Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

He smiles. He leans forward and puts his hand around the back of my neck. His fingernails dig into my skin. I choke on a swallow. He bends his head against my shoulder. I can smell stale, unwashed body.

“ Get off .”

He kisses my shoulder and steps away. “This is ours,” he says. “He doesn’t have this . Aidan doesn’t. Your meat pet. Your little pretty boy. No one has this. This is ours. This is real .”

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else, establishing an alibi or something?”

He licks his lips. His eyes glisten. He hesitates like he wants to say something. We both wait. We listen. I know that my brother has no real reason to kill the man upstairs. I know that. My brother may do drugs, but he has no capacity for addiction. He is, as he would be the first to admit, a god, a shaper and wreaker, not one who is wrought. Oh, I have no doubt that the actual facts of the case are true: the man for whom death waits is most likely one of those invisible people, stolen or purchased identity, habitual association with the lowest of criminal lowlifes. But I doubt that he holds my brother’s life in his hands. My brother is not the sort to permit such power to anyone besides me.

He wants me to kill that man for a different reason altogether.

“I should,” he whispers. “Yes.”

My brother turns and leaves. The metal door drifts shut behind him.

The stairwell is hot and when the door shuts it snuffs out the brief breath of rain-damp air. I go up the stairs. Gray smudges and fingerprints line the wall by the loose railing. Graffiti. The smell of ramen noodles, cigarette smoke, marijuana.

I stop on the stairs and turn and look down. The runner lights overhead buzz. My uncertain shadow shifts over the wall. The landing below is empty. I put the back of my wrist against the side of my skull, where inside a warm pain nestles. My molars ache. My jaw is clenched. The faint coppery taste of adrenaline. The pressure under my ribs.

The hallway of the fourth floor. A baby’s cracked voice ululates behind a closed door. The muffled sizzle of TV. Human spore.

I go down the hall looking at numbers. At 403, I stop and put my fingers gently against the cool metal of the door handle. The door is locked. I put the knife into my jeans pocket and with one palm pressed against the bulge, I set the other knuckles against the door. Take a breath. Knock. Three times. Clean and sharp.

After a long time, I hear the creak of floorboards and the rasp of the spyhole cover being lifted.

Then the lock clicks and the door opens an inch and a half.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The room exhales a pale miasma of boiled cabbage and cum.

“I’ve got payment. From one of your clients.”

I hold out the wad of twenties.

“You with the cops?”

“No.”

The door opens and I go inside. I walk into the main room. A TV on a broken coffee table. A splay of glossy foldouts, empty cartons of Chinese, a few crumpled wads of tinfoil, and the magazine of a nine-millimeter semiautomatic.

“You want soda? Beer?”

“Coke, please.”

He looks at me. He’s wearing a thin, stained T-shirt and his belly sags underneath it, flaccid and hairy. A gun stuck in the back of his too-tight sweatpants. The skin over his balding head and the backs of his hands is freckled. He’s so overweight that as he stands looking at me I can hear his breath wheezing, air exhaled through a moist sponge.

Then he says, “Coke it is. Coming up.” His lower lip glistens with saliva. He’s missing several teeth. He turns and goes into a small kitchen. He comes out with a can of Coke.

I put the twenties into his sweaty hand and take the cool can. Pop the lid and watch the run of sticky brown liquid. I sip. He snaps off the rubber band and thumbs through the twenties.

“Who’s this from?”

When I don’t answer, he thumbs through the roll. “Well, this is only three grand,” he says. He pronounces it, “Tree grand.” I wonder if the accent is put on.

I lick my lips. Show time. “Yes. I know.”

I bend down and set the Coke carefully on the floor. I straighten, my hand coming out of my pocket with the knife hasp in the palm. I flick open the blade.

“What—?”

His hands go back behind him.

I raise the knife and put the tip against my own throat.

“Wait.”

His hands reappear. His mouth is open. The room is very small. Sweat oozes around his nostrils.

“You know David Berkowitz, right?”

“David — what? Who are you?”

I say, “Berkowitz. Stay with me, please. You know who he is, right? Son of Sam?”

“The — the serial killer, right. Yeah, okay. So what?”

“You want to know the thing about serial killers?”

He licks his lips. “What?”

I press the blade, tipping it slightly against the skin. I feel the warmth of blood easing down my neck. The blood collects in the hollow of my collarbone. I lift the blade away from my neck.

“Jesus,” he says.

“The thing is,” I say, “that they suffer from an inability to imagine other people’s pain. And you know what else?”

He swallows. His cheeks shiver when he shakes his head once.

“That lack of imagination? It works for themselves, too. See, most people can imagine pain even when they’re not feeling it — their own. Someone else’s. That empathetic experience makes them avoid pain. Both their own and other people’s. You following so far?”

“What the fuck is this?”

“Okay. The deal is this. You can’t threaten a serial killer. What can you do? They’re not afraid of pain. They’re not afraid of their own pain and they’re sure as fuck not afraid of anyone else’s, because they can’t imagine it. In fact—”

I step forward and raise the blade with both hands, the one gripped around the handle, the other hand cupped under the end of the blade, supporting the meaty palm of the other hand. The basic grip for an up-thrust that puts all of the cutter’s body weight behind the blow. The blade slices cleanly into his right shoulder just under the collarbone, angled up. The tip hits bone. He screams. The sound shrill and echoing.

“In fact, the only thing that feels good to a serial killer is someone else’s pain.”

He lunges at me. I let him come. His body weight tips me back. I shift to the side, my arms circling him like I’m hugging him around the body. I pull the gun from his waistband just as my spine and left elbow hit the floor. He’s on top of me. I hook a foot around his ankle. Lever myself out from under him with my left elbow and the fulcrum of our wedged ankles. His sweat-slippery hands on my arms. I get a hand free and punch the knife at his eye. He screams again and flings up his hands to ward me off and I roll off him and scramble away. I snatch up the magazine from the table. I put the open knife through my jeans waistband and slam the magazine home into the gun. Turn my wrist to see if the safety is off. Then I ratchet back the slide.

I aim the gun at his head. He lies on the floor. Blood spreads over the T-shirt. A drop of sweat rolls off his upper lip and splats on the floor.

He swallows hard. “Don’t — shoot. You can have the — money back.”

“That’s another thing about serial killers.” I thumb off the safety and grip the gun in my right hand. With my left I pull out the knife. “You can’t bribe them not to kill you. You want to know why?”

His head barely moves. His pupils zigzag, white-rimmed.

“It’s because of what I said earlier. The problem with not being able to imagine pain is that the pain center and the pleasure center in the brain are actually the same place. Did you know that?”