My Second Death (18 page)

The cat looks like it’s been hit by a car or run over with a bike. Either way, the cat has dragged its broken spine across the sidewalk from the parking lot, leaving a smear across the concrete. The animal shows its pink spiny teeth, yowling.

When I move forward, a girl notices me and makes way. “Oh, my God, isn’t it the saddest thing ever? Can you imagine? We don’t even know what to do. Derek went to go see if he could find cardboard or something to put it on so we can take it to the vet or whatever.”

The thing is, I recognize it. The yellow eyes, the patches of caramel and mocha-colored fur. The cat I found in the bathroom sink when I moved into the apartment.

I look up at the kids. They seem so young, their cheeks pink-tinged in the gusty wind as they stare lusty-eyed at the distressed animal, their mouths warped into shapes of distress or disgust.

“Shit.” I sigh and shift my backpack more securely over my shoulder. I nudge the Zips athletic guy with my elbow and he takes a step back, his bullish head swiveling on a golden-brown neck.

I kneel carefully. The fur on the cat’s hind legs is matted with runny diarrhea. I reach out to turn the cat over so that I can see the ruined bowels better. The cat snarls but then when my hand brushes its flared whiskers, it starts suddenly to purr. The cat butts its wedge-shaped skull against my hand. I cup my hand, rub my knuckles once along the smooth side of its cheek. Its rough tongue strokes my finger.

“Oh God,” says a girl behind me. She sounds like she’s crying.

The Aztecs — and I think this is true of many cultures — believed that eating certain parts of their victims, like the heart, imparted the essential qualities of that person. If this cat has an essential quality, it is trust, or forgiveness. The cat looks up at me and I touch its warm chest, its vibrating, rumbling ribs. My fingers feel the cool, slippery coils of pink small intestines. The cat cries once and keeps purring.

When I touch its head I remember driving the knife into the pulpy wood of the stair. I still have that knife. It’s in my backpack. I think it’s Aidan’s knife. I saw him slice open a tube of paint with it. But I’ve held onto it ever since, like a talisman. Like if I held onto it, I would remember how I didn’t kill the cat. But now I will have to anyway.

I feel them around me, the students gathered close at my elbows. I don’t want to get out the knife in front of them. I don’t know how else to do it. But it’s up to me. I did this. I am the one who is the cause of its suffering, even if I’m not a useless moron standing around mordantly luxuriating in its pain like the rest of them.

So I bend over and pick up the cat, gather up the limp hind limbs and the frantic scurrying front legs, the dripping shit and blood and bile and matted fur and purring vocal chords. Warmth bleeds through the fabric of my shirt, and I can feel a dampness against my stomach. The cat cries when I cradle it in my arms.

The cry makes me feel dizzy. But the dizziness doesn’t make sense. This is just a cat I cast into the night a few weeks ago to remove any unnecessary temptation, to prevent myself from giving in to my darker side. I didn’t care then about the animal. Or maybe I did. Maybe I sent the cat away to save it.

I am surprised to find that I’m having a hard time breathing. My chest moves, but air doesn’t seem to flow in or out.

A cat’s skull is small, the neck vertebrae delicate as a china teacup. I grip the head in one hand, the other fist tight on the neck, and wrench the cat’s neck. A snap. The head dangles loose, a broken bone inside loose skin. The thick tangy smell of wet fur and feces.

Sticky fluids, blood and diarrhea, drip between my knuckles and paint stripes down my leg. The students look at me. Their faces are Klee paintings, void eyes and tombstone maws.

Their horror pisses me off. I raise the body of the cat in my two hands, proffered like Abraham lifting up his son to his god. “What? Did you want to let it linger? Do you get off on its suffering? Are you fucking
animals
?”

They jabber frantically, screeching and squawking and flapping away. One trips on the edge of the sidewalk, flails, and steps back into mud, foot sinking with a squelch, an ooze. They yell, and one girl’s face is covered in tears and her eyes shine like burning worms.

And I turn and run off, awkward. The backpack heavy and banging against my spine, the cat too light in my arms.

I get back to the apartment and only then realize I am still carrying it. What do I intend to do? Bring it inside?

Shit.

I look around. The industrial-sized garbage bin in the back parking lot.

