My Second Death (8 page)

My memory is unreliable and I’m so used to relying on my mind, the cold mechanisms of it flawless as steel and hard as adamantine. It’s all soft in my head now. Disintegrating.

I cross the street to the Chevelle and pull my keys out. My breath suddenly comes so fast that my vision clouds over and my muscles soften, as if they’ve turned to tapioca. I sag against the hood and close my eyes, the black painted metal under me sturdy and sunwarmed.

When I finally open my eyes I look out at a world not terribly changed. The house across from the secret mausoleum has a red and blue rental sign hammered into the front lawn. Dirt is ground into the cracked sidewalk so that it looks like ribbons of black. The houses on either side of the street are running to decay, blank faced, obtuse. Blind to the defiled relict in their midst. Or does each slant-poled edifice hide its own cankerous secrets?

I turn over my left hand, look at the cell phone. I know now that my own spore will not be so noticeable, not if the house is or was being used as an ad hoc homeless shelter. And there are the words on the door. People study handwriting, specialists do. City detectives could analyze the strokes and determine the author. No one would know it was me who made the call. No, they will. They will trace the call and I have no reason at all to be here. But still, there is evidence there. I should call. My thumb presses the 9. But why me? How am I complicit in this? It was done for me, with me in mind, at the very least. I press the 1. I don’t want to know the answers. I want to have never found that pink message slip. I want to go back to the garage and wake up innocent. I don’t care if I was bored. I was good, or at least, I wasn’t standing on the cusp of damnation with nothing but air underneath.

“Mickey?”

I freeze.

And look up, slowly.

He is wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head and he is no longer haloed by the kitchen light, but I recognize him anyway. That sparrow-frail build, the diffident stance, the pale skin.

Aidan is on the sidewalk, hands in his jeans pockets, looking at me from under his hood.

“What are you doing here?”

I turn my phone over, slide it into my jacket pocket. I straighten up.

He doesn’t back up. Doesn’t turn his head to look across the street in any startled gestures of guilt. I think that all of those cop shows are wrong. No one starts confessing with the reckless abandon born of stage directions.

I wait for him to glance inadvertently to his left, toward the house across the street. He doesn’t move, just keeps staring at me. It’s like a western, the showdown scene. Only it’s really cold and my nose is running. I wipe my nose on my wrist.

At my gesture, he takes a few steps toward me, stops before he reaches the car. He puts his head to the side like a sparrow spotting a worm. “Is this about what I said? The murder?”

I don’t say anything. He has no tells, no subtle tics or movements in the direction of the corpse not a hundred yards away.

“You know I didn’t mean to scare you or anything. I mean, I’m not saying you’re scared, but if you came here because — ” He breaks off. Then he says, “How
did
you know where I live? Did your brother tell you?”

“My brother?” I didn’t intend to say anything but the words are startled out of me. And then, “You live here?”

He scratches his nose with his thumb. “Well, yeah,” he says. “He came by a couple times.”

“You
know
know him. My brother.” I thought it was just a meeting at a poetry event. I thought Aidan was obsessed with me. But no, I’m being foolish. It would make so much more sense if it’s my brother he’s after, at least from a sexually motivated perspective.

“That doesn’t — nothing makes sense.” I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I push myself off the hood of my car. “Why would I come here about a murder?”

He just looks at me. Shrugs. “Why else are you here? I just figured you were, I don’t know. Interested.”

“Why would I be interested?”

He swallows, inhales. Says in a rush, “You’re telling me a murder doesn’t interest you?”

“Jesus,” I say.

He blinks twice and looks down at the sidewalk. He doesn’t look to his left. Or anywhere else. Then he says, “Okay. I just thought you were here to see me.”

I point my finger at the for rent sign. “I’m house hunting,” I say. “Real estate.”

He smiles a little. Then he stops smiling. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

For a second, I am transported — caught up in the hypothetical world in which I am not here playing corpse voyeur and amateur detective, but here for a perfectly prosaic and functional adult reason. A hypothetical world Aidan apparently finds at least partially plausible.

I think about what would happen if it were true, if I told my parents I was leaving the garage. Moving out. Becoming an independent adult.

“Maybe I am,” I say.

“Okay.” He shrugs again. “Well, you can come on up.”

“What?”

He says, “Do you want to see it or not?”

“Do I want to see what?”

He pushes his hood back and rubs his palm over his hair. It’s sweaty, dark strands like question marks glued to his forehead. “If you want to rent it,” he says, “shouldn’t you see it first?’

“You
own
it?”

