My Second Death (6 page)

“I said yeah.”

“Okay.” He sat down and opened his comic book.

I push my plate away and pinch the skin of my forehead between my two clenched fists. I need to get out of here, go somewhere I can breathe. Time for Elvis to leave the building.

I put my napkin on the table and go into the kitchen. I rinse my hands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing them in water so hot that curtains of steam waft upwards.

In the dining room, Dad says, “Thank you for a wonderful meal, Cynthia. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go over that FIDC report. Aidan, a pleasure.”

A chair scrapes. The rustle of wrapping paper.

Mom says, “Stephen, honey, did you want more dessert?”

He mumbles a reply, apparently committed to collecting his stash and retreating again to his lair, which is equipped with headphones and an Internet connection to the world beyond his home. I figure he’s earned his retreat.

Mom calls after him. “Don’t forget that you’re taking the PSAT on Saturday. Are you still planning to ride with the Rosenbergs?”

Stephen’s voice fades as he moves up the stairs.

Mom comes back into the kitchen with a stack of used plates, her lower lip pinched between her teeth. Then Aidan comes in carrying his own and Dave’s used bowls to the sink. I back away and lean against the counter, watching him.

He turns on the faucet.

Mom says, “You don’t have to, Aidan.”

“It’s okay. I kind of like doing dishes.”

Mom scrapes marinara sauce into a glass bowl. “So you two go to school together,” she says. “Have you been in any classes together?”

“Oh yes,” I say. “All of them. At recess we plait flowers into each other’s hair.”

Aidan gives a small cough. “It’s a pretty big place,” he says. “But actually I did meet Michaela — ”

“Mickey.”

His eyes flick up at me. “ — Mickey. We met at Dave’s poetry reading, the one on campus a couple weeks ago. You came in at the end.”

I frown. Because I do remember the night in question. About a week, maybe a week and a half ago, my much-vaunted (in certain select, poetry-reading circles) brother gave a reading at the university. Being my brother, he’s lost his license due to a third DUI. He required the services of a pro bono chauffeur, which inevitably ends up being me. I waited two hours in the parking lot but there were still people clustered around him when I went in to fetch him. He was leaning an elbow on the podium, his hair falling in his eyes, laughing. He may have pointed this wall-eyed stranger out to me. He could have pointed Elijah reincarnated out to me. I was too busy concentrating on dragging him away from his personal paradise of wattle-chinned geriatric poetry fans to notice.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Mom says. “Michaela, you didn’t tell me you knew him.”

“How odd,” I say. “He made such a lasting impression.”

But Aidan is watching me. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away. He’s holding a half-rinsed dish, and soap suds plink into the sink basin.

I shrug, but it feels more like a squirm. “Sorry.” I don’t even know why I’m apologizing

He blinks then, and turns back to the sink. “No problem.” He starts rinsing again. Slots the bowl in the dish drainer.

“I asked your brother about you,” he says. “Earlier. After we met.”

“Oh, Jesus. You’re not obsessed with me, are you? Do you want to have sex with me or something?”

“Honey,” Mom says.

“What? It’s a legitimate question.” To Aidan, I say, “
Are
you?”

“No.”

“Michaela, sweetie, that’s not — ”

“He doesn’t mind,” I say.

“I don’t mind,” Aidan says. “It’s just part of your condition. Right? Saying things that are offensive?”

There’s a brief silence.

Mom says, “Oh, well, that’s not — ”

“Mom,” I say, “Go away. You’re doing that thing, that
gooey
thing. Everything’s fine.”

She tosses the towel on the counter and walks out of the kitchen. She makes a wide path around me and she doesn’t look back. Her mouth is so thin it looks like a pink thread stitched across her face and the skin around her eyes is flushed like an overripe peach.

Aidan says, “Did we offend your mom?”

I sigh and rub my hand over my mouth. I pick up the towel and wipe off the counter. “I don’t understand why people take offense. If something’s only going to upset them, they could just not care.”

“Unless their feelings got hurt,” he says. There’s a short pause. He rinses off another dish and puts it on the rack. “Dave said that you don’t really — you don’t really
do
feelings.”

For a second I don’t know what to say. “I have them. Feelings.” But that seems inadequate, somehow. Untruthful. So I add, “Sometimes.”

