at me,
switches tapes. A languid bass rolls through the stereo.

  Chad and James are the official invitees—Chad knows one of the girls who lives in the house—Suzan—James another. They’re both pretty sure there’s a third housemate—a man, they think. Chad had something going on with Suzan before we started going out. He’s always cagey about just what was going on when I ask. I don’t want to be clingy, so I don’t push.

  Now, way out in western Massachusetts, the car’s high beams illuminate only a small stretch ahead of the car. I’m awed by the darkness—nervous, too—just a couple of hours out of Boston, I think.

  James shouts my name—I hit the breaks—a deer—its eyes—in front of the car. My heart beats hard. Chad—thrown against the front seat, bitches.

  James says, “Drop the highs.”

  I do. Our pocket of light shrinks. Three deer staring at me— “They’re beautiful,” I say. “I haven’t seen deer in—”

  “Turn the headlights off,” James says.

  I do. The dark is complete. I feel a hand on my breast—a quick touch that frightens me—“Chad, fuck off,” I say—he must have reached up from behind—an awkward reach. I turn on the headlights. The deer are gone. For a long moment, it seems, their shapes linger.

  Chad sings. Even with the tape, he screws up the lyrics: “Me and my girlfriend, don’t have no shoes, her nose is painted bright sunlight—”

  I laugh. He sings it this way all the time.

  Chad continues to sing his lyrics, slightly off, but right, “She loves me, I mean it’s oh, so serious, it’s serious candy.’”

  I laugh.

  James says, “Turn here.”

  “There’s no sign,” I say.

  “I’ve been counting. And isn’t that a red mailbox?”

  We drive another mile along an uneven dirt road. Chad sits up between the two front seats. “It is goddamn dark,” he says. “Goddamn dark. Turn off the music.” I’m glad for Chad and James. In the car, with them, I feel protected. There’s light ahead.

  Hanging from the trees are long, filmy, white shreds of cloth. On a small mound are gravestones—perfectly round at the top and carefully illuminated by flood lights set in the ground. A shovel stands in the dirt. The drive bends, and the house is directly in front of us. The house looks like two boxes stacked one atop the other, the upper box askew, creating a triangular upper deck. There are great square windows on the upper story, and tall, narrow windows all around the first floor, warmly lit. I can see people moving inside—they appear and vanish and appear, as if pictures in a zoetrope.

  James puts on his mask, a translucent face that distorts his own face just enough to be off-putting; he’s otherwise wearing a mismatched brown suit bought at a second hand store and a brilliant green shirt—“candy pumpkin green,” James told me when I picked him up earlier that evening. Chad gets out of the car—slugs out of the backseat. He’s wearing what he wears all the time—unstylish, tight, faded black jeans and a worn tan and black flannel shirt—but he surprised me by showing up at my apartment with a drug store make-up kit, and by asking me to, “Paint me like a skull-face.” He is so skinny, his face so gaunt, the make-up seems only to accentuate an already skeletal physicality. He walks loose. I lock the car and catch up with him. James walks a few steps ahead.

  The walk is decorated with carved pumpkins. Simple carvings, jagged cuts for mouths, eyes.

  “Who spent their fucking lifetime decorating the front yard?” Chad asks.

  “I’m guessing,” James says, “that’d be Heather. She’s passionately domestic.” James’ voice is muffled, as if he’s talking through crumpled tissue paper.

  A flight of wide, wooden steps, every other with another jack-o’-lantern. Their eyes flick like tongues. One has no mouth. The deck railing is decorated with cotton cobwebs, plastic spiders the size of a little girl’s hand and dismembered, skeletal hands. The yard slopes into a dark basin, lined with loose teeth stones—a farmer’s wall.

  James rings the bell and with no delay the front door is swung wide open—a woman dressed as an angel: a bell-shaped, thigh high negligee over a silky slip, white hose, a gold crown with a halo attached—bobbing above the woman’s head—hand-made gold wings visible just over the woman’s slight shoulders.

  Chad whispers to me, “This must be Heather.” I laugh.

  Heather hugs James and kisses him on the jaw. Kisses him again just above the mouth. “I’m so pleased you came—and so amazed. We live so far away I didn’t think any of my friends would come. Are you Chad and Rachel? Suzan’s told me all about you, Chad. All of you come in. Are you hungry? There’s soup and hors d’oeuvres. Oh, come in.” She steps aside and the three of us pass her into a single, great room. We’ve come into the kitchen area, separated from the rest of the first floor by a low wall. There’s a long table covered with food and wine, and a smaller table, where a group of men and women, all in their thirties, sit talking. Everything is decorated with gourds and dried wheat and corn. The living area is occupied by a small group of costumed people, chatting, holding wine glasses and black or orange paper plates. I see a little girl in a pink princess dress dash across the floor through a doorway to a dark back room.

