Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“Pay attention. Okay?” The skin on my face feels brittle, like the muscles are cracking, shattering. “It would be right to kill you. You’re a human disease and I would be like a doctor if I killed you. A good person. You know? So don’t think that this is mercy. It’s not. Okay? It’s not . This doesn’t make me a good person.”

His eyes find my face. He lies limp, staring at me. His breath rattles like pebbles in a bowl.

The knife blade snicks shut as I press it against my thigh. I get up and go outside and shut the apartment door behind me, and I wait to feel something. Guilt, grief, exultation.

Then I push through the stairwell door and emerge in an alley stained plum-colored by a watery crepuscular sky.

After I leave the drug dealer’s apartment I wander the city for hours. A fierce dawn breaks through rainclouds and a faint smell of rotting trash hangs like a pall over the city.

I call my brother at eight in the morning.

“So you need to know,” I tell him. I explain that I did not kill the man. “And, come on. You don’t need him dead. Killing him is stupid, it’s just plain fucking stupid and I’m not going to lose twenty years of good behavior for some total asshole. And don’t worry, because I’ll think of something else, okay? We’ll figure it out. You’re not going to ruin your life and mine and everyone else’s by telling anyone anything.”

“Mickey, chrissake, come on! He’s evil . No loss to humankind. You kill him and you’re still, what is it you want to be? A good person? You fucking are, you are , if you kill him. And darling, you need to kill people.”

“No I don’t. I did that once for you. And I’m not doing it again.”

He laughs. He talks again, his voice wheedling up and falling into raging lows.

My head hurts. I yawn. After a while, I say, “Just shut the fuck up. You sound like a lunatic.”

He swears and hangs up on me.

Wind skitters trash across the sidewalk. Cars zip past, churning slush. I hug my fingers under opposite arms, clenching my elbows tight against my ribs. I imagine some medical examiner slicing open my body and finding my blood slurry and thick as a cherry-flavored slush.

I am so cold my stomach muscles are twitching, I haven’t slept in almost two days, and in the past twelve hours I have pissed off, terrified, and almost killed half of the people I know. But for some reason I feel — I feel okay. I didn’t kill that man. I put the knife down and I left.

The phone buzzes in my hip pocket.

“You did it to yourself,” he says. My brother’s voice is brittle, the pitch strung tight and quavering. He’s talking so fast that I don’t understand what he means. What is on fire?

And then I laugh.

“You asshole,” I say. “That’s not even a joke. ‘I set your car on fire’ is a joke?”

“You had a choice, I swear, I told you I needed you to kill that guy. They’ll find something, trace evidence, DNA, something. You had the chance. You could have saved me.”

“The car is a 1971 Chevelle.”

“I don’t — are you listening to me? Are you fucking list ening? I needed you to cover for me just one more time, okay? I fucking need ed you and you didn’t do anything, you didn’t fucking do anything. I gave you everything and you could have saved me, you could have—”

My knuckles start to hurt.

“But,” I say. “But I need my car. I can’t — I mean, just give me the—” My voice breaks. “Just, can you, put out the fire or, or—”

“—but you didn’t. You turned your back on me. So if you want it that way, fine. Fine . You want to destroy me? Is that what you want?” He starts breathing hard. “Jesus,” he says, and his voice is high-pitched, almost childlike. “Why are you doing this to me? Why ?”

“But my car,” I say.

My cell phone illuminates. Call ended.

I press the phone hard against my ear.

My brother has never hung up on me before in our lives.

I want to find the right thing to say that will make time unravel.

Silence.

I stop walking. Someone pushes past me.

I sit down on the edge of the sidewalk with my feet in the gutter and lean forward and put my forehead on my knees. I put my hands over my head, holding the crown like it’s fragile, like it might explode.

I rock.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

People call to each other. Brush past me. I cringe away. The noise makes my head hurt. A freshening blue sky. Car horns blaring. A siren wailing in the distance.

The headache throbs harder. I can feel each beat of my heart in the ache. People shove by me. Elbows, arms, everywhere the smell of cooking food, sweat, piss, the smells of soiled human existence pressing against me, bruising my skin.

I want to run away. But I can’t run fast enough to escape this. I want — I need my car. Oh Jesus. If Dave tells the truth, the whole fragile construct of our lives will implode.

I put my fist to my mouth and bite my thumb to keep from screaming.

No air. Choking.

The dream again: falling into a void, into the vacuum pressure of a black hole.

I hate this fucking dream. The man on the steps. Blood. The taste of it in my mouth, coppery and sweet. In the dream I am pure rage, pure energy. Unleashed violence. In the dream there is no coming back. No more human left. Just the burning rage. The blood.

What I did when I was ten was wrong and I knew it and I knew that I deserved all those years of shrink visits and pills and boredom and rules. What I never fully realized was just how awful my crime was. The murder, that was wrong. Pulling out his eye was sick. It didn’t occur to me until now that the one good thing I did that day, my attempt to save my brother, was the worst of all my crimes. I know I will be punished for that crime, too, today or some other day. I don’t know if I can stand it.

I feel like vomiting.

If he tells, if our parents find out — I don’t know what will happen. All I can see is Aidan bending over the couch like a person dying of some incurable grief.

I open my eyes.

And I get up and run.

When I go inside, Dave’s apartment is empty.

I stand in the middle of the empty living space. Listening.

Then I turn and go towards the bathroom. And I halt in the doorway like I’ve run into a glass wall.

He’s lying fully clothed, collapsed in the corner of the shower with one leg sprawled out onto the bathroom tile. The shower is running. The water smells sulfuric, pumps out in fitful gusts and rattles. His arms draped at his sides, scarlet strings running from his wrists down the stained grout, splitting like a forged river around crusts of mold.

He looks up at me. Whispers, “You were — gone so long.”

I rest my head gently against the tile wall.

He tries to lift a hand. It flutters, the fingertips twitching. A small switchblade lies on the tile beside him. His lips move.

“—cops come,” he’s saying, trying to say. A dry tongue circles his lips. “Cops come, I’ll tell them — it was you. It’s okay. I know how much you want to — to—”

He still believes in his gift to me — the gift of the world believing in my psychosis. He was so fascinated by my pathology, by the way that I said and did things that startled ordinary people, appalled them, by how my mind galloped into dark places everyone else spends their lives hiding from. He thought I wanted to be free to live in the dark places. I know that I’m crazy, but I don’t want to be a sociopath. I’ve only ever wanted to be normal.

I take a breath. “It’s okay. I’m here now.”

I kneel down, my knees on the slick tile. He reaches for me. His fingers are cold, his skin clammy. “Kill me,” he says. “The — knife there.”