Oddlands Magazine: Laundromat Dreams by Luke Jackson
He watched her work through a filter of steam, her faded green tattoos writhing over thick muscles as she lifted ancient plastic bags, holes spilling loose socks and bloodied thongs. She slid the metal slugs into the slots with reverent concentration, simultaneously sprinkling chymical powders into the grate atop the ancient machine. Murmuring incantations in indecipherable Spanish, she yanked the strings on her short fingers backward, freeing three of the slugs-but one clanged inside the machine, trapped. She cursed and eyed me.”God is not pleased this morn,” Cyndra said, “and decrees that no others shall be cleansed after you.”Her face was that of a man’s,her jaw strong and jutting, and her smile revealed yellow stubs and gaping holes. “You are lucky to have been the last one for her.”
He nodded and sat back on the creaking wooden bench, pulling the scabbard from the roomy confines of his paint-splattered sweatpants and placing it across his lap as a warning to the other milling patrons, who sweated and moaned at the loss of another machine. Nonetheless, after a few minutes he closed his eyes and dozed in the vibrating heat.
He was brought to by a buzzer, the metal creature indicating that its duties were forever complete. The only other remaining patron was a short and hunchbacked hag next to his machine, her artificial black hair done up in the gravity-defying ways of yesteryear. The ornate rainbow dress buttoned to her sagging throat hid her decrepit flesh. He grunted in disgust at her selfish insistence on life and yanked the round glass door of his machine open.
“You almost hit me,” she whined, her magnified eyes blinking up at him through precious ground-glass spectacles.
“I stopped in time,” he said, and began unloading his wardrobe of faded cartoon nightshirts and loose sweatpants.
“That’s not an apology,” the crone complained.
The worst was her sense of entitlement. It was against God.
“It was not,” he acknowledged. “Don’t make trouble in strange places and others won’t make trouble for you.” The visage of the squat yellow god Pokemon peered up at him from a nightshirt and he rubbed it across his sweaty brow for luck.
“I’ve been coming here for well-nigh forty years,” the hag insisted, “and never have I been subject to such disrespect.”
For a moment he felt sorrow for this pathetic creature that did not realize how changed things were.His pity instantly transformed to disgust as the creature slammed her machine shut and began to pick at him with her wizened claws, the crooked hump of her multicolored back bobbing with her struggles. He flinched away from the disease-prone flesh of the elder and looked around the deserted laundromat but could not find Cyndra-probably gone off on yet another quest for slugs and chymical powders.
“Relax,” he grunted as he fought off her claws.
He hoped that his smile was placating, but the shrew easily brought his two wrists together and locked them tight in her right hand. She backhanded him powerfully with her left, and he saw dancing motes of light and felt the bite of her diamond ring on his cheek.
“What kind of witchcraft is this?” he asked her in a daze, but the hag only cackled.
“I’ll teach you to invade my personal space,” she said with a grunt as she hefted his entire body up and onto her camel hump. “Young punks have no respect for their elders any more…”
She yanked the glass portal of her machine open, spilling sudsy water and her archaic, painful-looking undergarments onto the tile floor. He blanched at her sacrilege and feebly cried out for Cyndra. His struggle took on a more urgent aspect as the hag began shoving his entire body into the opened portal.
“I’m sorry, okay?!” he yelled as his head cracked against the far end of the metal drum and the hag forced his kicking feet inside. But then he couldn’t see her magnified eyes through the glass portal any longer, and the drum began to whirl sickeningly and douse him with chymical waters.
‘How can she be so strong?’ he wondered before the spinning drum dropped him on his head.
#
‘Am I dead?’ was his first thought as he thrashed against the metal drum and choked water from his lungs. ‘I can’t be,’ was his second as he threw open the washer’s door and peered around the empty laundromat and its now-still machines.
Cyndra was not there-but she would never leave her precious laundromat to the scavengers of Westside. Where was she? She had been right that God was not pleased-she was enraged. He stumbled from the tub in dripping clothes, grabbed his scabbard, and walked out into the churning purplish sky and red moons of Outside.
Next to the laundromat was a wasted gas station, its machines uprooted and the black tubes of its pumps severed. The rusted hulks of automobiles rested atop each other in precarious towers. There were no Cyndras with the magick needed to resuscitate these long-dead machines.
