Authors: Lydia Cooper
My Second Death
SECOND
DEATH
A NOVEL
LYDIA COOPER
F+W Media, Inc.
For Joanna: now you’re in a book I wrote.
I would like to thank the best and kindest agent in the business, Amy Rennert, and Robyn Russell, editorial superstar, without whom this book would not exist, or at least would not exist in a form that any sane person would lay claim to. Robyn especially demonstrated uncanny and superwomanly patience, insight, and sense of humor through the book’s evolutionary process.
And of course, in a purely physical sense, this book would not exist in the form it currently takes without my publisher, Ben LeRoy, who has incredible energy and great vision. I am truly lucky to have him as a publisher. I would also like to thank Ashley Myers at F+W Media for her keen editorial eye, Arin Murphy Hiscock for her brilliant (and incredibly quick) copyediting, and the talented production department at Tyrus Books.
I was so fortunate to study writing with Bob Pope and Greg Garrett, who are magnificent teachers and writers and mentors and yet I still don’t have a big enough vocabulary to thank them properly.
And I have to acknowledge Emily Kolbe. I wouldn’t write if it weren’t for her. Even though she is dead now, she taught me about why people write and so in a way, everything I write is for her and because of her. I also want to thank my wonderful friends who have adventures with me in foreign countries and in weird parts of the U.S., and who have, all of them (you know who you are), taught me how to be a better person. And finally, my family, which defies adjectives, with a special shout-out to Kara and Beatrice for having such delightfully perverted tastes in television shows.
I gasp and wake up, damp with sweat, to a dim gray dawn and the gentle murmur of a late autumn drizzle. Rain crawls in shifting patterns across the windowpane as I wait for my pulse to slow. It’s always like this when I dream about my brother’s afterbirth: panic, something between lust and terror.
I was almost eleven when he was born. My older brother and I were waiting in the hallway. My mother lay exhausted on crinkly white sheets, and she turned her head to the doorway where the nurse stood like a guard.
You can come in, come look
, the nurse said, and I went into the room. I looked down. A lucent, pulsing cord of blue and gray sprouted from the baby’s taut belly. The doctor clipped the cord and lifted the heavy sac of placenta into a stainless steel surgical bowl, a blood-dark jellied anemone. He saw me watching and he raised his eyebrows a little, and then he winked, as if he could tell how much I loved the smell of the rich, metallic blood. But what I loved best was the neat snick of the scissor blades. It was seventeen years ago today, but I can still hear the sound of the scissors like an ache in my molars. That sound, that smell.
I’m not an idiot. In my relatively short life I’ve been through enough shrinks and therapists that I am well acquainted with the convoluted machinations of my psyche. I know better than to lose myself in visions of my younger brother’s afterbirth.
I scrub my thumbs against my eye sockets and get out of bed. The concrete floor is cool under my bare feet. Because there isn’t a bath in the garage where I sleep, I have to go into the house to shower.
The kitchen is quiet when I let myself in. The silent tableau looks like a postmodern Vermeer masterpiece, the pristine domestic scene full of shiny metallic objects — a coffee pot, a microwave, an electric can opener — but devoid of humans. I go upstairs.
The bathroom is still hot and steamed and smells of a man’s cologne. My father must have already left for work. Condensation drips down the mirror, dragging clear lines so that it looks like the mirror’s stripping itself off in pieces. Slices of my face appear. I check my watch. I’ve got fifteen minutes to shower, brush my teeth, and assemble the strips of my face in the right order. I grin at the mirror and see one eyeball, one incisor grinning back.
After my shower, I wrap a towel around my hair, pulling on a threadbare Jane’s Addiction T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a black hoodie that I zip up to my throat.
The bedroom door to the left of the bathroom is tilted open. I stop in the hallway and listen for his sleepy grunts and the rustle of sheets. My little brother. He’s a junior in high school, small and acne-chinned.
With my fingertips I brush his door in, and it swings on silent hinges. The shadows cling to his rumpled sheets, to the lines of his outflung limbs. One bare arm stretches over his pillow, his fingers curled against the headboard. I imagine running my fingers across his knuckles, the downy hair on his forearms, the rubbery tubes of veins. I imagine taking my pocketknife and peeling back skin to see the rich gelatinous blood, latticed muscle, and pearl-white tendons.
I rest my forehead against the wooden doorframe and wait for him to draw another breath. Then I go back into the bathroom and in the condensation on the mirror I write,
Happy Birthday, Kid
.
I pour coffee into a thermos then head out to the carport, ducking against a sudden spatter of cold rain. Dried leaves hiss across the tarmac. The sky swarms with roiling clouds, lavender and steel.
