Worse Than Myself

by Adam Golaski

  Across my dark red comforter were diamonds of white light, cast by the street light near the window. I sat up, slid back, away from Cheryl, disturbed by her lack of expression. Her eyes, open. And seated so straight. I waited for her to speak, I imagined I heard her say, “You terrible crumpled leaf; you dried thing.”

  She did not speak, had not spoken. She was asleep and her eyes were closed.

  I carefully got out of bed and walked past Cheryl, into the dining room. I poured myself a drink. Again I thought how I didn’t know Cheryl well at all. We’d been together for a month. I felt a lot of lust and maybe more, I said more. Cheryl came into my home, was invited. I took off my clothes, I got drunk; how vulnerable I allowed myself to be with her. I finished my drink. In the kitchen. I filled two glasses with water. I wasn’t sure how to wake her. I stood in the kitchen, cool glasses in hand, and felt as if the floor was being lowered, had the strong sensation I was being sucked into the empty apartment below.

  When I went back into the bedroom, Cheryl was in bed, asleep.

  The next morning: “I did not,” and she laughed at herself, put her hand to her mouth—an utterly disarming gesture—and we laughed together, and she went so far as to imitate herself, what she thought she must have looked like, and sat rigidly in the chair at the foot of my bed, eyes open and blank, mouth as unsmiling as was possible. Even this imitation was a little unnerving—it put me back into the frame of mind I’d been in. But not for long. I kissed Cheryl and she melted for me, her back relaxing, her body taking on the languid slouch that was her normal pose.

  “I must go,” she said. “Even though Neal said I could come in late, he means, like, five past nine and not,” she looked at the clock beside my bed, “well I’m going to be getting in at 11. I’m going to shower here, you lucky devil. I brought some clothes.” From the bathroom she tossed the borrowed boxer shorts she’d worn to bed into the bedroom. “No,” she said, “you may not join me, I must be clean!”

  On my way out I stopped on the second floor landing and paused to listen at the door to the middle apartment. I tested the doorknob. What compelled me to try it, I’ll never know, I’d stood by that door so many times before, but I tried the doorknob, it turned and clicked; the door was unlocked, had been maybe ever since the previous tenants had moved out, or maybe Leslie was cleaning the place out for new tenants, whatever, I stepped inside.

  All the blinds were drawn; I crossed the room to raise one; something—I looked down—glass crunched beneath my shoe. I opened the blind and the floor glittered in the sun. Where I’d stepped were shoe-sized patches of crushed glass and around my prints were larger pieces of filmy glass. I stared dumb at the circle the glass made, then looked up and saw that all the light bulbs in the ceiling were broken. In each socket—there were six in a circle—were the bases of each bulb and their black filament. The same damage appeared in every room—I opened blinds as I went, walked along the edge of each room. In the bedroom, a window had been left open.

  The breeze was chilly but the air was a relief. I left, eager to be out of that place, unnerved and without an explanation, glad for the office, for the jocular client I had a meeting with, glad for the receptionist, who wanted the latest on my love life.

  And so I didn’t think about the glass in the empty apartment until after work, when I bumped into my landlady, busy sweeping leaves from the front walk.

  “Leslie,” I said.

  She stopped sweeping and removed the cigarette from her mouth. “Hi David.”

  As soon as I thought to mention the broken glass to Leslie, I thought better of it—I didn’t want to explain why I’d been in the empty apartment. I asked, “Any more news about the empty apartment?”

  Instead of a quick answer, yes or no, my question elicited a funny look and a, “Why do you ask?” promptly cut off with, “No. Can’t seem to rent the place. Not that I mind the quiet.” She pulled on her smoke, and raked.

  The next day was Saturday. Unexpectedly, Cheryl had cancelled our Friday night plans, a girlfriend “in trouble” she had to see. So I woke alone, an unusual occurrence as of late. The sunlight in my room was clear and called for wakefulness. I rose, dressed, and went out with more gusto than I’d felt in some days. After a croissant (steaming, oily with butter and butter-sweet) and a coffee, I decided to walk. I set a gas station as my destination, where I could buy a newspaper. The morning was cold, though the sun bright. Only September, I caught whiffs of snow in the air—impossible—the earliest snow might come late October. Still, nice to think about snow. Cheryl had told me that winter was her favorite season. I wished she was with me but was also glad enough she wasn’t.

