‘Take one of those fancy libraries, the ones with the rolling ladder for reaching high shelves. Then, take out all the books and all the warm lighting. The shelves are now washers and dryers. The lighting is buzzing and sterile. The fireplace is a decrepit coin machine and the air is crowded with detergent and half-concealed sweat. That’s ‘The Nation’s Largest Coin Laundry’ for you- nothing at all like a fancy library except for those rolling ladders which, in the chemical atmosphere of ‘The Laundry,’ seems more hazard than luxury.
There’s a lot hazardous about ‘The Laundry,’ actually. It’s been the cause of several fires, both internally due to shorting machines and externally due to its tendency to emit smoldering balls of lint from long-neglected exhausts. People have fallen from the ladders onto the tile floors and there has been at least one recorded case of a customer slipping in blood from a fall and falling themselves. Then, of course, there’s the shocks. ‘The Laundry’ has so many dryers churning so many tons of clothes that a deadly electrostatic phenomenon tends to build in odd places and stop the hearts of unlucky patrons who happen to press the wrong vending machine button or brush their hand against a bolt in the plastic-seated waiting area. It seems like the sort of place that should have been shut down years ago.
An even stranger secondary phenomenon keeps ‘The Laundry’ alive: it’s a place where things come together. Much has been hypothesized about the effects of ‘The Laundry’s’ latent electrical fields on the human brain- that they act as some sort of neurological boost. Just as much has been written about ‘The Laundry’ as an archetype- something that triggers human behavior from the shadowy back brain, either because laundromats have long been portrayed as liminal enough to stir wisdom, or because ‘The Laundry’ has been granting quiet revelations for so long that the idea has worked its way from the individual subconscious to the collective.’
So, I have a sort-of affair at ‘The Laundry.’ Sort-of in the sense that I know it won’t last on the outside. Maybe that’s the nature of affairs. I don’t know. I’ve never had one before.
So I have this sort-of affair in ‘The Laundry,’ sleeping on piles of warm clothes and wandering the complex without any goal but to see the thing and to hold another person’s hand. We get lost and find our way back and get lost again. A laundromat brings people together, whether they want it to or not.
After a while, though, the detergent starts to irritate Hector’s nose and I start to think about how Autumn by the Wayside has an epilogue, already- that no amount of stalling will keep me from it. The book seems to grow in the middle but it has an ending. There’s no point in drawing things out.
So, the affair ends and I find myself back in the autumn cold, kicking gravel across the parking lot and slowly ruining my sneakers. ‘The Laundry’ belches fire in the dark. It radiates heat and humidity to such an extent that the ecosystem is changed for a mile around it. Hector and I camp in that weird nature and hurry away in the morning before anything can wake up before us.
-traveler
