Last week Mr. Evans did some laundry, passed on the two-ply toilet paper, and opened the lid on someone else's laundry.

She is panicked, at first, yelling at me, as he does, to get away from her laundry, trailing a concerned employee behind her. At first, panic, and that panic, when the realization that I am not going to steal her clothes, that what she is panicked about will not in fact happen, causes it to give way, gives way to anger.

I, of course, am forced to defend myself, although not really, now that I think about it in retrospect. She is poor and black and a woman and although I am fairly poor, I am white and a man and highly educated and responsible basically to no one but myself and therefore have great unrealized economic potential, and to that extent, the judgment -- the larger judgment -- has already been passed. But in the moment, I am put upon, one person has accused me of offending against her, and not thinking beyond the engaging of our two faces, the presence of my own presence in the anger in her eyes or something like that, I am not forced, I suppose, but compelled to defend myself; or perhaps I must defend myself because, if we are to believe Melville in Billy Budd or Blanchot in what he will later say about Billy Budd, in the moment of the accusation, there is only to speak -- in self-defense, I assume -- or to kill. Speak or kill, and I was not going to kill this woman. All things being equal, I think I would have considered it -- her anger was so ugly, and her poverty, insofar as it was greater than my poverty, was ugly, too, distasteful, impalatable -- but all things were not equal. I do not want to become a criminal. I do not want to go to jail. I do not want to have the death of some person who, during her life, I did not even know, weighing on my conscience which, as it does on the surface of the French language itself, seems awfully stubborn about the way it insists upon accompanying my consciousness. Defense is explanation. My bathmat was there first, I tell her, but this requires further explanation, for she counters my claim with her claim -- a legitimate claim -- that she put her laundry in the machine five minutes ago. Now I need to explain why the two are not exclusive: I put my bathmat in the machine over an hour ago. It was just sitting in there, taking up the machine, when she came and, I would assume, not realizing that my bathmat was in there but noticing that the machine was not in use, put her clothes in on top of it and started the machine, thus undertaking, unwittingly, to re-wash my bathmat with her clothes.

"My son's clothes," she specificies, and although I have no precise recollection of at what point she informed me of this, I am absolutely certain that at some point, and somehow, I come to know that her son's name is Anthony.

I let it rest there, for a moment, teetering: Anthony.

Of course, I'm right. My bathmat was in there already when she put her clothes into the machine. And she knows I'm right. Of course I'm right. That explains it. And it's so obvious.

But -- a single but before we proceed:

Now that I think about it, it really isn't until now, until I have explained what has happened, that the accusation occurs. Before that there is something more of a reacting, and then, after that, an establishing of terms. There is a man standing over my laundry, peering into the machine that is holding my laundry, my clothes -- or, in this case, my son's clothes -- and in which those clothes are being washed, the machine by way of which I am caring for those clothes, the asset that I have brought here for which to care. What is he doing? This is the question and the possibilities are established. What can a man peering into the laundry machine in which your clothes are washing possibly be doing? What can he be up to? Nothing good, I suppose, and more than likely something bad. Is he doing something to your clothes or is he stealing your clothes?

Tonight, Sunday night, at the Laundromat near Pico and La Brea, I am that man.

And she approaches with a sense of possibility. The terms have been reversed. She has caught me.

No, it is only after I have explained -- and she has struggled once to understand the simple mechanics of it and, then, I have explained again, this time more slowly and deliberately, using my hands to map out for her in the air between us how it might have happened -- that the real accusation arrives, the accusation that is not a question, not a what are you doing, but an accusation proper, an extended index finger, that kind of indication.

"You," she says to me. "You're a liar."

I try to put her off: "I'm not mad at you," I tell her. "I'm just telling you what happened."

And only now, after I have demonstrated to her that she was not catching me up to anything, only after I have showed her that I do not want her clothes, that I have no interest in taking those clothes, that those clothes are of no interest to me, is there accusation, and only now, where there is real accusation, the extended finger, accusation proper, is there real anger. The old anger was a kind of performed anger and one performed, I will argue now, with a kind of joy or pleasure: to catch me trying to take her clothes. The real anger, and the accusation it accompanies, arrives only after I have demonstrated for her that I am not trying to take her clothes, only after it has been established indubitably that I am not nor was I trying to take her clothes. I insist because there is nothing else for me to do. "Mine was already in there," I tell her, and by now we are attracting attention: we are causing a scene.

