The morons were spilling garbage on the church steps. They were proud. The wild ones, the wild morons. The mild ones. Roy called himself and his friend Joe the mild ones. Elizabeth laughed silently.
She was capable of doing it, she could murder them. She didn’t care. In prison she’d laugh maniacally, she’d sing, she’d write her jail notes, she’d take care of birds, she’d become famous for her legal acumen, she’d find a calling, she’d discover the nobility of suffering. She’d destroy herself meticulously.
The morons were proud of how they destroyed things. Things are easily destroyed. Elizabeth was proud of her restraint. She didn’t climb out the window and run down the fire escape, holding her robe so her nakedness wouldn’t be exposed, fly onto the street, arms flailing, and strangle them or stab them repeatedly, leaving a multitude of gashes. They wouldn’t know what hit them.
She might lose her mind, lose herself, just long enough to be declared legally incompetent, temporarily insane, and do it.
Judge, your honor, I found myself standing on the street in my robe and my hands were around his neck. Their necks. I had a knife in my hand. I don’t know who put it there. I was surrounded by dead people. They were everywhere. Blood was everywhere. It was awful. I don’t know what happened. There was so much noise and then I saw red. I suppose it was blood. And everything went black. I fainted dead away.
She probably wouldn’t say fainted dead away.
The fantasy contented her for a vacant minute. It became the content of her life. Her fantasies were tacky home movies, not features. At the movies she wasn’t in her own world, she was in another world that was hers for the time of the movie. Ninety minutes, two hours, three hours. In her own movie house, she was wrapped up, projecting, and it might just be a few seconds. A few seconds devours a lifetime.
Time was getting later or earlier. Elizabeth had spots in front of her eyes. The clock rested on a black metal stool. It turned time out and over. Like garbage. Elizabeth — the Lizard, to Roy — stared at its eternally dumb face. She watched the little hand spit its way forward. The hands of time jerked on. How much time would it take to murder the morons. She clenched her hands. They weren’t big enough to strangle anyone big.
A couple strolled on the other side of the street. They were holding hands, their arms and bodies entangled, octopus like, they were devouring each other. Then they saw the garbage. They moved away fast into the middle of the empty street. They kissed there. There were no cars around. Just garbage. And rats. The lovers didn’t care about the rats underground or behind the garbage cans, their homes uprooted. Love lets you forget rats. She wondered which of them would be disappointed first. Which of the lovers. The disappointment of rats was beyond her.
When she and Roy were new, sometimes she waited for him to come home. She’d stare at the clock’s face, expecting it to talk. The hands ticked, Where is he? Then he’d show up, tock, tick, drunk, impish, surly, or tired. She’d be angry, ragged, or relieved. With time passing, that didn’t happen anymore. She didn’t worry when he came in. She trusted Roy. He had no reason to hurt her. Not that you had to have a reason to hurt somebody.
Roy was sleeping.
He was inexplicable. They loved each other, whatever that was. Sometimes they hated each other. They had love scenes and hate scenes. They interested each other over time. He wished Elizabeth cooked, but she didn’t.
Lights turned on across the street. Third floor. A man leaned out. T-shirt, no shorts, no pants. Hard to tell. He was half a body. He stared down at the garbage and then across and up. He looked her way, like TV screens registering each other. Elizabeth moved away, to the side of the window, so that she couldn’t be seen, only in profile, if at all. She couldn’t really tell if he was looking at her. If he was, she couldn’t tell if his look was complicitous, a garbage-thrower-watching look, or hostile, lascivious, or sinister. She couldn’t tell if he was a danger to her or the community. At a distance it’s hard to tell who’s an enemy. She wouldn’t be able to identify him in a lineup. The distance was too great. His face was mushy, blurred. She couldn’t make him, she’d tell the cop who was encouraging her to nail the guy. She couldn’t say, Yes, that’s him, instead she’d have to say, I can’t make a positive identification. The cop would be pissed and tell the other officers out of earshot, except she’d hear, She couldn’t ID the guy. Scared.
The man in the third-floor window turned his light off.
Elizabeth didn’t know if he was a potential enemy. She had some enemies. A couple had been friends of hers. It’s hard to make a positive ID even when you’re up close. Her best friend had been the worst. Her mother hated Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a threat. She remembered that and her friend’s big, placid, lying eyes, her laugh, and that her friend hated to vomit. Now, whenever Elizabeth thought about her, she thought about vomit. Another friend schemed behind her back. Elizabeth found out. The friend manipulated everyone. She had no friends. She didn’t know that.
A few enemies were strays, accidental acquaintances. Accidents are sometimes dressed up as people. She’d had sex with some accidents. Accidents were always waiting to happen. Maybe she’d looked at someone funny once. Maybe she’d sided with someone in an unimportant bar argument and another person she hadn’t even noticed became enraged. This person was plotting against her secretly. She had a few secret enemies.
A couple of her enemies were blatant. They were disappointed, dangerously overweight men. She worked with them one week on, one week off, in the proofroom. She read proof with them. It was an outdated occupation. The two fat men taught her not to sympathize automatically with unhappy people. The emotionally crippled and downtrodden can be vicious. She worked with a lot of miserable people. There were many miserable people in the company, misery wants company. Proofreading didn’t make her miserable. She liked focusing on typos and misspellings, on periods, commas, quotation marks, neutral characters in her life.
Five out of ten working days she rolled out of bed and over to the proofroom and worked late into the night. Ten hours, twelve hours, silver time, golden time, good overtime. The first time she saw the proofroom, she was in the building to take a proofreading test. She’d prepared and memorized the symbols, for delete, add, cap, small cap, wrong font. They were listed in any adequate dictionary.
Elizabeth didn’t know it, but on the way to the test, she passed her future co-workers. They were sitting in a small room, with no door, at a long table, reading aloud to each other. Doing hot reads, she learned after she had the job. When you read silently to yourself, it’s a cold read. It was confusing, six voices going simultaneously, people reading business articles to each other. Others were eating take-out food from different restaurants, but all the restaurants used the same plastic or Styrofoam containers. Some were reading the paper. Some were waiting for copy to come through a slot in the wall.
There’s a field of ostriches. They all have their heads stuck in the ground. Another ostrich comes along. He looks around and says, Hey, where is everybody?
The proofreaders were low down in the company. It was obvious from their exposed quarters. The proofroom was similar to a stall in a barn, there was no privacy. No door, no windows. Company status was exhibited by the size of the office, the number of windows, closeness to the boss, a door that shuts others out. Status used to be access to the telephone, but now even janitors in the company had remotes.
The proofroom had one phone for twelve people. Even though proofreaders might do nothing for hours, might be waiting for the editors to edit, for the writers to finish writing or the fact checkers to check facts, they weren’t supposed to be in touch with the outside world.