My Second Death (2 page)

Last week, he returned one of my essays with a penciled lecture on my behavior. He wrote that graduating depended on being a great student, which I had the potential to be, but getting a job depended on politics, which I sucked at. I paraphrase. His point was that my writing was good, my research was great, but I’d been getting too many complaints about my attitude from students, from my peers, and from the dean.

When I don’t answer him right away, my dissertation director says, “Getting a job depends on
politics
.” His voice is damp, plummy, an old-man whiskey voice. “Playing the game. Part of which is, you don’t tell your dissertation director to fuck off.” He makes air quotes when he says “fuck.”

I grin. “Oh,” I say. “Okay.” I make air quotes around “okay.”

“See? That’s another example of what I was talking about. You get away with as much as you do because you’re a great student. But you’ll never become a great
academic
until you learn a little respect.”

At least he didn’t say I got away with as much as I did because of the dean.

“I respect you,” I say.

He smiles suddenly. The soft leathery wrinkles of his cheek fall into creased folds like a well-worn map. “I know,” he says. “That’s why I know you’ll think about what I said. Right?” He gives my backpack an awkward pat and then turns to go into his office. He stops in the doorway. “And I believe the dean wanted to see you.”

“I know.”

“All right, then. Tell him I send salutations.”

He disappears into his office.

I stand in the hallway and ball my fists in my pockets. The folded pink slip rubs against my skin. I could go see the dean.

Or I could investigate the message.

I decide to take the bait. I’ve got nothing better to do.

Allyn is the name of a street near campus. I have driven past it before, but it exists outside the periphery of my small world of classroom, car, and assiduously avoided office.

I walk out into decay-spiced autumn air and hike down the cobbled slope of the main campus, then turn down an alley behind a parking garage. A warren of shabby houses, all crackled paint and slanted ridgepoles, swarm the southern bank of the university like a scabrous architectural infection. I glance again at the pink slip in my hand, at what I assume must be an address, and a cryptic quote from Friedrich Nietzsche.

Cars hurtle down Exchange Street. I cross at the light and walk up a block past a blood plasma center, a pawnshop with barred windows, a bar whose neon brew signs flicker dyspeptically. I stop at the street corner where Allyn, a cramped alley, runs into Exchange Street.

I turn down Allyn. Weeds sprout through the cracked sidewalk. Collapsing houses crowd each other, their yellowed, overgrown lawns reaching across boundary lines like jaundiced fingers. I walk slowly, looking left and right.

And stop suddenly.

411 Allyn is indeed an address, but the house occupying the plot of land is a structural carcass. Plywood nailed over the windows, a yellow plastic streamer across the front door, paint chipping off aluminum siding, and bald patches of tar showing through shingles.

I believe this edifice is what is known in the vernacular as a “crack house,” a building once used but now condemned for its role in the sale of cocaine or, more likely, the refining, cooking, and selling of methamphetamines. Because I live in my parents’ garage, and have done so for most of my twenty-eight years, I have never had the opportunity to view even the remains of such a den of vice.

This lack of experience suddenly seems wrong, a deficit that must be immediately rectified.

Half-smiling, intensely curious, I go up the drive, the fine gravel like crushed shells under my feet. A side door stands partially open, hanging crookedly on two broken hinges. I reach out to touch the door. And such a
feeling
suffuses my bloodstream, adrenaline rushing through veins and arteries. I can’t believe how cramped, how stultified, my life has become, my God, how
bored
I’ve been since — oh, since I moved into my parents’ garage ten years ago.

My chest expands and constricts.

Even gods decompose
.

I push open the door and step inside. Darkness closes around me like a shroud when the door swings closed after my entrance. I blink and wait for my eyes to adjust, for the pale rainy light outside to reach into the cavernous gloom.

A chalky smell has leeched into the concave walls. The house sounds empty, the sort of dull stillness you only notice when the electricity and water have been long turned off. A faint musty, mammalian stench, as if wild animals have camped out in here at some point. A couple of empty rooms to the left and right. And straight in front of me, a narrow flight of stairs that climbs into shadow.

