Disconnected

He already had the two blue rubber gloves on when he typed in the password to unlock his phone—his hands were sweating again, and the fingerprint scanner wouldn’t recognize his damp finger. He unlocked the phone, set it down on the table, and reached for the little yellow box where the two wireless earbuds rested. He’d charged them yesterday, specifically for today’s task. At least the intention had been there to clean, and in the end he’d managed to force himself to do it.

In the past few days he’d been in a rather melancholic mood, and this morning’s awakening hadn’t been easy after reliving that nightmarish dream again. He’d tossed and turned in bed for a long time, listening to life going on outside. Behind the row of trees in front of the apartment building ran a busy street, and the sound of car tires slicing across the asphalt carried up perfectly. At first he couldn’t stand it, and even now he hadn’t fully made peace with it, but this morning, strangely enough, the noise that usually grated on his ears had a calming effect. He imagined the urgent, bustling life outside flowing in through the window and breathing a little strength into his tired body.

He couldn’t get out of bed right away; he pulled the blanket over his head, wanting to fall back asleep. Suddenly he didn’t care if the nightmare threatened him again once he slipped into unconsciousness. His stomach tightened into a single knot; he felt his heart pounding wildly, his entire upper body moving in sync with the beats. He turned onto his right side, then his left, then peeked out from under the blanket and stared at the ceiling for a while. He even tried lying on his stomach, as if one of the positions might bring some relief. Slowly he realized it was just wasted time—until he got up and did something, he’d only feel worse. „Come on!” he urged himself. „It doesn’t have to be much—„one, two, three!” He yanked the blanket aside and sat up in bed with a single motion.

Okay, that was something. One more deep breath and he straightened up. He went through his usual morning routine, frantically searching his body for whatever energy reserves remained so he could activate them. Today he planned to clean the apartment. He wanted to do it, because it felt so good to sit on the bed afterward, satisfied, thinking: yes, everything around me is spotless, and maybe my life has gotten a little more in order too, right? „You know it’s only hard to start” he reasoned with himself. „After ten minutes it’ll flow like clockwork!”

He put the earbuds in his ears and adjusted them. They didn’t have those pleasant soft silicone tips that don’t irritate the ear at all—the whole thing was hard plastic. But then again, what luxury quality could you expect from a fifteen dollars pair ordered from AliExpress? Otherwise, the sound was perfectly fine; for the price, it sounded beautiful. He pulled down the notification bar, turned on Bluetooth, and waited for the phone and the earbuds to connect.

“Connected,” said the female voice that reminded him of Google Translate.

Super, fully charged, excellent!

He was already sick of that lifeless female voice. When he masturbated, he always connected to the phone with these earbuds. He didn’t like it when cum splattered on the wired ones, because then he had to clean them, and he couldn’t feel they were clean until he did. Even with these, it sometimes crossed his mind that they weren’t entirely safe, because he’d experienced plenty of climaxes where the white fluid shot all the way to his face and a little landed in his ear canal too.

The earbuds had touch-sensitive sides. One tap paused the music or video; a long press turned them off. He always placed the pillow he slept on on the couch cushion too, so that nothing would accidentally hit the wall, because then he’d have to scrape that off as well. Even so, it was unpleasant and humiliating to remember that back when he was younger, in his parents’ house, he hadn’t paid attention and had jerked off without protection. The wall had looked like twenty naked snails had crawled across it. When it was time to paint, he’d said with a flushed face that he’d spilled tea on it, but it was obvious his mother knew what it really was as the two of them stared at the wall.

At home now, that couldn’t happen. He always prepared consciously. He often used this method to release tension, since it was well known that a large amount of endorphins was released in the brain after masturbating. More than once, when the overwhelming force of orgasm hit him, his head had jerked back between the two couch pillows, and his already somewhat large ears had pressed against the earbuds, which stupidly thought it was two fingers. Then he’d hear the robot voice reciting: “power off; power on; connected; disconnected.” Afterward he’d always pant for a while between the two pillows, and when he stood up to go wash himself, he’d remove the earbuds with the same hand that was holding the phone playing the porn video. Because there was no way he was touching the earbuds with his cum-covered hand. It probably wasn’t advisable to wipe such a device with a wet, bleach-soaked rag.

