Going downstairs to the newspaper vending machine I buy today’s Los Angeles Times. A girl who shot up a schoolyard of children “because she didn’t like Mondays” is pleading guilty. She will soon get probation. She took a gun and shot schoolchildren because, in effect, she had nothing else to do. Well, today is Monday; she is in court on a Monday, the day she hates. Is there no limit to madness? I wonder about myself. First of all, I doubt if my apartment is worth $52,000. I am staying because I am both afraid to move — afraid of something new, of change — and because I am lazy. No, that isn’t it. I like this building and I live near friends and near stores that mean something to me. I’ve been here three and a half years. It is a good, solid building with security gates and deadbolt locks. I have two cats and they like the closed patio; they can go outside and be safe from dogs. Probably I am thought of as the Cat Man. So everyone has moved out, but the Lysol Lady and the Cat Man stay on.
What bothers me is that I know that the only thing separating me from the Lysol Lady, who is crazy, is the money in my savings account. Money is the official seal of sanity. The Lysol Lady, perhaps, is afraid to move. She is like me. She just wants to stay where she has stayed for several years, doing what she’s been doing. She uses the laundry machines a lot, washing and spin-drying her clothes again and again. This is where I encounter her: I am coming into the laundry room and she is there at the machines to be sure no one steals her laundry. Why won’t she look at you? Keeping her face turned away. . . what purpose is served? I sense hate. She hates every other human being. But now consider her situation: Those she hates are going to close in on her. What fear she must feel! She gazes about in her apartment waiting for the knock on the door; she watches the clock and understands!
To the north of us, in Los Angeles, the conversion of rental units to condominiums has been effectively blocked by the city council. Those who rent won out. This is a great victory but it does not help the Lysol Lady. This is Orange County. Money rules. The very poor live to the east of me: the Mexicans in their barrio. Sometimes when our security gates open to admit cars the Chicano women run in with baskets of dirty laundry; they want to use our machines, having none of their own. The people who lived here in the building resented this. When you have even a little money — money enough to live in a modern, full-security, all-electric building — you resent a great deal.
Well, I have to find out if the Lysol Lady has been evicted yet. There is no way to tell by looking at her window; the drapes are always shut. So I go downstairs to the sales office to see Al. However, Al is not there; the office is locked. Then I remember that Al flew to Sacramento on the weekend to get some crucial legal papers that the state lost. He hasn’t returned. If the Lysol Lady wasn’t crazy I could knock on her door and talk to her; I could find out that way. But this is precisely the focus of the tragedy; any knock will frighten her. This is her condition. This is the illness itself. So I stand by the fountain that the developers have constructed, and I admire the planter boxes of flowers that they have had brought in … they have really made the building look good. It formerly looked like a prison. Now it has become a garden. The developers put a great deal of money into painting and landscaping and in fact rebuilding the whole entrance. Water and flowers and French doors . . . and the Lysol Lady silent in her apartment waiting for the knock.
Perhaps I could tape a note to the Lysol Lady’s door. It could read:
MADAM, I AM SYMPATHETIC TO YOUR POSITION AND
WOULD LIKE TO ASSIST YOU. IF YOU WISH ME TO
ASSIST YOU, I LIVE UPSTAIRS IN APARTMENT C-1.
How would I sign it? Fellow loony, maybe. Fellow loony with $52,000 who is legally here whereas you are, in the eyes of the law, a squatter. As of midnight last night. Although the day before it was as much your apartment as mine is mine.
I go back upstairs to my apartment with the idea of writing a letter to the woman I once loved and last night dreamed about. All sorts of phrases pass through my mind. I will re-create the vanished relationship with one letter. Such is the power of my words.
What crap. She is gone forever. I don’t even have her current address. Laboriously, I could track her down through mutual friends, and then say what?
MY DARLING, I HAVE FINALLY COME TO MY SENSES.
I REALIZE THE FULL EXTENT OF MY INDEBTEDNESS
TO YOU. CONSIDERING THE SHORT TIME WE WERE
TOGETHER YOU DID MORE FOR ME THAN ANYONE ELSE
IN MY LIFE. IT IS EVIDENT TO ME THAT I HAVE
MADE A DISASTROUS ERROR. COULD WE HAVE DINNER
TOGETHER?
As I repeat this hyperbole in my mind the thought comes to me that it would be horrible but funny if I wrote that letter and then by mistake or design taped it to the Lysol Lady’s door. How would she react? Jesus Christ! It would kill her or cure her! Meanwhile I could write my departed loved one, die feme Geliebte, as follows:
MADAM, YOU ARE TOTALLY NUTS. EVERYONE WITHIN
MILES IS AWARE OF IT. YOUR PROBLEM IS OF YOUR
OWN MAKING. SHIP UP, SHAPE UP, GET YOUR ACT
TOGETHER, BORROW SOME MONEY, HIRE A BETTER
LAWYER, BUY A GUN, SHOOT UP A SCHOOLYARD. IF
I CAN ASSIST YOU, I LIVE IN APARTMENT C-1.
Maybe the plight of the Lysol Lady is funny and I am too depressed by the coming of autumn to realize it. Maybe there will be some good mail today; after all, yesterday was a mail holiday. I will get two days of mail today. That will cheer me up. What in fact is going on is that I am feeling sorry for myself; today is Monday and, like the girl in court pleading guilty, I hate Mondays.
Brenda Spenser pleaded guilty to the charge of shooting eleven people, two of whom died. She is seventeen years old, small and very pretty, like one of those she shot. The thought enters my mind that perhaps the Lysol Lady has a gun in her apartment, a thought that should have come to me a long time ago. Perhaps South Orange Investments thought of it. Perhaps this is why Al Newcum’s office is locked up today; he is not in Sacramento but in hiding. Although, of course, he could be hiding in Sacramento, accomplishing two things at once.
An excellent therapist I once knew made the point that in almost all cases of criminal psychotic acting-out there was an easier alternative that the disturbed person overlooked. Brenda Spenser, for instance, could have walked to the local supermarket and bought a carton of chocolate milk instead of shooting eleven people, most of them children. The psychotic person actually chooses the more difficult path; he forces his way uphill. It is not true that he takes the line of least resistance, but he thinks that he does. There, precisely, lies his error. The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw.
Sitting in isolation and silence in her antiseptic apartment, waiting for the inexorable knock on the door, the Lysol Lady had contrived to put herself in the most difficult circumstances possible. What was easy was made hard. What was hard was transmuted, finally, into the impossible, and there the psychotic lifestyle ends, when the impossible closes in and there are no options at all, even difficult ones. That is the rest of the definition of psychosis: At the end there lies a dead end. And, at that point, the psychotic person freezes. If you have ever seen it happen — well, it is an amazing sight. The person congeals like a motor that has seized. It occurs suddenly. One moment the person is in motion — the pistons are going up and down frantically — and then it’s an inert block. That is because the path has run out for that person, the path he probably got on to years before. It is kinetic death. “Place there is none,” St. Augustine wrote. “We go backward and forward, and there is no place.” And then the cessation comes and there is only place.