“Cyndra?” he shouted, his voice muffled in the choking dust.
No answer, but his shout brought stabbing pain to the right side of his skull. He touched it and his hand came away wet and bright red, speckled with carcinogenic jewels of dust. Did he have a concussion?
The land was completely dead and still. There should have been some bustle on the Camino del Bundy thoroughfare. There should be the aluminum shells of Vipers and Vettes, faded paint gleaming under layers of wax in their masters’ vain hope of fighting the dust, pulled slowly down the streets by yoked oxen.
Where were the people? Where were the animals? As if conjured by his thoughts, he made out the speck of a silhouette across Bundy, through the haze of dust on the tarmac of the long-abandoned Aeropuerto de la Santa Monica. The figure held glowing sticks of light upraised towards the lowering clouds, the stance of imminent invocation.
“Hello?!” he shouted across the empty expanse towards the figure. The figures’ arms came slashing down to its sides. Was it some kind of signal? “Hello?” he cried again and began jogging towards the figure on the airstrip.
When he reached the toppled and partially submerged fence of aluminum and barbwire, an explosion of pain sent him reeling to his knees. He batted at the back of his head, and pulled a single blood-stained silver feather through the red haze.
Confused, he reached back to his throbbing head and pulled away wings that batted his face and a sharp beak dribbling his blood and meat. He quickly beat the hawk limp and quiet on the moist stones, then pulled his machete from his scabbard and stabbed it through the torso and deep into the dry earth.
He breathed out deeply before another squawk by his ear sent him scrabbling to extricate his sword. With the first bird still impaled on its shaft, he beat the second bird away from the wound on his head.
He looked up, even though he had been told not to do so since he was a child. The sky was black and shivering with beating wings. With one hand covering his oozing head wound, he slashed the air about him with his machete in the other, and began running towards the faded white tower across the air strip. Its imploded glass windows and lichen-encrusted shaft bespoke the vanity of Babel.
The silhouette tried to hunch out of sight behind its concrete skirting. He reached the stairs of the tower and began pounding upwards, towards its shattered pinnacle. He shook the bird’s carcass from his sword as he ran.
The air was torn with shrieks and caws, blood and feathers, as he slashed the air around him. They were summoned by his wounds, a sign of weakness that must have tempted their appetites across the miles of chymical stink.
The door to the control tower lolled on its hinges. He kicked through its rotted wood and found himself in an empty space, the dust blowing so quickly through the imploded windows that it burned his squinted eyes and cheeks.
The hag was there. She lurched her arms upward, almost toppling from the exertion. As she did, the black cloud of birds rose in a single tumult towards the violet sky, a wave that swept up and scattered into isolated black specks against the red moons.
“There has been a breach in the core server,” she said in a breathless monotone, her lips receding from blackened gums. “Initiating emergency shutdown procedures.”
“What?” he said, catching ancient sanctity in the words but no meaning. This was the most powerful witch he had encountered, far more powerful than Cyndra and her cleansing powers-this one had the power of Air. The power that had brought the darkness.
“Listen, I did not mean to attack you,” he said, but knowing that things had gone too far now. “I just wanted to clean my clothes, and now the world has become empty and void. I just wanted to ask questions…”
The crone swung a stripped electrical cord at him, the pronged end catching him in his wound. He stabbed blindly with his machete through the sparkling motes of wind-blown dust, and its point met with something with the resistance of cardboard and tin.
“I could tell you that this segment of spacetime has succumbed to entropy in a desperately improbable manner,” she said as his machete sank into her flesh. “I could tell you that the strings have become crimped in a way that even we did not foresee, that the particles are spinning improperly…
“But why would I?” she sneered at him as she twitched and oozed a black, tar-like substance. “It would just be more bullshit. You are a stupid young punk who won’t understand, or won’t believe.” She spat feebly at him as she struggled.
He shook her rigidifying body from his shaft, onto the torn carpet of the tower floor. Electricity sparked from her wounds, and the blackened flesh folded back to reveal gleaming metal.
“What in the name of God is wrong with you?” he asked through the shower of sparks.
“Let me tell you a secret,” she whispered as she died. “There is no awakening from this sleep. There is no God.”
