Low Life

1 SIMON

The morning of the day Simon first killed a man felt completely ordinary.

He was lying on a ratty twin-size mattress, which was resting directly upon a nail-riddled hardwood floor. An alarm clock, his glasses, and an orange prescription-pill bottle sat on the floor nearby. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a dresser which looked like it should have been left curbside years ago. Simon was flat on his back, arms at his sides, covered in a thin brown blanket. By all appearances he was asleep, face calm and relaxed. His cheeks were pale and littered with old acne scars. Erase the eyes and the nose and the mouth and you could have been looking at the surface of the moon, or perhaps some remote atomic test site. His hair was prematurely gray – he was thirty-four but had the thin, whitish, brittle hair of an eighty-year-old – and very choppy, despite the fact that he carefully parted it on the right and combed it down slick with pomade. He cut it himself. He hated barbers. When he used to go he always felt a captive of this man with a weapon, forced to listen to inanities concerning the day-to-day life of a person about whom he gave not a solitary shit, and, worse, forced to answer inquiries about his own life.

Simon was not one for small talk.

He opened his eyes.

A gray light was seeping in around the edges of a blue curtain which was really no curtain at all; it was a blanket purchased from a street vendor and nailed over the window with the use of a coffee mug. Simon kept waiting for his porcelain hammer to shatter while he banged away but it never did.

Am I awake?

He blinked.

I must be awake, he thought. Everything makes sense.

His alarm clock made a hollow click. A moment later it sounded.

He sat up, the blanket falling off his chest. The morning air was cool, despite the fact that it was late summer. He wasn’t sure of the exact date; each day was so like the one that came before it that days and dates didn’t seem to matter. He could tell you how many steps it took to get from the elevator at work to his cubicle – seventy-four if he was in a good mood, eighty-two if he was feeling low – but he couldn’t tell you the date. It was early in the morning and the room was night-chilled despite the fact that it was late summer. That was all.

Or maybe it was early fall. He was pretty sure it was September, anyway.

He grabbed the alarm clock, silenced it, and then gave it back to the floor. He picked up his glasses, metal-framed aviator-type jobs with thick lenses that shrunk his eyes by half – he was near-sighted – and set them on the bridge of his nose. He cringed as he did so and sucked in air with a hiss. Despite the fact that he had needed glasses since he was ten, and this pair was not new, over the last several weeks he had developed a sore behind his right ear from the plastic earpiece digging into his flesh. It was raw and rather bloody. When he touched the pad of a finger against the wound it stung sharply. He had tried to bend and contort the glasses into a more comfortable shape but the attempt proved futile.

Simon got to his feet. The hardwood floor was cold. He had gone to bed wearing socks but at some point in the night must have pulled them off because they were now lying inside-out on the floor in the corner of the room like dead rodents.

In a T-shirt and green checkered pajama bottoms he stood over the dirty blue basin in his bathroom, water slowly drip-drip-dripping from the leaky faucet. He looked at himself in the surface of the medicine cabinet’s toothpaste-spotted mirror. The reflective film on the other side of the glass was peeling away like sunburned skin, revealing the tubes and bottles of salves and pills inside. Simon moved the hard bristles of his toothbrush across the bony surface of his teeth. His gums hurt and when he spit into the basin there was a swirl of red mixed in with the toothpaste white. He turned on the water and rinsed it away.

After a luke-warm shower – the water never got hot – he slipped into boxers, a pair of brown pants, and a white shirt. He wrapped a tattered paisley tie, light blue pattern on a brown background, around his neck and slipped into a brown corduroy sport coat with leather elbow patches. He put on socks with holes in them and a pair of brown suede shoes which were old and stained, the suede flat and slick with age and use, the thin leather laces snapped and tied together again in multiple places.

He walked to the kitchen, where he made himself two liverwurst sandwiches with white onion and swiss cheese, packed two pickles and a handful of potato chips in cling wrap, wrapping them individually, and packed it all into a brown paper bag which he folded twice at the top, along creases already present from prior use.

That done, he looked at his watch – it was seven-thirty work started at eight – and headed for the front door.

Once through it, he turned around and shoved a key into the scratched and loosely fitted brass lock and tried to twist the deadbolt home. Whoever had installed the lock, however, had done a poor job of it and the deadbolt and the slot into which it was supposed to slide did not line up. Simon had to lift up the doorknob with one hand and rattle it while simultaneously turning the key in order to get the job done. Finally, after some under-the-breath cursing – come on, you son of a bitch – the lock slid home.

The corridor floor was covered with a carpet that might once have been beige but which was now leopard-spotted with stains and trampled flat where it wasn’t in tatters. The edges where a vacuum couldn’t reach and the center where most of the walking took place were solid black. The walls were nicotine yellow except where graffiti had recently been painted over, and despite the freshly painted-over spots that littered them there was also a new graffito, no more than two days old. It was on the wall opposite the stairwell that led down to the perpetually unattended lobby at street level.

it read. It had been spray-painted on, the nozzle held close to the wall. Surrounding the lettering were several splatter spots, and runs dripping down from it. Above was a finger-painted ‘s’. Simon assumed that whoever had done the painting had accidentally held his finger in the way of the nozzle’s flow, hadn’t liked the result on the pad of his index, and had attempted to wipe it onto the wall.

Well, take him. Take whom? Take him where?

Simon walked toward the graffito, turned his back to it, making a mental note to call his landlord, Leonard, and let him know about it (he wouldn’t be happy: he just painted over another graffito in the same spot only a few days ago), and headed down a creaky flight of stairs not quite wide enough for two people walking in opposite directions to pass without brushing against one another. The lightbulb overhead had burned out a couple of months earlier and still hadn’t been replaced, so even now, while a bright morning shone outside, it was night-time in the stairwell. As he walked down the wooden steps, listening to them issue moaning complaints at his weight, he smelled the familiar stench of urine. The lobby’s front door was kept unlocked, which resulted in the place being graffitied, as well as the occasional bum sleeping in the stairwell.

At the bottom of the stairs, the lobby. It might have reeked of charm ninety-five years ago when the building was constructed, but now it was possessed by the stench of decay. The tile floor was cracked and stained, the grout either blackened with filth or altogether missing; the wainscoting warped and scarred with carved initials; the windows foggy with filth; the slowly rotating fan blades hanging from the ceiling lined with an inch of dust they’d spent decades cutting through, dust which occasionally grew too heavy to hold its grip and dropped in great gray chunks like dead pigeons.

Simon walked through this, and then pushed his way out of the fingerprinted glass doors and onto Wilshire Boulevard, where the Filboyd Apartments stood, one of the city’s many growths, rising twelve storeys into Los Angeles’s sun-bleached sky, rectangular and utilitarian as a barrack, a rusted fire escape etching a crooked spine down its back. Immediately the sounds and smells of the city accosted him – diner food and exhaust fumes, car horns and helicopters.

Half a block away, a bum was sleeping on a bench in front of a restaurant called Captain Bligh’s (which sold an impossible-to-finish one-pound Bounty Burger). Traffic flowed like a steel river along Wilshire, dammed at various intersections and slowed to a trickle here and there. Across the traffic-filled street, a low strip of buildings – an electronics store, a laundromat, a Korean barbecue place.

