Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

Shit.

Aidan says, “What — what happened?”

The sirens came. That’s what happened. I saw the reflected flares of firelight and smelled smoke when I got out of the shower. I went to the window and stood looking down at an inferno. Arson. An accelerated burn, oily tar-black smoke coiling into the air. Shattering glass. Cops came. Atonal screams as metal overheated, wood beams cracked.

My eyes dazzled. Flames licked hungrily at the night sky. The next thing I knew I was outside. Holding out my palms to the fire. Rags of flame against the dark canvas of the sky. People screaming, wailing. A girl in blue flannel pajama pants clutching a bottle, her pale hair flaring incendiary white. Gusts of flaming debris. Delicate moth wings of newspaper, veined red with flame, disintegrated suddenly into ash. Cordate shells of curled plaster. I stood in a melting puddle of pewter silt. The crackle and patter of falling rubble. The wooden house shrieked like a frail woman in the halcyon arms of a violent and insatiable god.

I say without turning my head, “A fire.”

“Yeah, I can see. There’s smoke everywhere, and debris and cops and — and why are you naked? Is that — is that ash in your hair? What’s — were you down there?”

When I stood at the window looking down at the fire, all I could imagine was the heat of the flames. A gold and vermillion bacchanal. I only wanted to get closer. I imagine it must have caused a stir. I didn’t notice at first. Until the cops came and someone tried to touch me. I remember the plasticky smell of the blanket the cop was trying to put around me. And I realized I was standing in a melting snowbank, naked, my skin flaring gold and crimson in the great light, my hair swirling in heated updrafts, a silvery dust of ash settling on my shoulders and upturned hands.

So I pushed away the blankets and the cops and went back across the street and upstairs to the apartment, and I shut and locked the door and went into my bedroom. I stood at the window while the fire hoses stanched the living flame. The reek of smoke drifting over the street.

They found the body. With their masks and breathing apparatus they climbed through charred timber and glinting shards of glass. Sullen flares of red and orange amid the wreckage. They came out with a stretcher carrying a zippered plastic bag over a lumpy shape the size of a small child or a charcoaled corpse, a body reduced to its concentrate.

“Why were you down there?” Aidan asks. “Why did you go down there without — um.” He stops talking.

Someone pounds at the apartment door.

Aidan turns his head and looks behind him.

My lips are dry and stick together. “That’ll be the cops.”

Aidan rubs his palms over his dark bristling scalp. “Oh, God. Okay. Are you going to talk to them? Mickey?”

“Because it was beautiful,” I say.

There is a silence. Another bang at the door and the muted sound of a strident voice.

“What? What was beautiful? The fire?”

I rest my forehead against my knees. Aidan’s feet echo on the floorboards. I hear the metal click of the lock turning. They come in with cold air and smells, smoke mostly, but other human odors too, like deodorant and Mexican food. The clatter of hard-soled shoes in the hallway outside my bedroom door.

“—need to speak with her — some connection to what went down.”

Aidan says something about shock and the fire. The cop says he wants to know if I saw who started it. If I saw anyone run out of the house. If that is why I went running outside.

“I think she just went down to watch the fire,” Aidan says.

“She must’ve seen something or she knows something.” The cop lowers his voice. “She came running out like a — well, she just comes tearing out, you know, stark naked, and she runs up to the house and she’s standing there—”

“Like a conductor,” I say, lifting my head. I can feel the grit caked in my sweaty skin. “Like Beethoven conducting his ninth symphony. Deaf enough to hear.”

“What?” One of the cops is a woman.

“I’m crazy,” I say. “Not guilty. You’re wasting your time.”

Aidan is behind the cops. He says, “She’s not crazy, exactly. But she’s, you know, telling the truth. She has some mental—”

“Some mental what ?” says one of the cops. “Problems? Like starting fires?”

“ No ,” Aidan says. “I mean — not like that.”

“And who are you?”

“The roommate,” Aidan says.

“Name?”

“Aidan,” he says. “Devorecek.”

“Spell that.”

“D-e-v—”

The other cop says, “What sort of mental problems does your girlfriend have?”

“ Room mate,” Aidan says. “We just live — it doesn’t matter. She’s not a pyro. It’s, like, emotional issues. Not criminal issues.”

“So why’d she run to the house? She connected to the body we found inside? Emotionally?”

“No, it’s not like that,” Aidan says. “Wait, what body? I thought that place was empty.”

The guy cop goes closer to Aidan. Aidan licks his lips nervously.

Strands of hair are glued to the sweat on my face. I comb them away with my fingertips.

I climb off the bed and stand up. The cops twist their heads around and stare at me. The male cop’s eyes shift and he backs up a step. But even the female cop is staring.

I hold my arms out, palms cupped up like when I stood in front of the flames. “Is this why you came up here? You want to see this side too? The back wasn’t enough?”

The female cop says, “All right, that’s not funny.” She turns to the male cop. “Wait outside.”

I walk up to her until I’m only inches away. I can smell her, a scent that’s half smoke, half perfume, a sweet, acrid stench. Saliva fills my mouth. I swallow hard, trying not to gag. I can feel the coldness in her uniform, the heat of her skin.

“Step back,” she says. Her hand goes to her hip. “Step back .”

“I thought you wanted this. You came look ing.” My breath stirs the fine hairs by her ear. “Can you see me well enough now?”

“Step back,” says the male cop. I look over at him. He has pulled his gun, a stubby weapon with an oddly shaped square barrel. A Taser. He holds it like a real gun, forefinger on the trigger, the other hand bracing the fist.

I wonder what it would feel like to be shot with that much voltage. If I would feel the pain as much as any normal person would. My heartbeat picks up. I move over to him. My skin is cold. His eyes struggle not to look down at me, to see my nipples hardened by the cold. “Step away ,” he says.

“I don’t kill people.” I go close to him. The skin on his neck is leathery, the color of old bologna, moist and plucked-looking. “I don’t. I didn’t kill him. Okay? That wasn’t me.”

“Step back or I will restrain you,” he says. “Do you understand me?”

He’s talking loudly like he thinks I’m partially deaf in addition to being mentally deficient.

“I’m not stupid,” I say. “And I’m not an arsonist .”

“Leave her alone,” Aidan says.

The male cop looks at me and then he lowers his gun.

My heartbeat slows. The room is cold and gray, evening shadows creeping across the floorboards. The shattering gold light is gone now.

I take three steps back. “I didn’t start the fires.”

“Put some clothes on.”

“I didn’t.”

“Just tell us why you were down there.”

I lick my lips. My tongue is sticky. “To watch.” It comes out a whisper.

The cops look at me. And then the male cop says, “Well, that was pretty stupid. Wasn’t it.”

“I guess so.”

I wonder who hated him so much, the mutilated body in the house. Or who loved him. The knife peeling skin from its frame like a painter stripping a canvas.