Low Life (6 page)
Authors: Ryan David Jahn
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Thrillers, #General, #Psychological
He unpacked his lunch, laid it out in front of him, and began to work on a sandwich.
Chris smiled at him. ‘I think Babette’s sweet on you.’
‘No,’ Simon said. ‘She’s just working for tips.’
‘But what happened with the break-in?’ Robert said.
Simon licked his lips, swallowed, looked toward the wall where ketchup was splattered, a dried chunk of it hanging between two wood panels like a bloody booger.
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’
‘There was this one guy,’ Chris said, ‘UFO took him for a month, but it only felt like a couple of hours to him, though, right? So he gets home and he’s lost his job and
his wife is banging some neighbor and his dog ran off. Sounds like a country song, huh? Except for the UFO bit. But it’s true. It happens more than you think. Aliens are all around us, and
the only way you can identify ’em is by their eyes. They got crazy eyes. They look like—’
‘Would you shut up?’ Robert said.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to hear about UFOs.’
‘But they’re interesting.’
‘Not to me, they aren’t.’
‘Well, that’s ’cause you only like boring shit. Probably wanna talk about Dustonsky or some other German writer.’
‘Dostoevsky. And he was Russian.’
‘Whatever, man. He’s still dead.’
Simon got to his feet after only a few bites of sandwich. He decided he wasn’t feeling hungry.
‘Where you going?’ Robert said.
‘I don’t feel so hot.’
‘You sick?’
Simon shook his head.
‘No, I’m just—’
He let it end there, then walked toward the front door. As he did, Babette smiled at him from where she was standing at the counter. ‘Bye, Simon,’ she said. ‘See you
tomorrow.’
‘See you tomorrow, Babette.’
He grabbed the door handle.
‘Oh, wait,’ Babette said.
‘What is it?’
‘Do you—’ Babette began, and then took her gum from her mouth, apparently thinking this conversation was too serious for chewing. ‘Do you have a brother?’
Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘Some guy came in here yesterday asking about you and acting really strange.’
‘What’d he look like?’
‘You. Kinda. That’s why I asked if you had a brother.’
‘Yeah – no. I don’t think so. I was adopted.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you don’t know anything about—’
Simon shook his head. ‘Nope.’
‘Okay,’ she said. She bit her lip and seemed unsure about what to say next. Finally: ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘See you tomorrow, Babette.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay.’
She put the gum back into her mouth – peeling it off the tip of her finger with her teeth – and turned around to get back to work.
For the rest of his lunch break Simon sat in his cubicle flipping through a newspaper, glancing at headlines to see if anything struck him as worth reading. But it wasn’t
a headline that caught his eye; it was a photograph. The picture was of an old man with parentheses stacked up on either side of his mouth, with loose skin hanging below his chin despite the fact
that he was thin, with bags under his eyes that could hold a pint apiece. The headline read
GERMAN DIRECTOR HELMUT MÜLLER KILLED
and the piece continued
LOS ANGELES – Controversial German film-maker Helmut Müller, who wrote and directed Nazi propaganda films such as
U-Boote westwärts
and
Kolberg
before immigrating to the United States and making such anti-war classics as
The Last Coffin
and
Gunmen Die Too,
was found dead outside his Koreatown apartment early yesterday
evening, the apparent victim of a mugging. He was ninety-seven years old.
Müller, who hadn’t directed a film since the 1966 box-office and critical failure
Hell’s Mouth,
had condemned film as being ‘inherently incapable of purity or honesty.
