I didn’t count how many times I had hit the start button on the dishwasher, but I imagine it was the thirtysixth initiation of the 90-second cycle. When I bent over the button and pushed it in with my thumb the sensation had the uncanny feeling that I’ve come to know and fear, combined with the head rush of standing straight up again, spinning around to grab the empty rack behind me, and continuing in a full 360 to place it in the absence of the rack now in the machine, all accomplished by the muscle memory I had developed by enacting the same ritual hundreds of times before.
My clothes were different and the sun was higher and my hair was shorter. I was within a consciousness that was at that point historic to me, but one that was significantly more recent than previous similar into-body experiences. The scene felt identical, the same co-workers surrounded me, the same dishes surrounded me in various stages of cleanliness, I wore the same shoes, “She’s A Bad Mama Jama” by Carl Carlton was playing as it does eventually on the Motown, ‘70s funk, Michael Jackson and Hall & Oates stations, among others. I stacked the clean bowls behind me, replaced them by the line cook’s station, then grabbed a handful of silverware to unload by the bus tub area to make sure it wasn’t overflowing with haphazardly stacked dirty dishes. There was a load in there so I consolidated them into one of the tubs and came back into the narrowing kitchen announcing proudly, “coming back with a bus tub,” and I was able to fall into the four-hour closing routine without missing a step.
At a certain point, an hour or so later, after nearly catching up on all the dishes sent to me by the prep and line cooks, the customers and the juice station, I went to get my phone and check a few things. No messages or phone calls, but it was in fact two weeks earlier. It was the day before I was to take a two-day trip into the mountains. I bought four episodes on VHS of the Twilight Zone at a thrift store on the way to work. I rode my bike home and wanted to watch the Twilight Zone, but didn’t—I got ready for the trip and went to sleep early-ish.
Closing the place was the same kind of misery that culminates in the same kind of victorious feeling that feels simultaneously like a kind of failure—I just washed a shit ton of dishes, but really I just continually rewashed the same dishes, some sullied accidentally or dropped before they were even utilized, a feeling of dread and meaninglessness Dishwasher Pete saw symbolized in The Blue-Rimmed Plate, an unexplained black sheep in the stacks of white dishes, a singular plate that, one day counting, he washed 27 times in a shift. “As Blue-Rimmed went round and round, he pointed out I had it all wrong. Really I was just moving in circles: washing things that only got dirty again within minutes. The next town, the next job, the story would always be the same: the dishes would never remain clean.”
The worst was that not only had I washed these dishes over and over again already, but that I had already done them on this night in this order in these clothes at this pace so that déjà vu couldn’t even describe the vibrations of reoccurrence and synchronicity were pulsing from the dishwasher through the sink to my hips and from the faucet through the pressure washer through my fingertips onto the plates and over my other hand. Traces of my movements lingered in the air, the noises of the kitchen and the seating beyond echoed and only made sense as nonlinguistic sounds, I moved swiftly through a slow-motion world which included myself. And then I said goodnight and went home and insisted that we watch the Twilight Zone VHS because, having since watched it, I now knew that, in the first featured episode, “Walking Distance,” the protagonist experiences a situation that would have been pretty far out to experience. I couldn’t have insisted on this and explained that I was myself present in what I consider to be the past—I would have been thought crazy. And the two-day trip to the mountains would have to be postponed.
When I did end up watching the episode for the first time in what remains of my linear perception of time, I rewound the VHS and transcribed a particularly poignant Rod Serling transition:
A man can think a lot of thoughts and walk a lot of pavements between afternoon and night. And to a man like Martin Sloane to whom memories suddenly become reality, a resolve can come as clearly and as inexorably as stars on a summer night. Martin Sloane is now back in time and his resolve is to put in a claim to the past.
Everyone knows it’s dangerous to apply a free will not indigenous to its moment, realities not meant to exist open up irrationally and permanently, nostalgia destroys that which it worships, and so I didn’t watch “Walking Distance,” I redid everything as exactly as possible as it was already done and went to bed at precisely the time I vaguely recall doing so before.
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