Simon turned right on the sidewalk and started west on Wilshire to find his car. He was about halfway there when he saw the dog. It was a mangy thing with reddish-brown fur and a left ear that looked like a piece of steak fat that had been chewed on a while. Its fur was matted with blood and filth. Its right eye was pure white with blindness but for a red vein bulging in one corner.

Simon paused mid-stride.

He looked at the dog and the dog, which had simply been limping along to who knew where, stopped and looked back. Its good eye was bright and alive and sad all at once. Something about the thing broke Simon’s heart. He sat on his haunches and set his lunch bag between his feet. He opened the top and dug inside, pulling out one of the liverwurst sandwiches from beneath pickle spears which were already leaking through their wrappers. He peeled the sandwich and held it out to the dog.

‘Come here, boy.’

The mutt cocked its head to the left, looking at Simon.

‘Come on, it’s liverwurst.’

The mutt took a few hesitant steps toward him, walking sidewise, as if afraid of coming at him straight, its yellow nails clicking against the pavement. Once it was within about a foot of Simon’s outstretched arm, it stopped and looked over its shoulder, guilt in its eye, afraid it was doing something that would earn it a swift kick from some unseen punisher. Then it stretched its neck toward the sandwich, grabbed it in its jaw, and scampered several feet away before dropping it to the sidewalk and eating it in a few quick bites.

‘That was nice of you.’ A thin, reedy voice.

Simon stood up – a brief dizziness swimming over him, black dots dancing before his eyes – and turned around to see an old man – at least ninety, maybe older – whose faced was lined with wrinkles, who had parentheses stacked up on either side of his mouth. Loose skin sagged from his neck and the bags under his eyes looked capable of holding a pint apiece. His lips were colorless. He wore a moth-eaten yellow cardigan and a pair of well-ironed – though threadbare – slacks and polished leather shoes that he’d probably owned since leaving Germany in 1956, or whenever it had been. The accent was thin but still easily detectable. He looked at Simon with eyes that were pale blue and raw.

Simon said, ‘Thank you,’ and then broke eye contact.

The old man nodded but didn’t move and didn’t speak. His gaze was steady.

Simon felt as if the old man expected something from him.

‘I have to get to work.’

The old man nodded again but remained silent.

‘Okay,’ Simon said. ‘Have a good day.’

He turned around and walked away. He glanced over his shoulder once before reaching his old Volvo, and then got into it, made an illegal u-turn – quickly, while traffic was blocked on either side by red lights – and drove toward downtown, where a pack of buildings jutted from the horizon like crooked teeth.

He spent his morning crunching numbers. He worked for a large payroll company that occupied the twentieth floor of a building whose main purpose seemed to be blotting out the sun. He sat in his black chair at his brown desk inside his gray cubicle and punched away at the number pad on his white keyboard.

When lunchtime arrived he got up from his desk, grabbed his lunch bag from the office fridge – which stunk of the rotten food that had gotten pushed to the back – walked down the hallway to the elevator, and waited. The building was fifty storeys tall and had an elevator for every ten-floor section, one through ten, eleven through twenty, twenty-one through thirty, and so on, each one stopping at the lobby level for pick-up and drop-off. The elevator came and went and the people standing with him got onto it and went away – and he continued to wait. After several minutes an empty elevator arrived and there was no one left waiting but him. He stepped onto it, knowing he was foolish to wait for the solitude of an empty elevator when it would certainly be full by the time he reached the lobby, but having to do it anyway.

The elevator stopped on the seventeenth floor and picked up two women.

He turned to the brushed-steel corner of the elevator and closed his eyes. They stung and he pinched them tighter. His chest felt cramped somehow. He tilted his head up toward the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and the black cover of his eyelids went red.

‘…and then Vince says, “What do I care who you sleep with?”’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘I know, right?’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told him I slept with his brother.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. Vince’s brother smells like a dumpster. I just wanted to see how he’d react.’

‘And?’

On the fifteenth floor several others joined the party – and on the twelfth and eleventh.

By the time he reached the lobby Simon felt sweaty and hot and slightly sick; the elevator was packed with people.

He rushed out of it, pushing past several slowpokes – hearing a ‘Hey, buddy’ and an ‘Asshole’ as he did so – and swiftly made his way through the marble-floored lobby to the non-recycled air and daylight of the outside world. He was breathing hard. He felt stupid for panicking over a crowded elevator, but he didn’t know how not to panic over it. Yet twenty floors was a lot of walking. So he simply took the elevator and felt sick four times a day – once in the morning; twice at lunchtime, once down and once up; and once when the day was over.

He blinked in the noontime light, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints. Robert and Chris were both standing in front of the building, smoking cigarettes.

Robert was tall and thin, wore suits that hung on his bony body like trash bags, and had a ponytail hanging off the back of his head that looked like a horse’s tail. He had a weak chin and a large forehead, which in an earlier age might have marked him as some sort of degenerate, and surprisingly small and delicate hands for a man his height.

Chris was about five three, a stringy little Texan with teeth like rotting fence posts and thin blond hair combed straight down onto his forehead. His face seemed somehow too large for the head it had been slapped onto, big eyes like a lemur, and a wide fish mouth. The muscles behind the flesh often twitched for no apparent reason, especially when he got on a rant, which was frequently.

Simon had no idea how old either of them was – maybe thirty-five, maybe forty.

Robert looked at his watch. ‘You finally give up and start taking the stairs?’

Simon smiled a smile that felt forced and false. His eyes felt dull in his head.

Even though he considered Robert and Chris his friends – his only friends, really – he did not know how to react to them. He felt lost in the world of human interaction. He thought that after thirty-four years of life he sometimes knew what was expected of him in social situations – he had learned the correct reactions through trial and error – but it never felt natural. It felt like a performance. He was supposed to smile so he smiled. He was supposed to laugh at a joke so he laughed. He was supposed to talk to his friends about television programs so he watched television in order to have something to talk about. But he felt apart from it – separated from it by some invisible membrane, stuck outside even himself, in some no-place, watching himself interact with the world from a distance – unable to join in, even while he appeared to be doing so.

They headed to a place called Wally’s on Broadway and grabbed a table. Robert and Chris ordered their lunches. Simon sat and waited for their sandwiches to arrive before unpacking his own. When he first began eating his lunches here with Robert and Chris – four months ago, three months after he started working in the same building with them, though it felt like he’d been working here forever: every day was the same and they seemed to stack infinitely into his past like a line of dominoes – there was some trouble with the manager. This was a restaurant, not a park. He couldn’t just bring his own food in here and spread out. But since then they’d worked it out, and the manager let it slide.

When Babette brought out Simon’s daily 7-Up, she smiled and said hello. Simon returned the smile, pulled the paper sleeve off the top of his straw, and took a draw. It was cold and sweet and helped to settle his stomach.