Aidan looks over his shoulder. The left side of his face is toward me and his bad eye dances crazily.

I’m uncomfortable with his staring but it doesn’t feel as awful as other people’s. He looks like he’s waiting, like he’s a chess player watching for my next move, not like he’s trying to peel my skin back and break open the plates of my skull. For some reason, I find myself talking, the words pouring out like I’ve unstoppered a drain. “People don’t feel the right things. That’s the problem. They get — you know, everyone feels all this, all this junk, just messy, squabbly emotions over the smallest things. Like if someone says a political word at dinner, or forgets someone’s name. Those are stupid fucking things to care about. No one cares about the bigger things. You can — people just, you know, they watch all this shit on TV every night, bombings, and drone attacks, and disease, and no one melts down over that. But that’s — at least that’s
real
.”

My voice fades.

Aidan doesn’t say anything for a while. He turns back to the sink and starts washing spoons.

“So you’re getting a PhD?”

It surprises me, the question. Like some art major is more interested in the higher echelons of my intellectual ability than in my sordid, dog-mutilating psychoses. People are usually more morbid. I nod. But his back is to me now. So I say, “Yes.”

“Dave said you were the smartest person he knows. He said you could’ve joined Mensa.”

I laugh.

Aidan looks up.

“I’m not that smart.”

He looks at me like he’s trying to figure something out. “Are you being modest?”

“No. I don’t do modest. I’m smart. I’m really smart. Just not, you know, Mensa-smart. I’m not a genius.”

“Dave said you were.”

Dave has always had an inflated sense of my capacities. I think it’s just part of his love of cheap melodrama. “Well then. I must be.”

He nods once and goes back to washing off the spoons.

“Seriously.” I put my hands in my jeans pockets and lean against the counter. “What’s your deal? Why the twenty questions? They’re not — you’re not like most people.”

For one, he didn’t run out shrieking and crying in the middle of dinner.

“I told you,” he says. “I remembered you. From the reading.”

“Bullshit.” I’ve had this happen a few times. People noticing how I look. Then they talk to me. That’s usually when the interest wanes, and it wanes like that Roadrunner cartoon where the Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and then notices there is nothing but air beneath him. “You shouldn’t still be interested, not after Dave told you about me.”

Aidan shuts off the water and shakes his fingers over the sink. He comes over to the refrigerator to grab a hand towel. I step away from him. He looks at me, one eye straight and fierce, the other a dark aimless orb. “You want the truth?” he says. He’s standing so close I can feel his body heat, smell garlic and wine on his breath. I want to back up but I can’t. My ass is already pressed up against the counter. “I want you to solve a murder.”

My chest feels empty and then my heart starts to beat, each convulsion burning. My mouth goes dry.

“Jesus,” I whisper. “
Christ
.”

He looks a little surprised. His eyebrows rise and he takes a half step back.

“Not an open case.” He starts talking quickly. “It’s not illegal. It was a while ago, like a cold case. The cops already closed it. But — ”

I shake my head. “Wait. Stop.”

He stops talking.

“The cops know about it?”

For a second he looks even more confused. His forehead wrinkles slightly. “Sure. It was a long time ago. It — my mother. It was when I was a kid. My mother died. The cops say — well, it’s technically unsolved, they thought it might be homicide but they didn’t have evidence to — ”

“No.”

He backs up another step. “What?”

I push myself off the counter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no — there’s no dead woman.”

“What?”

We just stare at each other. I try to figure out what’s going on. Who he is, this frail, pale-skinned art student with a broken eye. And the incalculable odds that his fascination with me and his mysterious murder have nothing to do with the pink message slip, with 411 Allyn Street.

I take a breath. “You’re talking about — about someone who died a long time ago?”

“Yes,” he says. “My mother. She died ten years ago.”

I look down at the floor, then back at him. “You’re mentally fucking challenged. Dave
told
you about me. Why the fuck would you think it’s a good idea to come to me, to try to — to get me involved with a dead body? With fucking murder, or suicide, or whatever it is? This is — you’re playing with, not fire, God, you’re playing with unstable isotopes in a nuclear reactor. Do you understand that? Do you
get
it?”

