My Second Death Read Free Page A

dangerous?
    I know that this is a bad idea. I push the door open anyway.
    For a second, I hesitate, every muscle tensed, waiting for something — anything. But the room is empty.
    Another door on the left, latched shut. I touch the door handle. It turns. The door creaks and sighs. A smell, the cold touch of wind on my skin and the smell. A sweet reek, like raw sugar and mold-softened tomatoes.
    I reach into my pocket, feel the cold teeth of my car keys. Find a thin plastic tube, a miniature flashlight attached to the keychain. I click on the flashlight. Iodine-yellow light trips across the room. Wooden floorboards, an antique bureau with clawed feet, the veneer chipped and faded in patches, each porcelain knob stenciled with tiny violets.
    In the opposite corner of the room, a twin-sized mattress on a metal bedframe. Something is lying on the bed. I inhale sharply.
    The flashlight blinks off when my hand momentarily loses all messages from the neurons frantically misfiring in my brain.
    I can’t breathe.
    My thumb presses on the flashlight button again. The beam pins the bed in its single-eyed gaze.
    A man lies facedown on the mattress, his arms cuffed at the wrists to the bedposts. His legs are duct-taped at the ankles. The skin of his back is slit down the spine and spread like wings across the bed sheets.

TWO
    My heart kicks against my ribs and electricity fizzes through my veins. My pupils dilate. I have to,
fuck
, I have to leave.
    My feet shift. A step closer to the bed. And then I am bending over it.
    My hair swings down. The strands brush against the body’s cold skin. I pull my hair back, wrap the length around my fist and tie the hank into a knot.
    The corpse has been flayed, his back skin pulled apart like fabric. The skin drapes white-clotted against persimmon-red sheets. The red sheets are bleached pinkish-yellow in patches as if some acidic substance splattered them.
    Knots of vertebrae like sea sponge, slender yellowed laths of ribs. Clumps of macerated pink flesh cling to the bone. The head and neck are intact, the skin split from the protruding curve of spine at the base of the shoulders down to the lumbar vertebrae at the top of the swell of buttocks.
    Venetian blinds stir as rain-scented wind snakes in the cracked windowpane. Broken slats clack against each other like teeth. I take a breath. The smell of blood, cold soil and coins.
    I reach out two fingers of my left hand and brush lank strands of hair from the corpse’s neck. The skin there is the color of milky tea. I press my fingers against the skin. The knobby vertebrae shift under the skin with a gritty sound. A thin fluid wells up from an almost-invisible slit.
    I look at the man’s head. His face is turned to the wall, his right cheek pressed against the sheets. His left eyelid is visible, but the skin is puckered where it droops over the drained sac of his eyeball. The jaw is distended, the left cheek tented. I see a glimpse of fabric between his lips. With my forefinger and thumb I tug at the tiny corner. The teeth are locked tight. My tug jolts the head. A handcuff clinks against the metal post.
    The wad rips as it comes free, stiff and clotted with dried saliva. A handful of crumpled pages, a fuzzy archaic type. I try to separate the wad and the paper crumbles in my hand. I pull free a large fragment with a section of print and realize that the text is not in English. There can only be a handful of citizens in the decrepit burg of Akron who would be able to read this foreign text, but I am one of them. Even more uniquely, I know the book from which it comes, Nietzsche’s
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
(
The Gay Science
), that contains the (translated) phrase “even gods decompose,” as well as, more famously, the expression
Gott ist tot
.
    All I can make out of the blurred type on the scrap in my hand is “
wenn dir eines Tages oder Nachts
.” I feel a prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. In English, this section reads something