But at least my video, the one I’ve been waiting for—where Helen gives her soliloquy, the one where she says yes, the cosmos appears fixed but she can reverse it—is about to play.
And then just like that, my laptop screen freezes, goes black. Dead. A battery icon appears and then fades.
I picture the power cord, coiled in the black satchel sitting on top of my desk, the cord gray and worn like the snipped hair of a Fury. I contemplate the socket in the wall that is absurdly low to the floor, behind my desk. I picture getting up and hunting for the power cord, then bending down and plugging it into the socket.
I lie there. I stare at the dead laptop screen smudged by my own fingerprints.
Snow from the open window I cannot close because I cannot bend keeps falling on my face. I let it fall. I close my eyes. I smoke. I’ve learned to smoke with my eyes closed, that’s something.
I feel the wind on my face. I think: I’m dying. Death at thirty-seven.
The fat man on the chair whose leg is crushing my foot raises his glass to me. Drinking sherry, it looks like. Cheers, says his face. He is pleased. He settles deeper in. Returns to his newspaper.
I shake my head in protest. No, I whisper to the fat man, to the back of my eyelids. I want my life back. I want my life back.
“Miranda, hello? Miranda?”
A soft knock on the half-open door. And then that voice again from which I instantly recoil. The fires rise, the fists clench, the fat man looks up from his newspaper. I can hear the new age chimes in that voice twinkling. It is the voice of false comfort, affected concern, deep strategy, it is a voice I often hear in my nightmares. It is the voice of Fauve. Self-appointed musical director. Adjunct. Mine enemy.
“Miranda?” says the voice.
I don’t answer.
I feel her consider this. Perhaps she can see my feet poking out from behind the desk.
“Miranda, is that you?” she tries again.
I remain silent. So I am hiding. So what?
At last I hear her retreat. Soft footsteps pattering down the hall, away from my door. I breathe a sigh of relief.
Then another voice follows. Decisive. Brisk. But there is love in there somewhere, or so I tell myself.
“Miranda?”
“Yes?”
Grace. My colleague. My assistant director. My… I hesitate to say friend these days. Both of us the only faculty left in the once flourishing, now decrepit Theater Studies program. Both of us forced to be the bitches of the English department. All of our courses cross-listed. Offering only a minor now. Grace and I share this pain; except, of course, Grace has tenure. As an assistant professor, four years into the job, I am more precariously employed.
“Where are you?” she asks me now.
“Just here,” I say.
I feel her suddenly see me. Firm footsteps approaching. Timberlands, even though we are nowhere near mountains. She’s wearing a hunting vest too, I’m certain. Camouflage, possibly flotational. Grace is always dressed like she is about to shoot prey with a sharp eye and a clear conscience. Or else hike a long and perilously ascending trail. And on this journey, her foot will not stumble, though the terrain will be uneven, treacherous. She will whistle to herself. Her footfall will frighten all predators in the dark woods. Her footfall is the sure stride of health coming my way, and I feel my soul cower slightly at the sound. I keep my eyes closed. I will her away. Can I will her away?
No.
Her boot tips rest at my head, stopping just short of my temple. She could raise her boot and stomp on my face if she wanted to. Probably a small part of her does. Because that’s what you do with the weak, and Grace comes from Puritan stock, a witch-burning ancestry. Women who never get colds. Women who carry on. Women with thick thighs who do not understand the snivelers, the wafflers, people who burn sage. I picture those women in my daymares, the great-great-great-grandmothers of Grace, standing on Plymouth Rock or else a loveless field, donning potato-sack dresses patterned with small faded flowers, holding pitchforks perhaps, their bark-colored hair tied in buns, loose tendrils blowing in an end-of-the-world wind, which they alone will survive.
Now I feel Grace’s small bright eyes assess the situation as surely as I feel her glowing with actual health beside me, a health that is unbronzered, unblushed. Grace does not ask what I am doing lying here with snow on my face beside a dead laptop. This is not the first time she has encountered me in a strange configuration on the floor. Nor does she comment on the absolutely prohibited cigarette.
Instead she walks over to the window. Begins to close it.
“Unless you wanted it open?” she asks, but it isn’t really a question.