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Deskny.

And thus began the onset of unfiltered waves.

What followed next was the collapse of everything. A primordial flood. Frothing white tides. A great mechanical cleansing after which hoarse arid winds purged the world of dampness and moisture.

In other words, I was doing my laundry.

The local laundromat sat two and a half blocks from my apartment. It was not the busiest spot. Most homes and even some apartments in the area housed in-unit washers and driers now. Like all things trapped in the cycle of suburban sprawl, the clientele at the mat could be modeled with exponentially weighted moving averages, where the half-life lambda spiraled toward zero in proportion to every new square foot added to the city limits.

The facility was owned by a very old couple.

The husband spent his days behind the counter in the back, reading a hardcover or trying the morning crossword. The wife toured the laundromat, rediscoverying it each day. She inspected the machines, scrubbed their interiors with a long scruffy brush, and requested her husband fix the ones that rattled too much.

Today, the laundromat was nearly empty.

I brought two hampers separating the whites from the colors and sat near the front of the store. Despite the fact that I remained certifiably hopeless at it, I brought the reading materials from philosophy class to pour over while I waited for the washers to finish spinning.

Halfway through the drying cycle, and no more than halfway through one page, a young woman wearing a white undershirt and a blue skirt walked into the laundromat. She was carrying one laundry bag which contained a colorful array of differently sized outfits.

There was, for instance, a notable yellow sundress in there.

“Grandma!” called a familiar voice.

“Valerie!” cried the old wife. “What a nice surprise. It’s been so long.”

“I saw you just the other day, grandma…”

“That’s forever to me, Valerie,” the old wife chuckled. “Come here. Give your grandmother a kiss.”

Only when the youthful woman brushed her carved out face against sagging, wrinkled skin did she spot me. From the way her shoulders locked, I could tell she recognized who I was. The old wife turned around also, presumably to look at me.

“Is that a friend of yours?” asked the old wife.

“I just know her from school,” said the woman. “That’s all.”

Valerie, president of the film club, but not clothed in her usual yellow sundress, walked over and presided over me.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed.

“I’m doing laundry,” I answered.

“I’m doing mine next to you then,” she said.

“Suit yourself.”

Valerie popped open her washing machine. Into it, she threw underwear, her yellow sundress, a burnt sepia blouse, burgundy skirts, more undershirts, loose socks, and blue denim short shorts.

“That denim’s going to stain everything,” I said.

“Mind your own business.”

“Suit yourself,” I repeated.

“You must think you’re so smart and clever,” Valerie said, “causing us all that trouble. Getting Natasha to come back to us was not easy.”

“I don’t think I’m smart or clever at all,” I replied, “but bullies like you will always be idiots. You’ll believe just about anything.”

“I didn’t believe that you were the Electromagnetic Man. You aren’t fit to be him.”

“Congratulations.”

“And you’re wrong about another thing,” Valerie continued. “There’s only one thing that the film club believes in, and that’s Destiny.”

“Destiny? Like fate?”

“No,” Valerie scoffed. “Right. Of course you’d be ignorant about her. Your nose is buried in books all day. Destiny’s our savior. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched to call her a goddess. She has that kind of power, and she’s guiding us back to where we belong. She’s asked us to save as many people as possible. We try, but most acolytes fall at the first obstacle.”

“Save people? From what?”

“What do you think happened to the Electromagnetic Man?” Valerie said. “He did those things, yes, but what drove him to the brink was the coming waves of deskny. And deskny is coming for us all. I’m starting to hear it everywhere. If we don’t rise to our rightful place, we’ll fall from the resulting world just like the Electromagnetic Man and the rest of them.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“If you were among the deserving, you would have understood once you finished Apocalypse Anew,” Valerie sighed. “It depicts the destruction and rebirth of things. It shows the moment of deskny, when the limited perspectives of the unworthy are obliterated while the rest of us breach Destiny’s wonderful world and merge our inner and outer realities together.”

