Worse Than Myself

by Adam Golaski

  During the first hours of the morning, K[ ] woke from a dream of herself. She stood in a field, its border defined by forest. Her awake self knew this field to be about two miles behind the house (as a young girl, especially during her high school years, she had taken to exploring the woods and had gotten to know them quite well. She got to be so comfortable there, she often sang while she walked, not paying attention to anything but her own voice). In her dream she watched herself doing nothing—she stood still in the center of the field, hands palm-forward. The sky behind her was lightening-blue, as it can only be on the coldest of days.

  There was nothing overtly unusual or remarkable about her dream except… she couldn’t pin-point why it unnerved her. Maybe because the self standing in the field was her now, at her present age, in a field she’d not stood in for years, or maybe it was the slightly jerky quality of the image: the still picture that was her in the field trembled as if someone off-frame held it and had held it for a long time.

  As K[ ] sat on the couch, her heart beat fast, as if she’d made a hard run. When was the last time I had a dream? She tried to relax. I can’t remember—in high school? That’s impossible. It can’t have been that long. She sat still until the sun rose. Its light was cold like moonlight. Light crept across the snow in the backyard and the snow became blindingly bright—it seemed more than white, seemed more like empty space, like a crisp sheet of paper just fed through the roller of a typewriter.

  Judging by the trees in the yard, she guessed the snow was at least four feet deep. Mrs. Lawrence had been right last night; it would be a day at least before the plows reached the roads near the house.

  After K[ ] showered, she washed her underclothes and socks in the sink, then slung them over the shower curtain rod. Just like when I lived here, she thought, amused.

  Over breakfast, Mrs. Lawrence talked a little about K[ ]’s cousin. “When he came to the door, answering my ad for a tenant, and told me he was related to your mother, I thought, ‘terrific,’ since your mother was so nice. After I showed him the place, I called your mother—just to be sure he was who he said. She was stunned. She told me that he was in fact your cousin, and not a terribly distant one at that. You know, only once removed or something like that. I can never keep track of all the removeds and seconds and halves in my own family, so how can I be expected to remember yours?” She laughed at her own joke. “Anyway, your mother told me that the two of you, when you were both very young—two or three—before you really begin to remember things—you used to be playmates. Your family and his lived near enough, so when baby-sitting was needed, a child could be dropped off at one house or the other.” She stood to clear her plate. “Would you like anything more? I’ve got more eggs in the pan.”

  “No thanks. Maybe some more of that coffee—it’s good.”

  “I buy the fancy stuff. I figure one should never cut corners when it comes to coffee and tea.”

  “So, we played together when we were young?” She wished she could remember. Of course, there were small memories—lone moments, mostly—and K[ ] could never be sure which of those were stories she’d been told about herself and which were real memories.

  “Then his family left. Your mother wasn’t really sure why. Which struck me as funny, since it sounded as if both families were close. I suppose that’s no stranger than his coming back twenty-three years later and rooming in the room that once was your bedroom! Your mother said she never heard from them again. She worried for a while, of course, tried to track them down, but after a few years passed, she figured they had reasons for not wanting to be found, and pretty much let it go. She told me she hadn’t thought about them until I called.”

  K[ ] sipped her coffee—which was very good—and thought about a stranger—who wasn’t really a stranger—living in her room. Of course, she was picturing her room as it was when she was living in it. Big mirror to practice her ballet, small brass bed, murals she’d painted on the wall and taped-up magazine cutouts of her once-idols. She tried to imagine the room without her things in it, then realized she didn’t have to. “I suppose I ought to get to the task at hand.”

  The door to her former bedroom—J[ ]’s room—was closed. Mrs. Lawrence had said that after his body had been taken care of, the room had been closed and no one had gone in since. “I found the idea of going in there a little spooky,” Mrs. Lawrence had said. “That’s why I was so pleased you were coming to take care of things.” K[ ] opened the door, making a point not to hesitate.

