Asylum 6

by Brian Marley

Night and day, the machines in the laundry thrum to a vibration very similar to that of the universe. The building shivers imperceptibly and we shiver too, though most of the time we don’t even notice. What we can’t fail to notice is that the mortar between the bricks is turning to dust, and layer by layer the walls are shedding their skin of paint. The building is slowly being shaken apart. It’s common knowledge that the steam and toxic chemicals in the air make the laundry as dangerous as a third world Union Carbide plant. The laundrymen who don’t wear goggles are as blind as subterranean worker ants, and even those who wear full-face masks suffer from pulmonary fibrosis, sarcoidosis and other terrible diseases of the lung. Allegedly there’s more blood in their sputum than in their veins. Upon hearing a frogs’ chorus of coughs – hacking, spasmodic, muffled by the laundry’s steel-clad door – we listen for a moment, thinking unruly thoughts. Then we move on. At the end of the hallway we avert our gaze and tiptoe past the mortuary, its door typically (invitingly?) ajar. Perhaps it swings open of its own accord, who knows. One day we’ll be laid out, cold and uncomfortable, on the ridged surface of the mortuary slab, the only piece of furniture in the room. But not yet, not just yet. First we want to know everything there is to know about the laundrymen and their short, unhappy lives. It’s become something of an obsession.

The laundry is one of the forbidden zones. At all times the door is shut against prying eyes. An unusual feature of the door is that the knob is missing. The spindle on which the knob would fit is shiny with wear, though the metal surrounding it is grubby and dull. We deduce that on a regular basis someone must be entering the laundry by way of this door. Moreover, this someone must keep the knob about his person, for it has never been seen. We suspect the local undertaker and have reason to believe that the boiler room, which adjoins the laundry and is accessed via the laundry room door, may serve as a makeshift crematorium. When coffins leave the premises they often look suspiciously light, as though they contain nothing but a cupful of ash. And even though the door fits snugly into its frame, wisps of steam, or smoke, constantly leak round the edges. But the dead must attend to their own; our concern is with the living, and by that I mean the laundrymen. We know each of them by their distinctive coughs, a broken consort of whoops and barks, indicative of life though not health, muffled by a door sheathed in metal, often drowned out by the thrum of machinery. Sometimes the coughs are so faint we wonder whether they’re a figment of our imagination. Our greatest fear is that one day we’ll listen for the laundrymen’s coughs but hear nothing, and like vengeful demons all our projected anxieties will return devastatingly to their source.