ntonio is the first to make it to the cafeteria to ask if everything’s okay. His crossed eyes pose the question to both Elisa and Zelda, but Zelda knows full well she’s the one who has to answer. All this time and the crew hasn’t bothered to learn so much as the sign-language alphabet. Zelda’s tired of it. She doesn’t want to be in charge here, or at home, or anywhere. It’s too hard. Look at her hands—they’re shaking. She conceals it by turning to face the Automat, scanning the geometric sandwiches and gamy fruit like it’s just another three-in-the-morning dinnertime.

Duane arrives next, toothless as a newt and just as squeaky. Yolanda makes up for their timidity, cycloning in and honking on about how it sounded like someone was shooting up the joint, she can’t work like this, she has half a mind to blah, blah, blah. Zelda lets her eyesight blur until she can only make out the Automat’s nickel-operated compartments, each one an itsy-bitsy Alice in Wonderland doorway. If she could become small, she might crawl through one and get the heck out of here.

Instead, she’s trapped to relive F-1’s gory eruption in her mind, over and over. She tries to generate sympathy for Mr. Strickland. The next time he visited a men’s room, would he even be able to undo his zipper? This stab at sympathy is like trying to chop ice with her hand. There’s no way that man couldn’t guess how it might feel for a black woman to be cornered by a white man with a cattle prod. She looks up and notices Lucille; her albino coloring cloaks her against the cafeteria wall.

“Look, even Lucille’s upset,” Yolanda cries. “¿Qué pasa?”

Zelda turns around. She’s been avoiding it. She doesn’t want to look at Elisa right now. She loves the skinny little lady so much, yet can’t shake the certainty that this is her fault. She’s the one who insisted they follow the questionable QCC directive to enter F-1, which grounded them on Strickland’s bad side, and Zelda can’t help but think Elisa purposely lingered outside F-1 tonight, which put them in the worst spot imaginable when the gunfire began.

Elisa wilts in her chair, like Zelda is stomping her chest. Zelda feels terrible, then tells herself to quit feeling terrible. Elisa’s a good person, but she’ll never get it. How could she? Things go wrong at Occam, and it won’t be the white woman who gets blamed. Hell, Elisa goes around pocketing loose change from labs like it’s nothing. What if it’s a trap? Elisa would never even think of such a thing. What if a scientist left it there to test the night janitors, and when it vanishes, and Fleming is told, guess whose neck is on the butcher block?

Elisa lives in a world of her own devising. That’s obvious from the shoes. Zelda imagines Elisa’s perception as one of those dioramas she saw in a museum, perfect little realms, breakable but not if you walk softly. This is not Zelda’s world. She can’t turn on a TV without seeing black people marching, stabbing signs into the anger-stirred air. Brewster sees footage like that, he changes the channel, and Zelda, in her heart, is grateful, even if it’s spineless. Anything racial goes down anywhere in the USA, and the looks she gets at the punch clock the next day are murder. All over the country, men like David Fleming are looking for reasons to fire women like Zelda Fuller.

What other work could she do? She’s lived in Old West Baltimore since birth, and the row houses haven’t improved much since then. Today, the neighborhood is more crowded, more segregated. Zelda gets the concepts of blockbusting and white flight, but doesn’t give a damn. She dreams of the suburbs. She can taste the air, like pine and marmalade, feel it flushing Occam’s toxins from her body. She won’t be working at Occam when she lives out there—it’s too far away. She’ll be running her own cleaning business. She’s told Elisa about it a hundred times, how she’ll bring Elisa with her, hire other smart ladies, pay them square like no man would. She’s waiting for Elisa to take it seriously. She never does, and it’s hard to blame her. How would Zelda make enough dough with Brewster only working at whim? What bank would cosign a business loan for a black woman?

Zelda imagines the cafeteria is a white man’s paradise of horseplay and joviality during the day, but at night it’s as bare and clangorous as a cave. Footsteps resound down an adjacent hall, coming closer. It’s Fleming, every last one of his promotions evident in his unfaltering stride. Zelda looks at Elisa, her best friend, her potential ruiner, and feels her dreams of getting out of Old West Baltimore, and out of Occam, start to drip down like blood off the prongs of Strickland’s cattle prod.