Worse Than Myself

by Adam Golaski

  Nicolas finds himself disoriented and runs a little toward the felled tree. Looking up, seeing I-90, he realizes his mistake and makes a diagonal dash toward his plywood bridge. Though he took a good hour poking around the island, it’s not large—his bridge is just beyond the log where he disassembled the low lean-to. Nicolas jumps to clear the log—

  he falls further than he expects to, comes down hard, feels all the impact in his knee. He has landed in a hole. Where the low lean-to was is now a deep hole, the bottom sodden with river water. Nicolas isn’t sure his left leg will work at all until he hears a branch snap. The sound is electric; Nicolas is out of the hole.

  He is seated at the edge of the hole, a hole that runs deep beneath the log. Struggling in the water are dozens of slithering snakes. He thinks of the shoes swarming in the eddy beneath the felled tree. Nicolas hears a truck on I-90, its iron rumble as small a sound as a pebble bounced into a puddle. Nicolas doubts the man is even a man, thinks, insanely, that he’s a bear or a rotten tree stump. Nicolas mumbles, “Dear blessed Jesus Christ on Earth,” and shouts, “I admit I am powerless…” and he’s on his feet, and he sees that there’s no man on the island at all. He’s alone on the island and all that is unusual, all that is frightening, is that where an hour before was an organized pile of sticks is a big hole. Nicolas limps across his bridge. He takes the time to tug the plywood board off the rocks. He tosses it as far as he can—not very—but the river takes it, spinning it along past the island.

  Nicolas pushes his bike as fast as he’s able along the narrow trail. Once he’s on the main trail again, past the university, past the field where a softball game is on, he stops muttering, “I admit I’m powerless over alcohol and that my life has become unmanageable.” He stops by a bench and cries. His mouth tastes as if full of gin.

  The shorthand version of A.A.: become humble enough to believe that you will not always be able to take care of yourself without seeking help and become confident enough to know that you are capable of making good decisions. The serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Tom hopes Nicolas isn’t hung over, though Nicolas sure looks it. For Nicolas to give up two months of sobriety would be a shame. Nicolas pours himself a cup of the coffee Tom brewed for the group and sits down a few rows in front of Tom. Nicolas has looked hung over the past several days, Tom notes. Nicolas worries the edge of his Styrofoam cup. Andrew speaks: “I don’t have much to say except that I’m grateful not to be drunk today. I woke up from a bad drinking dream—” some in the room nod their heads— “and I was just so relieved that I hadn’t picked up for real I decided to come down to a meeting.” Andrew is thanked; Tom smiles. Tom wishes Nicolas would speak—he hasn’t yet, even though Tom’s been urging him to do so. Still, Nicolas is at the meeting, he’s been at a meeting every day for two months, that’s something. Tom approached Nicolas after Nicolas’s first meeting. You can tell who wants to talk by who lingers. Tom gave Nicolas a list of numbers and names and a list of meetings and times. After some of the meetings, Tom, Andrew and Nicolas would go for coffee or breakfast. A woman wants to speak. She says, “I dropped the kids off at school this morning. All I wanted to do after that was go home and go back to bed. I got so angry in the car, so angry that I had to go to a meeting. I was so certain all the other parents were on their way to a job or back home to relax, have an easy breakfast, all worry-free. I really dug my nails into the palms of my hands, you know what I mean?” A few nods from the group. “I feel better now,” she continues. “I feel as if I’m cooled down and now I’m glad I’m at a meeting, glad I made it. I know I’ll feel better for the rest of the day.”

  And other little stories are told. The basement of St. Paul’s is dark until the sun, released by a cloud break, shines in through stained glass. The whole room takes on a yellow and rose glow. The air is full of dust. The coffee urn chugs as someone pours a cup. Instead of folding chairs, the group sits in pews that once served the congregation upstairs. Tom wishes they were in a Protestant church instead of a Catholic church—Catholics don’t believe in cushioned pews.

  After the meeting Nicolas lingers. A good sign. Tom asks him for help cleaning up the coffee.

  “You got coffee duty?” Nicolas says.

  “You’re up soon.”

