Authors: Lydia Cooper
When I am about to cross the street, a car turns onto Allyn and rushes toward me, headlights burning funnels into the fractured dark.
I stumble back onto the sidewalk and look carefully before I cross the street.
I make sure to slide inside the condemned house before clicking on the flashlight.
The minute my flashlight glows white in the dark, I hear a quick scuffle and a sharp crack. Then the sound of hard panting.
I walk into the kitchen, my back to the wall. It occurs to me that I should be afraid, that I might be attacked. That I could be killed and flayed.
But underneath the patina of fear that coats my skin like a candy shell is something hot, vivid, burning in the pit of my stomach. I am excited.
The noise comes from the kitchen.
The flashlight beam picks out the empty, crackled linoleum, and then the glint of the backpack. And a woman, clutching the backpack against her breasts like it’s a baby.
She’s huddled under the counter in the hollow left by a missing appliance, maybe a dishwasher. In the sharp glare of the flashlight she blinks up at me, her skin shimmering like moist creosote, eyes flaring white with terror.
I spread my free hand so she can see the harmless pink skin of my palm.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say. “I just want to know about the — the body upstairs.”
She makes a gargling noise. I move the light slightly and see the shine of mucus or saliva on her chin. She has a gap between two yellowed eyeteeth, the middle teeth a blank space. Her tongue thrusts pink and moist between her lips, ballooning them out. The tip of her tongue curls and then retracts and then thrusts out again. Plum-colored skin under her left eye twitches.
I sigh. I recognize her frailties. Years spent kicking the heel of my sneaker against a chair in a psychiatrist’s office have familiarized me with the physical evidence of any number of mental disorders. The waiting rooms of those places are like carnivals of the mentally disturbed.
The dregs of Thorazine and olanzapine, the heavy-duty drugs used to treat schizophrenia, float around the bloodstream, infecting it with myriad glitches and twitches like a fragging computer screen, symptoms of the cure rather than the disease. These twitches are called tardive dyskinesia and God knows I’d rather believe the FBI had hired space aliens to kidnap me than twitch like a short-circuiting motherboard.
She watches in silence when I come up to her. Her head jerks to the side.
I crouch down in front of her.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I just need to know. The man upstairs. The dead body. Did you put the sheet over him?”
She groans, a sound like a constipated moose.
And then she flies up, her limbs a whirlwind. I scramble back.
She rushes by me and the door slams.
I’m alone in the kitchen with nothing but the fresh smell of aconite and ammonia and the old reek of decomposition.
At least I know what the witness looks like. And, I think, looking around the empty kitchen, at least she remembered her blanket, drugs, and Dora backpack this time. Her night is looking up, even if mine has turned to shit. Without her — well, hell, even with her, given her mental condition — I won’t be any closer to identifying the killer. I click off the flashlight and wait for my eyes to adjust before going back to the apartment across the street.
My feet are quiet on the wood stairs and I turn the key carefully in the lock, easing the door open. But when I creep inside the apartment is quiet, so quiet I can hear the faint hum and gurgle of the refrigerator.
If Aidan is still in his room, he is no longer snoring. But nothing moves. No creak, no rustle of fabric. I imagine that he is lying there, awake, listening to my furtive creeping. I wonder what he is thinking. If he knows where I went. And I wonder if he has made similar journeys himself.
I ease my feet out of my sneakers and my bare feet are invisible in the dark as I go back to my room.
I get up at six the next morning. Shower. Dress. Instead of driving, I walk to campus to teach my first class of the day. I can see advantages to living so close to work.
Sometime after midnight last night the temperature dropped and rain turned into a heavy wet layer of snow. Frozen sludge covers the fields between the academic buildings. The sidewalks have been salted and grit under my shoes. The sky hangs low and bruised, pregnant with rain and ice, grieved to precipitation.
I don’t remember much of what I lecture, but from the Plasticine expressions on my students’ faces they don’t notice anything out of the ordinary, or really anything at all. After teaching, I check my e-mail in the grad student office. Then I work in the library for five hours. I was supposed to finish a translation of the manuscript pages last week, but I’ve done no work on my dissertation at all since finding the corpse.
I finish the translation and go back to the apartment. Everything seems brighter, sharper, inside. Even shadows are razor-edged. I don’t know if it’s just the scintillation of the unknown, the sharp tang of death and disaster haunting every corner of the cheap construction, but every minute in the apartment, every moment since my decision to move out of my parents’ garage, has felt like holding a live butterfly in my cupped hands, something frantically alive and almost unbearably fragile.
I think I like the way I feel.
Aidan is at the sink draining a pot of spaghetti.
I sling my backpack by the door.
“Hey,” he says. “I made enough for two. You want some?”
“Yeah.” The word sounds bald, awkward. I don’t know what else to add. I could thank him. That might be the polite thing to do. But I didn’t ask him to cook for me. So I say, “I’m pretty hungry.”
“Good.”
He pours the drained pasta into two bowls and takes them to the kitchen table. I edge behind him and wash my hands at the sink.
“Do you drink wine?” he asks.
“What?”
