The cleaner, p.1
The Cleaner, page 1
“Is it just office trash or the ephemera of a life? Wells masterfully invites the reader into the beating heart of a workplace, uncovering secrets, fantasies, and sorrows with every cleaned cubicle and vacuumed hallway.”
—Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark
“A richly crafted delusion of a novel. I couldn’t put it down—one hell of a book!”
—Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe
“The Cleaner is a sharp and toothy portrait of a life devoted to the convenience of others. Told through the perspective of an acerbic and lovingly conniving night-shift cleaner, this novel skillfully satirizes the workplace novel.”
—Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
“A smart thriller about what the essential workers you choose not to see might right now be thinking about you—and a sharp reminder that you ignore the people upon whom your good life depends at your own peril.”
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
“There are people who pass unnoticed, but who nevertheless quietly shape the worlds that others occupy. The Cleaner is about one such person, about someone who, secretly, without being noticed, subtly tugs on the strings that remain unseen to so many others... A clever portrait that scrapes away the slick veneer of the every day to reveal the rough grain of the wood beneath.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
“A biting, witty, pitch-perfect novel about one woman’s desire to connect with her office co-workers. The Cleaner is funny, slyly moving, and totally weirdly wonderful, and Brandi Wells is a gloriously bold writer. I adored it.”
—Annie Hartnett, author of Unlikely Animals
“Suspenseful, obsessive, and scalpel-sharp... [A] profound parable of contemporary work life imbued with the soft blue glow of a middle manager’s computer screen at night... [An] electrifying, singular debut.”
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Brandi Wells
A NOVEL
The Cleaner
for Susan Bowie Doss
Brandi Wells is the author of a novella, This Boring Apocalypse (Civil Coping Mechanisms), and a chapbook of stories, Please Don’t Be Upset (Tiny Hardcore Press). A native of Georgia, they teach creative writing at California State University, Fullerton.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgments
EVERY DAY, SOME rogue shitter leaves a streak of feces on the back of the toilet seat, right where his ass crack would be. He picks a different toilet each time, like we’re playing a game of cat and mouse. Sometimes, before I look, I imagine that this time he’s shuffled forward and missed the seat, or that he’s constipated so there’s no shit at all, but it’s always there. Imagine seeing that first thing in the morning. Imagine the kind of tone that would set for your day. Trying to write emails and finish presentations and smile in the hallway, but thinking ass crack, ass crack, ass crack.
Tonight, I go to the top floor, because L. will check the others first and, in the meantime, I’ll have some peace. She spends all night following me around, as though without her supervision I might damage the building or commit petty theft. Like, oops, I meant to clean the floors, but I’ve accidentally stolen a sensitive file on sweaters and also spray-painted lopsided boobs across the lobby wall. But I guess she has nothing else to do, no threat to manage in a building like this.
I work from the elevator toward the back of the room, enjoying the wet flapping sound of the mop smacking the floor. I like doing this with no one else around—not having to do it quietly or neatly. Just doing it well.
At the back, I rest at Sad Intern’s desk. It’s stuck in a corner. All the other desks are pushed together in twos or fours, with dividers between them to create the facade of privacy, but hers is against the wall, an afterthought. She’s been here almost two months and the top of her desk remains neat, but the drawers are full of information. What started as a bottle of probiotics, some B12 and a book on how to master your feelings has completely taken over her desk. There’s zit cream and pimple patches and bobby pins full of broken-off hair.
Almost every day, I clean granola or cracker crumbs out of the top drawer where she’s secretly eaten, hunched over and hiding her food. She doesn’t want to leave her desk and miss anything. An intern has to maintain a kind of vigilance, waiting for something important to happen, for her chance to be important too. She lives not just at her desk, but in it. Her top drawer, which ought to be full of paper clips and notepads, is instead full of capsules and powders, all geared toward self-improvement. Get rid of stress! Strengthen your hair! Increase your sex appeal! That one has a picture of a tiger on the front and includes “real animal pheromones.” And pushed way in the back are two different kinds of diet pills, one bottle covered in cartoon flames and the other with the word “miracle” in large print. I consider leaving them on top of her desk in full view, but she seems so helpless that I can’t bring myself to do it. I dig into another drawer and find a tampon, not even in its plastic wrapper or applicator, but loose, and three new books, all about feelings and what to do with them, who’s having them, and how to produce the ones you want.
She’s awfully sad, I think. Sad Intern. Her first week here, I found the feelings book in her desk, under a photocopied welcome packet full of pointlessly underlined phrases, huge blocks of text highlighted in greens and pinks, and hearts and stars she’d drawn in the margins. The packet was mostly instructions for how to work the copier and forward phone calls, but you’d think she’d been given something precious, detailing the company’s deepest editorial secrets.
Her supplements have multiplied over the last few weeks. The sex dust is her newest. It’s shimmery, probably in an attempt to make it seem less sad. Young women have been trying to look less depressed by coating themselves in glitter for decades.
