The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  Certainly this wasn't going to be easy; the apartment's walls were white, the tables were white, the bookcases and wardrobes and bed-tables and dressers and bedframes were white. The sheets and towels and dishes were white. In short practically every surface in the place was white, except for the floors, which were a fine blond hardwood. But I was getting good at cleaning the apartment, and having lived in Switzerland for two years, I had a general idea what to expect from the inspection. I knew the standard that would be applied. My soul rose to the challenge, and defiantly I swore that I was going to leave the place immaculate.

  Soon I realized how difficult this was going to be. Every scuff from a muddy shoe, every drip of coffee, every sweaty palm, every exhalation of breath had left its mark. Lisa and I had lived here in our marvelous domestic chaos, and the damage proved it. We had put up pictures and there were holes in the walls. We had never dusted under the beds. The previous tenant had gotten away with things, having moved out in a hurry. It was going to be difficult.

  Immediately it was obvious to me that the oven was going to be the crux of the problem. You see, once we went over to some American friends to have a home-like barbeque, and the grill was out on the balcony up on the fifth floor in the town of Dübendorf, looking out at all the other apartment blocks, the fine smell of barbequed chicken and hamburger spiralling out into the humid summer sky—when there was the howl of sirens below, and a whole fleet of fire engines docked and scores of firemen leaped out—all to combat our barbeque. One of the neighbors had called the police to report a fire on our balcony. We explained to the firemen and they nodded, staring coldly at the clouds of thick smoke filling the sky, and suddenly it seemed to us all that a barbeque was a very messy thing indeed.

  So I never bought a grill for the balcony of our apartment. Instead I broiled our teriyaki shish-kebob in the oven, and it tasted all right. We use a fine teriyaki sauce, my mother got the recipe out of a magazine years ago; but it calls for brown sugar, and this was the source of the problem. When heated, the liquefied brown sugar caramelizes, as Lisa and her chemist colleagues are wont to say; and so on every interior surface of the oven there were little brown dots that refused to come off. They laughed at Easy Off, they laughed at Johnson & Johnson's Force. I began to understand that caramelization is a process somewhat like ceramic bonding. I needed a laser, and only had steel wool. So I began to rub.

  It was a race between the flesh of my fingertips and the brown ceramic dots; which would the steel wool remove first? Flesh, of course; but it grows back, while the dots didn't. Only the miracle of regeneration allowed me to win this titanic battle. Over the course of the next two days (and imagine spending fifteen hours staring into a two-foot cube!) I muscled off every single dot, hour by hour becoming more and more enraged at the stubbornness of my foe.

  Eventually the victory was mine; the oven was clean, a sparkling box of gray-black metal. It would pass the inspection. I stalked through the apartment in an ecstasy of rage, promising similar treatment for every other surface in the place.

  I attacked the rest of the kitchen. Food had suffused into every nook and cranny, it was true; but none of it had caramelized. Stains disappeared with a single wipe, I was Mr. Clean, my soul was pure and my hands all-powerful. I put Beethoven on the stereo, those parts of his work that represent the mad blind energy of the universe: the Grosse Fugue, the second movement of the Ninth, the finale of the Seventh, and of the Hammerklavier. I was another manifestation of this mad blind energy, cleaning in a dance, propelled also by the complex and frenetic music of Charlie Parker, of Yes, "Salt Peanuts" and "Perpetual Change." And soon enough the kitchen gleamed like a factory display model. It would pass the inspection.

  The other rooms offered feeble resistance. Dust, what was it to me now? "I am the mad blind energy of the universe, I vacuum under the beds!" Cleaning lint from the vacuum I sliced the very tip of my right forefinger off, and for a while it was hard not to get blood on the walls. But that was the most resistance these rooms could offer. Soon they shone with a burnished glow.

  Now, inspired, I decided to get really thorough. It was time for details. I had been going to leave the floors alone, as they appeared clean enough to pass; but now with everything else so clean I noticed that there were little dark marks around the doorways, little dips in the grain of the wood where dirt had managed to insinuate itself. I bought some wood polish and went to work on the floors, and when I was done it was like walking on ice.