#
Then the indigo sky darkened and the winds became stronger, invisible dust slashing against his exposed face and blinding him further, accumulating in a chymical crust over his head wound.
Only the fool stayed Outside when night fell.
He returned to the laundromat. He cleared the chipped tile counters of clothes, then beheaded and defeathered the hawk he had slain. With the ancient and unintelligible periodicals as fuel, he started a fire in the center of the floor and began roasting the bird on the spit of his sword.
The bird’s pale pink flesh warmed into a moist and succulent brown. His mouth watered and his stomach grumbled.
“God provides for those who do her will,” came Cyndra’s voice from the front door. He jerked the cooking fowl behind his back. She would be enraged by his burning of her magazines depicting the adventures of the old gods. “You have passed the first test,” was all she said.
She circled him with beady eyes and a forced smile. The firelight cast the wrinkles about her eyes and mouth into stark relief and glistened off the silver hoops in her ears. Behind him, he felt her stubby fingers grasp his shoulders and begin kneading the muscles of his back. The stabbing pain in his head swallowed all incipient questions. He merely nodded and returned his sword to the flames.
“God tests us, as she tested Job,” Cyndra sighed into his ear. “Only the elect, the chosen, pass.” Her small hand enclosed his and put the roasting bird aside. “Those not worthy are cleansed from the world-thus its emptiness.” She swung her stout hips across his torso. “Doing her work can be lonely,” she breathed as she lifted the hem of her bedspread skirt over her thick torso. Underneath, the hair of her pubis stretched upwards, shrouding the tattooed symbols across her great belly.
“Is this not sin?” he asked as he sprung free from the elastic waistband of his sweatpants.
“Not sin,” as he was engulfed in the folds of her drooping labia. “Reward.”
#
He woke to a thundering staccato of rain across the shingled roof of the laundromat. He extricated himself from Cyndra’s snoring bulk and gazed Outside.
For the first time since he could remember, he was able to make out the glowing sphere of the sun behind the reddened clouds. Great glistening oblongs of water splattered and smeared the windows, rattling them in their bare frames.
The rain was resuscitating the dead earth of Westside. Great green ferns and multicolored flowers the size of automobiles had been born overnight, and vines sent shoots and tendrils hungrily towards the new rain and the returned sun.
Cyndra came to his side as he watched the rebirth of the world. “God is great,” she said in hushed tones. “She has made the world new for us, as foretold in Genesis.”
But chirruping crickets and insects the size of rabbits beat their wings against the windows, as if seeking escape from the Outside. In their desperation, the bugs left yellow innards commingled with the rain, occluding the windows.
“Perhaps there is no place for them in God’s new world,” he said. In God’s wisdom, she had decided to remove Man’s ancient enemies. He took a broom leaning against the counter and went Outside to sweep away their remains.
Outside, the rain beat against him as if to bruise him. Each drop brought searing pain and a long red welt marking its trajectory across his flesh. The crust on his scalp began to sizzle and foam. He dropped the broom, and stumbled back into the safety of the laundromat.
“Can there be no place for us in God’s new world?” he asked Cyndra, shaken. She was silent for a moment.
“It is not for us to know the mind of God,” she said. Her faith was all-encompassing and unshakeable-the fact that God might be trying to kill her had passed as only a mild ripple across her blunt features. “But God helps those who help themselves.
“Our second test is to repair the world. The wizards of old knew that there is no now, but that all of spacetime an immutable block of ice. Now is an illusion concocted by our own imperfect minds, the stuttering flash of our mental bulb that only illuminates the tiniest portion of God’s magnificent creation.”
He shook his head to clear it of the strange and unfamiliar thoughts. “The wizards of old brought the darkness,” he said. “Just like the witch I slew. How can you speak of them? Maybe your magick is bringing the wrath of God upon the world a second time.” He was scared-mostly because, for the first time, he doubted that Cyndra walked with God.
“I know that there is no now,” she said simply. “I have seen more than the now.” Her small, dark eyes took on a distant and unfocused quality. “The greatest challenges to God’s power exist not in the present, but in the past. But first the illuminating machine needs to be broken down,” she said, running her gnarled thumb across the encrusted wound on his scalp. “Only when the projector breaks down and is reconstituted does the entire reel come into view.” She walked across the glowing embers of last night’s fire in her bare feet and threw open the steel and glass door of a washing machine. She fiddled with the dial, selecting DELICATE and COLD WASH. “It is better if she goes gently for you,” she said. Then she gestured him inside.