“That doesn’t sound wonderful at all.”

“Only because, like I said, you’re one of the uninitiated,” Valerie laughed.

A pair of sequences of three slow beeps signalled that my clothes had finished drying. I popped open the doors of the two driers I was using. I pushed my hands around both heaps of clothes. Satisfied, I began tossing them back into two clean hampers I had also brought along.

“The return to deskny begins very soon,” Valerie said. “I suggest you come to the film club this week to finish Apocalypse Anew. There is no surviving otherwise.”

“You seem a bit too insistent on getting me to join,” I shrugged.

“Natasha seems to really like you,” Valerie grumbled. “Her attachment to you calls her away from her responsibility to our world. We have to be forceful to pull her back. If you were there, it would be easier to keep her in line.”

“And why does this person matter?”

“Because Natasha is Destiny’s physical form,” Valerie said. “She’s the conduit that’ll shield us from electromagnetic waves. That’s why we need her. Destiny saved the world once in July 1999. She’s destined to save the world again this summer, this month, when our electromagnetic fields become overrun by the return of deskny.”

“You should just leave people alone,” I murmured. “Just leave them all alone.”

“By the way, before you leave,” Valerie said. “Is your hair normally like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“That pink color.”

“Oh. I think… I’ve had it since I was a kid. Why?”

“You should wear something other than white then. White’s too bright on you.”

“...I’ll think about it.”

I stuffed the rest of my clothes into the clean hampers and left. Just like last time, Valerie made no move to stop me. She tended to her doting grandmother, who pointed at me again as I exited the laundromat.

When I returned to my apartment, I arranged my clothes into their designated dressers. With the dirty hampers, I folded them flat, turned on the bathtub, laid them inside the tub, then finally drenched them in a cleaning solution.

For once, my list of chores had left me with a comfortable remainder of the day. I contemplated studying further, but I had already devoted the majority of my intellectual battery trying to parse dialectical arguments with minimal success.

I needed a real break, some sort of reprieve.

So, I turned my computer back on.

I had buried my brother’s melted monster figurines below the monitor. With the wooden boards I had pulled from the walls and a serrated knife, I had carved makeshift tombs for their cadavers. I pulled those coffins out now and placed my microphone on top of them to level the mic with my lips.

I knew what I was doing, knew what I was implying by flipping open the security cover on my camera. How else should one interpret stitching my phone to its adjustable mount and booting up the model tracking software? I could hide behind other rationales before, but what could be done now?

What was wrong with me?

Why was I doing this?

Had the radio waves gotten to me already, as Valerie had predicted? It felt like a possibility now that the electric eel monster figurine lay in its wooden coffer with its plastic face molded by sunlight.

The computer screen blinked. Several clicks later a red dot blinked over the back of my hand. My headphones fell over my ears, and Destiny stared back at me.

She couldn’t actually see me. We lived in different worlds, she in her two dimensional plane broadcasting to my world folded in three. If she could see at all, then I existed to her only as a line or at most a series of flat distributed coordinates distinguishable only by color.

But I could see her, rendered on my monitor with her bright pink hair and deep mauve irises. Her pointed chin rested below the center of the screen. Her taut shoulders floated and fell. Unlike her usual exuberant demeanor, Destiny offered now an empty gaze, the kind born from the ancient eras, where celestial seers stared vacantly into a future too terrible to bear back to the present.

Every so often, whether from a utility outage or an electronic malfunction or the deskny that breached the perimeters of my apartment, my monitor flickered. But even in that split second where the screen snapped on and off, Destiny remained.

Like burn-in on plasma displays, the monitor retained a dull echo, where her pink hair had faded from too much bleaching. Murky circles dimmer than the off screen grew in the lidded undergrowth beneath her violet eyes. Her chin appeared thinner, more gaunt. Flaky skin dipped into vague hollows between her cheeks.

Then the screen turned back on. The recording light started blinking and Destiny smiled.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, this is Destiny. How are you today?