Low Life (8 page)

Simon felt a sudden desperation to keep Robert there. In part because if Robert left Simon didn’t know what he would do – maybe he would go straight to the police – but mostly
because he simply didn’t want to be alone right now. Thinking of the life Shackleford must have lived with his wife and his students and his university friends made Simon feel hollow in his
own. What did he have? His record collection and his whiskey. And Francine, of course. But it wasn’t enough.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. I’m just gonna wait outside.’

‘Please. Just stay for one more drink.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Robert walked to the front door and pulled the chair away from it.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said again, and then pulled open the door.

‘Robert.’

Robert stopped. He turned and looked at Simon.

‘Don’t go to the police. Please. I need to find out why he wanted me dead.’

Robert bit his lip, looked out into the corridor – maybe thinking of Tijuana and his trouble there – and then he looked back.

‘I didn’t see a thing,’ he said finally. He swallowed. ‘And now we’re square.’

Simon stared down at the ice in his glass for a long moment.

‘Simon?’

He looked up at Robert.

‘If I keep quiet,’ he said, ‘we’re square. I don’t owe you anything else.’

Simon nodded.

‘Okay.’

Robert stepped out of the front door, pulling it shut behind him, but it only swung back open again. Simon listened to him walk across the corridor floor and then down the stairs to the lobby,
shoes clunking against wood. Then he was gone.

Simon poured himself another drink, sipped it.

When he leaned back he felt something large and heavy in his pocket. He reached in and pulled it out. It was the picture of Jeremy Shackleford and Samantha he had taken from their house. He
looked at it for a long time, at Samantha’s smile, at how beautiful she was. It must have been wonderful to have a woman like that, to be able to call a woman like that your own. Simon
imagined sleeping beside her, spooned up against her bottom, one arm wrapped around her, hand cupping a firm breast. He imagined he’d be able to feel her slow heart beating in her chest.

He set the picture down on the coffee table and looked at it for a while longer.

Then he got to his feet, found a screwdriver – the one with the black and yellow plastic handle – and screwed a hasp and staple combination into both sides of the door, so the
apartment could be secured from inside and out.

While doing this, he finished the bottle of whiskey.

Sleep did not come that night. He simply lay in bed, turning this way and that, pushing his blanket off him and then pulling it back on, flipping his pillow over repeatedly,
his neck kinking, his ankles popping, his right arm falling asleep as he crushed it under the weight of his body, then his left. Thoughts swirled round his brain, which refused to go silent.

After what felt like an eternity – would this useless fucking night never end? – the gray light of morning began to seep in past the edges of the blue blanket nailed over the
window.

The alarm clock didn’t have a chance to ring. He shut it off early, got out of bed, and padded to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth and spat toothpaste and blood into the basin. He rinsed
it down the drain, then cupped his hand under the running water, brought a palmful to his mouth, swished it around in there, and spat again. He turned off the water and stared at himself in the
mirror, his face only inches from the glass. He looked into his own green eyes – green with flecks of brown. He had tiny bumps under his eyes, just above his cheekbones. They were white and
about the size of the tip of a pen. He had accidentally scratched a few off once when he had an itch and despite their size they bled quite a bit. He pushed on the gray bag under his left eye. It
was soft and moist and when he pushed on his eyeball through it his eye made a squeaking noise, as air was forced from a duct there, and his vision went blurry. He scraped the eye boogers from the
corners of his eyes with a fingernail. He looked at them and then wiped his finger on his pajamas.

Then he turned away from the mirror and looked at the corpse lying in the now almost ice-free bathtub. He should have bought more ice yesterday. He would have to buy more this morning, even if
it meant being late for work. He walked to the tub and sat on the edge of it. The porcelain was cool through his pajamas.

‘You had a very beautiful wife,’ he said. ‘I hope you appreciated her.’