Under the canted carport roof a faded blue tarp covers the car. Not a car,
the
car. I drag the tarp off a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle with a 350 cubic-inch V8 engine sitting under its sloped hood. In this case, the V8 engine is more of a V7, one cylinder misfiring. I need to sit down and order parts sometime.
The cracked vinyl seat is cold, and I set the thermos between my thighs to drive. I roll down the driveway, the car’s broken insides heaving and bucking against the strain. Windshield wipers screech metronomically, swish-screek, swish-screek. My parents’ house is on a brick-paved street and when I pull onto the street the car’s suspension creaks and rattles through pocked cobbles filled with rainwater.
The house is in west Akron, a maze of brick streets and old houses with turrets and leaded glass windows, solariums and Tudor-style wood frames. The city of Akron, Ohio, is, as everyone knows, an ugly city, a plastic and rubber city with dirty streets and abandoned factories and warehouses. Goodyear and Firestone built Akron a century ago; the sky darkened as greasy factory smoke billowed out into the wind, and now, a century later, gritty rain weeps down on us ten months out of the year. To the north, Lake Erie is a gray sea floating with soggy trash, yellow McDonald’s wrappers, iridescent skins of oil, and pale dead fish with raw white bellies and staring eyes.
But
this
is west Akron, cloaked in ancient oaks and maples, aristocratic, quiet, something slightly removed, a swath of archaic rectitude and decaying beauty. Long ago the Seiberlings and all the wealthy tire-factory-owning families lived here. They built their mansions and now the biggest mansions are sub-divided into apartments and the smaller houses are dreary, cracked relicts of a noblesse long gone. The families who live here today are a different aristocracy, a poor, working-class aristocracy.
Like the faded paradise in which they live, my parents are gods in ruins. My father is an academic dean at the university. My mother teaches piano lessons. They are quiet, respectable, successful people whose lives are free of blemish. They use the correct silverware when they eat and they are unfailingly polite to each other. Unassuming, educated, urbane, they err perhaps on the side of decorum rather than happiness.
Like the rest of the city of Akron, however, the other members of my family are more tarnished, a faintly sordid smell clinging to the corners of their lives. My older brother, Dave, recently moved back to Ohio from New York. He now lives in a bohemian studio apartment littered with cigarette butts, twists of aluminum foil, a threadbare volume of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” He published a short story when he was in high school, a chapbook of poetry in his first year at college, and another critically received book of poems before he was twenty-three. His charm is manic, addictive, and because he makes almost all of his editors’ deadlines and usually manages to walk without a stagger he is forgiven his tawdry aura and loved by all.
My younger brother, Stephen, is an honor roll student at a preppy mostly Jewish high school where he pretends that his Jewish genes outweigh his Presbyterian ones. Chameleon-like, he becomes Presbyterian when my mother forces him to attend church. He is an atheist when he visits our father at the university. His cosmology, his colloquialisms, and his convictions switch at the speed of light, adapting mercilessly to his environment. His only constant is a quiet yet determined smile, shining so brightly that no one suspects he has an older sister who lives in the garage behind his house and who, like crude oil drillers, coal factories, and logging companies, has the dubious honor of being a dark catalyst for adaptive genius. I’m not proud of it.
And then there’s me, the middle child. I live in the garage and say “fuck” too much, but I never whine about the rain or the cold, I rarely eat dead animals, and I haven’t killed a man since I was ten.
I park in a gravel lot at the university. The rain has faded and the air is thick with the smell of car exhaust, ozone, and wet soil. Sunlight breaks through mottled shelves of clouds, striated bands of gold making the packed rows of cars glimmer like subaqueous stones.
The glass doors of the humanities building open onto a hallway packed with hurrying students. Eddies of voices, fragmented shouts, giggles, curses, and the swirling smells of bubblegum and chalk. Speckled linoleum flickers under the glare of fluorescent runner lights. Nausea bubbles like rotten sewage in my gut.
Elbow tilted out, chin ducked, I brandish my thermos in front of my face and press through the crowded hallway to my classroom. The students have already arrived. They sprawl behind tiny pressboard desks and watch the doorway with sullen eyes. A few of them have fixed their gazes fervently on the second hand ticking round the clock that hangs over the teacher’s podium.
I am out of breath. I dump my backpack on the seat behind the podium, turn to the chalkboard and scrabble along the metal rim for a piece of chalk. The chalk squeaks.
Acrasia, Amavia, Ruddymane
.
I turn around and dust my fingers on my legs. Papers rustle. A pen scratches. I face a gulf of four feet and then rows of blank, expressionless eyes.
