Ryan Jahn - Low Life

Shackleford: this was where he’d lived.

Why had he wanted Simon dead?

The orange walls wouldn’t tell him, nor the television, nor the floor beneath his feet.

As Simon wandered through the house, he found a picture of Shackleford and a brunette woman, a woman he assumed was Shackleford’s wife. She was about six inches shorter than him, which would make her five three, hair shoulder-length, eyes the color of a clear blue sky. Her skin was smooth and white, her lips pink and soft-looking, her neck graceful and thin and long. She was wearing a gray blouse with the top two buttons undone, revealing the shallow cleavage of a small-breasted woman in a push-up bra. She wasn’t smiling save in one corner of her mouth, but her eyes were alive with humor. She and Shackleford were arm in arm.

The picture was in a four-by-six-inch frame, and Simon slipped it into the outside pocket of his brown corduroy coat.

The dining room had been converted into an office. There was a desk against one wall with a computer atop it. The computer’s screen was black. There were stacks of paperwork on either side of the keyboard. On the wall opposite the desk, three waist-high bookshelves filled with books on mathematics. The books seemed to be organized by difficulty rather than alphabetically. Several of them were textbooks.

Simon walked to the desk and sat down in a black leather chair. He grabbed a stack of paperwork from the desk and set it in his lap and flipped through it. He found gas bills, cable bills, directions to various locations, torn bits of paper with phone numbers scrawled across them, penciled names of authors, and doodles of penises and breasts and eyes, sometimes in odd combination. And at the bottom of the stack he found a folder filled with math tests for an Algebra I class, a class that had apparently been taught at Pasadena College of the Arts, a class that had apparently been taught by Dr Jeremy Shackleford. They were from a summer session, now surely over.

A mathematics instructor. Pasadena College of the Arts.

Simon was setting the stack of paperwork back onto the desk when he heard a key sliding into the front door. He turned to face the sound and heard the lock tumble.

He jumped to his feet and frantically looked for a place to hide.

The doorknob rattled.

There was a coat closet on the other side of the room. He ran for it.

‘Jeremy?’ the woman said.

Simon recognized her from the photograph. Her voice was smoky but still feminine and very melodic; she almost sounded as if she were singing when she spoke. She stood near the couch, purse still over her shoulder, keys still in hand. Simon could smell her from where he stood: a light, clean sweat and bar soap and lotion and some kind of fruit-scented shampoo.

He could feel hangers poking into his back and the arms of leather and wool coats brushing against his wrists and hands. It gave him the creepy sensation that people were standing behind him. He could smell the closed-off smell all closets seemed to possess, despite the slats in the door. He watched the woman on the other side through those slats, waiting to see if she would somehow sense his presence.

She looked around the living room, and for a moment seemed to look right at him through the door. Simon’s breath caught in his throat. He swallowed and it stung. His neck was still swollen.

She pulled her purse off her arm and tossed it onto the back of the couch, and then grabbed a remote from the couch’s arm. She clicked on the television – a local news program. Some woman with short blonde hair was talking about the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dumping plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in order to protect it from the sun’s rays and keep birds from shitting in it.

What’s your name? Simon wondered.

The woman muted the television and looked around.

‘Jeremy?’

Had he said it aloud? He didn’t think he had. She couldn’t have heard him.

Maybe he had.

‘You’re going crazy, Samantha,’ she said to herself. She turned the television’s volume back on, watched the news for a moment or two longer, and then set the remote back down on the arm of the couch and walked away. She disappeared into a hallway.

Her name was Samantha.

Simon wondered what it was like to live with her. He wondered what it would be like to look into the eyes of a woman like that and have her tell you she loves you; he wondered what it would be like to tell her you love her, too.

He pushed open the closet door and stepped out into the living room. He closed the closet door behind him.

He walked softly across the hardwood floor and once he’d nearly reached the hallway he stopped. He leaned forward and looked around the corner. At the end of the hallway was an open door, and on the other side was Samantha. She was sitting on a toilet, her skirt bunched up around her waist and panties stretched like a rubber band between her knees. She was reading a magazine with an actress on its glossy cover.

‘Samantha,’ he said in a low whisper. ‘Your name is Samantha.’

He walked to the front door, grabbed the doorknob. He turned it carefully and pulled the door open – pausing momentarily when it squeaked, glancing back over his shoulder, seeing nothing, and continuing – and then he stepped out into the early-evening sunlight.

He walked toward the street, looking around, feeling paranoia flowing cold through his veins, throbbing at his temples like a headache.

Samantha’s car was in the driveway now, parked on the right side, a dark blue Mercedes, perhaps the same year as Simon’s Volvo, but in much better shape, paint new, well-oiled leather interior uncracked by the sun.

He walked past it, reached the street, slid onto his torn-up driver’s seat, and tried to slam the door shut behind him, but it banged against the metal seatbelt clip and bounced open again. He grabbed the clip and pulled the belt over his chest and waist and latched it, then tried the door a second time. This time it stayed closed. He started his car, turned it around, and drove down the street the same way he had come.

The two blonde girls in the flower-print dresses with red ribbons in their hair were still in their yard. Simon glanced at them as he drove, and though he might have been mistaken, he would’ve sworn they were taking turns poking a dead cat with a stick.

He pushed through the smudged glass doors and into the lobby of the Filboyd Apartments carrying a plastic bag from the hardware store he’d stopped at on the way home. He headed up the dark stairwell toward his apartment, smelling stale urine as he went. At the top of the stairs, he saw his landlord hadn’t yet gotten someone to clean up the graffito painted there.

it still said, somewhat impatiently.

When he turned left at the head of the stairs, he saw Robert standing in the corridor by his front door. His arms were crossed and he was leaning against the wall.

Simon’s stomach clenched as if squeezed by a fist. Why was he here?

After a moment: ‘Hi.’

‘I got a flat tire. Hoping to use your phone.’

‘Flat tire?’

‘Yeah, over on Normandie.’

‘Normandie? Don’t you live off Western?’

‘You can’t choose where to get a flat.’

‘You don’t have a cell phone?’

Although Simon himself didn’t have one, it seemed odd to him; everybody had a cell phone these days.

‘I do,’ Robert said, pulling it from his pocket and holding it up, ‘but I dropped it in the toilet at work when I was pulling up my pants. Fried it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is it a problem?’

Simon tried to smile but it felt like a grimace. All he could think of was the corpse in his bathtub.