I walk up the stairs slowly, the fingers of my left hand running along the wall, my feet delicate, searching each stair before I lever my weight onto it.

A hallway. A thin carpet, creaky floorboards.

A door to the right. I reach out to open it, then hesitate. I don’t know what lies inside. I don’t even know what kind of hide-and-seek game I’m playing at. Is my mysterious message-leaver a chess player, intrigued by mental gymnastics? He, or she, I suppose, could be sending me on goose chases, trying to see how much influence over my actions he can wield. But what if my Nietzsche-quoting stalker is actually dangerous?

I know that this is a bad idea. I push the door open anyway.

For a second, I hesitate, every muscle tensed, waiting for something — anything. But the room is empty.

Another door on the left, latched shut. I touch the door handle. It turns. The door creaks and sighs. A smell, the cold touch of wind on my skin and the smell. A sweet reek, like raw sugar and mold-softened tomatoes.

I reach into my pocket, feel the cold teeth of my car keys. Find a thin plastic tube, a miniature flashlight attached to the keychain. I click on the flashlight. Iodine-yellow light trips across the room. Wooden floorboards, an antique bureau with clawed feet, the veneer chipped and faded in patches, each porcelain knob stenciled with tiny violets.

In the opposite corner of the room, a twin-sized mattress on a metal bedframe. Something is lying on the bed. I inhale sharply.

The flashlight blinks off when my hand momentarily loses all messages from the neurons frantically misfiring in my brain.

I can’t breathe.

My thumb presses on the flashlight button again. The beam pins the bed in its single-eyed gaze.

A man lies facedown on the mattress, his arms cuffed at the wrists to the bedposts. His legs are duct-taped at the ankles. The skin of his back is slit down the spine and spread like wings across the bed sheets.

My heart kicks against my ribs and electricity fizzes through my veins. My pupils dilate. I have to,
fuck
, I have to leave.

My feet shift. A step closer to the bed. And then I am bending over it.

My hair swings down. The strands brush against the body’s cold skin. I pull my hair back, wrap the length around my fist and tie the hank into a knot.

The corpse has been flayed, his back skin pulled apart like fabric. The skin drapes white-clotted against persimmon-red sheets. The red sheets are bleached pinkish-yellow in patches as if some acidic substance splattered them.

Knots of vertebrae like sea sponge, slender yellowed laths of ribs. Clumps of macerated pink flesh cling to the bone. The head and neck are intact, the skin split from the protruding curve of spine at the base of the shoulders down to the lumbar vertebrae at the top of the swell of buttocks.

Venetian blinds stir as rain-scented wind snakes in the cracked windowpane. Broken slats clack against each other like teeth. I take a breath. The smell of blood, cold soil and coins.

I reach out two fingers of my left hand and brush lank strands of hair from the corpse’s neck. The skin there is the color of milky tea. I press my fingers against the skin. The knobby vertebrae shift under the skin with a gritty sound. A thin fluid wells up from an almost-invisible slit.

I look at the man’s head. His face is turned to the wall, his right cheek pressed against the sheets. His left eyelid is visible, but the skin is puckered where it droops over the drained sac of his eyeball. The jaw is distended, the left cheek tented. I see a glimpse of fabric between his lips. With my forefinger and thumb I tug at the tiny corner. The teeth are locked tight. My tug jolts the head. A handcuff clinks against the metal post.

The wad rips as it comes free, stiff and clotted with dried saliva. A handful of crumpled pages, a fuzzy archaic type. I try to separate the wad and the paper crumbles in my hand. I pull free a large fragment with a section of print and realize that the text is not in English. There can only be a handful of citizens in the decrepit burg of Akron who would be able to read this foreign text, but I am one of them. Even more uniquely, I know the book from which it comes, Nietzsche’s
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
(
The Gay Science
), that contains the (translated) phrase “even gods decompose,” as well as, more famously, the expression
Gott ist tot
.

All I can make out of the blurred type on the scrap in my hand is “
wenn dir eines Tages oder Nachts
.” I feel a prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. In English, this section reads something like:
What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
. It’s a section where Nietzsche describes a demon calling into awareness the darkest parts of a man, so that he can throw off the constraints of civilization. So that he can be free.

