Wired

Matt Smith worked until the plate glass windows of his office turned black.  The lights of neighboring buildings twinkled in the darkness like spaceships carrying humankind to new worlds.  After-hours personnel arrived.  Fax operators, messengers, copiers, security guards.  Night secretaries replaced day secretaries.  Far below his office the glowing threads of streets and highways fanned out to the horizon and made the earth into an overloaded circuit board.  He worked long after nightfall.  In the bright mothership dazzle of adjacent skyscrapers, sections of darkness appeared with the departure of less diligent employees. Their lights were extinguished by motion detectors or roving security guards.  These people were now represented by a void.

At midnight, he took a taxi home to his quiet loft apartment.  After sending a few emails and making an indifferent attempt to read a contract, he went to sleep.  He dreamt strange dreams and awoke in darkness.  A small green light blinked like a distress beacon.  It indicated the location of some appliance, maybe the dishwasher, or his laptop.  The digital clock on the VCR said two thirty. 

He switched on the light.

Blood covered every surface.  It was matted into the white pile rug in front of the sofa.  It was tracked across the bare wood floors.  It lined doorframes in big handmade blotches. It splattered darkly, Pollock-esque, across white textured walls.  He looked down at his hands.  They were sticky and dark.  He circled the entire apartment, slouching low in Neanderthal anticipation.  Something bad had happened here.

He found the body in the bathroom.  A young man lay face down in the empty bathtub.  He wore a soggy gray suit.  Matt grabbed a towel and used it like a potholder.  He lifted the man under both arms and rolled him over: the face and chest had been hacked and stabbed by a large blade.  Matt had heard a ripping sound and then realized the man’s cheek had been glued by half-dried blood to the side of the bathtub.  He retched as his olfactory senses in delayed reaction registered what they were smelling.

The phone rang.

“Hello?” he said, wiping his hands first to answer.

“You had better do something about the stink or the neighbors will start complaining.”

“What?” exclaimed Matt.  “Who is this?”

“You heard me.  The body in your bathtub.  He stinks.  He’s been there for three days.”

Matt looked again at the VCR.  It was two thirty five in the morning.  But the date was four days later than it was supposed to be.

“What the fuck is going on?” he screamed into the phone.  “Who are you and what do you want with me?”

He remembered.  The voice had just been in his dreams, garbled and distant.  He had not understood what it was saying.

“There’s no time to talk,” it now said through the phone in his hand.  “In case you’ve forgotten, your cleaning lady comes today.  She’ll be there in seven hours.”

Click and then dial tone.

Matt scurried around the apartment opening all the windows.  He brought armfuls of sanitary supplies into the bathroom and poured one fluid after another into the tub.  He turned the hot water tap.  Soon the body practically floated in a concoction of noxious cleaning solutions. The stench subsided, replaced by an overpowering chemical smell.

He returned to the main room and began cleaning.  After hours of scrubbing and rinsing he discovered something under the sofa.  A 13-inch butcher knife, made of hardened titanium; the latest yuppie kitchen accessory.  The top quarter of the blade was missing.  It had to have been subjected to enormous pressures to break like that.  Maybe it was lodged in the body.