He fell into his car, the work day over. The car was a gray 1987 Volvo. The paint was peeling from the hood where the heat of the engine had cooked it and from the trunk where several different owners had set the gas cap when refilling the tank. He started the engine, thumbed the button on the left of the transmission’s handle, and dragged it down to drive. He pulled out into the slow flow of traffic, edging in with his right fender – this was a oneway street – forcing the car behind him either to stop or hit him. Take your pick, pal. In five minutes he was back on Wilshire and heading toward home. But then he drove right past the Filboyd Apartments and past the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated forty years earlier, and onward. The Ambassador was under construction, being turned into a school, its history knocked away with the walls, goodbye Cocoanut Grove, hello detention, and there was nothing left of it but its steel skeleton surrounded by great pits of earth and a chain-link fence. Los Angeles was a city that perpetually razed its own past. History was for people who hadn’t yet made it here. This was the edge of the new world and it would remain so. You couldn’t go any further, and who would want to? Just ignore the slums and the dirt and the poor and try not to trip over any broken dreams while walking down Hollywood Boulevard.

In another few miles he reached his destination. The front of the place simply read

and though he had never seen an actual book inside, there were certainly plenty of magazines.

He parked his car on a side street just off Wilshire, checked the meter, found that whoever had parked there last had left him twenty-three minutes of free parking, added a quarter’s worth of time, and then walked along the cracked sidewalk toward the arcade.

The metal gate which acted as a front door was locked. It was always locked. Simon pressed a button on the wall to his right and heard a bell chime inside. He looked up at the camera mounted above the door. A moment later, a buzzing sound. Simon pulled on the door. It opened.

The place was humid and smelled of ocean salt and rotting undersea vegetation or – more likely – of something that resembled those combined odors; it was fifteen miles to the nearest beach in Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel spun slowly and bikinied women lay on brightly colored towels, and the only seabirds this far inland were gulls hanging out behind the seafood restaurant on Fourth and Vermont, picking through the shrimp shells and lobster tails left in its dumpster.

At the counter – behind which stood a bored-looking fellow in a burgundy tracksuit, who was flipping through a wrestling magazine – Simon exchanged a twenty-dollar bill for twenty one-dollar bills, and then made his way through the front room, where rows of magazine covers displayed various fetishes – close-ups of well-manicured feet with red and blue polished toenails; the tiny breasts, puffy nipples and bald vaginas of women pretending to be prepubescent girls; submissive women whose waists were cinched by corsets and whose asses were welted red by thorough canings; nurses wielding enema nozzles; pig-tailed women in diapers tonguing pacifiers – and then through a doorway and up a single step into the back room above whose door was a sign which labeled it the

A few lonesome middle-aged men with glistening black eyes were hanging around outside the booths, apparently looking to find someone with whom to share some of their time inside before heading home to their wives (Simon saw several wedding bands). He avoided eye contact, not wanting to give anyone the wrong idea, and made his way to a booth with a green light glowing above it. The booths with red lights above them were occupied, their doors locked, and the faint sounds of videotaped sex issued from the cracks beneath their doors.

There was a television built into one of the walls inside the booth, and to its right a slot for collecting dollar bills. On the wall opposite the television, a built-in wood bench. On the floor beside it, a trash can half-filled with wadded-up kleenexes and paper towels and fast-food napkins. The stench of rotting ectoplasm was overwhelming.

Simon put a dollar bill into the slot beside the television, and the screen came aglow, filling the small room with sickly light.

The television displayed six channels of pornography, which came in six distinct flavors. Simon chose channel three – a woman in a black leather mask was flogging a completely nude man, who was on hands and knees on a cracked concrete floor in some anonymous warehouse (probably a warehouse just over the hill in Sherman Oaks or Encino). She called him terrible names while she beat him.

Simon did not sit down, but his knees felt shaky.

When he got back to the Filboyd Apartments he could not find parking on Wilshire, so he turned left onto a side street lined with apartment buildings and drove north toward Sixth. Near the end of the block, beneath a broken streetlamp – all of the lamps were out on this block, while across Sixth they were turning on in the dim evening light – he found a spot he could barely squeeze his car into, and proceeded to do so, his right front fender poking only slightly into a red zone. A fire plug jutted from a brown patch of grass about ten feet away.

He stepped from the Volvo, slammed the door shut, put his key into the scratched-up keyhole, and gave it a turn from twelve to three. There was a satisfying resistance, and then all four doors locked simultaneously with a chorus of thwacks. He turned away from the car and started south toward home, stuffing keys into his pocket.

Both the sun and the moon were visible as they changed shifts, the moon high and the sun sinking below the horizon. The clouds looked like pulled cotton. The nearest stars – or perhaps they were planets – poked through the darkening sky like flashlights in a distant wood.

A few steps from his car he stopped to light a cigarette. After getting it lighted, he flipped the cap over the silver Zippo, snuffing the flame, and stuck it warm into his pants pocket. He could feel the heat of it against his thigh. He took a drag and felt the smoke swirling within his lungs, heavy and hot and somehow comforting. He exhaled through his nostrils. His father – adoptive: Simon didn’t know who his birth parents were, though in his youth he had often made up different stories about them, and about why they dumped him off at an Austin, Texas, police station when he was only three months old – used to smoke Camel Filters and often exhaled through his nostrils. When he was a small boy he thought it was the coolest thing in the world, how someone could take smoke into his mouth and exhale it through his nose. It seemed like it must be some kind of magic.

He continued walking south. He made it only seven steps before something terrible happened.

It began with someone saying, ‘You got the time?’ But not to him. The voice came from across the street. Simon looked over there and saw a tall guy with a neck tattoo standing only a couple of feet from an old man wearing a moth-eaten yellow cardigan.

‘Let me see,’ the old man said. He had a German accent, his voice thin and reedy.

He pushed back the left sleeve of his cardigan, revealing a silver watch which glistened in what was left of the light. He squinted at the numbers, pulling his head away from his own outstretched arm, apparently far-sighted and without his glasses.

‘I think it’s about—’

Two other men stepped out of the shadows of a brick apartment building – one with a Dodgers cap on his head, the other’s bald pate slick as a polished bowling ball – grabbed the old man’s arms from behind and started pounding at his kidneys. He cried out once or twice, but then his breath must have been gone because after that all he managed were sad little grunts. His legs gave, knees buckling, but the other men held him up and continued to punch at him for a while, his feet dragging on the concrete beneath him as he was punched and jostled, making quiet scuffling sounds like whispers. Then they emptied his pockets of a billfold, removed his watch, and let him crumple to the sidewalk, let him simply fold on top of himself. The guy with the neck tattoo gave him three more kicks to the gut, and then said to one of the others, ‘Get his shoes. I can wear ’em to church.’

‘Get ’em yourself if you want ’em. They’re not my size.’

The guy with the neck tattoo cursed, ‘Lazy bastard,’ and then pulled the shoes off the old man’s feet, revealing plaid yellow socks that matched the cardigan.

‘Hey,’ Simon said, after snapping out of his stunned silence. ‘What are you guys doing?’

But they weren’t doing anything. They’d finished.

‘You want some too?’ the bald one said.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Forget about him,’ said the one with the neck tattoo.

