Ryan Jahn - Low Life

A concussion reverberated through the apartment, pulling him out of the beginnings of his dream, and he opened his eyes and saw the ceiling and heard the sound of wood splinters scattering across the living-room floor like shrapnel.

Then silence.

He sat up – the blanket falling off him – and listened.

His head felt swimmy with whiskey, the world Vaseline-lensed, smeared at the edges.

‘I know you’re here,’ a voice said. ‘I watched you come in.’

Simon heard footsteps, a thunk as something dropped to the floor – in the living room? kitchen? – and then nothing.

He reached out and swept his hand across the grimy floorboards, back and forth, until his fingers brushed across his glasses. He picked them up and put them on, unconsciously hissing at the pain behind his ear – without even realizing he was feeling it – and then got to his feet and padded as quietly as possible to the light switch on the wall. He tried it and got nothing but a click.

Did the intruder know where the fuse box was? Had he—

He walked to the dresser. He thought he had a flashlight there, sitting amongst a litter of other things for which there was no specific home. He patted at the surface of the darkness, trying to find the flashlight without knocking anything over, without making any noise at all. He could feel the sweat on his forehead and the once-calming sound of his thumping heartbeat had turned into the pounding of a feral beast trying to escape a cage. Every sound he made was monstrously loud to his own ears. He was sure the intruder could hear everything – could hear the beating of his heart and the labored sound of his breathing and his hands brushing across the various not-flashlights on the top of his dresser.

Finally, his fingers touched a smooth plastic surface – what he wanted. He picked it up, thumbed a black plastic button, and the flashlight shot out a bright beam of light. Panicked – fuck, he’ll see it – he immediately shut it off again.

Then, a moment later, he clicked it back on.

He turned around to face the room and dragged the beam back and forth across the darkness, revealing shifting circles of bedroom – empty corner, closet, blank white wall, mattress covered in rumpled blanket, cracked doorway opening onto the narrow apartment hallway which led to the bathroom in one direction and the living room in the other.

On the other side of the bedroom door, dark silence.

He half expected that when he opened it he would find a vast emptiness littered with pinprick stars and gray planets floating like ghosts in a fog of toxic clouds.

He swallowed.

Why wasn’t the intruder making any noise? What was he doing out there?

Simon walked to the bedroom door and pulled it open with trepidation. The hinges squeaked. On the other side was only the hallway – not empty space or pinprick stars or ghost planets – just a narrow strip of floor which led from one room to another.

He stepped into the hallway and went right, to the bathroom, where the apartment ended in a brick wall. He would search the place methodically, starting there.

He tried the switch by the door and again got nothing. He nodded to himself in the dark – the intruder had gotten to the fuse box. There was some small light coming in through the window, however.

The window looked out on the wall of another apartment building. Below it stood a rusty fire escape on which a dead potted ficus, looking like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, had been sitting since he first moved in, left by the last tenant, or perhaps the tenant before that. In the spring, when Simon moved into the Filboyd Apartments, a mourning dove had laid eggs in the pot, and Simon had watched as the eggs hatched and the chicks left the nest. Strange how, even in a city of millions, all concrete and glass and inhuman machinery, there were little corners where the natural order of things continued.

The apartment directly across from his still had its lights on, and behind the closed white roller shade Simon could see a silhouette of human movement. The silhouette was male. It was doing something that required a lot of arm waving. Simon turned away from the window. He dragged the flashlight beam across his bathroom walls, looked in the corners, looked into the bathtub, and found the room was empty but for him.

He stepped out of the bathroom, closing the door gently behind him. He swallowed and made his way down the hallway toward the living room, checking to make sure his bedroom was still empty before continuing past it. Every step across the creaky floorboards marked his location for the intruder while he himself heard nothing from the other man in his apartment.

He thought he might be walking into a trap, but the alternative was to cower in his bedroom and wait for the intruder to come to him, and that was no alternative at all.

At the end of the hallway he waved the flashlight left and right across the living-room walls, into the corners, seeing no one and nothing. The front door was open and the forty-watt light from the corridor was pouring into the room, lighting up the couch and the end table and Francine the goldfish in her Mason jar, that quart-sized enclosure that made up her entire world.

He walked to the front door and looked out into the corridor, left then right – no one’s here, it’s safe – and then pushed the door closed. It failed to latch. It simply swung back open about half a foot, allowing the light from the corridor back in. What little of it could squeeze through a six-inch gap, anyway.

He thought whoever broke into his apartment must have looked around, realized he’d broken into the wrong place – oh, hell – and left. He turned away from the door. He could put a chair against it to keep it closed for the remainder of the night. He’d call Leonard tomorrow and tell him what had happened. There was no profit in calling the police if the man had gone; nothing had been stolen so far as he could tell. Aside from his record collection, he didn’t think he had anything worth stealing.

But then a black shadow lurched from the darkness of the kitchen and put its hands around Simon’s throat, and those hands didn’t feel like shadows at all. They felt like flesh and bone; they felt like murder.

‘Die, you son of a bitch.’

The hands were strong and tight and Simon found it impossible to pull air into his lungs past them. The shadow slammed Simon’s back against the door and his head banged against it and dizziness swam over him. The shadow slammed him against the door a second time and he dropped the flashlight. It fell to the floor and a foot kicked it in the scuffle. He grabbed at the hands wrapped around his throat and tried to pry them away, but it proved impossible. The man would not let go. Simon was going to die – as requested.

He swung out blindly at the shadow in front of him and felt his hand weakly punch the side of a head – an ear, a jaw – and the punch, he was sure, did next to no damage, but he knew where the head was now. He swung again, this time with much more force – in a powerful hook aimed for where he thought the face was – and felt his fist slam into a nose, push it sideways, and then something in the nose snapped, and the shadow grunted and its grip loosened. Simon swung again, landing another punch.

He breathed in and his throat stung with the pain of it, but it felt good too. He remembered swimming at a public pool when he was a boy and touching the bottom of a thirteen-foot deep end, and staying down as long as possible, till his vision went gray and his head felt like it might be crushed by the pressure of it all – his ears hurt so much – and how when he surfaced and inhaled that first hot summer lungful it felt like he was breathing for the first time. This felt like that – painful and good and clean and new as a flower that hadn’t yet opened.