loopinfinite

A guy once spent six hours trying to rid his apartment of invisible dirt. The guy’s name was Plato, the apartment’s name was #944, and the invisible dirt had no name.

Every night, a layer of dirt grew out of the carpet and crawled up the walls and furniture of Plato’s apartment. Every morning, when Plato woke up, he felt, rather than saw, that everything he owned was covered by a thin, grimy film. If he waited a week, he knew the the film would become a series of hills. If he waited a month, it would become a vast, craggy mountain range.

Plato didn’t know what would happen if he waited longer than a month, because he’d never done that. Sometimes, though, when popping tabs, he saw terrifying images of himself going to bed and never waking up because the dirt had buried him in his sleep. He swore he’d never let things escalate to that point.

So, if he could, Plato cleaned every day. He vacuumed and lysed and dusted. It was a losing battle, because more and more dirt always grew back, no matter how much he cleaned. Plato had tried to move to get away from the stuff, but the dirt followed him from apartment to apartment. Plato had no idea why it followed him like that. He had no idea where it came from. His father said it came from his imagination; Plato still cleaned every day. Cleaning had become his side job. His main job was different – typical nine-to-five work.

Plato was a scribbler. Freelance, technically, though since his feeder days he’d only worked with one company, Shark Corporation, and he’d only been assigned one territory, the Lightfall network. Plato had been scribbling up and down the Lightfall monostrips for nearly a year now. He made decent money, too, though he spent an awful lot of it. For example, he’d had three telescreens ruined by the crawling dirt already. Telescreens were pricey.

So dirt was Plato’s second job. He was master of the dirt, lord of the dirt, keeper of the dirt. There could have been a documentary about him: “Plato: Dirtologist Extraordinaire.” It could have chronicled his early life, his graduation from feeder school, and his upwardly-mobile, record-breaking career with Shark. Plato had broken scribbling records and tagged more walls in an hour than a team of six could do in the past; he was one of the nation’s top scribblers and word was that they liked him at Shark – word was, the kid was going places.

And yet, the documentary would say, there was a dark side to young Plato, one only those closest to him knew anything about.

Perhaps the narrator would, in a voice both somber and resonant, describe the lengths to which Plato had gone to understand the dirt.

Perhaps he would mention Plato’s attempts to stay up all night, clutching a flashlight, in an attempt to watch the dirt emerge from its daytime hiding place: because he was sure that this was nocturnal dirt. 

“Plato.” his father had said. “Nocturnal dirt?”

Plato collected samples of the dirt as it crawled up out of his carpet. He sealed those samples away in plastic bags and kept records of which bags contained which samples from which dates. He put the bags in his fridge. When the fridge filled up, he bought another fridge.

Plato eventually discovered a whole new species of dirt, a kind that diffused out of his ceiling and dropped down, instead of emerging from the carpet and crawling up. Two sources of dirt meant twice as much of it to deal with. And the idea of the stuff dropping down? Potentially onto him? Plato wasn’t comfortable with that.

He started sleeping with a blanket over his head. He set up jars to catch the samples of this second dirt species. Then he compared them to the original species. He postulated that both types had come from a single dirt-progenitor. He drew sketches of what this dirt-progenitor might have looked like. He taped the sketches to his bedroom wall.

Then Plato’s father died. Plato was unaffected at first. The two of them had never been close. Plato’s father was a monostrip engineer. He had not approved of his son’s job – he had felt scribbling was a blight upon the maglev system. He had not approved of his son’s second job, either – he had felt his son was going a little crazy. And now, of course, he felt nothing.

Plato had no one left to talk to, and while he was okay with this at first, it eventually began to take its toll. He craved human contact, but couldn’t get it. He tried to meet people. It was hard, what with the job he had, but he tried to go out. He went to Mobius. He went to the Monostrip. He went to Shark Attack. He didn’t meet anyone, though – he just embarrassed himself. He started buying pornographic magazines. Guitar Girls and Titillating Tits were favorites.

One Friday, feeling daring, he called a sexconnect listing he found in NexusIndex.

