Ryan Jahn - Low Life

He got inside, started the engine, slid the transmission into reverse, and backed out of the garage, careful not to hit Samantha’s car, which was parked in the driveway to his right. He rolled out into the street, put the car into drive – and drove.

While he drove he thought about what he was doing and why. Was he really doing this in order to find out why Shackleford had broken into his apartment – was he really doing this in order to find out why Shackleford had wanted him dead? Or was he doing it because Shackleford had had everything he’d ever wanted, everything he’d dreamed of but had never attained – because he wanted to step into a life he’d always desired but which someone else had built?

‘There’s no reason it can’t be both,’ he told himself while he drove. Shackleford was already dead. Why shouldn’t he step into his place – if he could get away with it?

Jeremy Shackleford’s office was a small rectangular box, about eight feet wide and ten feet deep. The walls were roughly textured and one of them – the one to the left of the oak desk which sat in the middle of the room, facing the door – was painted green. A captioned picture of Bertrand Russell hung there. The caption read:

Simon sat at the desk and looked around. He pulled open a drawer and found a pint of whiskey. He unscrewed the whiskey and took a swallow. It burned his throat and felt good and warm inside him.

The clock said he had half an hour before his class started. That gave him some time to search the place. He took another swallow of whiskey, put the bottle back, and started looking.

Fifteen minutes later he walked into the room where he would be teaching. He’d found nothing in the office, but then he had no idea what he should be looking for. Maybe once he knew more he’d know better what to look for. He glanced around the classroom. It did not surprise him to find that it was small – about big enough to hold an algebra class in a high school. This was an arts college, after all; people loved neither their maths nor their sciences at such institutions. He was glad for that. He was pretty sure he could handle teaching the history of geometry to students who were fidgeting and thinking about the short film they were directing or the oil painting they were in the middle of – or whatever – without too much trouble. If he’d had to deal with people who gave a damn about mathematics, it might have been a problem.

He’d stopped at the cafeteria between here and the office and picked up a large cup of coffee, and he sipped it now, looking around the room, at the empty wooden desks with initials carved into them, at the overflowing trash can in the corner, stuffed with donut boxes and orange juice jugs and coffee cups and muffin wrappers from whatever class was here at eight o’clock. Based on the red writing on the whiteboard at the front of the room –

– Simon guessed first-semester French.

He walked to the whiteboard, used a stained cloth that was hanging from a nail in the wall to wipe the board clean, and then stared at the blank surface, fluorescent light reflecting off it. He exhaled, wondering if he was crazy for doing this. Maybe he was – maybe he was crazy – but he had never felt more himself either. Of course, that might be a symptom of his insanity. Probably was.

He turned to face the empty room.

‘Today,’ he said, ‘we’ll be discussing the development of geometry in ancient Greece.’

‘I already covered that chapter.’

Simon jumped, startled, and turned toward the door.

A man in a plaid yellow suit stood in the doorway. He was in his fifties with a trimmed mustache and white shoes with buckles on them. He was bald on top – the slope of his head shiny enough to see your reflection in – but the hair he had growing around the back and hooked over his ears with sideburns was long and wrapped in a rubberband to form a ponytail. His eyes were brown – except for the whites, which were very red – and cocked up on the inside to give him a permanent look of gentleness regardless of mood. His skin was bad. He wore several bracelets for various causes – he appeared to hate cancer, AIDS, and orphaned children in equal measure.

‘How are you, Jeremy?’

‘I’m okay, Professor Ullman.’

Simon must have accidentally raised his pitch at the end of the sentence, making it a question, because Professor Ullman said, ‘Who else would I be?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Neither would I, Jeremy.’

‘Okay.’

‘And since when do you call me Professor Ullman?’

‘I’m sorry. Henry.’

Wrong answer. Simon could see it on the man’s face. What had Samantha said his name was? Don’t panic, just give him a deadpan and maybe he’ll let it slide.

But, of course, he didn’t.

‘What did you call me?’

‘What?’

Oh, goddamn it, what did Samantha say his fucking name was?

‘You called me Henry. Are you sure you’re okay to come back?’

‘I didn’t call you Henry.’

‘I heard you, Jeremy.’

‘Well, Howard – ’ there it was – ‘if I did I simply misspoke.’

‘You’re sure you’re okay?’

‘Sure I’m sure. I’m fine. I had an accident is all.’

‘That’s what Samantha said—’ Howard put a finger on his own cheekbone and traced an invisible line down to his chin. ‘That’s what Samantha said, but that doesn’t look like an accident to me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you know.’

‘Well, I don’t. And anyways, I’m fine, Howard.’

Howard took several steps closer to Simon, examining him. Simon suddenly understood why his eyes were red and tired-looking. The stench of marijuana clung to his clothes and hung around him in a pungent cloud. You could almost feel it sticking to your skin.

‘You just – ’ Howard exhaled through his nostrils – ‘you don’t seem yourself. I look at you and I think: this man isn’t Jeremy Shackleford. His face doesn’t move quite right, his eyes don’t look the same.’ He looked away. ‘I don’t know. Maybe after what happened— Anyway, you’re back.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll talk later, and I’ll rip out your fucking heart.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘We’ll talk later,’ Howard said. ‘Your class is about to start.’

He sat at the desk at the front of the room as students walked in with backpacks strapped over their shoulders, thumbing cell phones off, listening to music through ear buds, chattering.

He felt nervous and sweaty. Once the class was full – there were still a few empty desks, actually, but once it seemed no one else would be arriving – he got to his feet. He put his palms on the surface of the desk and leaned forward.

‘All right,’ he said, hoping no one heard the nervous tremor in his voice. ‘Where did Professor Ullman leave off?’

A male student, thin and young – pale cheeks still smooth and free of stubble despite the fact that his hair was dark – raised his hand and, without waiting to be called upon, said, ‘Conic sections’.

Simon blinked.

‘Chronic what?’

Two hours later it was over.

He fell into the chair behind his desk, covered in a thin gloss of garlic-stinking sweat, his carefully combed hair now hanging in his face. He exhaled in a sigh and watched the students grab their bags and strap them over their shoulders, turn their phones back on, pull cigarettes from their pockets and pack them against the backs of their hands, and shuffle out of there for the courtyard or their next class or home or one of the fast-food joints that surrounded the campus.