Low Life (3 page)

He walked through the empty lobby and up the creaky stairs and across the leopard-spotted corridor floor to his apartment. He could hear the Korean couple four doors down
yelling at each other (though he couldn’t understand them), and somewhere else nearby someone was watching a situation comedy which kept spitting out laugh track ha-has that sounded like a
lawnmower trying to start. He unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Before closing the door behind him – before locking out the forty-watt light coming in from the naked bulbs in the
corridor ceiling (the fixtures long since shattered or stolen) – he fumbled around in the dark for the switch on the inside wall, found it, flipped it, and with a
click
the old yellow
lamp with its crooked and stained paper shade came to life, lighting up the glossy covers of a few paperback novels, with which it shared an end table, as well as the rest of the room. Then he
closed the door, set the deadbolt, and slid the chain into place.

The living room was about twice the size of the bedroom. The walls were stained yellow and white patches where the last tenant had hung pictures were still visible, rectangular evidence that
someone else had once lived here. Every time someone in the building flushed a toilet or washed their dishes the rusty pipes behind the walls shook and rattled and moaned with ghostly voices. The
brown and red striped couch sagged in the middle and horsehair stuffing poured from holes in the fabric. The coffee table which sat in front of it was made of pressboard and the thin sheet of
imitation wood which covered it was peeling at the corners and chipping away. On top of the coffee table, a Mason jar filled with water in which a goldfish swam.

‘Hello, Francine. How you doing?’

He sprinkled flakes of fish food onto the water where they formed a thin scrim on its surface. Francine opened her little black mouth and sucked in bits of it. He stood and watched her eat in
silence for a couple minutes and then headed into the kitchen to fix himself dinner.

The whiskey was good and strong and cold on top of the ice cubes in the tumbler. Simon drained the glass and poured himself a second before walking back out to the living room
with the glass in one hand and a half-full bottle in the other.

He sat on his couch in the lamplight, sipped his cold whiskey, and listened to a warped Skip James record playing through the rusted horn of an old Victrola he’d found in
an alleyway three months earlier, brought upstairs, and repaired. He drank two more glasses of whiskey while the record played. Then it ended and he drank the rest of the whiskey in silence.

In his bedroom he undressed down to underwear and T-shirt. He slipped back into his green pajama bottoms and crawled beneath his brown blanket. It felt good to be in bed. He
set the alarm clock and dry-swallowed a pill and removed his glasses and set them on the floor. He touched the sore behind his ear and felt the sting of his finger. He stared at the ceiling, his
arms at his sides. The ceiling was lined with cracks from various San Andreas renovations. From here on the second floor, with the bedroom window closed, the sounds coming in from Wilshire were
muffled, and if you didn’t listen closely they combined to create a low electric hum, like a refrigerator. But Simon did listen. He listened to people talking as they walked by on the
graffiti-covered sidewalk below. The sound of their voices was comforting. The sound of people reminded him that even if he was set apart somehow, the rest of the world was still close by. It was
strange: he didn’t usually like to be around people, but he liked to know they were there.

‘—just floating around like radio waves and—’

‘—what I don’t understand is—’

‘—and they train you to think it’s normal. It’s brainwashing and that’s—’

Simon closed his eyes. He could hear his heart beating in his chest. He’d been born with a heart murmur. The aortic valve didn’t close all the way after blood had been pumped through
it, and so some flowed back in, creating an audible murmur and threatening to fuck up the whole works. When Simon was a teenager his human heart valve had been replaced by an artificial heart
valve, what they called a caged-ball heart valve. He took blood thinners daily; it was blood thinners in the orange bottle that sat on the floor beside his bed. There was a scar running down the
middle of his chest – thick as rope, and meaty as cartilage.

Slowly, the sound of his heartbeat transformed into the sound of a drum, and Simon found himself standing on the sidewalk at a parade as a band stomped by, led by a man with a huge bass drum
strapped to his chest: thump-thump, thump-thump. He looked around at the other spectators and found that at the top of their necks were cone-shaped funnels leading to, he somehow knew, other
universes, and the funnels were all turned toward him, looking at him, swirling emptiness threatening to suck him in. Their bodies were normal. They wore suits and ties and shorts and dresses, but
at the top of each, a swirling vacuum. They walked toward him. Simon turned away from the parade and looked for somewhere to run, but—

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.

But then shadow fingers were gripping for his throat yet again, and he was fighting with a man who wanted him dead, and legs got tangled, and he fell to the floor on top of his attacker. He
grabbed the man by his neck with his left hand and squeezed it tightly. With his right hand he grabbed the flashlight from the floor and aimed it at the shadow face, making it human.

‘Who are you and—’

But then he stopped – was stunned into silence. He knew this man: he had seen him in mirrors, reflected back by rippling lake water, as a ghost in shop windows as he walked by.
Simon’s hair was gray – almost white – while this man’s was a healthy brown; Simon’s skin was as pale as the moon while this man had a tan; Simon had no scars on his
face, save the acne craters of youth, while this man had a twisted rope of white scar carved into his right cheek; Simon wore glasses while there was nothing between this man’s pale green
eyes and what he was looking at – but otherwise Simon could have been staring at his twin.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

And then the man’s hand jutted up, quick as a jack-in-the-box, and the fingers clenched Simon’s already bruised neck for the third time.

‘Die, goddamn you,’ the man said. Simon saw the corners of his mouth were crusted with dry spittle and his bloodshot eyes were veined with madness.