She is shouting but not just shouting into a distance between us, now, as she had been walking across the Laundromat to intervene. Now she is shouting into my presence before her. We are two faces separated by a nominal distance, and it is into that lack of separation that she is shouting.

"You," she says to me, and I cannot help but think of this you, although indeed it arrived or exited her mouth embedded within a larger sentence, as standing on its own, not simply separate from the accusation itself but also, in a sense, the very body of the accusation itself. The rest, the "you're a liar," is just gravy, dressing, whatever you want to call it. The accusation itself, the real accusation, the accusation proper, the body of that accusation, is only the one pronoun that names at once absolute presence and absolute otherness: you.

You cannot escape it.

In the Laundromat, the scene becomes contentious. There is a racial element, yes. There is an economic element, of course, which is the same as the racial element but not quite. I am fairly poor, it's true -- poor enough that I have to increase my poverty by wasting time and money at the Laundromat -- but at the same time, being white and male and without wife or child and highly educated and from a family of schoolteachers that, as such, associates toward upper middle class even if we aren't quite there economically, my condition of poverty is contingent. Again: I am like Husserl. I have put a more economically comfortable existence in suspension.

Until?

Until I feel like it. Until never. Even if I never actually become more economically comfortable, this economically uncomfortable existence of mine is still contingent, suspended, not real.

Hers, I will suggest, is real. I cannot corroborate this hypothesis but the anecdotal evidence -- black, bad teeth, with son, doing her laundry in a Laundromat in a lower income area of Los Angeles -- suggests it. I am suggesting that the real anger was not in encountering me trying to steal her clothes, but in encountering me as I really was, not trying to steal her clothes. Despite myself, I had a made a fool of her, and if, on its face, the accusation -- you're a liar -- seems ridiculous, since obviously I wasn't a liar, looked at more closely it presents itself as absolutely necessary. Did she have any choice, in that moment -- that moment of nudity before me -- to accuse.

Of what?

Of stealing her clothes? Of lying? It doesn't matter. Just to accuse. Just: you.

Of course I didn't want the clothes. Not her clothes and not her son's clothes. She is poor. Her son is poor. I am poor, too, but my poverty is a much more generous economic negotiation. I have traded poverty for loft living and books -- those I have read as well as those I have written -- whereas -- and I am only guessing, here -- she has traded her poverty for nothing. For existence. For living. For doing banal things. Having a place to live. Having groceries. There is no glory in that. I have expensive clothes. I didn't pay for most of them. I got my Diesel jeans from a roommate who used to work for Diesel. My sunglasses as a gift from my sister. My shoes with a student loan. The gold comes from dead relatives. It's different. I drove up to the Laundromat in a recent-model Volvo station wagon, and never mind the various processes of sympathy and charity that led to my possession of it. I didn't really even have to say that I wasn't trying to steal her clothes. All I had to do was stand straight and look at her, and in that moment, I would like to suggest, there was nothing for her to do but to accuse, and, in particular, to accuse ridiculously and frivolously.

"You," she says, and we are in the present tense again. "You're a liar."

Her teeth. Her eyes. But I'm not Alice. I have not come to the Laundromat tonight for the seduction.

The accusation is ugly. I cannot explain what it is like to be accused. Nobody can. The only accusation is the accusation of not simply that which you did not do, but that which you could not possibly have done, that of which it is simply ridiculous to accuse you, for that is the accusation to which there is no response, really, just paralysis.

Or, as Melville suggested in Billy Budd and Blanchot suggested reading Billy Budd, that is the moment in which there are only two choices: to speak or to kill.

I would not kill.

Tonight, if we are to render it in the present tense, I will not kill. It is not to be.

"I'm not lying," I tell her, speaking.

"You are," she says. "You're lying."

"I'm not."

The repetition.

She has pulled my bathmat out of the soupy swill of soapy water and filth.

Then it drops like an apple -- like something suspended that falls, but not something light like a leaf: "I don't know you," I say to her. "Why would I waste my time lying to you?"

*

And there it is.