I make a fist around the wad of paper and wipe the back of my wrist across my mouth. Turn to the mute messenger on the bed.

In this instance, the god is not only dead but quite literally decomposing.

I try to focus, to be objective. I am meant to see this. What am I meant to see? I step back and look at the mattress, at the sheets spattered with blood already oxidized and brown, a few congealed clots of skin and fatty tissue. The lack of blood spatter and the relative smallness of the pooled bloodspill make me think that the man on the bed was killed and then skinned. I wonder how he was killed. Drugged first, maybe. And then the body, lax, under the killer’s nimble hands —

Wetness pools in my mouth.

I swallow and blink. The pages in my fist waver and I realize the tremor is in my hands. And like waking up, I think with sudden and fierce clarity that I am standing over an exquisitely mutilated corpse.

I turn and collide with the door. My fingers slip on the knob. I run down the steps. My left shoulder bangs into the wall. I elbow open the side door.

The air is cold, shocking and fresh after the fetid sweetness inside. I grip my fingers around my knees and squeeze. The underside of my hair is damp with sweat.

Defying all odds that I can calculate, the body upstairs is only the second human corpse I have seen or touched. It is this sole fact that has kept me walking free among the sane.

I bend over and cough and spit onto the gravel.

Then I get up and run. I run fast, my lungs making scissoring noises. I run through backyards and gravel alleys, across the busy four-lane street dissecting the hovels of poverty from the university campus, between towering brick buildings alight with morning sun. I get to the car, start the engine.

My fingers shake when I uncurl them from the clutch of paper.

I put the wad from the dead man’s mouth into my jacket pocket and reach for the gearshift. My palm itches. I turn my hand and see crescent-shaped nail marks, oily beads welling up from slit skin.

I put my head against the steering wheel. Shit. Shitshitshit.

I imagine grabbing whoever wrote that fucking note and screaming into his face. What do you think will happen, I want to ask him. What do you fucking
think
will happen now?

Somehow I drive home. I don’t remember the trip.

I sit on the bare mattress in my cinderblock garage cell. A small pile of ash on the white-painted floor where I burnt the pink message slip and the pages of Nietzsche. It occurs to me that the decision to burn the message is forensically intelligent but of course I have little interest in establishing my connection to the corpse or in hiding it. All I want is the smell of burning paper to overpower the memory of blood-stink. My mouth keeps filling with spit. I wipe my hands on my knees and breathe smoke and can’t stop smelling the body and imagining my fingers exploring the vertebral ridge, each knob a fossilized cauliflower blossom. What it would feel like to dig a serrated blade into a spinal column, metal teeth catching on bony joints.

I clench my jaw and rock and squeeze my eyes closed. Focus on the darkness. Focus.

I breathe in slowly, exhale.

Calm seeps into my muscles. My diaphragm relaxes. My breathing slows. My heartbeat decelerates. I have been forcing myself through this pantomime — under tamer circumstances and with lower stakes, to be sure — for, well, for close to all my life. Some people practice yoga. I pose formulaic dialogues in my head, Glaucon to my own Socrates. What is good? What is justice? What is beautiful is most loveable, Glaucon. Do you not agree? Therefore right love has nothing mad or licentious about it.

So: What is the proper thing to do?

The civically responsible individual would call in the cops, who would investigate. The cops would inevitably question that civically responsible individual. But any investigation into my past will uncover my unfortunate encounter with a man that ended in his falling down a flight of steps in my parents’ basement and cracking his neck. The judge said that the murder was self-defense. The shove down the stairs wasn’t what got me the rapt attention of psychiatrists. Mutilating the corpse did that.