  The room was painted white and, though neatly stacked and pushed against the wall, was dominated by newspapers and magazines. Against one wall, there was a bed, of course, and beside it, a dresser. In a corner, on top of a pile of newspapers, was an old typewriter. The air smelled metallic—newsprint’s acid.

  Her first reaction was of disappointment. My mural has been painted over! She tried to recall the mural in some detail, but couldn’t even recall its subject. She could remember standing in this room, paints all around her, feeling proud of her work. Nostalgia is bad. Nostalgia is for unhappy times and unhappy people. Her own apartment wasn’t much different from this room—it too was impersonal. K[ ] resolved to stop being cheap and buy some new drapes and a little more furniture as soon as she returned.

  She leaned over a stack of newspapers and opened the window a crack. The sharp, cold air from outside calmed K[ ]. She found a spot on the floor, sat down, and began to look through the first pile of newspapers.

  After she’d gone through two stacks, she felt she’d confirmed two things: most of the newspapers were either rinky-dink town publications or tabloids, and that her cousin had an article in every single one. If she could say he had a focus, it would be a focus on the minor and the bizarre. In one small town paper, The High Falls Chronicler, he’d written obituaries and birth announcements for several months. In the tabloids, his stories were inevitably about people’s encounters with the supernatural. Specifically ghost sightings.

  One article stood out. It was in a tabloid K[ ] had never seen on any supermarket checkout lane. Next to the byline was a photograph of the author, a grainy picture of a grave looking young man wearing a tie. The story caught K[ ]’s attention because it was set in High Falls; indeed, the events took place in the forest behind the house. The story detailed a ghost sighting by a stream K[ ] had often walked alongside. The ghost had been seen by a local (whose name was obviously an anagram of her cousin’s own) who had been out on a hike. The woods were familiar to the local, so he had no compunction walking through them late in the evening or after dark. He followed a stream that flowed into a small pool, located just outside a clearing. The night was clear, with a nearly full moon in the sky.

  As he approached the clearing he heard a woman singing. Her voice was lovely, and he hoped to find the source. He moved toward the edge of the clearing. There he saw the woman. She was young, he had guessed her to be in her twenties. She wore a white dress and sang.

  Not paying attention to where he was going, he walked out of the clearing and into the pool of water. This startled him—the way the ground dropped out—and he yelped. The woman stopped singing, and looked at him. At that moment he realized she was standing not just beyond the pool, as he had originally thought, but on the water.

  He floundered for a moment in the pool, then tore away through the forest. The rest of the article was J[ ]’s bizarre speculations as to why the singing woman was in the woods, who she might have been, and then the article went on to detail some research into the history of local hauntings, which bore little fruit.

  The bedroom door opened and K[ ] jumped.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Mrs. Lawrence.

  “I didn’t hear you come up the stairs. I was engrossed in a story of my cousin’s.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Lawrence didn’t sound interested. “I’ve made sandwiches for lunch. Are you hungry?”

  K[ ] found that she was, noted that the time was already two o’clock, and th
ought it a good idea to take a break. At the kitchen table, K[ ] asked about her cousin.

  “Do you know much about J[ ]’s professional life?”

  “Not at all. I am, I’ll be the first to admit, a little nosey, but in his case,” she paused, to carefully chose her words. “He unnerved me at times. Intimidated me. Not that he was rude or mean in any way, he just seemed so very serious.”

  “He looked serious. I saw a photograph of him in a newspaper he’d written an article for.”

  “He was a reporter? I knew he was a writer of some sort. I assumed it was a novel. How could he have been a reporter? He hardly ever left the house.”

  “Well he wasn’t reporting for any prestigious journal, that’s for sure. The stories I read were mostly outlandish stories about ghostly encounters. He wrote for tabloids. There wasn’t any real journalism. I didn’t read anything he couldn’t have written with a telephone and a vivid imagination.”

