My Second Death Read Free Page B

like:
What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
. It’s a section where Nietzsche describes a demon calling into awareness the darkest parts of a man, so that he can throw off the constraints of civilization. So that he can be free.
    I make a fist around the wad of paper and wipe the back of my wrist across my mouth. Turn to the mute messenger on the bed.
    In this instance, the god is not only dead but quite literally decomposing.
    I try to focus, to be objective. I am meant to see this. What am I meant to see? I step back and look at the mattress, at the sheets spattered with blood already oxidized and brown, a few congealed clots of skin and fatty tissue. The lack of blood spatter and the relative smallness of the pooled bloodspill make me think that the man on the bed was killed and then skinned. I wonder how he was killed. Drugged first, maybe. And then the body, lax, under the killer’s nimble hands —
    Wetness pools in my mouth.
    I swallow and blink. The pages in my fist waver and I realize the tremor is in my hands. And like waking up, I think with sudden and fierce clarity that I am standing over an exquisitely mutilated corpse.
    I turn and collide with the door. My fingers slip on the knob. I run down the steps. My left shoulder bangs into the wall. I elbow open the side door.
    The air is cold, shocking and fresh after the fetid sweetness inside. I grip my fingers around my knees and squeeze. The underside of my hair is damp with sweat.
    Defying all odds that I can calculate, the body upstairs is only the second human corpse I have seen or touched. It is this sole fact that has kept me walking free among the sane.
    I bend over and cough and spit onto the gravel.
    Then I get up and run. I run fast, my lungs making scissoring noises. I run through backyards and gravel alleys, across the busy four-lane street dissecting the hovels of poverty from the university campus, between towering brick buildings alight with morning sun. I get to the car, start the engine.
    My fingers shake when I uncurl them from the clutch of paper.
    I put the wad from the dead man’s mouth into my jacket pocket and reach for the gearshift. My palm itches. I turn my hand and see crescent-shaped nail marks, oily beads welling up from slit skin.
    I put my head against the steering wheel. Shit. Shitshitshit.
    I imagine grabbing whoever wrote that fucking note and screaming into his face. What do you think will happen, I want to ask him. What do you fucking
think
will happen now?
    Somehow I drive home. I don’t remember the trip.
    I sit on the bare mattress in my cinderblock garage cell. A small pile of ash on the white-painted floor where I burnt the pink message slip and the pages of Nietzsche. It occurs to me that the decision to burn the message is forensically intelligent but of course I have little interest in establishing my connection to the corpse or in hiding it. All I want is the smell of burning paper to overpower the memory of blood-stink. My mouth keeps filling with spit. I wipe my hands on my knees and breathe smoke and can’t stop smelling the body and imagining my fingers exploring the vertebral ridge, each knob a fossilized cauliflower blossom. What it would feel like to dig a serrated blade into a spinal column, metal teeth catching on bony joints.
    I clench my jaw and rock and squeeze my eyes closed. Focus on the darkness. Focus.
    I breathe in slowly, exhale.
    Calm seeps into my muscles. My diaphragm relaxes. My breathing slows. My heartbeat decelerates. I have been forcing myself through this pantomime — under tamer circumstances and with lower stakes, to be sure — for, well, for close to all my life. Some people practice yoga. I pose formulaic dialogues in my head, Glaucon to my own Socrates. What is good? What is justice? What is beautiful is most