‘It can be a two-for-one night.’

‘No. Fuck him. I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco.’

‘You lucked out this time, fucker!’

They turned and walked away from there. Simon stood motionless a moment or two longer – wanting to make sure they weren’t going to return – and then jogged across the street to where the old man lay motionless.

He knelt down – cigarette dangling from his dry lips, smoke wafting into his eyes, making them water – and felt for a pulse. He felt nothing. If ever a pulse had been there, it was in the wind now. The old man was dead.

When he reached Wilshire he found a pay phone, a small metal box set against a brick wall, and called the police. He did not want to call from his home telephone because he did not want the police to show up and question him for hours about something that had lasted thirty seconds. He told the woman who answered that he had witnessed a mugging. Three men had accosted an old man with a German accent. He told her where it had happened and described the three men as well as he could given the distance and the dim light. He told her that the old man was dead. When the woman asked him his name he simply hung up and walked away.

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.

Simon did the only thing he could think to do. He slammed the flashlight against the man’s head. Blood splattered across Simon’s chest and face, staining his T-shirt and dotting the lenses of his glasses, but the hand on his throat did not loosen its grip. If anything, it gripped tighter, with more determination. Simon swung again. The room filled with the scent of copper and sweat, heavy and thick as honey. Enough to make you gag. The grip on his throat loosened, but still he swung – again and again and again. His shoulder ached. His wrist hurt. At some point the cap was knocked off the end of the flashlight and the batteries flew out and scattered across the wood floor and everything went dark, but still he swung. And then he stopped. Finally it was over.

He sat there for a long time, straddling this stranger’s chest.

He breathed in and he breathed out.

There’d been moments in his everyday life when he had wondered what it would be like to kill a man. He thought everybody probably had those moments. Those moments made up what he thought of as a person’s low life – the internal life they lived but told no one about. Those moments that passed through one’s thoughts but didn’t so much as ripple the surface of reality. Those moments when an exhausted mother on the verge of losing control thought she just couldn’t take the crying any more and considered holding the baby’s head underwater. Those moments when a scorned lover thought that if he couldn’t have his love, then no one would be allowed to. Those moments when a man looked out of the window, saw a ten-storey drop, and wondered what it would be like to take that final step. But then a pacifier-placated child went quiet, the turmoil of a scorned lover faded, and a man turned away from the window and went back to what he was doing before glancing at that long drop. Of course, sometimes a person’s low life broke through the surface, like a breaching whale with an unstoppable momentum. But most of the time killing seemed impossible; most of the time the thought was downright nauseating. There’d been moments in his everyday life when he had wondered what it would be like to kill a man – but until tonight it hadn’t happened.

Blood dripped from the flashlight in his hand.

He swallowed back the urge to vomit.

He let go of his grip on the flashlight and it dropped to the floor and rolled in a lazy half circle before coming to a stop. He got to his feet. He took off his glasses and cleaned the blood from them with his T-shirt – the front of which was littered with tiny holes which had been put there by the caps of beer bottles, as he used the shirt to twist the things off – and then put them back onto the bridge of his nose. He walked to the wall and flipped the switch. An empty click. A strange laugh croaked from his throat, and then he felt his way to the kitchen. Then through the kitchen to the fuse box embedded in the back wall, its gray metal door hanging open. He flipped all the switches and various lights throughout the apartment came on, including the lamp on the end table in the living room. The fridge began humming. Someone on the TV chattered about a political controversy.

Simon walked to the living room and shut it off, killing the news mid-sentence.

He looked toward the telephone.

It sat on the floor, a thin gray cord twisting off it, and curling behind the back of the couch. The man who broke into his apartment was stretched out on his back in the middle of the hardwood floor, blood pooling beneath his head. He was wearing an expensive gray suit and a black overcoat. His shoes looked new, except that the toes were scuffed. They were dull-polished, hiding their newness, but Simon saw there was little wear on the heels and only shallow creases in the leather. A green scarf was wrapped around the dead neck, and beneath that and the collar a green tie knotted with a full Windsor. Simon took a few steps toward either the phone or the corpse. He wasn’t sure which. He could smell the sweat on the man’s skin and the anti-perspirant he’d applied and the stench of beer and an unidentifiable but thick odor beneath that. Perhaps the stink of insanity. Less than a minute ago this man had wanted Simon dead.

‘Why?’

His voice sounded strange to his own ears.

The telephone sat on the floor. Simon could see the man’s brown wallet poking from the inside pocket of his overcoat.

‘Why?’

He glanced toward the telephone once more, and then reached down and slid the wallet from the man’s pocket. It was warm from body heat and the leather was smooth in his hand. He flipped it open and looked at the driver’s license inside. The dead man’s name had been Jeremy Shackleford. He’d lived in Pasadena. Inside the wallet were six crisp hundred-dollar bills, several credit cards, a Ralphs club card, a Borders Rewards card, and an Arclight Cinemas membership card.

Simon tossed the wallet onto the coffee table, and then looked back at Jeremy Shackleford.

‘Why did you come here?’

The corpse didn’t answer. But then it didn’t need to. He had come here to kill Simon. That much was clear. That much was obvious. Why he had wanted Simon dead was the unknown.

A thorough search of Shackleford’s person turned up a wad of keys but nothing more; his pockets were otherwise empty, the lint which lined their creases excepted.

Simon put the keys beside the wallet on the coffee table.

‘Why?’ he said again.

He put a plastic grocery bag over the corpse’s head, then wrapped duct tape around the neck, one two three times, taping the bag in place. He tore the tape with his teeth and set the roll aside. If blood continued to ooze from the head it would be contained. Also, Simon did not want to have to look at the corpse’s face and see that mouth hanging open, as if on the verge of speaking. What exactly do you think you’re doing, Simon? Don’t you think you should be calling the police? He did not want to have to see those closed eyelids which looked like they might open at any moment. I can see you, Simon. I know what you did – and I won’t forget. I saw it all and I will tell everybody.

He dragged the body out of the way and laid paper towels over the pool of blood where the head once was. He stood silently and watched the paper towels fade to red. Once he got most of the blood soaked up and the bloody paper towels into a black trash bag, he got on hands and knees with spray cleanser and a scouring sponge and scrubbed away at the red-stained floor. Because the polyurethane finish had been worn off by years of use, blood had gotten into the grain of the wood and Simon couldn’t get it all out, but he scrubbed what he could for several minutes, putting all of his weight into it. Once he’d gotten the floor as clean as it was going to get, he threw the sponge into the trash bag with the paper towels. Then he removed his blood-stained T-shirt and threw that into the bag as well. He tied the top of it closed.

He used a coffee mug to bang a nail into the wall outside his apartment and to the left of his front door. Then he tied one end of a shoelace to the doorknob and the other end to the nail. He’d found the shoelace in a drawer in the kitchen, but had no idea where it had come from. Once it was tied in place he nodded. That, he thought, would keep the door from swinging open when he was out. When he was in, he could prop a chair in front of the door to hold it closed. Tomorrow he would buy a padlock to keep the door shut. He didn’t want Leonard or any of the handymen he hired to come into the apartment, which meant he’d have to fix the door himself.