  I was really enjoying myself, feeling carefree, until I reached my destination and saw that car I’d seen before, with Denise in the backseat. I froze—a few feet behind the car—and saw that her friend Alan was in the car with her. I approached the gas station and got a clearer view of Denise’s friend. He sat rigid, and his face was stricken—utterly pale, tense.

  My first instinct was to approach the car, to ask if anything was wrong, even, to introduce myself (the feeling I knew these people was strong even though I did not know them, not at all). I stopped myself, and stood and took in the scene: an Outback, Denise the teenaged girl of the mysterious religion and her friend, a boy who no doubt was in love with her but would never get anywhere romantically with her, and a driver, an adult—a woman—the way the shadow was I couldn’t see more. And there they were, a tableau, the car by a pump but neither being gassed nor with the engine on. No one inside the car moved except Denise—she leaned against the window, then sat back in her seat, then touched Alan’s face, etc. Not frantic, impatient.

  Alan’s look disturbed me and so I stared at him. I gradually began to believe that he was not alive at all. Not dead, but a facsimile, a wax dummy made for the car. This notion was dispelled when Denise flicked Alan’s cheek and he flinched. So odd, that flick—playful but cruel. Denise saw me, and returned my stare until I broke off eye contact and went into the store for my paper. When I came out, the car was gone.

  I could not walk back to my apartment fast enough, I walked foolishly, on the cusp of a run, newspaper pinched under my arm. When at last at home, I watched the latest entry of Denise’s video journal:

  [Denise’s bedroom is dark, lit only by the three candles beneath the photo of the old woman. On the bed is a shape—Alan. Above his head, the picture of the white houses. The camera floats toward him, halts at medium close-up. The camera operator turns the camera around. Close-up of Denise, who smiles. She turns the camera back toward Alan. He appears to be sleeping.]

  Denise: Listen—

  [The microphone picks up Alan’s voice. His speech is sluggish; he talks in his sleep.]

  Alan: A string of lights… their candles trail endlessly though infinity… in the black sky of the universe… and each bulb… a glass blank… those bulbs that are no good… unmade…

  [Denise turns the camera on herself.]

  Denise: He’s such a sensible doll, isn’t he?

  [Denise turns the camera back to Alan. He still appears to be asleep, but he is violently trembling. A hand—Denise’s—reaches toward Alan. A dark figure, who presumably had stood behind Denise, steps into the frame toward Alan. End.]

  I watched through all the films again, and every one, even the first, the most charming entry, revealed a dark color, but offered no explanation, and I really could not say what it was exactly that had me so troubled. The phone rang—Cheryl wondered if I was free and if she could come over. As I said yes, I heard yells from outside. Phone in hand, Cheryl talking, I walked to the window—the yells were kids playing, I thought, then—the yells sounded as if they were closer than outside, as if they came from the empty apartment below. I said, “Yes, come over,” and I shut off the phone.

  I opened the door to my apartment and leaned out into the hall—the stairs down to the second floor apartment were dusty-sunny. The yells could very well have come f
rom outside—the yells were gone—a creak from below set me in motion. Down the stairs to the second floor, to the door of the unoccupied apartment.

  The living room was empty—the glass had been swept into a corner—but what absolutely stunned me was the picture of the two houses. The picture was hung, crooked, on the wall between the two windows that faced the street.

  One window was open, and a very cold wind blew snow onto the sill. Though the snow was totally improbable, it was the picture that disturbed me most.

  A creak on the floor behind me—

  “David.”

  “Cheryl,” I said. Her presence gave me courage. “Cheryl, follow me.”

  We walked from the living room into the dining room into a hall. From a room at the end of the hall Denise came: she held a white, digital camera. She held the camera high, so it partially blocked her face; its lens aimed at me.

  Cheryl put her hand on my shoulder.

  I heard footsteps, followed them, in my mind, from the second floor landing, to the living room, to the dining room, to the hall, to somewhere just behind Cheryl.

  Cheryl said, “Hello, Leslie.”

