Low Life (10 page)

After examining a floor plan of the library by the escalators – he’d only ever gone upstairs to where they kept fiction and literature – he found what he was looking for two
floors below ground, on lower level two, in the science and technology section. He walked past the information desk and made a left, and there he found the mathematics books.

He grabbed an armload of them, almost at random, and then found an unoccupied wooden cubicle and sat down. He opened one of the books. It told him that if velocity was constant, and one knew the
velocity, then distance was that multiplied by time, and if one knew the time and the distance, then one could figure out the velocity, but if one knew only one of the three variables, one was,
ultimately, fucked.

He wondered how often in life – rather than in hypothetical situations – one really had enough information to know anything with any amount of certainty.

There was an entire chapter in the same book dedicated to spheres. He had some experience with spheres. He lived on one, for instance – on an approximation of one,
anyway. Here was a fact about the sphere that the book didn’t discuss: the sphere offered no escape: go in any direction for any distance, for an eternity, and you would never find the edge.
You might cover the same ground a thousand times – but you would never find an edge.

Time passed.

It was four days after Simon’s first trip to the library that he took the band-aids off for the first time. They had started to smell bad. He had been tonguing the wound
from the inside since the beginning and had felt it growing shallower as its lips began to seal themselves together. Now he wanted to see how it was progressing on the outside. He peeled the
band-aids away with some pain – his beard was growing in and the adhesive was sticking to it – and in a few minutes the crescent scab was revealed. It was brownish-red and about an
eighth of an inch wide at its widest point and ran four inches in length. There were strange little stretch marks in his skin at the edges of the wound, and it was red and raw there as well, but he
didn’t think it was infected. Each end of the wound, where the cut had been shallowest, was already mostly healed. The scab had peeled away there, revealing pink scar. The middle, though, was
still deep and raw. If he grimaced or frowned or smiled it bled still through cracks in the scab. But it was looking good. It was healing well. In another week or two the scab would flake away,
revealing a scar very much like the one on the face of the – now stinking – corpse in his bathtub. Simon glanced at it. He was going to have to do something with it. He was tired of
driving through the city, hunting for ice. He was going to have to get rid of it.

But not yet. He was afraid that if he got rid of it, someone would find it, and this ruse would be over before it was fairly begun. If it was here, it was safe. And he was safe. If it was out in the world, then anything might happen.

He put a cotton ball against the open mouth of the peroxide bottle, and then tilted the bottle. He wiped at his face, cleaning old blood away.

After that, alcohol.

And after that, a fresh dozen band-aids.

Soon it would be time. In another week – maybe two.

Even though there was parking directly in front of the house, Simon drove to the end of the block – about six houses down – before pulling his Volvo to the curb and
killing the engine. His right cheek was free of band-aids now and lined with a meaty white scar. There was still a bit of pink where the wound hadn’t completely healed, but he couldn’t
make himself wait any longer. He’d just been sitting around thinking about it for days.

He knew more about mathematics than he ever had before.

He tongued at his cheek. There were a dozen hairs growing on the inside. When the wound healed it healed with hair follicles in the pink interior of his mouth and they had begun growing hairs
that made the lining of his cheek itch.

He tongued at the centimeter-long hairs as he stepped from his car, and then slammed the door shut. He had become aware of the hair growing in his mouth six days ago, but on the drive over it
had become an obsession, despite what he was doing here this morning. He reached into his mouth with his left hand and grabbed one of them between his thumb and index finger – pinching it
against the pad of the finger with the thumbnail – and yanked.

There was a sharp sting and his eyes watered and he tasted blood. He looked at the small gray hair for a moment – examining it closely, the way it curled and formed a half circle, the
white pin-dot of flesh hanging on one end – and then tossed it away.

He tongued at his cheek again, but then forced himself to stop. He wasn’t thinking about it despite what he was doing here this morning; he was thinking about it
because
of what he
was doing here this morning. He was distracting himself from it. But it served no end. There was no profit in it.

