Louis got home from his shift and shed his work clothes: a white shirt, black slacks, and a red vest. Most days, he still smelt the car exhaust on his body, the scent trapped beneath his fingernails and under his armpits. Today, however, he was feeling giddy and clean. Tomorrow, tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow he would get a new job where he wouldn’t have to radio someone every time he had to pee. He dreamed of sick days, lunch breaks, and vacation time. He could work regular hours and have work buddies. They could all go to the bar afterwards to shoot the shit; Louis could learn to play pool.
He changed into what clean clothes he had left: a Hawaiian shirt and some striped pajama pants. The pile of clothes on his studio apartment floor had grown significantly. From the height of the pile, Louis estimated that it had been about two weeks since he had last trekked across the hall and done his laundry. It was the way that Louis measured days. Months were measured according to rent checks. He hadn’t bothered to find a way to measure years yet.
Hours were, of course, measured by dollars. It was $7.50 for every 60 minutes. One night at his booth, he tried to calculate how much he got paid by the minute, but then he got distracted by a sudden rush of cars coming. A movie had probably let out or something. Afterwards, Louis then thought about how it would depress him to figure it out anyway and he spent the rest of his time watching I Love Lucy reruns on his tiny portable television.
It was a $1.25 for one load into the washer; a quarter for each fifteen minutes in the dryer. Louis rummaged through all his pants’ pockets for extra coins. He was a serial change jangler, some part of him thought it made him sound a bit like Christmas, like jingle bells or something like that, when he walked down the hall. It distinguished himself from the other people that lived in the building. Through his door, at certain times of the day, Louis heard the rumblings of countless whistlers, yelping children, and heavy-booted men.
There were a few singers in the building. After returning from his night shifts, sometimes Louis heard one woman singing opera. Or at least that’s what Louis thought it was. To him, an aria sounded like it was a type of flower or a skin disease. Still, the voice was clear and mournful, high class and alien, and flooded the space between his ears. Louis often thought about what she looked like, but he kept imagining a fat lady in a Viking helmet. He was probably wrong about that.
But today there wasn’t any music at all. Louis couldn’t even hear his neighbor’s radios buzzing from the walls. Maybe no one else was home.
The first load of laundry was washed without incident. But after Louis transferred all his clothes from the washer to the dryer, the memory of doing so got lost in the minutiae of his day. First, his mother had called, asking all the questions she always asked in the same worried tone of voice that always said, though never out loud, “I am very disappointed in you.” Then Louis had turned on the television to get his mind off of it, watching some rerun of some sitcom with a laugh track. It was only after a few hours, a peanut butter sandwich, a joint, and a couple cans of beer that he sat up from his couch.
“Fuck.”
Louis got up quickly, hoping that his things were left undisturbed. There still wasn’t any noise coming from the hall.
When he got to the laundry room, he was relieved at first to find a heap of clothes still in the dryer. But he cursed again when he saw that sitting on the very top of the heap, was something a bit unfamiliar, pair of bright red silk underpants.
