My Second Death (27 page)

His eyes find my face. He lies limp, staring at me. His breath rattles like pebbles in a bowl.

The knife blade snicks shut as I press it against my thigh. I get up and go outside and shut the apartment door behind me, and I wait to feel something. Guilt, grief, exultation.

Then I push through the stairwell door and emerge in an alley stained plum-colored by a watery crepuscular sky.

After I leave the drug dealer’s apartment I wander the city for hours. A fierce dawn breaks through rainclouds and a faint smell of rotting trash hangs like a pall over the city.

I call my brother at eight in the morning.

“So you need to know,” I tell him. I explain that I did not kill the man. “And, come on. You don’t need him dead. Killing him is stupid, it’s just plain fucking stupid and I’m not going to lose twenty years of good behavior for some total asshole. And don’t worry, because I’ll think of something else, okay? We’ll figure it out. You’re not going to ruin your life and mine and everyone else’s by telling anyone anything.”

“Mickey, chrissake, come on! He’s
evil
. No loss to humankind. You kill him and you’re still, what is it you want to be? A good person? You fucking are, you
are
, if you kill him. And darling, you
need
to kill people.”

“No I don’t. I did that once for you. And I’m not doing it again.”

He laughs. He talks again, his voice wheedling up and falling into raging lows.

My head hurts. I yawn. After a while, I say, “Just shut the fuck up. You sound like a lunatic.”

He swears and hangs up on me.

Wind skitters trash across the sidewalk. Cars zip past, churning slush. I hug my fingers under opposite arms, clenching my elbows tight against my ribs. I imagine some medical examiner slicing open my body and finding my blood slurry and thick as a cherry-flavored slush.

I am so cold my stomach muscles are twitching, I haven’t slept in almost two days, and in the past twelve hours I have pissed off, terrified, and almost killed half of the people I know. But for some reason I feel — I feel okay. I didn’t kill that man. I put the knife down and I left.

The phone buzzes in my hip pocket.

“You did it to yourself,” he says. My brother’s voice is brittle, the pitch strung tight and quavering. He’s talking so fast that I don’t understand what he means.
What
is on fire?

And then I laugh.

“You asshole,” I say. “That’s not even a joke. ‘I set your car on fire’ is a joke?”

“You had a choice, I swear, I told you I needed you to kill that guy. They’ll find something, trace evidence, DNA, something. You had the chance. You could have saved me.”

“The car is a 1971 Chevelle.”

“I don’t — are you listening to me? Are you fucking
list
ening? I needed you to cover for me just one more time, okay? I fucking
need
ed you and you didn’t do anything, you didn’t fucking do anything. I gave you everything and you could have saved me, you could have — ”

My knuckles start to hurt.

“But,” I say. “But I need my car. I can’t — I mean, just give me the — ” My voice breaks. “Just, can you, put out the fire or, or — ”

“ — but you didn’t. You turned your back on me. So if you want it that way, fine.
Fine
. You want to destroy me? Is that what you want?” He starts breathing hard. “Jesus,” he says, and his voice is high-pitched, almost childlike. “Why are you doing this to me?
Why
?”

“But my car,” I say.

My cell phone illuminates. Call ended.

I press the phone hard against my ear.

My brother has never hung up on me before in our lives.

I want to find the right thing to say that will make time unravel.

Silence.

I stop walking. Someone pushes past me.

I sit down on the edge of the sidewalk with my feet in the gutter and lean forward and put my forehead on my knees. I put my hands over my head, holding the crown like it’s fragile, like it might explode.

I rock.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

People call to each other. Brush past me. I cringe away. The noise makes my head hurt. A freshening blue sky. Car horns blaring. A siren wailing in the distance.

The headache throbs harder. I can feel each beat of my heart in the ache. People shove by me. Elbows, arms, everywhere the smell of cooking food, sweat, piss, the smells of soiled human existence pressing against me, bruising my skin.

I want to run away. But I can’t run fast enough to escape this. I want — I
need
my car. Oh Jesus. If Dave tells the truth, the whole fragile construct of our lives will implode.

I put my fist to my mouth and bite my thumb to keep from screaming.

