Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“Let her up.”

The weight lifts off.

My mouth is sticky and dirt cakes my tongue.

A cop with a face like a slice of Spam, pinked and moist. He bends over me. He is chewing gum, and his pores reek of fermented hops and latex. He grips a gun in both hands, the nose downward-angled, a professional bend in his knees. His small pupils fix on me.

He is talking but I can’t tell if it’s to me or to a woman wearing a brown creased suit who stands next to him, a city detective badge swinging from a cord around her neck. Through the open apartment door the kitchen light shines like leaking blood onto the sheet ice caked over the cement stoop. A man is crying by the doorway. The woman in the brown suit is swiveled on her hips to stare at me but from the angle of her torso I think she was questioning him a second before.

I scramble to my feet and wipe dirt from my chin. I wait. But the cop just stands there. So I brush past him and go up to the door. The man standing on the stoop wears gray sweatpants and an OSU fleece jacket. Golden licks of light on his sweat-sheened skin. He snivels. He looks vaguely familiar and I think he must be the apartment’s inhabitant, that I have passed him while taking out the trash or heading to my car.

The woman in the brown suit is demanding something from him, a sharp cadence repeated.

“No,” the crying man says and sniffs hard, wiping his palm across his chin. “I swear to God I don’t know who she is. I don’t recognize anyone .”

I climb up onto the stoop next to him but don’t break through the yellow tape across the open doorway. The wind tangles in my hair. The air fresh smell of snowy cold is tainted with an acrid stench, ammonia and bleach mixed with something sweet and salty.

The kitchen linoleum, a crackled, heat-warped skin, the twin of our floor above. Framed by quotidian kitchen appliances — an old Whirlpool dishwasher, a dented Kensington refrigerator — sits a metal folding chair. A hand armed with scalpel instead of brush has sculpted this body, this teak-skinned, ash-eyed, naked woman. Her breasts, like jam-filled silk, dangle above arms cradling an obscene mass of pinkish-gray small intestine, lumpy ridges of large intestine lying coiled in the crook under a slit of rib. Duct tape wrapped around the back frame of the chair and across her ribs, just under her breasts, holds her upright in a seated position. Her neck and head bow to gravity and her curved spine, her gently bent arms, are masterstrokes. She is a visceral Madonna, an impious pietà.

A dizzying familiarity, as if this scene has been acted out a thousand times. I knew who it was before I saw her. The minute I saw the lights, I knew who I would find.

Desiree, the woman to whom I gave a peanut butter and jelly sandwich not ten hours earlier, and who, not quite two months ago, in one brief gesture of humanity, signed her fate.

A hot sour taste and a sharp pain in my gut. The importance of paying attention this time. I feel the cops around me, watching me. My heart is pounding. I want to stare at her but I can’t afford it. I hold some terrible noise shut in the back of my throat, some yell or scream.

I make myself study the room, the position of the body. I notice odd aspects of this human artwork: the duct tape around her throat. A slit throat, maybe. The bruised darkening around the skull. Body hung upside-down to drain. That would explain the bloodless intestines

But not here. No blood pool around the chair.

Where, then? The railroad tracks? Or —

I feel like I’m going to fall down. I hold very still, breathe, and think.

And I know how she was hung. I see those butchering sites from the web flashing behind my eyelids. How do I remember them so clearly? I feel as if I have seen them somewhere else.

I turn away from the doorway, stumble off the cracked cement stoop. The ground under my feet is uncertain.

The pink-faced cop face asks questions. Do I know her. Did I kill her. Where was I. I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything. I want to ignore them but the cops surround me. One puts a hand out when I try to slide past and get back to the car. Then the meaty cop comes up behind me. His palm slides over my wrists as he cuffs me. Mucus-thick sweat coats my skin.

The backseat of the cop car smells like cigarette smoke and vomit and piss. A nub of stubbed plastic where the interior handles were removed. I always wondered if cop cars were modified or created fully formed, a vehicular Athena emerging from the cranium of Crown Victoria. Enlightenment comes at the oddest times.

My heartbeat is unsteady. Sometimes it feels as if it has stopped altogether and I wait in silence for the knowledge that I am still alive.

Streetlights striate the darkness, swiping yellow across my legs, sliding up my body and disappearing into darkness.

In daylight, I have run and driven past the sand-colored edifice with pale stacked steps and shining plaques of fallen public servants. Tonight the car takes me underneath the glimmering edifice. The cop car burrows into a cement parking deck, gnome-globe lights casting sickly prickles across chipped plaster walls. A steel door. The smell of industrial bleach.

A small room with a metal-framed table, a chair. He uncuffs me and leaves me alone in the room. A while later the woman in a brown suit comes in. A young cop in uniform behind her carries a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He puts it down on the table.

The woman slaps a buff-colored folder down on the table. The folder is stenciled with the letters C.A.P.U. and the seal of the city of Akron.

The woman leans across the metal table. In the strange naked light her extended palm looks like uncooked chicken flesh.

“Detective Sandra Smith,” she says. “Crimes Against Persons.”

When I don’t offer my own hand she draws back and folds her hands in front of her. She puts her lips together neatly, but other than that small motion her facial expression does not change. She stands with one leg slack, a confident posture. Standing is unnecessary. Her confidence is unnecessary. I already know that — Jesus, the clichés are endless. The other shoe has dropped. The straw has broken the camel’s back. The fat lady has wound up her high notes. I am metaphorically fucked.

“Why don’t we start off with your name. Would you state your full name, please?”

The words start off ripple, seeming to undulate through the mote-strewn air. When you’re old, you’re smart about stuff and you don’t get caught .

The smell of bleach. Bleach and ammonia.

I swallow. My fingernails press against my palms. The smell of — the smell in the kitchen, Desiree’s body, but the smell lying thick in the kitchen was not blood but bleach. Her death was quick but her after-death, the arrangement of her mortal coil, took longer, a meticulous marriage of aesthetics and pragmatics. I realize that her corpse is forensically mute. No evidence, if any existed, of my proximity to her, my hands on hers, my fingerprints on the plastic baggie of her sandwich, wherever it is. She was killed far from her lair, far from our contact, her body purged of my spore. But she was killed underneath my home. Or, underneath mine, and that of my strange-eyed, innocent-faced roommate.

“For what?” My voice surprises me, a hoarse whisper. I swallow.

“You’re a person of interest right now, not a suspect. You don’t need a lawyer, though you have a right to one. If you want one we can get a lawyer down here. But we’re just going to ask you a few questions, figure out how you fit into the equation. All right? Let’s start with your name.”

She is staring at me so intently that her gaze feels like fingers pressing against the skin over my cheekbones. I want to look away. I want to jump up and smash her head into the stainless steel table edge. I squint slightly to force my gaze to hold hers, to hold steady, to appear sane and ordinary. “My, my wallet with my ID got taken at the desk when I came in. I’m, I mean, that’s me.”