Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

I put my thumbs on either side of my nose and press. A calcified knot of pain sits just behind my left eye.

The slick threads of his hair against my fingers, the spongy feel of his bloated skin when I pressed on the slit at the base of his skull.

My fists convulse. I sit back sharply and bump into the desk. The pen rolls across the desk and falls to the floor.

I open my laptop, pull up the library catalog, and scroll through entries for Nietzsche’s works. Then I leave the carrel and wander through the stacks, running my fingers over the crumbling spines. The library carries very few foreign-language copies, and I don’t see any copies of The Gay Science in the original German. When I turn to leave, I see a book wedged beside a Germanic translation of the Bible and a travel guide to Vienna. A thin blue volume with faded letters. I can only make out the “ D ” and the “ issenschaft .”

My cell phone rings. I blink. Look at the phone.

My mom.

Shit.

She’s calling about the dinner. You would think, from how much energy they are expending to enforce my presence at my brother’s birthday dinner, that I am wildly unpredictable. But I’m like clockwork. Dysfunctional, broken, and self-isolating clockwork, but still. I always come home at the same time every day. Then I go for a long run. Then I shower. Then I study or work on my dissertation. Then I check my e-mail and go to bed.

I look at my watch. I am usually running at this time.

I silence my phone and open the book. Flip through a few pages.

The pages are stiff, the binding crusty with disuse, and there is a broken part of the spine that the book wants to open to. When I separate the book at the broken place, I see that a page is missing.

My breath seizes.

When I trace my fingers over the faded script, sounding out the words, the words sound familiar. Und wir — wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen!

And then the faint ruff of a ripped-out page. But I know what that missing page says. I just don’t know how it got from the book to a dead man’s teeth.

I close the book. The tips of my fingers are dusty and itch. I almost slide the book back onto the shelf where its OCLC number belongs. But instead I take it back to my study carrel and put it under a stack of books on old English land reform laws.

The book was misshelved for a while and no one noticed. The shelvers here at the library are mostly undergraduate students on work study. No one cares if a volume is missing.

When I come out from the carrel and lock it behind me, the buzzing fluorescent lights give my skin the yellowed cast of ageing paper.

And we — we must throw off his shadow .

But I don’t know whose shadow to throw off. I don’t know whether I’m being hounded by gods or demons, or how to find my way out from their shadow.

I can’t go home yet. Not with the smell of book glue and burnt paper on me. Not with my mind caught like a stuck needle on German phrases. I grab my duffel bag out of the trunk of the Chevelle and go into the campus gymnasium to change into running gear.

After my run, I return home, shower in scalding water, and watch my skin flare red. Steam billows up and chokes the bathroom with the scent of apple blossom shampoo. Outside the bathroom window the rain comes and goes in waves, applause dimming to a gentle hush.

Everything is wet and clean. I towel off and dress and take a breath. Then I go downstairs, twisting my wet hair into a rope and draping it over my shoulder. The kitchen is full of smells, sweet basil and olive oil sizzling on the stove, rosemary bread baking in the oven. My mother stands over a simmering pot, stirring, droplets of condensation beading her upper lip. She startles when I come in, but she turns toward me. “Oh, honey, hi! I didn’t see you come in. I didn’t know if you were — I’m glad you decided to come.”

Her hands are clasped under her breasts. She pauses, smiling, watching me. Her life is punctuated with strange pauses and verbal ellipses. I have always felt that in her head she plays an edited footage of her own life and in these moments she is blocking in a scene of familial warmth. A kiss to my cheek, perhaps, or a brief maternal embrace.

“Where’s the birthday boy?” I say.

“In the living room. We haven’t had this in a while, have we? The whole family together for a birthday.”

“The whole family?” I realize this is the first family birthday since Dave moved back to Ohio a couple months ago. “He’s coming?”

She’s smiling but the tendons under her translucent skin are tight, carving dark ridges down her neck. “Aren’t you going to be glad to see him?”

“Are you?” I want to know why she looks anxious.

She says, “Of course I am. I’m always glad to see him — to see my whole family. I love all of you.”

I raise my eyebrows a little but don’t say anything to that.

I go into the living room, a wide wood-floored room with brown leather couches and a white shag rug. Separated from the living room by an empty foyer is the solarium, a flagstone room with vast windows and a jungle of green plants, lush sun-house for the mirror-shiny grand piano which sits like a black goddess in the center of the otherwise empty room. I want to go into the solarium where it smells like eucalyptus and orange-scented wood polish. I hate the smell of human bodies, the clammy sweat, and the way human eyes and voices crawl all over me, sticky, brutish, bruising .

The TV is on, mumbling to itself. Flashes of blue light reflect off an evening-dark windowpane. Stephen lies on the rug in front of the TV, a game controller in his hand, eyes fixed on his screen avatar. The human-shaped cartoon lurches across rooftops with the graceful stop-motion of a praying mantis.

I sit on the far end of the couch and clear my throat.

“Happy birthday.”

His thumb joints move but the pupils of his eyes remain fixed. “Yeah. I got your message on the bathroom mirror. Classy.”

“Sniper,” I say.

“Yeah, I see it.”

Graphic gunfire rattles the screen with flares of yellow and orange. Red blood like a paint can flung in a slow-motion arc. I think of Stephen’s blood spooling from the sliced umbilical cord.

“I dreamed about your afterbirth last night.”

Without looking around he wrinkles his nose. “Gross.”

I sit forward, my elbows on my knees. “Yeah. You were pretty gross too. When you were born.”

“Some would say,” he says without looking around, “that I still am.”

I smile.

The front doorknob rattles and opens and along with a swirl of ozone-scented air a silvery voice calls, “I’m home! Hello! I’m hee-eere !”

Stephen drops his controller and twists around.

Dave comes into the living room, unwinding a red knit scarf. A man comes in after him, turning to shut the door after them. Dave advances into the wood-floored foyer, pausing under the halo of the glass-shaded lamp with an almost-unconscious theatricality. His hair is untrimmed but he is clean-shaven. Faint red veins splay across the shadowed hollow under his cheekbones.

He holds his arms wide. Stephen goes to him and they hug, Dave cupping Stephen’s face and kissing his forehead loudly before releasing him. Mom comes out wiping her hands on a towel and he kisses her as well, his lyrical voice in cadenced ecstasies over how beautiful she looks. Her eyes catch his fevered sparkle, and her tired lines disappear into a haze of pure happiness.

“Sweetie,” she says, “you’re thin .”

“Sweetie,” Dave says, “you’ll feed me.” They both laugh. Stephen crosses his arms around his middle and shifts his weight.