I would like, I think, to say that in this moment, in the moment of this speech, she did something violent and severe, like taking my bathmat and throwing it onto the ground, maybe stomping on it once for good measure. She did not. And while I would not say that she put it to the side, on top of another machine, with care, and would also not say that it was careless, either. There was conscience to it. She made some effort to preserve it, and maybe that was when I became angry, as she had been angry, instead of simply defensive. I grabbed it and headed in no particular direction. It was dripping on my pants. Expensive pants. Pants I didn't pay for. Pants that suggest, even as I do my laundry at the Laundromat, wastefully and counter-productively, that I am in a suspended state of poverty, and not real poverty. I will tell this as though it were happening right now: the employee, who has hovered nervously throughout the event, follows me, and not only that but sort of directs me toward a sink at the back of the space where she will help me rinse my bathmat, try to get the soap out of it. She does not speak English but I can talk to her in Spanish, although she seems reluctant to allow me to do so, refusing to respond with more than a single bilingual word.

"I'm not angry," I tell her in Spanish.

"No," she says.

"She tried to tell me that I had put my bathmat on top of her clothes," I tell her. And to an extent, calling me a liar, she was suggesting this, but at the same time I don't think she ever really mean to suggest that I had done this. It would have been too impossibly dumb. The accusation was itself, naked and violent, brutal.

"I wasn't angry," I tell the employee while she rinses my bathmat, not because she owes me any such service but because I am too far away to take care of the banalities and the practicalities, because I am still too deep into the realm of intensity.

"No," she says. "Not at first," I tell her in Spanish.

She nods, shakes her head.

"But," I tell her. "Si me acusa..."

If she accuses me.

I let it hang.

The employee looks at me, now, with sympathy or with understanding or perhaps simply to watch me as I return to myself.

"Si me acusa," I say again, because it feels like a fit.

She looks at me and nods.

And says, finally, something more than no. She says:

"Hay que defender."

It means: you must defend yourself. But it's also a more particular formulation than that. I translate it with the you and the yourself because they are implied, of course, and because in English it would be much more rare to say what she has said in Spanish, something that is not rare or awkward or unlikely at all. Most literally it means: there is to defend.

There is accusation.

And there, where it is, there is also to defend. I leave with the bathmat in a brown paper bag but end up ditching it against the curb outside my building. I could make all kinds of arguments for why, in this condition, it is actually physically, or functionally, ruined, but the truth is that I just don't want it anymore. I could take it back to the Laundromat the next day and wash it again, and this time dry it. I could let it sit in the shower with the water running for thirty minutes. There are plenty of ways to recover the value of the bathmat. It doesn't matter. It has been ruined for me.

Or there is something more to it than that. I am angry and I am stripped bare by the accusation that has been leveled against me. What am I doing when I throw that bathmat away? When I leave it by the curb outside my apartment? I don't need it. It's a problem? Take it. It's garbage. I can buy another one. Five dollars. Ten dollars, maybe. It doesn't matter. In a way, it's the end of the argument, it is the definitive response to the accusation, the response which cannot be responded to with another accusation. She says to me, you're a liar, and I say to her, I can prove to you that I am not a liar, and I prove that I am not lying by throwing the bathmat away, by wasting the value in it. I do not know anything about this woman but I have imposed certain conditions upon her, fit her into certain structures, and we might as well see them through. If she is who I have suggested she is, then she cannot afford to throw her bathmat away. Although she is not there to witness it, although I abandon it half a mile up Pico Boulevard on the curb outside my building, the gesture is offered in her direction, and it is neither to speak nor to kill. It is to waste. To discard. To throw away. It is the third column, to borrow and profane a metaphor from Hemingway himself.

*

Then there is this: "I don't even know you, so why would I waste my time lying to you?" It is only later that I have the opportunity to wonder, why in the name of God would I have said that? Why that? It was a moment of desperation, that's given. It was a moment in the face of the accusation. Say it in French: J'accuse. But why that? I think of some of the bad television talk shows I watched when, as a child, I would from time to time wrangle my way into staying home from school, either because I was sick or because I was simply pretending to be sick and succeeding in convincing my mother of it. That's the famous talk show line. The guests come forth and present themselves as revolting and atrocious human beings. There is, of course, almost always an element of race and class at work. They are black. They are poor. Or they are white. They are almost always poor, and if they are not poor they are deviant, usually sexually so. But they are almost always poor. People who are not poor would not give themselves up for free, even though people who are not poor need the money less. It's like going to the Laundromat. Eventually the time comes for the audience to speak, and eventually, inevitably, from some member of the audience, an accusation is turned against one of the guests. You are disgusting. You are a slut. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should never have done that. It doesn't matter what. The accusation itself is pure and separate. You. And then comes the patented talk show response, one that itself, in all of its comic reproductions, also has something to do with race, is often rendered comically or imitatively with a head bob and some bastardization of a manner of speaking: "You don't know me. You don't know me so you can't judge me."

