Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

Dave is still talking. I push my thumb down. Message deleted .

I am almost finished stretching when my cell phone starts buzzing again.

I pick it up. “Are you mad at me or something?”

He sucks in a breath, and I think hearing my real voice startled him. From the short silence I can tell he was working his way up to a dramatic crescendo for my voicemail and I’ve broken his rhythm.

When he starts talking, he sounds normal, his voice light and happy. “ God , no, my darling. Why would I be mad at you? I just don’t want to see that sweet little boy — crushed by your machinations. Do you like that? I think machinations has the right mech anized feel—”

“Don’t do that.” I hate when he gets metaphysical. Or maybe it’s metapoetic. Meta-anything, really. “I didn’t do anything. Not to him.”

“Not to him.” Dave’s voice mimics mine so perfectly that it startles me. He’s always been a good mimic, but in his mouth my voice sounds so — melodic. Feminine. It disconcerts me. I always feel like my voice should sound more like broken glass. “That’s not the real problem, though, is it?” He’s back to his normal voice. “The real problem we find ourselves confronted with is your little sojourn this afternoon. Into the bowels, as it were, the belly of the beast. The beast, in this metaphor, being our metropolis, the summit of our acme, Akron. The point is—”

“You’re high.” I should’ve figured that earlier. I pinch the skin between my eyebrows. “Christ.” I hate it when he is like this.

“ High ?” And he’s shouting again, suddenly. I move the phone away from my ear. “What the fucking shit does that have to do with anything? Are you try ing to distract me? We need to discuss why you would hunt down little Aidan, if that’s even what you were doing. What else could you be doing there? What else were you doing there? ”

His anger pisses me off. He knows how much I hate yelling. I hear my own voice rising to match his, fighting back against his decibels with my own. “I was looking at his fucking rental property. I’m moving out. That’s what!”

There’s a short silence.

Then Dave says, “No you weren’t.”

“You don’t know everything about me. I’m not a pet rock, I’m not a fucking joke, the kid who never grows up, never changes — I change. I grow up.”

I see corpses and I don’t melt, I don’t collapse into madness.

He laughs. “No you don’t,” he says. “Who’s telling you this? Is it Aidan? Did he tell you you were a joke?”

Oh, God. I am different. I feel something weightless and buoyant in my chest. I put a palm against my heart and feel it beating, steady and solid.

I just realized where that strange fantasy about moving out came from.

I have looked into the abyss and nothing has crawled out to take up residence in my mortal shell. I have seen my second corpse and I am not descending into a replay of the madness after I encountered my first.

I say, “No. This is me talking. No one else. Me.”

Dave says, “Well, good. I’ll fucking slice his throat if he does. No one talks to you that way.”

I smile at that. “You do. Sometimes.”

He starts to laugh again. “Okay, touché, you got me on that one, babe. But you know I love you. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

“Quit yelling at me, then.”

There’s a brief quiet. And then, in a whisper, he says, “Anything for you, princess.” And then he starts laughing loudly.

I hang up the phone.

After my shower I still feel anxious so I go out to work on the Chevelle. The car sits under the slanting raw wood carport roof and it smells faintly of sap and cold soil. The hood propped up, the smell of axle grease and WD-40, the gravel chips crunching under my sneakers like broken teeth — it feels good. So after I replace a spark plug and a couple of worn cylinder heads I keep tinkering, finally decide what the hell, I’ll replace the whole intake manifold. I’ll have to order parts online.

While I lie on my back on the gravel, my hands caked in grit and oil and the smell of burnt rubber and oxidized steel all around me, I think about Dave and wonder how he sees me. When he first came back to Ohio he kept asking me to move in with him, kept saying that I was an adult now and it was time to act like one, not to keep hiding in the garage like I was ashamed of something that happened when I was ten. And when I was eighteen. Well. Any time I left the house, basically. He stopped asking after a while.

I think about my mother’s delicate panic. I wonder if they are right. They probably are. They know me better than anyone, apart from my childhood shrinks. The accounting of my life is a simple line in the ledger of human history. It does not add up to much.

But the man in the house on Allyn Street is already dead. It seems to me there is little that I can do to make things worse, to fuck up his life any more than it is already fucked. And if I do nothing, whoever targeted me with that note might try again, might kill someone else. If I do nothing, I might become a proxy murderer. If I do something I could save a life. There is a Jewish proverb that if you save one life, you save the world.

I have, by the mathematics implicit in that proverb, already wrought the destruction of the planet. If I pull anything from the ashes of my own deeds, it will likely be some pernicious, mutated thing not capable of saving anyone.

But at least I will have done something. I wonder if there is some way to balance a ledger with a single column.

I wash my hands with orange-scented grease-cutting soap, rubbing the granules into my skin around the nail beds. Then I sit on my mattress and pick up my phone. I scroll through missed calls and hit dial.

After two rings, Aidan picks up. His voice is quiet, but it tilts up at the end with curiosity.

“Mickey? Is that you?”

“Were you serious?” I say. “About needing a roommate.”

There’s a short silence. “What do you mean?”

“I want to know if you’re serious about wanting a roommate.”

“I guess so,” he says. “I like where I live. It’s really close to campus.” Each word sounds like he’s pronouncing it while taking another step onto crackling ice.

“You said my brother told you about me. Did he tell you about my other roommate? The cutter?”

“Yeah.” Another pause. “Look, I don’t—”

“Are you scared of me? Scared to live with me, I mean.”

“No.”

That one word is the only thing he says that sounds confident.

“Okay, then,” I say.

“Okay then, what?”

“Okay, I’ll move in with you.”

“ What ?”

“If you’re okay with that.”

“Geez,” he says. He starts to say something a couple times. The silence stretches.

“I can pay rent,” I say. “I have a job, and I have some savings.”

“Oh,” he says. “I mean, yeah. No. That’s great.”

“Do I have to sign a lease?”

“Not really. The landlord gives us month-to-month leases here. You just have to get credit approval. But you have to sign this asbestos waiver. I think the house was painted before 1970 or something.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. “I might screw this up,” I say. “After the last time I tried moving out. I mean, I’m going to try. But I’m just saying.”

Aidan says, “You don’t have to worry. I’m not like that.”

I know that he is nothing like my former roommate, who was ordinary in an almost cartoonish way. Aidan is no caricature. The problem is, I don’t know what he is. I don’t know if he is an unstable but relatively legal citizen, or if he is a more publicly polished version of me, something truly demonic.