Ryan Jahn - Low Life

He walked into the diner with his grease-stained lunch bag hanging from his fist. Robert and Chris had left without him again. He stood on the scarred vinyl floor and scanned the room, looking for his friends. The diner was busy, full of chatter and the sounds of forks and knives scraping against plates, and chairs being scooted in or pushed out, and heads of blond and brown and black and red hair filled Simon’s view. But after a moment Simon saw Robert’s ponytail hanging down his back. Robert and Chris were sitting side by side in a booth in the back corner. Their backs were to the door. It was almost as if they were hoping Simon wouldn’t see them.

Simon weaved his way through the crowded tables and sat down across from them. Their food had already arrived and they were eating.

‘Hi, guys.’

‘Hi,’ Chris said.

Robert did not look up from his plate. He simply dragged a couple fries through a smear of ketchup and shoved them into his mouth.

‘How you doing, Robert?’

‘I’m okay,’ Robert said, his voice cold. ‘I just lost my appetite, though.’ He did not look up at Simon when he spoke. He simply stared down at his plate.

Simon blinked. Then he understood what Robert had meant last night about no longer owing him anything, what he meant when he said they were square.

‘Oh,’ he said after a minute. ‘Okay.’

Chris looked confused. ‘Okay, what?’ he said through a mouthful of food.

Simon didn’t answer. He got to his feet and walked toward an empty table. As he did the sound of Chris asking Robert what was going on faded into the overall noise in the room and became inaudible. Simon sat down. He unpacked his lunch and ate without even tasting his food, just giving fuel to the machine that was his body, just doing what was necessary. His stomach did not feel good. He glanced at Robert and Chris a couple times, but they were simply eating and talking and did not look back. Not even Chris.

Maybe it was best this way. As long as Robert stayed quiet it probably was.

When his lunch was gone he folded up the cling wrap in which it had been packaged, making several small translucent squares and stacking them neatly on the table. Then he folded his grease-stained lunch bag into quarters and put it in the inside pocket of his corduroy sport coat.

He got to his feet.

Alone on his couch with a glass of whiskey in his hands. The glass was cold and wet with condensation. Skip James was singing ‘Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues’, and Simon was staring at his grayish reflection in the broken television in the corner. He’d turned it on when he got home, but there was no picture, just sound, so he’d turned it off again.

He finished his whiskey and set the glass down on the coffee table. He looked at the photograph of Samantha and Jeremy Shackleford and twisted the wedding band on his hand. He liked the pressure of it on the webs between his fingers. He liked the weight of it. He imagined himself in that photograph. He imagined himself caressing Samantha’s body. He imagined himself making love with her, feeling her hot exhalations as she breathed into the crook of his neck.

He poured himself another drink.

Once he’d decided what he was going to do he felt okay. He slept soundly. If he dreamed at all, the dreams were peaceful, and he awoke the next morning feeling better than he had in a very long time, despite the dull ache of a hangover hovering around his head like a cloud, despite the sourness in his stomach.

The office was Saturday quiet, staffed at ten per cent, and in the quiet all Simon could think about was what he was going to do once his shift ended. It was the first time he had ever regretted his six-day work weeks, the only time he would rather have had the day off. Before today he had only regretted the fact that he couldn’t also work Sundays.

Eventually, though, it was time to leave.

Instead of continuing along Wilshire to the Filboyd Apartments, Simon made a right onto Vermont, drove past Sixth, and made a left into the Walgreens parking lot. He pulled into a spot, pushed open the car door, and stepped out onto the asphalt and right into a pink wad of bubble-gum. As he walked, he dragged his right foot along the ground, trying to scrape the gum off the bottom of his shoe. By the time he reached the front of the store with its automatic glass doors – a kid standing there trying to sell candy bars from a cardboard box – his foot was barely sticking to the ground at all.

He stepped past the kid, shaking his head, no, I don’t want a candy bar, and into the bright fluorescent light of the store. A security guard sat just to the right of the door in a metal fold-out chair – eyeballing him.

Simon hated security guards. There was something about their mere presence that made him feel guilty. He also felt guilty when he heard a siren, momentarily certain that it was the police coming for him – coming to take him away. His heart would start beating fast and his mouth would go dry and he would try to figure out what it was he had done. His mind would flip through all the nasty, horrible thoughts he’d had recently (stupid bitch, someone should—), flip through them like index cards (if I had a knife, I’d—), as he tried to figure out which one he’d acted upon. He must have acted upon one of them: the police were coming for him. Inevitably, the police car screamed past, or it was a fire engine, or it was an ambulance. Nobody even glanced in his direction. But the guilt still sat there – weighing on him.

Maybe it was simply the built-up guilt of his youthful petty crimes. When he was young he had been quite a thief. He had grown up poor, and the only way for him to get things he wanted was to steal them. He remembered stopping into a convenience store when he was ten or eleven – this was in Austin, Texas, where he had spent his youth – and seeing a box of kites near the back of the store. He looked through them for several minutes, examining the small pictures on their packaging, pictures which were supposed to be depictions of what they would look like in flight – eagles and jet planes and flaming rockets.

‘You gonna buy one of them or just gawk?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and left the store.

But the next morning on his way to school he had walked into the convenience store with a pronounced limp – apparently he’d injured his knee and couldn’t bend it – knowing what he was going to do, and when the guy behind the counter wasn’t looking he slid a kite down the leg of his pants and limped right back out. He was sweaty and full of turmoil inside – guilt – but even then he knew the trick to stealing was to not have a guilty expression on the outside, so he made sure his face was calm – bored even – until he was safe.

He’d flown that kite every weekend for two months, until it finally got caught in a tree in Big Stacy Park and he couldn’t get it out again.

Maybe it had just been the built-up guilt of his youth before – but this time the guilt was earned, wasn’t it? The reason for it decomposing in his bathtub.

He grabbed a basket from the stack sitting between the security guard and the newspaper display case and walked through the store. He collected a box of brown hair dye, a box of razor blades, band-aids, a bottle of alcohol, a bottle of peroxide, and a bag of cotton balls.

Before going to the checkout line, he stopped to look at the paperback novels. He flipped through a couple, sticking his face into one and inhaling its scent before putting it back down again, but he didn’t buy one. He didn’t read very much any more, but in his youth books had been his only escape from his adoptive father, who was always drunk and as likely to punch him in the face for some imagined offense as hand him a beer and let him stay up late watching television with him. He felt an odd, bittersweet nostalgia whenever he smelled a certain kind of glue used on some paperback novels – or maybe it was the paper itself, or the ink – and when he did, he couldn’t help but put his face into the pages and breathe it in. Sometimes he bought a book for that reason alone, whether he was interested in the content or not. Not today, though. Today he had other things on his mind.