My Second Death (19 page)

I open my eyes and push my hand through my hair. God, I’m tired.

“Go away.”

He comes into the room. The knife in his hand. Dripping dishwater on the scarred hardwood boards.

I push myself back. Backbone pressed against the wall. “Don’t come in.”

“What the hell is going on?”

I put my head down on my knees. You’ve been through this before, I tell myself. In the dreams. You can see how it will play out. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not like you haven’t done it before.

“Just tell me.” He crouches down. Trying to make himself eye-level with me, modulating his voice like he’s talking to a fucking head case or something. “You’ve got to at least tell me someone’s not dead. Okay? Do you see my point here, Mickey? That I’ve got to know? Are you even listening to me?”

I lift my head. “Yes. Yeah, I’m listening to you. Now get the fuck out.”

He holds the knife. It drips pinkish water.

The silence goes on for a long time. Long enough that I can smell him. The faint smell of human under the turpentine.

My heart feels stiff, the muscles struggling to contract, to expand. “No one is dead.”

“Okay. Good. No, that’s good. Okay. So, whose blood is on my knife?”

My arms are wrapped around my legs. I can still feel the heat of its skin, the oily texture of its fur.

I look up at him.

“I killed our cat.”

We breathe. In and out. In and out.

“Our cat?” he says. “You mean, the cat that you said ran away? Like,
weeks
ago?”

“It did.” I swallow. “I didn’t lie.”

“Okay.” He sits back on his heels. He puts his free hand, the one not holding the knife, over his mouth. “Okay. What happened?”

I say something about the students. My voice seems to be coming from far away. It sounds like when Dave mimics me, like someone reciting poetry in a voice meant for singing lullabies.

I tell him about snapping its neck.

And then I am silent.

After a while he says, “What about the blood? The knife?”

“Oh,” I say. I close my eyes. “It’s just — look, you said I didn’t want to hurt anyone but that’s — oh God, I do. I want to — I can’t even
think
about — I don’t want to, you have to believe me. I don’t want to let him get control of me yet.”

“Him?”

“Satan,” I say.

Aidan’s mouth twitches.

I wave my hand impatiently. “The Tempter. You know, in medieval plays — never mind.” My skin feels frail. “I don’t hear voices or anything. It’s just an — expression. I don’t want to — turn darkside. Not yet. Not
ever
, but I don’t think I can — I can’t put it off forever.”

When I open my eyes he’s staring at me and his face is a collection of sharp lines with rage printed in them. He sees me looking at him and his face flushes slowly. He opens his mouth like he’s going to yell. Then he takes a breath and holds it, lets it out. “Okay. Let’s try this again. The knife.”

I say, “I couldn’t — help it.”

He just waits.

And so I tell him what I did to the cat.

When I stop talking he closes his eyes briefly. “My God, Mickey.”

Another short silence.

“You had to kill it,” he says.

I look at him. “What?”

He is frowning, thinking hard. “I get it, about the cat. You had to kill it. That was — it wasn’t, you know, what you said. It wasn’t you going — darkside. The cat was in pain. But then — using the knife. Why did you do that? What made you flip like that?”

I want to tell him. I
intend
to tell him. It felt like panic. And rage. Mostly hatred. I hated it for making me a killer, again. I open my mouth to explain but my tongue feels thick. I close my mouth and shrug.

“You don’t know?”

I shrug again.

He is silent. Then he says, “You said that I got you. Like your brother gets you. Right?”

I don’t answer. I don’t know what he means.

He puts the knife down. I watch him, confused. And then he gets up and comes forward.

My eyes widen.

“No — what the —
no
!”

He kneels down next to me.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I say. I look at the knife, lying about two feet away. “Get the hell away from me or I will stab you in the face.”

He puts his arms around me.

I hold my breath. Close my eyes. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

Fuck
.

I lunge for the knife. He wraps his arms tight around me and holds on. I strain against him, shove myself back with my legs. We both slam against the wall. I wrench sideways. He clings on, gets a leg across mine. Jerks back on my leg and pulls me off balance. I fall forward. He tips over and we crash down together. Lie panting. My eyes fixed on the knife. I get an arm free and my fingers reach for the blade. He pulls hard, holding me back. I make a straining noise.

“Please.
Please
get off me.”

“No.” He’s breathing hard.

“Get off or I’ll stab you in the eye. I am not kidding.”

