My Second Death Read Free

you.”
    “I know.”
    “All right, then. Tell him I send salutations.”
    He disappears into his office.
    I stand in the hallway and ball my fists in my pockets. The folded pink slip rubs against my skin. I could go see the dean.
    Or I could investigate the message.
    I decide to take the bait. I’ve got nothing better to do.
    Allyn is the name of a street near campus. I have driven past it before, but it exists outside the periphery of my small world of classroom, car, and assiduously avoided office.
    I walk out into decay-spiced autumn air and hike down the cobbled slope of the main campus, then turn down an alley behind a parking garage. A warren of shabby houses, all crackled paint and slanted ridgepoles, swarm the southern bank of the university like a scabrous architectural infection. I glance again at the pink slip in my hand, at what I assume must be an address, and a cryptic quote from Friedrich Nietzsche.
    Cars hurtle down Exchange Street. I cross at the light and walk up a block past a blood plasma center, a pawnshop with barred windows, a bar whose neon brew signs flicker dyspeptically. I stop at the street corner where Allyn, a cramped alley, runs into Exchange Street.
    I turn down Allyn. Weeds sprout through the cracked sidewalk. Collapsing houses crowd each other, their yellowed, overgrown lawns reaching across boundary lines like jaundiced fingers. I walk slowly, looking left and right.
    And stop suddenly.
    411 Allyn is indeed an address, but the house occupying the plot of land is a structural carcass. Plywood nailed over the windows, a yellow plastic streamer across the front door, paint chipping off aluminum siding, and bald patches of tar showing through shingles.
    I believe this edifice is what is known in the vernacular as a “crack house,” a building once used but now condemned for its role in the sale of cocaine or, more likely, the refining, cooking, and selling of methamphetamines. Because I live in my parents’ garage, and have done so for most of my twenty-eight years, I have never had the opportunity to view even the remains of such a den of vice.
    This lack of experience suddenly seems wrong, a deficit that must be immediately rectified.
    Half-smiling, intensely curious, I go up the drive, the fine gravel like crushed shells under my feet. A side door stands partially open, hanging crookedly on two broken hinges. I reach out to touch the door. And such a
feeling
suffuses my bloodstream, adrenaline rushing through veins and arteries. I can’t believe how cramped, how stultified, my life has become, my God, how
bored
I’ve been since — oh, since I moved into my parents’ garage ten years ago.
    My chest expands and constricts.
    Even gods decompose
.
    I push open the door and step inside. Darkness closes around me like a shroud when the door swings closed after my entrance. I blink and wait for my eyes to adjust, for the pale rainy light outside to reach into the cavernous gloom.
    A chalky smell has leeched into the concave walls. The house sounds empty, the sort of dull stillness you only notice when the electricity and water have been long turned off. A faint musty, mammalian stench, as if wild animals have camped out in here at some point. A couple of empty rooms to the left and right. And straight in front of me, a narrow flight of stairs that climbs into shadow.
    I walk up the stairs slowly, the fingers of my left hand running along the wall, my feet delicate, searching each stair before I lever my weight onto it.
    A hallway. A thin carpet, creaky floorboards.
    A door to the right. I reach out to open it, then hesitate. I don’t know what lies inside. I don’t even know what kind of hide-and-seek game I’m playing at. Is my mysterious message-leaver a chess player, intrigued by mental gymnastics? He, or she, I suppose, could be sending me on goose chases, trying to see how much influence over my actions he can wield. But what if my Nietzsche-quoting stalker is actually