No air. Choking.

The dream again: falling into a void, into the vacuum pressure of a black hole.

I hate this fucking dream. The man on the steps. Blood. The taste of it in my mouth, coppery and sweet. In the dream I am pure rage, pure energy. Unleashed violence. In the dream there is no coming back. No more human left. Just the burning rage. The blood.

What I did when I was ten was wrong and I knew it and I knew that I deserved all those years of shrink visits and pills and boredom and rules. What I never fully realized was just how awful my crime was. The murder, that was wrong. Pulling out his eye was sick. It didn’t occur to me until now that the one good thing I did that day, my attempt to save my brother, was the worst of all my crimes. I know I will be punished for that crime, too, today or some other day. I don’t know if I can stand it.

I feel like vomiting.

If he tells, if our parents find out — I don’t know what will happen. All I can see is Aidan bending over the couch like a person dying of some incurable grief.

I open my eyes.

And I get up and run.

When I go inside, Dave’s apartment is empty.

I stand in the middle of the empty living space. Listening.

Then I turn and go towards the bathroom. And I halt in the doorway like I’ve run into a glass wall.

He’s lying fully clothed, collapsed in the corner of the shower with one leg sprawled out onto the bathroom tile. The shower is running. The water smells sulfuric, pumps out in fitful gusts and rattles. His arms draped at his sides, scarlet strings running from his wrists down the stained grout, splitting like a forged river around crusts of mold.

He looks up at me. Whispers, “You were — gone so long.”

I rest my head gently against the tile wall.

He tries to lift a hand. It flutters, the fingertips twitching. A small switchblade lies on the tile beside him. His lips move.

“ — cops come,” he’s saying, trying to say. A dry tongue circles his lips. “Cops come, I’ll tell them — it was you. It’s okay. I know how much you want to — to — ”

He still believes in his gift to me — the gift of the world
believing
in my psychosis. He was so fascinated by my pathology, by the way that I said and did things that startled ordinary people, appalled them, by how my mind galloped into dark places everyone else spends their lives hiding from. He thought I wanted to be free to live in the dark places. I know that I’m crazy, but I don’t want to be a sociopath. I’ve only ever wanted to be normal.

I take a breath. “It’s okay. I’m here now.”

I kneel down, my knees on the slick tile. He reaches for me. His fingers are cold, his skin clammy. “Kill me,” he says. “The — knife there.”

The skin on his fingers is loose, a sack around a ridge of bone.

“No.”

A long silence.

His tongue makes a sticky sound against the roof of his mouth. He says, “ — want to kill yourself?”

The water eases his blood away, drains him. My head spins, a pulse throbs in my temples. A hardness under my ribs. We’d fade together. It would be neat, bequeathing our parents a shearing grief instead of the lingering wretchedness of court cases and newspaper stories. And I
could
do it. I am genetically predisposed to play the devil, having no natural talent, no capacity, no emotional propensity for kindness.

My lips are dry. “No.”

“Then … what are you doing?”

His hand on my wrist. Ribbons of blood twine through our fingers. Water streams down his face like Christ’s sweat.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Don’t leave,” he says. “Don’t — leave me — alone. Not again.”

I slide my fingers out from his. My hands slippery with blood.

“Okay,” I say. “I won’t.” I hook my hands under his armpits to budge him forward. The water pounds on my head, trickles down the back of my neck. I climb behind him and ease myself down, my back against the tile wall. His torso lying across my lap, his head against my breasts. His dead weight presses against my chest. His head lolls against my neck.

I fold my arms around his shoulders like a kid afraid of falling off a playground spinning wheel. Rest my chin on the top of his head. My hair falls down over his neck, tumbles across his chest. The water strikes the crown of my head and runs down us, turning my hair to snaking dark tendrils that blend and merge with his blood.

“Oh,” he says. “Hey. Little sis. My good little sis.”

My chest feels tight, airless. I want to run away, to shove off the weight. I hold tight.

Dave turns his face, burrowing the ridge of his nose and jaw against me. The pressure a thousand weights and tiny teeth tearing at my skin.

“You still love me?” he whispers. “After — what I did to your car. Still — love me?”