  I dusted off the tops of the bookcases, up near the ceiling. I put spackle in the nail holes in the walls. When I was done the walls were all smooth, but it seemed to me that I could see a little discoloration where the spackle had gone. A few moments' pacing and inspiration struck: I got some typewriter Wite-Out from our boxes, and used it as touch-up paint. It really worked well. Nicks in doorways, a place where the wall was scraped by a chair back; typewriter Wite-Out, perfect.

  In the evenings during this week of cleaning frenzy, I sat with friends, drinking and feeling my hands throb. One night I overheard by chance an Israeli friend tell a story about a Swiss friend of hers who had unscrewed the frames on her double-paned windows, to clean the inside surfaces. I shot up in my chair, mouth hanging open; I had noticed dust on the inner sides of our double-paned windows that very afternoon, and figured it was something I wouldn't be able to do anything about. It never would have occurred to me to unscrew the frames! But the Swiss know about these things. The next day I got out a screwdriver, and unscrewed and polished until my wrists were liked cooked spaghetti. And the windows sparkled from all four surfaces. They would pass the inspection.

  On the morning of Inspection Day I walked through the big rooms of the apartment, with their tan leather chairs and couches, and the white walls and bookcases, and the sun streamed in and I stood there transfixed as if in the dream of a cognac advertisement, in air like mineral water.

  Glancing at the long mirror in the foyer something caught my eye; I frowned; I walked up to it, feeling uneasy as I often do around mirrors, and looked at it closely. Sure enough, some dust. I had forgotten to clean the mirror. As I went to work on it I marvelled: you can see the difference between a dusty mirror and a clean one, even when—staring at the paper towel in my hand—there is only enough dust to make a thin short line, like a faint pencil mark. So little dust, distributed over such a large surface—and yet we still can see it. The eye is that powerful. If we can see that, I thought, why not ourselves? Why not everything?

  So I strode around the cognac advertisement in a state of rapture; until I remembered the sheets, down in the washing machine. All would have been well, if not for the sheets. All through the week I had been washing those sheets, downstairs in the basement. Red plastic laundry basket filled with linen: we had seven bottom sheets, seven pillow cases, seven big duvet cases. The duvets were fine, as white as cotton. But the bottom sheets, the pillow cases…. Well. They were yellowed. Stained. Alarming evidence of our bodies, our physical existence: oils, fluids, minuscule scraps of us rubbed into the cloth like butter, ineradicably.

  Certainly, I thought, the Swiss must have methods for dealing with evidence as serious as this. So I had gone out and bought bleaches. Recalling the bleach ads from back home, I trustfully assumed that the stained linen would emerge from one trip through the wash gleaming like lightning. But it wasn't so. Wash after wash did nothing to change their color. I went out and bought a different kind of bleach, then another. Two powders, one liquid. I upped the doses on each of them. Nothing worked.

  And now it was the morning of Inspection Day, and I had recalled the sheets in the basement, and my rapture was shattered. I hurried down stairs, walked down the long concrete underground hallway to the laundry room. I saw that the building would stand for a thousand years. It would resist ten megatons. The washing machine was trilingual and as big as a truck. I brought it online, gave it its pre-run check-off for the final attempt, set my array of bleaches on top of the machine. It was the f
ourteenth time I had run things through this week, and I had the procedure streamlined; but this time I stopped to think. I looked at the three different kinds of bleach on top of the dryer, and I had an idea. I took the largest cap and turned it open end up, then poured in liquid bleach until the cup was half full. Then I poured in some of both of the powders.

  Synergy, right? Singing a little tune in praise of the mysterious force of synergy, I took the pencil from the sign-in book and stirred the mix in the cap vigorously. It began to bubble a little, then to foam.

  Only at that point did I remember my wife, the chemist, yelling at me for mixing two cleansers together in an attempt to get a bathtub clean. "If you had mixed ammonia and Ajax it would have made chloramine gas and killed you!" she had said. "Never mix stuff like that together!"

