by Alex Behr
Troy stepped down from the stool, adding the air-vent repair to his mental list of chores, and swept up the ochre-colored dirt. The miners tracked it in, those nasty, poisoned folks with their constant vomiting and diarrhea, no wonder they needed the Laundromat so often.
Troy sipped a cola a customer had left behind. He frowned. He smelled rot around the can’s sharp lip. Microbial rot. The supply ships didn’t arrive from Earth too often. The colas went bad and no one fucking cared. He stuck his hand inside his pants pocket to feel his lucky pebble, his sacred pebble—the one he had found in the dust by a shredded bra.
He needed Bobbi’s attention. She was slumped on a taped-up stool, her butt folded over the seat. She was eating her hamburger and French fries, as she did every day, as if her life as a Laundromat manager on Mars were one extended Happy Meal. She ignored his voice. But he needed her to unlock the office door.
Troy gripped his broom. He shouldn’t touch her. He needed to. He shouldn’t. It would be painful. The men needed taming on Mars, like anywhere, so to lure women to the planet, the colony leaders had installed electroshock machines. Men had to press red buttons if they couldn’t control their base impulses. The leaders threatened uncontrollable men with expulsion to one of Mars’s lumpish moons, like being sent to rot on a potato. Maybe a quick tap on Bobbi’s shoulder? What was the harm? He did it, with the tip of a finger.
“Hit the red,” she said. She opened the burger and licked a dab of ketchup off the bun.
“I need the tool kit.”
“Hit the red.”
“I did already. It’s still working.”
“You touched me. I can feel the imprint, the heat. Hit the red.”
Troy reached above a dryer and punched a red button on the wall. It was about the size of his fist, like a miniature smoke alarm. The button beeped, loudly and steadily, as it adjusted its beam on Troy’s balding head. He tensed his body, anticipating the currents penetrating his skull—300 electrical watts per pulse. Pain jacked his body, emptying his mind so he couldn’t articulate the result: scattered neuron death. The watts penetrated the three layers of membrane protecting Troy’s brain, all named after mothers, all vulnerable, whether hard (dura mater), spidery (arachnoid mater), or soft (pia mater). He fell, banging his knees and forehead on the chipped linoleum floor.
Mining was set up on Mars after it ruined Africa. Sierra Leone and other unfortunate nations were depleted, sucked out. Processing rutile, a gray, pock-marked mineral, to extract titanium dioxide caused the usual environmental embarrassments: the flooding of lowlands, deforestation, tailings like bedsores on the terrain—nothing new, nothing shocking. NASA needed new sources of titanium, chromium, gold, platinum, silver, and other rare metals—especially as space colonization became practical. NASA’s mining component had set up a space colony on Arabia Terra, a Martian wasteland—blighted by erosion not caused by humans but by water, spewed out by volcanoes about three million years prior. This underground water was now eagerly, wastefully, pumped out by the colonists.
Troy, our Martian hero, felt extracting metals was worth the human costs. Look at titanium—it had strengthened the Mars rover’s suspension system in 2009. And for that, Troy was thankful. If it weren’t for the Mars rover finding water, he wouldn’t be on Mars now, in a Laundromat, with a steady job. Troy believed in progress.
When the pain subsided, Troy braced himself on a machine and stood. None of the miners paid much notice; one was grinding against a machine, watching the spin cycle. Bobbi unlocked the office door and called him to come with her. Inside, stacks of Chinese takeout containers and fast food bags filled a metal trashcan. A clipboard on the wall listed customer names that corresponded to amounts refunded for broken machines.
Troy still wanted to touch Bobbi. He wanted to unbutton her top and let the neck breathe. She was in her sixties, a black woman from Texas, whose husband used to sign up for all the free gifts on the credit card bills. She’d told him they weren’t free—nothing was—but he wouldn’t believe her. They came to Mars to make a killing on the Laundromat, but her husband died at a Martian bar; he went for a free lap dance and got asphyxiated by a stripper with one eye. Troy picked up a pair of pliers, wire cutters, and a roll of wire.