He suppressed his doubts and crawled into the metal tub for the second time, remembering that women were the true Messengers of God’s will in this world. Only they could translate her divine imperatives into action on the mortal plane.
“In the name of All, in the name of Tide, douse him so that he may live,” Cyndra said as she smeared an oily residue on the glass portal and genuflected, then punched the buttons to begin the spin cycle, bringing the cleansing waters and foam. He thrashed sickeningly in the tub as she muttered the familiar incantations, but the last words he heard before the darkness returned were a solemn chanting: ‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/ Life is but a dream.’
#
He knew that there has been a time before the darkness. He knew this not only in the abstract, from the inferior and degraded remnants of a past world, but on a gut level as well. He knew that man was fallen, with woman as his vague and flickering signposts out of the dungeon of his sin.
The problem was that he remembering nothing about the before time. Something had gone wrong on this second trip. The water he choked from his lungs had a strange technicolor fluorescence. The chymical crust protecting his mind had shattered into shards and crumbs, contaminating Cyndra’s holy water with future time.
The laundromat was cold and dark. He jiggled the glass door but it would not budge. He found a discarded garment, wrapped it around his soaking elbow, and smashed out its panels.
Noise exploded and red lights began to twinkle and flash. Terrified, he struggled through the glass shards, cutting himself. He ran barefoot across the white snow, dribbling crimson behind him. He ran and ran until the siren became a distant background noise.
Outside was transformed. He was surrounded by the terrifying glare of fluorescent lights, as if the entire world were searching for him in the darkness. The sky was full of sparkling lights, as if this world were protected and contained from the carcinogenic jewels that would later descend. A single pockmarked white moon hung in the sky. The time before was returning to his memory now. Great billboards proclaimed the vain glories of the old gods. Neon signs twinkled and beckoned and, when he struggled to comprehend, held out a tantalizing glimmer of meaning. All of this light, only to summon darkness.
From the confusion of lights, two raced at him with a roar and sent him diving into hard and unyielding snow. The automobile bounced up the curb and hit an embankment of ice with a screech of rubber. Its engine died.
A man stepped out of the vehicle. He wore glasses and his greased black hair was parted down the middle. His blue shirt and khaki pants demonstrated the decadence of the past: cleaned, pressed, unstained, with buttons and lapels. His breath came out in gasps of steam.
It was his Father.
“Did I hit you?” Father asked him.
“I’m okay,” he said after a moment, remaining still in the packed snow. The waters of the washing machine had solidified into a crust of ice on him, and he shivered.
“You don’t look okay,” Father said, taking a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and lighting one with jittery hands. He inhaled deeply and let out the steam. “Shit.”
“I’m remembering now,” he told Father. “This is the time when things started to change. Snow in Westside. It had never happened before.” “Damn straight it’s weird,” Father said, “but why you talking in the past tense?” Father crouched by him and eyed the multicolored plume leaking from his head and solidifying in the snow.
“Jesus, your blood’s not red,” Father whispered. “Listen, you’re not going to survive on the streets now. Come on, let’s get you to a hospital.” Father put his arms around him and helped him into the back seat of the gold Volvo that had nearly killed him.
“I remember this car,” he told Father, running his hands along the beige leather of the back seat and warming his hands before the vents.
“Know this model?” Father asked as the engine sputtered and chugged into life. Father cranked the heater’s dial all the way up.
“This is the car I grew up in,” he said.
“Listen, I think you have a head wound,” Father said, his uncertain eyes flickering at him in the rearview mirror. “You also have black fingers and toes from frostbite-Just take it easy, okay?”
He was quiet as Father drove through the well-lit snowy streets of Westside. The streets were largely deserted, with only the occasional car screaming past towards the freeway.
They saw the camps several blocks before they reached the hospital. Tents, cardboard boxes, and makeshift forts thrown up as shelter against the snow, with raging gasoline fires in the metal drums of trashcans. Shrouded and limbless creatures huddled around the fires, seeking warmth, staring at them with empty eyes as they drove past.