He asserted that the ‘dream of an artist is always pure’, in an essay for the now-defunct
Los Angeles Free Press,
‘but we contaminate it with our mental illnesses in
the act of creation. I do not agree with Freud. I do not believe dreams are evidence of anything; only how we corrupt our dreams when trying to realize them is evidence. The difficulty lies in
telling where the dream ends and the corruption begins. Dreams come to us fully formed, as gifts from the gods, and we destroy them. It is best to leave them in the ether where they can remain
holy.’ He gave up film-making for good in 1970, after over twenty-seven years and twenty-two films, opting instead to open a restaurant in Sherman Oaks. ‘Feeding people,’ he
said at the time, ‘is at least honest work.’ The restaurant closed in 1982, and Müller had since been in retirement.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had planned on honoring the film-maker with a lifetime achievement award in 2002, but plans were dropped when his previously buried past as a
Nazi propagandist was brought to the public eye by protesters. When asked for his response to the Academy’s dropped plans to honor him, he said, ‘I would not honor me. What I have
done is unforgivable. I have spent the last fifty-seven years trying to redeem myself. But I do not believe that I have, or that I will before I retire from this earth. But it is a relief that
it is out. It was a terrible secret to keep.’
In 2005 Mr Müller spoke at the Los Angeles Film Academy about ‘the importance of telling truth to power, whatever the consequences’, but noted that this advice was
‘coming from the lips of a famous coward. I was worse than silent. I let oppressors and murderers speak through me. This is an unforgivable sin – to allow something as holy as art
to be used for evil. Unforgivable.’ This was his last public speech.
All three of Mr Müller’s children are deceased. He is survived by four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Simon read the piece twice, and then folded up the newspaper and dropped it into the trash can under his desk. He looked at the clock. His lunch break was over.
The Pasadena street on which Jeremy Shackleford once lived was just off Colorado Boulevard. It was a quiet, tree-lined strip of pothole-free asphalt dotted with late-model
cars, old but well-maintained three- and four-bedroom houses, and green yards. The sidewalks were covered in faded chalk hopscotch etchings and jump-rope scars, and were cracked in a few places by
tree roots that had gotten bigger than expected; but the gutters were free of trash – no paper cups and condom wrappers here – the driveways were free of oil stains, and the yards were
free of weeds. Despite the sound of traffic from Colorado, the street had an air of calm about it.
Simon drove his old rattling Volvo along the asphalt, glancing from the driver’s license in his left hand, pinched between thumb and index finger, to the numbers painted curbside. He found
parking right out front, pulled to the curb, and killed the engine.
Above him, the orange sun shot daggers through the branches of one of the many eucalyptus trees which lined the street, creating a strange pattern of shadows on the car, a natural stencil
painted with light.
He looked to his right and saw the Shackleford house through his water-spotted passenger-side window. It was a Craftsman-style building, set at the top of five concrete steps which had been
painted green, and half-hidden behind a plant-littered front porch. Basil and rosemary and aloe grew there, as well as ficus and three hanging pots spilling vines dotted with large purple
flowers.
He tossed Shackleford’s driver’s license onto the passenger’s seat beside the wallet from which he’d pulled it and stepped out of his Volvo. He did not lock the doors. In
this neighborhood he doubted anyone would even glance in the direction of his battered car, and if they did they would no doubt assume it belonged to someone’s maid. Or perhaps
someone’s child visiting from USC or UCLA, home so mom could do the laundry.
He walked up the concrete path that cut the green yard in two, made his way up the painted steps, and, standing in front of the door, took a deep breath. He felt nervous and afraid. His chest
hurt. His body shook slightly. He doubted anyone would notice just by looking at him, but he could feel it.
He thumbed the doorbell and heard the muffled sound of it chiming inside.
There was no response.
He rang again, and again there was no response, no sound of footsteps rushing to reach the door, no request to hold on just a moment, I’ll be right there, I’m in the kitchen and my
hands are full. There was only silence.
He looked over his left shoulder and saw a man of retirement age walking his dog. Or rather, the dog was walking him, leaning forward and pulling the old man behind it on its leash. The old man
was paying Simon no attention. And a moment later he was past, being pulled forward by his eager dog while leaning against the force like a man in a windstorm trying to maintain equilibrium. Over
his right shoulder, Simon saw a pair of blonde girls, wearing identical flower-print dresses and red ribbons in their hair, hunched over something on their lawn, their backs to him. With those
exceptions, the neighborhood appeared to be empty.
And still no one opened the front door.
He rang the doorbell a third time just to be sure.
