So the performance is done, and everyone has given their hugs, their thanks, their tears. The auditorium begins to empty. The guards are friendly as they usher the audience out the door, and I watch them all like one might watch an anthill or the draining of a bath full of water. I am empty. I drain as the people flow out of the room, approaching complete emptiness of thought. I register movement but no movers. The people are vertical lines, multicolored hairs, backs, and bottoms, each dressed differently, being sucked by the door to the other side. Very soon they will be gone.
I am exhausted. I could fall asleep on my stool, but suddenly I snap awake. My attention focuses on the final person leaving the hall, who has stopped. A disturbance in the landscape. He turns and reveals his face. A middle-aged man with glasses, perfectly normal, or so you might suppose if you saw him on the street walking with everyone else. Suit jacket on top, relaxed jeans below, slender, obviously in good shape. Maybe he’s a marathoner, since something in him seems tenacious that way. There is determination in his movements, with a dash of compulsion, which is needed to carry out the plan he has been nursing for so many years in his mind.
He has the wiry stride of a long-distance runner, but now he isn’t in his own element, out in the fresh air. The hall stinks of a mass ecstasy whose causes he can only understand one way. In front of the crammed door, he makes a small, restless turn and finally lifts his eyes to me. I see in his gaze that he is looking at Satan himself.
He has hung behind to the last in order to ensure being noticed, so I will see his significant gaze, which is meant only for me. Then he slips out the door. In that very moment I realize I am in great danger. He isn’t working alone! There are several of them here. A moment ago I had seen that same look in the queue that formed in front of me. I remember a young man whose body language was similar, made tense by a stubborn vehemence; behind him walked a young woman, and I remember her too. They came together. Neither of them cried. Neither of them looked for comfort in my eyes. Their eyes were full of something they had brought into the auditorium themselves and which they took with them when they left. And I thought they were upset! How blind a person can be. They were full of hate and nothing else.
The young woman wordlessly slipped a piece of paper into my hand, and I placed it on the stool under my rear end to wait. More people were coming, and I tried to brighten my face for each of them, to be unique for each of them for one moment.
Once the marathoner is gone, I pick up the scrap of paper and unfold it. BITCH YOU’RE AN INSTRUMENT OF SATAN YOU OUGHT TO DIE!!! The message is written in block capitals with a black marker, and after it are three exclamation points: a vertical line and a dot, a vertical line and a dot, a vertical line and a dot. Any less would not have been sufficient. Sensible, vigorous Katie McKeen comes from behind the curtain now. She just waves when I show her the paper. “It’s a wonder there weren’t more of those crazies this time,” she says. She just wants to get me to the ambulance. “You aren’t going to die in my arms,” she adds. I love her black humor.
Katie drapes a caftan over me and hands me my favorite slippers, these silly fuzzy ones. From one side of the stage we can walk downstairs to the basement, to a cluttered dressing-slash-storage room, and from there outside. I can walk under my own power, supported by Katie. I’m at my thinnest point and the uttermost limit of my strength, and that was exactly how it was supposed to be.
Katie forces me to sit in a wheelchair, which had been left in the corridor for this very moment. I can’t be allowed to walk another foot so I won’t needlessly lose any energy. We start moving. Katie pushes me, occasionally reaching ahead to open a door with an electronic key, which she has on loan from the museum caretaker. This is surprisingly laborious: there are a lot of doors, at least six, and we are deep in the bowels of the museum. The corridor is only a little wider than the wheelchair, so Katie has to stand on her tiptoes and suck in her belly to reach over the chair and open the door; she’s a bit plump, and her belly is large. The doors have no mechanism to keep them open, so they start closing as soon as she lets go of them. So Katie uses her rear end to hold the door open and pulls me by the leg to get the chair through. When I cautiously suggest that I might walk myself, she snorts, wipes her brow, and says, “Sit down, Shlomith.”
God I miss her . . .
Then something happens that neither of us expected. One of the doors refuses to open. Katie presses the keycard in its leather cover against the reader over and over again, and the green light flashes. She pushes the door and jerks the handle, but the door doesn’t budge. Is this a technical glitch or sabotage? It’s as if something heavy is in front of the door on the other side. Katie lets out a groan and curses. She tries to call the caretaker, but she doesn’t have any bars in the basement. “Shlomith,” she says with false vivacity
