Low Life (9 page)

He walked into his apartment with a plastic bag hanging from his fist. He set it on the couch and padlocked his door. Then he removed his jacket and his button-up, stripping
down to his yellow-pitted T-shirt. He picked up the bag again and walked down the hallway to the bathroom.

He blew into the powder-covered latex gloves and then slipped his hands into them one at a time before lacing his fingers together and forcing them down tight. His stomach felt
sour and his liver hurt. He mixed the hair dye in a small plastic bottle and then squirted it through a nozzle onto his gray head of hair. He massaged it into his scalp with gloved fingers, wiping
it away with toilet paper when it ran down his forehead or the backs of his ears or his neck. It made his scalp tingle. In ten minutes his head was covered in a brown layer of dye the consistency
of warm mayonnaise.

He sat on the toilet and waited, wishing he had bought a book after all. He had a few lying around the apartment, but he’d read them all – most of them more than once. He felt
tickles of moisture on the back of his neck and blindly wiped at them with wads of toilet paper. Stomach acid bubbled up into the back of his throat and he swallowed it down again.

Half an hour passed.

He rinsed his head in the basin, under steaming hot water, knowing this was stupid, knowing he couldn’t possibly look as much like Jeremy Shackleford as he seemed to at first glance,
knowing that even if he did look that much like him he would still never be able to pass himself off as the man.

But then he asked himself, Why not – why couldn’t I?

What better way to find out why Shackleford had broken into his apartment and tried to kill him than to give himself access to the man’s life?

He thought of the cracks in his ceiling.

He thought of himself floating through space – directionless.

Well, now he had a direction, didn’t he? It gave him a sense of purpose, a reason to wake in the morning. There was a mystery in his life, and no matter what it revealed, it had to be
better than eight hours at the office, masturbating in a small booth in a pornographic book store, and sleeping on a small mattress while the sounds of the city echoed through his apartment and
small insects nibbled at him. It had to be better than that same routine day in and day out as the months fell off the calendar like dead leaves.

Anything would be better than that – anything at all.

Simon pulled his head out of the sink, dried off with a threadbare brown towel. He put his glasses back on and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a different person. He felt like a
different person.

‘Not too bad.’

He peeled the latex gloves off his now sweaty hands – fingertips white and pruned – and threw them into the trash can.

But he wasn’t done yet.

He reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a white and blue box. He opened the paper lid, revealing the shining backs of two hundred razor blades. He slid one of them from the box and held
it up close to his eye. He looked past the blade and to his reflection in the peeling medicine cabinet mirror.

Can you do it, Simon?

He swallowed.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He put the razor blade against his right cheekbone. It was cold and sharp. He exhaled, began to press the blade into his pockmarked skin – and then stopped. He wanted this to be right.

He set the blade down on the counter beside the basin and walked over to the bathtub.

He pulled the grocery bag off the corpse’s head, and immediately looked away, gagging. It had only been three days and he had tried to keep the body cold, but already there were things
living in the corpse. There was a disturbing subcutaneous movement, as if on the other side of the flesh were a million crawling legs trying to inch the face down the front of the skull.

Simon could not see what he needed to see without turning the head toward him, but he didn’t want to touch it. He walked over to the trash can and put one of the gloves back on. When he
found himself standing in front of the corpse again, he swallowed, held his breath, and then leaned down and turned the head so he could see the scar. It was four inches long and ran jaggedly from
cheekbone to chinbone. It was white, and despite the five o’clock shadow covering the rest of Shackleford’s face, it was smooth and free of hair.

He stared at the scar for a long time, ignoring the sucking wet holes the eyes had become, and once he thought he had it etched into his memory, he nodded to himself and turned back to the
mirror. He could do this.

