Ryan Jahn - Low Life

‘Of course not,’ he said.

He walked to the front door and unhooked the shoelace from the nail in the wall. The front door swung open on its own. It occurred to him now how dumb it had been to leave his apartment unsecured like that. He should have done something to keep the apartment closed off this morning. Well, what was done was done. There was no point in worrying over—

‘Come on in.’

They stepped over the splinters of wood still on the floor.

Simon pushed the door shut behind them, and then shoved the back of a chair under the doorknob to keep it closed.

‘Go ahead and call whoever you need to. Want a drink?’

‘Sure.’

Simon nodded, then headed into the kitchen.

The two men sat on the couch with their whiskeys. Someone from the auto club would be arriving within thirty minutes. Simon watched Francine pull fish food from the neuston at the water’s surface and into her black mouth. He wanted Robert out of his apartment.

He had done Robert a favor a few months ago, a big one – it was how they’d become friends – but it wasn’t the kind of favor that would allow Simon to show the man the corpse in his tub. Robert might have been beaten to a pulp and/or spent a few months in a Tijuana jail cell without Simon’s help – but months were not years.

He wanted Robert out of his apartment.

Robert took a swallow of his whiskey.

‘You never said what happened last night.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. It was all he could think to say.

‘So?’

‘It’s not even worth discussing, really.’

‘What else are we gonna talk about? Politics?’ He said this last word with disgust.

Simon exhaled in a sigh, took a sip of his whiskey.

‘This guy broke into my apartment. I heard the noise and came out to the living room. I’d been in bed. He was digging through my record collection. I have a lot of old records. Maybe he followed me home from the record shop on La Brea on Saturday. I don’t know. Anyways, when he saw me, he attacked. I fought back, but… he must have brained me or something.’ He shook his head to demonstrate his confusion. ‘When I woke up he was gone.’

Robert looked at the record collection.

‘It doesn’t look like he took anything.’

‘He must have panicked after the confrontation.’

‘Maybe,’ Robert said.

Simon reached into the inside pocket of his corduroy sport coat and pulled out his Camel Filters and his Zippo lighter. He lighted a cigarette. Usually he didn’t smoke inside. He hated the stale smell of cigarettes lingering in a room. Usually he climbed through the bathroom window and smoked on his fire escape if he didn’t want to trudge all the way downstairs. But he was nervous and he needed to be doing something, and the bathroom was not available. He inhaled deeply.

‘You all right?’ Robert asked.

Simon glanced at him. Was there a look of suspicion in Robert’s eyes? Simon thought perhaps there was. Something about the way his eyebrows were cocked, the way his head was tilted, like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

‘Yeah,’ Simon said. ‘I guess I’m more upset by the break-in than I realized.’

Robert nodded. Then he drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass, set it on the coffee table, and got to his feet. He twisted his neck around, sending out several pops from between the vertebrae.

‘I’m gonna take a leak.’

He started for the bathroom.

‘No, wait!’

Robert paused at the head of the hallway.

‘What?’

‘The toilet’s broken. It doesn’t flush.’

‘It’s probably just the chain. I’ll reach into the tank and pull the stopper manually. If I can fix it, I will.’

Then he continued down the hallway.

Simon got to his feet. He took two steps toward the hallway and then stopped. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t attack his friend. He could, but that might be as bad as him finding the body. No, it wouldn’t. He had to stop him from going into the bathroom.

‘Robert, no,’ he said as he rushed into the hallway. ‘It’s not the—’

But it was too late.

‘What the fuck?’ Robert said from the bathroom.

Simon stopped mid-stride. He looked at Robert, who was standing in the open doorway, facing the bathtub.

He pulled a lungful from his cigarette. He swallowed.

‘Robert,’ he said.

Robert looked at him.

‘What the fuck?’

‘What?’ he said, as he walked into the bathroom.

‘There’s a fucking dead guy in your bathtub, man.’

‘I know – I put him there.’

‘Why?’ Robert said.

‘He broke into my apartment.’

‘I don’t care if he raped your goldfish. You don’t store a corpse in your apartment. You have to call the police.’

Simon felt as if someone was slowly drilling a wood screw into his forehead, just above his left eye, and his left eye was leaking water as a result of this. It ran down his cheek and he wiped it away with the back of one hand.

‘You have to call the police,’ Robert said again.

Simon took off his glasses, pulled his shirts out of his waistband, used the T-shirt to wipe off the lenses, wiped at his eye again, and replaced the glasses.

‘I can’t,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t call the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s a dead guy in my bathtub, Robert. A dead guy who’s been on ice for almost a full day. The police won’t just let that go.’

‘Well, why the fuck did you put him on ice?’

‘I didn’t want to call the police. I wanted to buy myself some time.’

‘For what?’

Simon closed his eyes, head throbbing. He let out a sigh and tried to ignore what his mind was telling him was the easiest way to solve this problem – which was to kill Robert. Robert was his friend, his only close friend – as close a friend as he’d ever had, anyway – and he couldn’t just kill him. He couldn’t simply steal forty or fifty years of breath from him because he had become a problem, especially since it was Simon’s own fault. He could have found a reason to keep Robert out. And yet a disturbing voice in his head – the voice that narrated his low life – kept insisting that murder was the simple solution: Just kill him, Simon. You’ve already killed once. It wasn’t so bad, was it? You didn’t even lose an entire night’s sleep. So do it. Do it and get it done with. Sure, it’s your fault. You fucked up. So fix your mistake. You pay or Robert does. Kill him. Kill him and be done with it. It’ll only take a few minutes and then it’ll be over.

Simon opened his eyes.

‘What?’ he said.

‘You needed to buy time for what?’

‘He broke into my apartment to kill me,’ he said. ‘I need to find out why.’

‘You said yourself he attacked you because you caught him going through your record collection.’

‘Well, I didn’t catch him doing anything. He broke in and he tried to murder me and that’s all he tried to do. I need to know why. And look.’

Simon reached down and started pulling the duct tape away from the corpse’s neck.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Robert said. ‘I don’t want to see this.’

‘Just hold on. Maybe it’ll help you understand.’

‘I already understand. You killed a man and now—’

Simon pulled the plastic bag away and Robert went silent. Blood dripped from the bag, and Simon thought of times he had purchased a hamburger and the packaging had leaked.

‘Jesus,’ Robert said. ‘You didn’t say—’ He put his hand over his open mouth. ‘I – who is he?’

‘Jeremy Shackleford. He taught math at the Pasadena College of the Arts.’

‘Why did he break into your place?’