“Don’t talk to nobody,” she said. “Stay out of trouble.” Troy nodded, holding his hands by his side. By dryer fourteen, he cut and wove pieces of wire into a tight mesh, sealing the air vent, wishing he could tighten the wire around a drug addict’s throat. They were everywhere on the ship, like fruit flies.
A faded cardboard sign above the wall of dryers read: RESPECT YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. He saw a girl in her early twenties, smoking a cigarette near the corridor. He felt love. He set the tools on the dryer and finished the cola, so his breath would smell sugary, as if to impart his goodness. Cool jazz from the corner speakers couldn’t soothe Troy’s fever.
The girl met his standards, which got higher every year. Not that he’d try anything, of course, but what she did and how she looked and how her dirty laundry got that way were matters to discuss. His place.
Troy knew he frightened people; he had bad posture and his teeth were graying. He often wore extra-large from the lost-and-found box, with someone else’s stains. Sometimes he wore rainbow suspenders.
If he could work up the nerve, he’d say, “Let’s meet tonight. I’ll tell you my secrets. Like this one: Every night I can’t swallow right. I clutch my stomach before sleep, kneading into the sore spot beneath my belly button. Evil beings bowl in my guts and slam pins against the walls.”
He had guilt. When Troy was young, he spied on his sister. One day he hid in the media closet behind an accordion door, watching Guineveve stare at the TV in their living room den. Marvin the cartoon Martian told the space dog to get that Earth creature. The drum rolled. Troy didn’t know what Marvin meant by a uranium PU-36 explosive space modulator, but he liked it when Martin said, “Isn’t that wonderful? Now we can blow up the Earth!” The trombones on the soundtrack slid, and the xylophone went berserk.
Their mother came into the room. She grabbed Guineveve’s arm, pulling her out from under a blanket. Her mother had to bring her to the cheap doctor, the one at the mall. She was always taking them to doctors. That’s why Troy liked to hide.
Troy opened the door and threw a ball without thinking. It arced above the teddy bears lining the shelves. It hit a glass vase, which shattered, and pieces landed on Guineveve’s face and dress. Their mother held her to her shoulder. Guineveve’s pain became a warm oval of spit, mucus, and tears on her mother’s dress. When she leaned back to scream, her face glittered with red dots of blood and glass. Or maybe that memory was false? Maybe she got covered in blood when she stood behind a pane of glass and he kicked, kung-fu-style. Little kids who broke glass got spanked. So did little kids who drew pictures on the dryers with permanent markers. Whipped around by their mother, with her death grip on their noodle arms. Each time Troy pressed the red button, he hoped the rays would kill his Earth memories, false or real.
A pair of boots and a sleeping bag thudded inside dryer number eight. Troy huffed on his glasses. He lifted the lid to washer number five. A sock looked as if it had strangled itself around the agitator. He picked it up and put it into the girl’s dryer, number seven.
The smoking girl wore silver Mylar leggings and rhinestone flip-flops. Troy named her Susie. Her barrette held her bangs aloft, like a hedge he wanted to trim. She shivered in her leopard-print coat, something she got, no doubt, from screwing one of the roaming flea-market scabs who visited the space colony every fortnight. She stamped out a cigarette and kicked it into the corridor in a fluid movement.
“Nice aim,” Troy said. He pointed to a book on the folding table, next to a stack of Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets. “What are you understanding?”
“You want the red?” Susie asked.
“I’m sorry, but what are you understanding? I’ve taken a lot of computer classes. And the books I used were all titled Unde
rstanding This, Understanding That.”
“It’s Undertaker. Excuse me.” She picked up her book and got a cart. He wandered to the bulletin board, as if they’d never spoken. But he felt that weird energy of connection, as if his heart were overheating just for her.
When Susie emptied the clothes from the dryer into the cart, Troy saw an opportunity. He got one edged with gray duct tape and blocked Susie’s cart with his, trapping her in the narrow aisle.
She looked down and scratched her cheek.
“I like gross things,” Troy said to her. “Your scab is not gross to me.”
She laughed. “Do you like medical textbooks?”
“No. That’s too gross.” Troy thought, Why is she asking me? What can she guess?
“Do you like dead animals?”
“Not particularly. I like the precipice of grossness, like hearing a gross story and being able to back away.”
Bobbi rustled her bag of food. “Settle down now, Troy,” she said.
