Worse Than Myself

by Adam Golaski

  At the bottom of the first page was a date written in heavy black ink that bled through the page. J[ ] wrote this version of his story a year after the ghost version was published. And just a month before he died.

  A spell was broken by the noise of pans in the kitchen. K[ ] went downstairs. Mrs. Lawrence was at the counter, pouring cream into a cup of coffee. K[ ] thought Mrs. Lawrence looked perturbed, and she wondered if she shouldn’t have slept in J[ ]’s room.

  “I didn’t intend to sleep in J[ ]’s room,” K[ ] explained. “I’m not sure why I went up there last night. I suppose I thought I’d get some work done.”

  “That’s what I assumed when I saw you in there.”

  “Mrs. Lawrence?”

  “What happened in the living room last night? Did a log roll out of the fireplace? Did you try to clean it up?” Before K[ ] could answer, Mrs. Lawrence added, “I came down this morning and there was a trail of ash across my carpet. The ash looked as if it had been walked in—I could see footprints in it. Bare feet. Can you tell me what that’s all about?”

  K[ ] left the kitchen without answering. She went to the living room.

  Mrs. Lawrence followed her, “I cleaned up.”

  With the evidence gone, K[ ] could doubt Mrs. Lawrence. But she didn’t doubt her. K[ ] considered making up a story and she considered telling Mrs. Lawrence the truth, but neither option struck K[ ] as… useful. She did know what would be useful, though. “I need some air. I’m going for a walk.”

  Mrs. Lawrence looked uncertain. “Dear, I didn’t mean to yell.”

  “You didn’t yell.”

  “I was just hoping for an explanation.”

  “I just really need to get out.” K[ ] put on her shoes.

  “Cabin fever?” Mrs. Lawrence forced a laugh. “Well, wear my boots, honey. And let me get you a hat. You didn’t bring a hat, did you?”

  K[ ] took the hat, swapped her shoes for the boots; K[ ] put on her coat and opened the back door. The light outside made her eyes ache.

  “Do you know when you’ll be back?”

  A dim thought emerged at the back of K[ ]’s mind: she should be used to strange behavior. Other thoughts, did a man assemble himself and step out of the fireplace? Did J[ ] take a picture of me in the backyard when I wasn’t there? crowded her head for attention. She said to Mrs. Lawrence, “I’ll be fine.”

  Covered with a layer of ice, the snow held K[ ] for an instant before her weight pushed her boot down, packing the foot of powder beneath her rubber tread. Keenly aware of each step she took, K[ ] made for the black line the little stream had cut into the snow, a black line that led deep into the forest. She stepped onto the frozen stream, saw clear water running beneath; the ice creaked, but bore her weight.

  The air was sharp; the cold, clean. She felt how filthy the air in the city was, how terrible. Here, the air smelled of water: a stony, mineral smell; and on the air were hints of pine and the sweeter smell of chimney smoke. K[ ] bent to pass under pine boughs, heavy with snow. When she bumped branches, snow fell across her jacket, froze her bare neck, melted into her shirt collar.

  The trees thinned, and the stream flowed into a clearing. At the heart of the clearing was the pool. She stepped off the ice, onto the field. The field was white, the sky, blank; trees wrote their way along the horizon. K[ ]’s foot slipped out from under her, but she kept her balance. The pool, she thought. She stepped cautiously forward, stopped, and thought, I’m standing on the pool.

  She turned around and faced the path she had made. Where she had walked on the stream, there were no boot-prints, no mark of her passage, as though she was placed in the field by an invisible hand and urged to the pool. When K[ ] saw herself walk out of the forest, she was not particularly surprised.

  She—K[ ] from the forest—stopped at the edge of the wood, and looked at herself—at K[ ], who stood on the frozen pool. K[ ] heard her breath leave her mouth, saw the cloud. She thought of J[ ], of his trips to this pool, his late-night outings. The reason for his outings—he went out to look for her. She thought of the plows, how they would come soon enough, and the roads would be clear. K[ ] could return to the city. She knew that the snow would melt, that the earth would turn muddy, and that from the mud would spring grass and flowers. The pool would once again become liquid and it would not hold her, not the K[ ] that worked a job that bored her in a city she’d become inured to, but never liked. The forest would be dense with green, the air would be warm, though at night—K[ ] knew—the air would still carry a chill. She knew, finally, that she would be here, exactly where she stood, to see all these changes. K[ ] knew this as she looked at the rest of herself, who stood still in the shadow of the trees.