Since then he’d switched to regularly putting a sock over his erection and releasing the hot fluid into it, which he then washed out individually at sixty degrees. He knew he was wasting water, but at forty degrees he didn’t feel like the semen would come out of the fabric properly, and anyway, sixty was a much better number than forty. Both its shape and its sound.

All of this usually flashed through his mind in a single moment when he wanted to use the earbuds for a completely different reason. Right now the goal was to put on some upbeat music so he could get into the rhythm with it, and then when his mood suddenly shifted—as it so often did in a single day—he could already be shaking his hips in the bathroom while cleaning the mirror. He opened Spotify and pondered which of his favorite artists to play. He pulled his mouth to the side and chewed on his lip, thinking that he already knew all of them by heart. He wanted to hear something new, so he found the playlist that contained the current most-listened-to hits. He tapped the first track, and the music started thundering in his ears. „Great”, he thought—let’s get to it!

While he pulled on the two rubber gloves, he silently sent a few mental prayers to the playlist creators, asking them not to include any song that would bring up an unpleasant memory. No problem—if one did come up, he’d quickly take off the gloves (since he couldn’t touch them with Clorox-covered hands), tap the side of the earbuds twice carefully, and the music would switch. The machine could do that too. He could only hope that the next song would quickly erase the unpleasant, dark feeling left by the previous one.

He cleaned with flexible energy. It happened exactly as he knew it would. Starting was the damn hard part. He’d already cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen in a state of transcendence from the music’s rhythm. Several songs came on that he already knew and loved, but there were also one or two he’d heard on the radio before without knowing the exact title or artist, so he had the pleasure of discovering some new tracks he liked. We could probably talk at length about whether it was the kindness or the cruelty of fate that two songs came on that were remakes of older hits—both naturally evoking memories filled with shame and humiliation.

Why not? – the fate seemed to stick its tongue out at him, but he didn’t let it shake him. He quickly took off the rubber gloves, tapped the earbuds twice, and the next song came immediately, swiftly carrying away the painful images. This way he wasted a minimal number of gloves, because of course he couldn’t put the removed ones back on, for two reasons. One was that the glove was already dirty—though he knew it had only been soaked in cleaning agents and couldn’t really be dirty. The other was that when he took it off, a small pool of water ran down his hand; he’d sweated so much from the clinging rubber material.

He carried the phone with him instead of putting it in his pocket, because naturally it wasn’t just his hands that sweated, but his whole body, so he didn’t make the mistake he’d made before, when the phone screen in his pocket had almost gotten soaked from the sweat seeping from his thigh through his pants. Because if the earbuds went beyond the eight-meter range from the phone, the music would stutter in a weird rhythm, or in the worst case it would disconnect completely. He always made sure to touch the phone only where absolutely necessary so it wouldn’t get dirty either, but that wasn’t such a big problem—he could clean it after finishing the cleaning. His back hurt a little while vacuuming after he’d finished the bathroom, but he didn’t pay attention to it; the feeling of cleanliness was spreading more and more through his soul. Yes, the environment around me is getting clean, and I feel much more liberated too. I can breathe a little easier.

Meanwhile, without him noticing, black clouds were gathering outside, and soon a huge storm broke out. The music was booming in his ears; he didn’t hear the thunder, only saw that the apartment had gotten a bit darker as the dark clouds covered the sunlight. When he looked up, he touched the side of the earbuds and the music immediately quieted. „Oh yes!” he thought—„maybe this day isn’t as horrible as it seemed this morning.”

He loved storms very much. He felt that the wind tearing at the treetops and the lightning glowing in the clouds were destroying everything in sync with the storm in his own soul. Adrenaline pulsed in his veins. He set the phone down on the small table facing the window, pushed the curtain aside, opened it wide, and took a deep breath of the scent of freshly falling rain. It was pouring hard; a little spray even reached his face. He pulled the roller blind all the way up—the wind would help the floor dry faster after he mopped it. Smiling, he danced the mop across the floor and quickly finished the job. When he was done with the entryway too, he quickly reached for the cigarette pack and lighter and went out onto the open corridor to smoke.

