Low Life by Ryan David Jahn Read Free Book Online Page B

he did, Babette smiled at him from where she was standing at the counter. ‘Bye, Simon,’ she said. ‘See you
tomorrow.’
    ‘See you tomorrow, Babette.’
    He grabbed the door handle.
    ‘Oh, wait,’ Babette said.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Do you—’ Babette began, and then took her gum from her mouth, apparently thinking this conversation was too serious for chewing. ‘Do you have a brother?’
    Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’
    ‘Some guy came in here yesterday asking about you and acting really strange.’
    ‘What’d he look like?’
    ‘You. Kinda. That’s why I asked if you had a brother.’
    ‘Yeah – no. I don’t think so. I was adopted.’
    ‘I didn’t know that.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘So you don’t know anything about—’
    Simon shook his head. ‘Nope.’
    ‘Okay,’ she said. She bit her lip and seemed unsure about what to say next. Finally: ‘See you tomorrow.’
    ‘See you tomorrow, Babette.’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘Okay.’
    She put the gum back into her mouth – peeling it off the tip of her finger with her teeth – and turned around to get back to work.
    For the rest of his lunch break Simon sat in his cubicle flipping through a newspaper, glancing at headlines to see if anything struck him as worth reading. But it wasn’t
a headline that caught his eye; it was a photograph. The picture was of an old man with parentheses stacked up on either side of his mouth, with loose skin hanging below his chin despite the fact
that he was thin, with bags under his eyes that could hold a pint apiece. The headline read
    GERMAN DIRECTOR HELMUT MÜLLER KILLED
    and the piece continued
    LOS ANGELES – Controversial German film-maker Helmut Müller, who wrote and directed Nazi propaganda films such as U-Boote westwärts and Kolberg before immigrating to the United States and making such anti-war classics as The Last Coffin and Gunmen Die Too, was found dead outside his Koreatown apartment early yesterday
     evening, the apparent victim of a mugging. He was ninety-seven years old.
    Müller, who hadn’t directed a film since the 1966 box-office and critical failure Hell’s Mouth, had condemned film as being ‘inherently incapable of purity or honesty.
     He asserted that the ‘dream of an artist is always pure’, in an essay for the now-defunct Los Angeles Free Press, ‘but we contaminate it with our mental illnesses in
     the act of creation. I do not agree with Freud. I do not believe dreams are evidence of anything; only how we corrupt our dreams when trying to realize them is evidence. The difficulty lies in
     telling where the dream ends and the corruption begins. Dreams come to us fully formed, as gifts from the gods, and we destroy them. It is best to leave them in the ether where they can remain
     holy.’ He gave up film-making for good in 1970, after over twenty-seven years and twenty-two films, opting instead to open a restaurant in Sherman Oaks. ‘Feeding people,’ he
     said at the time, ‘is at least honest work.’ The restaurant closed in 1982, and Müller had since been in retirement.
    The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had planned on honoring the film-maker with a lifetime achievement award in 2002, but plans were dropped when his previously buried past as a
     Nazi propagandist was brought to the public eye by protesters. When asked for his response to the Academy’s dropped plans to honor him, he said, ‘I would not honor me. What I have
     done is unforgivable. I have spent the last fifty-seven years trying to redeem myself. But I do not believe that I have, or that I will before I retire from this earth. But it is a relief that
     it is out. It was a terrible secret to keep.’
    In 2005 Mr Müller spoke at the Los Angeles Film Academy about ‘the importance of telling truth to power, whatever the consequences’, but noted that this advice was
     ‘coming from the lips of a famous coward. I was worse than silent. I let oppressors and murderers speak through