“God, no,” he says. “I’m renting it. But my roommate moved out and I can’t afford the whole rent, so — ” He waves his hand vaguely at the house. I look over at it, study it for the first time. The house is large, a graying clapboard with faded blue shutters subdivided into apartments. Beside the front door a black mailbox has white stenciled numbers: 412½. It directly faces 411 Allyn Street.

“It’s Apartment B,” he says, watching me study the place. “The upstairs.”

A wooden staircase trails up the outside wall to the upper-floor apartment.

“So, do you want to come up or not?”

“No.” I shake my head and look away. I was joking, I almost say. I am here about something else entirely. Aidan never looked across the street. I won’t look either. But the shaking is coming back. I feel panic climbing up my throat like a centipede. “I should — I need to go. I’m late.”

He coughs and shakes his head. “Look, I’m really sorry if I scared you or anything. I didn’t mean to.”

“I’m not
scared
,” I say. “I don’t
get
scared.” I wrap my hand around the keys in case it’s still shaking.

“Okay,” he says. “Well. You can come over if you want. It doesn’t have to be about renting the place.”

I don’t know what an obsessed person looks like. He looks calm, his mouth relaxed. But I don’t know what his game is. “Stop this,” I say. And I don’t know what I mean.

I turn away from him, fumble with the door, heave the heavy construction open.

When I climb in the car, his mouth moves. I can’t hear him but I recognize the words.

Bye, Mickey
.

He gives a brief wave with his hand.

After I drive off I realize that I have pushed the delete call button on my phone and erased the almost-dialed call.

I drive south, past my parents’ house to the running trail in a metro park near the Cuyahoga Valley. My skin feels like it’s going to crawl off my skeleton if I can’t run fast and hard enough to pull my body back into some sort of order.

I think about the corpse, about the faceless homeless person who pulled a sheet over a mutilated body, a gesture so startlingly kind it makes my jaw hurt from clenching. I think about that stained sheet like a sacred shroud cast over a festering orgy of desecration. I think about the red and blue RE/MAX sign and Aidan’s sudden apparition, a gray-hooded specter, a human
deus ex machina
. I think about my parents’ garage and the stench of burning paper. I think about the smell of hot piss and how I stared at the wax-smooth skin of a man I had just murdered and wondered if I was supposed to feel something.

I run until the trail fades onto great slabs of slate rock, a vast shelf slanting up to a steep drop-off. Crouched at the stone lip of the precipice, I prop my hands on my knees, panting.

Scarlet and brown peaks and hollows of the valley spread out beneath masses of dark clouds piled against the western horizon. The whole earth is beneath me. If I could stretch my arms and lift off I would fly into the cold and limitless gray and be clean forever.

On the way back a low ripple of thunder curdles the air. The first drops of rain taste like rust and salt. I like running in the rain. The noise and the stinging slap of wet running clothes drown out everything else. I almost feel calm by the time I get back to the car.

When I return home I go through the garage into the house. I wipe my hands over my face and flick away the droplets.

The house breathes. Muted noises. Human voices.

I go through the kitchen and dining room into the solarium.

Stephen and another teenage boy I don’t recognize are in the living room. The strange boy turns his head sharply, stares at me from behind plastic-framed glasses, his moist pink lips slack. Stephen ignores me and slouches his spine lower on the couch. He twiddles the control in his hand and his avatar on the TV screen jumps across a dark chasm.

“You.” I point at the pale teenager. “Quit staring. And you. Where are the parents?”

Stephen says without looking at me, “I dunno.”

A distant voice calls: “Mickey? Honey, is that you?”

I look at Stephen. “Thank you, brother. Your usefulness is overwhelming.”

He shrugs.

The friend watches me, thumb immobile over the control. His eyes track me as I leave the room. I can feel the heat of his gaze and it itches between my shoulder blades.

My mother is in the basement sorting laundry. The fresh cottony scent of her detergent has seeped into the kitchen.

I stand at the top of the stairs, resting my palms against the doorjamb and looking at the carpeted wooden slats descending into shadow. Beneath the smell of the laundry detergent, I taste lingering traces of stranger scents: dust, macaroni and cheese, urine. I haven’t gone down those basement steps since that day when I was ten years old and met my first corpse at the bottom. Harmony of the spheres. I swallow a hysterical laugh and back away from the basement. I sit on a stool at the kitchen island and wait for her to emerge from the basement with a plastic laundry basket on her hip.

She smiles when she comes up.

“Hi, there.” Her smile fades. “You’re wet. You should dry off before you catch a cold.”

“Did you ever want me to move out?”

She falters. “What?”

