Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“I’m going to try here,” I say. I am almost surprised to hear myself say it. “I’ll pay my rent on time. I’m responsible that way, with numbers and schedules and stuff. I like cleaning, I like the smell of bleach and all, so I’ll clean the kitchen, but you’re going to have to keep your own shit picked up at least. And I don’t go shopping unless I have to, so don’t expect me to play housewife and buy you food or make you meals and don’t expect me to talk to you all the time or whatever.”

“No,” he says.

“And if you have parties I’ll lock myself in my room and open the window but if they stink up the place I might throw stuff at them and start screaming cuss words or something.”

His mouth twitches but he doesn’t say anything, just watches me.

“I’m not some nutjob who’s never lived on her own. You don’t have to worry about, you know, anything weird like that. I have zero social skills but I won’t do anything.”

He still doesn’t say anything.

“I didn’t kill my last roommate.”

The laugh-light flickers out in his eyes. He straightens up. “I know. You didn’t mean to hurt—”

“The only guy I ever killed—”

“I know .” He looks at me. He’s not smiling. “I won’t ever do that sort of thing. Okay? I’m not like that. Your bedroom is yours. I won’t go in it. I don’t cut myself and I certainly don’t mo lest people. Promise.”

I shrug. “Okay. That’s okay, then.”

He nods. “Got it. And you don’t touch my stuff. The film in the freezer stays in the freezer. And don’t eat my food, but you can drink the beer if you want. And you can clean the kitchen and living room but don’t go in my room, okay?”

“I hate beer.”

“Do you smoke?”

I shake my head.

“Because I sometimes smoke.”

“That’s okay. I like that smell better than what you smell like now.”

He looks at me and then smiles again. “We’ll be okay,” he says.

I don’t know how to respond. If Aidan is my corpse artist he is too subtle to let me read it in his face. And anyhow I am terrible at reading faces.

At night, after the apartment falls into silence and Aidan’s husky breathing comes from the bedroom across from mine, I slide my feet into my sneakers and go out, holding my palm against the kitchen door’s latch to silence the click as the door closes.

This time, instead of my cell phone or the tiny flashlight on my keychain, I am holding a real flashlight, a slim penlight that I found in the toolshed behind the garden at my parents’ house.

It’s dark but the downtown heart of the city is not quiet or dark. There is no hush of wind through pine needles, no creak of telephone wires like in my parents’ suburban paradise. A pinkish smog hangs over the skyline. Voices, distant music, and ambulance sirens pitch and fall like a tidal pool.

When I am about to cross the street, a car turns onto Allyn and rushes toward me, headlights burning funnels into the fractured dark.

I stumble back onto the sidewalk and look carefully before I cross the street.

I make sure to slide inside the condemned house before clicking on the flashlight.

The minute my flashlight glows white in the dark, I hear a quick scuffle and a sharp crack. Then the sound of hard panting.

I walk into the kitchen, my back to the wall. It occurs to me that I should be afraid, that I might be attacked. That I could be killed and flayed.

But underneath the patina of fear that coats my skin like a candy shell is something hot, vivid, burning in the pit of my stomach. I am excited.

The noise comes from the kitchen.

The flashlight beam picks out the empty, crackled linoleum, and then the glint of the backpack. And a woman, clutching the backpack against her breasts like it’s a baby.

She’s huddled under the counter in the hollow left by a missing appliance, maybe a dishwasher. In the sharp glare of the flashlight she blinks up at me, her skin shimmering like moist creosote, eyes flaring white with terror.

I spread my free hand so she can see the harmless pink skin of my palm.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “I just want to know about the — the body upstairs.”

She makes a gargling noise. I move the light slightly and see the shine of mucus or saliva on her chin. She has a gap between two yellowed eyeteeth, the middle teeth a blank space. Her tongue thrusts pink and moist between her lips, ballooning them out. The tip of her tongue curls and then retracts and then thrusts out again. Plum-colored skin under her left eye twitches.

I sigh. I recognize her frailties. Years spent kicking the heel of my sneaker against a chair in a psychiatrist’s office have familiarized me with the physical evidence of any number of mental disorders. The waiting rooms of those places are like carnivals of the mentally disturbed.

The dregs of Thorazine and olanzapine, the heavy-duty drugs used to treat schizophrenia, float around the bloodstream, infecting it with myriad glitches and twitches like a fragging computer screen, symptoms of the cure rather than the disease. These twitches are called tardive dyskinesia and God knows I’d rather believe the FBI had hired space aliens to kidnap me than twitch like a short-circuiting motherboard.

She watches in silence when I come up to her. Her head jerks to the side.

I crouch down in front of her.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I just need to know. The man upstairs. The dead body. Did you put the sheet over him?”

She groans, a sound like a constipated moose.

And then she flies up, her limbs a whirlwind. I scramble back.

She rushes by me and the door slams.

I’m alone in the kitchen with nothing but the fresh smell of aconite and ammonia and the old reek of decomposition.

At least I know what the witness looks like. And, I think, looking around the empty kitchen, at least she remembered her blanket, drugs, and Dora backpack this time. Her night is looking up, even if mine has turned to shit. Without her — well, hell, even with her, given her mental condition — I won’t be any closer to identifying the killer. I click off the flashlight and wait for my eyes to adjust before going back to the apartment across the street.

My feet are quiet on the wood stairs and I turn the key carefully in the lock, easing the door open. But when I creep inside the apartment is quiet, so quiet I can hear the faint hum and gurgle of the refrigerator.

If Aidan is still in his room, he is no longer snoring. But nothing moves. No creak, no rustle of fabric. I imagine that he is lying there, awake, listening to my furtive creeping. I wonder what he is thinking. If he knows where I went. And I wonder if he has made similar journeys himself.

I ease my feet out of my sneakers and my bare feet are invisible in the dark as I go back to my room.

I get up at six the next morning. Shower. Dress. Instead of driving, I walk to campus to teach my first class of the day. I can see advantages to living so close to work.

Sometime after midnight last night the temperature dropped and rain turned into a heavy wet layer of snow. Frozen sludge covers the fields between the academic buildings. The sidewalks have been salted and grit under my shoes. The sky hangs low and bruised, pregnant with rain and ice, grieved to precipitation.

I don’t remember much of what I lecture, but from the Plasticine expressions on my students’ faces they don’t notice anything out of the ordinary, or really anything at all. After teaching, I check my e-mail in the grad student office. Then I work in the library for five hours. I was supposed to finish a translation of the manuscript pages last week, but I’ve done no work on my dissertation at all since finding the corpse.