You Remind Me of Me Read Free Page A

awareness.
    The first bite was one of the worst. The long front tooth, the canine, sank into the skin just below Jonah’s left eye and tore in a line through his cheek to the edge of his throat. Blood shot up and stippled the window. The bottles of shampoo on the edge of the tub clattered as Jonah’s feet kicked in a surprised spasm. When he jerked away from her, Elizabeth bit down on his ear and pulled a piece of it off.
    Later he would try to think that Elizabeth had gone crazy. People would say that it might have been the taste of blood, that it might have been the noises he was making, the high-pitched sounds that instinctively made her think he was some kind of prey. People would say that attack dogs like Dobermans can be high-strung, that they can lose control of themselves. He didn’t want to believe that she hated him. He didn’t want to think that he was her tormentor, that whatever he’d done to her, she’d finally had enough. That she bit him and liked it, thinking
at last
.
    But she didn’t stop. Her teeth raked through his palms when he held them to his face, trailing through his forearms as he flailed at her, trying to hit. One bite cut through his lower lip as she tried to get to his neck, and another pulled the skin of his torn face into a flap. He remembers trying to press the skin back against his face, like it was a puzzle piece he was trying to fit. When he fell out of the bathtub onto the tile floor, he felt wet. He was aware of Elizabeth’s front paws clawing fast against his clothes as if she were trying to dig a hole into him, her jaws, bites on his scalp, his neck, his chest as he curled and rolled and kicked, smearing blood behind him.
I’m sorry,
he said.
Mom, I didn’t mean to! It was an accident!
    Maybe he doesn’t really remember this. Maybe he only imagines it, looking at his body, his naked skin in the mirror. Most of what happened is outside of his memory. He can recall flashes of heat, of pressure, but not pain, exactly. Most people don’t understand what it means to be an animal, to be killed, eaten. A quiet peacefulness settles in. The body relaxes, accepts everything.
    ——
    That was all there was to it really. At a bar, years later, a woman says,
Tell me something interesting about yourself
and Jonah pauses.
    I was dead once,
he thinks. That’s the first thing he thinks, though he doesn’t say it. It sounds too melodramatic, too complicated and inappropriate. She is a smooth thinker, this woman, she will look at him skeptically, she will take a piece of ice from her drink and roll it in her mouth.
    Oh, really,
she’ll say, after a moment.
So what’s that like? Being dead?
    ——
    And he doesn’t know, exactly. He is aware of a feeling of rushing forward. It is not unlike the way it felt on the expressway when suddenly, at sixty-five or seventy-five miles per hour, a pair of semi-trucks framed his car on either side, the rushing walls of their trailers creating a tunnel he was hurtling through. Ahead, a rattling garbage truck drifted into the lane in front of him; behind, a woman in a minivan pushed impatiently toward his bumper, sealing him into a coffin of velocity. Enclosed and yet hurtling forward.
    At that moment, he felt a memory spin through his insides. The dog’s teeth. The yellow house, the wide plain, seen from above. The skeleton key, the baby in the basket, the lady who said
Please don’t touch, your hands are dirty.
    ——
    He was dead, or almost dead, when his grandfather broke open the bathroom door. He doesn’t remember this, he just knows. He is aware of the blood, his own blood, all over everything. He feels the door splinter and fall open. He hears the sound of his grandfather’s raw, smoker-voiced moaning. His grandfather caught Elizabeth by the collar, pulling her away, and then his grandfather began to kick her in the ribs and the head.
    In the movie, the bathroom would seem to float in space, white and glowing fluorescently. In the movie, the