“I get it.” He doesn’t even blink. “I didn’t really buy most of what Dave said. And now I’ve met you, I think it was mostly just crap. I think you’re more normal than he said. You’ve got emotions. You just don’t… you know. Coddle people.”

“I don’t — what the fuck are you talking about?”

He says, “I want someone who’s not afraid of truth. Of hurting people.”

I take a step toward him. My heart is pounding and my head feels weightless, my skull like crepe paper. “This isn’t a joke. You should be afraid of me.”

And his face cracks into a smile. He gives a snort that turns into a laugh, a cough-like bark of happiness surprised out of him.

“Are you kidding?” He grins. “Why would I be afraid of you?”

I can’t breathe. And then I reach out and shove my hands against his chest. He stumbles back a step, his eyes opening wide with shock.

I go around and him fling open the door.

It’s cold, the air snatching at my skin. My sneakers hit the gravel drive with a crunch.

I’m halfway down the drive when I realize I didn’t even shut the door behind me. When I look back over my shoulder he’s standing there in the door, looking after me, hugging his arms around his chest like some penitent cenobite. The kitchen light limns his silhouette in gold.

I startle awake. A milky glaze of moonlight across the ravaged sheet. My shirt is soaked through. Even my hair is damp. His skin felt rubbery, moisture seeping through the dead pores. I can feel crusted spinal fluid and coagulated blood under my fingernails. I showered and washed my hands three times and they still have that salt and damp soil smell.

I jerk upright and kick off the sheet. Wipe my hands on my T-shirt. My neck and chest itch. I scratch at my skin. It feels gritty. I’m still in my clothes. After I ran out of the house, I just kept running until the cold made me turn back.

And then I must have fallen asleep without undressing.

I bury my face in the pillow and try to calm down from the dream. But with my eyes closed the only thing I can see is the raw pink-gray sheet of veined skin, the only thing I can smell is that syrupy sweet rot of dried blood.

I scramble up and change into running shorts and a warm sweatshirt and I run through the darkest hour, the hour when humans’ circadian rhythms ebb lowest, when the world is asleep and I am alive. I run beneath a piebald predawn sky. I run until my lungs are burning, until the inside of my head is finally calm, swept clean in a breathless gray haze of oxygen deprivation and glycogen depletion.

My calf muscles twitch. Sunlight turns the insides of my eyelids a pulpy reddish-orange. I open my eyes. I’m lying on my mattress, my sports bra and running shorts crisp. My arms powdered with a white salty residue from dried sweat. I sit up. My left calf spasms. I rub my knuckles into the muscle and remember going for a run at, what was it? Five in the morning? And I remember suddenly what woke me up before. The smell. Viscous fluid, my fingernail peeling the — no, the eye belonged to the man I killed when I was ten.

I lie back on the mattress and rest my forearm over my eyes. Dried sweat crystals burn the mucus membranes around my eyes. Fluid collects in the corners of my eyes and leaks down my nose. I’m too tired to run anymore. My legs hurt. Christ.

It doesn’t matter how much I run. How much I follow rules and teach my classes and write my dissertation. How much I show up for family dinners and make conversation. The dreams come back.

I used to think that every year that passed, every year that I lived like an ordinary person, I was like a snake growing larger than its skin. Like I could walk out of one life and into the body of a different person, like a snake sloughing off its papery shell.

But the dreams always come back. And I always wake up the same.

When I was eleven, I died and came back to life.

My life the previous year, after I got out of the psych unit, had been a series of frantic visits to psychiatrists who laid tattered stuffed bunny rabbits on my lap and told me to talk to them, then prescribed medications. Long hours in gray offices spent staring at primary-colored Lego and Fisher Price toys. I asked for my brother but he was in school, dear, he can’t come play with you now. What do you play, when you are with your brother? Does your brother
touch
you when you play?

Assholes.

The visits faded in intensity. Days between shrinks grew longer. My parents’ voices regained a measure of lucidity. My brother’s laughter grew less manic, his eyes less wary and white-rimmed.

At the end of the year the baby was born. Grandparents in the house. Fat happy women from Mom’s Pilates class and gourd-dry academics from Dad’s department. I stayed in my room. Only Dave ventured inside. He budged out the rocking chair I’d shoved in front of the door to bring me white cake with chocolate frosting and to laugh at the decapitated stuffed animals under my pillow.

