My Second Death (26 page)

The stairwell is hot and when the door shuts it snuffs out the brief breath of rain-damp air. I go up the stairs. Gray smudges and fingerprints line the wall by the loose railing. Graffiti. The smell of ramen noodles, cigarette smoke, marijuana.

I stop on the stairs and turn and look down. The runner lights overhead buzz. My uncertain shadow shifts over the wall. The landing below is empty. I put the back of my wrist against the side of my skull, where inside a warm pain nestles. My molars ache. My jaw is clenched. The faint coppery taste of adrenaline. The pressure under my ribs.

The hallway of the fourth floor. A baby’s cracked voice ululates behind a closed door. The muffled sizzle of TV. Human spore.

I go down the hall looking at numbers. At 403, I stop and put my fingers gently against the cool metal of the door handle. The door is locked. I put the knife into my jeans pocket and with one palm pressed against the bulge, I set the other knuckles against the door. Take a breath. Knock. Three times. Clean and sharp.

After a long time, I hear the creak of floorboards and the rasp of the spyhole cover being lifted.

Then the lock clicks and the door opens an inch and a half.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The room exhales a pale miasma of boiled cabbage and cum.

“I’ve got payment. From one of your clients.”

I hold out the wad of twenties.

“You with the cops?”

“No.”

The door opens and I go inside. I walk into the main room. A TV on a broken coffee table. A splay of glossy foldouts, empty cartons of Chinese, a few crumpled wads of tinfoil, and the magazine of a nine-millimeter semiautomatic.

“You want soda? Beer?”

“Coke, please.”

He looks at me. He’s wearing a thin, stained T-shirt and his belly sags underneath it, flaccid and hairy. A gun stuck in the back of his too-tight sweatpants. The skin over his balding head and the backs of his hands is freckled. He’s so overweight that as he stands looking at me I can hear his breath wheezing, air exhaled through a moist sponge.

Then he says, “Coke it is. Coming up.” His lower lip glistens with saliva. He’s missing several teeth. He turns and goes into a small kitchen. He comes out with a can of Coke.

I put the twenties into his sweaty hand and take the cool can. Pop the lid and watch the run of sticky brown liquid. I sip. He snaps off the rubber band and thumbs through the twenties.

“Who’s this from?”

When I don’t answer, he thumbs through the roll. “Well, this is only three grand,” he says. He pronounces it, “Tree grand.” I wonder if the accent is put on.

I lick my lips. Show time. “Yes. I know.”

I bend down and set the Coke carefully on the floor. I straighten, my hand coming out of my pocket with the knife hasp in the palm. I flick open the blade.

“What — ?”

His hands go back behind him.

I raise the knife and put the tip against my own throat.

“Wait.”

His hands reappear. His mouth is open. The room is very small. Sweat oozes around his nostrils.

“You know David Berkowitz, right?”

“David — what? Who are you?”

I say, “Berkowitz. Stay with me, please. You know who he is, right? Son of Sam?”

“The — the serial killer, right. Yeah, okay. So what?”

“You want to know the thing about serial killers?”

He licks his lips. “What?”

I press the blade, tipping it slightly against the skin. I feel the warmth of blood easing down my neck. The blood collects in the hollow of my collarbone. I lift the blade away from my neck.

“Jesus,” he says.

“The thing is,” I say, “that they suffer from an inability to imagine other people’s pain. And you know what else?”

He swallows. His cheeks shiver when he shakes his head once.

“That lack of imagination? It works for themselves, too. See, most people can imagine pain even when they’re not feeling it — their own. Someone else’s. That empathetic experience makes them avoid pain. Both their own and other people’s. You following so far?”

“What the fuck is this?”

“Okay. The deal is this. You can’t threaten a serial killer. What can you do? They’re not afraid of pain. They’re not afraid of their own pain and they’re sure as fuck not afraid of anyone else’s, because they can’t imagine it. In fact — ”

I step forward and raise the blade with both hands, the one gripped around the handle, the other hand cupped under the end of the blade, supporting the meaty palm of the other hand. The basic grip for an up-thrust that puts all of the cutter’s body weight behind the blow. The blade slices cleanly into his right shoulder just under the collarbone, angled up. The tip hits bone. He screams. The sound shrill and echoing.