  After lunch, K[ ] returned to her late cousin’s room. The room was cold—with the window open a crack, and with the door closed, the room had probably cooled down quickly. She closed the window and paused to look out over the backyard.

  Sans a swing-set, the yard was as she remembered. The end of the yard was marked by a curve of trees. A stream wriggled among their trunks. She tried to remember where the stream flowed (to a pool?), but could not.

  She turned back to the room and its contents. She didn’t think she would go through all the newspapers—J[ ]’s stories were interesting, but not especially worthwhile. She would skim the rest, and what caught her eye, she would keep (for whom?). First she thought she would have a look at his typewriter, which looked pretty old. She clacked out an invisible line or two on the black roller, then thought to try it out on paper. Next to the typewriter was a Strathmore box; she put the box on her lap and removed the lid—it sucked at the box, oozed off. When the bottom dropped free, K[ ] saw that, on top of the paper, were photographs. She glanced over at the bookshelf, and saw a case for an old manual camera. She brought her attention back to the opened box, and picked up the first photograph. She recoiled and dropped the photo back into the box. It’s a photograph of me. It’s a photograph of me now. In the back of her mind, she imagined asking Mrs. Lawrence how J[ ] would have gotten such a picture. Did my mother send Mrs. Lawrence a picture of me? Did my mother keep up a correspondence with her? With J[ ]?

  K[ ] stared at the picture and knew no one had sent J[ ] the photo. Knew because the photograph was quite obviously taken in the forest behind the house. “This is impossible,” she said, and her hand trembled, and the image before her blurred, blurred enough for her to put the photograph face down in the box, and put back the lid. Blurred enough so she could say to herself, she looked so much like me, and for a moment believe that the photo was of another woman.

  K[ ] did not stay in J[ ]’s room long after the discovery of the photograph. When she went downstairs she told Mrs. Lawrence that she had grown tired; the work a little dull, and that since she was going to be stuck here for at least another day anyhow, she thought she would take a break and maybe call it quits for the night.

  “That’s sensible. I’ll enjoy some company. It gets lonely out here, especially when you’re snowed in. I’ll make us a nice dinner and we can eat in front of the television.”

  “That sounds very nice.”

  “Good.” Mrs. Lawrence looked down to her needlework, then looked up again; K[ ] had not decided what she was going to do yet, and still stood at the bottom of the stairs. Mrs. Lawrence said, “feel free to use the phone if you need to let someone know you’re stranded here.” K[ ] would need to call the office if she wasn’t going be in on Monday, but that could wait until Monday morning. Otherwise, there was no one to call.

  K[ ] was grateful for Mrs. Lawrence’s company. The photograph really disturbed her, though she was unable to address what it meant in any direct way. She did ask Mrs. Lawrence if J[ ] had, during his stay in the house, ever had a girlfriend. The answer was, of course, no. “He did often go out at night,” Mrs. Lawrence said. “I thought maybe it was to see a woman.” K[ ] helped set up the fireplace for a fire, they made dinner, and they chatted about the shows they watched on TV. A little after midnight, Mrs. Lawrence stood up, brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt, and told K[ ] that she had to be going to bed.

  “Goodnight,” K[ ] said, and turned to face the dying embers in the fireplace. She recalled sitting near the fireplace as a girl, sometimes laying on the floor in front of it for hours, her parents seated behind her, her father in the big armchair, always, her mother on the couch. She stared at the flame intently; its tongues waved like snakes’ bodies crawling in the sand; she marveled at the array of colors in the flame and the shadows the flame cast against the brick (odd that light can cast a shadow). The fire died. The only source of light was from the dim lamp behind her. The ash in the fireplace was cold, where only a moment ago was warmth.

  Something fell from the chimney into the pile of ash. K[ ] jumped, sat up, no longer sleepy but tensely alert. A plume of ash obscured whatever had fallen. The ash slowly settled, K[ ] was afraid of what might be revealed, and then something else fell from the chimney. She lifted her feet up off the floor and tucked them under herself.

