Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

I reach out two fingers of my left hand and brush lank strands of hair from the corpse’s neck. The skin there is the color of milky tea. I press my fingers against the skin. The knobby vertebrae shift under the skin with a gritty sound. A thin fluid wells up from an almost-invisible slit.

I look at the man’s head. His face is turned to the wall, his right cheek pressed against the sheets. His left eyelid is visible, but the skin is puckered where it droops over the drained sac of his eyeball. The jaw is distended, the left cheek tented. I see a glimpse of fabric between his lips. With my forefinger and thumb I tug at the tiny corner. The teeth are locked tight. My tug jolts the head. A handcuff clinks against the metal post.

The wad rips as it comes free, stiff and clotted with dried saliva. A handful of crumpled pages, a fuzzy archaic type. I try to separate the wad and the paper crumbles in my hand. I pull free a large fragment with a section of print and realize that the text is not in English. There can only be a handful of citizens in the decrepit burg of Akron who would be able to read this foreign text, but I am one of them. Even more uniquely, I know the book from which it comes, Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft ( The Gay Science ), that contains the (translated) phrase “even gods decompose,” as well as, more famously, the expression Gott ist tot .

All I can make out of the blurred type on the scrap in my hand is “ wenn dir eines Tages oder Nachts .” I feel a prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. In English, this section reads something like: What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times . It’s a section where Nietzsche describes a demon calling into awareness the darkest parts of a man, so that he can throw off the constraints of civilization. So that he can be free.

I make a fist around the wad of paper and wipe the back of my wrist across my mouth. Turn to the mute messenger on the bed.

In this instance, the god is not only dead but quite literally decomposing.

I try to focus, to be objective. I am meant to see this. What am I meant to see? I step back and look at the mattress, at the sheets spattered with blood already oxidized and brown, a few congealed clots of skin and fatty tissue. The lack of blood spatter and the relative smallness of the pooled bloodspill make me think that the man on the bed was killed and then skinned. I wonder how he was killed. Drugged first, maybe. And then the body, lax, under the killer’s nimble hands —

Wetness pools in my mouth.

I swallow and blink. The pages in my fist waver and I realize the tremor is in my hands. And like waking up, I think with sudden and fierce clarity that I am standing over an exquisitely mutilated corpse.

I turn and collide with the door. My fingers slip on the knob. I run down the steps. My left shoulder bangs into the wall. I elbow open the side door.

The air is cold, shocking and fresh after the fetid sweetness inside. I grip my fingers around my knees and squeeze. The underside of my hair is damp with sweat.

Defying all odds that I can calculate, the body upstairs is only the second human corpse I have seen or touched. It is this sole fact that has kept me walking free among the sane.

I bend over and cough and spit onto the gravel.

Then I get up and run. I run fast, my lungs making scissoring noises. I run through backyards and gravel alleys, across the busy four-lane street dissecting the hovels of poverty from the university campus, between towering brick buildings alight with morning sun. I get to the car, start the engine.

My fingers shake when I uncurl them from the clutch of paper.

I put the wad from the dead man’s mouth into my jacket pocket and reach for the gearshift. My palm itches. I turn my hand and see crescent-shaped nail marks, oily beads welling up from slit skin.

I put my head against the steering wheel. Shit. Shitshitshit.

I imagine grabbing whoever wrote that fucking note and screaming into his face. What do you think will happen, I want to ask him. What do you fucking think will happen now?

Somehow I drive home. I don’t remember the trip.

I sit on the bare mattress in my cinderblock garage cell. A small pile of ash on the white-painted floor where I burnt the pink message slip and the pages of Nietzsche. It occurs to me that the decision to burn the message is forensically intelligent but of course I have little interest in establishing my connection to the corpse or in hiding it. All I want is the smell of burning paper to overpower the memory of blood-stink. My mouth keeps filling with spit. I wipe my hands on my knees and breathe smoke and can’t stop smelling the body and imagining my fingers exploring the vertebral ridge, each knob a fossilized cauliflower blossom. What it would feel like to dig a serrated blade into a spinal column, metal teeth catching on bony joints.

I clench my jaw and rock and squeeze my eyes closed. Focus on the darkness. Focus.

I breathe in slowly, exhale.

Calm seeps into my muscles. My diaphragm relaxes. My breathing slows. My heartbeat decelerates. I have been forcing myself through this pantomime — under tamer circumstances and with lower stakes, to be sure — for, well, for close to all my life. Some people practice yoga. I pose formulaic dialogues in my head, Glaucon to my own Socrates. What is good? What is justice? What is beautiful is most loveable, Glaucon. Do you not agree? Therefore right love has nothing mad or licentious about it.

So: What is the proper thing to do?

The civically responsible individual would call in the cops, who would investigate. The cops would inevitably question that civically responsible individual. But any investigation into my past will uncover my unfortunate encounter with a man that ended in his falling down a flight of steps in my parents’ basement and cracking his neck. The judge said that the murder was self-defense. The shove down the stairs wasn’t what got me the rapt attention of psychiatrists. Mutilating the corpse did that.

I spent a couple weeks in a juvenile psychiatric unit under observation. Lots of valium. I have watery memories of crosshatched pink patterns on the backs of my thighs from sitting on hard plastic chairs. The first diagnosis was schizophrenia. It was accompanied by little pills that went by exotic names like Haldol and Prolixin. They made me sleepy and my mouth dry. After I got out of the psych unit my parents took me to a shrink who asked me questions like, “Do you hear voices?” And, “Does it make you angry when people ask you questions?” The shrink was a large woman with a chest the size of a coastal shelf and smile-crinkles by her eyes. The Mrs. Claus of prescription drugs. She dropped the schizophrenia diagnosis, downgraded me to “borderline personality disorder,” and gave me anti-anxiety meds. My older brother called the diagnosis “crazy lite.” The new meds were supposed to stabilize my moods but they made me scratch the skin on the backs of my hands and bang my head against the wall. So I got a new shrink and a couple of Rainbow Bright Band-Aids. The next psychiatrist, a man who stroked his fingers slowly across his mouth while he talked, gave me the MMPI and an IQ test and announced that I was too bright for school so I was bored, and that was why I had killed and mutilated a man. The following morning my parents deposited me at a different therapist’s office.

By the time I was twelve the collectors’ set of psychologists and psychiatrists in the greater Akron area had ruled out emotional neuroses and decided that all that was wrong with me was that I lacked the capacity to experience guilt or love or compassion. In short, I was a highly intelligent borderline sociopath. Dave said that was shrink-speak for “evil.” There are no pills for evil so, at the recommendation of a couple of child therapists and a psychologist, my parents pulled me out of school. My dad gave me exams in analytic geometry and the history of Western civilization each week. My mom listened to me play Chopin etudes on the Steinway while she breastfed baby Stephen upstairs. When I was fourteen Dave moved to New York to study Marxist poetry at New York University. I would go days without speaking to other people. It was the closest I’ve ever come to being content.