“Of the garage. Do you and Dad have these fantasies where I’ll suddenly be like, Hey, I’m a fully grown woman with a PhD. I think I’ll rent a two-bedroom condo in Cleveland for a while, maybe go vegan and raise some cacti.”

“You want to raise cacti?” She sets down the laundry basket and puts her arms around her middle.

“Of course not,” I say. “You’re missing the point.”

“No — no, I think — oh, honey, your father and I have talked about it, of course, but — and you
are
doing well. Recently. I mean, at least from what I’ve seen, especially in the past few months, you’ve seemed — happier.” She shakes her head. “But you know we love having you here. That’s not a problem. There’s no need to — you should never feel like your father or I would ever pressure you to do anything, or to make decisions out of a need to… Sweetie, I’m saying you should move at your own pace. Don’t ever think we would pressure you to do things you’re not ready for.”

I smile a little. I am getting cold, just standing here with the basement door open. I rub my arms. “God, you make me sound like a recovering cancer victim.” I wave a hand to forestall her anxious protests. “But I get the message. Thanks. I was just wondering.”

I go into my garage and shut the door and sit down on the mattress. My sneakers leave dark wet patches on the concrete. My cell phone is lying on my pillow. I have four missed calls, and two messages. Three of the four calls are from Dave. One is from a number I don’t recognize.

I listen to the messages. The first voice is so quiet I unconsciously lean forward to hear better. But even without hearing the words I recognize the voice.

“Hey, Mickey, it’s Aidan. I got your number from your brother. I just wanted to apologize again if — ” Some words are lost altogether as the sound of a siren goes by in the distance. “Sorry,” his voice says in my ear. “I’m — walking to class and it’s loud. Anyway, that was all I wanted to say. Bye.”

I delete the message and stand up to stretch and shower. I just can’t figure out what he’s after.

The next message comes on and even with the phone lying on the bed I can hear the digitalized squawking. My brother is not one for dulcet tones.

“Jesus
fucking
Christ, Mickey,” he’s shouting. “Just got a call from your new fucking
boy
friend! Did you put Ro
hyp
nol in his drink yesterday? God in
fuck
ing heaven, babe, he had, like, fifty questions about you, does Mickey do this, why did Mickey come see me, did you give her my address — ”

He’s laughing but he’s not usually so loud if he’s not angry. I pick up the phone but don’t put it to my ear. My thumb covers the delete key. I wonder why he’s angry, but then think that maybe he brought Aidan home for his own purposes and for the first time in his life has been cockblocked by a sibling. The thought almost makes me smile. But I remember that Aidan’s interest in me has nothing to do with the sordid minidramas of suburban American life and I swallow hard.

Dave is still talking. I push my thumb down.
Message deleted
.

I am almost finished stretching when my cell phone starts buzzing again.

I pick it up. “Are you mad at me or something?”

He sucks in a breath, and I think hearing my real voice startled him. From the short silence I can tell he was working his way up to a dramatic crescendo for my voicemail and I’ve broken his rhythm.

When he starts talking, he sounds normal, his voice light and happy. “
God
, no, my darling. Why would I be
mad
at you? I just don’t want to see that sweet little boy —
crushed
by your machinations. Do you like that? I think
machinations
has the right
mech
anized feel — ”

“Don’t do that.” I hate when he gets metaphysical. Or maybe it’s metapoetic. Meta-anything, really. “I didn’t do anything. Not to him.”

“Not to him.” Dave’s voice mimics mine so perfectly that it startles me. He’s always been a good mimic, but in his mouth my voice sounds so — melodic. Feminine. It disconcerts me. I always feel like my voice should sound more like broken glass. “That’s not the real problem, though, is it?” He’s back to his normal voice. “The
real
problem we find ourselves confronted with is your little
sojourn
this afternoon. Into the bowels, as it were, the belly of the beast. The beast, in this metaphor, being our metropolis, the summit of our acme, Akron. The point is — ”

“You’re high.” I should’ve figured that earlier. I pinch the skin between my eyebrows. “Christ.” I hate it when he is like this.

“
High
?” And he’s shouting again, suddenly. I move the phone away from my ear. “What the fucking
shit
does that have to do with anything? Are you
try
ing to distract me? We need to discuss why you would hunt down little Aidan, if that’s even what you were doing. What else could you be doing there?
What else were you doing there?
”

His anger pisses me off. He knows how much I hate yelling. I hear my own voice rising to match his, fighting back against his decibels with my own. “I was looking at his fucking rental property. I’m moving out. That’s what!”

There’s a short silence.

Then Dave says, “No you weren’t.”