  I could not turn away from Denise or from the camera’s eye. Cheryl’s hand burned my shoulder.

  “Snow in September,” she said. “How perfectly unusual.”

  Denise lowered the camera from her face. She went back into the room from where she’d come.

  Cheryl said—and she pushed me a little, toward the end of the hall: “You know about the string of lights. Let’s go see what’s left of Alan.”

  MONTANA

  WHAT WATER REVEALS

  Where water recedes, land is revealed. Beneath the oceans of the Earth lie a vast, unexplored landscape, as foreign to humans as is the surface of Pluto.

  Water reclaims what it reveals, too: eventually, all the world will be ocean and frozen like Jupiter’s Europa. Humans may have left by then; charging like a white bull through space. Or they’ll be here, as fossils, or here, waiting. In Time, there is room for great patience.

  Nicolas rides his newly acquired mountain bike alongside the Clark Fork river, follows a narrow trail cut by other bikes. Today, there are no other bicyclists; none ahead of Nicolas and none behind. The weather is right. No gray cloud cover. Only lone, white clouds that keep the vivid blue sky from appearing too unreal. And along the trail everything’s gone green or muddy brown. Nicolas sweats. He wears a light coat, nylon pants, t-shirt. No one knows where he is—there’s really no one to tell (though he has numbers in his cell phone). He’s gone off on this ride as part of a major personal effort to feel better, to reclaim his life. He’s already lost weight. Subtract eight to twenty beers and a bottle or two of liquor a day from your diet and see that you don’t lose weight. He dodges branches, catches brambles and hops over tree-roots. It’s April (at last); plants creeping and bursting. He wonders why there’s no one else on the trail: it is Tuesday, he thinks, but such a beautiful day—and after a long nasty winter that buried everything with snow—he thinks, surely people would be playing hooky. He isn’t truant. He’s unemployed. He doesn’t dwell on his situation. He was fired a little over two months ago and that set off a whole chain of events leading to this morning. The ride occupies his mind. Navigating muddy ruts without taking a spill and dodging branches frees his mind from worry and fear.

  The trail is high above the river. To his right is brush and trees—just thick enough to block his view from the wide walkers’ trail that follows the base of Mount Sentinel. If he were to jerk his hand to the left, his bike would fly through a thin tangle of young trees and bushes, fifteen feet into snow-cold water. When he starts to think that way, his arms tremble.

  Nicolas squeezes the breaks before a hump of dirt. The trail slopes down and away from the river. Beneath arched pines the ground is covered with a mat of gold pine needles. Nicolas relaxes his grip on the breaks and his bike rolls forward. Sun penetrates the thicket over his head in smoke-shape patterns on the ground. He’s slightly nervous he’ll encounter a bear fresh from hibernation. There is no bear ahead, and the stretch of dark is brief. When Nicolas emerges, he passes an abandoned grill and another. He stops and gets off his bike to get a sense of where he is. The drop to the river’s edge is just five feet; he jumps to a sandy patch of land level with the river. “A beach,” he says.

  The water is amber-clear. He can’t sense how cold it is with only a quick dip of his finger; the water’s quite cold. On the other side of the river is I-90. A truck passes, a car. Though he feels alone, he’s far from the middle of nowhere. Directly opposite where Nicolas stands, the river splits around a narrow island. Tall, dry grass covers most of the island. The grass vanishes into a coppice of pine trees. He can’t see past the pine trees to the end of the island. Nicolas can’t tell how old the trees are from looking at them, but they’re fifty-footers and dense—the heart of the coppice is night-dark, darker than the sunken stretch of trail Nicolas rode through.

  His left knee hurts a little from the ride. He’s mildly worried by this; he’s too young to have problems with his knee. He’s certainly given his body a hard time, though. Who knows what he’s done to his knee, crashing into his apartment night after night of drinking, blacked-out. He doesn’t want to think about this, so he considers ways to get across the river to the island. Too deep to ride across and too rocky. He walks along the river—in the direction he’d ridden from but below the trail, hidden from the trail. A few yards from his beach, the rocks rise up, almost make a stone path to the island. Not quite—on his weak knee he isn’t sure he could hop across without falling and perhaps, he thinks, “breaking my knee or cracking my skull.” Further down the river bank is a sheet of plywood, river-detritus caught among exposed tree roots. Nicolas gets the board and lays it over the rocks that jut above the water’s surface.