He laughs, breathless. “You’re not going to stab me.”

My face is pressed against the floor. I turn it to the side. Pressure on my cheekbone. I close my eyes. Lie slack. And then tense and lunge for the knife again. But he doesn’t let go. He grabs my flailing arm and we wrestle in silence until I fall again and he lies on top of me, arms wrapped around mine. I feel sweat on my face. The walls move forward gently. Pulse. The flesh floor breathes. I gag.

He pulls my hair back.

Jesus. I close my eyes and swallow. Hot spit pools into my mouth.

I swallow rapidly, twice. And then gag. The taste burns.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

He holds on and I throw up. He lets me get a hand free to wipe my mouth. I spit and then try to pull away. He grabs my wrist and holds on again. We fight until I throw up again. I lie with my face near the vomit and try to calm down. Everything stinks.

“You — fucking pervert,” I say. “Your sister? The one who knocks you around when you go visit her? Remind me to send her a fucking
gift
basket.”

Aidan laughs. His breath hot on my neck. I jab an elbow back but he moves. My skin is feverish and sweating, my tongue is dry and tastes like bile. I blink and drop my head, rest my cheek against the floor. “
Please
get off me.”

And he lets me go.

I scramble away on hands and knees and crawl into a corner. I gag and spit and wipe my mouth with my hands. “You rat bastard asshole!”

He gets onto his knees and watches me. His good eye is dark and grave, his walleye tugged like a restless compass needle towards an uncertain pole.

He gets up and goes into my bathroom. He comes back with towels and starts to clean the floor. He stops briefly and then glances up at me. I’ve scrambled onto the bed, wedging myself into the corner, the knife gripped in my hand. He bends down, his bare neck thin and white, the knobby vertebrae in bas relief. He wipes up the floor. Goes back into the bathroom to rinse out the towels. Then comes out and scrubs at the floorboards. I watch him squirt cleaner fluid and then scrub with the towel. The acrid stench of bleach drifts through the room.

My fingers are squeezed so tight around the handle that they tingle.

“What the
hell
is wrong with you?”

He says, “Are you okay?”

“Am I okay. Am I okay. What the hell do you
think
I am? I fucking — I want to — ”

He looks at me. “But you’re not going to. Okay? You’re not going to do anything. You’re going to put the knife down and feel like shit and
deal
with it.”

“I
am
fucking dealing with it! I was fucking
dealing
with it before you
assaulted
me!” I hold out my free hand, the one not gripping the knife. “Look at this, you asshole! Look at my hands! I’m — ” The tremor is visible. Each finger quivering like a leaf stirred by an unseen wind.

He looks at the shaking hand. Lines crease by his mouth. “Now you know what it feels like,” he says. And he bends his head and starts to scrub the floor again.

I blink. “What? Like what feels like?”

He gestures with the vomit-soaked rag. “Guilt,” he says. “Or grief. Whatever you felt when you killed the cat. I don’t know. The point is, you’re going to have to learn how to feel things without going — you know. Without taking it out on whatever makes you feel that way. You have to learn to feel
shitty
and just keep feeling it and not do anything. That’s what people do. They just — bear it.”

He stops talking.

I stare at him.

He points at me. “So don’t ever do that again. Don’t freak out with the knife like you’ve crossed some invisible boundary and it’s too late. It’s not too late. You’re not Satan’s bitch just because you had to put a cat down. You’re just a person. People feel bad. You just have to learn how to feel like hell and go on.” He stands and balls up the rags. He carries them into the bathroom. I hear the hamper lid shut. A cupboard door closes. The sink faucet runs and then is shut off. He comes in. “You want any dinner? Or not yet?”

I open my mouth. Close it. He shrugs and walks out. I hear the silverware drawer bang in the kitchen. I peel back my fingers. The knife falls onto the blankets in front of me. My hand is sweaty and pink. A headache prickles behind my right eye and my stomach feels clammy, but my heart rate is slowing, evening out.

I stand up.

He’s at the freezer holding a bag of frozen chicken patties. He turns when I come in. “Mac and cheese and chicken patties? Yes? No?”

I swallow hard. It can’t be worse than what I just felt. I go up to him and lean in and kiss his cheek. His skin is cool. I back away quickly, bump a hip into the counter edge. I fold my arms tight across my chest and look at the wall behind his head.