If he could get Susie to look him in the eyes for ten minutes, they would fall in love. Troy had fallen for much less.
He reached across his cart and picked up the blue sock he had put in Susie’s dryer. “This is mine, perhaps?” he asked.
“What the hell,” she said. “Don’t put your laundry in with mine!”
“Oh, so sorry. I’m sure you didn’t have room to dry one little sock? I’ll pay you back the extra quarter.”
“Get away,” she said. She picked up the sock with two fingers and flung it at him. He smiled, touched. She looked as if she might cry, but she coughed instead, a hacking that led to dry heaves. She leaned against a dryer and wiped her eyes.
Bobbi stood and pulled the TV earplugs out. “Troy, take it easy and everything will be fine.”
She’s jealous, Troy thought. Just the other day she had told him about her cancer treatment. She had her hair up in netting and wore a hospital gown, and he told her she looked great. He of all people should know. He made it his business to study women.
Where did Bobbi get off, with her fears that Troy would bother the customers? He stuffed the sock and a couple of damp towels from the lost-and-found box into a plastic trash bag.
He studied the bulletin board again as if that were the reason he’d come in. A flyer read: ENLARGE YOUR MIND. FIRST SESSION FREE. CONTACT DR. MARCY GRABLE, REGISTERED THERAPIST. He thought of telling Susie, “Hey, there’s the word rapist in the word therapist. A coincidence?” Instead, he ripped down the flyer and walked out.
At home, Troy narrated his life as if to a lawyer, guilty as charged: Here I am: a fat man on his toilet with a chipped wooden seat. Everything’s filtered with a gold light. Piles of computer magazines are tipped against the hamper, and my bare feet rest on a plush rug. A soft cascade of speckled vomit runs across the ceiling and down the shower curtain, as if it were a map of the Dark Continent. I have chromium poisoning. I keep it a secret. I vomit only at home. Peeking out of the linen closet is a pink shoe, a mule, with feathers.
You want to see me. You want to, and here I am. Cramping and aching.
He went to the kitchenette and fried baloney on the plug-in stovetop unit, spattering butter on his shirt. Eating his baloney sandwich, he looked out the bulletproof window to the Laundromat across the corridor. He figured Susie would come back eventually. He liked his job. He liked where he lived. So easy to fit in here. His heart pounded when he finally spotted her, now wearing a red raincoat as if she wanted him to be the Woodsman, saving her from the Wolf. He put down the rest of his sandwich, locked the door, and walked into the Laundromat. He smelled his fingers. He couldn’t help it. He wished he’d eaten honey instead.
Troy clutched his lucky pebble in his fist. Bobbi was gone for the night, but a few customers—old miners—folded their vomit-stained clothes or read newspapers. The buzz of fluorescent lights crawled through Troy’s brain. Susie ducked her head when she saw him. Perhaps she is shy.
“Susie!” he said—but that wasn’t even her real name. How would he learn it?
She turned around. She had a screwdriver in her hand. The little thief. His precious girl.
She handed the screwdriver to Troy. Did her slender fingers graze his on purpose, with her rings so fragile, with her shimmery silver nails?
“Help me, will you?” she said. Her voice was slurred.
He took the screwdriver and wondered what to do with it. Should he stick it in his eye, like Oedipus did to his own bloodshot orbs with two pins from his mother’s dress? Or no, something simpler, She probably wanted money. He banged it against the coin-op machine. The boxes of laundry flakes shook inside.
“Try again,” she said. “I don’t feel well. Stick it up the other way.” She winked, but her upper fake eyelash got stuck on her lower lid.
He jammed the screwdriver into the change slot. He moved it around, feeling for the lever to open the valve. He sweated, shaking coins loose that clattered on the ground. He couldn’t concentrate; he was so filled with longing. He couldn’t let the scream out. He could feel it in his throat.
Susie knelt down, under her red cape, and picked up the coins. She left with a quick wave. The bandit. She didn’t say good-bye. It wasn’t because of him—it was the fault of the drug addict who came in while she was on the floor.
The drug addict, a thin white guy with a sore on his lip, shook a stack of religious pamphlets in the air. He lurched toward Troy. He spoke loudly, his breath tainted by sour vomit. “Got any money for old age disease?”
