The Shagomat

Erica was an even girl, one might say, to the point of never baring her stomach. She considered it a plus.

She was twenty-four and owned not a single top that ended higher than the belt of her trousers. At the lake she wore a navy one-piece swimsuit, of the kind that look as though they were meant to save someone’s life. Erica’s theory was simple: whoever shows nothing has nothing to explain. The girls from her estate said her stomach was a safe-nobody knows what’s inside, but everyone assumes it’s something valuable. Erica laughed along with them, and then tugged her sweater down anyway.

She was also even in the colloquial sense, the one in which people say “a good sort.” She paid back borrowed money to the last penny, didn’t gossip, and didn’t make scenes. When someone was moving house, she turned up first with the boxes and left last. People said of her: “You can rely on Erica.” She considered it a plus.

She worked at a self-service launderette on Fabryczna Street. The sign in the window read: “Insert coin, wash it yourself.” Erica emptied the coin boxes, changed banknotes into tokens, and pulled out of the drums the socks that the machines swallowed without a word of explanation. She liked the work. The machines were honest: you put in a coin, you get your washing. No promises, no surprises. Erica believed the world would be a better place if everything worked like a washing machine.

The world did not forgive this.

In March the owner announced that he was selling the premises to a discount supermarket. In April Kuba, with whom she had lived for three years, left for Spain with the car and her best sweatshirt, leaving her the loan for that car as her inheritance. The loan was in his name, but she was the one who had guaranteed it—of course she had, “just for a while,” because she was even. In May the bailiff came knocking. In June the launderette was closed, and Erica had a hundred and forty zlotys in her account, a travel bag, and the conviction that somehow it would be all right.

It wasn’t.

She met Wiola outside the closed doors of the launderette, with her termination notice in her pocket. Wiola had gone to primary school with her, then left for the big city, and now she had come back in enormous sunglasses and a perfume that smelled like other people’s money.

“I’ve got something for you,” she said instead of “hello.” “Reception at a modern entertainment venue. Two thousand a week, a room on site, meals. They’re looking for someone even.”

“Even?”

“Well, someone like you. Someone you can rely on. Someone who doesn’t make trouble.”

Erica took it as a compliment. It did not occur to her that this was a job description.

She went that very evening. The venue was called Club “Moneta” and stood on the edge of town, in the former Retail Automation Works: red brick, bars on the windows, a neon sign that blinked nervously like an eye with a tic. Wiola drove her right up to the door but did not get out.

The door was opened by Mr Zygmunt, a man in his sixties, in a waistcoat, with a moustache trimmed as evenly as a lawn. By way of greeting he asked for her ID and her phone: the ID to be copied, the phone because there was no signal in the building anyway. Erica handed over both. After all, she was even, and even people don’t make a drama out of formalities.

Mr Zygmunt had made his fortune on vending machines for coffee, sandwiches and condoms in men’s toilets. He talked about it as he led her down the corridor, with the tenderness with which others speak of their children. One evening, when the fourth coffee machine broke down, he experienced an epiphany, which he called a gap in the market.

“People don’t like to negotiate,” he explained. “They don’t like talking, dinners, or pretending. People like to put a coin in and get what they came for. Coffee. A sandwich.” He let his voice hang, and in that pause there was room for everything he did not say.

“And reception?” Erica asked.

“Reception is a cost. A system replaces reception.” He smiled with an inventor’s pride. “Here we call it the Shagomat.”

The corridor stretched between two rows of identical doors, lacquered dark green and marked with brass numbers. By each one, at hand height, a metal box had been set into the wall, with a narrow slot for a token and a small lamp. Red or green. Erica recognised the mechanism before she understood its meaning: for four years she had been repairing ones just like it.

Mr Zygmunt stopped at number seven.

“You’ll be Seven.”

In the room there was a bed, a washbasin and a mirror in which Erica avoided her own gaze. On the wall hung a framed set of instructions, as in lifts: “Insert token. Wait for the green light. Complaints not accepted.” She read it once, and her stomach went cold, the very same stomach she never showed to anyone.

Mr Zygmunt sat her down on the edge of the bed and handed her a contract. Beside her name someone had already written in block capitals: “hereinafter referred to as the Device.” She read, and with every clause she felt colder.

§ 3. The Device remains on standby twenty-four hours a day.

§ 4. Upon payment of the fee, the Device fulfils the order. The Device does not refuse and does not negotiate.

§ 7. The Device covers the costs of transport, training, wardrobe and joining fee, in the total amount of PLN 48,000, from its own revenues.

“There must be some mistake,” said Erica. “Wiola said it was reception.”

“Wiola says all sorts of things,” Mr Zygmunt replied gently. “But she is honest. She took a commission for you and didn’t even hide it. By the piece, as always.”

“I’m leaving.”

“Of course.” He bowed slightly, almost with sympathy. “The door is not locked. All that remains is the matter of the forty-eight thousand the club has already laid out, and of your documents, which will stay in deposit until the account is settled. But you are an even girl. You won’t leave a debt behind.”

Erica opened her mouth to say that she had signed nothing, that nobody had invited her here on such terms, that she owed no one anything. The words did not come. For as long as she could remember she had paid back everything to the last penny and could not do otherwise, and Mr Zygmunt had known it before he ever saw her. They had been looking for someone even. Only now did she fully understand that word.

“Please make yourself at home,” he said from the doorway. “Today it is enough for you to listen. Everyone understands how it works after the first clink.”

He left. Under the door a thin green line of light appeared.

Erica sat on the edge of the bed with the contract in one hand and, in the other, the navy sweatshirt she had pulled out of her bag—the only one Kuba had not had time to take. The clink came after a quarter of an hour. Somewhere deep in the corridor, metal rang against metal, a lock clicked, and someone laughed a low, contented laugh-the way people laugh when a machine has just given them their change.

Erica knew that sound better than her own name. All her life she had considered it the most honest sound in the world.

She pressed the sweatshirt to her stomach and, for the first time in her life, found not a single plus in anything.