He reached down and grabbed the corpse’s cold purple hand. The skin was soft and loose on the bones, like the skin on an undercooked chicken. He pulled the ring off the third finger and
skin came with it, turning inside out and peeling backwards. Simon rinsed the gold band off under the faucet before putting it on his own finger. Then he sat back down beside the corpse. It was
just beginning to smell. The scent was thick and slightly sweet. You could feel it like horseradish behind the roof of your mouth and the backs of your eyes.

‘Me,’ he said, ‘I’ve never been in love before. I’ve often wondered what it felt like. So many poems and songs try to describe it, it must be—’ He
stopped there, licking his lips. He just didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

With most of the ice gone, he could see the corpse’s right hand. It was a blue-white color, the color of a week-old bruise, and covered in a network of scabbed-over cuts.

Strange.

He got to his feet and walked out of the bathroom.

He was only fifteen minutes late for work, and only three times that morning did he stop working in order to look at the gold band on the third finger of his left hand. When he
did stop, he held his hand palm up and looked down at it, and with his right hand he twisted the ring around and around on his finger, thinking of what it meant to be attached to someone by such a
thing. He longed for that. But then each moment passed – he snapped himself from his thoughts – and he went back to work.

He walked into the diner with his grease-stained lunch bag hanging from his fist. Robert and Chris had left without him again. He stood on the scarred vinyl floor and scanned
the room, looking for his friends. The diner was busy, full of chatter and the sounds of forks and knives scraping against plates, and chairs being scooted in or pushed out, and heads of blond and
brown and black and red hair filled Simon’s view. But after a moment Simon saw Robert’s ponytail hanging down his back. Robert and Chris were sitting side by side in a booth in the back
corner. Their backs were to the door. It was almost as if they were hoping Simon wouldn’t see them.

Simon weaved his way through the crowded tables and sat down across from them. Their food had already arrived and they were eating.

‘Hi, guys.’

‘Hi,’ Chris said.

Robert did not look up from his plate. He simply dragged a couple fries through a smear of ketchup and shoved them into his mouth.

‘How you doing, Robert?’

‘I’m okay,’ Robert said, his voice cold. ‘I just lost my appetite, though.’ He did not look up at Simon when he spoke. He simply stared down at his plate.

Simon blinked. Then he understood what Robert had meant last night about no longer owing him anything, what he meant when he said they were square.

‘Oh,’ he said after a minute. ‘Okay.’

Chris looked confused. ‘Okay, what?’ he said through a mouthful of food.

Simon didn’t answer. He got to his feet and walked toward an empty table. As he did the sound of Chris asking Robert what was going on faded into the overall noise in the room and became
inaudible. Simon sat down. He unpacked his lunch and ate without even tasting his food, just giving fuel to the machine that was his body, just doing what was necessary. His stomach did not feel
good. He glanced at Robert and Chris a couple times, but they were simply eating and talking and did not look back. Not even Chris.

Maybe it was best this way. As long as Robert stayed quiet it probably was.

When his lunch was gone he folded up the cling wrap in which it had been packaged, making several small translucent squares and stacking them neatly on the table. Then he folded his
grease-stained lunch bag into quarters and put it in the inside pocket of his corduroy sport coat.

He got to his feet.

Alone on his couch with a glass of whiskey in his hands. The glass was cold and wet with condensation. Skip James was singing ‘Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues’,
and Simon was staring at his grayish reflection in the broken television in the corner. He’d turned it on when he got home, but there was no picture, just sound, so he’d turned it off
again.

He finished his whiskey and set the glass down on the coffee table. He looked at the photograph of Samantha and Jeremy Shackleford and twisted the wedding band on his hand. He liked the pressure
of it on the webs between his fingers. He liked the weight of it. He imagined himself in that photograph. He imagined himself caressing Samantha’s body. He imagined himself making love with
her, feeling her hot exhalations as she breathed into the crook of his neck.

He poured himself another drink.

Once he’d decided what he was going to do he felt okay. He slept soundly. If he dreamed at all, the dreams were peaceful, and he awoke the next morning feeling better
than he had in a very long time, despite the dull ache of a hangover hovering around his head like a cloud, despite the sourness in his stomach.