“Uh, hi,” he said. “I – I’d like a sexconnection.” He felt weird saying the words.

“Name and address?” The voice spoke in a disinterested monotone, yet it was also alluring and effeminate.

Plato said his name, and then said his address. The voice said a sexconnection named Kim Lorraine would visit him the next night at ten.

Plato pressed the button behind his ear to end the call but his finger was sweaty and it slipped. He was nervous. He’d have to clean better than he’d ever cleaned before. His place wasn’t presentable. Too much dust. What if Kim Lorraine noticed? No one had been to his apartment in months except his father and his father hadn’t thought much of it. Plato wanted to impress.

So the next day, after Plato woke up, he vacuumed the carpet, washed the dishes, and doused the bathroom tile-grout with ammonia. He slid on his latex gloves, grabbed a can of lysing spray and a synthetic scrubbing cloth, and walked around spraying and wiping down every surface he saw.

Plato was good at spraying, because spraying was his job. Spraying was both of his jobs. He sprayed his bed and sprayed the surrounding area. He sprayed the front door and sprayed the short corridor that joined it to his living room. He sprayed the couch. He sprayed all the corners, all the crannies, all the cracks. Sprayed all the places he’d first sprayed, again. Sprayed the clothes he was wearing.

By then, the spray-can was empty, so he put it and the scrubbing cloth into a trash bag which he tied shut and took down to the complex’s basement, where he threw it into the incinerator.

Then Plato rushed back to his apartment, sat cross-legged on the floor near the door, and waited, trying his best to keep his heart rate down.

When the sexconnect arrived at apartment #944, Plato was sweating more than he’d thought possible. 

“Hello,” Kim said.

Over the past several hours, Plato’s unconscious mind had developed an image of what Kim Lorraine looked like. In this image, Kim was basically a goddess. Now, face to face with the reality, Plato had to admit that she was not a goddess. This did not mean that he wasn’t still attracted to her, because he was, though he wasn’t sure why or how. 

Had he been asked, at this point, exactly what it was about Kim Lorraine that he was most drawn to physically, he would not have been able to give a straight answer. He would have just stammered a lot. He was stammering a lot as it was.

“I’m, uh, Plato,” Plato said.

“Plato,” Kim said. “What’s your last name?”

Plato just stared blankly at her.

“…okay,” Kim said. “Two hours, right?”

“Is two hours enough?”

Kim laughed. “That’s for you to decide.”

“Well, you know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Not many of our customers do.”

They sat down. Plato asked Kim if she’d like anything to drink.

“Water.”

“I have sharkol,” Plato said. “In case you want any sharkol.”

“Water is fine.”

“Right.”

Plato went into the kitchen. When he walked in, he was horrified to discover that the dirt was already growing back. He looked at the ceiling – dirt was raining down. He looked at the floor – dirt was creeping up. What if Kim were to see this?

He walked back out, glass of water in his hand. He gave the glass to Kim. She took it.

Kim said, “you’re not drinking anything yourself?” Plato shook his head. He’d forgotten.

Kim laughed. “You look nervous,” she said. “Relax.”

Plato sure as hell couldn’t relax. Later, when Kim took off her shirt, he was even less able to relax. In fact, at that point, he was thrown into a state of panic. When she wrapped her right arm around his neck and pulled him down onto the floor he was still in a state of panic and when they slipped onto the carpet he had lost it.

“We can’t be here,” he said, sitting up.

“What?” Kim said. “What are you talking about?”

Words gurgled out from between Plato’s lips – words about the dirt and his father, but mostly about the dirt and how it was here, how he and Kim were rolling in it and were stuck in it and would never get away from it. The dirt, Plato explained, had kept coming and was going to keep coming and until then all they could do was fuck.

“You’re sick,” Kim said, and walked out. Plato just sat cross-legged on the floor, muttering to himself.

He sat in the back. His eyes kept closing, and every time they did, he was already downtown. When they opened, he was on the train again. He’d gotten no sleep the night before. He figured he was hallucinating.

