The All-Night Laundromat

Lao Lin took over the round-the-clock laundromat by the university town last winter.

The place stays lit twenty-four hours; condensation beads on the glass door and the rumble of the drums comes out in layers. Lao Lin works the day, leaves the nights to a part-timer, and drops by every couple of nights to check.

The strange thing is machine three.

Whenever he comes in after midnight, around seven minutes past three, machine three starts up on its own. No coins, no clothes, the drum empty, yet the light goes on, water fills, and the drum turns slowly, as if someone were washing something. The first time he took it for a faulty timer and called a repairman, who checked the wiring and found nothing wrong. On the camera you can see, just before it starts, a thin tall shadow pass the glass door, bent over as if talking to the machine — but there is no one outside.

He asked Fatty, the woman who packs up the night market next door. She thought a moment and said the shop used to belong to a night-shift worker who washed work clothes; two winters back a gas leak killed him in the back room, with his blue work jacket still soaking in the machine, unretrieved. The shop changed hands, the machines were replaced, but that habit of his seemed not to leave with the man.

Lao Lin stopped trying to fix it.

From then on, every night at three he left a light burning by machine three and a bottle of warm water. The shadow came a few times; once it lingered a long while and gently patted the lid, and after that was never seen again.

Others called him superstitious. Lao Lin said: a man who washed work clothes half his life can't shake the habit of clocking in even after he's gone — tell him to stop and he can't.

Midnight Record note: A machine reads a program, not a person; yet some people's habits are more stubborn than any program. That night-shift worker who died in the back room left behind, in this world, an unwashed blue jacket and a washing machine that turns itself on at the hour. The light and the water Lao Lin leaves are not for a ghost, but for a man who took showing up for work as a duty he never dropped, even in death: rest now, I'll watch it tonight. A city has many lights burning past midnight, most of them for oneself; the ones left on for a stranger are rare.