The Laundromat at the Center of the Universe

The outpatient clinic knows him only by the name of SK45, which is the moniker he puts on intake forms when police occasionally try to get him off the street.  He wears tattered clothes and believes that his mission is to keep the washing machines and dryers at the Washington Avenue Laundromat in continual operation.  He feeds them quarters he gets from panhandling, believing that electromagnetic energy given off by the machines keeps the earth spinning and the cosmic gears turning so that galaxies, moons, and planets will continue their orderly, sidereal procession through the cosmos.

The mental health clinic has diagnosed him as schizophrenic and pumps him full of anti-psychotic drugs.  When he's released, he resumes his supremely important task at the Washington Avenue Laundromat.

Some say that SK45 is crazy, a lunatic who should be locked up for good at the state mental hospital.  An astute observer, however, would notice that when he's at the clinic or one of the dryers stops spinning for too long, earthquakes and tsunamis occur.  Huge blocks of ice break away from the western shelf of Antarctica.  Typhoons churn through the warm waters of the Pacific like scorned lovers.  The clocks at the Naval Observatory show that the earth's rotation has lost a full second of time, although they are unaware of the existence of SK45.  Stars in distant galaxies explode into supernovas.  Planets move in retrograde.

Let us hope that SK45 receives an unending supply of quarters, for the center of the clockwork universe is at the Washington Avenue Laundromat.

~William Hammett

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