He points to a cheap bottle of cabernet with cartoon animals on the label. I shrug and he pours wine into two plastic cups. He sets one cup on the table near me and takes his cup and a bowl of pasta and goes to the living room. He stands in the doorway and shifts his weight. I sit down at the table and reach for the cup and drink for a long time and then set the cup down. The wine eases through me. Settles in my stomach like a warm fist.
“You can sit.”
He breathes out and comes quickly and sits down at the table across from me.
He looks at his plastic cup. His lips part like he wants to say something.
I hold myself still.
“How was your day?”
I say, “Shit.”
“What?”
I spread my hands. I don’t understand how people can do this — the talking. The meaningless mutterings. “Are you going to just pretend you didn’t hear me leave last night? Is this some — is this normal? I mean, I’m serious here. I don’t understand you. But can we at least — can you just, I don’t know, talk about
real
stuff. Say things that are true and that
matter
.”
He shuts his mouth. Looks down at his bowl. Then he looks back up. “It’s not my business where you go.” His thumb plays with the edge of his bowl, traces shapes on it. “You know? I mean, I don’t want to know. I’m, we’re both adults.”
He sounds awkward, his words stiff, like they are uncomfortable in his mouth.
“Fine.” I wave my hand. “So you’re not curious. That’s your business. But I am curious about you.” I point my fork at him. “I want answers.” What I really want to ask is, Did you kill and skin a man in the abandoned house across the street? But if his answer is no, I’m no closer to the truth and that much closer to a phone call to the cops and a lifetime playing with Play-Doh in a room that smells like SpaghettiOs and vomit.
“Start with that murder thing you said at my parents’ house,” I say. “What’s that about?”
“My — you mean, my mom?” He sits back in the chair. Puts his fingers over his mouth, and then buries his hand in his lap. “I didn’t think you were interested. You didn’t sound particularly happy about it at your parents’ house.”
“I’m not interested. If your mother died ten years ago and the cops never solved the case then there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Which begs the question: Why bring it up? Why corner me, a total stranger, and start going on about solving murders?”
I lean forward. His head moves back.
If anyone sketched the two of us, I would look like a lion and he would be a gazelle transfixed between terror and oblivion.
“Even by my abysmal standards of normal interactions, that’s bizarre. So talk.”
He clears his throat. Then he looks down at his bowl. He lays his fork down and reaches for his cup. He drinks, and then takes a deep breath.
“Okay. So, well, the thing is, I was a kid when my mother — ” His voice catches. He takes a breath, carefully. As if he’s tasting the air. “My mom died. Eleven years ago. She died of asphyxiation in a massive house fire. We — my sister and I — were at my father’s house when it happened. The police found two separate origin points for the fire, so they figure it was arson. The case was ruled a homicide but it wasn’t ever solved.”
I lean back in my seat.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?” he says.
“Okay, I get it. You want me to find the asshole who killed your mother and you want me to go Son of Sam on them. Blow them to kingdom come.”
The skin on his face slackens. “Wha — no! No, of course not. I don’t want — you don’t kill people.”
He says it as if I’ve proposed that the sun rises from the west and he is correcting me, gently but firmly.
“You don’t know that.” I drain the rest of my wine and set the empty cup down. A droplet shivers on the rim before racing crookedly to the chipped plastic tabletop. “My brother told you that but he also told you about the guy I killed when I was ten, and about my last roommate being hospitalized. You’re hoping I’m like some personal gorgon, able to be unveiled at your whim and turn your enemies to stone.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
He leans forward. His fingertips whiten on the edge of the table. “Your brother said you can’t feel pity or, well, and you can’t
like
anyone. And I saw you at your house. What you said to your mother. You tell the truth because you don’t care how it feels to the person you’re talking to. I want the truth. That’s all. I want someone who will find out the truth and tell me.”
I look at him. “So you already know who did it.”
His eyelids droop. He lowers his head. His shoulders rise when he takes a breath. “No,” he says. “I don’t know. I want you to find out.” His voice is a whisper. But I can hear him and I know that he is lying.
“This is stupid.” I stand up and take my empty bowl to the sink. “Why would you stalk me to my parents’ house just to ask me to tell you who killed your mother when you already know, or at least have a pretty good guess?”
“I
don’t
know.” He slams his palm flat on the table. The sound startles me and I jump.
His breathing is uneven.
I grip the edge of the sink.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “God, I’m really sorry. It’s just, my dad and my sister act like — well, they don’t ever talk about it and they never talk about anything, or go visit — I mean, my family never gets together. Not all of them. I think we need to bring everything into the open, to really talk about what happened, if we’re ever going to deal, you know? Only, I was really young when it happened. Sometimes it feels like everyone else
knows
while I’m just guessing. Maybe no one knows what really happened. But I
need
to. I need to know the truth and deal with it. I need to talk with sister and my dad about stuff instead of everything just, you know, festering.”
“Go visit who?”
“What?”
“Your family never visits who?”
Aidan rubs his forehead with his palm. Then he smoothes his palm over the back of his neck and drops his hand to the table. He looks at his upturned palms.
“I have a sister in an assisted living facility. She sort of lost it when my mom died. No one ever visits her or talks about her. Like she doesn’t exist anymore.”