He looked down at the bottle he clutched in his hands; 50-proof sharkohol. The SharkCo insignia was clear and bold and it disgusted him. Here he was, twenty years old. Twenty years of life and all he’d done was become a lowlife, an addict, a sharker. Twenty years of life had built up to a train journey downtown to the Intersect, a journey he was taking for reasons he didn’t even understand.

A thought flickered and died in his mind: a sudden, piercing thought that spat and fumed and waggled its finger in his face, and told him, you’re never going to see her again so what the hell are you even doing? He hated the thought and tried to push it away, but he had to admit that it had a point.

The Intersect was a vast place, a towering, glittering sparkle-city of the vacuum-dry future, dry and devoid of vitality, devoid of history, devoid of context. There was no cracked marble; there were no chunks of historical detritus. There were just plastic rafters and steel bars and glass panels. 

He thought about this as he sat in that train car. He thought about the Intersect, that suffocating, slick city full of lights and metal and ugly people and ugly things; the thick gauze of a city that wrapped itself around his brain and clogged his thoughts with gunk.

When his stop came, he got off the train and in doing so had to hand an identification card to a man at the turnstile with a frown on his face. The man took his card and held it up and looked at the name on it and nodded, and then handed it back.

Standing in the train station, he could feel its iciness press against his shoes and creep up his legs. He watched the people all around him, always moving, always anonymous, always terrifying, and thought, god, what am I doing here? Why did I even come here? And then he remembered, yeah, he’d come to the Intersect to see someone who maybe wasn’t even alive anymore.

But the months he’d spent in the chaos pit of his mind had dulled him enough that the incoherency in his life didn’t bother him anymore. If he was going to go on long train journeys for shaky reasons, then so be it.

He found himself staring at a puddle of piss in the corner, and at the adjacent wall, covered with verbal diarrhea, with graffiti, weirdly luminescent in the station’s half-light. He wasn’t sure what to feel.

It’d be nice if I could just disappear at will and reboot my life somewhere else, as somebody else. I mean, what if I could do that, really? Just snap my fingers or something to cause my current life to cease to exist? To scrub the universe clean of any and all evidence that my present incarnation even existed, while also setting me up to be born, again, in a different context?

What if everyone could do it? It’d be a kind of reincarnation-on-demand. There’d be no limit to how many times you could start over – all you’d need would be the desire, and wham, you’d be annihilated and reconstituted just like that.

I wouldn’t let myself age past about seven years. To hell with college and high school and middle school – I’d let myself get up to maybe second grade before restarting. That way I’d never have to deal with any of the messy, horrible stuff that comes with getting older. I’d be an eternal child but wouldn’t even be aware of it, because my memory would erase itself every time I decided to restart the cycle.

The only information that would carry on from incarnation to incarnation would be the abstract knowledge that at any given time I could stop everything; the abstract knowledge that I would always have a convenient, magic trapdoor, ready whenever I wanted it.

A knock at the door in the middle of the night woke my father up. He went to see who it was. It was her family. They had come to hang out with my family. We all sat down in the living room and watched a crazy fucking game show on television, one in which people killed each other in violent ways for fun and profit. The contestants climbed a giant DNA molecule. Whoever reached the twenty-first cytosine residue first would be the winner. 

The show’s host was a demon who dressed all in yellow. His face was red and pointed. He was too enthusiastic about everything and he gave me the creeps. Every few minutes he said, “and now a word from our sponsors” and there was a commercial break. All the commercials were the same commercial: a brash, obnoxious ad for a new Gillette razor with seventy blades.

Her mother was a catlike woman with sharp features, and she never smiled. Her father was a burly asshole. He was a producer. He had greenlighted the game show we were watching. It was making him millions of dollars. He was very proud of this.

The couple had two daughters. The older one was boring and she sat in the corner reading Nabokov and sighing loudly every time she turned a page. The younger one was electrically gorgeous. I looked at her and suddenly realized that I could see in her eyes that she hated this game show we were watching. She didn’t want to be there. I can’t remember her name, but it was something pretty and lilting, much like her face.

When no one was paying attention, I confronted The Lilting One and told her, you don’t want to be here, do you? You hate this show. She said, you’re rude, fuck off.