  So I left the cap of bleaches on the dryer and ran out of the room. From the concrete hall I stared back in, sniffing carefully. Glancing down I noticed the pencil, still clenched in my hand; and the bottom half of it, the part that had stirred the bleaches, was as white as a stick of chalk. "Ho!" I exclaimed, and retreated farther up the hall. Synergy can be a powerful thing.

  After some thought, and a closer inspection of the pencil, which now had a pure white eraser, I returned to the washroom. The air seemed okay. I was committed at this point, I had to meet the Swiss challenge. So I tipped the capful of bleaches carefully into the plastic opening on top of the washer, and I stuffed our yellowy bottom sheets and pillow cases inside, and I closed up the washer and punched the buttons for the hottest water available, ninety degrees centigrade. Walking back upstairs I noticed that the very tip of my left forefinger had a white patch on it. Back in the apartment I found it wouldn't wash off. "Bleached my flesh!" I exclaimed. "That stuff is finally working the way it's supposed to."

  An hour later I returned to the washroom apprehensively, hoping that the sheets had not been eaten to shreds or the like. On the contrary; when I opened the washer door there was a glare as if several camera flashes had gone off right in my face, just like in the ads; and there were the sheets, as white as new snow.

  I hooted for glee, and stuffed them in the dryer. And by the time the Inspector rang the bell below, they were dried and ironed and folded and neatly stacked in the linen drawers of the bedroom wardrobe, looking like great hunks of Ivory soap.

  I hummed cheerfully as I let the Inspector in. He was a young man, perhaps younger than myself. His English was excellent. He was apologetic, defensive; it was a boring task for both of us, he said, but necessary. No problem, I replied, and showed him around the place. He nodded, frowning slightly. "I must count the various items in the kitchen," he said, brandishing an inventory.

  That took a long time. When he was done he shook his head disapprovingly. "There are four glasses missing, and one spoon, and the top off the tea kettle."

  "That's right," I said happily. "We broke the glasses and lost the spoon, and I think we broke the tea kettle, though I can't remember." These things didn't matter, they didn't have to do with the essential challenge, which concerned not number but order; not quantity, but quality; not inventory, but cleanliness.

  And the Inspector understood this too; after listening to my admission, he shook his head seriously and said, "Fine, fine; however, what about this?" And with a satisfied look he reached up into the back of the top shelf of the broom closet, and held out before me a short stack of grimy kitchen towels.

  In that moment I understood that the Inspector wanted dirtiness, in the same way that a policeman wants crime; it's the only thing that can make the job interesting. I stared at the kitchen towels, which I had completely forgotten. "What about them?" I said. "We never used those, I forgot they were up there." I shrugged. "The previous tenant must have done that to them."

  He stared at me disbelievingly. "How did you dry your dishes?"

  "We stood them in the drainer and let them dry on their own."

  He shook his head, not believing that anyone would rely on such a method. I recalled the Swiss friend of ours who dried her bathtub with a towel after showering. I shrugged stubbornly; the Inspector shook his head stubbornly. He turned to look in the broom closet again, to see if there were any other forgotten treasures. Without forethought I quickly reached behind him and touched the stained kitchen towels with my bleached forefinger.

  They turned white.

  When the young inspector was done searching the broom closet, I said casually, "But they're not that bad, are they?" He looked at the kitchen towels and his eyebrows shot up. He regarded me suspiciously; I just shrugged, and left the kitchen. "Are you about done?" I asked. "I have to go downtown."

  He prepared to leave. "We will have to see about the missing glasses," he said, voice heavy with dissatisfaction.

  "And the spoon," I said. "And the tea kettle top."

  He left.

  I danced through the sparkling air of the empty apartment. My work was done, I had passed the inspection, my soul was pure, I was in a state of grace. Weak sunlight lanced between low clouds, and out on the balcony the air was frigid. I put on my down jacket to go into the city center, to see my Zürich one last time.

  Down the old overgrown steps and through the wintry garden of the ETH, past the big building housing the Chinese graduate students. Down the steep walkway to Voltastrasse, past the Japanese fire maple and the interior design store. I touched one red rose and was not particularly surprised to see it turn white. My whole fingertip looked like paraffin now.