I walk around to the parking lot. But I can’t let it go. The eyes are still open. Green-yellow. Staring.

I want to apologize to the cat. I want it to close its eyes. I hate how death does that, steals even the silence of closed eyes. It just keeps fucking
watching
you. It stares at you as you descend into jibbering madness, watches your mind escape out the back door while your hands are covered in blood and viscous fluid from a severed eyeball —

Shitfuckshit.

I’m kneeling on the gravel and it’s sharp in my knees like broken teeth. I claw the backpack open. The knife is in my hand.

I want the cat to stop watching me. The smell of it. The shining smell of viscera and iron-scented blood. The clean snap of its bones. I wish I didn’t like the sound so well. The feeling of it.

Stop it
, I say. I scream at the cat.
Fucking stop it
.

The warmth of the apartment flushes against my skin. I look like a ravaged golem, the cat diarrhea turning tacky and blood drying in flakes.

I walk into the kitchen. My body feels buoyant, a jellyfish floating in a saline silence. I can’t tell if I’m dreaming. Aidan comes home. I hear him at the door behind me. The kitchen light is off. A pale rain-washed gloaming leaks through the large living room window.

My hands are buried in the kitchen sink, rinsing the knife.

He sees the knife lying in the sink, the faucet running uselessly. Some sticky red substance crawling towards the drain.

“Mickey, what — ? Is that — is that
blood
?” He won’t stop nattering away. “I’m not trying to be
nosy
, but I think I’ve got a
right
to know why my knife’s got blood on it and is rusting in the sink.”

My back is to him, head bent, hair fallen down in front of my face and he comes up behind me and I move my head, a curtain of hair falling over my shoulder. He reaches out, his fingers in the fall of hair, and I turn into his hand.

We stand that way in silence, his palm electric against my skin. And then I move with the quickness of a thought, a blink, a flicker. He makes a small hitch in his breath.

I stare at him and the lines of his face and neck are as sharp as awl-etched copper. He looks down at himself, at the rough black knife grip jutting from the sticky brown-red smear on his shirt. I put a hand against his chest and jerk the knife back. He makes a sound like a scream, only faint as a kitten’s cry, and falls to his knees. He hits the linoleum with a dull thud.

I hold the knife under the water again. Turn the faucet handle to hot. Scrub it with lemon-scented suds. Then I dry the knife on my jeans and lay it blade-open on the countertop. I step over him and say, “What did you fucking
think
would happen.”

I startle awake. I’m sitting in the corner of my bedroom, my arms wrapped around my knees. There is a knife in my hand and I’m shivering. Have I been dreaming? Hallucinating?

My dreams are always filled with death. The problem is, my memories are too. Sometimes I have a hard time differentiating them.

Once when I was little, but this was after I killed that guy, so let’s say I was twelve, Dave and I went down to the park near the corner of Rose and Exchange Street. He went to play basketball and I sat cross-legged on a park bench reading a book while listening to the dangling rusted chains of the baskets creaking in the wind.

A girl about Dave’s age came up pushing a baby stroller. The kid was wailing, snot pouring out its squashed-looking nose. I put my finger in the book to mark my place and watched them come up to the bench. I pushed out my jaw and lowered my eyebrows but she didn’t stop. Didn’t even look at me. A basketball bounced across the grass and hit the wheel of the stroller. The girl looked around. “Hey!” she said. “What’s
with
you?”

Dave came jogging across and scooped up the ball. “Sorry,” he said, grinning down at her. He pointed a thumb in my direction. “But you might want to think about moving the kid somewhere else.”

“Oh yeah? Well, it’s a free country, buddy. In case you hadn’t noticed.” She put her hands on her hips. She had a belly ring, and her shirt rode up when she put her hands on her hips so that we could see it. I watched her with interest. Dave balanced the ball on one hipbone, ran a hand through his longish hair. He knew he looked good and he liked to get girls to come on to him. The girl pushed out her lower lip but her eyes got wider and curious, not squinty and angry.

“That’s my sister,” Dave said. “And she’ll eat that kid of yours if you don’t shut it up. You think I’m joking but I’m not. I’m telling you for your own good.”