I can feel the thud of his heartbeat. One beat. Nothing. Another beat. The moments of nothingness stretch longer.

I say, “I never have.”

The shower stall is rank with the sweetness of blood and the taint of lime, a strange milky musk. It smells like amniotic fluid.

And I think of Stephen’s birth.

When I was let into the hospital room, the baby’s kidney-colored body was being manipulated in latex-covered hands. The slick rasp of plastic over mucus-shiny skin. Stephen’s first breaths were rusty. The obstetrician and a nurse moved on squeaky rubberized shoes around the room, checking the baby, measuring it, wrapping it up in blankets. The nurse came and laid the swaddled bundle of squalling infant on my mother’s soft deflated stomach.

Come over here
, my mother said. But my eyes went to the umbilical cord looped around the placenta.

Dave went over, leaned his hips against the mattress, his hands burrowed into the bed sheets, and bent his face toward the baby, cooing, making baby sounds at the bundle. My father stood with his fingertips resting on my mother’s collarbone, his thumb making small circles on the back of her shoulder. My mother’s skin was reddened, her hair clinging wet to her temples.

Then the nurse tried to lead me to the bed where my family rested against each other, limbs and fingers and eyes touching each other. My hand went to the cool plastic rail on the side of the hospital bed.

Don’t you want to touch him? You can. He’s your brother
, my mother said.

I put my hands behind my back and sunk my chin toward my neck. A ten-year-old turtle drawing in on itself.

A few months later at one of my scheduled shrink visits I overheard my mother telling the psychiatrist that I didn’t want to be around the family, that I withdrew from them, resented being made part of family dinners, family picnics.

But it wasn’t that. It was never that.

My mother cries because I’m strange, but I don’t understand that. As far as I can tell, she’s never actually admitted to herself that I am psychologically different from ordinary people. She never even tried to understand. When I was a kid, I balked and shrieked and ducked but she didn’t once ask how it felt when she tried to touch me. She never asked herself how scared I must have been, months after scraping a dead man’s eye out of his skull with my fingernail, to be told to touch an eight-pound baby’s face. What was I supposed to do? I can’t read emotions very well but I’m not stupid. I knew by the looks on their faces that my family felt things I would never feel. I knew what I was capable of. So I put my hands behind my back and stepped away from the hospital bed. Then I turned and bolted out of the hospital room.

The smell of placenta and amniotic fluid clung to my clothes.

Dave came to find me. He always did.

I was sitting by a planter. The windowpanes were a rain-washed pewter gray. Shadows inched across the linoleum floor. Dave walked over to the seat and leaned against it. Tipped the plastic frame. Startled, my hands flared out, grabbed at the armrests. Dave pinned the chair against the wall with his weight, trapping three of my fingers. The bones ached.

“Stop it,” I said.

He waited for a few minutes and then let the chair go. It settled onto all four legs. I rubbed at the pink welts in my hand. Then I reached up and took his hand. I dug my fingernails into the soft skin over the tendons at the base of his wrist. He bit his lip and when I let go, he gasped and laughed and rubbed his wrist against his stomach.

“Jeeeesus,” he said. “Ow.”

He rubbed my hair and went over to the window to look out into the rain-swept parking lot. I felt calm for the first time since we had come to the hospital. I felt evil. I felt honest.

Dave whispers, “Yeah, you do.”

I don’t remember what he’s talking about. The water cools, a sluggish trickle pumping out over our heads.

A slow pulsing ache throbs against the edges of my eye sockets. I close my eyes and imagine that I’m far away, in a dark airless place with no smell except emptiness and nothing hurts and nothing matters.

“Oh God. Oh God. Dave, what did you — what’s wrong with Mickey? Come on, wake up, Mickey. It’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay, just, I’m going to have to — oh, God.”

The darkness sways.

The voice moves away, jabbering frantically. “ — 911 emergency, yes, I need an ambulance, emergency paramedics, right away. I don’t — I think so, yes. Attempted suicide. Yes, probably. No, I don’t know what he took, just — yeah. Hurry.”

My eyes are shut tight. The light hurts.

But Dave shifts in my arms. His ribs press against mine as he inhales.