For a while I stand at the sink and watch him.
I was right. His story isn’t interesting. The family secret that keeps them all apart is either the fact that his assisted-living sister killed their mother and then tried to off herself, or the mother killed herself and tried to take the sister with her. It won’t take much time or energy to figure out which it is, and, if I do figure it out, the knowledge won’t change anything. It occurs to me that I could probably do this, solve his family’s sordid little mystery. It’s a finite group of suspects, unlike the Case of the Corpse Across the Street.
But his broken family isn’t my problem. And I have bigger things to worry about.
“You’re right,” I say.
“I am?” He looks startled. “About what?”
“About why people engage in small talk. Real drama is pathetic. It’s almost worse than discussing the weather. Why do people always talk about the weather? It’s October in Akron, Ohio. The weather goddamn sucks. There’s nothing else to say about it.”
He looks up at me and smiles.
“I wonder if you could get a job just telling people the truth,” he says. “You know, saying things no one in their right minds would say but people need to hear anyway.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. But at least he is talking. It gives me an idea. Maybe this is the game. Maybe I have to solve his personal drama in order to figure out his relationship to the house across the street. If he met me at the poetry reading, then he’s been aware of me — interested in me — since before the corpse became a corpse.
I leave the kitchen and go back to my bedroom and come back with a yellow legal pad and a pen. I put them on the table and he looks up at me with his eyebrows raised and his lips parted.
“Pertinent information. When you’re done, put it on the counter.”
“Seriously? You — you don’t have to, you know.” He smiles a little, raises a shoulder. “I mean, I know this is my problem. What you said, it’s just — pathetic drama. My issues. I know that. And I know there’s probably not anything you can do.”
“I can ask around. No promises. But you obviously want to know, so — whatever. I’ll do it.”
“Okay.” He picks up the pen. Rolls it between his fingers. Then he says, “No, this is a stupid idea. It really is. I don’t know what — I mean, it’s not like it’s going to change anything.”
“No,” I say.
He clicks on the pen. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Okay.”
He frowns and when I turn to walk away he says, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“For real. Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know.” I grin. “What is the expression? For shits and giggles? I never understood what that means.”
He looks at me. And then presses his lips together and bends his head to the legal pad. Whatever he sees in my face, it is not, apparently, the hungering need to know about murder that has infected my dreams now for weeks.
I shut my bedroom door behind myself. The cat tangles between my legs. I pick him up and he settles like a mink across my shoulder, his purr vibrating against the tendons in my neck. There is a coin-sized spot of pain behind my left eye. It burrows like a cyst into my eyeball and my head flickers with hot-cold light. I lie down on the bed, curl over on my side. The cat turns in a circle and then lies down, cupped against the hollow of my stomach. Its sleek brown body rises and falls with my breathing.
I see a bloody footprint on the floor. Another on the stairs. My eyes hurt. The walls are shadowy and lean inward. There is blood everywhere, glistening. The basement is a hellish grotto lit by a moon made incarnadine. I can feel blood caked under my fingernails. Someone is lying at the foot of the stairs. A high-pitched voice is cackling, giggling, crazed. I realize that I am dragging my fingernails down my skin, shredding strips of flesh like paint peeling from a wall. The hysterical cackles pour out of my throat.
I startle awake suddenly. Shadows lie thick and brown around the bedroom. My mouth tastes like chalk dust.
I roll over and the cat squawks and wakes up and stretches, arching its back, the fur bristling. Dying sun burnishes the fine hairs along its spine.
I get up and go into the bathroom and bend over the sink, cup cool water and drink, then splash water over my face.
A noise to my left startles me. I look up and see Aidan lying on the sofa with one arm crooked behind his head. He lifts his head from his arm and looks at me. “Everything okay?”
I shove the cat off the counter. It falls on its paws, but grunts when it hits the floor.
“Mind your own fucking business.”
But I am surprised to find that my voice comes out a rasping whisper. I am hoarse.
I need to get out. I put on my shoes and run across campus and down busy roads, my sneakers splashing through gray slush, the air nipping at my exposed face and neck. My mind submerges into a misty calm and I don’t have to think.
In particular I shut out the truth that’s been rattling around my ribs like a hard nut, a truth I’ve never told my parents. The truth is, my version of crazy isn’t just manifested in a dislike for being touched, in a propensity to say the word “fuck,” or even in my utter lack of empathy for other humans. No. At night, I dream about the basement where I killed a man. I dream about my brother’s afterbirth lying in its steel bowl like violence floating in pain. I don’t know why my parents let me get close to human organs and blood so soon after I mutilated a corpse. My mother told me that she thought it would be good for me to see birth, a new baby. To be reminded of life. She should have known better. She must have been able to see that it isn’t
life
that fascinates me. My parents, my therapists, my brothers — everyone knows I dream about those two events. Here is what I have never told them: in the dreams the basement pools with blood and it is my brother’s newborn body that I am mutilating on the floor.
When I wake up my jaw muscles ache. I am so worn out, so unutterably weary of the fight against my own perversion. The truth is that I don’t know if I can make it. I don’t know how long I can keep from cutting someone’s skin and letting all the sweetness run out.