Ryan Jahn - Low Life

‘My conscience.’

Kate smiled, licked her lips.

‘Simon,’ she said, ‘nobody has a clear conscience – except maybe sociopaths. Everybody’s done something they’d rather not have done.’

He nodded. But then he found himself very bothered by what she had just said. For a long moment he couldn’t figure out what it was. He replayed the sentence in his head and examined each word – something wasn’t right about what she had said – and then, after a minute, he knew.

‘Why did you just call me Simon?’

‘I didn’t.’ She got to her feet. ‘Anyway, I should get out of here before your wife comes home. That’s a kind of awkwardness I’d rather not experience.’

She looked down at herself, smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt, and headed for the door.

Before she reached it – her arm outstretched, extended toward the knob – Simon got to his feet and cut her off, blocking her path.

‘You did. You called me Simon. I heard you. What do you know?’

Kate’s eyes went scared.

‘This isn’t funny.’

‘I’m not laughing. What do you know?’

‘Jeremy, please.’

‘Does the phrase “walk the mile” mean anything to you?’

She took a step back.

‘My God, you are crazy.’

‘Who said I’m crazy?’

‘Just let me go.’

Simon grabbed a handful of Kate’s hair and pulled her toward him.

‘You’re in on it, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’

Kate pried his hand away from her hair, the fear suddenly gone from her eyes, replaced by anger, and once she was free of his grip she pulled back and slapped him hard across the face.

‘What the hell is the matter with you?’

Simon touched his fingers to his cheek and felt the skin rising in a welt and he felt moisture at the corner of his mouth. When he looked at his fingers he saw blood on them. He wiped the blood off onto his pants.

‘Someone is trying to ruin me. I think it might be Zurasky and I think you’re in on it. It’s not gonna work.’

‘I don’t know who Zurasky is.’

‘A lie.’

‘Jeremy, I—’

‘It’s not gonna work.’

‘I think it is working, Jeremy. You’re acting crazy. You’re not acting like yourself at all.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘What?’

‘I’m not acting like myself. First you call me by another name and then you suggest – what?’

‘I don’t know—’

‘What is this?’

‘What is what?’

‘Who’s doing this to me?’

‘Would you please just let me go? I don’t – I don’t—’

The fear had returned. Tears were welling in her eyes. It was Simon’s day for making people’s eyes well with tears.

‘You don’t what ?’

‘I just want to go. You need help and I don’t know what to do and I just want to go.’

‘You called me Simon.’ But as time passed he was becoming less and less sure of that. Perhaps he had misheard. Hadn’t he thought for a moment that Professor Ullman had threatened to rip out his heart? Hadn’t he misheard that? He thought so – unless Professor Ullman was in on it too.

‘I didn’t, Jeremy. I don’t even know anyone named Simon. Can I please just go?’

He licked his lips, wiped at the corners of his mouth. After a moment he stepped aside.

He followed her outside, and as she walked across the street to her yellow 1967 Chevy Nova he padded barefoot down the steps and watched her. His hands were in his pockets. The night air was cool and the thin sliver of the crescent moon hung like a fish-hook in the sky. Simon wondered what God was fishing for. If there was a God.

If God existed, and if He paid any attention, He was surely laughing at those who would drop to their knees and pray for the sick and the injured and the poor whom He had sickened and hurt and dropped into squalor to begin with. Laughing and dangling that fish-hook moon, making sure He caught anyone who thought they might escape and throwing them back down to Earth to face what they had coming.

Maybe Jesus had gotten away, floated into the heavens, but nobody else would. And Simon suspected Jesus’s ascent was just a story that people told themselves anyway, a story passed down through the generations that made it possible for people to live with the world they saw around them: at least escape was possible. But Simon knew something about spheres. And even if you managed to get off this planet, even if you found a way to get up and away from this low life, to float toward the heavens, there was that fish-hook moon there to catch you before you’d made a full escape.

He tongued the inside of his mouth, plucked one of the hairs out, and watched Kate get into her car.

The engine sputtered to life and the headlights shot yellow beams out into the street. Then the driver’s side window rolled down and Kate turned to look at him.

‘One thing before I go.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You might want to ask yourself why you can’t remember anything that happened during the month of May last year.’

She then put the car into gear and drove away before Simon could respond.

He stood in the bathroom. The light was off, but enough splashed in from the master bedroom for him to see clearly his reflection in the mirror. He tongued the inside of his cheek and looked at himself. He touched his cheek where Kate had slapped him. The welt had already gone down. He ran his finger down the scar on his cheek.

What was he missing? There was something big and obvious that he wasn’t seeing, and if he could just make himself see it, all of this would make some kind of sense. What was he missing? He had to figure it out. This was turning him into a monster. Everywhere he looked he saw conspiracy; in every face someone conspiring against him. Every voice he heard was someone whispering about him. Every siren was a cop coming to collect him.

But that didn’t make sense. Everyone couldn’t be plotting against him.

Kate had mentioned last May and she was right. It was blank. How could she know that? What did she know about last May that he didn’t? What had been erased from his mind? What happened last May?

It had been in April – seventeen or so months ago – that he had last seen Zurasky. Was there a connection there, a reason that after the blank month he had stopped seeing his psychiatrist? Had Zurasky done something to him in that blank space?

What was he missing?

He had only wanted to know why Shackleford broke into his apartment, why Shackleford had wanted him dead, and instead he was tangled up in something that grew more and more confusing. He felt like a man trying to untie a knot whose every movement only tangled things further.

What was he missing?

Goddamn it – what the fuck was he missing?

‘Figure it out, you stupid fuck!’

He punched his reflection and glass shattered around him, breaking him into hundreds of sharp pieces. Shards fell into the basin and onto the tile floor. The noise of the glass falling was incredibly loud in his ears – and then it was over and there was only silence.

He lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. It was smooth and white. The only light in the room came in through the window from the fish-hook moon.

His right hand stung and blood oozed from a network of slices in his flesh like veins of color in a marble surface. It poured onto the white comforter and spread there, blooming like a flower, as the fabric absorbed it.

Then a sound came from the living room, the sound of a key sliding into a lock, a lock tumbling, a door opening. A brief cool breeze blew through the house. The door was closed, the deadbolt twisted, the breeze stilled. Simon listened, waiting to hear who it was. He thought he knew. He was waiting for their call: It’s the police. We have a warrant for the arrest of—