Secret Life
Interlude 2
Some say that more people travel up to the fifth floor than ever come down. Others, that more come down than go up. Those on the first floor say the fifth floor is empty, while those on the fourth floor say it is full, but will not say full of what. A few have speculated that a vast ossuary fills up the space—a plateau of bones and skulls receding off into the distance. That no manager is ever buried outside the building. That this field of bones, if measured, is longer than the building could logically contain. The janitors laugh at such speculation. They like to say, “Wiser to ask: What is in the basement?” But this only the janitors know.
“Down There”
“We rule from the bottom up,” the janitors say from their basement stronghold, knowing in their hearts that they could as well survive without the floors above as a turtle can survive without its shell.
There exist two types of janitor in the office building: night janitors and day janitors. They can be distinguished by how they manifest themselves. The night janitors rest in closets during the day, among the brooms and mops, and do not emerge until dusk. The day janitors leave the building at twilight in large, unsmiling groups. The two types of janitor never meet—know each other only by their handiwork, the signs left in the patterns of swept floors, polished hallway lamps, changed light bulbs. They are as ghosts to one another. Each has created a mythology for the other—an act of faith. On the rare occasions when they by accident meet, they stare at each other as if seeing a stranger in the mirror, and to as much effect.
Only one janitor travels between the two worlds of night and day: the Head Janitor, he who works during both light and dark and rarely sleeps. It is the Head Janitor, bulked and bulky, tall and thick, who growls out orders in a gravelly baritone from between moistened lips, as much despot as cleaning agent. They listen as if to a force of nature; during the day, he comes to the night janitors in their closets as a premonition of darkness and they smile in their twisted sleep, dancing through the halls with mop and broom.
He it is who gives voice to their thoughts, their desires, as he paces up and down the basement hallway, neither cleaned nor cleaner.
“You shall not think of them as your masters,” he says to them. “You shall not think of them at all. Your work exists independent of them, without them. They are as wraiths to you. Our faith has to do with honest labor, with the purification of the inanimate. This is how we pray and how we do our jobs. Remember that. They are nothing: a scrap of cloud, a hint of a breeze.”
“We empty their trash,” the janitors intone. “We straighten up their messes. We complete their very thoughts. They can as well survive without us as without the very air.”
Their philosophy has descended to them through long years from the floors above—from crumpled pages saved, from the backs of notepads casually scribbled upon and tossed aside. They are as likely to divine wisdom from a discarded sentence passed down from generation to generation as from any reputable source. Theirs is a philosophy of scraps and fragments, the punctured code of incomplete memos and torn note cards. What words were meant as flotsam, they regain as compost for their ways.
The Head Janitor cannot remember a time when he was not alive. He looks out sometimes through the ground-floor window that faces the south and grumbles about the gray, the gloom. “Clean,” he mumbles. “Cleaner.” His bloodshot eyes widen and he trembles, in the grip of some secret emotion.
Infiltration
...and the vine continued to grow, twisting its way across the inside of the ceiling tiles, winding its way past layers of insulation, found the air ducts, and began to colonize the building’s arteries, harming no one, so that even the strange people of the second floor, with their clicking beetle speech, noticed that the air had become fresher, while in the basement the janitors grumbled and jabbed their mops into the air, for they had grown to like the stifling mustiness above the basement, the vine still crawling and pushing its way through the building, filling every hidden corner, allowing mice to crawl over it and chew on its blossoms, their droppings over time creating a thin layer of soil from which it grew stronger still, the infiltration continuing…