  Down at the Voltastrasse tram stop, in the wind. Across the street the haunted house stood, a pinkish wreck with big cracks in its walls; Lisa and I had always marvelled at it, there was nothing even remotely as derelict as it anywhere in Zürich. It was an anomaly, an exile like we were, and we loved it. "I'll never touch you," I said to it.

  A Number Six tram hummed down the hill from Kirche Fluntern and squealed to a halt before me. You have to touch a button to get the doors to open, so I did that and the whole tram car turned white. Usually they are blue, but there are a few trams painted different colors to advertise the city museums, and there are some painted white to advertise the Oriental museum in Rietliberg, so I assumed that this car would now be taken for one of those; and I climbed aboard.

  We slid off down the hill toward Platte, ETH and Central. I sat in the back of the tram and watched the Swiss in front of me, getting on and off. Many of them were old. None of them ever sat in seats beside each other until all the seats had been filled by single parties. If single seats were vacated at a stop, people sitting next to strangers in double seats would get up and move to the single seat. No one talked, though they did look at each other a little. Mostly they looked out the windows. The windows were clean. These trams on the Number Six line had been built in 1952, but they were still in factory perfect condition; they had passed the inspection.

  Looking down, I suddenly noticed that each pair of shoes on the tram was flawless. Then I noticed that each head of hair was perfectly coifed. Even the two punks on the tram had their hair perfectly done, in their own style. Shoes and hair, I thought, these will reveal the wealth of a nation. These extremes reveal the soul.

  At the ETH stop a Latin American man got on the tram. He was dressed in a colorful serape, and thin black cotton pants, and he looked miserably cold. He was carrying an odd thing that looked like a bow; it was painted crudely, in many colors, and there was a small painted gourd attached to it, where you would hold the bow if it were meant to shoot arrows. The man had long lanky black hair that fell loosely over his shoulders and down the back of the serape, and his face was big and broad-cheeked; he looked like a mestizo, or perhaps a purebred Indian from Bolivia or Peru or Ecuador. There were quite a few of them living in Zürich, Lisa and I often saw groups of them on Bahnhofstrasse, playing music for change. Pan pipes, guitars, drums, gourds filled with beans: street music performed right through the winter, with the players and audience alike shivering in the snowy air.

  When the tram
started to move again, this Latino walked to the front of the car and turned around to face us all. He said something loudly in Spanish, and then began to play the bow and gourd instrument, plucking it rapidly. Moving one thumb up and down the metal bowstring changed the pitch of the sound, which reverberated in the gourd, making a kind of loud twang. The resulting sound was awful: loud, unmelodic, impossible to ignore.

  The Swiss stared resentfully at this intrusion. This was not done; I had never seen it before, and neither had the others aboard, it was clear. And the sound of the primitive instrument was so insistent, so weird. The disapproval in the car was as palpable as the sound, the two vibrations battling each other in tense air.

  The tram stopped at Haldenegg, and several people got off, more than would usually; clearly some were just escaping the musician, and would get on the next tram to come along. Newcomers, unpleasantly surprised, stared at the man as he twanged away. The tram doors closed and we moved off again, down the hill to Central. The captive audience stared at the musician, as belligerent as cows eyeing a passing car.

  Then he broke into song. It was one of those Bolivian or Peruvian hill ballads, a sad tale dramatically told, and the man sang it over the twanging of his absurd instrument in a hoarse wild voice, expressing all the anguish of the exile, lost in a cold land. What a voice the man had! Suddenly the ridiculous twanging made sense, it all fell together; this voice in a foreign language cut through all the barriers and spoke to us, to each and every person on the tram. That kind of singing is impossible to ignore or deny—we knew exactly what he was feeling, and so for that moment we were a little community. And all without understanding a word. What power the voice has to express what really matters! People shifted in their seats, they sat up, they watched the singer intently, they smiled. When he walked up and down the tram, holding out a black felt hat, they dug deep in their pockets and purses and dropped change in, smiling at him and saying things in Swiss German, or even in High German so he might perhaps understand. When the doors hissed open at Central, they were surprised; no one aboard had noticed our arrival.