Low Life

For Dave Morton and Jacque Morton –

who bought me my first typewriter

1. SIMON

2. JEREMY

3. SURFACING

4. THE BREAK-IN

EPILOGUE

The morning of the day Simon first killed a man felt completely ordinary.

He was lying on a ratty twin-size mattress, which was resting directly upon a nail-riddled hardwood floor. An alarm clock, his glasses, and an orange prescription-pill bottle sat on the floor
nearby. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a dresser which looked like it should have been left curbside years ago. Simon was flat on his back, arms at his sides, covered in a thin
brown blanket. By all appearances he was asleep, face calm and relaxed. His cheeks were pale and littered with old acne scars. Erase the eyes and the nose and the mouth and you could have been
looking at the surface of the moon, or perhaps some remote atomic test site. His hair was prematurely gray – he was thirty-four but had the thin, whitish, brittle hair of an eighty-year-old
– and very choppy, despite the fact that he carefully parted it on the right and combed it down slick with pomade. He cut it himself. He hated barbers. When he used to go he always felt a
captive of this man with a weapon, forced to listen to inanities concerning the day-to-day life of a person about whom he gave not a solitary shit, and, worse, forced to answer inquiries about his
own life.

Simon was not one for small talk.

He opened his eyes.

A gray light was seeping in around the edges of a blue curtain which was really no curtain at all; it was a blanket purchased from a street vendor and nailed over the window with the use of a
coffee mug. Simon kept waiting for his porcelain hammer to shatter while he banged away but it never did.

Am I awake?

He blinked.

I must be awake, he thought. Everything makes sense.

His alarm clock made a hollow click. A moment later it sounded.

He sat up, the blanket falling off his chest. The morning air was cool, despite the fact that it was late summer. He wasn’t sure of the exact date; each day was so like the one that came
before it that days and dates didn’t seem to matter. He could tell you how many steps it took to get from the elevator at work to his cubicle – seventy-four if he was in a good mood,
eighty-two if he was feeling low – but he couldn’t tell you the date. It was early in the morning and the room was night-chilled despite the fact that it was late summer. That was
all.

Or maybe it was early fall. He was pretty sure it was September, anyway.

He grabbed the alarm clock, silenced it, and then gave it back to the floor. He picked up his glasses, metal-framed aviator-type jobs with thick lenses that shrunk his eyes by half – he
was near-sighted – and set them on the bridge of his nose. He cringed as he did so and sucked in air with a hiss. Despite the fact that he had needed glasses since he was ten, and this pair
was not new, over the last several weeks he had developed a sore behind his right ear from the plastic earpiece digging into his flesh. It was raw and rather bloody. When he touched the pad of a
finger against the wound it stung sharply. He had tried to bend and contort the glasses into a more comfortable shape but the attempt proved futile.

Simon got to his feet. The hardwood floor was cold. He had gone to bed wearing socks but at some point in the night must have pulled them off because they were now lying inside-out on the floor
in the corner of the room like dead rodents.

In a T-shirt and green checkered pajama bottoms he stood over the dirty blue basin in his bathroom, water slowly drip-drip-dripping from the leaky faucet. He looked at himself
in the surface of the medicine cabinet’s toothpaste-spotted mirror. The reflective film on the other side of the glass was peeling away like sunburned skin, revealing the tubes and bottles of
salves and pills inside. Simon moved the hard bristles of his toothbrush across the bony surface of his teeth. His gums hurt and when he spit into the basin there was a swirl of red mixed in with
the toothpaste white. He turned on the water and rinsed it away.

After a luke-warm shower – the water never got hot – he slipped into boxers, a pair of brown pants, and a white shirt. He wrapped a tattered paisley tie, light blue
pattern on a brown background, around his neck and slipped into a brown corduroy sport coat with leather elbow patches. He put on socks with holes in them and a pair of brown suede shoes which were
old and stained, the suede flat and slick with age and use, the thin leather laces snapped and tied together again in multiple places.

He walked to the kitchen, where he made himself two liverwurst sandwiches with white onion and swiss cheese, packed two pickles and a handful of potato chips in cling wrap, wrapping them
individually, and packed it all into a brown paper bag which he folded twice at the top, along creases already present from prior use.

That done, he looked at his watch – it was seven-thirty work started at eight – and headed for the front door.

Once through it, he turned around and shoved a key into the scratched and loosely fitted brass lock and tried to twist the deadbolt home. Whoever had installed the lock, however, had done a poor
job of it and the deadbolt and the slot into which it was supposed to slide did not line up. Simon had to lift up the doorknob with one hand and rattle it while simultaneously turning the key in
order to get the job done. Finally, after some under-the-breath cursing – come on, you son of a bitch – the lock slid home.

The corridor floor was covered with a carpet that might once have been beige but which was now leopard-spotted with stains and trampled flat where it wasn’t in tatters. The edges where a
vacuum couldn’t reach and the center where most of the walking took place were solid black. The walls were nicotine yellow except where graffiti had recently been painted over, and despite
the freshly painted-over spots that littered them there was also a new graffito, no more than two days old. It was on the wall opposite the stairwell that led down to the perpetually unattended
lobby at street level.

it read. It had been spray-painted on, the nozzle held close to the wall. Surrounding the lettering were several splatter spots, and runs dripping down from it. Above was a
finger-painted ‘s’. Simon assumed that whoever had done the painting had accidentally held his finger in the way of the nozzle’s flow, hadn’t liked the result on the pad of
his index, and had attempted to wipe it onto the wall.