He looked around to see if he’d drawn anyone’s attention with his late-night noise-making, but the corridor was empty save for him.

He grabbed the trash bag and headed for the stairs.

He parked his car in front of a 7-Eleven, the fluorescent light from inside spilling out through the dirty windows, splashing across the sun-faded asphalt of the parking lot. He stepped out of the car, carrying the trash bag, and with it he walked around to the back of the convenience store where a dumpster sat smelling of rot. He threw the bag into it.

He stood squinting just inside the door for almost a full minute before his eyes adjusted to the bright lights of the convenience store and he could make out the rows of chips and pork rinds and candy bars and magazines, all foiled in bright blue and green and yellow packaging.

Once his eyes adjusted he made his way to the back of the store, where a white freezer with steel doors sat, a picture of a polar bear holding up a bag of ice on its front. He opened one of the two steel doors and looked inside. He counted eighteen seven-pound bags of ice. He thought his bathtub held sixty gallons, which meant there were about a third as many bags as he needed – give or take. The bags were shy of a gallon, and he wasn’t sure exactly how the cubes would pack. About a third of what he needed, minus however many gallons a body took up.

If you rounded down and said a gallon weighed about eight pounds – a gallon of water actually weighed eight-point-three-five pounds – and if you assumed a person weighed about the same – eight pounds per gallon of meat – then Shackleford, if he weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and that seemed about right to Simon, would take up another twenty-two and a half gallons of space himself. So to fill the tub Simon needed another twenty or so bags of ice in addition to what was in this freezer.

‘Is this all the ice you got?’ he asked the man behind the counter.

‘You think I’m holding out on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, that’s where we keep the ice.’

‘It’s where you keep all the ice?’

‘We tried to store extra on the roof, but it kept turning into water.’

After paying for the eighteen bags of ice, Simon loaded the back seat of his car up and headed to another 7-Eleven. There he got another fourteen bags of ice. And at a liquor store near his apartment he got another six bags just to be sure he had enough. Also a bottle of whiskey, since he was out. Then he headed back home.

There was a hole in the grocery bag that he hadn’t seen, and as he was carrying the body to the bathroom – struggling: a hundred and eighty pounds was a lot of weight, and this happened to be a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight – the head rolled right, as if the corpse wanted to see where they were going – watch out you don’t bang my head on the wall, buddy – and the blood which had pooled inside drizzled out and onto the hallway floor.

Simon put the body into the tub and cleaned up the trail of blood. He put the bloody paper towels into his trash can. He thought he should probably get rid of them as he had the others – by dropping them off in some random city dumpster – but it was late, he was tired, and the chances of anyone finding anything were slim. Still, just to be safe, he made sure there was nothing in the trash can with his name on it, a bill or a letter addressed to him. It was clean.

That done, he made several trips up and down the stairs, carrying as much ice as he could in each trip, his arms getting damp and cold, and then numb. He broke open the bags once he got them upstairs, and poured them over the body.

By the time he was done, the ice formed a mound at the top of the tub – like the black dirt on a fresh grave – and only the corpse’s head was visible above it. Or rather, the bloody bag which was taped over the corpse’s head.

He gathered up the empty plastic bags the ice had come in and threw them on top of the bloody paper towels in his trash can.

He changed back into pajamas, poured himself a whiskey, propped a chair in front of his front door to keep it closed for the night, and walked to the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the tub and sipped his drink.

The ice shifted and settled as it melted. Simon jumped at the sound, then laughed at himself for being so skittish. He took another sip of whiskey.

He felt cold inside. He had killed a man, a man who was now lying in his bathtub, and he felt almost nothing. He did not feel a loss. He wondered idly if Shackleford’s mother was still alive, and if she was whether she’d notice his absence – would phone calls go unanswered? He wondered if Shackleford’d had a wife – and if they’d been on good terms. He reached into the ice and grabbed the left hand and pulled it up to look at it. There was a gold band on the third finger. He wondered if Shackleford and his wife had any children. Would Shackleford’s wife look into her son’s green eyes and see her missing husband? Did they sit up in bed at night reading novels by Mickey Spillane or biographies of Audrey Hepburn, their feet touching beneath the blankets and sheets, sharing choice bits of text with one another? He wondered how long they had been married. He wondered if Shackleford ever had cause to remove his wedding band. He wondered what his wife tasted like when they kissed. Was her breath sweet? Did her lipstick taste waxy? He wondered what it felt like to have a wife, what it felt like to lie next to someone every night, to feel that warmth.

But mostly he wondered why this man had broken into his apartment, why this man had wanted him dead. For that was why he had come here. This hadn’t been a burglary. This had been an attempted murder – a premeditated murder: this man lying dead in Simon’s tub had driven here, parked his car, walked up the steps, and broken in through Simon’s front door with it in his mind to kill a man.

Why?

Simon couldn’t understand it. He lived a quiet life. He had never hurt a soul – until now, and this was self-defense. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want him dead. How anyone could be filled with so much rage, and all of it directed at him.

He sipped his whiskey and felt cold inside.

The ice shifted again. A sound came from the grocery bag. Simon reached over and put his drink on the small bathroom counter. He leaned closer to the grocery bag and thought he sensed movement – very slight movement – perhaps caused by shallow breathing. Was Shackleford still alive – unconscious but breathing low? The thought made Simon’s stomach feel sour.

Would he be able to dash out this man’s brains while he lay unconscious in his tub? Would he be able to simply dash out this man’s brains in cold blood, for no other purpose than to have it done? And if he couldn’t, what was he going to do with him? Let him go?

Simon leaned closer, hoping he was mistaken – maybe it was just the sound of the ice shifting again – but he wasn’t. He wasn’t mistaken.

Shackleford’s cold left hand shot up and grabbed a handful of Simon’s gray hair and yanked it hard, slamming Simon’s head against the blue art deco tiles that lined the wall around the tub. The pain was immediate and a star burst exploded in front of his eyes. He slipped off the edge of the tub and thudded to the floor with a clacking of teeth. He heard the ice shifting, felt cubes of it falling out of the tub around him and on him, and then something heavy – something which weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds – was on top of him. It was cold as a corpse, wet, and slippery as a fish.

Simon blinked away the blindness and saw floating above him a white plastic grocery bag. There was a hole in the front of it and it dripped blood onto his face, into his mouth – salty and thick and metallic – and through the hole he could see one pale green eye staring at him, bright and alive and filled with rage and insanity.

He reached behind him for a weapon of some kind – I’m not going to die on the floor in my own bathroom for no reason at all – and knocked over a magazine rack, sending the glossy things sliding across the tiles. The next thing to fall was a toilet plunger, and then a toilet brush. Water spilled out of the cup the brush had been sitting in, stale and reeking.

Simon’s vision was fading and going smeary at the edges and the colors were distorting, becoming bright and strange, everything turning blue and green and grainy as an old film.

And then he felt it.

