Low Life

EPILOGUE

He walked over to Captain Bligh’s, ordered himself two Bounty Burgers, a whiskey, and two beers. He drank the first beer as soon as it arrived.

The place was dark and there was no one in the booth adjacent to his, so there was no one but the waitress to see his bruised and battered face, and he thought it’d been a long time since she’d last given a shit.

He sat and listened to the newsheads drone on the television above the bar and the chatter of old-timers on padded stools before it.

When his food arrived he ate it noisily, in great bites which he washed down with his second beer. He managed one and a half of the burgers before he was done. He leaned back, grabbed his whiskey, and downed it.

He slept in the apartment that night, and he slept soundly. There were no dreams. There was only darkness.

The next morning he got up and took a shower and put on a clean T-shirt and a pair of checkered pants. He put on the corduroy coat. He combed his hair. He ate breakfast at the Denny’s on Wilshire and Vermont, and then got into his Saab and drove toward Pasadena.

Samantha was sitting in the living room drinking coffee when he walked in. She was wearing a pair of sweat pants and a T-shirt. Her face had no make-up on it. She looked beautiful.

‘I came to say goodbye,’ he said.

‘What – what’s happened to you?’

He scratched his cheek.

‘I came to say goodbye,’ he said again. ‘And to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I’ve done.’

He waited for twenty minutes at the police station before he was put into a room with a detective who was wearing snakeskin boots and pinky rings. The detective remembered him.

It was a great relief to be there. He had so many things to confess.

They put him in a cell. It was a small room with a single cot, a seatless toilet, and a sink. The bars had been painted white, but where hundreds of hands had gripped them the paint had been worn away, revealing dark metal. There were no windows. He sat silently and read the graffiti on the walls. Everything meant exactly what it appeared to mean.

The lights went out at ten o’clock.

To the darkness he spoke his final confession – his own name – but it only echoed back at him, so he did not speak it again.

Though he could not see it, he knew that outside and over him stretched the vast darkness of the universe. The faint light of distant stars and planets. The thin sliver of the fish-hook moon.

He closed his eyes.

He wanted to speak God’s name, but did not know what it was.