  “I can’t make a pot to save my life.”

  Tom says, “Are you okay? You look worse for wear.”

  Nicolas carefully lifts the hot filter from the top of the urn, drops it into a wastebasket. He says, “You had your breakfast yet?”

  Tom shakes his head.

  “I’ll buy you a bagel.”

  Andrew is in the church parking lot, smoking. The three walk to a nearby bakery and sit outside at a little metal table. The sun is out and on them; the mornings are still chilly. Andrew sits and smokes while Tom and Nicolas get breakfast. Their coffees steam. Nicolas watches Andrew’s cigarette for a moment, says, “Something really strange happened a few days ago.” Andrew didn’t want food; just coffee. Tom begins to unwrap his bagel; he does this methodically, tugging at the paper until he finds the final fold. He works as if unfolding a fragile road map. Nicolas tells Tom and Andrew about his experience on the island.

  “Someone chased you?” Tom asks.

  “I don’t know anymore. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that I saw anyone. All I know is there was a big hole in the ground where there wasn’t one before.”

  “Have you been back?”

  “No.”

  “You really got scared.”

  “My mouth tasted like gin.”

  Tom nods, takes a bite of his bagel. “Are you thinking of going back?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good. I don’t think you should.”

  “You think I was in danger?”

  “In danger of going to a bar, yeah.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know.”

  Nicolas drinks some coffee. He has a little more and takes a too-big bite from his bagel. He speaks with his mouth full: “I didn’t go back but I sort of checked on the island yesterday.”

  “What does that mean?” Tom wipes the corners of his mouth with his napkin. Andrew listens, sips his coffee, starts another cigarette.

  “I rode alongside I-90 east and took a look. I guess the snow-pack has really been melting fast because from the highway it looked as if most of the island was underwater. I could still see that little forest, though, so I knew I was looking at the right spot.”

  Andrew speaks: “Those trees are probably twenty years older than you. Maybe more. Maybe fifty years. They didn’t sprout up when the drought started. I bet there’ve been times when the island was much bigger, too, when it wasn’t an island. The rivers used to flood parts of downtown Missoula. Hard to imagine that happening now.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tom asks, “You been looking for work?”

  “Not since Tuesday.”

  Andrew says, “I got a little yard work I could use a hand on. I’d be happy to put a little cash in your pocket.”

  “You don’t have to pay me to help you with a little yard work.”

  Tom cuts in, “When Andrew says ‘a little yard work’ he means major landscaping.”

  “Still.” Nicolas finishes off his bagel. “Okay.” Nicolas asks, “What do you think about what happened?”

  Tom says, “I would have been scared shitless too. Maybe you had some kind of hallucination. Maybe you over-exercised.”

  “Not likely.” Nicolas pats his gut. “Look, I can write off the man, too, but what do you make of the hole?”

  Tom pushes his bagel aside. Andrew has a sip of coffee, coughs and says, “You probably dislodged something when you knocked apart that pile of sticks. While you were away, the river water did the rest.” Andrew exhales a silver smoke-cloud. “Montana’s funny. There’s a lot underground out here. That’s why men came o
ut here—to dig. They left all kinds of holes all over. Ever see the Berkeley Pit? Some of the towns out here are riddled with underground passageways. To keep people warm, to keep the Chinese out of sight, for men to sneak to bars and brothels without their wives seeing. And then… where there’s mountains there’s caves, I guess. With all the tectonic crashing and what-not, ice ages, glaciers. There are worlds underground out here.”

  Behind the refrigerator in Nicolas’s kitchen, a small hole in the cement floor opens up, no larger than a tea-saucer. Nicolas is shaving. He turns on the faucet at the moment the cement in his kitchen collapses, so he does not hear the little wet noise it makes.