“Do not,” I say, “attempt to reciprocate, or I will really and truly stab you in the fucking eye and I am quite serious about that.” The refrigerator hums, starting to defrost as the freezer door stands open. The skin around his eyes tightens. For a long time he is quiet.

And then he smiles. “Okay.”

He goes to the cupboard and takes down a cardboard box of macaroni and cheese. “Do you add milk or water to the cheese mix?” He squints at the packet of powdered and chemically-enhanced cheese.

“I think you use milk.”

“Crap. I think our milk went bad.”

“I told you we needed more milk.”

“Yeah.” And he looks over at me. “Me too. Okay?”

I don’t know what he means, but he flushes and I feel faintly dizzy myself.

Thanksgiving is next week. The first serious signs of winter have crept in and hunkered down. I run under flat gray skies stacked with clouds like steel-hawsered frigates. Cars tires froth through a salted slush thick with wet leaves, cigarette butts, and other detritus.

On Monday I come in from my run and see my cell phone lit up on my bed, ringing. Dave’s phone number blinks on the screen. I ignore it and shower.

After my shower I check my voicemail. When his familiar voice picks up I realize how long it’s been since I talked to him. Weeks, probably. Maybe a month. Even when he lived in New York I never went this long without talking to him.

I wonder why I’ve stopped returning his calls or picking up. I’m not paying attention but I focus when he mentions a copper band. I realize he’s asking about a mystery, if I have made progress in my Sherlock Holmes impression on Aidan’s familial drama.

“ — Because I don’t want to sound cliché, but you really were made for greater things. I mean, watching you run around after that boy’s late lamented
maman
is like when I see the Dalai Lama on a
bill
board advertising fucking peace or some such asinine shit. You’re meant for mountains and goddamn
yaks
. Do you know what I mean? Your art student’s mommy died bloodless, it was a fucking Angela
Lans
bury murder.”

Something cold settles in my gut and I shiver. My thumb hits the delete key before I am even conscious of making the decision. I slide the phone back under my pillow.

And then I take a breath. I pull out the phone and call him.

He picks up right away. “My darling!”

“Sorry I haven’t called.”

There’s a brief, awkward silence. I never noticed before how easily we talked. There was never anything uncomfortable between us, not like when I try to talk to other people. Dave’s mind is like an Olympic athlete, preternaturally quick, prescient in its ability to seize on my fragmented thoughts and make of them something coherent.

I clear my throat. “Are you going to Dad’s thing?”

Our father has an annual party for faculty members. The notes about this event have been appearing regularly in my mailbox at work.

He laughs. “Oh, I love it. Are you inviting me? And will we go? And will we join the common throng and will we whisper and giggle like all the beautiful morons in their feckless fancy?”

“I hate it when you start alliterating. Are you coming or not?”

He stops laughing. “Listen,” he says. “Don’t go there. They sap your soul, doll. They drain you of everything vital, everything beautiful.”

I sigh. Maybe he was always this hard to understand, but for whatever reason it seems like recently everything he says is moving light years faster than I can follow. He used to be the only safe person in my world but now the only thing I am thinking is that Aidan is so much easier to talk to. Even though he is an utter enigma to me, Aidan is easier to read than the brother who has always been my other self.

“I know,” I say. But I don’t want to listen to him anymore, so I hang up the phone.

And I stare at it where it lies on my pillow. “I know.”

That night I don’t sleep, just sit on my bedroom floor with my laptop propped on my knees, writing a dissertation chapter. The semester is almost over and I have no dissertation draft to show for it. I have no murderer, no longer even a corpse. I have failed at everything. My fingers feel stiff. Even the joints are exhausted.

Tuesday morning sneaks in the window while I’m still sitting on the floor with my laptop open. My neck is stiff, my ass is numb, and my eyes ache.

I get up and look out the window. The street below my bedroom window lies hidden under a white Precambrian mist. I decide to go for a run and hope it will wake me up enough to teach my classes.

I pull on a Gore-Tex running jacket, not looking forward to the run this morning. It’s not quite December and the real cold hasn’t sunk in yet. The temperature still hovers in the upper twenties, but it’s a wet, relentless cold that makes your teeth ache.

Aidan is in the kitchen watching coffee percolate when I back come in from my run. He stands with his arms folded over his chest, leaning against the wall, his eyelids dropped to half-mast.