“Oh, whatever,” she said. But she looked over at me. I was sitting neatly like a little Buddha, a heavy old hardback copy of
The Iliad
on my lap. I looked back at her, unblinking.

“I’m serious,” Dave said. “Really.” His voice had taken on that warm, soft tone. The earnest, almost husky cadence that had everyone from teachers to parents to hormonal, post-adolescent girls melting.
Believing
.

“You’re crazy,” the girl said, looking sideways at me but talking to Dave.

“Crazy?” Dave shook his head. “
She
’s the crazy one. My little sister here killed a man a couple years ago. Just because he tried to touch her. I’m just saying, for your own sake, that you might want to move that kid.”

The girl glared at Dave and grabbed the stroller. She pushed it over the bumpy grass, glancing over her shoulder at us. Dave bounced the ball twice, caught it again, and sat down next to me. He leaned his elbows on the ball and rolled it to his knees and back.

“What book is that?”

I tipped the cover to show him.

“Blood and guts, the original version,” he said. And giggled. He rubbed the back of his hand under his nose. Then he reached over. I ducked under his hand but he grabbed my hair anyway. He held my head with his fingers knotted in the hair at the nape of my neck. Then he put his other hand over my mouth and said, “No biting. Don’t bite, now, little girl.”

I bit him so that he would move his hand, a pinch, not a real bite. He giggled again and pulled his hands away. I shook my head and opened the book and started reading again.

“What?” he said. “Am I
boring
you?”

“You’re annoying me. There’s a fine difference, but those with acuity can tell the difference.”

“Acuity. Do you even
know
what that word means?”

I rolled my eyes without looking up at him.

“So,” he said. And stopped rolling the ball. “Should I have left it here? The little victim? The cute little kid with those big, delicious, juicy — ”

I hit him with the book.

He laughed.

“I don’t eat people.”

“You might. Someday.”

I didn’t say anything. Then after a long time, I said, “I wouldn’t
eat
people.”

He shrugged. “You never know. They might taste good. Jeffrey Dahmer thought so. He was like you. He was antisocial. But he dated people. He liked them. Then he ate them.”

I was quiet for another several seconds. “That’s stupid.”

“What is?”

“Eating your girlfriend.”

Dave laughed. “Well,” he said. “You’ll never know.”

“Why?”

“Because of how you are. No boys will ever date you. I’m pretty much the only person who’ll ever love you.”

“How come?”

“How come what? How come I love you?” He held the ball out and tried to spin it on a finger. It fell and he caught it, hugged it to his stomach. Looked over at me under a fall of dark hair. “Because I can. No one else can. But me, it doesn’t gross me out that you might someday eat people. See what I mean?”

I laughed. “Okay. So, what would people taste like?”

“Maybe like chicken, only stringier.”

I grinned. “Oh, and maybe a fat person tastes like bacon.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I think it would be tangier. Like that venison we had that time that Uncle Randy killed the deer. Remember when we ate that deer?”

“Yeah. But why would a person taste like that?”

He shrugged. Seemed to lose interest in the conversation.

I shook my head and opened my book again.

He rolled the ball restlessly over his legs. Then he stood up and bounced the ball at me, but I was ready and I pulled my book up and the ball bounced off harmlessly.

“I’m going to go invent the cure for cancer and take over Mesopotamia,” he said. “You okay with waiting here?”

“Whatever.”

He went off dribbling and weaving around the ball, graceful as a professional player. I turned a page and went back to reading.

At that age, I didn’t know there were limits. Things I would only ever be able to dream of. At that age, Dave was still able to make me believe that no bogeyman of children’s nightmares was beyond my capacity to become. In any event, Dave never mentioned that Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in a high-security prison. I found that out when I was older, when I realized that human laws would keep me moral, if only because I could never survive in a prison.

I rock back and forth and wonder if there is any way to halt this process, or if I am fated to complete the transformation, if I am some murderous chrysalis, a nightmare creature struggling against human bondage towards an inexorable and terrible freedom.

Aidan bangs into my room.

“Mickey! What have you done? Is this — is this
blood
?”

I’m sitting in the corner of my bedroom with knees hugged against my chest.

“Hey! You’ve got to answer me, okay? I’ve
got
to know why my knife’s got blood on it, why it was lying there rusting away in the sink.”