  Nicolas’s former girlfriend Rachel helped Nicolas get sober. Once he’d gone a day without drinking she thought their lives would become normal, that they would go to parties with their old friends and go out on the weekends and all that would be different would be the sparkling water in Nicolas’s wine glass. This, of course, couldn’t be true: for Nicolas, a walk to the post office was a difficult prospect without a little alcohol to make him who he was. Nicolas broke up with Rachel on his third day of sobriety. He did so as abruptly as possible. He didn’t care to have back the clothes and books he had at her place. When those items appeared in an anonymous box in front of his apartment, he resealed the box and dropped it off at Goodwill. Good riddance. The dollars left in pants pockets, the receipts from liquor stores, the angry-sad note from Rachel asking Nicolas to at least explain why he was breaking up with her. She’d dealt with his “problem” for so long, she thought she, “at least deserved an explanation.” Nicolas himself didn’t know. During those first days, he wasn’t convinced he was an alcoholic. He wasn’t sure he’d ever go back to another A.A. meeting or that he wouldn’t go out and get blind with gin later that night, in the evening, ten minutes from where he stood. He’d risen from a beautiful dream: Rachel’s freckled face, red hair. Eyelashes tumbled-down on her cheeks, five lashes, six black lashes. Nicolas put a finger to her cheeks and brushed each lash away, I love you lash, I love you, I love you lash, I love you and Rachel embraced him. He didn’t dream of Rachel as often as he dreamed of drinking. The drinking dreams were more real. He woke up with a hangover. He woke up afraid that he’d had a drink. He woke up and cried.

  Nicolas works in the morning scraping paint with Andrew. Nicolas likes to work with Andrew because Andrew doesn’t talk much. Andrew is older by a decade than Tom and Nicolas. He’s been sober for twelve years. He likes to say, “I smoke to stay healthy.” Rain spits and sputters for a little while; Nicolas and Andrew keep working. Andrew hopes to put a coat of primer on his shed before evening. Clouds open up and Nicolas and Andrew run into Andrew’s house for cover. The rain hasn’t let up by the time they’ve put away a six-pack of cola, so Andrew gives Nicolas a ride home. “You want your cash?” Andrew asks. Nicolas wishes he could say no but he knows he can’t so he nods.

  When he gets back to his apartment he discovers an inch of water on the kitchen floor. He calls the landlord and passes half an hour picking up his apartment—finding higher ground for his books, emptying the floor of his closet, taking boxes out from under his bed. He finds, a moment before his landlord knocks on the door, three small bottles of vodka stashed in a shoebox. The landlord knocks; Nicolas stuffs the vodka into his pockets.

  The landlord tosses a yellow slicker on the floor of Nicolas’s living room and plants two muddy boot prints beside it. “I’ll have someone come in and clean up later,” the landlord says, a wave of his hand in the general area where he intends to walk with his muddy boots. Nicolas mutters a “sure” and glances at the permanent black streaks his landlord left on the living room wall the last time he came in to do some emergency repair. The landlord sloshes around Nicolas’s kitchen: swirls of mud from his boots. Nicolas fingers the vodka bottles in his pockets. He’s sure the landlord notices his misshapen pockets and he’s just as sure the landlord knows what’s in his pockets, even, what kind of liquor. Nicolas almost says something like, “I didn’t know I had them,” when the landlord says, “This isn’t coming from a bad seal in the window or the wall—” the landlord peeps out the ground level window— “This is coming from under the apartment.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand either since this is supposed to be the basement.” The landlord grips the refrigerator plug. “Anything perishable?” Before Nicolas can say yes the landlord yanks the plug from the wall. “Don’t want to get ‘lectrocuted. Give me a hand.” Nicolas steps into the pond in the kitchen and the two men pull the refrigerator away from the wall. The landlord says, “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how this can be.”

  “What?” Nicolas touches the vodka bottles and starts to sweat, wonders if he’d stashed other bottles behind the refrigerator during the same blackout he’d stocked his old shoeboxes.

  “There’s a hole in the floor. Did you notice that before?”

  “No.” The landlord’s eyes drift over Nicolas’s pockets. “No. I cleaned back there last week.” And Nicolas remembers that that’s true, he did clean behind the refrigerator, he would’ve already found any stashed bottles.

  “Hold on,” the landlord says. Nicolas stands still, water soaking into his shoes.