He turned away from his car and walked toward the Shackleford house. He could see Samantha’s Mercedes sitting in the driveway.

Soon he would know if she believed him.

‘Hey, Jeremy. Got that hammer you borrowed?’

Simon paused. He was standing on the first step leading up to the front porch. When the morning breeze blew he could smell basil and rosemary on the air. The pollen in the purple flowers on the
front porch made his eyes water and his nose run. The voice came from behind him – the voice of a man who ate gravel.

Simon swallowed and turned around.

A heavy man in his late forties was jogging in place about ten feet away on the sidewalk. He wore stained gray sweatpants and a T-shirt that didn’t quite cover his light-bulb-shaped belly.
Between his sweats and his shirt, a white slice of hairy gut. He had a face like wet papier-mâché, drooping off the bones, and his neck was dotted with razor bumps. A few white bits of
toilet paper were stuck to his skin with drops of drying blood. Simon’s adoptive father used to call those red-dotted bits of toilet paper Japanese flags. As in, ‘You got a Japanese
flag stuck to your neck there, pal.’

He had been dead for six years now. Simon hadn’t gone to the funeral, but after his mom told him about it – that the old man had been found dead in his motor home in Nevada (they
were divorced when Simon was fifteen) – he’d spent two weeks walking around in a daze. He hadn’t cried. He hadn’t even felt particularly sad, but he felt something related
to sadness, something that lived next door to it, a kind of echoing hollow. A month later he cried about it for the first and last time. It was strange. He hadn’t liked the man – in
fact, he had hated him – but he was the only father Simon knew and he’d loved him too.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘My hammer. You got it?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s in my garage. Mind if I bring it by later? I’m kinda busy.’

‘Yeah, no prob. I can’t take it now anyway. About to go on a run. I just saw you and thought I’d toss out a reminder.’

‘Oh,’ Simon said. ‘Okay. I’ll bring it by later.’

‘Sounds good. See you then.’

‘Right.’

The man turned and jogged a few steps before stopping and backing up again.

‘By the way – what happened to your face?’

‘My face?’

‘That scar.’

Simon touched his cheek.

‘Oh, that. My barber had a seizure.’

The man was silent a moment.

‘Really?’

Simon nodded.

The guy whistled, sucking in through his teeth. ‘Tough luck.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘Okay. Later, then.’

‘Later.’

The guy went on with his jog.

Simon watched him go, letting out a relieved sigh: one person had believed him to be Jeremy Shackleford, anyway.

But what had he meant mentioning the scar? Hadn’t Shackleford had one just like it?

He pushed quietly through the front door and walked down the hallway. He felt sick to his stomach. Despite having brushed his teeth, the dry slab of his tongue tasted awful. He
swallowed, or tried to, but had no spit.

At the bedroom door he stopped. It was cracked a bit, and he could hear the sound of shallow breathing – the shallow breathing of sleep, one long sigh followed by another – and he
could smell the clean smell of a woman’s sweat and the stale smell of slept-on sheets. He put his hand up, pressed his fingers against the coarse grain of the wood, straightened them till his
knuckles were locked, and pushed. The door opened easily, sliding gently against the plush wool bedroom carpet and then stopping, leaving behind a half circle of nap it had brushed flat, like the
wing of a snow angel.

Samantha was asleep on the bed. She was lying on striped burgundy sheets, beneath a white quilt, her head resting on one pillow, her arms wrapped around another, hugging it in place of a human
absence – which absence, Simon thought, was in his bathtub. Well, some of it was. Once the smell had gotten too bad to tolerate, once neighbors started calling Leonard and complaining about a
foul stench, once he had given up on burning incense and icing the body, he had driven to the store and picked up a half dozen bottles of drain cleaner. He poured the drain cleaner over the corpse,
let it dissolve the tissue, and ran warm shower water over it. He did this four days in a row (going to a different store each time). The drain had clogged several times, but he’d managed to
plunge the stoppages through. Now what was left was mostly bones and teeth and what hair hadn’t swirled down the drain. He still had to get rid of that, but he was afraid. Dental records and
so on. He would have to smash out the teeth and—

That was for later.