Well, take him. Take whom? Take him where?

Simon walked toward the graffito, turned his back to it, making a mental note to call his landlord, Leonard, and let him know about it (he wouldn’t be happy: he just painted over another
graffito in the same spot only a few days ago), and headed down a creaky flight of stairs not quite wide enough for two people walking in opposite directions to pass without brushing against one
another. The lightbulb overhead had burned out a couple of months earlier and still hadn’t been replaced, so even now, while a bright morning shone outside, it was night-time in the
stairwell. As he walked down the wooden steps, listening to them issue moaning complaints at his weight, he smelled the familiar stench of urine. The lobby’s front door was kept unlocked,
which resulted in the place being graffitied, as well as the occasional bum sleeping in the stairwell.

At the bottom of the stairs, the lobby. It might have reeked of charm ninety-five years ago when the building was constructed, but now it was possessed by the stench of decay. The tile floor was
cracked and stained, the grout either blackened with filth or altogether missing; the wainscoting warped and scarred with carved initials; the windows foggy with filth; the slowly rotating fan
blades hanging from the ceiling lined with an inch of dust they’d spent decades cutting through, dust which occasionally grew too heavy to hold its grip and dropped in great gray chunks like
dead pigeons.

Simon walked through this, and then pushed his way out of the fingerprinted glass doors and onto Wilshire Boulevard, where the Filboyd Apartments stood, one of the city’s many growths,
rising twelve storeys into Los Angeles’s sun-bleached sky, rectangular and utilitarian as a barrack, a rusted fire escape etching a crooked spine down its back. Immediately the sounds and
smells of the city accosted him – diner food and exhaust fumes, car horns and helicopters.

Half a block away, a bum was sleeping on a bench in front of a restaurant called Captain Bligh’s (which sold an impossible-to-finish one-pound Bounty Burger). Traffic flowed like a steel
river along Wilshire, dammed at various intersections and slowed to a trickle here and there. Across the traffic-filled street, a low strip of buildings – an electronics store, a laundromat,
a Korean barbecue place.

Simon turned right on the sidewalk and started west on Wilshire to find his car. He was about halfway there when he saw the dog. It was a mangy thing with reddish-brown fur and a left ear that
looked like a piece of steak fat that had been chewed on a while. Its fur was matted with blood and filth. Its right eye was pure white with blindness but for a red vein bulging in one corner.

Simon paused mid-stride.

He looked at the dog and the dog, which had simply been limping along to who knew where, stopped and looked back. Its good eye was bright and alive and sad all at once. Something about the thing
broke Simon’s heart. He sat on his haunches and set his lunch bag between his feet. He opened the top and dug inside, pulling out one of the liverwurst sandwiches from beneath pickle spears
which were already leaking through their wrappers. He peeled the sandwich and held it out to the dog.

‘Come here, boy.’

The mutt cocked its head to the left, looking at Simon.

‘Come on, it’s liverwurst.’

The mutt took a few hesitant steps toward him, walking sidewise, as if afraid of coming at him straight, its yellow nails clicking against the pavement. Once it was within about a foot of
Simon’s outstretched arm, it stopped and looked over its shoulder, guilt in its eye, afraid it was doing something that would earn it a swift kick from some unseen punisher. Then it stretched
its neck toward the sandwich, grabbed it in its jaw, and scampered several feet away before dropping it to the sidewalk and eating it in a few quick bites.

‘That was nice of you.’ A thin, reedy voice.

Simon stood up – a brief dizziness swimming over him, black dots dancing before his eyes – and turned around to see an old man – at least ninety, maybe older – whose
faced was lined with wrinkles, who had parentheses stacked up on either side of his mouth. Loose skin sagged from his neck and the bags under his eyes looked capable of holding a pint apiece. His
lips were colorless. He wore a moth-eaten yellow cardigan and a pair of well-ironed – though threadbare – slacks and polished leather shoes that he’d probably owned since leaving
Germany in 1956, or whenever it had been. The accent was thin but still easily detectable. He looked at Simon with eyes that were pale blue and raw.

Simon said, ‘Thank you,’ and then broke eye contact.

The old man nodded but didn’t move and didn’t speak. His gaze was steady.

Simon felt as if the old man expected something from him.

‘I have to get to work.’

The old man nodded again but remained silent.

‘Okay,’ Simon said. ‘Have a good day.’

He turned around and walked away. He glanced over his shoulder once before reaching his old Volvo, and then got into it, made an illegal u-turn – quickly, while traffic was blocked on
either side by red lights – and drove toward downtown, where a pack of buildings jutted from the horizon like crooked teeth.

He spent his morning crunching numbers. He worked for a large payroll company that occupied the twentieth floor of a building whose main purpose seemed to be blotting out the
sun. He sat in his black chair at his brown desk inside his gray cubicle and punched away at the number pad on his white keyboard.

When lunchtime arrived he got up from his desk, grabbed his lunch bag from the office fridge – which stunk of the rotten food that had gotten pushed to the back –
walked down the hallway to the elevator, and waited. The building was fifty storeys tall and had an elevator for every ten-floor section, one through ten, eleven through twenty, twenty-one through
thirty, and so on, each one stopping at the lobby level for pick-up and drop-off. The elevator came and went and the people standing with him got onto it and went away – and he continued to
wait. After several minutes an empty elevator arrived and there was no one left waiting but him. He stepped onto it, knowing he was foolish to wait for the solitude of an empty elevator when it
would certainly be full by the time he reached the lobby, but having to do it anyway.