He rouses when I come in. “Hey, Mickey. Your dad called me. He wanted me to tell you to come tonight. Something about your dissertation director being there, and you need to be able to pull off a social gathering if you’re going to be an academic, and he’s been leaving messages all week.”

I strip off my jacket and hang it on a hook by the door. “Yikes.”

Aidan tries a smile and his jaw cracks when he yawns. “Yeah. He said he’s left messages at your office and tried your cell phone but you didn’t answer, and he doesn’t know if you check messages.”

I untie my shoes and peel them off my cold, wet feet. “The thing I would miss most,” I say, and, when Aidan blinks at me, “if I were to wake up normal someday, the thing I would miss most is how you all overcompensate for my deficiencies. It’s so very restful.”

Aidan grins a little and swings his head side to side in exaggerated annoyance. Then he makes a sudden lunge for a cupboard. I startle, but he’s just pulling out a mug. The coffee has finished its last dying gurgles and the pot is full.

My father, like many academic administrators, spends the semester freezing salaries and the holiday season hosting end-of-semester shindigs designed to release accumulated tension and grease the wheels of faculty-administrative collaboration. I have no desire to attend this evening, but I’ve avoided Telushkin long enough. At some point I should remind him what I look like, at least to the extent that he’ll be able to pick me out of the lineup of graduates at commencement, assuming I actually graduate some day. But, God, parties are annoying. They are not something I do well.

The thought of desires and annoyance makes me think of Desiree. I have taken her sandwiches a couple times in the last few weeks. She never says anything, not anything more significant than jumbled words, although she no longer panics or faints when I make sudden movements. She likes the color pink, apparently. She is taken by shiny things, though only for short amounts of time. She smokes cigarettes to the filter and then rips apart the filter as if she’s looking for the secret to immortality. I have discovered nothing else useful.

I move around Aidan and pull out a jar of peanut butter, and grab grape jelly from the fridge.

“So?”

I glance up at Aidan in surprise.

He’s clutching his coffee mug. Steam beads on his eyebrows. “So are you going to go?”

I shrug.

“What,” he says, “you don’t
love
parties?” He laughs at the look on my face. “You should go. And you can invite me. You know, like, as your escort?”

Over the rim of his mug I can only see the slant of his eyebrows and the crinkles by his eyes. It strikes me as odd that I am so familiar with his facial expressions that I can read only half of his face so easily. I know his face better than I do the faces of my family members. I wonder why that is.

“Of course,” I say. “Let the plebeians revel in our love. They will write sonnets to us.”

He laughs.

When I finish making the sandwich, I pull on jeans and a sweatshirt over my running clothes and collect my backpack. Then I put the sandwich in a baggie and collect another baggie of vegetables. I zip the food into my backpack and leave.

Clouds swarm dark over the morning sky burgeoning with storm.

I head for the car parked behind the house.

“She walks in darkness.”

I startle so badly that I almost drop my car keys.

He emerges from the shadow behind the industrial trash bin and something in the stale smell of trash and the crisp wet darkness makes me think of a tarnished Beowulf trailing seaweed and smelling of monster blood.

I suck in air.

“
Fuck
you,” I say. “And it’s ‘beauty’ not ‘darkness,’ you Neanderthal.”

My elder brother laughs. He swings his hand at me but I duck it.

“Where are you going?”

“What are you doing here?”

We talk at the same time, but he answers first. “I haven’t yet visited my sister’s abode, the spider’s nest, as it were. Stephen has. He told me that you gave him the personal tour. I felt — left out.” He comes forward into the pale of light by the rear door of the first-floor apartment. “It’s really quite lovely. Very do
mes
tic.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re doing here. Did Dad send you to break my arms if I don’t show up tonight or something?”

He laughs. His bare throat gray in the dark.

“It’s not like you would do what I told you to. Not anymore. Is it?”

It’s a strange thing to say. I can feel my heartbeat under my ribs.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Take me with you.”

“No.” And because the statement is so bald, I laugh and turn away from him and jog down the sidewalk. I think I hear his footsteps behind me but I doubt my brother can keep up. It surprises me how something as simple as running — an action
Homo sapiens
adapted for particularly, the speedy lope of the two-legged creature across the plains — seems so challenging to most people. One time, when I was a couple minutes late for an appointment with Telushkin, I didn’t shower first. Just showed up in his office slick with sweat and breathing hard. He asked how many miles I had run that morning, and when I told him he shook his head and said he could never run like that. I had laughed. He is potbellied, his skin slack on his bones. He seemed to think the laughter was offensive.