“In fact, the only thing that feels
good
to a serial killer is someone else’s pain.”

He lunges at me. I let him come. His body weight tips me back. I shift to the side, my arms circling him like I’m hugging him around the body. I pull the gun from his waistband just as my spine and left elbow hit the floor. He’s on top of me. I hook a foot around his ankle. Lever myself out from under him with my left elbow and the fulcrum of our wedged ankles. His sweat-slippery hands on my arms. I get a hand free and punch the knife at his eye. He screams again and flings up his hands to ward me off and I roll off him and scramble away. I snatch up the magazine from the table. I put the open knife through my jeans waistband and slam the magazine home into the gun. Turn my wrist to see if the safety is off. Then I ratchet back the slide.

I aim the gun at his head. He lies on the floor. Blood spreads over the T-shirt. A drop of sweat rolls off his upper lip and splats on the floor.

He swallows hard. “Don’t — shoot. You can have the — money back.”

“That’s another thing about serial killers.” I thumb off the safety and grip the gun in my right hand. With my left I pull out the knife. “You can’t bribe them not to kill you. You want to know why?”

His head barely moves. His pupils zigzag, white-rimmed.

“It’s because of what I said earlier. The problem with not being able to imagine pain is that the pain center and the pleasure center in the brain are actually the same place. Did you know that?”

His eyes quiver, focusing on the hand gripping the knife and the hand with the gun and the distance to the coffee table and the door. I wave the knife. The slim blade glints.

“Pay attention, please. We are about to do something beautiful. But it will require your full attention.”

He glances back at my face. The pink tip of his tongue darts to his lower lip again. “Wh — what?”

“We are going to — embrace.”

“Emb — what the fuck are you talking about?”

I wipe the back of my knife hand over the cut in my neck. The blood is sticky, drying. My neck itches. Watching him, I lick the back of my hand. Let my tongue linger on the gum of blood in the creases between my thumb and palm. His eyelids quiver.

“The money is irrelevant.” I take a step forward. Not close enough that he can kick me or reach me. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want to play a little game. The game goes like this: you get to pick, knife or gun. See, most people
can
imagine pain. The interesting part of this game is that you’re a normal person. And a normal person is actually more afraid of a knife than of a gun. Isn’t that weird? Your logical mind
knows
the gun will cause more physical structural damage to your knee. But that emotional, atavistic part of your animal brain imagines the blade of the knife slicing through skin, muscle, tendon — ”

His fleshy throat moves convulsively.

“ — and that imagination is more terrible and more real than the scenario in the logical part of your brain. Isn’t that fascinating? The gift of being able to imagine pain, to empathize, is a fundamentally illogical gift. I do not have that gift. I am the enlightenment ideal — a purely logical, fundamentally rational being.”

I look down at him. At that maculate sweating hide. I can strip that sallow skin one piece at a time, and with each blubbery shred, I could exact punishment.

“You won’t survive.”

I watch the words imprint themselves in his frantic eyes, on his doughy flesh. He makes sounds, kittenish mewls.

Sounds like —

— like Aidan made —

Like I made when Aidan —

Now you know
.

I blink. Press the backs of my hands against my eyes. The faint smell of gun oil and metal.

I hear him move and my eyes open.

He’s gathered his legs, half-rolled on his side, trying to rise.

He freezes. Stares at me. His jowls tremble. His tongue darts out, makes a dry, smacking noise on his fleshy lower lip. I smell the sweat oozing from his pores, the stench of pure terror.

In my head, I suddenly see the man on the basement stares, the urine stain on his pants. Then I am in the basement, standing by the corpse with half-closed eyes. And I remember the feeling. The power coursing through me. The sparkle racing along my nerve endings.
This
feeling.

I laugh out loud.

Time to quit fucking around.

I flip the safety pin so the gun won’t fire and spin the weapon away behind me. It clatters on the floorboards. I pull out the role of cling wrap and before he can move, as the whites of his eyes begin to roll, I jump on him and wrap his face once, twice, three times in plastic. He begins to thrash and I jam the knife through one sleeve, pinning his arm to the floor. I grip the other arm, the one wet with dark blood, and lever it under my knee, then sit back on his upper thighs.