The office was Saturday quiet, staffed at ten per cent, and in the quiet all Simon could think about was what he was going to do once his shift ended. It was the first time he
had ever regretted his six-day work weeks, the only time he would rather have had the day off. Before today he had only regretted the fact that he couldn’t also work Sundays.

Eventually, though, it was time to leave.

Instead of continuing along Wilshire to the Filboyd Apartments, Simon made a right onto Vermont, drove past Sixth, and made a left into the Walgreens parking lot. He pulled
into a spot, pushed open the car door, and stepped out onto the asphalt and right into a pink wad of bubble-gum. As he walked, he dragged his right foot along the ground, trying to scrape the gum
off the bottom of his shoe. By the time he reached the front of the store with its automatic glass doors – a kid standing there trying to sell candy bars from a cardboard box – his foot
was barely sticking to the ground at all.

He stepped past the kid, shaking his head, no, I don’t want a candy bar, and into the bright fluorescent light of the store. A security guard sat just to the right of the door in a metal
fold-out chair – eyeballing him.

Simon hated security guards. There was something about their mere presence that made him feel guilty. He also felt guilty when he heard a siren, momentarily certain that it was the police coming
for him – coming to take him away. His heart would start beating fast and his mouth would go dry and he would try to figure out what it was he had done. His mind would flip through all the
nasty, horrible thoughts he’d had recently (stupid bitch, someone should—), flip through them like index cards (if I had a knife, I’d—), as he tried to figure out which one
he’d acted upon. He must have acted upon one of them: the police were coming for him. Inevitably, the police car screamed past, or it was a fire engine, or it was an ambulance. Nobody even
glanced in his direction. But the guilt still sat there – weighing on him.

Maybe it was simply the built-up guilt of his youthful petty crimes. When he was young he had been quite a thief. He had grown up poor, and the only way for him to get things he wanted was to
steal them. He remembered stopping into a convenience store when he was ten or eleven – this was in Austin, Texas, where he had spent his youth – and seeing a box of kites near the back
of the store. He looked through them for several minutes, examining the small pictures on their packaging, pictures which were supposed to be depictions of what they would look like in flight
– eagles and jet planes and flaming rockets.

‘You gonna buy one of them or just gawk?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and left the store.

But the next morning on his way to school he had walked into the convenience store with a pronounced limp – apparently he’d injured his knee and couldn’t bend it –
knowing what he was going to do, and when the guy behind the counter wasn’t looking he slid a kite down the leg of his pants and limped right back out. He was sweaty and full of turmoil
inside – guilt – but even then he knew the trick to stealing was to not have a guilty expression on the outside, so he made sure his face was calm – bored even – until he
was safe.

He’d flown that kite every weekend for two months, until it finally got caught in a tree in Big Stacy Park and he couldn’t get it out again.

Maybe it had just been the built-up guilt of his youth before – but this time the guilt was earned, wasn’t it? The reason for it decomposing in his bathtub.

He grabbed a basket from the stack sitting between the security guard and the newspaper display case and walked through the store. He collected a box of brown hair dye, a box of razor blades,
band-aids, a bottle of alcohol, a bottle of peroxide, and a bag of cotton balls.

Before going to the checkout line, he stopped to look at the paperback novels. He flipped through a couple, sticking his face into one and inhaling its scent before putting it back down again,
but he didn’t buy one. He didn’t read very much any more, but in his youth books had been his only escape from his adoptive father, who was always drunk and as likely to punch him in
the face for some imagined offense as hand him a beer and let him stay up late watching television with him. He felt an odd, bittersweet nostalgia whenever he smelled a certain kind of glue used on
some paperback novels – or maybe it was the paper itself, or the ink – and when he did, he couldn’t help but put his face into the pages and breathe it in. Sometimes he bought a
book for that reason alone, whether he was interested in the content or not. Not today, though. Today he had other things on his mind.