  A STRING OF LIGHTS

  No afterlife, a phrase, indignant, someone, a man, his voice, not to my left where the tall tables and the open windows were, to my right, but I couldn’t locate the speaker, but then, “You really don’t think so, do you?” A guy, at a table with two other guys and a woman, all pretty young, maybe graduate students. The woman said, “No. There is no afterlife,” and the man said—he looked like anybody—the man said, “Then what’s all the universe for?”

  I finished my drink, tipped the bartender, wished her luck with the GMAT, and crossed the street. I’d lucked out with a parking spot right across from the bar, which I’d thought when I’d parked would be great for when I walked out with Cheryl, but she hadn’t shown.

  A long enough drive back to my apartment to think about what I’d overheard: “No afterlife?” and “Then what’s all the universe for?” All the universe. Did afterlife equal universe? No. Earth was in the universe. No. With a universe so big, there was room enough for just about anything. No. Scratch that. In an infinite universe, there was room for everything. Including THE AFTERLIFE. So. In death we travel to another part of the universe. Okay. So the afterlife’s like a solar system? Is a solar system? A planet? My musing kept me company all the way up to my driveway. Above the car, trees—some animal rustled in the dark branches—that owl, the one that’d scared Cheryl so much. Where was Cheryl? Her phone was off, as per usual, and I didn’t feel like leaving another message. Up through the tree branches, the night sky was murky, too much light by the front steps to see anything. Another noise, a squeak, a sponge on glass: Leslie’s apartment was dark; the sound didn’t come from Leslie’s apartment. The second floor apartment was dark, of course, though for a moment, at the lower right corner of the left-most window, a pinpoint of light, brilliant and clean white. But Leslie had yet to rent the middle apartment. It’d remained empty for months, now. There were days when I was home alone and the emptiness of the rooms below me became oppressive. But! the quiet was good for sleeping.

  My desk light, blue in the attic window. The squeak forgotten. I unlocked the front door.

  Another drink, tumbler beside my computer, email, and there it was, Cheryl hadn’t stood me up, she’d only been late letting me know she had to cancel (why did it never occur to her to call?). She wrote: “I’m stuck here, late, because Neal (her boss) FAILED to show up and the client DEMANDED that someone finish the brochure by very early AM because it was quite due and their client…” I’d been to Cheryl’s office, late at night: I knew what she must look like, now. Lights out except for the lamp in her cubical, the light from her screen, her thick hair disheveled by her own hand, eyes shiny. I wanted to be with her and was tempted to go, but it was 10 PM and maybe she was gone, and if she wasn’t, she probably didn’t want to be interrupted. So a quick email of encouragement, carefully not mentioning our cancelled date.

  The other email in my box was from a co-worker, I think, but now I honestly don’t remember who the email came from, and I deleted the email, so I can’t check. The email was nothing personal, just, “Check this out,” or something, and a link. I sipped my drink and sleepily clicked the link.

  The page that came up was crowded with photos, stills from short films. At the center of the page was a square—at first black, then
not, this:

  A girl—as young as 15, as old as 19 (though a scrawny 19 she’d be)—in a bedroom. A spare bedroom, a bed behind her and on the wall a framed picture of two houses, white, simple houses. She was modestly but not prudishly dressed, a T-shirt, jeans. She sat at the edge of her desk chair, held her knees to her chest and said, “Hi, I’m Denise” and that she was starting a video diary and didn’t have much to say but that she liked books and photography and old movies. Then, a little inspired goofiness, she pushed her wheeled chair (it looked like an office chair from the 1950s) and rolled back on a parquet floor, past her bed, until she bumped the wall behind her.

