Nadir Spectrum, Montana
Josh Amses
For
KR, DM, ZMD, NS-B, ML KM, SA
*
Eating Italian prune plums with an area drug dealer at my brother’s dining room table at 9PM on a Thursday, and discussing the job market in Western Montana.
*
The bicycle I shipped from Montpelier, VT arriving in Missoula, MT without a seat, and wondering if it is possible to use it this way until I get a job.
*
Discovering I could be mistaken for homeless in the bathroom mirror of a student purlieu shortly before my first meeting with a woman I met on the internet.
*
Looking through my roommate’s couch for enough change to get my divorce papers notarized.
*
Considering dipsomania beneath a prairie moon, halfway between the North side trailhead and a fete at an old homestead a mile and half into the foothills. I can’t so much hear the band as sense their music at the base of the declivity, where the combined lights of an outdoor tent and a bonfire embarrass an otherwise twilit and perfectly still reminder of why I left New York City. But the beer I volunteered to carry in for some undergraduates slows my descent, and I wonder: Am I an alcoholic? And then: No, just an underachiever.
*
Receiving a note from my wife:
“To avoid:
1) being tracked down and served a summons,
2) being involved in a drawn-out legal nightmare,
3) continuing to be legally married to a woman who is involved with another man,
4) potentially being considered legal parent to an infant not your own,
sign, notarize, and return form UD-7. Procrastinating or refusing will necessarily end in (1) - (4).”
*
A 22 oz. bottle of Stone IPA slipping out of its paper bag and shattering in the parking lot of the Old Post at approximately 7:30PM on First Friday. I share an expression of shock with a young woman passing athwart the parked cars between which I’d been drinking, and begin combing the glass into a sort of tumulus with the toe of my boot, thinking: I am a shameful custodian. In the foreground, another string band beneath a tent saws away at a cover of ‘Down in the Willow Garden.’
*
Helping my internet date feed pigs and staple tarpaper around a beehive at 8PM on Wednesday night, and hoping she doesn’t notice I have no practical skills.
*
Shaving before submitting my resume to a taco stand. I don’t know how to make tacos and have no food service experience, but hope being clean-shaven will set me apart. Missoula in particular needs another unemployed beard the way New York City needs one more pear-martini-swilling apologist.
*
I do not get the job.
*
My internet date watching me over her shoulder after I request a change of position, like she has caught me laying the groundwork for a practical joke and decided to let me go through with it anyway. I can’t meet her eyes, and glare at an extinguished bulb in a strand of Christmas lights hemming the mattress, envying it.
*
An acquaintance exiting a stall in the men’s room of the Union Club at 10:45PM on a Wednesday, noticing me by the urinal, and asking how I’m doing. I am entirely too candid. He nods and says, ‘Get that dong out!’ before exiting.
*
My brother catching me speaking about my wife to the middle-aged Quaker next door. She has been unemployed for nearly three years and single for far longer, and in my diluted state seems like a good daytime friend. I often spend twenty minutes to a half an hour scraping our leaf-less yard with a rake, hoping she will come outside and address me over the fence so I can inform her of how little emotional progress I’ve made since our last colloquy.
*
Securing my order at the gyro stand on my block with nothing but a nod to the girl behind the counter. This makes me feel like a local personality, and puts enough of a skip in my step that when my roommate returns from work and asks how I’m doing I provide an answer so florid he eats dinner in his room.
*
My father asking how many times I plan to walk into the propeller that is my ex-wife’s relationship with male vulnerability. I tell him I don’t know, while thinking: Until she turns the engine off, obviously.
*
Ignoring a call from a collection agency while waiting to get a cyst drained in the lobby of a free clinic between Albertson’s and Ace Hardware the day before Halloween.
*
Hanging my chin over the chain-link fence dividing the Quaker neighbor’s yard from my own and counting the neat rows of red Russian kale, zucchinis, and Delicata squash as I unconsciously test my toe in one of the wire diamonds whose composite, flimsy shape is all that physically stands between myself and a well-balanced diet. I could climb it, but this is only part of the problem. A filament of drool leaves my mouth and descends like a spider onto the other side of the fence as the opening bars of ‘Nessum Dorma’ play from somewhere inside the house.
*
My internet date revealing that her ex made her a compost bin from repurposed wood, and that moving forward she needs an ‘environmental warrior.’ We’re in my room, where I live like a defrocked priest in a garret on the top floor of my brother’s house. Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, John Muir, Bernd Heinreich, John McPhee, and Thoreau are interred in the bookshelf behind her. I ask if she’s read any of them and she shakes her head. I explain that my environmental and human ethic has more to do with where I’m from and how I was raised than the classes I took as an undergraduate, or any subsequent adduction of lifestyle choices based on the pathological and egoist need to make a difference in a world that will continue much the same with or without twenty-somethings pimping their integrity in the name of social and environmental justice. I say something about how communities are recognized not built, and in any case we as a species don’t deserve people as smart as her working on our behalf. Before I can finish speaking she leaves the room.
*
Interviewing for a job at a resort where people from places like New York City spend $2,000 per night to sleep in a tent.
*
Reporting the environmental warrior requirement to friends back East. They are uniformly appalled, and ask me why we’re still together.
*
Mentioning the idea of robbing our neighbor’s garden to my brother, and trying to pass it off as a joke after seeing the expression on his face. He spends the rest of the afternoon on the phone and is gone for the next three days. I only know he has been home to sleep because there are groceries in the cabinets. I stand in the kitchen in my underwear at 11AM on a Wednesday, eating a brick of Western Family cheddar cheese like a candy bar and weeping soundlessly into the house’s empty shape.
*
My internet date dumping me a week later. I see our problem as the basic difference between fiction and non-fiction.
***
Josh Amses is the author of the novels Raven or Crow and The Moment Before an Injury, both published by Fomite Press. His work has appeared most recently in Nomadic Sojourns and Elohi Gadugi Journal. He lives in Chicago.
