Godot and the Stranger

Waiting for Godot is the right image. I am alone in the house for two weeks, with not even a cat, with my mom gone to Denver. I’d like to go see Gwen, but a handyman friend of mom’s will be by, on two unspecified occasions on different days, to finish fixing a hole in the living room ceiling (not as long a story as it sounds), so I cannot leave the house.

Which leaves me free to entertain myself…

… which so far seems to involve using my best foghorn voice to, every now and then, announce to myself at the top of my lungs, making the artwork vibrate on the shelves, “I’m going to watch The Poseidon Adventure Saturday night!!!”

Not even a cat.

I may get some good work done on my class project… if I don’t go completely Catherine Deneuve in all this emptiness…

You know what, zork this, I’m going to go see Gwen around four if I don’t hear anything.

***

I was randomly attacked a few days ago. It was interesting. Mom had wanted someone to go for the drive with her to see The Dark Knight Rises at the Academy Theater, so I went with her, although I’d already seen it. She met her friend Cindy there. I got a beer, they have nice beer there, and I went down to sit in the front row and in the middle, as is my wont. It didn’t seem like the middle seat, since the single aisle was off center so I only had to move to my left two or three seats to reach it, but it was the right place centered in front of the screen.

The movie was nice…

… and then, about halfway through, I heard a motion behind me, and then something hit the right side of my head!

I blinked. The person had thrown something made of plastic at me at point-blank range as he or she had entered the row! Whatever it was had bounced off my head and fallen behind the row of seats. Not accidentally dropped, not with that force. I’d been bombed.

The unknown figure passed behind me and went a little way down past me, and then I heard the figure sit, and saw two shoes cross themselves at leisure atop the back of the front seats.

What do you do?

I watched the movie while I thought about it. Should I jump up angry? Already thinking too much for that. “This is an outrage”? Was there some sort of continuing confrontation going on, that I might now have encouraged by failing to react? Do I get up and go bother the house manager? Do I just keep watching the film?

I just kept watching the film. Amusement and wonder slowly took over. Actual pure motiveless totally random malice, observed in its natural habitat. One rarely see it outside of the internet. When I was walking with my Census bag in 2010 someone did cream me with a half-empty Slushie from a moving car, but even that was some sort of hostility at least aimed at the Census. This was from nowhere. Just to do it.

And I watched the rest of The Dark Knight Rises. I actually enjoyed it, and was able not to be thinking only of what had happened.

When the end credits began I got up, peered quickly behind my seat – the object turned out to be a large crackly plastic bag, as for candy – and walked up to near where my mom and Cindy were sitting. Then I looked back down the walkway. No one getting up and coming up the aisle seemed to be the person who had been sitting in the second row of seats. But I no longer saw anyone down there.

After the aisle had cleared a little, I walked down to the entrance to the second row…

There he was – a little shrunken, wasted figure in green fatigues and secondhand rags, the sort of more-distorted-than-gaunt physique that you see with serious substance addiction, of no great height but looking too small even for that, fast asleep in his seat.

I left him to his sleep and his unfocused spasms of contemptuous rage, and met my mom and Cindy as they got up from their seats.