The Laundry Room Light

The sealed basement laundry room was running, and I was already inside it.

I saw myself through the wired-glass door at 1:20 in the morning, bending over a washer beneath a buzzing fluorescent tube.

Five minutes earlier, I had gone downstairs because a light shone through my kitchen vent. The apartment manager, Mr. Ruiz, had told me the basement was sealed after a flood killed the boilers twelve years ago. Yet my building key opened the gray fire door.

The corridor smelled of wet concrete and dryer sheets. At its end, new cinder blocks filled most of the laundry-room entrance, leaving only the old door exposed.

Through the glass, the other me wore yesterday’s yellow work blouse.

I looked down at my pajamas. When I looked up, she was gone.

Six front-loading machines turned in the room. Black water slapped their windows. My blouse rolled inside washer four with the coffee stain I had made during Tuesday’s budget meeting.

That blouse was folded on my bedroom chair upstairs.

I tried my key. The laundry door opened.

Heat pressed against my face, humid and sour. Coins rattled in empty machine slots. A plastic basket on the folding table held my gray skirt, one black sock, and the cotton underwear I had thrown away after the elastic tore.

Washer four stopped.

Its door unlocked with a heavy click.

The woman who crawled out had my face.

Her skin was pale and ridged from soaking. Steam lifted from her hair. A brass apartment key was buried lengthwise in her palm, with only the teeth protruding from the heel of her hand.

“Don’t let it rinse,” she said.

Washer five filled behind her.

Through its window I saw a man turning slowly underwater. He wore the red delivery jacket of Tomas from apartment 3C.

Tomas had gone missing in February. Police found his bicycle chained outside the building.

My double dragged herself across the tile. Each movement left lint and pink water.

“Who are you?”

“Thursday.”

It was Wednesday night.

She told me the room washed tenants out of their clothes and sent copies upstairs. The flood had not closed the laundry. It had fed it. Every cycle learned another person through skin, sweat, receipts left in pockets, strands of hair.

“If five finishes, Tomas goes home,” she said. “If six finishes, I do.”

Washer six began filling.

Inside lay the clothes I was wearing.

I ran. The fire door locked behind me, and my building key no longer fit. Upstairs, I pounded on Ruiz’s apartment until he answered in slippers and an undershirt. He smelled of toothpaste.

When I said laundry room, he stopped pretending to be sleepy.

Ruiz took a ring of old keys from a flour tin above his refrigerator. On the way down, he admitted his father had managed the building during the flood. Seven tenants disappeared that night. The city report listed two deaths because the other five bodies were never recovered.

“My father sealed the machines in,” he said. “He said concrete made them quiet.”

The cinder blocks around the laundry door were sweating.

Ruiz’s old key opened it. Washer five displayed one minute.

The thing wearing Tomas stood beside the machine, fully dressed and dry. It smiled at Ruiz.

“Package for 3C.”

Ruiz crossed himself. The real Tomas struck the washer window from inside, eyes open in black water.

My double crouched near the floor drain, weaker now. She pointed toward a red lever behind the dryers.

EMERGENCY DISCHARGE.

The Tomas-copy moved first. It crossed the room with the jerky speed of laundry tumbling between frames. Ruiz swung his flashlight. The metal cracked its cheek, revealing compacted gray lint beneath the skin.

I reached the lever.

It was wired upright.

Someone had wrapped copper wire around it years earlier to prevent the drain from opening. I cut the wire with the small scissors on the folding table. The copy caught my blouse and pulled hard enough to tear the collar.

My double bit its wrist.

Her teeth sank through skin into lint. She held on while I dragged the lever down.

The floor drain erupted.

Black water surged knee-high, carrying buttons, coins, dentures, and laminated tenant ID cards. Washer doors sprang open. Tomas spilled onto the tile with three other bodies, all breathing.

The copies reacted differently.

Tomas’s collapsed where it stood. My double sagged against me. Faces pressed briefly from the wet lint covering the floor, then dissolved as water thundered into the drain.

Washer six continued filling.

Its display showed thirty seconds.

“The intake,” my double gasped.

Two pipes entered the wall behind the machines. Ruiz closed their valves, but the display kept counting. The room was drawing water from somewhere beneath the building.

I looked at the key embedded in my double’s hand.

“That opens my apartment?”

She nodded. “It opens where you belong.”

I gripped the exposed teeth and pulled.

The key came free with a strip of skin. My double screamed. I drove it into washer six’s coin slot and twisted.

The machine unlocked.

There was no drum behind its door. There was a vertical shaft filled with floodwater, descending farther than my flashlight reached. Shapes floated below, dressed in decades of lost clothing.

Hands began climbing toward us.

Ruiz shoved the emergency-discharge hose into the open shaft. I jammed the key sideways in the lock so the washer door could not close. The drain caught the underground water and pulled.

For forty seconds, the building shook.

The fluorescent tubes burst. Pipes screamed in the walls. One by one, the pale shapes below came apart into cloth and sediment. The washer display went dark at two seconds.

My double smiled with my mouth.

“You’ll make it to Friday,” she said.

Then she collapsed into wet lint around my feet.

Ambulances took Tomas and the other three survivors to County General. Their bloodwork showed dehydration but no explanation for years missing. One woman had vanished during the original flood and had not aged a day.

Police photographed everything. We gave them seven old ID cards from the drain and the corroded key from my double’s palm. The city opened the foundation and found a ruptured storm culvert running beneath the laundry room. Human remains in it matched the other missing tenants.

The building was evacuated.

Ruiz pleaded guilty to concealing evidence after admitting he had heard machines restart twice and bricked them in rather than report it. The structure was demolished under health-department supervision. Each washer was cut apart. None contained an extra shaft.

I moved across town. The four people pulled from the machines rebuilt what lives they could. Tomas delivers medical supplies now because ordinary packages make him panic.

I kept the key in a specimen jar supplied by the police after the case closed. Its brass remains green, and a dark line marks where it entered my double’s hand.

Nobody from my old building has disappeared since.

Every Tuesday, however, my clean laundry smells faintly of river mud.

Last week I reached into my winter coat and found a pale fingertip in the pocket, wrinkled from soaking. The nail was painted with the discontinued yellow polish I wore the night we opened the drain.

At its cut end, instead of bone, was a tiny brass key tooth.