He walked to the bed and stood over Samantha. Samantha was for now.

She was pale and smooth and beautiful.

He had to make her believe that he was Jeremy Shackleford.

When he sat on the edge of the bed a low moan escaped her throat. He reached a hand out and brushed the back of it across her smooth cheek, feeling the light blonde hairs on it like the fuzz on
a peach. He ran the pad of a thumb across her soft lips. His breathing grew heavier. He swallowed.

Yes, Samantha was for now.

He imagined lying with her, loving her. He imagined her loving him in return. It seemed like a dream. Would she know he wasn’t Jeremy? There were so many things besides appearance that
made a man – the way he closed his eyes when angry, forcing himself to calm down; the way he bit at his bottom lip; the way he carried himself when he walked – and marriages, Simon
thought, were so intimate that it would be impossible for a spouse not to, eventually, pick up on all of them. Twins, for instance, might look identical to strangers, but parents and spouses could
tell the difference in an instant. Would she be able to see he wasn’t Jeremy just as quickly? Would she look at him and just know? Would all this have been pointless?

There was only one way to find out.

‘Samantha.’

She rolled over in her sleep, mumbling something under her breath.

He reached out and ran fingers through her hair.

‘Samantha.’

She brushed his hand away.

‘Not right now, Jeremy,’ she said, still asleep. But a moment later her eyes opened. ‘Jeremy?’

She sat up and there was something like fear on her face, her eyes wide and blue and beautiful, and her mouth was hanging open, and she crawled backwards, away from him, until she bumped up
against the dark wood headboard.

‘Jeremy?’

‘Hi.’

‘Where – where have you been?’

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘You don’t – did you have another?’ She pinched her eyes closed and rubbed at them, still mostly asleep, apparently incapable of grasping completely what was happening
when only a moment earlier she had been dreaming impossible dreams. She opened her eyes again. ‘Did you have another – spell?’

‘I guess I must have.’

Had Shackleford had blackouts as well? Simon’s had been less and less frequent (six months ago he was having them often, but now they almost never came), but just a couple of days before
all this started – before Shackleford broke into his apartment – he’d found himself in the adult book store and didn’t know how he’d gotten there, couldn’t
remember it at all. He was wearing only one shoe. When he got back to his apartment, he’d found the other shoe sitting on his coffee table. What did it mean that—

Suddenly Samantha was crying. At first Simon didn’t know what was happening – she simply looked down at her lap, and a moment later her body began to shake and hair that had been
tucked behind her small but jutting ears – flopped out like loose shutters – fell into her face and small sobs escaped her – and even after he did know what was happening he
didn’t know what to do. He simply sat and stared at her as she shook and looked down at her own lap.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m back. It’s me – Jeremy.’

She looked up at him with her red-rimmed eyes and wiped at her cheeks and her nose with the back of her hand. She tucked loose strands of hair back behind her ears. Her eyes were alive with
emotion and beautiful for it. But as she searched his face, something behind them changed somehow. Something entered her eyes that Simon didn’t like at all.

‘You’re not – who are you?’

Simon swallowed. His face got hot with blood but he tried not to show it, tried only to give Samantha a deadpan while he thought of what to say next. Like stealing a kite, half the trick was not
to give yourself away.

‘Who am I?’ he said with absolutely false humor. ‘Jeremy.’ He said this in the same tone he’d use to explain to someone that the sky was blue: it was so obvious it
didn’t deserve mentioning.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

She shook her head.

The way a man held his shoulders, the way his mouth looked when he was relaxed, how often he blinked while lying or telling the truth, where he rested his hands – in his pockets or on his
lap or pressed against his hips – the way he scratched his face, whether he crossed his legs at the ankles or knees or not at all when sitting down: a man was more than his appearance. He
should have known he could never get away with this. He had known, hadn’t he?