Drop dead. Stop it. Drop dead. Stop it. Drop dead, stupid. Doing nothing was her civil right, doing nothing was her civic duty. Nothing is hard to do.
When Westley Dodd was little, he used to sit at his window and stare at the kids in the playground across the street. Dodd began exposing himself at thirteen, then he molested one hundred little boys, then he murdered three, took pictures of them. He confessed everything. He’d never been praised, he’d never been touched, he lived in an emotional desert, an emptiness, no one laid a hand on him for love or hate, and growing up as he watched the kids squealing in the school playground, all he could think about was how he wanted to hurt them. When he was arrested, he said he’d hoped to kill many more boys. He said he didn’t think he had any feelings abour anything.
Elizabeth didn’t have the right profile to be a serial killer, she didn’t have a child to drop out a window, she had a lot of feelings, all her feelings were bad now, she had nothing against Fatboy.
One of the morons leaped on a car and banged it with a quart bottle of beer. The bottle shattered and several windows across the street squealed open. The ancient black woman with a Chihuahua came to her window, she was wheelchairbound, but she had a portable phone. She’d call the cops. They’d get right on it, they’d say, then they’d put the phone down and grin contemptuously at each other in the station house.
Last week an alarm pulsed and throbbed across the street on the top floor of the ancient black woman’s building. A thousand-watt bulb blazed and flashed on and off, while the alarm throbbed and sobbed. Elizabeth phoned.
— There’s something weird going on across the street.
— Yeah, we’ve had calls, we’ll send a car. We’ll get right on it.
For another hour the light flashed and the alarm whined.
Elizabeth phoned again.
— Did you send a car?
— Yeah, we sent a car. We didn’t see nothing.
— The alarm’s still going, and the light’s still flashing.
— We drove past and we didn’t see nothing.
— Did you look up?
They didn’t look up. They didn’t get out of the car. An apartment had been robbed and ransacked, the tenants were away, their alarm went off, the cops didn’t hear it or see it, they didn’t look up. They shouldn’t be cops.
A man’s disgusted. He just wants out. So he decides to go to a local monastery. The head monk says he can enter, except he must agree to take a vow of silence. No one in the monastery is allowed to speak at all, except for two words on New Year’s Day. The man says fine. So he enters, and at the end of his first year, on New Year’s Day, the monk asks him if he has two words he wants to say. The man says, Fruit stinks. Then another year passes, and the monk asks the man if he has two words he wants to say. The man says, Bed hard. After the third year, on New Year’s Day, the monk asks the man, Do you have two words you want to say? The man says, I quit. The monk says, I’m not surprised. All you’ve done since you got here is complain.
A moron bellowed. A crustie turned the volume up on her boombox. Now two were going full blast.
Elizabeth climbed through the window, back into the apartment, and walked to the refrigerator. She took out a full carton of eggs and carried it to the window.
Roy opened his eyes when she was nearly out the window.
— What are you doing?
— Nothing.
— Don’t do it.
— Don’t worry.
She assumed her position and cradled a white egg in her hands.
The man in the third-floor window watched Elizabeth. She was strange tonight, going in and out of the window. He usually turned off his light before he started watching her, the street. He didn’t think she knew he was there generally. Tonight she didn’t look like she cared. He didn’t know her name. Everyone on the block knew who she was because she was friendly. She was the kind of woman who sometimes didn’t close her blinds. Not that she walked around naked. She wasn’t a whore. She lived with a man. He saw the same guy there, not like some of the other women he watched, different men every night, the ten-dollar junkie whores on the block, like Jeanine, giving blow jobs in doorways, disgusting lowlife.
The man in the third-floor window imagined getting a blow job from Jeanine. He got hot, then he got angry. He pictured blowing her away, the disgusting bitch, her mouth to his joint.
A snail was crawling on a man’s newspaper. The man flicked it off and the snail went flying. Five years later, the man’s doorbell rang. He opened it, and the snail said, Hey, what was that all about?
The crusties were jubilant.
The fire escape hurt her ribs. Fatboy plopped himself on her ass. Elizabeth’s view was straight down to the fire escape below, which had a few sorry plants on it and a wet package of Raid Ant Bait. Kills the Queen. Kills the colony. She could set a trap of silent-killer food on the church steps and see the morons eat it and die in agony.
In memoriam forget hope forget hopelessness forget innocence forget guilt forget lies forget truth forget good forget bad forget purity forget corruption forget vice forget virtue this is for you.
Elizabeth angled her head and body. She took a different position and looked around without moving. Her vision, peripheral and otherwise, was one of her best features. Elizabeth relaxed and released the white egg from her hand. A mild, humid breeze carried it. The egg cracked and splattered in the gutter.
Fatboy growled. The morons looked up. Elizabeth kept her head down, giggled, and whispered to Fatboy.
— Somebody’s got to stand up for the character of the girls.
She extended her arm. She dropped another egg from a different side of the fire escape. It popped and cracked on the sidewalk. The yolk and white flowed, and the morons looked nervous. The loudest one looked up in her direction. He didn’t see anything.
The man in the third-floor window was still, like a polluted pond.
The ancient black woman with the chihuahua was anxiously waiting for the cops. She took some notice of the white woman, but not much, it was just more craziness.
Elizabeth didn’t care how she appeared to others. She saw herself.
Yes this is a fatal mistake or maybe just bad judgment it’s no worse than fucking most of the guys I fucked no more stupid than trusting the people I have so it’s really dumb and I’ll be miserable it wasn’t my choice I’m not that free I’ll trade it all in the job the boyfriend the dog the friends the apartment and leave it all behind manacled and shackled by myself and I’ll enter the land of the damned the spoiled and damaged race past everyone who’s never risked anything stupid as this is they’ll catch it later on TV people like disease and failure at a distance if they can watch it on TV it makes them feel safe especially when things are out of control everyone wants control things are going down there’s no way to judge the speed of the fall no one admits the thrill the pleasure of giving up give it up give it up no one confesses to wanting to surrender be an untouchable who slinks along the streets a nobody who wallows in sublime degradation nobody’s a dirty word yes I’m guilty take me away I want to leave the block I’m guilty OK.
When the cops arrived, the crusties would say someone was throwing eggs at them, that’s why they were whooping, hollering, and blasting their boomboxes. They were just reacting, defending themselves against a sick creature sniping at them from an indeterminate fire escape, they were only battling an unseen enemy.
Elizabeth had an irresistible impulse to stand tall on the fire escape and address the block. She’d speak about the need for quiet. Abraham Lincoln spoke from the balcony of Cooper Union which wasn’t far from where she was now. He delivered his second inaugural address after the Civil War ended: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”