His head is banging against the floor, his chest bucking as he strains for air. A mist of condensation has spread across the vacuum-sucked plastic spread over his gaping mouth. His fingertips twitch and his legs are squirming under me.

“You have about two minutes,” I say. “After that, I lose you. So listen up.”

The agony in his face is like an El Greco painting, each line and shape exquisite with suffering.

Now you know
.

My gaze flickers. Licks of flame race through my skin. His head rolls around. It sounds like a wooden ball on the floor.

Now you know
.

I cough. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Shit.”

I get to my feet. The door in front of me. I shoulder it open and it swings shut behind me. I lean over in the empty hallway as if I’m about to vomit. Panting.

One of my shrinks told me that ordinary people rely on their gut to tell them the right thing to do. But my moral compass has no bearing, no consistency. I thought it would be the right thing to take the blame. Isn’t that what Christ did? He took blame for human crimes and two thousand years later the churches still reverberate with hallelujahs.

But when I told Aidan that I had killed his mother, he didn’t act like a man set free. And now I wonder what it will mean if I do this thing for Dave. I know what I am doing. I am finishing what I started eighteen years ago on the steps leading down into my parents’ basement: interceding my DNA for Dave’s crimes. He doesn’t need this drug dealer killed. He
wants
him killed. That’s different. I can only think of one reason why Dave would be so desperate for me to kill a man whose death doesn’t benefit him in any material way. My brother gave me a knife to slice the skin off this man’s bones. Odds are good that the knife I’m holding was recently intimately embedded between the carotid artery and jawbone of a woman named Desiree. If I kill this man and leave the knife on the premises I can provide a beautiful red herring, irresistible to city detectives who enjoy a neatly wrapped up crime with that ubiquitous non-motive that explains everything: criminal insanity.

I suppose Dave thought I would turn killer more easily. I imagine that he thought leaving me the tantalizing literary messages would be enough, that the image seared into my brain of that flayed body would tip me over the precipice. When I did nothing about the corpse, didn’t even mention it, he burnt it down to protect his own identity. For all he knew, I hadn’t even gone to look at the house.

He must have been confused, until I called with my frantic, gasped-out tale of muddled emotions from my confession to a crime of another in order to set Aidan free, and in which I failed and for which I sought some solace from him. And so Dave set to work, fixing his own problems, fixing my problems. Playing by the rules of the game that I had just established for him: I would not kill for pleasure. But for pointless expiation? I’m the stooge the whole world has been waiting for.

For the first time, I wonder what trade we really made all those years ago. It was a pretty straightforward setup. The man caught Dave doing something. Dave was scared, thought the man would call the cops or tell our parents. So he asked me to kill him. I didn’t really think I could kill anyone. I just pushed him as hard as I could and he wasn’t expecting the strength in my ten-year-old arms, the calculating cleverness of my ten-year-old brain that caught him at the top of a steep, narrow flight of stairs.

I thought I killed that man to give my brother innocence. In return I perjured a soul I had no real use for anyway since it was so flawed, so barely-human, in the first place. A fair exchange. But now I wonder. I know what I did back then was wrong but for the first time I wonder if I was both morally wrong and abysmally stupid. If killing that man did not set my brother free at all.

I turn and go back inside. My victim’s eyelids flutter. I bend over him and yank the knife out of the floor. Then I flip the blade in my hand and slit the edge through the plastic, a quick twist of the wrist to catch the edge and then a fluid upward pull. The faintest scarlet thread wells up on his skin under the blade’s tip.

“Listen.”

His mouth strains, his throat making dry clicking noises as he gasps for air. I can’t tell if he’s conscious or not.

“Pay attention. Okay?” The skin on my face feels brittle, like the muscles are cracking, shattering. “It would be right to kill you. You’re a human disease and I would be like a doctor if I killed you. A good person. You know? So don’t think that this is mercy. It’s not. Okay? It’s
not
. This doesn’t make me a good person.”