“
Ai
dan!” he breathes. “You
came
!”

Even faint as mist, his voice holds its silvery chime, its mocking incantatory lilt.

I open my eyes. My lashes are gummed and sticky.

Aidan’s face hovers overhead, framed by the chipped pinkish bathroom tile. His eyebrows dark wings, a blue vein pulsing in his temple. His good eye burns, even his walleye steadied in the force of his glare. He reaches into the shower and cranks off the spigot.

Then he hunkers down in front of the stall, one hand splayed against the wall to steady himself. His solitary eye is not on Dave but on me.

“He said he took something. I came as soon as I could. He didn’t say — he didn’t say you were here.”

“You’re — a
saint
, a — veritable saint,” Dave whispers. His bloody fingers reach out, trembling, and close around Aidan’s wrist.

Aidan reaches across with his free hand and peels Dave’s fingers off his wrist.

Dave’s rejected fingers flutter in the air, questing for skin, for contact. They dance like butterflies across Aidan’s forehead, touching his cropped dark hair, his forehead, his lips, leaving pink stains where he touches.

“So — pretty.”

Aidan’s skin is the color of old milk. His lips tighten across his teeth.

Dave gasps on a laugh. His fingers fall away. “Oh, don’t be like that,” he says. “I’m
dy
ing.”

“No, you’re not. I called the paramedics.”

The bathroom shimmers, washed in silky rose light.

Aidan frowns and rubs his fingers on his kneecaps. “Mickey,” he says. “You okay?”

When I don’t answer, Dave says, “Do you know — did she ever — tell you why she killed him? Killed B-Bracy Hoff?”

Silence.

Dave starts talking again. When he speaks, even though he is barely whispering, I can feel the translated vibrations, each breath inhaled and exhaled trembling through my body.

Dave says, “
Oh
. Oh, yes, you don’t know who Bracy Hoff is. Of course you don’t. She — never calls anyone by name. You must have noticed. She read in some — book, has this notion that — she can set us free — if she refuses to — call us by name.”

From somewhere far away, I hear myself say, “Don’t do this.”

Dave laughs. His head shifts.

“See? You think — you know her. You don’t know
shit
about my — darling sister. You think she tells the truth. But it’s all lies. She lies about Bracy. Why is that, babe? Tell — tell Aidan why.”

Aidan doesn’t say anything.

“
Tell
him.”

And my hands tighten their grip on Dave.

“I killed him.”

“Tell the
truth
.”

“I killed him and I dug his eyeball out with my fingernails.”

Dave says, “See, Aidan darling, everyone
thinks
that little Mickey — pushed Bracy Hoff down the, the stairs because he was — trying to — do something naughty to poor Mick.”

I taste salt in my mouth.

“But the
truth
, the truth is that Mr. Hoff was a good man who — who caught little Davy Brandis with a penknife and a — and a box of matches, and he was doing something — to little Mickey. And when Mr. Hoff tried to reach the t-telephone, little Davy told — his sister to push — him and — and what happened then? Babe tell — tell Aidan what
happened
then.”

A soft sound like a groan escapes. I bite my tongue until I can feel the creaking pain of it.

“She pushed him and — God Almighty, Aidan. You should — should have
seen
it. Like watching the — the birth of Venus, the a-awakening of Eve. More beautiful and terrible than — sin itself.”

“Stop.” Aidan’s face is calm. The tears sparkle on his lashes, on the creases by his mouth. He doesn’t move to wipe them.

“No,” I say. “It wasn’t like that.”

“It was,” Dave says. “It
was
like that. Our games. What games did we play? The cutting games. The burning games. Tell — tell him about playing Gestapo. God, our endless in
vent
iveness.”

“Mickey.” Aidan’s voice is strained, pitying, gentle. Like he’s talking to a little kid.

“Don’t sound like that,” I say.

“Mickey. It’s okay.”

I take a breath. Struggle to focus on his face, to make the words come out right. “I’m sorry I lied.”

Aidan doesn’t blink. “You mean about my mother?” His good eye is steady, watching me. “I know why you said that. For Stella. To protect her. It’s okay.”