  Chad fills a glass with liquor, and asks where he can smoke.

  Heather says, “On the deck or upstairs, on the balcony—don’t you want to say hello to Suzan?”

  Chad grins, “For Suzan I need to be fortified.” Heather smiles. “Besides, she smokes. I don’t see her here. She must be out smoking.”

  “Well then, you really should go, it’s lovely up there.”

  “Lovely,” Chad repeats, and nods. “You are as Suzan said. I’ll go upstairs then. You comin’, Rach?”

  “I’m hungry,” I say. I’m not ready for the fray.

  “Whatever,” and Chad moves swiftly across the living area to a staircase that disappears through a rectangle in the ceiling.

  James says, “I can’t believe this house, it’s amazing.”

  Heather points, timidly, to a man dressed as a murderous doctor, seated at the kitchen table. “He designed it, built it. He’s renting rooms to me and Suzan.”

  A woman, dressed as a devil—a red miniskirt and a red turtleneck sweater, red stockings, red high heel shoes and with horns protruding from her black hair—steps out of a room on the far side of the living area.

  “There’s Suzan,” Heather says.

  Suzan says, “I’m Sue, welcome.” She angles her hip just so when she says “welcome.”

  “I’m Rachel.”

  “Oh?” Suzan looks around. “So where’s our lothario Chad?”

  James looks at Suzan’s legs, her breasts, goes for a glass of wine and some soup.

  Heather follows James. I can’t decide for a moment; I finger the pack of smokes in my bag, follow James instead. On my way I’m stopped by the house-designer—“And who are you?” he asks. The rest of the table goes on talking. I hear a man—not costumed at all—say the words, “…to capture Saddam.” A woman, dressed in a vinyl French maid outfit, answers, “It’s just Clinton trying to distract us from Whitewater.” I say, to the house-designer, “I’m Rachel. I’m with Chad and James. They know Sue and Heather.”

  “Well, delighted to have you. Did you come far?”

  “Boston.”

  “That’s not too bad. Though everything seems far away when you live out here. Especially at night. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been dropped into the middle of nowhere. So glad to have roomies.” He winks. “Oh. I’m Stephen. Hey guys, can we stop boring each other with politics for a second?”

  I’m certain Stephen is gay, which makes his choice of roommates seem less odd to me. He’s at least ten years older than Heather and Suzan. He introduces me to three others at the table, all of whom eye me up and down.

  “But I shouldn’t stop you from getting some libations,” he says. “Heather spent so much time preparing everything—or ordering it with my credit card.” Again, he winks. I wonder if it’s actually
a twitch.

  I ask, “Who’s little girl is here?”

  “Little girl?” Stephen raises an eyebrow. “Did someone bring a child to our little bacchanal?” He looks around the table. The man who isn’t wearing a costume laughs. “Maybe one of Heather’s friends?” Stephen points in the general direction of the people grouped in the living area. I see Chad and Suzan come down the stairs—I’m relieved. Surprised by how relieved.

  “This house is beautiful,” I say.

  He gestures the compliment away with his hand. The woman in the fetish French maid costume says, “He’s a genius.” The man without a costume says to her, “Don’t be such a fag.” The man who hasn’t said anything, wearing the lower half of a gorilla suit, snorts out a laugh.

  Chad, Suzan, Heather, James and I stand around the long table with the food. James has a bowl of soup in his hand. Heather watches him eat; she’s got doe eyes, I think. I try to catch James’ attention, to see if he knows that Heather obviously wants him, would tear off her slutty angel outfit in an instant for him. He sees nothing but soup, apparently. Chad says, “Rach, you gotta come upstairs and have a smoke out on the porch with me and Sue—this house is fuckin’ amazing.” I look at Suzan and think, Do those legs go all the way up, and laugh out loud. “What?” Chad asks. “Nothing,” I say. I stand next to Chad, and take his hand. He leans over to me and says, “Upstairs. They told me they have some,” he puts his lips to my ear—his dry, waxy lips brush against my earlobe—and he tells me what exactly they have upstairs. I jerk my hand away, “You said you would never.” He grins at me—at first I think he’s mocking me but he says, “I’m only messing with you.” He smiles until I do and he goes to the living area, grinning at the people gathered there. He sits on the piano bench and begins to play, a little too fast but with great ability, the Rondo from Beethoven’s, “Pathétique.” The group in the living area and even Stephen’s friends stop what they’re doing to watch. Heather gives a cute little clap. I smile; the jolt from what he said slips away, tingles out through my fingers and my feet.

  I know I’d better go down and sit on the bench with him before anyone else—before Suzan—does. Chad’s done this at parties before and there’s always some girl who goes for it. I grab what looks like a shrunken quiche, slosh wine into a glass and go sit with Chad.