The front entrance of the hospital was heavily barricaded and fortified by uniformed National Guard soldiers with machine guns . “You’re not going to get any help here,” Father muttered as he stamped his cigarette out in the car’s ashtray. He kept driving. “What’s your name?” Father asked.
“I… I don’t know,” he said. Had he ever known?
The Volvo pulled up in front of the laundromat, where the siren still blared. The blue letters now made sense to him-COIN WASH-but seemed simple and childish, overly reductive.
“This is not my day,” Father muttered as he unlocked the shattered door and punched a code on the numerical keypad, killing the noise. “At least Cyndra set the alarm this time…”
“You know Cyndra?” he asked Father.
“Of course I do. She works for me. You a customer?”
“No,” he said. He had no memory of Father being such a powerful warlock in the before time, one who could control even Cyndra. “Who would go and do this now?” Father asked, looking at the shattered glass door.
“Sorry Father,” he said.
“I’m not a priest,” Father said, then turned and looked at him closely. “You saying you did this?”
“Yes,” he confessed.
“Okay. You tell me why you did this to my shop,” Father said, quiet and cold now.
“It was the only way to get out,” he said. “I’m really sorry, Father,”
“I told you I’m not a priest,” Father said, “and you’re starting to piss me off. I know you’ve been through a lot, guy, but hey, everyone has been-things are weird enough as it is, without this.” He let the shattered front door swing loose on its hinges.
“I don’t want to live through the darkness again,” he said, beseeching the powers of his Father. “I can’t live through the darkness again. Father, it’s me,” he said, reaching out to Father as Father stepped away from him.
“Crazy homeless fuck,” Father said as he retreated back to the closet room where the gun was. “Should have known better…”
“Please don’t, Father,” he said, grappling Father from behind as Father’s fingers closed around the handle of the .22 Magnum taped under the wooden counter.
“Get off me!” Father yelled, lurching backwards and slamming him against a giant-size dryer. His breath whooshed out, but he managed to get his arms in a full nelson around Father’s neck.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said in Father’s ear.
“Tough shit,” Father grunted as he spun around and tried to slam him against a washing machine. He partially released Father, holding him in a half nelson as he opened the door and dragged them both back into the machine.
There was only one way to show him the truth. To make Father believe.
#
When he came up for the third and final time, his icy fingers gripped only the cold steel of the Magnum’s muzzle. Father was gone.
“Father?” he shouted as he kicked open the machine’s door and dropped the gun. Cyndra sat in a creaking plastic chair by the washing machine, her body engorged and bloated, stretching against the seams of her plain bedspread skirt.
“Your father is not here,” Cyndra said, her hands around her great belly. “He passed long ago, during the darkness.”
“I know,” he said, “but I tried to bring him back.” He choked and spluttered and his eyes burned from more than the suds and soap. “I wanted so much to bring him back-to show him that I am his son, that I was speaking the truth.”
“I know, I know,” Cyndra said, running her hand along his damp and shivering brow. “But we can’t bring them back through the darkness. Not ever.”
“I didn’t kill him?” he asked Cyndra in horror. He began to remember how Father had vanished at the first sign of snow. How they had all thought themselves abandoned, and how difficult the years of darkness had been without Father.He looked down at Cyndra as if seeing her for the first time. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“I am with child,” she said, and heaved herself upwards and took his hand in hers. “Have you forgotten already? Your child.” She brought a thick woolen blanket from the lost-and-found and put it around his shivering shoulders.
“No more snow,” she said as she walked him to the shattered front door still stained with caked black blood. “No more darkness.”
Outside, the sun burned unimpeded throughout the newly blue sky, and the terrible acid rain had stopped. A glorious profusion of green life reached up from the earth, skyscrapers of writhing leaves and blossoms that almost touched the clouds.
How quick he had been to question God’s plan. He came up behind Cyndra and wrapped his arms around her distended belly, and the new life growing within.
“This is our world,” he said softly into her ear.
“You have passed all of the tests,” Cyndra nodded. “You have erased your Father and become God.” He thought he felt movement deep inside of her.
Now there could be no doubt that Cyndra walked with God.
Author Bio:
Luke Jackson’ prior publications include “The Saving Power” in Adbusters #74 and “Reduction Descending” in Electric Velocipede #12.
