Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

I sigh. Maybe he was always this hard to understand, but for whatever reason it seems like recently everything he says is moving light years faster than I can follow. He used to be the only safe person in my world but now the only thing I am thinking is that Aidan is so much easier to talk to. Even though he is an utter enigma to me, Aidan is easier to read than the brother who has always been my other self.

“I know,” I say. But I don’t want to listen to him anymore, so I hang up the phone.

And I stare at it where it lies on my pillow. “I know.”

That night I don’t sleep, just sit on my bedroom floor with my laptop propped on my knees, writing a dissertation chapter. The semester is almost over and I have no dissertation draft to show for it. I have no murderer, no longer even a corpse. I have failed at everything. My fingers feel stiff. Even the joints are exhausted.

Tuesday morning sneaks in the window while I’m still sitting on the floor with my laptop open. My neck is stiff, my ass is numb, and my eyes ache.

I get up and look out the window. The street below my bedroom window lies hidden under a white Precambrian mist. I decide to go for a run and hope it will wake me up enough to teach my classes.

I pull on a Gore-Tex running jacket, not looking forward to the run this morning. It’s not quite December and the real cold hasn’t sunk in yet. The temperature still hovers in the upper twenties, but it’s a wet, relentless cold that makes your teeth ache.

Aidan is in the kitchen watching coffee percolate when I back come in from my run. He stands with his arms folded over his chest, leaning against the wall, his eyelids dropped to half-mast.

He rouses when I come in. “Hey, Mickey. Your dad called me. He wanted me to tell you to come tonight. Something about your dissertation director being there, and you need to be able to pull off a social gathering if you’re going to be an academic, and he’s been leaving messages all week.”

I strip off my jacket and hang it on a hook by the door. “Yikes.”

Aidan tries a smile and his jaw cracks when he yawns. “Yeah. He said he’s left messages at your office and tried your cell phone but you didn’t answer, and he doesn’t know if you check messages.”

I untie my shoes and peel them off my cold, wet feet. “The thing I would miss most,” I say, and, when Aidan blinks at me, “if I were to wake up normal someday, the thing I would miss most is how you all overcompensate for my deficiencies. It’s so very restful.”

Aidan grins a little and swings his head side to side in exaggerated annoyance. Then he makes a sudden lunge for a cupboard. I startle, but he’s just pulling out a mug. The coffee has finished its last dying gurgles and the pot is full.

My father, like many academic administrators, spends the semester freezing salaries and the holiday season hosting end-of-semester shindigs designed to release accumulated tension and grease the wheels of faculty-administrative collaboration. I have no desire to attend this evening, but I’ve avoided Telushkin long enough. At some point I should remind him what I look like, at least to the extent that he’ll be able to pick me out of the lineup of graduates at commencement, assuming I actually graduate some day. But, God, parties are annoying. They are not something I do well.

The thought of desires and annoyance makes me think of Desiree. I have taken her sandwiches a couple times in the last few weeks. She never says anything, not anything more significant than jumbled words, although she no longer panics or faints when I make sudden movements. She likes the color pink, apparently. She is taken by shiny things, though only for short amounts of time. She smokes cigarettes to the filter and then rips apart the filter as if she’s looking for the secret to immortality. I have discovered nothing else useful.

I move around Aidan and pull out a jar of peanut butter, and grab grape jelly from the fridge.

“So?”

I glance up at Aidan in surprise.

He’s clutching his coffee mug. Steam beads on his eyebrows. “So are you going to go?”

I shrug.

“What,” he says, “you don’t love parties?” He laughs at the look on my face. “You should go. And you can invite me. You know, like, as your escort?”

Over the rim of his mug I can only see the slant of his eyebrows and the crinkles by his eyes. It strikes me as odd that I am so familiar with his facial expressions that I can read only half of his face so easily. I know his face better than I do the faces of my family members. I wonder why that is.

“Of course,” I say. “Let the plebeians revel in our love. They will write sonnets to us.”

He laughs.

When I finish making the sandwich, I pull on jeans and a sweatshirt over my running clothes and collect my backpack. Then I put the sandwich in a baggie and collect another baggie of vegetables. I zip the food into my backpack and leave.

Clouds swarm dark over the morning sky burgeoning with storm.

I head for the car parked behind the house.

“She walks in darkness.”

I startle so badly that I almost drop my car keys.

He emerges from the shadow behind the industrial trash bin and something in the stale smell of trash and the crisp wet darkness makes me think of a tarnished Beowulf trailing seaweed and smelling of monster blood.

I suck in air.

“ Fuck you,” I say. “And it’s ‘beauty’ not ‘darkness,’ you Neanderthal.”

My elder brother laughs. He swings his hand at me but I duck it.

“Where are you going?”

“What are you doing here?”

We talk at the same time, but he answers first. “I haven’t yet visited my sister’s abode, the spider’s nest, as it were. Stephen has. He told me that you gave him the personal tour. I felt — left out.” He comes forward into the pale of light by the rear door of the first-floor apartment. “It’s really quite lovely. Very do mes tic.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re doing here. Did Dad send you to break my arms if I don’t show up tonight or something?”

He laughs. His bare throat gray in the dark.

“It’s not like you would do what I told you to. Not anymore. Is it?”

It’s a strange thing to say. I can feel my heartbeat under my ribs.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Take me with you.”

“No.” And because the statement is so bald, I laugh and turn away from him and jog down the sidewalk. I think I hear his footsteps behind me but I doubt my brother can keep up. It surprises me how something as simple as running — an action Homo sapiens adapted for particularly, the speedy lope of the two-legged creature across the plains — seems so challenging to most people. One time, when I was a couple minutes late for an appointment with Telushkin, I didn’t shower first. Just showed up in his office slick with sweat and breathing hard. He asked how many miles I had run that morning, and when I told him he shook his head and said he could never run like that. I had laughed. He is potbellied, his skin slack on his bones. He seemed to think the laughter was offensive.

I squat on the glass-speckled gravel and hand over the sandwich. Desiree talks to me about blue and cops and words that seem to be either Klingon or some archaic form of pig Latin.

She glances over her shoulder. She freezes for half a second, then wrenches her head to the side like she’s been struck. Her fingers splay over her forehead. She starts to moan.

I look around and see my brother.

For a second I don’t do anything.

Then I jump up. For some reason I’m angry.

“I told you not to come, you fucking asshole.”

He laughs and gravel skitters under his shoes as he comes down the slope. “But I was curious, my darling.” He stops and looks around, his fingers playing with strands of his hair. His eyes travel over the backpack, the shopping cart, over Desiree bobbing her chin and patting her forehead with her palm, rocking back and forth. I can’t tell if she’s having some sort of attack or just greeting my brother in her planet’s native language.