loop, infinite

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.