  The make-shift bridge holds. Nicolas walks a slight slope toward the center of the island. The grass is knee high. He’s sure he hears an animal moving through the grass—he’s no longer sure—“the wind blowing through the grass?” A tree, felled but still with leaf, shivers in the breeze and Nicolas gives the sound to that. Caught in the branches of the tree are logs, branches, twigs. He picks up a suitable walking stick and pokes his way to the opposite side of the island. The flotsam held by the felled tree has made a cradle of water, and eddy where scum has collected and, “shoes. How many pairs of shoes?” He starts to count but loses interest. He imagines himself falling into the garbage covered pool and manages to revolt himself; the oily water, the tangle of wreck below nagging at his legs, “stealing my shoes,” he kids himself from his dim fantasy.

  On the spine of the island—a grassy hump that runs into the little forest—is a log. Beneath the log is a nest of garter snakes—Nicolas is startled as one slips from beneath. Against the log is a man-made structure. Two heavy branches lean against the log, set a few feet apart. Across the branches are sticks and boards. Like a lean-to, but too low for anyone to find shelter. Maybe a pack was kept dry and maybe there’s still a pack beneath. He looks down the island, toward the little forest. He calls out, a feeble, “Hello,” then another, “Hello!” He steps back from the low lean-to and with his walking stick knocks the sticks and boards from their branch supports. Nothing is revealed but a damp patch of earth about half a man long; a patch that runs under the log, where the snakes nest; a few millipedes writhe in the sunlight—they scurry toward the snakes to be devoured.

  Nicolas looks back at his bike. He’s not worried someone will steal it, but he’s a little uncomfortable with how far away he is from where he was: his bike seems small. The cars on I-90 seem small. Though he can see houses, and knows that beyond the narrow bike trail is the oft-used foot trail, and even though it’s broad daylight, and still morning, he feels lonely and nervous, nervous as he’d feel in a dead-end alley in New York City.

  And for this he feels foolish. He’ll see the far end of the island, go back to his bike, ride into town and treat himself to
a good lunch. He shouldn’t spend the money, but he needs to spoil himself these days.

  He follows the spine toward the trees. Just ahead of the little forest is a dead tree, thick—thicker than any of the trees in the coppice. The dead tree’s branches are long gone. The tree’s top is a splintered spike, a point like the tail of a dinosaur. Among the stegosaur spines is a crow which calls as Nicolas passes beneath. The crow’s caw is guttural, as if the bird had phlegm caught in its throat. Nicolas turns, looks up, catches a glimpse of something moving near the log that had supported the low lean-to.

  There are no trails on the island and no trail amongst the trees. The ground is covered with pine needles—black, not golden. Nicolas can see lines of light—the far end of the island, he presumes.

  After a few steps into the coppice, he turns again and sees a man standing where the low lean-to had been. Nicolas thinks, “He must’ve come over on my plywood bridge.” Nicolas gets the distinct impression that the man sees him and so Nicolas waves. The man doesn’t wave back. Nicolas walks into the coppice, away from the man. “He can catch up with me if he wants.” Nicolas reaches the other side of the island. There is a little sandy strip and the river, tumbling toward him. For a moment, without looking up or around, he imagines the rippling water as the ocean’s edge, imagines he is standing by the Atlantic, on a sunny spring day, gulls calling—

  The crow caws its unhealthy caw. Nicolas turns and sees the man’s shape among the trees.

  “Hello,” Nicolas says.

  The man doesn’t reply, just shambles forward. “That’s the word for it,” Nicolas thinks, “shambles. He looks drunk. I don’t want to deal with that.” So Nicolas walks to the end of the beach and begins to walk around the little forest. As soon as he does, the man changes direction. Nicolas doesn’t want to be ridiculous, so he says hello again, still walking away from the man. The man remains silent; the man’s shape is a wavering line of sunlight. Nicolas continues along the forest, then dashes through—he doesn’t care anymore about looking ridiculous. And when he glances back, he sees that the man isn’t far behind—though his movements have the wobble of drunkenness, those movements are quick.