That's what the guests always, or typically, say, on those television talk shows, in response to the inevitable j'accuse. "You don't know me."

And, curiously enough, that is more or less the formulation that I have employed in the Laundromat, although in my case not in relation to judging but in relation to lying, and in my case not in relation to a judgment rendered of or on me by others but to a lying that I would perform to or toward or for another. But either way, what does knowing or being known have to do with any of it, and beyond that, even if you could somehow do the work to establish that indeed knowing does have something do with it, well then you would be in even more trouble, because how in the world would you know whether or not somebody knows you, or two people know each other, or a person knows another person, or when. Why does the member of the audience at the television talk show not know the guest? Has the guest not spent, I don't know, six or twelve minutes presenting herself, articulating herself, and simply being in this public and performative way? Perhaps six or twelve minutes isn't enough, but if we're going to turn it into quantity, then how long is enough? Is an hour enough? A hundred hours? The logic doesn't hold up. To the extent that we cannot regiment or systematize knowing somebody, it doesn't function as an axis of logic. Does the audience member know the guest? Probably not, but at the same time, the audience member has just as much a right to make that claim of knowing as the wife of her husband, or the mother of her child, for there is no way to measure it. It's a cipher. It's just a way of saying no, and beyond that a no that cannot be contradicted. The guest cannot say yes, I do know you, for indeed the possibility exists that despite the information she has received during the duration of the guest's performance on the television set, she still does not really know that person. And besides, has anyone done the work to prove that this elusive knowing somehow determines the right or the ability to judge? It's possible that we cannot judge another human being without knowing him -- although we may never be able to know whether or not we know him -- but it's equally possible that the two have nothing to do with one another. The supreme illogic of the statement -- you don't know me, you can't judge me -- is precisely its functionality.

But it makes no sense.

Neither does my formulation of it: I don't know you, so why would waste my time lying to you. Why was I so sure that I didn't know her? Or, perhaps I should see it this way: why so insistent, to myself if no one else, that I didn't know her? What was at stake in my not knowing her?

And anyway, what does the first part of that sentence really have to do with the second? What does lying, or wasting time, or both, have to do with anything. In high school I forgot to turn my headlights on pulling out of a grocery store parking lot and right away a little police fellow turned me over. As ridiculous as it was, since obviously he had seen that my headlights weren't on when I pulled out of the parking lot, my impulse -- one which determined my behavior in the first instant -- was to lie.

"They were on," I said when he asked me if I knew I had been driving with my headlights off.

It was a lie. I knew I was lying and he knew I was lying and I knew that he knew I was lying, ad nauseum.

Did I know him?

Maybe I did: He was power.

But I didn't, really. I didn't know that guy from Adam, but I had indeed wasted my time lying to him.

And beyond all of that, what is this about lying and wasting time? Since when did the lie, or the act or action of lying, become a form of wasting time? Time for what? For telling the truth?

I don't know where I came up with this discursive oddity, why it, instead of an apple, fell at that moment of gravitas, but I do know that I would have been more at ease with it, more comfortable in general, if it had proved somehow decisive, or if, more to the point, it had ignited this woman's rage, if, when I made that illogical and contradictory defense -- for what was it, if not a defense -- she had responded by, I don't know, maybe taking that bathmat and throwing it, wet and soapy, onto the dirty floor, maybe taking one good, hard stomp on top of it for good, or bad, measure. But she did not. Instead she put it to the side, on top of one of the $1.00 USD machines to its right, and I don't want to say that she did this carefully, as though it were hers, but in a sense she did it with an awareness that it very well could be hers, making sure not to waste its value which, finally, is exactly what I myself would do, ten minutes later and half a mile up the road.

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