A porcelain jar out of which a small bamboo plant was growing. It was the only plant in Simon’s apartment, and he took great care to make sure it stayed alive. Filled with water and small stones, the porcelain jar was heavy.

Simon wrapped his hand around it and swung his arm forward like a catapult, smashing the thing into his attacker’s face. A moment later blood came gushing from the hole in the bag and the bag sagged with the weight of what blood could not escape it. Simon wrapped his hands around Shackleford’s throat and squeezed as hard as he could, gritting his teeth, feeling the veins in his temples pulsing, feelings the cords in his neck go taut. His heart was pounding in his chest.

Shackleford went limp, but Simon wasn’t going to fall for it this time. He let the body drop to the cold tile floor and then crawled atop it and continued to throttle the neck. And then he picked up the porcelain jar again – now slick and smeared with blood – and slammed it against Shackleford’s head. It was an easy thing to do when there was no face to look at. He might have been cracking a walnut. He slammed the jar against the head a dozen times, breathing hard. With each hit, what was behind the bag went softer and softer as the bone of the skull broke into smaller and smaller pieces. The porcelain jar finished what the plastic flashlight had begun.

He got to his feet, feeling weak and lightheaded, swaying on his legs like a top-heavy tree in a strong wind. He swung a leg and landed a kick into Shackleford’s ribs, but when he kicked again he lost his footing and fell to the floor, sitting in the stinking water that was running along the grout lines.

He sat there, sprawled out, legs in front of him, hands pressed against the tile behind him, holding him up, and stared a blank moment. His chest hurt from heavy breathing. His throat was sore and bruised and it hurt to pull air through it.

‘Jesus,’ he said, and then looked at Shackleford. ‘You better stay dead this time.’

He crawled toward the bathroom counter, grabbed his whiskey, and downed it in a single draught. It burned going down.

He sat down on the couch with the telephone in his lap. He dialed Dr Zurasky. He hadn’t talked to Zurasky in over a year – since last April or May – but for some reason he was the first person Simon thought to call. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t tell him what had happened. He just wanted someone to talk to. After four rings that someone picked up and said, ‘’Lo?’

‘Dr Zurasky, it’s Simon Johnson.’

‘Who?’

‘Simon Johnson.’

‘I don’t – never mind that. It’s late.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s just—’

‘Is it an emergency?’

‘I don’t—’

‘This is my emergency line. It says so right on my card. Is this an emergency?’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘Are you thinking of harming yourself?’

‘No.’

‘Are you thinking of harming someone else?’

Simon paused. Then: ‘No.’

‘Okay,’ Dr Zurasky said. ‘Call my office tomorrow morning at nine. Tell my assistant Ashley I said to squeeze you into the schedule. What was your name again?’

‘Simon Johnson.’

‘Right.’

The click of a signal being severed.

‘Oh,’ Simon said. ‘Okay.’

He put the phone back into its cradle and set it on the floor. For a moment he thought about calling Robert or Chris, but then decided against it. No good would come of it. He got to his feet and padded to his bedroom.

He awoke with a bit of a hangover. His throat hurt. He stumbled to the bathroom, wetted a washcloth, wiped himself down with it – the bathtub being in use – brushed his teeth, and combed his hair. There were two dark blue-green thumbprint bruises on the front of his neck, and eight barely noticeable fingerprint bruises stitching their way up the back, right into his hairline. He was surprised the bruises weren’t worse. He looked at the corpse in the bathtub. A lot of the ice had melted in the night and gone clear – before, it had been frosty white – and he could now see the body beneath. It was strange, like an insect in amber.

He walked out of the bathroom, down the hall, and into the kitchen.

There was a screwdriver on the kitchen floor, partly hidden beneath the edge of the counter. It was a Phillips head with a black and yellow plastic handle. According to the same handle it was a Stanley screwdriver.

He picked it up and put it into a junk drawer.

He packed his lunch.

He grabbed Shackleford’s wallet and keys and headed out through the front door.

He pushed his way out of the Filboyd Apartments and walked along Wilshire toward his car. As he walked he kicked a pack of Camel Filters – his brand – picked up the box, shook it, found it was empty, and dropped it again. Then he saw the dog just to his left. It was in the gutter, its head resting on the curb, which was smeared with blood. He recognized its chewed-on steak-fat ear. It lay dead behind a black Saab sedan. Its mouth was open, its tongue hanging out. The car was no more than two years old and had blood streaked across its otherwise white rear license plate.

Poor bastard.

Simon briefly considered keying the Saab, scratching something awful into the door, but decided against it.

He continued on to his Volvo.

He sat at his desk and dialed the number.

Ashley picked up on the other end. ‘Dr Zurasky’s office.’

‘Hello. This is Simon Johnson. Dr Zurasky was expecting me to make an appointment for today, and—’

‘He said you’d be calling. Have you seen Dr Zurasky before? He wasn’t—’

‘I’m actually feeling much better today, so I’m just gonna hold off.’

A pause, and then: ‘Okay. I’ll let him know.’

‘Thank you.’

He hung up the telephone.

Then he saw something out of the corner of his eye. He glanced left and there was his boss, Bernard Thames, a pear-shaped man in his fifties with narrow shoulders and a wide middle. Big forehead a beach over which the wave of his bangs splashed, eyebrows like question marks, long and narrow fingers with knuckles like knots, fingernails trimmed so short a couple of them were bloody. He wore gray suits and spoke in an inflectionless monotone. But Simon thought there might have been more to him than was immediately obvious – Mr Thames often wore red socks.

He had no idea how long his boss had been standing there.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘About the Samonek account.’

‘If you mean the discrepancy between the check and the time card for Fran Lewis, it’s the time card that’s in error. I got a last-minute phone call from Sheryl on Wednesday. I must have forgotten to update and initial the time card.’

Mr Thames nodded a quick affirmation, tipping his chin briefly.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That answers that.’

He turned to walk away, managed three steps, and then turned back.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he said, ‘did you call the office a couple nights ago?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, sir. I don’t recall ever having called the office after business hours.’

‘That’s what I thought. Strange.’

‘Someone called?’

‘Someone claiming to be you called and left a message. Apologized for missing so much work, and then asked for his job back. It didn’t make sense.’

‘No, sir. I haven’t missed a day yet.’

‘I know. I checked your file.’

‘Oh.’

‘You have no idea what it might be about?’

‘Not the foggiest.’

Mr Thames nodded and frowned, as if that was what he had expected to hear but had been hoping for more. Then he simply stood and stared for a moment.

‘Is that all?’ Simon asked.

Mr Thames blinked and looked around like he didn’t know how he’d gotten there, smiled a smile that could have meant anything, and said, ‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Okay, sir.’

Mr Thames turned and walked away, each step he took momentarily revealing a thin slice of red sock before the gray pants fell down to cover it again.

When Simon stepped out of the office building and into the noontime sun, Robert and Chris were nowhere to be seen. He figured they’d gotten tired of waiting for him – it had taken longer than usual for the twentieth floor to clear out – and headed to Wally’s without him. They had been doing that more and more frequently.

He lighted a cigarette and started his walk toward Broadway.

