Ryan Jahn - Low Life

He walked into his apartment with a plastic bag hanging from his fist. He set it on the couch and padlocked his door. Then he removed his jacket and his button-up, stripping down to his yellow-pitted T-shirt. He picked up the bag again and walked down the hallway to the bathroom.

He blew into the powder-covered latex gloves and then slipped his hands into them one at a time before lacing his fingers together and forcing them down tight. His stomach felt sour and his liver hurt. He mixed the hair dye in a small plastic bottle and then squirted it through a nozzle onto his gray head of hair. He massaged it into his scalp with gloved fingers, wiping it away with toilet paper when it ran down his forehead or the backs of his ears or his neck. It made his scalp tingle. In ten minutes his head was covered in a brown layer of dye the consistency of warm mayonnaise.

He sat on the toilet and waited, wishing he had bought a book after all. He had a few lying around the apartment, but he’d read them all – most of them more than once. He felt tickles of moisture on the back of his neck and blindly wiped at them with wads of toilet paper. Stomach acid bubbled up into the back of his throat and he swallowed it down again.

Half an hour passed.

He rinsed his head in the basin, under steaming hot water, knowing this was stupid, knowing he couldn’t possibly look as much like Jeremy Shackleford as he seemed to at first glance, knowing that even if he did look that much like him he would still never be able to pass himself off as the man.

But then he asked himself, Why not – why couldn’t I?

What better way to find out why Shackleford had broken into his apartment and tried to kill him than to give himself access to the man’s life?

He thought of the cracks in his ceiling.

He thought of himself floating through space – directionless.

Well, now he had a direction, didn’t he? It gave him a sense of purpose, a reason to wake in the morning. There was a mystery in his life, and no matter what it revealed, it had to be better than eight hours at the office, masturbating in a small booth in a pornographic book store, and sleeping on a small mattress while the sounds of the city echoed through his apartment and small insects nibbled at him. It had to be better than that same routine day in and day out as the months fell off the calendar like dead leaves.

Anything would be better than that – anything at all.

Simon pulled his head out of the sink, dried off with a threadbare brown towel. He put his glasses back on and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a different person. He felt like a different person.

‘Not too bad.’

He peeled the latex gloves off his now sweaty hands – fingertips white and pruned – and threw them into the trash can.

But he wasn’t done yet.

He reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a white and blue box. He opened the paper lid, revealing the shining backs of two hundred razor blades. He slid one of them from the box and held it up close to his eye. He looked past the blade and to his reflection in the peeling medicine cabinet mirror.

Can you do it, Simon?

He swallowed.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He put the razor blade against his right cheekbone. It was cold and sharp. He exhaled, began to press the blade into his pockmarked skin – and then stopped. He wanted this to be right.

He set the blade down on the counter beside the basin and walked over to the bathtub.

He pulled the grocery bag off the corpse’s head, and immediately looked away, gagging. It had only been three days and he had tried to keep the body cold, but already there were things living in the corpse. There was a disturbing subcutaneous movement, as if on the other side of the flesh were a million crawling legs trying to inch the face down the front of the skull.

Simon could not see what he needed to see without turning the head toward him, but he didn’t want to touch it. He walked over to the trash can and put one of the gloves back on. When he found himself standing in front of the corpse again, he swallowed, held his breath, and then leaned down and turned the head so he could see the scar. It was four inches long and ran jaggedly from cheekbone to chinbone. It was white, and despite the five o’clock shadow covering the rest of Shackleford’s face, it was smooth and free of hair.

He stared at the scar for a long time, ignoring the sucking wet holes the eyes had become, and once he thought he had it etched into his memory, he nodded to himself and turned back to the mirror. He could do this.

Once again, he put the blade against his cheekbone. He breathed heavily, in and out and in and out, almost to the point of hyperventilation, and then he stopped breathing altogether. He pushed the blade down into his cheek, hard, and it forced the skin down with it – the skin taking a surprising amount of pressure – and then there was a popping sound as the skin broke. A bead of blood formed around the corner of the blade. He pushed down further, feeling the skin part. The bead became a stream. Warm liquid flooded down the side of his face. The pain was citric and overwhelming, but he tried to ignore it and simply dragged the blade down his cheek, following his mental image of the corpse’s scar.

When he reached the center of the cheek, the blade broke clean through and he ended up cutting his gums as well, and he cursed and stomped on the floor and had to stop. He put the brown towel against his cheek and found himself bent over at the waist, groaning. He tongued the wound on the inside of his mouth. The tip of his tongue touched the towel on the other side. He breathed through his nostrils like an angry bull about to charge. He walked in a circle. The blood continued to pour out of him, and it continued to fill his mouth. He let it drain from between his lips, down his chin, and onto the floor.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he said through gritted teeth as the taste of metal filled his mouth, warm and thick and salty. He’d cut too deep – far too deep.

After a while, he stood up again.

Still holding the towel against his face, he looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were red and full of tears. He pulled the towel away and blood poured out of him and dripped onto his T-shirt and splattered on the tile floor and ran along the grout lines like branching rivers. He put the towel back. If he was going to go through with this he had another two inches to go. He’d only managed to cut halfway down his cheek. He wasn’t done.

He looked around for the razor blade. He’d dropped it or thrown it or something. When the pain hit – when he broke through the skin of the cheek and cut his own gums – he’d no longer been altogether present. He scanned the countertop and saw nothing but splatters and drips of blood. Then he saw it on the floor, in the corner, amongst a wad of hair and dust which had collected by the bathtub.

He picked it up and threw it into the trash can. It clinked as it hit the edge and then disappeared amongst the paper waste.

There were a hundred and ninety-nine clean ones; there was no point in risking infection.

After sliding a clean blade from the box, he pulled the towel away from his cheek. Blood still seeped from the wound, but it was no longer pouring out of him.

He tongued the wound, saw a glimpse of it through the cheek. It made his stomach feel sour.

He closed his eyes, trying not to be sick (and trying not to wonder what kind of pain that would produce in his new wound), and once the nausea passed – it rolled through his stomach, and he burped, tasting acid, then swallowed it away – he opened them again. It had been difficult the first time; this time it felt impossible. He knew what pain he had to look forward to – the sharpest of it was still fresh in his mind, only moments old. Before it had merely been an idea. Now it was a reality. He knew the pain. He did not want more of it. But he thought, too, he was past the point of changing his mind. He was scarred for life; he might as well finish doing what he had set out to do. He put the blade against the edge of the wound. It stung before he even went to work. His stomach clenched. He felt dizziness swim over him. When he looked at himself in the mirror he felt that he was looking at a stranger.