I squat on the glass-speckled gravel and hand over the sandwich. Desiree talks to me about blue and cops and words that seem to be either Klingon or some archaic form of pig Latin.

She glances over her shoulder. She freezes for half a second, then wrenches her head to the side like she’s been struck. Her fingers splay over her forehead. She starts to moan.

I look around and see my brother.

For a second I don’t do anything.

Then I jump up. For some reason I’m angry.

“I told you not to come, you fucking asshole.”

He laughs and gravel skitters under his shoes as he comes down the slope. “But I was curious, my darling.” He stops and looks around, his fingers playing with strands of his hair. His eyes travel over the backpack, the shopping cart, over Desiree bobbing her chin and patting her forehead with her palm, rocking back and forth. I can’t tell if she’s having some sort of attack or just greeting my brother in her planet’s native language.

I stand up and brush the dirt and grit off my jeans. Then I march away from Desiree, heading back toward campus. Dave doesn’t follow right away but then I hear his footsteps behind me. I think about breaking into a run. I know he can’t keep up with me, but he somehow figured out where I was going. Like maybe he’s followed me before. I try to think if I’ve ever seen him but I know I haven’t. And I would sense my brother’s presence. I know I would.

I let him catch up with me.

He falls into step, his breath coming fast. White gusts swarming into the pearlescent air.

“You shouldn’t smoke so much.”

“What?” he says. “What’s that apropos of?”

I don’t correct his grammar. “You’re too young to be so out of breath from such little exertion.”

“Aw. I think you’re
worried
about me.”

“I always worry about you,” I say. And then, because I can’t stand it anymore, the sound of his panting breath or the smell of him, like cigarettes and the warmth of his aftershave, I break into a run and leave him behind.

I pull up to the driveway of my parents’ house at five-thirty that evening. Aidan’s rusted yellow hatchback Tercel crunches up the drive behind me. I still don’t know why I agreed to bring him. There is already a neat collection of shiny cars along the cobbled street, year-old Audis, convertible Mustangs, even a cherry-red Porsche GT2. No one embraces the most cliché iterations of midlife crisis like academics.

I lead the way to the porch and open the front door. Light floods out into the gray-blue twilight, followed by a warm swirl of cologne, hair gel, wine, sizzling butter, cinnamon. Laughter clinking like wine glasses. A glitter of color, rustling fabrics, and the flash of rings and bare skin in the living room and solarium. I wind through, Aidan in my wake. The Persian rug underfoot, a stained glass panel in the dining room reflecting flickering flames from dozens of candles.

“Michaela! Michaela, come over here.”

I turn to see who’s yodeling my name across the room. My dissertation director, wearing a mustard-colored corduroy jacket, sweeps his arm over his head. When I turn back, Aidan has abandoned me. He threads his way through the throng in the direction of the fireplace. When I stand on my toes, I see why. Stephen is sitting on a folding chair near the fireplace, shoulders hunched, headphones on, a plate of shrimp and prosciutto balanced on his lap. It occurs to me that my quiet roommate is, in fact, closer in age to my younger brother than to anyone else in this room. Excepting me, of course. I don’t tend to think of Aidan as young.

My dissertation director’s breath smells sweet. He crowds in too close, wheezing and chattering about career plans and my dissertation chapter.

“ — And have you met Dr. Scott Renfield? Visiting lecturer from Purdue I was telling you about?”

A thin man is standing beside Dr. Telushkin, gazing into the middle distance. When Telushkin says his name, the thin man raises his eyebrows and looks at me. His eye sockets are sunken, the skin over his thin cheekbones delicately puckered like the crust that forms over boiled milk.

He reaches out a hand.

I wipe my palms on my thighs, shift my weight back. “Right,” I say. “Dr. Renfield. You, um, you wrote that book on Chaucer and financial reform.”

“That’s right. Yes.” He rolls his lips together when he talks and makes a moist kissing noise. His rejected hand wanders back to himself, smoothes his tie and fingers the tie pin. “Won an NEH grant with that project.”

I don’t know what to say. I hear myself saying, “That’s — prestigious.”