When he arrived at the diner, he found both of his friends at a booth against the back wall. They were sitting next to one another.

The diner walls were thin wood paneling and the tables which littered the room were white with specks of blue and scratched and stained as well. The chairs were a mishmash, some metal, some wood, some plastic, no two alike. The diner had a ‘B’ rating – maybe cockroaches had been found in the kitchen, or the refrigeration system wasn’t quite up to code – and in a fit of humor someone had spray-painted a graffito on the glass window in which the ‘B’ was posted to make it the beginning of a claim of quality.

it said. Simon could neither confirm nor deny the claim, since he’d never ordered a meal here.

He walked across the scarred vinyl floor to the booth where Robert and Chris were sitting.

‘Hey, Simon,’ Chris said.

‘Hey.’

‘How you doing?’ Robert said.

Simon sat down across from them, shrugged.

‘I’m good. Did you guys order already?’

‘Yeah, it’s on the way,’ Chris said. ‘Did you watch that UFO special last night?’

‘What UFO special?’

‘The one about UFOs.’

‘No,’ Simon said. ‘I had company. Was it any good?’

‘Was it any good? Are you fucking kidding me? It was about UFOs. Of course it was good. Those fuckers’ll get you, man. I told you to watch it. I can’t believe you forgot.’

‘You never mentioned it.’

‘When we talked on the phone the other night. Man, you got a memory like a cheesecloth.’

‘When we talked on the phone the other night?’

‘When you called me.’

‘I didn’t call you.’

‘’Course you called me.’

‘You had company?’ Robert said.

‘Well – not company exactly. Someone broke into my apartment.’

‘Goddamn, man,’ Chris said. ‘I told you you should move outta that dump and into a proper apartment. Were you home?’

‘Yeah,’ Simon said. ‘I was in bed.’

‘Are those bruises on your neck?’ Robert said. ‘What happened?’

‘He broke in through the front door.’

‘After that.’

Simon opened his mouth but nothing came out.

Babette arrived carrying a brown tray and gnawing on her gum like a horse on cud. She put chipped white plates with sandwiches and fries in front of Robert and Chris, and then put Simon’s 7-Up on the table in front of him.

‘Hi, Simon,’ she said, smiling.

Babette was almost pretty. She was in her mid-thirties, and her face was a smooth oval framed by boyishly short brunette hair. Her lips were thick and red and looked very soft. She had a large backside and a narrow waist, where her body bent forward like an elbow, maybe from the weight of her breasts, which were sizable. Somehow, she reminded Simon of a rather sexy ostrich.

‘Hi, Babette,’ he said, smiling back. ‘I like your lipstick.’

‘Aw, you’re too sweet. Thank you.’

‘Sure.’

Then she pivoted on a dirty white sneaker and bounced away like a beach ball.

Simon took the paper off the top of his straw and drew in a swallow of 7-Up. There was something black floating on the surface of the liquid. Simon thought it was a piece of ground pepper. He dipped a finger in, got whatever it was on the tip of it, and then wiped it off on his pants. If he didn’t like Babette he might complain. But he did like her.

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

and the piece continued

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.

What’s your name? Simon wondered.

The woman muted the television and looked around.

‘Jeremy?’

Had he said it aloud? He didn’t think he had. She couldn’t have heard him.

Maybe he had.

‘You’re going crazy, Samantha,’ she said to herself. She turned the television’s volume back on, watched the news for a moment or two longer, and then set the remote back down on the arm of the couch and walked away. She disappeared into a hallway.

Her name was Samantha.

Simon wondered what it was like to live with her. He wondered what it would be like to look into the eyes of a woman like that and have her tell you she loves you; he wondered what it would be like to tell her you love her, too.

He pushed open the closet door and stepped out into the living room. He closed the closet door behind him.

He walked softly across the hardwood floor and once he’d nearly reached the hallway he stopped. He leaned forward and looked around the corner. At the end of the hallway was an open door, and on the other side was Samantha. She was sitting on a toilet, her skirt bunched up around her waist and panties stretched like a rubber band between her knees. She was reading a magazine with an actress on its glossy cover.

‘Samantha,’ he said in a low whisper. ‘Your name is Samantha.’

He walked to the front door, grabbed the doorknob. He turned it carefully and pulled the door open – pausing momentarily when it squeaked, glancing back over his shoulder, seeing nothing, and continuing – and then he stepped out into the early-evening sunlight.

He walked toward the street, looking around, feeling paranoia flowing cold through his veins, throbbing at his temples like a headache.

Samantha’s car was in the driveway now, parked on the right side, a dark blue Mercedes, perhaps the same year as Simon’s Volvo, but in much better shape, paint new, well-oiled leather interior uncracked by the sun.

He walked past it, reached the street, slid onto his torn-up driver’s seat, and tried to slam the door shut behind him, but it banged against the metal seatbelt clip and bounced open again. He grabbed the clip and pulled the belt over his chest and waist and latched it, then tried the door a second time. This time it stayed closed. He started his car, turned it around, and drove down the street the same way he had come.

The two blonde girls in the flower-print dresses with red ribbons in their hair were still in their yard. Simon glanced at them as he drove, and though he might have been mistaken, he would’ve sworn they were taking turns poking a dead cat with a stick.

He pushed through the smudged glass doors and into the lobby of the Filboyd Apartments carrying a plastic bag from the hardware store he’d stopped at on the way home. He headed up the dark stairwell toward his apartment, smelling stale urine as he went. At the top of the stairs, he saw his landlord hadn’t yet gotten someone to clean up the graffito painted there.

it still said, somewhat impatiently.

When he turned left at the head of the stairs, he saw Robert standing in the corridor by his front door. His arms were crossed and he was leaning against the wall.

Simon’s stomach clenched as if squeezed by a fist. Why was he here?

After a moment: ‘Hi.’

‘I got a flat tire. Hoping to use your phone.’

‘Flat tire?’

‘Yeah, over on Normandie.’

‘Normandie? Don’t you live off Western?’

‘You can’t choose where to get a flat.’

‘You don’t have a cell phone?’

Although Simon himself didn’t have one, it seemed odd to him; everybody had a cell phone these days.

‘I do,’ Robert said, pulling it from his pocket and holding it up, ‘but I dropped it in the toilet at work when I was pulling up my pants. Fried it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is it a problem?’

Simon tried to smile but it felt like a grimace. All he could think of was the corpse in his bathtub.

‘Of course not,’ he said.

He walked to the front door and unhooked the shoelace from the nail in the wall. The front door swung open on its own. It occurred to him now how dumb it had been to leave his apartment unsecured like that. He should have done something to keep the apartment closed off this morning. Well, what was done was done. There was no point in worrying over—

‘Come on in.’

They stepped over the splinters of wood still on the floor.

Simon pushed the door shut behind them, and then shoved the back of a chair under the doorknob to keep it closed.

‘Go ahead and call whoever you need to. Want a drink?’

‘Sure.’

Simon nodded, then headed into the kitchen.

The two men sat on the couch with their whiskeys. Someone from the auto club would be arriving within thirty minutes. Simon watched Francine pull fish food from the neuston at the water’s surface and into her black mouth. He wanted Robert out of his apartment.