“Okay, so we’ve got through Book Two of
The Faerie Queen
,” I say. “We’re going to talk about Ruddymane today. Anyone want to start us off by defining anagogical allegory?”
A student leans over and whispers. Quiet snickers.
I suck down a mouthful of coffee, then set the thermos under the teacher’s podium. The bitterness sticks to teeth, my tongue. The clock ticks in the silence.
“All right. Pop quiz.”
I grin. They hate this. The hatred sizzles on their post-adolescent faces. They take their heavy textbooks and shove them back into backpacks. The multiple thuds of book spines hitting the floor sounds like a flock of dead birds falling from the sky.
A hand rises in the back.
“Yes, in the back. Question?”
“Are these terms going to be on the exam?”
I lean against the chalkboard. “Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Back Row. I get paid a stipend to teach this class while I work on my dissertation. I am here because I want lots of letters after my name, letters that mean I don’t have to talk to people, or spend any more time breathing their air than I have to.
You
are here because you want a degree that means you won’t have to flip burgers the rest of your life. But with the state of the economy right now you will likely settle for some minimum-wage government job, like, say, delivering mail, that will provide you with a modicum of security and health insurance. Disappointed by your life work, you will drink yourself into a coma every night in front of
American Idol
reruns. You will sink into a stupor from which you will be barely aware of your own insignificance in the world, far less the insignificance of esoteric terminology you failed to memorize in your sophomore-level literature class at college. So even if I say yes, they are on the exam, would it make a difference?”
Twenty-five pairs of doughy lidded eyes, twenty-five moist, slack mouths. Silence. The guttural tick of the clock.
A hand from the back row.
“So, you’re saying they
will
be on the exam?”
After class, I cram the heavy volume of Spenser’s collected works into my bag and go upstairs to the fourth floor where the graduate students work in a windowless room overstocked with broken swivel chairs and outdated computer monitors. In addition to teaching one class a semester, we are required to hold six office hours per week so that our students can come to us with complaints or for help understanding course material. I spend an average of six minutes a week in the office, but I rarely get reported for dereliction because my students don’t feel the need to seek my sage advice, and my fellow graduate students do not exactly miss my less-than-sunshiny presence.
The room is almost empty. Two grad students sit at a computer sharing a pair of headphones. The one sitting awkwardly on the arm of the chair leans against the other’s shoulder. They are bobbing their heads back and forth and singing along with some video clip. I’ve seen them do this before. They told me it was “poor man’s karaoke,” but I still don’t get it. I wonder what it would feel like to plant a palm casually on someone’s shoulder, to feel the rise and fall of a person’s breathing synchronized with your own. They look so oblivious, like they don’t know I’m standing here. Like they don’t know how lucky they are that they find it so goddamn easy to be happy. I inhale as if I want to say something, but I don’t know what I would say. I don’t even know why I would want to join their cat-neutering wail. I breathe out and back out of the doorway.
Because life is short and graduate student offices are boring, I sign my name on the spreadsheet of hours and turn to leave. On my way through the front office the secretary lifts her head from behind her laminated desk.
“Ms. Brandis? You’ve had a lot of calls. I’ve got the messages here. The dean wants to see you.”
She holds up a sheaf of small pink notes, my missed messages. I flip through them. The dean. My dissertation director. The dean again. I crumple them. One note is written in a different script, a slanted down-stroke of black ink. The words make me pause.
Even gods decompose
.
I look up. The secretary is behind her desk unwrapping a kielbasa croissant, her phone headset moved away from her mouth.
I look back at the message.
Message for: Michaela Brandis. Time and date: 3:20 p.m., Wednesday, 10/06. Message: Even gods decompose
. And then numbers and a name.
411 Allyn
.
I frown, and fold the note and put it in my pocket. For some obscure reason I feel the need to hide it. But I honestly have no idea who left it for me, or what it means.
“Michaela Brandis!”
I startle.
“Sorry to jump out at you like that. I didn’t see you here all week.”
Dr. Robert Telushkin, my dissertation director, scuttling into the office smelling like rain, an umbrella beaded with mist pinned under his tweed-sleeved arm. He’s a small man with brown liver spots on his forehead, and eyes that are metallic green-gold like a bullfrog’s. He wears heavy gold rings on his fingers, untucked shirts, and sandals even in winter.
“So! Have you thought about what I said, Michaela?” The loose skin under his chin ripples when he talks.
I scowl at him. “Oh, I’ve got a
great
idea. Why don’t you fuck off and leave my personal life alone?”
His chin waggles. He waves a gold-banded finger back and forth. “Now, I’ve told you. I know academia, the ivory tower, all that seems ideal for the social recluse, but what did I say?”