Once again, he put the blade against his cheekbone. He breathed heavily, in and out and in and out, almost to the point of hyperventilation, and then he stopped breathing altogether. He pushed
the blade down into his cheek, hard, and it forced the skin down with it – the skin taking a surprising amount of pressure – and then there was a popping sound as the skin broke. A bead
of blood formed around the corner of the blade. He pushed down further, feeling the skin part. The bead became a stream. Warm liquid flooded down the side of his face. The pain was citric and
overwhelming, but he tried to ignore it and simply dragged the blade down his cheek, following his mental image of the corpse’s scar.

When he reached the center of the cheek, the blade broke clean through and he ended up cutting his gums as well, and he cursed and stomped on the floor and had to stop. He put the brown towel
against his cheek and found himself bent over at the waist, groaning. He tongued the wound on the inside of his mouth. The tip of his tongue touched the towel on the other side. He breathed through
his nostrils like an angry bull about to charge. He walked in a circle. The blood continued to pour out of him, and it continued to fill his mouth. He let it drain from between his lips, down his
chin, and onto the floor.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he said through gritted teeth as the taste of metal filled his mouth, warm and thick and salty. He’d cut too deep – far too deep.

After a while, he stood up again.

Still holding the towel against his face, he looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were red and full of tears. He pulled the towel away and blood poured out of him and dripped onto his
T-shirt and splattered on the tile floor and ran along the grout lines like branching rivers. He put the towel back. If he was going to go through with this he had another two inches to go.
He’d only managed to cut halfway down his cheek. He wasn’t done.

He looked around for the razor blade. He’d dropped it or thrown it or something. When the pain hit – when he broke through the skin of the cheek and cut his own gums –
he’d no longer been altogether present. He scanned the countertop and saw nothing but splatters and drips of blood. Then he saw it on the floor, in the corner, amongst a wad of hair and dust
which had collected by the bathtub.

He picked it up and threw it into the trash can. It clinked as it hit the edge and then disappeared amongst the paper waste.

There were a hundred and ninety-nine clean ones; there was no point in risking infection.

After sliding a clean blade from the box, he pulled the towel away from his cheek. Blood still seeped from the wound, but it was no longer pouring out of him.

He tongued the wound, saw a glimpse of it through the cheek. It made his stomach feel sour.

He closed his eyes, trying not to be sick (and trying not to wonder what kind of pain that would produce in his new wound), and once the nausea passed – it rolled through his stomach, and
he burped, tasting acid, then swallowed it away – he opened them again. It had been difficult the first time; this time it felt impossible. He knew what pain he had to look forward to –
the sharpest of it was still fresh in his mind, only moments old. Before it had merely been an idea. Now it was a reality. He knew the pain. He did not want more of it. But he thought, too, he was
past the point of changing his mind. He was scarred for life; he might as well finish doing what he had set out to do. He put the blade against the edge of the wound. It stung before he even went
to work. His stomach clenched. He felt dizziness swim over him. When he looked at himself in the mirror he felt that he was looking at a stranger.

He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth – his jaw going tight and cramping with the pressure of it – and sawed the blade down toward his chin. As he cut downward, his head seemed to
roll out of consciousness, like a ball on a gentle slope – and then it dropped off the edge into total darkness.

He woke up on the bathroom floor. His mouth was full of blood both clotted and wet. He sat up, tongued his cheek, felt the sting of pain, and smiled. The movement of facial
muscles sent more electric pain throbbing through his face and neck. Blood was still drizzling from the side of his cheek. He looked down at his wrinkled white T-shirt. It was covered in a thick,
drying crust of burgundy. His glasses – also splattered with blood – were on the floor by the edge of the counter. He picked them up and put them back onto his face. Out-of-focus blood
spots covered the lenses. He pushed himself up off the cold tile floor and onto his feet. He looked at himself in the mirror. The reflection he saw was something out of a horror film. It looked
like he’d just spent the last hour rolling around a slaughterhouse floor.

He got a washcloth from one of the drawers and wetted it with hot water and gently wiped at his face and neck. Even though he started far from the wound, it hurt to wipe the blood away. His
nerve endings felt raw and exposed. Still he continued, rinsing and wiping, being careful not to actually wipe at the slit in his face.

