Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“You were having fun.”

“Is that a crime?” Dave flung himself by my mother and reached his cold fingers to touch the baby’s toes. The baby’s leg kicked. My mother touched Dave’s face.

“Watch it, young man,” she said and smiled.

He kissed the baby’s toes. Smiled up at her with eyes like Loki, full of a canny joy.

I went away from them down the shore.

And I saw the shape of me walking, growing smaller and smaller on the filthy beach. The earth tipped sideways and I slid off into an airless abyss.

Heat swept over me. I burned from the inside out. My bones shimmered through clear gelatinous flesh. The luminescent sac of my body, emptied of its flesh, slipped off the pebbly sand and drifted up and up through darkness and white light and more dark blacker than the center of nothingness.

And I gasped and opened my eyes. A sick pain bubbled up in my gut. My intestines were a wriggling mass of diseased worms. The taste of vomit caked the insides of my teeth. Everything hurt, a raw weeping pain at the base of my jaw emanating out like tidepool ripples.

And noise, and the stench of burning tires.

The paramedics said it was a seizure. My mother was crying and patting the baby, bouncing it, heedless of the tiny chin knocking against her collarbone.

A woman who smelled like strawberries and talc, her nipples pressing out against her pastel green smock, bent over me in the emergency room and shone a small light in my eyes. A doctor with breath that smelled like peanut butter said it was an idiopathic tonic-clonic seizure, that four out of every hundred children experience them before adolescence. They put me through an MRI and I didn’t mind it. It felt cold and smelled like plastic and aerosol bleach. I knew that the universe smelled like bleach and charred bone and the scent reminded me of my miracle.

A medical attendant asked why I was smiling and I said that I had died and been raised again and my soul was clean.

On Monday I was back in the psychiatrist’s office with a stuffed rabbit on my lap.

I am a pragmatist and so — at least during my waking hours — I no longer believe in miracles or in resurrection. It was a fantasy my mind created to cope, not with the murderer lurking in my eleven-year-old brain, as the shrink suggested, but with my inability to remain on the same stretch of sand with a smiling mother, a nursing brother, a contented father. I think I realized then, in my fumbling, prepubescent way, that I was a demon changeling, the kid who would fuck them up, all of them, for the rest of their lives. An abscess that would never heal.

As an adult, I understand about the seizure, although I never had a seizure again (roughly 60 percent of children who have idiopathic seizures never have another one). Even then at the age of the eleven I was quick to suspect that I had not actually died and come alive again. And anyway, even if I had, resurrection is a shitty deal. Because I was returned to this mortal sphere exactly the same as I left it. My first reincarnation was no marked improvement from the original model.

And I realized that my particular flawed brain would not change appreciably on its own. So I created the dialogues in my head, the rules, the obsessive running. It is the only way I know to do it, to fake like I’m an ordinary person. I sleep in a garage and I go to work and I say stupid shit to people so that they leave me alone but I never lay a hand on them. I pay my taxes and keep my dreams to myself and if people touch me I may howl like a talk show host but I don’t take a kitchen knife to them.

After half a lifetime, this game is second nature.

I shower and dress and drive to campus. The class I teach meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means that I don’t have to teach or go to the office today. Days that I don’t teach I work in the library, researching for my dissertation. When I climb the shallow steps to the library I pass through a mist of cigarette smoke around the pebbled ashpits. The smokers chatter like blue jays.

Upstairs, I unlock my study carrel and sit down. I square the edges of the stack of books, arrange a yellow legal pad in front of me, line up my pens. Then I pull over an Old English dictionary and a pocket verb guide. On the other side of the legal pad I smooth out a copy of an Old English manuscript page. The Xeroxed copy of a vellum manuscript is smudgy and gray. I take notes, looking up words, declining verbs.

My life is like an encyclopedia, a structured taxonomy of proper social behaviors and daily functions to which I adhere like a human-sized strip of duct tape.

The filigree of ancient Latin script blurs.

I put the pen down and push over the pile of books. They slither down the desk, collapse like a minor avalanche to the floor. The thin volume of German philosophy sits isolated on the shelf. But I don’t know what else I can discover by opening it to the missing page again. The book was never checked out. I don’t have any way to place a mind behind the missing page. Only the evidence of its absence. And I burnt the page itself.

I don’t know who wanted me to find the body. I do know I should leave it alone, leave it — fuck, call the cops, be done with the whole hideous thing already. But how do I do that without ruining everything I’ve constructed over the years?

If I can figure out who it is, or at least why , I can go to the proper authorities then.

But how do I find out anything? I’ve arrived at a dead end. A dead end — I grimace and rub my fingers over my temples. My head hurts.

The dead body. That’s it. That unsheathed carcass once possessed a mind. The mind holds its own secrets in death. How does a person go about deducing the physical identity of a body when the obvious things like a wallet or dog tags aren’t likely to present themselves?

I figure a cop would go back to the house, look for trace physical evidence, receipts, clothing tags, shoe size. Collect forensic samples. And wear sunglasses at night. That’s what they do in those cop shows, anyway.

Cop shows. The police. I think the police department keeps public records of people who go missing, or at least they do for kids. Those flyers of missing kids are plastered all over Walmart entrances.

I type quickly, pull up the Akron Police Department webpage. Ah, yes. A link for reported missing persons. I scroll through the lists of names, only opening up the files on male names with ages between twenty-five and fifty-five. Clicking on posters with pixilated faces staring blankly back at the world, looking for features that might belong to a man who is only a vague impression of porous, wax-slick skin, attached lower earlobes, and gray-streaked lank brown hair. I read through descriptions. Tattoos, scars, complexions, eye and hair color.

Then one of the posters makes me pause. James A. Sims, Caucasian male, thirty-four, brown hair, blue eyes, no scars or tattoos, epileptic, no permanent address. A note at the bottom of the poster claims that MP could not contact his only known living relative, a sister. The face in the grainy photograph is several years out of date. Wide, unfocused eyes, a button-down shirt, a thin neck with a prominent Adam’s apple. I squint and move my face close to the laptop screen. His earlobes are attached.

His neck is so thin. The shirt hanging on a frame that must have been underweight. I close my eyes and try to remember the corpse but all I see are rough brown-gray spinal knobs, whitish pink flesh clinging to the underside of the skin.

I realize how stupid I am. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not an investigator. Whoever left the notes for me was not asking me to solve a crime. It was the string dangled in front of the bored cat. Cats don’t care who dangles the string. They only care that they are the ones who demolish the string.