  When the ash at last settled K[ ] saw what had fallen into the fireplace. Human feet. She recoiled and made a sharp noise and then fell a leg, it fell perfectly onto a foot and foot and leg were solidly united. The other leg fell. K[ ] pushed herself back against the couch, stupid in her fear. Something else fell, something very heavy, and she knew what it was, though she could not see it, the torso, because the person that was assembling himself was tall enough that, standing upright, only their feet and legs were visible. I have to scream, she thought, to wake Mrs. Lawrence. She screamed. The sound of her scream—high, piercing—almost wiped out the hideous shuffling of the person assembling.

  The assembled person in the fireplace bent into a crouch, revealed itself to be a man, then revealed more as his shoulders appeared like white balls from the dark and finally, leering out from the shadowy hearth, his white face.

  K[ ] screamed when he looked at her. His glassy eyes shifted till they met her eyes, and when they did she shut up. He stepped out of the fireplace, dragging soot with each step. His face shone in the lamp light, his features obscured until his mouth emerged from the glare into shadow. His lips framed a word, once, slowly, then again and again. His dry lips parted and his teeth came together over the last consonant. The word was her name.

  When K[ ] snapped awake she shook violently and cried out. She stood. A dagger of moonlight fell across the carpet. She walked along that strip of light to the window, unable to release the image of the assembled man’s mouth making her name. Since when do I have nightmares? She was accustomed to sleep without dreams. To the absence of visions in her life.

  The strip of moonlight led from the house to the darkness of the forest. She imagined what it would be like to be out in the snow, pictured herself standing in the snow, facing herself. Saw herself framed by the window, then again standing in the snow, and this idea of two selves spun, stretched out across the white yard.

  When she broke free of her rumination she realized she was falling asleep standing up. She walked quietly up the stairs to J[ ]’s/her room, lay down on the floor, and drifted into the dreamless sleep she knew best.

  K[ ] woke, disoriented, it took her a few minutes to reconstruct where she was. J[ ]’s/her room. Her strange, dead cousin’s room. And her room, the room in which she had lain awake at night as a teenager and wondered about her future would anyone ever love me? The room she was now meant to empty out once and for all, and, since yesterday, the room that contained the photograph that couldn’t be. She had the urge to look at the photo again, though she was afraid. She looked over at the camera on the bookcase, and wondered if J[ ] had taken the picture himself. As she lifted the lid from the paper box, she tried to establish an explanation, so when she saw
the photograph again, it would not be too much of a shock. Perhaps the girl was a relative she had not met, it was a photograph of her mother, it was an older picture of herself taken while she still lived in the house. These were rational explanations, but, as she held the picture in her hand, she found she was not convinced by any of them (her hand trembled as the hand in her dream had trembled). Rather than hide the photograph away again, as if it were something dangerous and alive, she placed the photo on the typewriter, propped up between two rows of keys.

  Looking down at the keys, K[ ] saw there were sheets of paper, typewritten and annotated in longhand, beneath the typewriter. Another tabloid story, never submitted, she thought, and she thought, because he died. She slid the pages out from under the typewriter. What she read was another version of the ghost story she’d read before. A man walked through the forest. He followed the stream and a woman’s voice. When he found her, he saw that she stood not beside a small pool of water, but on the pool of water.

  At this point the article deviated from its published counterpart. Instead of a speculative meditation on the local ghosts the woman might have been, J[ ] wrote about astral projection, “the ability to release one’s consciousness from their body in order to let their consciousness travel.” J[ ] wrote, “I believe it is possible not all astral projection is consciously permitted, but that sometimes the consciousness leaves the body to go where it feels right. Anyone who encountered such a consciousness would likely mistake it for a ghost. I suppose they would not be entirely wrong.”