  There the image froze, Denise, eyes wide (startled by the bump—or acting startled), mouth shut tight, her whole figure in frame, small, skinny.

  I watched the three other video diary entries Denise had posted, and then returned to the first.

  There—along the wall—I paused the little video—a candelabra with three white candles and above a framed photo of an elderly woman, dressed in black. And then my phone rang: Cheryl.

  A half hour later, she and I were undressing each other, me a little drunk, her exhausted and wired. We had fun, sleepy sex which concluded satisfactorily with dozy sleep, a joint trip to the bathroom and then real sleep, until my alarm woke us and we split, Cheryl to her place for a quick change of clothes, me to my office.

  Before Cheryl’s phone call, I’d gone back to the first entry of Denise’s video journal because of something she’d said in her third:

  “I’m not going to tell you about my religion because I know you would make fun of it.”

  And so Denise offered a mystery. Suddenly what had been only a cute and well-made video journal was colored new; ceased to be just the mild complaints of an ordinary, bright and lonely girl—“this town is so boring” and “my parents suck”—and became a little more interesting/complex.

  While at work but not working, I tried to guess at what her religion might be. Of course, I started with conservative Christian religions: what Christian religion would a teenager expect to be made fun of for believing?—but a teenager fears persecution for anything that singles them out, and so Denise’s fear of being teased wasn’t much help. Still, I thought, Southern Baptist? Mennonite? Mormon? But she complicated those guesses, too—she talked often about science, her love for it, its centrality in her reading—and she was homeschooled, so presumably her parents, who presumably shared her religion, who likely gave religion to her, were encouraging her to study science, which included Darwin (I know because she admired him especially). Most of my day passed in such thought—did Denise deliberately mention her love of Darwin as a clue? Still, I figured Christian, but nothing too orthodox. She was creating an online video journal, after all, and her clothes were not so conservative. And then I thought, as I drove to meet Cheryl for dinner near her office (“Rescue me! My ass-boss just gave me another past-due assignment!”), teenagers are often very proud of their religion, are more confident about religion than adults. Cheryl kissed me in front of her office building, then waved up to where I presumed her boss was, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to go back after dinner.” She slumped, did a little exhausted-prisoner-walk to my car, and said, “And I really wanted to have sex tonight, too.”

  That changed the focus of my thoughts. I suggested a million scenarios that put us in bed together, but ultimately all Cheryl needed was a good meal, some non-work conversation, a glass of wine (“Just one! Okay. Two.”), and a ride back to her office. When I got back to my house, I stopped on the second floor landing and put my ear to the door of the empty middle apartment. A creak… nothing… a pipe—the radiators kicking in for the first time since April… nothing… a phone, the faint ring of a phone—was someone in there? My cell phone was buried in my bag, muffled by papers, I fumbled around (the phone’s blue light the brightest light on that second floor landing), “Hello?” Cheryl was coming by after all. And she was going into work late the next day, so I needed to brace myself for a late night.

  During the next few days, I didn’t think much about Denise’s video journal, or think to check for new entries. Mystery aside, other distractions kept me occupied. What brought my mind back to Denise was Cheryl, who one night ranted about mega-churches, because of an article she’d read in a back issue of The New York Times Magazine, that’d turned up in her office. “I’ve done perfectly well without religion,” she said, leaning back in her chair, plate near-full (mine, half-eaten). “Why would anyone want to believe in God, especially one who promotes bad music and bad TV?” This was the most she’d ever said about religion.

  “A most compelling argument,” I said.

  I remained non-committal. My occasionally Protestant parents left me with a sort-of faith in something. I’d been to a dozen services in the last year because my previous girlfriend sung in a choir and the masses they sang were undeniably beautiful. She left me for someone who wasn’t non-committal—no doubt a good decision for her. I did believe in some kind of supernatural thing, that thing that occasionally made lonely moments profound.

  Cheryl was pretty much in the same boat as me, at least I thought so, and she backpedaled, which was a quality of hers I perversely adored. She said, “Oh, I do believe in God. And I totally believe in Bach.”

  I didn’t know Cheryl all that well, but that was easy to forget when I was with her.