Troy’s shirt smelled like greasy meat. He felt ashamed. He walked out to the corridor, calling over and over, “I love you, Susie!” But she was gone.
The next morning, Troy took a handful of quarters he’d found under dryers and hired a motorcycle driver, the least sick one he could find. The weather was cold and clear. His appointment was at noon. He wore his space suit, duct-taped from all the damage incurred by dust storms. He coughed into his respirator and handed the driver the address. He loved being outdoors, feeling one-tenth his Earth mass, but the air was carcinogenic, and the respirators were notoriously faulty.
The motorbike wove between triple-decker buses with huge, chained wheels, taking miners to work, the windows caked with dried vomit and dust; water hawkers with weights around their waists hung upside-down from the roofs, handing water bottles to the parched workers inside. Troy’s driver paused to let a convoy pass. Troy said a prayer to the Tikonravev Crater, which once held an ancient lake. Today, no clouds of dry ice obscured Troy’s vision of it, a huge pedestal crater perched above the land. Martians worshipped it, collecting rocks to caress like magnetized statues of saints.
This sector mined titanium to treat sewage and toxic waste; NASA shipped it to outposts past the asteroid belt. Suction pipes dredged miles of Martian soil; like impervious worms they separated the heavy minerals from the worthless sands, moving slowly through the terrain and shitting out unneeded dirt into the drilling holes.
Troy’s driver parked in front of Dr. Grable’s office, enclosed by a gate topped with concertina wire and security cameras. Troy pressed a door buzzer and was let in to a heated, blue room. It had high windows and a cow’s skull on the wall.
The doctor was spindly, but her wrinkles looked severe. She held out her hand, smooth, with no discolorations. Troy put his palms behind his back and shook his head no. “It’s OK, Troy,” she said. “There’s no red button here. I hope it’s OK I call you by your first name.”
Troy told her he didn’t have a lot of money. He came here because it was free. Dr. Grable shushed him, calming him. She sat at the edge of a couch and rubbed the cushion in a circular pattern, motioning Troy to sit by her. “I met this man the other day,” she said. She looked at Troy, not blinking. He tried not to blink, either. “I told him to see someone in the healing profession,” she said. “I gave him my card and patted him on the shoulder. I knew no one had touched him in a while. How do you feel about that?”
She tried to pat him on the le
g, but he moved away, his stomach churning. He was so thirsty. The purple cushions on the couch smelled odd, like shampooed goats.
Dr. Grable left the room, saying she would bring him something special. He looked for the indent on the couch from her thighs and ass. He was alone with the cow’s skull and its empty sockets. A rhythm of light pulsed from the bulb above his head, yellow and blue like pictures of a sunny sky in a children’s book, but loud chirps pierced from somewhere in the building, like a smoke alarm with dead batteries, but they didn’t have smoke alarms on Mars. He was worried. Why wouldn’t anyone stop it?
Dr. Grable returned, smiling with greasy teeth and lips, and handed him a stack of postcards. He studied one from Peru, of mummies in loose wrappings, whose skulls didn’t betray one happy thought.
“You don’t believe I was ever young,” he said. The air was strange in here, making him confused, making him feel high and paranoid. “That’s why you handed me these images of dead things. You mock me.”
“Troy, I don’t judge you,” Dr. Grable said.
“Do you remember the alphabet on the walls? The girls clapping about Miss Mary Mack all dressed in black? And the hermit crab. They forgot to water it, or they didn’t want to. They wanted the water for themselves. It died in its glass prison, shrunken and inert.”
He hoped he didn’t have to leave yet. He hoped she wouldn’t rush outside to the driver, to tell him how Troy disgusted her, to touch him instead. The doctor walked across the room to look out the window. Every so often she tapped it, as if in beat with the mining equipment.
“You think you know me,” he said. He sat up, and his voice got louder and more insistent. “And when you’re done talking, I’ll still be the kid who stands on the chair when the teacher goes out of the room. All the kids look up at me. There’s Sandy in red boots and Laura in gray tights. I have their attention. I press out my stomach and pull my shirt up. I’m eight, just like the rest.”