Ryan Jahn - Low Life

He was inextricably connected to Jeremy in some way. And now he was becoming him, becoming a man who, from the inside, he hated. He was an angry, bitter, violent man. He had a beautiful wife and a beautiful home and he wore nice clothes but he was a monster – he was a monster because he allowed the beastly thoughts that lived beneath the surface to lash out of the deep. Everyone had a low life. Not everyone let it control him.

He stood up from the microfilm reader and walked out of the library thinking about the man he’d seen in the corduroy sport coat – the man who had left the graffito on the corridor wall.

He sat in the Saab smoking a cigarette, holding it between two fingers in his shaking right hand and looking through the window at Wally’s, inside which he could see Robert and Chris and a third man eating. The third man had prematurely gray hair and was wearing a brown corduroy coat. He was eating a sandwich he had pulled from a brown paper bag.

He smoked two more cigarettes before Robert and Chris and the man in the corduroy coat left. He watched the man in the coat step out of Wally’s and light a cigarette of his own with a Zippo lighter before disappearing around a corner with his two friends at his side. Once they were gone Simon stepped from the car and went into the diner.

He looked around till he saw Babette. She was dropping some sandwiches off at a corner booth and gnawing away on her gum. After she’d dropped off the food she turned away from the booth and started bouncing toward the kitchen, where plates were being set out with prepared food.

Simon walked over to her and touched her arm and said, ‘Can I talk to you, Babette?’

‘Sure, Si—’ But then she stopped when she turned to look at him. Confusion gleamed in her eyes. ‘Uh.’ She licked her lips. ‘What – what is it?’

‘Those three guys who were sitting there – ’ he nodded toward a table a busboy was clearing off – ‘who was the guy in the corduroy coat?’

He knew what she was going to say but he had to hear it anyway.

‘Simon?’ she said.

‘Wrong,’ he said.

Though he didn’t understand what was happening, a theory was forming in the back of his mind, a theory that he’d been half-ignoring for the last three days – ever since he’d accosted Robert and asked him if he took it. This sick vertigo of repeated events had overwhelmed him again and again but he couldn’t make the events make sense – not in a world where two plus two equaled four, not in a world where distance traveled could be measured by multiplying velocity by time – so he had kept them at the back of his mind. He had kept them back there waiting for something that could make them make sense. And now a theory was forming, but it wasn’t whole. One thing he did know: he hated what he had become, he wanted his own life back – and there could only be one Simon Johnson living at the Filboyd Apartments.

Parked in front of the office building, waiting for the man in the brown corduroy coat to leave for the day, Simon smoked and watched his side-view mirrors. He saw three cop cars roll by, but none of the drivers so much as glanced in his direction.

His stomach ached. His liver hurt.

He pulled out his cigarettes and flipped open the top and counted how many he had left. Seven. He put the pack to his mouth, pinched one of the filters between his teeth, and dragged the box away. Six. He lighted his cigarette with a match. The smoke felt heavy in his lungs. He exhaled.

Two cigarettes later he saw the gray 1987 Volvo pull away from the curb and out into the street. He started his Saab and pulled out after the other car, making sure he stayed several car lengths back so that the man in the brown corduroy coat wouldn’t see him.

After a few turns they were on Wilshire, heading west.

Simon followed from as far back as he could while still keeping the rectangular tail lights in view. They drove right past the Filboyd Apartments, and then past the under-construction Ambassador Hotel, which would soon no longer be the Ambassador Hotel at all. They continued on. And then the man in the brown corduroy coat turned right and parked on a side street not far past a place fronted with a sign that read

Simon slowed down and watched the guy buzz the bell and then enter the place. Then he drove to the next light, made an illegal u-turn, and headed back toward the Filboyd Apartments. If he was right, the guy would show up there soon.

When he reached the apartment building he made another illegal u-turn. There was an empty spot across the street – right in front of the Filboyd Apartments – that he wanted to pull into. He drove just past it, and backed his way in. But as he was backing in his car hit something and he heard a yelp. He braked. He looked in his rear-view mirror and both side-view mirrors but didn’t see anything. The car behind him was still a good five feet from his bumper. He continued back and finished parking before he stepped from the vehicle. He walked around the back of the car and saw it – the stray dog with that ear like chewed-on steak fat and that white eye. It was dead, its head on the curb. There was blood streaked across his rear license plate. He hadn’t been hallucinating. Not the dog, anyway, and if not the dog, then not Müller. But now he had caught back up with the dog’s death, and so – unfortunately for the dog – had it.

‘Fuck,’ he said. He sat on his haunches and petted it and said, ‘Boy?’ just to be sure. It didn’t move. Its chest neither rose nor fell. Its tongue hung limp from its partially opened mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

It was very nearly dark out – the moon clearly visible and the sun making its descent – when he saw the man in the corduroy coat head around the corner – onto Wilshire – and walk to a pay phone. He picked up the phone, punched three numbers, talked for a couple minutes, and then hung up the phone in a hurry. He walked right past Simon in the Saab and pushed his way through the fingerprinted glass doors and into the Filboyd Apartments.

After the man was gone, Simon pushed his way out of the Saab and walked to the corner. Helmut Müller lay on the sidewalk across the street beneath an unlit streetlamp. He had no shoes on. Simon was fairly certain that the shoes were in the possession of a man with a neck tattoo.

He thought about walking straight up to his apartment and killing the man in the corduroy coat – he thought about doing it right now – but he needed a minute to think this through. He needed a minute to wrap his mind around what was happening, now that he was certain it was indeed happening.

He walked back to the Saab and got inside.

He lighted a cigarette, dragged deep, coughed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He had circled around somehow – he had become Jeremy and he’d come full circle. If he went in there, that meant what? It meant the man in the corduroy coat would kill him and put him in his bathtub; it meant he was walking into certain death – didn’t it?

Maybe it didn’t.

Jeremy had failed to kill him; didn’t that mean that he stood a better chance now that he was him? Or was—

Think this through. You’re Simon Johnson. Simon Johnson lives a quiet life in a small four-room apartment, working every day, listening to records and drinking whiskey every night. He hurts no one. He is harmless. He is a harmless nobody who would never hurt a soul. I am a harmless nobody who would never hurt a soul – I’m Simon Johnson.

I was Simon Johnson. And I could be again.

Just because Jeremy was killed when he broke into the apartment – that didn’t mean that’s the way it would happen this time. It didn’t have to happen that way this time. He was sure it didn’t.