  “You just reminded me of something,” I said, and I told her about Denise’s video journal.

  “You’re just watching it ‘cause she’s a cute teenaged girl, sicko.” Then she leaned close to me, deliberately allowing me a grand view of her cleavage. “Are you already tired of this old flesh, darling?”

  We went to a show after our dinner, a band Cheryl liked, and I didn’t think about Denise again until early in the morning (Sunday). While Cheryl slept in my bed, I was inexplicably awake, a terrible sick nervousness all over me—too much to drink, perhaps. Wearing boxer shorts only, I went online, checked my email, then remembered Denise. I watched four new journal entries.

  The second of the new videos introduced a friend, a boy, her age, Alan. His role was to appear disinterested in Denise’s doings, to pretend to read (sprawled across her bed—as I watched I remembered being in the bedroom of a high school crush—how sacred and confusing) while she made her video.

  Denise: Today I ran into Janet. She was in my biology class before I stopped going to school. She used to call me alien-girl. I don’t know why she was mean to me except that I asked the teacher lots of questions…

  Alan: (without looking up from his book) She was just teasing you.

  Denise: I asked a lot of questions and then Janet told everybody that something was going on between me and the teacher so I had to leave…

  Alan: You didn’t have to.

  Denise: (Rolls eyes) …school.

  During the last of the new videos, someone opened the door to Denise’s bedroom—apparently unexpectedly. Denise’s reaction was to stand, her back to the camera (putting me at eye-level with her rear-end). Though a little muffled, I heard,

  Denise: Mom?

  Alan: No…

  Denise: It’s you.

  Alan: Who?

  Denise: Come back later.

  and

  Denise: Don’t worry, it’s good.

  When Denise turned back to the camera, her expression was grave—for only a second, but a freezable second, and I did freeze it, her face, deadly serious.

  And then I let it go, and Denise shushed Alan, who asked, “Who was that?” and Denise said, “Alan loves just about every girl he sees.” Alan protested, but was shushed again: Denise winked and puckered her lips, “He’s so sensitive,” and then turned on Alan, and pounced on the bed, her long self stretched out at Alan’s knees.

  Denise became real to me three days later. I left the office in the afternoon for a client meeting and saw Denise, seated in the backseat of an Outback. She looked bored as she stared out at the street. My first
instinct was to duck out of sight, then I remembered that I didn’t know Denise, nor she me. As the car passed, she looked through me, I wasn’t even there.

  That night, as I waited for Cheryl to stop by (“I can’t stay but a drink would be nice”) I checked to see if Denise had posted another entry and she had. Initially a teenage lament about a party she wanted to go to but couldn’t. She had, she said, “An honor bestowed upon me, an honor bestowed by my church.”

  Denise: I have to learn a long speech. I read it last night. It is very beautiful.

  [Inter-cut with footage of Denise hanging a string of white lights along the wall, close to the ceiling, above that picture of the two white houses.]

  Denise: We quote one of The Great Sermons, the lovely part about the strand of white lights that stretches out, deep into space.

  [Denise twists the string of lights once around a nail.]

  Denise: And when a single bulb is faulty, the whole string of lights will fail; we fail until we pluck the dead lights.

  [She is on her toes, on her bed, tapping a little black nail into the wall, the strand of lights draped over her shoulder; I think she must be tall; her legs are so slender.]

  Denise: We stretch out.

  [Denise plugs the lights into an outlet. The lights fail. She mugs for the camera, a comic frown.]

  Denise: Finding those dead lights can be a trick.

  [She puckers her lips and leans into the camera and mouths something, a word like “solder.”]

  Cheryl decided to stay after I poured out the last of our first bottle of wine. She slouched back on the futon that served as my couch. She looked up at me with her down-turned mouth. She was very slim; every time I undressed her I was amazed how small she was. She was highly energetic in bed. I tried to mask how out-of-breath I was and I admit she did most of the work.

  We slept hard after we came: but I woke with a shout in the middle of the night. And there Cheryl was, small and pale, sitting naked in a wooden chair she’d taken from the dining room, seated at the foot of my bed. I thought, at first, that she was staring at me.