“You don’t know everything about me. I’m not a pet rock, I’m not a fucking joke, the kid who never grows up, never changes — I change. I grow up.”

I see corpses and I don’t melt, I don’t collapse into madness.

He laughs. “No you don’t,” he says. “Who’s telling you this? Is it Aidan? Did he tell you you were a joke?”

Oh, God. I am different. I feel something weightless and buoyant in my chest. I put a palm against my heart and feel it beating, steady and solid.

I just realized where that strange fantasy about moving out came from.

I have looked into the abyss and nothing has crawled out to take up residence in my mortal shell. I have seen my second corpse and I am not descending into a replay of the madness after I encountered my first.

I say, “No. This is me talking. No one else. Me.”

Dave says, “Well, good. I’ll fucking slice his throat if he does. No one talks to you that way.”

I smile at that. “You do. Sometimes.”

He starts to laugh again. “Okay, touché, you got me on that one, babe. But you know I love you. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

“Quit yelling at me, then.”

There’s a brief quiet. And then, in a whisper, he says, “Anything for you, princess.” And then he starts laughing loudly.

I hang up the phone.

After my shower I still feel anxious so I go out to work on the Chevelle. The car sits under the slanting raw wood carport roof and it smells faintly of sap and cold soil. The hood propped up, the smell of axle grease and WD-40, the gravel chips crunching under my sneakers like broken teeth — it feels good. So after I replace a spark plug and a couple of worn cylinder heads I keep tinkering, finally decide what the hell, I’ll replace the whole intake manifold. I’ll have to order parts online.

While I lie on my back on the gravel, my hands caked in grit and oil and the smell of burnt rubber and oxidized steel all around me, I think about Dave and wonder how he sees me. When he first came back to Ohio he kept asking me to move in with him, kept saying that I was an adult now and it was time to act like one, not to keep hiding in the garage like I was ashamed of something that happened when I was ten. And when I was eighteen. Well. Any time I left the house, basically. He stopped asking after a while.

I think about my mother’s delicate panic. I wonder if they are right. They probably are. They know me better than anyone, apart from my childhood shrinks. The accounting of my life is a simple line in the ledger of human history. It does not add up to much.

But the man in the house on Allyn Street is already dead. It seems to me there is little that I can do to make things worse, to fuck up his life any more than it is already fucked. And if I do nothing, whoever targeted me with that note might try again, might kill someone else. If I do nothing, I might become a proxy murderer. If I do something I could save a life. There is a Jewish proverb that if you save one life, you save the world.

I have, by the mathematics implicit in that proverb, already wrought the destruction of the planet. If I pull anything from the ashes of my own deeds, it will likely be some pernicious, mutated thing not capable of saving anyone.

But at least I will have done something. I wonder if there is some way to balance a ledger with a single column.

I wash my hands with orange-scented grease-cutting soap, rubbing the granules into my skin around the nail beds. Then I sit on my mattress and pick up my phone. I scroll through missed calls and hit dial.

After two rings, Aidan picks up. His voice is quiet, but it tilts up at the end with curiosity.

“Mickey? Is that you?”

“Were you serious?” I say. “About needing a roommate.”

There’s a short silence. “What do you mean?”

“I want to know if you’re serious about wanting a roommate.”

“I guess so,” he says. “I like where I live. It’s really close to campus.” Each word sounds like he’s pronouncing it while taking another step onto crackling ice.

“You said my brother told you about me. Did he tell you about my other roommate? The cutter?”

“Yeah.” Another pause. “Look, I don’t — ”

“Are you scared of me? Scared to live with me, I mean.”

“No.”

That one word is the only thing he says that sounds confident.

“Okay, then,” I say.

“Okay then, what?”

“Okay, I’ll move in with you.”

“
What
?”

“If you’re okay with that.”

“Geez,” he says. He starts to say something a couple times. The silence stretches.

“I can pay rent,” I say. “I have a job, and I have some savings.”

“Oh,” he says. “I mean, yeah. No. That’s great.”

“Do I have to sign a lease?”

“Not really. The landlord gives us month-to-month leases here. You just have to get credit approval. But you have to sign this asbestos waiver. I think the house was painted before 1970 or something.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. “I might screw this up,” I say. “After the last time I tried moving out. I mean, I’m going to try. But I’m just saying.”

Aidan says, “You don’t have to worry. I’m not like that.”

I know that he is nothing like my former roommate, who was ordinary in an almost cartoonish way. Aidan is no caricature. The problem is, I don’t know
what
he is. I don’t know if he is an unstable but relatively legal citizen, or if he is a more publicly polished version of me, something truly demonic.