The Genius at Work:
I grant that mysterious invisible room cleaning
is every slob's fantasy, like having a mom
without the guilt. But there is also a creeping
uneasiness about it that presents-at least in my
own case-as a kind of paranoia. Because after a
couple days of this fabulous invisible room
cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly Petra
knows when I'm in 1009 and when I'm not. It's
now that it occurs to me that I hardly ever see
her. For a while I try experiments, like all of a
sudden darting out into the lO-Port hallway to
see if I can catch Petra hunched somewhere
keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour
the whole hallway-and-ceiling area for evidence
of some kind of camera monitoring
movements outside the cabin
doors. Zilch on both fronts. But then I see that
the mystery's even more complex and unsettling
than I'd first thought, because my cabin gets
cleaned always and only during intervals when
I'm gone for more than half an hour. When I go
out; how can Petra or her supervisors possibly
know how long I'm going to be gone? I try leaving
1009 a couple of times and then dashing
back after ten or fifteen minutes to see whether I
can catch Petra in delicti, but she's never there. I
try making an ungodly mess, then leaving and
hiding somewhere on a lower deck, then dashing
back after exactly twenty-nine minutes again
when I come bursting through the door
there's no Petra and no cleaning. Then I leave
the cabin with exactly the same expression and
appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden
for thirty-one minutes and then haul ass
back-again no sighting of Petra, but now 1009
is sterilized and gleaming, and there's a mint on
the pillow's new case...
...The shower itself overachieves in a very big
way. The HOT setting's water is exfoliatingly
hot, but it takes only one
preset manipulation of the
shower knob to get perfect
98.6-degree water. My
own personal home
should have such water
pressure: the showerhead's
force pins you
helplessly to the stall's
opposite wall, and the
head's MASSAGE setting
makes your eyes
roll up and your sphincter just
about give.24 The showerhead and its flexible
steel line are also detachable, so you can hold
the head and direct its punishing stream just at
your particularly dirty right knee or something.
But all this is still small potatoes compared
with 1009's fascinating and potentially malevolent
toiler. A harmonious concordance of elegant
form and vigorous function, flanked by
rolls of tissue so soft as to be without perforates
for tearing, my toilet has above it this sign:
II ' ozodoesR t
1 era Cab; I 111y
n stezoard J
J I k.?nOh.
ZOllen I'. IV
111In and J 111y r00111
ZOllenl' ,
111 not?
THIS TOILET IS CONNECTED TO A VACUUM
SEWAGE SYSTEM. PLEASEDO NOT THROW INTO
THE TOILET ANYTHING [SIC] THAN ORDINARY
TOILET WASTE AND TOILET PAPER
The toilet's flush produces a brief but traumatizing
sound, a kind of held high- B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale.
Along with this sound comes a suction so awesomely
powerful that it's both scary and
strangely comforting: your waste seems less removed
than hurled from you, and with a velocity
that lets you feel as though the waste is going
to end up someplace so far away that it will
have become an abstraction, a kind of existential
sewage-treatment system.