  The landlord dips a cheap, wooden yard stick down into the hole. “Deeper… shit,” the landlord mutters. He opens his toolbox and takes out a lead bob. He ties it to a coil of fishing wire and drops it into the hole. “Jesus,” the landlord says. “I don’t know exactly how much coil was left but that’s, that’s at least twenty feet. There’s gotta be a sub-basement in this building I never knew about.” For a moment the landlord is excited, thinks he’s got a whole extra floor he can make into apartments or at least to rent out as storage. “Damn,” he says. “I’m gonna have to pump.” The landlord grabs his toolbox and yard stick and heads out of the apartment.

  Nicolas imagines dumping the vodka into the hole, but he isn’t sure the little bottles will sink. He imagines drinking the three little bottles in rapid succession. The landlord reappears in the hall outside Nicolas’s apartment. He says, “Forgot my slicker!” Nicolas nods, grins, rolls the little bottles in his pockets.

  Ten minutes, more, pass before Nicolas realizes he should have insisted the landlord put him up in a hotel until the problem is solved. Nicolas considers using the cash he earned today for a room, decides instead to go out for a bite—he remembers, “hungry, angry, lonely, tired”—and decides to take care of hungry with the money he earned. On his way, he tosses the three bottles of vodka into a dumpster behind an ice cream shop.

  Rain makes rapids of the street gutters, whirlpools of drains; rain blasts from breaks in the gutter around the roof of the all-night diner. Nicolas orders a lumberjack special; comfort food. An arm of the Clark Fork runs beneath the diner, runs under Broadway and Front, connects with the Clark Fork near a footbridge that once carried freight cars. Up the river, the island (as Nicolas calls it) is completely under water, its coppice of trees now growing from a river bed. The sticks Nicolas broke apart have washed away, his plywood bridge is lodged half a mile down river, underneath the Orange Street bridge. The rivers haven’t been this high in ten years, and with winter snow-pack still breaking up, the river will only rise higher. In the mountains, it’s snowing.

  Since the rain doesn’t let up during Nicolas’s dinner, he assumes the water on the floor of his apartment will have risen. When he steps into his apartment he sees that the opposite is true. The kitchen floor is dry. The hole in the floor has grown slightly bigger—the size of a dessert plate. Nicolas plugs in his refrigerator. The refrigerator rattles and concrete pebbles break free from the edge of the hole. Nicolas aurally follows the pebbles as they fall. They hit a shallow pool of water far below. He knows the landlord couldn’t have pumped out the sub-basement in the time Nicolas was out. A small deep hum comes from the hole—air from beneath. The hum lets up, starts up again. Nicolas lays on th
e floor and with a flashlight peers into the hole. The space below is more like a cave than a sub-basement; Nicolas remembers, There are worlds underground out here, and thinks of the island, re-experiences a little slice of the fear he felt that afternoon. He doesn’t want to push the refrigerator over the hole, because he doesn’t want the damn thing to fall through. He clears off a near-bare cupboard shelf, takes out the shelf and lays it across the hole. “That’s better,” he thinks, because at least he can’t see the problem. “And it can’t moan anymore,” he says.

  Nicolas can’t think of anything else to do but go to bed. He takes two Tylenol PM and begins to brush his teeth.

  He steps out of the bathroom. A shape at the corner of his eye.

  From the threshold of the bathroom, Nicolas can see into his kitchen.

  A shape steps from behind the refrigerator. A man except—

  Rather than a face a ragged mouth opened so wide the lower lip is the chin the upper lip is the top of the head and where there would be teeth is rot, where a tongue would protrude is rot, black rot, swarming rot. From this mouth a low hum, a rattling throat. The man takes a step forward—his foot falls on the plank that covers the hole in the floor. Nicolas bolts for the front door and the man takes another step forward. Nicolas, in the hall outside his apartment, his hand still on the doorknob, turns for a glance at the man’s progress and the man is almost at the door, stride huge— “Blessed virgin mother!” Nicolas shouts; he slams the door shut, and says, over and over, “…could restore us to sanity, could restore us to sanity.” He notices he’s still holding the doorknob when he feels it turn under his hand and he’s free, out the back of his building, into the pouring rain. He runs for a few blocks, can hardly breathe in the rain, seeks cover under the eaves of the closed ice cream shop.