Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

But his broken family isn’t my problem. And I have bigger things to worry about.

“You’re right,” I say.

“I am?” He looks startled. “About what?”

“About why people engage in small talk. Real drama is pathetic. It’s almost worse than discussing the weather. Why do people always talk about the weather? It’s October in Akron, Ohio. The weather goddamn sucks. There’s nothing else to say about it.”

He looks up at me and smiles.

“I wonder if you could get a job just telling people the truth,” he says. “You know, saying things no one in their right minds would say but people need to hear anyway.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. But at least he is talking. It gives me an idea. Maybe this is the game. Maybe I have to solve his personal drama in order to figure out his relationship to the house across the street. If he met me at the poetry reading, then he’s been aware of me — interested in me — since before the corpse became a corpse.

I leave the kitchen and go back to my bedroom and come back with a yellow legal pad and a pen. I put them on the table and he looks up at me with his eyebrows raised and his lips parted.

“Pertinent information. When you’re done, put it on the counter.”

“Seriously? You — you don’t have to, you know.” He smiles a little, raises a shoulder. “I mean, I know this is my problem. What you said, it’s just — pathetic drama. My issues. I know that. And I know there’s probably not anything you can do.”

“I can ask around. No promises. But you obviously want to know, so — whatever. I’ll do it.”

“Okay.” He picks up the pen. Rolls it between his fingers. Then he says, “No, this is a stupid idea. It really is. I don’t know what — I mean, it’s not like it’s going to change anything.”

“No,” I say.

He clicks on the pen. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Okay.”

He frowns and when I turn to walk away he says, “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“For real. Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know.” I grin. “What is the expression? For shits and giggles? I never understood what that means.”

He looks at me. And then presses his lips together and bends his head to the legal pad. Whatever he sees in my face, it is not, apparently, the hungering need to know about murder that has infected my dreams now for weeks.

I shut my bedroom door behind myself. The cat tangles between my legs. I pick him up and he settles like a mink across my shoulder, his purr vibrating against the tendons in my neck. There is a coin-sized spot of pain behind my left eye. It burrows like a cyst into my eyeball and my head flickers with hot-cold light. I lie down on the bed, curl over on my side. The cat turns in a circle and then lies down, cupped against the hollow of my stomach. Its sleek brown body rises and falls with my breathing.

I see a bloody footprint on the floor. Another on the stairs. My eyes hurt. The walls are shadowy and lean inward. There is blood everywhere, glistening. The basement is a hellish grotto lit by a moon made incarnadine. I can feel blood caked under my fingernails. Someone is lying at the foot of the stairs. A high-pitched voice is cackling, giggling, crazed. I realize that I am dragging my fingernails down my skin, shredding strips of flesh like paint peeling from a wall. The hysterical cackles pour out of my throat.

I startle awake suddenly. Shadows lie thick and brown around the bedroom. My mouth tastes like chalk dust.

I roll over and the cat squawks and wakes up and stretches, arching its back, the fur bristling. Dying sun burnishes the fine hairs along its spine.

I get up and go into the bathroom and bend over the sink, cup cool water and drink, then splash water over my face.

A noise to my left startles me. I look up and see Aidan lying on the sofa with one arm crooked behind his head. He lifts his head from his arm and looks at me. “Everything okay?”

I shove the cat off the counter. It falls on its paws, but grunts when it hits the floor.

“Mind your own fucking business.”

But I am surprised to find that my voice comes out a rasping whisper. I am hoarse.

I need to get out. I put on my shoes and run across campus and down busy roads, my sneakers splashing through gray slush, the air nipping at my exposed face and neck. My mind submerges into a misty calm and I don’t have to think.

In particular I shut out the truth that’s been rattling around my ribs like a hard nut, a truth I’ve never told my parents. The truth is, my version of crazy isn’t just manifested in a dislike for being touched, in a propensity to say the word “fuck,” or even in my utter lack of empathy for other humans. No. At night, I dream about the basement where I killed a man. I dream about my brother’s afterbirth lying in its steel bowl like violence floating in pain. I don’t know why my parents let me get close to human organs and blood so soon after I mutilated a corpse. My mother told me that she thought it would be good for me to see birth, a new baby. To be reminded of life. She should have known better. She must have been able to see that it isn’t life that fascinates me. My parents, my therapists, my brothers — everyone knows I dream about those two events. Here is what I have never told them: in the dreams the basement pools with blood and it is my brother’s newborn body that I am mutilating on the floor.

When I wake up my jaw muscles ache. I am so worn out, so unutterably weary of the fight against my own perversion. The truth is that I don’t know if I can make it. I don’t know how long I can keep from cutting someone’s skin and letting all the sweetness run out.

I don’t think about this truth during my run.

After I finish the run and shower, I pad barefoot into my bedroom, rubbing my long wet hair in a towel. The windowpane flickers gold and crimson. It’s only when I go across the room and look out the window that I start to think about the truth. And the truth lunges at me and swallows me whole.

I tried this almost ten years ago. The living-on-my-own thing, I mean. It didn’t work out so well. I am thinking this while I sit with my elbows crooked around my knees looking out my bedroom window. The oil smears from myriad fingers pressed against the glass over the years collect light and fracture it like crystals. Red and blue and white and yellow, tiny Christmas lights dancing across the dark. The cop cars silenced the sirens a couple minutes ago but the ambulances are still there and blue uniforms move jerkily through the colored strobe lights. A silent, deadly disco dance.

The apartment door slams. Footsteps pound across the floorboards and my door bangs on its hinges. I look around.

Aidan is sucking in air hard, gripping the doorframe. He sags against the fulcrum of his fingers and the tips whiten. He leans his head back.

“I didn’t do it,” I say. I turn my head and look back out my window. My hair falls around my face and hangs over my bent arms and the twin humps of my pale knees.

“God,” he says when he gets his breath back.

“He didn’t have much to do with it either.”

Aidan comes inside the room. He is breathing hard.

I keep my eyes fixed on the glittering spectacle below. Billows of inky smoke from the wood frame house across the street. The stretcher has been shunted into the back of the ambulance. Along the street half-naked people wearing flimsy cotton pajamas or hastily thrown-on coats and boots stand ankle-deep in dirty snow, agog and salivating with curiosity.

A knot of cops is gathered around a clipboard. The pajama-clad voyeurs cluster around, heads nodding, shoulders hunched up around their ears in the cold. I guess the cops are collecting names, interviewing witnesses. One of the neighbors turns and points up at our apartment.