Then – after a moment – pulled Shackleford’s wad of keys from his pocket. He tried three or four of them before he found the one that could unlock the front door, and with it
he did so. He pushed the door open, stepped just inside, and closed it behind him. He put the keys back into his pocket and twisted the deadbolt home.
The house appeared to be empty of life, but it also seemed to be humming; the electricity in here tingled on his skin and in his hair. The living room had polished hardwood floors. The walls
were a warm orange, the ceiling a darker version of the same. A flat-panel television hung on the living-room wall above the fireplace hearth, black plastic surrounding a black screen, a small red
light glowing in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. The fireplace itself was simply ornamental now, the one-inch stub of gas pipe sticking from the wall capped off long ago. Several candles
sat on the bricks in front of it. A plush brown couch sat atop an area rug that was thick and tightly woven. Expensive-looking art hung on the walls. The living room was the size of Simon’s
entire apartment.
Shackleford: this was where he’d lived.
Why had he wanted Simon dead?
The orange walls wouldn’t tell him, nor the television, nor the floor beneath his feet.
As Simon wandered through the house, he found a picture of Shackleford and a brunette woman, a woman he assumed was Shackleford’s wife. She was about six inches shorter than him, which
would make her five three, hair shoulder-length, eyes the color of a clear blue sky. Her skin was smooth and white, her lips pink and soft-looking, her neck graceful and thin and long. She was
wearing a gray blouse with the top two buttons undone, revealing the shallow cleavage of a small-breasted woman in a push-up bra. She wasn’t smiling save in one corner of her mouth, but her
eyes were alive with humor. She and Shackleford were arm in arm.
The picture was in a four-by-six-inch frame, and Simon slipped it into the outside pocket of his brown corduroy coat.
The dining room had been converted into an office. There was a desk against one wall with a computer atop it. The computer’s screen was black. There were stacks of paperwork on either side
of the keyboard. On the wall opposite the desk, three waist-high bookshelves filled with books on mathematics. The books seemed to be organized by difficulty rather than alphabetically. Several of
them were textbooks.
Simon walked to the desk and sat down in a black leather chair. He grabbed a stack of paperwork from the desk and set it in his lap and flipped through it. He found gas bills, cable bills,
directions to various locations, torn bits of paper with phone numbers scrawled across them, penciled names of authors, and doodles of penises and breasts and eyes, sometimes in odd combination.
And at the bottom of the stack he found a folder filled with math tests for an Algebra I class, a class that had apparently been taught at Pasadena College of the Arts, a class that had apparently
been taught by Dr Jeremy Shackleford. They were from a summer session, now surely over.
A mathematics instructor. Pasadena College of the Arts.
Simon was setting the stack of paperwork back onto the desk when he heard a key sliding into the front door. He turned to face the sound and heard the lock tumble.
He jumped to his feet and frantically looked for a place to hide.
The doorknob rattled.
There was a coat closet on the other side of the room. He ran for it.
‘Jeremy?’ the woman said.
Simon recognized her from the photograph. Her voice was smoky but still feminine and very melodic; she almost sounded as if she were singing when she spoke. She stood near the couch, purse still
over her shoulder, keys still in hand. Simon could smell her from where he stood: a light, clean sweat and bar soap and lotion and some kind of fruit-scented shampoo.
He could feel hangers poking into his back and the arms of leather and wool coats brushing against his wrists and hands. It gave him the creepy sensation that people were standing behind him. He
could smell the closed-off smell all closets seemed to possess, despite the slats in the door. He watched the woman on the other side through those slats, waiting to see if she would somehow sense
his presence.
She looked around the living room, and for a moment seemed to look right at him through the door. Simon’s breath caught in his throat. He swallowed and it stung. His neck was still
swollen.
She pulled her purse off her arm and tossed it onto the back of the couch, and then grabbed a remote from the couch’s arm. She clicked on the television – a local news program. Some
woman with short blonde hair was talking about the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dumping plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in order to protect it from the sun’s rays and
keep birds from shitting in it.