Once he’d gotten most of the blood away, he started dabbing at the wound itself with cotton balls soaked in peroxide, watching the peroxide turn white with bubbles. It stung, but not as
badly as the alcohol would, and that was next.

After unwrapping a dozen band-aids, Simon taped them over the wound, thinking that he should have purchased gauze and medical tape instead. He hadn’t anticipated the
extent of the damage that would be done – that now was done. The first layer of band-aids immediately went red and he stuck on a second layer, and then a third.

He found an expired bottle of Vicodin in the back of the medicine cabinet. He couldn’t remember ever having been prescribed Vicodin, and, in fact, he still wasn’t
certain he ever had been. Maybe the last tenant had left the pills. He couldn’t know: the name had been peeled off the label. But there had been a few sweaters in the bedroom closet, and a
few frying pans in the kitchen, and of course that dead ficus on the fire escape, so it was possible. He didn’t care. Even expired, its usefulness fading with age, it should dull the pain
better than acetaminophen. He swallowed two of the pills, and then undressed, leaving his bloody clothes in a pile on the floor – he would take care of the clean-up tomorrow; right now, the
entire right side of his head was throbbing like a bad tooth – and padded to the bedroom. He crawled under his blanket and looked up at the cracked ceiling.

He wondered if this had been a mistake.

Throughout most of the night he was awake and in pain. Once, as morning approached, he fell asleep with his eyes open and dreamed the bedroom was filling up with water. He
dreamed – with his eyes open – that he was drowning. Then the dream – or the hallucination, whatever it was – was over, and he was simply lying in his bed again. He was
covered in sweat and the night air was chilling him.

He closed his eyes, but sleep didn’t come again.

He stumbled into the living room early next morning. It was Sunday. He had cleaned up himself and the bathroom and was wearing a pair of brown checkered pants and a T-shirt and
his corduroy jacket. He walked to the couch and sat down. He bent down and picked up the phone from the floor and set it in his lap. He dialed seven digits. After three rings the automated
answering machine picked up and he dialed a three-digit extension, followed by the pound key. It being Sunday, he thought he would just leave a message, but someone picked up.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello – Mr Thames?’

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Simon Johnson.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is something the matter, Simon?’

‘Oh. I’m just calling to let you know I won’t be in next week. I’ve had a death in the family. My mother. Well, my adoptive mother. I was adopted. I don’t know if
you knew that. Anyways, I’ll be flying down to Austin for the funeral and to be with my family.’

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ Mr Thames said.

‘Okay.’

Simon pulled the phone away from his ear.

‘Simon?’

The tinny sound of the voice barely reached him, but it did, and he put the phone to his ear once more.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I know this is a bad time for you, but is there a number where we can contact you if we have any questions about your accounts?’

‘You can call my apartment. I’ll check the messages daily.’

‘Okay, Simon.’

‘Okay.’

He put the telephone back into its cradle and set it back onto the floor. He didn’t have an answering machine.

Later that afternoon he drove downtown to the Los Angeles Central Library on Fifth and Grand. He parked on Fifth Street, across from the Edison building, stepped from his car,
took one last drag from his cigarette, and dropped it into the metal tray which lined the top of the trash can out front. The tray was filled with nicotine-yellow water and cigarette butts and
straw wrappers and wads of bubble-gum and bubblegum papers. The cigarette Simon dropped in sizzled briefly and then went silent. His cheek was covered in multiple layers of band-aids. Inside his
mouth, though, a slow flow of blood still oozed from the wound when he made any kind of expression at all, and when he smoked it stung. But he wasn’t going to stop smoking. Had he any will he
would have stopped long before now. He spit a wad of blood into the trash can and headed for the front door, past a homeless guy with no shoes whose toes looked black with decay.

He walked into the lobby, where a line was twisting toward the checkout desk, filled with people holding library-card applications and library cards and stacks of books to check in, or out, or
both.