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glass. They were as visible as on the street. But sometimes, even on the street, they huddled close together like Russians on the steppes and stuck needles into their arms, sheltering each other under blankets or stained coats.
    The crackheads didn’t leave blood in the vestibule. They left plastic vials and sometimes plastic cups of water. They were bloody, though, erratic and hostile. One of them said, when Elizabeth insisted they get off the floor and leave the vestibule, so she could open the door and get inside, one of them said, with deep sarcasm:
    —You’re some human being.
    Elizabeth wanted to strangle the peroxided, stringy-haired creature, with her disastrously thin legs and arms, and a face that betrayed every bad night she’d ever had. Elizabeth wanted to knock her senseless, not that she had any. The peroxided creature might one night come to her senses, she might look in a car’s mirror, twist it to see her ravaged face. Elizabeth couldn’t see what she’d see. People make the best of a bad situation.
    Elizabeth preferred heroin users to crackheads. Everyone did. Crackheads were erratic. Her preference was irrelevant. She would’ve preferred never to work.
    The poor scrambled, adapted, and metamorphosed into their poverty. They grew ugly. The rich grew ugly too. Repellent. They were complacent. Elizabeth hated that complacent, unearned well-being. Complacency was the rich glow on their faces. They believed in their right to their wealth. The glow made them ugly. Poor people never glowed. Ugliness is more than skin deep. They ate up their poverty, the way the rich ate up their plenty. The poor digested meagerness and cramped quarters, and even if some of them were Catholic and preached to about God’s loving the poor more than the rich, they were living in the U.S.A. People lived the lives they deserved.
    Now one of the morons stood up and vomited. He vomited all over the sidewalk. He made gut-wrenching noises to roars of moronic approval. Elizabeth lost her appetite. One of the other morons threw some food at a store window. The drug store windows all displayed Tide and Ajax, which signaled they didn’t sell anything but drugs. Idiots or gringos went in and asked for milk.
    The morons bellowed again and held some kind of vomit-and-garbage-throwing ceremony. Glass broke. Stones and bottles were tossed. They screamed happily, unimportantly. Her mother would say like banshees. Elizabeth wondered what a banshee sounded like.
    The taste of vomit was in her mouth. Vomit was putrid longing backing up.
    She wanted to be able to stop the morons. She couldn’t do everything she wanted.
    He vomited again. He probably liked to vomit.
    She’d been able to stop some girls. She persuaded them to stop blasting music from their car. It was parked under her window. They were doing their laundry across the street. It was a dope Jeep. Elizabeth dressed and walked downstairs. Roy told her not to. She knocked on the Jeep’s half-open window. The driver didn’t hear anything. Elizabeth had to touch her on the shoulder. The driver turned to her.
    —Could you please turn down? My baby can’t sleep, Elizabeth said.
    The girl did instantly, out of a traditional respect for babies and motherhood. Elizabeth walked away, aware of the girls in the Jeep studying her and doubting that she was a mother. They didn’t turn up again.
     
How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
    None of your fucking business.
     
How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
    I don’t know. I left early.
    She could easily pretend to be a mother. She couldn’t see herself going into Paragon Sporting Goods, asking to look at crossbows and arrows. Before she did anything, Elizabeth saw herself doing it. If she was going to walk down the stairs, she saw herself walking down the stairs. She saw herself taking the first step. She prepared herself. Her heel might catch in the hem of her pants, and she’d hurtle