I said, you can talk to me, you know. It’s okay. And she didn’t do it at first but then she did. She told me that the game show scared her and her family scared her and so many things scared her (but mostly the game show). I said, look, it’s like that for me, too. She said, let’s go somewhere to talk, can’t we go somewhere to talk? I said, yes, why don’t we? That was exactly what I was thinking, actually. How about the corner Starbucks? The one they built last night? Let me just grab my car keys.

I peeked out the window. Outside, it looked like the LCD screen of a malfunctioning digital camera. We lived in an ugly city where everything was a shade of brown, but where the streetlights buzzed with an unreal yellow intensity. I told her we’d get into my car and drive to Starbucks. I told her it would be a beautiful thing. Then she grabbed my hand and said in this amazingly playful, flirty kind of way that she did not in fact want to go to Starbucks after all; she wanted us to drive down the freeway under the stars for thirty minutes until we found an out-of-the way dive bar in the middle of nowhere. She wanted us to go in there, talk in there, because that would be “so” “much” “more meaningful.” 

I said, you know what? That sounds great. Realizing I had found true love, I grabbed the car keys from my bedroom. It took several minutes of searching, but I found them. Then I decided I’d better tell my mother that I was going to disappear for a minute, or forever, but I ended up horribly caught in a web of family bullshit.

On the game show, contestants were crawling from one side of an arena to the other. The girl’s producer father, an immensely muscular man who ironically happened to be in a wheelchair (he had contracted polio just two hours before), had one leg stretched way, way out, encased in a cast-like apparatus (he had broken his leg ten years ago). He said, “hey, I can do that too. I can do it too. I’ve done it before.” My parents made me stay and watch him. It was immensely boring and I kept thinking about the beautiful lilting girl. Her mother was nowhere to be seen; she and the father had been fighting and they had gotten a divorce just thirty minutes before.

When I finally escaped the living room and went to the entrance hall with the keys, The Lilting One was there and there were tears in her eyes and she said, “we’re leaving, you know – my mother is taking us and leaving. We’re going to live on Mars. We’re going to live there forever.” The mother already had her older sibling by the hand and was dragging her and her Nabokov novel out the door.

I said, “no, you can’t leave,” and she said, “I’m sorry, but we’re leaving,” and I said, “no, no” but she was in fact leaving. Right before she left we kissed, and needless to say it was the greatest feeling ever but then she tore away and then I saw her walking across the grass, following her mother, and then I heard the gunshot and heard her scream and watched her fall and looked behind me down the hallway and saw her father, the polio-stricken monster, sitting in his wheelchair, clutching a smoking rifle. I could hear the roar of the studio audience from the TV back in the living room.

It kept raining. It didn’t stop. I got the feeling it never actually would. We walked to the end of the Arrow: that was what the villagers called the stone slab that rose out of the water. They’d called it that for decades. I had never understood why.

The Arrow pointed into the water, which smelled like a rotting orange: pungent and strong and unpleasant. We stood among shifting, crumbling stones. We breathed in thick, oxidized sea air.

The haze was all around us and it was a filter. It dulled the world’s edges. It dulled my edges, too. I held my hand up to my face and could barely see it. Even from six inches away, it was an indistinct mass, fuzzy and watery. It didn’t seem real.

“I need some money,” I said. My words were officially addressed to no one in particular; unofficially, they were for you. You did not respond, so I felt the need to explain further.

“Basically, I need twenty dollars,” I said. “I want to buy a cat. I think that would run about twenty dollars. I’m not sure.”

Still, you said nothing and neither did the ocean. It kept roaring; I kept staring into gray nothingness. After six minutes of my lonely staring and after two thousand years of its own endurance in the face of countless crashing waves, the Arrow disintegrated.

I was underwater, sinking fast and watching bubbles dance out of my mouth. A school of cats darted past me and swam into the distance. I could barely see their fins, twirling madly and twirling forever. I thought, “damn it.” Above me floated rough, Styrofoam rocks: the remains of the Arrow. Below me was the seafloor. I was running out of oxygen. I looked for you, but you were dead.