“No,” I say. “Your sister didn’t do anything wrong. I did find out — it wasn’t her. Okay? Your mother wanted to — your mother wanted to die. She wanted to kill herself. Okay? I’m sorry. I thought if I told you — I mean, I thought it would help. I never say the right thing.”

Aidan’s fingers tap against his knees. “It’s okay. You know … what I did, that wasn’t your fault.” He licks his lips. “I know you had to touch me, and all. Thank you.”

“Well. I owed you.”

Aidan smiles slightly and shakes his head.

Dave inhales. He reaches around and his fingers grab tight to my hair. He pulls hard. The pain is sharp.

“Someone want to
tell
me the fucking story?” he says.

The crusty slash on his wrist stinks like hot milk and copper. I put my fingers to his wrist, the nails resting against the edges of the slashed skin.

“Stop.” Aidan stands up suddenly. “
Stop
.”

I pull my fingers away. Make a fist and press my knuckles against the tile wall.

“She won’t,” Dave says. “Look. See? She
won’t
.” He drops his hand. Threads of hair tangled around fingers that lie, half-curled, across his stomach. “I tried though,” he says. “To make her — astonishing. To make her famous. The dear Lord knows I
tried
.” A breath of laughter. “Few have done what I did,
off
ered what I did — to the deity.”

The creases by the sides of Aidan’s mouth deepen.

I grab onto Dave’s shirt, twist my fingers in the wet fabric. “Shut up,” I say. “Shut
up
.”

Dave laughs once then gasps shallowly for air. His ribs against mine, his spine against my breastbone. “You don’t — want me to tell him what I did for you? How I became
like
you — how I tempted you with the tenderest — morsels that you crave?”

Aidan’s eyelids suddenly lift.

“Yes.” Dave inhales. “The sacrifices — you are thinking of them? Wondering, perhaps. Well. I did it because — because blood pleases the god.”

Aidan’s eyes sharpen. His good eye swivels, focuses on me. “Mickey what is he — what’s he
saying
?”

“The dead,” Dave says. “Yes. Your suspicions are correct. I brought them to her — like the cat brings dead mice. A humble — supplicant.”

“
Them
?”

I close my eyes.

“Oh, I have more — offenses at my beck,” Dave says. His voice cracks with grief. “I
wish
I hadn’t done it. Don’t I —
don’t
I, my darling? But — you left me anyway, growing smaller — on the horizon — locked in the — embrace of such a one as this — this goddamn artistic infant.”

“No,” Aidan says. “What are you saying? You murdered — ”

“The woman, made a pietà of her. Yes. And the other — across the street. In the pretty room, inside the empty house. In
Xan
adu. I killed him in a dying — paradise and burnt it — to the fucking ground.”

“Is this true?” His voice despairing.

I don’t say anything.

“Mickey why didn’t you say anything? To the cops? You should have, you can’t just — I know he’s your brother but — ”

“She will never — hurt me,” Dave says. “No matter what I do. Do you see that, little Aidan? She belongs — to me.”

I open my eyes and look at Aidan. “At first I — I thought it was you.”

Aidan looks at me unblinking and tears stand on his lashes and lie in the hollows of eye sockets and his upper lip. “What?”

Dave chokes, a bubble rising and popping on his lips, laughing silently through a mist of mucus and water. “Because my plot was — peerless. Because of proximity — and timing. When we met, when you told me your sad, sad tale of murders and, and
fire
— you became my — muse. You are the demon of my — loneliest loneliness.”

Aidan looks at Dave for a long time.

“That woman who was killed. You
mutilated
her.”

Dave says. “Sh, don’t distress yourself. You’re thinking now that you may have been wrong to have — saved my life. But I am not — like her, not like my dear sister. Not
sick
like her. I tempt, I tease, but I am only — vaguely dispossessed. I am not — crazy. I kill but am not a
killer
. I’m not compulsive, not a
psycho
path. I only ever harmed the hairs of — of heads no longer counting in the general consensus. Has there been — a hullaballoo? The civic voice raised in outrage? No. They don’t
matter
. I would never kill a — kill a
real
person.” He stops talking. And then his breath hitches. He holds it, and then lets it out, slowly. “But
you
. You, Aidan, darling. What kind of man are you? Mickey, she’s going to — going to
crack
someday. Once she starts there will be no stopping her. Will you try? Do you realize that you should? You should stop her now. If you want to do the right thing.”

