Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

Aidan makes a noise like a grunt. He looks down at the knife lying by Dave’s thigh and his fingers reach out, touch it, and close around the handle. He looks around at the empty apartment behind him as if someone will arrive, leaping out at the last minute to free him from his dilemma. But no one comes.

“Do it. Darling, do it.”

Aidan looks down at the knife in his fist. He swallows hard.

Dave reaches out and his fingers touch Aidan’s face. Aidan jerks. The hand gripping the knife instinctively pulls back and Dave reaches over and grabs Aidan’s wrist. He laughs.

Aidan gasps and yanks his hand back. It comes free, Dave’s fingers slippery with blood and weak. Aidan’s shirt cuffs are sodden and pink in finger-shaped stripes.

The knife falls from his hand and lands near Dave with a clink. Dave looks down at it. And then he picks it up.

“Well, well,” he says, “will you lookie at that .”

Aidan looks at him, the thin white skin on his forehead pleated. He looks like a confused child.

I feel Dave’s muscles tense and even though I can’t see the direction of his eyes I know what he’s thinking. I know the burning fixation in his mind that won’t forget the knife, that won’t ignore the pulsing blue-purple vein in Aidan’s thin neck, and that can’t resist the increasing proximity between the two.

“No,” I say. “ Don’t .”

I grab Dave’s hand to force it down, dig my fingernails into his wrist. He’s weaker than I thought. His arm falls heavy as a flank of meat. The point of the knife slices down cleanly into his thigh.

Dave chokes, gasps. His head bucks back into my chest.

I let go.

Aidan whispers, “Oh Christ.” He stumbles to his knees, his feet, and runs into the main room. He coughs and then retches loudly.

A dark pulsing gush.

I push the weight of Dave’s torso to the side. I press my fingers against the hot rhythmic spurts. I know there has to be a way to find the severed artery. My hands slip.

Dave tenses. And then, slowly, he relaxes. His muscles unclench. A tremor ripples through his left leg. His breath trickles out and then he inhales and holds his breath. He coughs once.

“ No ,” I say. I hit him in the chest and then in the face. A dark blood print across his cheek. “Come on. No. Please. No. Jesus, please, come on.”

My chest is an empty cavity. I can’t breathe. It hurts. A tight hard knot of pain under my ribs. It hurts like my heart has stopped beating and won’t ever start again.

Noise swells into a sudden cacophony. Harsh strident voices in the hall. Fists bang on the door. Aidan’s silhouette rises up in the living room, haloed in red and blue. The paramedics have come.

The bathroom fills with sound and smell and the heat of sweating bodies. They move in sharp, efficient gestures in the tiny bathroom space. Hairy arms and plastic hands reaching, pushing, pulling. Professional latex gloves pressing into his thigh, a rubber tube wrapped around his leg and pulled tight. When they lift Dave away from me his left arm slips, the hand falling with a thud to the floorboards. Black strands of my hair dangle from his thin fingers.

They haul Dave to the main room and strap him to a gurney. Aidan is hunched on the couch, his arms wrapped around his chest, rocking back and forth.

Blood and sulfuric water stick my shirt to my belly. The dream leaking into real life and this time I can’t wake up. I want to cut something, to feel something, some pain worse than the choking airlessness. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. My lungs cramp. My hands are shaking. The floor is smeared with blood. My hands and shirt. The smell of it everywhere. My hand reaches for the knife where it lies on water-beaded tile. I rise, shivering, the air crystalline and empty around me. The room sparkles. The knife blade is in my fist.

One of the paramedics bent over Dave lifts her head. The skin on her forehead wrinkles and lines curve near her nose. Her upper lip lifts away from her eyeteeth. She looks like a cowering hyena hunched over half-eaten prey that has caught the scent of a starved lioness.

“You poor kid,” she says.

And I realize that I have completely misunderstood the lines on her face.

The knife falls out of my loose fingers.

First comes the scarred tiling and the blue plastic curtains around a crinkle-papered bed at Akron General Hospital. Ten minutes to put three stitches in my neck, swab a little disinfectant, tape on a bandage. Then what feels like hours in the glass-walled waiting room with Aidan hopping up to dash outside and talk on his cell phone, talking, I think to my parents. The black print hanging over the plastic palm fronds in the waiting room: No Cell Phones in the Waiting Area.

Pressing my damp palms on my jeans knees. Rocking back and forth, breathing shallowly through my mouth. It smells like perfume and feces and hair oil. Swallowing spit. Quick trot down the hall, sneakers squeaking on the freshly-mopped linoleum. Bang into the women’s, shoulder open a stall door, try to vomit but nothing comes up.

When the shakes calm down I go out of the stall and lean over the sink. Cup my hands under an automatic faucet that keeps failing. Rub my damp soapy hands over my face.

The mirror reflects pale skin, blank dark eyes. I want to see some expression on that face, some shift or tightening of muscles that will tell me what it feels.

Nothing changes.

I look down at the sink. I wish that I could throw up. Or cry. I want to be loud.

I wipe my hands on a paper towel and go back out into the waiting room.

Aidan’s standing in the waiting room trying to look calm.

“You holding up?”

I look at him and then go over to the chairs and sit down.

The skin by his mouth crinkles as he sort of collapses into himself. He’s trying, the poor kid is, to hold together the tattered threads of my life, of his life, of all of our lives, the strands of a shot-to-shit family that isn’t his. I don’t know why.

He sits down next to me, legs splayed out. He picks up a magazine and starts to flip through it. He has been calm, which surprises me. The wild panic of earlier receded and when they took Dave away he got up and came over to me. He picked up the knife, wiped it off on his T-shirt, and folded the blade up. I don’t know where he put it.

He’s controlled, peaceful now. Even his hands are quiet. The only noticeable change in his demeanor is the odd, almost proprietary way in which he answers questions. He says that my brother called us, that we went together, arrived to find him so far gone. With grief and some level of competence we joined him in the shower to staunch the flow or to (a hitch in breath) be with him to the end. He speaks in the plural as easily as if born to it.

I get up and walk over to the plate glass window. Thinking how many sharp objects are in the waiting room and how it smells of antiseptic but everything feels foul, gritty, infected.

My parents and Stephen arrive. How’s he doing, my mother says, and doctors say, blood transfusions, and if he stabilizes, and so forth. Tissues. Snot dripping from the edge of my mother’s left nostril. A nurse leads them back. They confer with doctors in a conference room. They are led behind the plastic curtain.

12:23 P.M.

My parents and Stephen come back from his room. They sit in chairs opposite the ones in which Aidan and I perch.

We wait in silence.

Stephen says, “So, um, what happened?”

My father clears his throat. He opens his hands and then closes them. But he doesn’t say anything.

I clear my throat. “Are you hungry?”

They all look at me in surprise.

I say to Stephen, “You want to get something to eat? We could go find a cafeteria.”