Months passed. And then in June, a year, more than a year since my first murder, we packed a lunch of pastrami and cheddar sandwiches, baked chips, apple slices. We drove north to Lake Erie to have a picnic on the dirty sand of Mentor Headlands, a cigarette-strewn beach flocked with squabbling seagulls. The water greenblack and vast under a serried gray sky. Cold and endless. Icy yellow foam raced along the sand and we ran through it, my brother and I, our bare feet aching in the cold water. Cloud-shadows skittered like animate inkstains over the crinkled skin of the water.

When they called us in from the water we came flushed, seaweed lacing our toes and our fingers pruned and smelling like rancid fish and old cheese. My mother sat with her knees tilted to the side, a nubby cotton sundress tucked between her thighs, a soft blanket draped over her shoulder. The baby underneath. My father with his pants rolled to his calves, bulbous blue veins prominent on his thin legs. He was reading a book on analytic geometry, his glasses lying in the sand at his side. They looked at us, lips stretching, pushing skin into shapes and angles that were unfamiliar to me. I thought it was happiness.

“You were having fun.”

“Is that a crime?” Dave flung himself by my mother and reached his cold fingers to touch the baby’s toes. The baby’s leg kicked. My mother touched Dave’s face.

“Watch it, young man,” she said and smiled.

He kissed the baby’s toes. Smiled up at her with eyes like Loki, full of a canny joy.

I went away from them down the shore.

And I saw the shape of me walking, growing smaller and smaller on the filthy beach. The earth tipped sideways and I slid off into an airless abyss.

Heat swept over me. I burned from the inside out. My bones shimmered through clear gelatinous flesh. The luminescent sac of my body, emptied of its flesh, slipped off the pebbly sand and drifted up and up through darkness and white light and more dark blacker than the center of nothingness.

And I gasped and opened my eyes. A sick pain bubbled up in my gut. My intestines were a wriggling mass of diseased worms. The taste of vomit caked the insides of my teeth. Everything hurt, a raw weeping pain at the base of my jaw emanating out like tidepool ripples.

And noise, and the stench of burning tires.

The paramedics said it was a seizure. My mother was crying and patting the baby, bouncing it, heedless of the tiny chin knocking against her collarbone.

A woman who smelled like strawberries and talc, her nipples pressing out against her pastel green smock, bent over me in the emergency room and shone a small light in my eyes. A doctor with breath that smelled like peanut butter said it was an idiopathic tonic-clonic seizure, that four out of every hundred children experience them before adolescence. They put me through an MRI and I didn’t mind it. It felt cold and smelled like plastic and aerosol bleach. I knew that the universe smelled like bleach and charred bone and the scent reminded me of my miracle.

A medical attendant asked why I was smiling and I said that I had died and been raised again and my soul was clean.

On Monday I was back in the psychiatrist’s office with a stuffed rabbit on my lap.

I am a pragmatist and so — at least during my waking hours — I no longer believe in miracles or in resurrection. It was a fantasy my mind created to cope, not with the murderer lurking in my eleven-year-old brain, as the shrink suggested, but with my inability to remain on the same stretch of sand with a smiling mother, a nursing brother, a contented father. I think I realized then, in my fumbling, prepubescent way, that I was a demon changeling, the kid who would fuck them up, all of them, for the rest of their lives. An abscess that would never heal.

As an adult, I understand about the seizure, although I never had a seizure again (roughly 60 percent of children who have idiopathic seizures never have another one). Even then at the age of the eleven I was quick to suspect that I had not
actually
died and come alive again. And anyway, even if I had, resurrection is a shitty deal. Because I was returned to this mortal sphere exactly the same as I left it. My first reincarnation was no marked improvement from the original model.

And I realized that my particular flawed brain would not change appreciably on its own. So I created the dialogues in my head, the rules, the obsessive running. It is the only way I know to do it, to fake like I’m an ordinary person. I sleep in a garage and I go to work and I say stupid shit to people so that they leave me alone but I never lay a hand on them. I pay my taxes and keep my dreams to myself and if people touch me I may howl like a talk show host but I don’t take a kitchen knife to them.

After half a lifetime, this game is second nature.