He had done Robert a favor a few months ago, a big one – it was how they’d become friends – but it wasn’t the kind of favor that would allow Simon to show the man the corpse in his tub. Robert might have been beaten to a pulp and/or spent a few months in a Tijuana jail cell without Simon’s help – but months were not years.

He wanted Robert out of his apartment.

Robert took a swallow of his whiskey.

‘You never said what happened last night.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. It was all he could think to say.

‘So?’

‘It’s not even worth discussing, really.’

‘What else are we gonna talk about? Politics?’ He said this last word with disgust.

Simon exhaled in a sigh, took a sip of his whiskey.

‘This guy broke into my apartment. I heard the noise and came out to the living room. I’d been in bed. He was digging through my record collection. I have a lot of old records. Maybe he followed me home from the record shop on La Brea on Saturday. I don’t know. Anyways, when he saw me, he attacked. I fought back, but… he must have brained me or something.’ He shook his head to demonstrate his confusion. ‘When I woke up he was gone.’

Robert looked at the record collection.

‘It doesn’t look like he took anything.’

‘He must have panicked after the confrontation.’

‘Maybe,’ Robert said.

Simon reached into the inside pocket of his corduroy sport coat and pulled out his Camel Filters and his Zippo lighter. He lighted a cigarette. Usually he didn’t smoke inside. He hated the stale smell of cigarettes lingering in a room. Usually he climbed through the bathroom window and smoked on his fire escape if he didn’t want to trudge all the way downstairs. But he was nervous and he needed to be doing something, and the bathroom was not available. He inhaled deeply.

‘You all right?’ Robert asked.

Simon glanced at him. Was there a look of suspicion in Robert’s eyes? Simon thought perhaps there was. Something about the way his eyebrows were cocked, the way his head was tilted, like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

‘Yeah,’ Simon said. ‘I guess I’m more upset by the break-in than I realized.’

Robert nodded. Then he drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass, set it on the coffee table, and got to his feet. He twisted his neck around, sending out several pops from between the vertebrae.

‘I’m gonna take a leak.’

He started for the bathroom.

‘No, wait!’

Robert paused at the head of the hallway.

‘What?’

‘The toilet’s broken. It doesn’t flush.’

‘It’s probably just the chain. I’ll reach into the tank and pull the stopper manually. If I can fix it, I will.’

Then he continued down the hallway.

Simon got to his feet. He took two steps toward the hallway and then stopped. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t attack his friend. He could, but that might be as bad as him finding the body. No, it wouldn’t. He had to stop him from going into the bathroom.

‘Robert, no,’ he said as he rushed into the hallway. ‘It’s not the—’

But it was too late.

‘What the fuck?’ Robert said from the bathroom.

Simon stopped mid-stride. He looked at Robert, who was standing in the open doorway, facing the bathtub.

He pulled a lungful from his cigarette. He swallowed.

‘Robert,’ he said.

Robert looked at him.

‘What the fuck?’

‘What?’ he said, as he walked into the bathroom.

‘There’s a fucking dead guy in your bathtub, man.’

‘I know – I put him there.’

‘Why?’ Robert said.

‘He broke into my apartment.’

‘I don’t care if he raped your goldfish. You don’t store a corpse in your apartment. You have to call the police.’

Simon felt as if someone was slowly drilling a wood screw into his forehead, just above his left eye, and his left eye was leaking water as a result of this. It ran down his cheek and he wiped it away with the back of one hand.

‘You have to call the police,’ Robert said again.

Simon took off his glasses, pulled his shirts out of his waistband, used the T-shirt to wipe off the lenses, wiped at his eye again, and replaced the glasses.

‘I can’t,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t call the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s a dead guy in my bathtub, Robert. A dead guy who’s been on ice for almost a full day. The police won’t just let that go.’

‘Well, why the fuck did you put him on ice?’

‘I didn’t want to call the police. I wanted to buy myself some time.’

‘For what?’

Simon closed his eyes, head throbbing. He let out a sigh and tried to ignore what his mind was telling him was the easiest way to solve this problem – which was to kill Robert. Robert was his friend, his only close friend – as close a friend as he’d ever had, anyway – and he couldn’t just kill him. He couldn’t simply steal forty or fifty years of breath from him because he had become a problem, especially since it was Simon’s own fault. He could have found a reason to keep Robert out. And yet a disturbing voice in his head – the voice that narrated his low life – kept insisting that murder was the simple solution: Just kill him, Simon. You’ve already killed once. It wasn’t so bad, was it? You didn’t even lose an entire night’s sleep. So do it. Do it and get it done with. Sure, it’s your fault. You fucked up. So fix your mistake. You pay or Robert does. Kill him. Kill him and be done with it. It’ll only take a few minutes and then it’ll be over.

Simon opened his eyes.

‘What?’ he said.

‘You needed to buy time for what?’

‘He broke into my apartment to kill me,’ he said. ‘I need to find out why.’

‘You said yourself he attacked you because you caught him going through your record collection.’

‘Well, I didn’t catch him doing anything. He broke in and he tried to murder me and that’s all he tried to do. I need to know why. And look.’

Simon reached down and started pulling the duct tape away from the corpse’s neck.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Robert said. ‘I don’t want to see this.’

‘Just hold on. Maybe it’ll help you understand.’

‘I already understand. You killed a man and now—’

Simon pulled the plastic bag away and Robert went silent. Blood dripped from the bag, and Simon thought of times he had purchased a hamburger and the packaging had leaked.

‘Jesus,’ Robert said. ‘You didn’t say—’ He put his hand over his open mouth. ‘I – who is he?’

‘Jeremy Shackleford. He taught math at the Pasadena College of the Arts.’

‘Why did he break into your place?’

‘I told you,’ Simon said. ‘To kill me. He broke in because he wanted me dead.’

‘Why?’

Simon shook his head.

‘I don’t know.’

He reached down and put the bag back over the corpse’s head.

Both men simply stood silent for a long moment.

Finally, Robert said, ‘I’ve – I’ve seen him before.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know,’ Robert said. ‘Monday maybe. Is today Thursday?’

‘I don’t know. What happened?’

‘Remember when I told you a guy accosted me on the street?’

Simon nodded. He remembered. Robert had even mentioned that the guy looked a bit like him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that till now.

‘This is him. I was walking to that liquor store on Fourth Street to get a pack of smokes and he grabbed me by the shirt and slammed me against a wall and asked me if I was the one who took it.’

‘Took what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him I didn’t.’

‘What are you gonna do now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘Now that you know, I was – I was hoping you could help me figure that out.’

Robert was shaking his head before Simon even got the sentence out.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No way. I don’t – I never. No. No.’

Simon and Robert had been sitting on the couch, but now Robert got to his feet.

‘I’m gonna wait for the auto club outside.’

‘You don’t want another drink?’

Robert shook his head.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ Robert said. ‘I’m – ’ he licked his lips and swallowed – ‘yeah, I’m okay. I have to drive. I’m gonna go.’

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.

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.

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.