Aidan makes a noise like a grunt. He looks down at the knife lying by Dave’s thigh and his fingers reach out, touch it, and close around the handle. He looks around at the empty apartment behind him as if someone will arrive, leaping out at the last minute to free him from his dilemma. But no one comes.

“Do it. Darling,
do
it.”

Aidan looks down at the knife in his fist. He swallows hard.

Dave reaches out and his fingers touch Aidan’s face. Aidan jerks. The hand gripping the knife instinctively pulls back and Dave reaches over and grabs Aidan’s wrist. He laughs.

Aidan gasps and yanks his hand back. It comes free, Dave’s fingers slippery with blood and weak. Aidan’s shirt cuffs are sodden and pink in finger-shaped stripes.

The knife falls from his hand and lands near Dave with a clink. Dave looks down at it. And then he picks it up.

“Well, well,” he says, “will you lookie at
that
.”

Aidan looks at him, the thin white skin on his forehead pleated. He looks like a confused child.

I feel Dave’s muscles tense and even though I can’t see the direction of his eyes I know what he’s thinking. I know the burning fixation in his mind that won’t forget the knife, that won’t ignore the pulsing blue-purple vein in Aidan’s thin neck, and that can’t resist the increasing proximity between the two.

“No,” I say. “
Don’t
.”

I grab Dave’s hand to force it down, dig my fingernails into his wrist. He’s weaker than I thought. His arm falls heavy as a flank of meat. The point of the knife slices down cleanly into his thigh.

Dave chokes, gasps. His head bucks back into my chest.

I let go.

Aidan whispers, “Oh Christ.” He stumbles to his knees, his feet, and runs into the main room. He coughs and then retches loudly.

A dark pulsing gush.

I push the weight of Dave’s torso to the side. I press my fingers against the hot rhythmic spurts. I know there has to be a way to find the severed artery. My hands slip.

Dave tenses. And then, slowly, he relaxes. His muscles unclench. A tremor ripples through his left leg. His breath trickles out and then he inhales and holds his breath. He coughs once.

“
No
,” I say. I hit him in the chest and then in the face. A dark blood print across his cheek. “Come on. No. Please. No. Jesus, please, come on.”

My chest is an empty cavity. I can’t breathe. It hurts. A tight hard knot of pain under my ribs. It hurts like my heart has stopped beating and won’t ever start again.

Noise swells into a sudden cacophony. Harsh strident voices in the hall. Fists bang on the door. Aidan’s silhouette rises up in the living room, haloed in red and blue. The paramedics have come.

The bathroom fills with sound and smell and the heat of sweating bodies. They move in sharp, efficient gestures in the tiny bathroom space. Hairy arms and plastic hands reaching, pushing, pulling. Professional latex gloves pressing into his thigh, a rubber tube wrapped around his leg and pulled tight. When they lift Dave away from me his left arm slips, the hand falling with a thud to the floorboards. Black strands of my hair dangle from his thin fingers.

They haul Dave to the main room and strap him to a gurney. Aidan is hunched on the couch, his arms wrapped around his chest, rocking back and forth.

Blood and sulfuric water stick my shirt to my belly. The dream leaking into real life and this time I can’t wake up. I want to cut something, to feel something, some pain worse than the choking airlessness. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. My lungs cramp. My hands are shaking. The floor is smeared with blood. My hands and shirt. The smell of it everywhere. My hand reaches for the knife where it lies on water-beaded tile. I rise, shivering, the air crystalline and empty around me. The room sparkles. The knife blade is in my fist.

One of the paramedics bent over Dave lifts her head. The skin on her forehead wrinkles and lines curve near her nose. Her upper lip lifts away from her eyeteeth. She looks like a cowering hyena hunched over half-eaten prey that has caught the scent of a starved lioness.

“You poor kid,” she says.

And I realize that I have completely misunderstood the lines on her face.

The knife falls out of my loose fingers.