Charlie listened to the buzzing sound of the alarm, and tried not to. He picked up the mop and focused on the sound of water falling from the blue and white microfibers back into the bucket and began to push the mop around the segment of the floor he’d cleaned. Roaches skittered away and filled him with disgust.

He turned his face a little away from what he was doing, not wanting to see how filthy the mop was, either looking to the side or down at the path ahead… neither of which was pleasant in his mind.

‘I will do this. I will get this done. It’s not a big victory, it’s a small one, it’s a nothing one, but it’s mine.’ Charlie reassured himself and pushed down hard on the long white pole to which the strands of cloth were attached.

Nothing about it felt fantastic, but he zoned out in the moment and ignored the buzzing well enough eventually. He took the mop up, soaked it in the water, and repeated the process. His best efforts however, had cleaned up only a bare minimum. He looked again. A quick calculation in his head based on the known square footage of his apartment and the known length of his foot and the average footfall, ‘I’ve done one hundred square feet… that’s kind of pathetic. But it’s one hundred square feet that wasn’t clean yesterday.’

He picked up the bucket, took it to the bathroom and dumped the water down the toilet where it drained away with a gurgling noise, the filthy gray would have filled him with nausea if it weren’t for the fact that the strong scent of pine kept the smell hidden. ‘If it smells clean, it is clean.’ The words came to mind that one of his less clean friends had said when he explained why he febreezed his clothes rather than doing laundry more often.

Blatantly false as it was, Charlie couldn’t abide by it, and coined his own phrase at just that moment, ‘If it doesn’t smell, at least it doesn’t stink.’ He snorted at the pointed sophistry and slid the door of the shower open, then turned on the hot water again, the round showerhead sprayed water out on full blast.

‘Wait, when was the last time I did laundry?’ Charlie asked and looked down at his clothes, ‘Dinner, right? My dinner with Josef and Mileva… but wasn’t that just a dream? I mean I had to tell Josef later… maybe I should stop by the liquor store.’ The idea of a drink was pleasant enough to make him smack his lips.

Then the noise of a heavier waterfall echoed in the rectangular shower and he glanced down. “Shit!” He cursed, the white bucket was now overflowing, he darted his hand out and tilted it forward, dumping half of the eight gallon bucket out before a grunt of effort had it hefted over the handspand high lip of the shower base.

He hefted it past the door, splashing his shoes and soaking his feet before swinging the shower door closed and leaving the water running.

A flurry of activity later the water was now white as snow from additional cleaners and the mop was sweeping over the space of his apartment, his shoulders strained and his body ached. But determination took over. ‘I will not die in filth. I can’t make it right, but dying in dirt and grim and disgusting hovel like conditions just makes it nastier for everybody else too.’ So he scrubbed.

The buzzing sound was gone.

He scrubbed.

The ‘floor’ at least part of it, was now completely visible and the tan wooden surface where he’d cleaned was now sparkling enough that it caught the sun through the window and actually created ‘glare’.

The rest of the room remained a wreck.

‘But this was a nice start… I think I can reward myself a little.’ It was such a delightful thought, a real ‘reward’ for himself had been a long time coming.

He took off his clothing and went to the little closet-like space where his washer and dryer sat and opened up the washer. The tell tale ‘thunk’ like noise of the little security latch echoed for a moment when he opened the top.

Then Charlie took off his clothes and threw them in, overhead there was a small shelf where liquid detergent sat, he plucked the blue bottle from overhead, opened the white cap with a quick slap that spun it up the screw shape and popped it off. He caught the top, tilted it, and poured the bluish liquid into the measuring cap and poured it over his clothing.

He put the cap back in place, slapped a good spin the opposite direction to secure it again, closed the washer and turned it on after setting it to a small load and then went back to the shower where the water still ran.

The water burned a little bit at first, but the reddening of his skin was a small price to pay for the supreme comfort of almost boiling himself in the torrential downpour of the high powered showerhead.

The tops of his feet began to itch, he reached up and then tilted the showerhead down so that it was aimed at his feet. The heat scratched that itching sensation. Charlie sighed in comfort and then raised the head up again.

He reached for the green bottle of Irish Spring body wash and turned the water of the shower off while he lathered himself up. “Ugh…” Charlie shuddered while he looked down at his protruding gut, “I feel gross. I hate this.” He mumbled and put a hand on his belly, pushing the flesh of his palm to the flesh of his gut, his gut gave easily and jiggled a little. He grabbed the fat and shook his head. “Nope. I don’t have to let myself go farther…” He looked down at the lathered flesh and wished it away.

It went nowhere.

He turned the water back on and it began to assault his body, carrying away the thick lather he’d worked into his skin and the filth with it.

He turned around to do his backside and when he was completely clean, he sat and enjoyed the feel of hot water for its own sake.

The minutes passed quickly for him, sitting beneath the water with his legs crossed and head bowed, it was as serene as possible and there was nothing to distract him from nothingness at all.

Through his mind ran thoughts of all his past experiments, the delving of the quanta, proving that he could reverse electron spin and how it could be used for limitless long range communication and replace the traditional binary code with electron shift calculations around protons. The release of the first commercially viable quantum computer and the acceleration of the internet speeds, even the instant control of probes that were leaving the solar system.

“No more waiting for information to take years to return via radio waves, no more signal loss, no more slow downloads…” He chuckled and raised his head with pride in all his accomplishments.

Charlie impulsively began to laugh uproariously in the water when a favorite memory came to mind.

“Here, Josef, take a look at this.” He’d said and slid a stack of papers across the coffee shop table to his friend.

Josef’s eyes, normally soft as that of a cow, became hard and focused and darted over the page, his finger sliding steadily forward to guide his eyes that much faster, the noise of each rustling page shifting as the brilliant mind in a behemoth body tore through the work.

“What do you think?” Charlie remembered catching his own shit eating smug grin, translucent in the glass window of the campus coffee shop.

Josef set the paper down, took a sip out of the white cup with the green mermaid on it, smacked his lips, sighed, folded his hands with fingers interlocked over the top of the papers and said,

‘Now porn downloads will be instant no matter how large the files are.’

Charlie laughed enough to turn every head in the busy shop, and it made him laugh again in the moment as water cascaded down his face like a limitless supply of happy tears.

The buzz hit his ear to interrupt the moment, ‘Laundry.’ Charlie said and stood up, he turned the handle of the shower and stepped out, sliding the door closed behind himself and then snatching a towel he quickly dried his body off and went out into the main room, then over to the washer.

The machine was shaking and rattling as it went through the last minutes of the spin cycle. Charlie reached down to tug lightly on the lid, but the autolock feature was engaged and there was nothing he could do to open the door without stopping the process.

“Damn it! I could have sworn…” Charlie muttered, it wouldn’t be long. However, that didn’t make it less annoying.

Then he heard it again, but it was behind him.

The buzzing came from the floor at the head of his bed as if it had never stopped.