Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

When I was sixteen I got one last shrink who downgraded me for the final time, said I had “antisocial personality disorder” and that he’d send my parents a bill. I’ve been drug- and shrink-free for the last twelve years.

But even after so many years of legal purity, I can’t imagine that claiming to have “discovered” a corpse in a condemned house on whose premises I had no reason to be would go over well with Akron’s finest. If I decide to play the civically responsible individual, in all likelihood what freedom I now have would end with my being abruptly returned to closely monitored living quarters and mandated psychotherapy.

Finding a corpse and not calling the cops is wrong. I know that.

But. Finding that corpse…

I think of my hands wandering over the wallpaper, the stair railing, the doorknobs, at 411 Allyn Street. My hair falling across the corpse’s naked vertebrae. In addition to the inevitably uncomfortable questions I would face if I, with my preadolescent psychiatric record, reported finding the corpse, there is the one other little problem as well: I was set up. That note was intended to make me curious, to make me explore the condemned house, leaving fingerprints all over the place. It’s not like I would necessarily get convicted, but at the very least I would be a suspect.

If I don’t report the body, I could be in worse trouble once the Akron police department steps in and finds those prints. Then again, there’s nothing to connect me to the site except for my fingerprints, and my fingerprints would only bring up a sealed juvenile record. Besides, the corpse has been there for at least a day, probably more, by the smell. The note left in my message box was dated yesterday. So far there hasn’t been any hue and cry. If I wait — just don’t say anything, or do anything unusual for a few days — well, I don’t know what will happen next.

I pick at dry skin on my lower lip until I taste salt. I drop my hand to my knee and stare at the limb. Because all of this is pointless, really. I don’t want to do the therapy circuit again, and I won’t risk going near any more corpses. Which leaves me with exactly the same option I faced ten years ago when I decided to move into my parents’ garage and live like a saint in a monk’s cell. I know what I will do and it is what I have done since I was ten, what I will always do, world without end, amen. I will do nothing.

The worst part is, I don’t know what this decision means, if it shows the strength of my resolve to be civilized, or if it makes me monstrous. I get up and hold my hands under the hot water tap in the industrial sink until my fingers have stopped shaking. Above the sink a flyspecked mirror reflects a pale-skinned ovoid face with two eyes, one nose, one forehead, two lips and approximately thirty-two teeth. The human face, unblinking, looks away while the human hands turn off the tap, dry themselves on a towel, and two human feet walk steadily to the door. I go back out to the car, sitting patiently under a white-scabbed sky.

I drive back to campus because the only rules for normalcy I have involve going to the university. I need to find out who left the message in the box. I climb the stairs to the English department floor. My palm squeaks against the over-polished metal railing. Outside the glass door with the stenciled words “Department of English” in some faux-Old Germanic script, I stop and wipe my palms on my thighs. Then I stick my iPod earbuds in my ears and push through the door. I don’t know how to ask. The office is open from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. every day and the department secretary won’t necessarily have seen everyone coming and going. She takes long breaks, heading across town to Panera to chat with her friends, while a student worker sits behind the desk and reads Us Weekly .

Maybe the graduate students will know. Maybe it was one of them. I have almost reached the graduate student office when a finger touches my scapula. My whole body flinches. My heartbeat thuds in my neck and pain grips my scalp like fingernails dug hard into my skull. I take a breath and let it out.

I pull out an earbud and turn around. It’s the department secretary, wearing blue polyester and smelling like overripe peaches and greasy sausage. Her little shiny marble eyes stare up at me and her mouth is moving. “ — Brandis?”

I realize she has been saying my name. In my left ear, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in E major swells to a crescendo.

“The dean called again. He wants to see you at your ear liest convenience.”

I can almost hear the dean’s inflection in her voice.

I swallow. “Okay.” It comes out faint, cracked in the middle.

Her little face crumples when I answer. She starts to smile. “He’s been calling all morning, you know. I’m so glad I finally caught you! I’ll just tell him you’re on your way.”

She trots off. Her small bottom twitches under the shiny synthetic fabric of her suit skirt. I watch her go. I didn’t mean, “Okay I will go see the dean.” I can’t go see the dean.

She doesn’t understand.

But she’s on the phone already. She glances up and smiles at me. Her mouth is moving, the lips pushing in and out like she’s chewing.

“Who else leaves me messages?”

The sound of my voice is loud. It sounds metallic, echoing. I wonder if something is wrong with my ears.

The secretary ignores me, just holds up one finger and keeps talking.

After she hangs up the phone she leans forward. Hair falls over her left eye.

“What was that now?”

“The dean and my dissertation director,” I say. “Who else? Who else leaves me notes?”

“No one that I know of,” she says. She smiles at me. Her lips are shiny with semiliquid gloss. She looks fake, painted.

“Someone else left me a message,” I say. “Was it one of them?” I point to the grad student office door.

Her little mouth wrinkles around the edges. “As far as I know, Ms. Brandis, the only person leaving you messages all day is the dean. Maybe you should ask him .”

I imagine talking to me feels like licking soap to her. She is not helpful. I think that she would walk a far distance to avoid noticing anything about me, or talking to me. She is not likely to be an observant source of information.

I turn and walk down the hall toward the stairwell.

One time — I must have been thirteen or so, down to one psychiatric visit a week — my shrink du jour asked me if I ever felt happy, or sorry for someone else, or scared. I told her she was wrong to imply I didn’t feel things. “It’s just that other people feel with their emotions,” I told her. “And I only feel with the nerve ends under my skin.”

She gave a snort of laughter so hard her glasses slipped down her nose. Then she straightened her glasses and smoothed her hand over her mouth. “That was a good one,” she said. “You got me with that one.”

But I hadn’t meant to tell a joke. My face felt hot and I wanted to punch her in the mouth.

In retrospect, I should have explained it better. It’s not that I don’t feel things. It’s that the emotional center in my brain feels like it’s a million galaxies away but the world around me is pressing in on me, hot and sticky and loud, full of bright colors and breathing and textures. By the time I figured out how to explain myself I was seeing a different psychiatrist who didn’t care about feelings, only about dosages and fifty-two minute sessions. In my adolescence I went to more psychologists and psychiatrists than most kids go to football games or sleepovers. I understand the way my mind works better than tax attorneys understand the month of March, but sometimes I wonder if a big part of my problem isn’t just that I never learned the basics that most kids learn at those games and parties. I mean, I figured out how to tell jokes. I just never learned how to laugh at them. Sometimes I think I could have turned out so much closer to normal if I had just been forced to act like a normal kid.