Who would have thought, but the neighbor was home, standing on the corridor with one of his buddies, enthusiastically chatting about something. He was so embarrassed that he could only respond to the greeting with a nod. He sat down on the plastic chair; the corridor echoed with the click as the lighter spat out flames, then the cigarette end crackled softly as he drew the first drag into his lungs.

He felt very uncomfortable. He listened to the conversation; he didn’t really understand the topics men usually talked about. But he sensed that the two men were very close to each other—the direct exchanges made that clear. Cautiously, he glanced sideways and looked at the neighbor’s calf. It was thick, with a half-finished tribal tattoo on it. Although he didn’t often have the courage to talk in person, he was bolder in writing, so he’d exchanged a few messages with the neighbor on Messenger. He hoped it wouldn’t draw too much attention if he asked what the tattoo on his calf was—though in reality he didn’t care; he just wanted to compliment the man that he had a very attractive calf.

That’s when he learned it was supposed to be a tribal tattoo, but it hadn’t been finished because he’d had varicose vein surgery, and afterward he hadn’t wanted to complete the piece. Out there on the plastic chair he imagined the man inviting him over to his apartment, throwing him on the bed, climbing on top, and passionately devouring his lips. How the man would pin him down, carefully press his weight onto his back, and gently enter him, while one arm trapped his neck and the other hand clasped his own, squeezing it so he would feel safe. After a thorough session he would have gladly touched the man’s calf to find out what the tattooed skin felt like.

But the man had a girlfriend. Once he’d had the miserable luck of overhearing an act through the wall at one o’clock in the morning. „I haven’t cried in a while anyway”, he thought while long streaks of tears ran down his face—perhaps the biggest one had burst from his eye exactly when the man and the woman sighed together in the seconds of their shared orgasm.

Outside, through the corridor’s milk-glass pane blackened with dirt, you could see the wind tearing at the trees and more and more thunder rumbling. He heard the whole outside world strangely, and then it occurred to him that he’d left the device in his ears. At the thought that he must look ridiculous, he quickly stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and scurried back into the apartment.

He was in a bad mood; he’d grown sad. He took a deep breath, came in from the entryway, and walked along the corridor to his room, where there was carpet the whole way so he wouldn’t track up the freshly mopped tiles. He saw the sky flashing again and again outside, and twice in a row a powerful rumble struck the ground as lightning assaulted the earth. He felt a little relieved again; for a moment he even imagined that if he concentrated hard enough, he could summon another lightning strike with the pain now swirling in his soul.

He stepped onto the carpet and looked around the room to see where his phone was. He thought he’d check social media—which he really only used as empty time-filling and for nothing else except to make him feel how lonely he was. „Fuck”, he cursed in his head—„it’s on the small table!” And the only way to get to the small table was to step at least once on the floor section between the two carpets that were far apart from each other. He hated the thought of leaving his footprint in the spotless cleanliness. He thought he’d wait a bit, maybe the floor would dry quickly, but it didn’t look like it would happen fast. Then he’d go get it.

He sprang from the edge of the carpet and felt the tip of his right foot touch the wet floor, then pushed himself forward. Suddenly he felt a childlike urge; he remembered how, even back then during storms, he would always press his little hands against the terrace door and watch the heavenly battle from inside. He had always thought he would be a bird that sliced through the air at times like this, riding the wind, feeling it ruffle his feathers, the cool raindrops slapping his face. He had dreamed about it many times when he was little. According to his mother, he hadn’t been an easy child to put to sleep, but there were times when he slept as sweetly and quietly as milk. He knew that was what he had always dreamed then.

The whole thing lasted only a single second, but he had never felt so free, so calm. In that one second he tried to remember what was causing this uplifting feeling, what this dreamlike sensation was in which the nightmare had no place. Before he could figure it out, his skull shattered on the concrete. The sound of the impact was swallowed by the roar of a lightning bolt that struck the ground at the exact moment he did. Who is the person crazy enough to walk around outside in weather like this? Still, a woman’s scream sliced through the air. Whether she had screamed in fright at the lightning strike or because she had seen the protagonist’s body shatter into pieces on the ground dotted with puddles that quickly turned dark red, we will never know. What is certain, however, is that he had fallen more than eight meters, because the robot female voice rang out from between the bones and the brain matter.

“Disconnected.”

But at least the apartment was clean.