I spent a couple weeks in a juvenile psychiatric unit under observation. Lots of valium. I have watery memories of crosshatched pink patterns on the backs of my thighs from sitting on hard plastic chairs. The first diagnosis was schizophrenia. It was accompanied by little pills that went by exotic names like Haldol and Prolixin. They made me sleepy and my mouth dry. After I got out of the psych unit my parents took me to a shrink who asked me questions like, “Do you hear voices?” And, “Does it make you angry when people ask you questions?” The shrink was a large woman with a chest the size of a coastal shelf and smile-crinkles by her eyes. The Mrs. Claus of prescription drugs. She dropped the schizophrenia diagnosis, downgraded me to “borderline personality disorder,” and gave me anti-anxiety meds. My older brother called the diagnosis “crazy lite.” The new meds were supposed to stabilize my moods but they made me scratch the skin on the backs of my hands and bang my head against the wall. So I got a new shrink and a couple of Rainbow Bright Band-Aids. The next psychiatrist, a man who stroked his fingers slowly across his mouth while he talked, gave me the MMPI and an IQ test and announced that I was too bright for school so I was bored, and that was why I had killed and mutilated a man. The following morning my parents deposited me at a different therapist’s office.

By the time I was twelve the collectors’ set of psychologists and psychiatrists in the greater Akron area had ruled out emotional neuroses and decided that all that was wrong with me was that I lacked the capacity to experience guilt or love or compassion. In short, I was a highly intelligent borderline sociopath. Dave said that was shrink-speak for “evil.” There are no pills for evil so, at the recommendation of a couple of child therapists and a psychologist, my parents pulled me out of school. My dad gave me exams in analytic geometry and the history of Western civilization each week. My mom listened to me play Chopin etudes on the Steinway while she breastfed baby Stephen upstairs. When I was fourteen Dave moved to New York to study Marxist poetry at New York University. I would go days without speaking to other people. It was the closest I’ve ever come to being content.

When I was sixteen I got one last shrink who downgraded me for the final time, said I had “antisocial personality disorder” and that he’d send my parents a bill. I’ve been drug- and shrink-free for the last twelve years.

But even after so many years of legal purity, I can’t imagine that claiming to have “discovered” a corpse in a condemned house on whose premises I had no reason to be would go over well with Akron’s finest. If I decide to play the civically responsible individual, in all likelihood what freedom I now have would end with my being abruptly returned to closely monitored living quarters and mandated psychotherapy.

Finding a corpse and not calling the cops is wrong. I know that.

But. Finding
that
corpse …

I think of my hands wandering over the wallpaper, the stair railing, the doorknobs, at 411 Allyn Street. My hair falling across the corpse’s naked vertebrae. In addition to the inevitably uncomfortable questions I would face if I, with my preadolescent psychiatric record, reported finding the corpse, there is the one other little problem as well: I was set up. That note was intended to make me curious, to make me explore the condemned house, leaving fingerprints all over the place. It’s not like I would necessarily get convicted, but at the very least I would be a suspect.

If I don’t report the body, I could be in worse trouble once the Akron police department steps in and finds those prints. Then again, there’s nothing to connect me to the site except for my fingerprints, and my fingerprints would only bring up a sealed juvenile record. Besides, the corpse has been there for at least a day, probably more, by the smell. The note left in my message box was dated yesterday. So far there hasn’t been any hue and cry. If I wait — just don’t say anything, or do anything unusual for a few days — well, I don’t know what will happen next.

I pick at dry skin on my lower lip until I taste salt. I drop my hand to my knee and stare at the limb. Because all of this is pointless, really. I don’t want to do the therapy circuit again, and I won’t risk going near any more corpses. Which leaves me with exactly the same option I faced ten years ago when I decided to move into my parents’ garage and live like a saint in a monk’s cell. I know what I will do and it is what I have done since I was ten, what I will always do, world without end, amen. I will do nothing.

The worst part is, I don’t know what this decision means, if it shows the strength of my resolve to be civilized, or if it makes me monstrous. I get up and hold my hands under the hot water tap in the industrial sink until my fingers have stopped shaking. Above the sink a flyspecked mirror reflects a pale-skinned ovoid face with two eyes, one nose, one forehead, two lips and approximately thirty-two teeth. The human face, unblinking, looks away while the human hands turn off the tap, dry themselves on a towel, and two human feet walk steadily to the door. I go back out to the car, sitting patiently under a white-scabbed sky.