I decide to throw away one of her self-help books—the one with a man on the cover, pointing accusingly at the reader. She’ll think she misplaced it. I try to get rid of these things gradually and steadily. If I don’t, they’ll spread to the rest of the office, a contagion. Other people will start taking supplements. Women will think they have to manage their feelings. Someone will bring in a bunch of crystals and sage. The whole place will begin to shimmer and reek. That kind of atmosphere is not conducive to productivity.
I clean the offices and bathrooms and lobby five nights a week, but my actual job is to take care of everyone. They need so much help.
I idly wonder if Sad Intern and Mr. Buff might get along. His desk is pushed out into the middle of the floor like everyone else’s, but the only thing to hint at a personal life are a few travel-sized containers of different protein powders in his bottom drawer. It feels extra pathetic to bring them to work, and then somehow sadder that they’re his only possessions. I never even have to clean his desk. He wipes it down every day. Something about this is pathetic too—a man who erases himself.
I consider mixing his protein powder with Sad Intern’s sex dust, so they each have a portion of the other. I imagine holding the two of them up like dolls and making them kiss. Two lonely people sitting in the same room, never knowing the other exists because they’re each so preoccupied with maintaining their own appearances. But as I’m rifling through his desk, I find a half-full pack of cigarettes. I don’t know if it’s a new habit or something he’s been hiding from me. Maybe this is why he’s been so conspicuously cleaning his desk. But if he keeps smoking, Sad Intern is never going to like him. She’s probably already smelled the smoke on him, in the elevator, their breakroom, or just walking by his desk.
I empty the pack and carefully line up the cigarettes, to be sure they don’t roll off the desk and get away from me. I spray them with cleaning spray, rotating them a couple times to be sure I’ve saturated them all. Enjoy smoking these, Mr. Trying to be Buff, Trying to be Cool, Trying to be Sick to Death. Here’s a little new poison to go with the old. I tuck them back into the pack and put them where I found them. If I didn’t leave everything so clean, you’d never know I was here.
I’m standing up from his desk when I see L. making her rounds, holding a Maglite even though all the lights are on. It’s bright enough that I can see her black “Security” shirt has gone dingy gray from too many washings with the wrong dete rgent or at the wrong setting. The fabric is starting to pill up and go nubby. No one would see her and feel intimidated. I’m bigger than she is, probably because I do more work. Maybe she uses the flashlight to kill the roaches on the first floor. I’ve put in complaints about them several times, but if pest control’s coming at all, their chemicals don’t do anything. In fact, I think the roaches appreciate the challenge. They get revved up and multiply. But when my supervisor went and looked for the roaches in broad daylight, they were nowhere to be found. As though they’d just be lounging around in the afternoon, sunning themselves. She left me a note anyway, telling me to “make sure to clean the area,” like I was responsible for them. Like I pack them up and bring them to work with me every night. She thinks of me and all she can picture is garbage and distress.
“I see you’re working hard,” L. says, like her hourly stroll around the building is extremely arduous. She doesn’t look like she’s prepared to do any sort of work. Her hair is pulled back loosely, but spilling out, almost an afterthought. She’s cuffed the sleeves of her shirt and has it half-tucked, hanging out on the side. I can tell she thinks this makes her look younger and hipper, but she’s only a little younger than me, and her socks don’t even match.
I give her my best eat-shit smile.
“You know if you start at the back of the office and mop toward the elevator, you won’t have to walk over what you’ve already done,” she says.
“I wasn’t walking over it,” I say, glancing at her clunky, supposedly no-slip work shoes. Somehow, she’s found the most obnoxious ones she could buy. They’re so large that they become the main thing about her. Mine are slim little things, hardly noticeable. And you know what? I’ve never once fallen. While she talks, I luxuriously picture her sliding and falling down the stairs, which she never takes. Feet twisted, elbows bruised, everything a beautiful tangle. At the end of her fall, I’d be at the bottom to tell her where I got my shoes. “They’re not even that expensive,” I’d say.
“You’d get it done faster if you mopped toward the elevator, though,” she says.
“I get it done in plenty of time,” I say. “But thank you.”
I like sitting at the back of the office, waiting for the floor to dry. It’s part of my process. When I walk back to the elevator to do the next floor, I can inspect my work. If I missed a spot or it’s drying funny, I can go over it again. It’s called quality control.
“I heard they were going to install cameras,” she says. “To watch people and see what they’re doing.”
“Then they won’t need you,” I say.
“They’ll mount them over the desks,” she says. “They don’t care about us. They’re watching everyone else.”
But I’m up now, rolling my cart toward the elevator, floor be damned.
“You see the mess in the lobby?” she calls after me.
I’m getting farther away, so I pretend I don’t hear her. Of course I saw the mess. But I’m surprised she even noticed it, because the mess was way at the back of the room, where I hardly ever see her walk. When she’s not chasing me, she spends most of her time rifling through breakrooms or lounging on her stool in the lobby, which she gets to have because she’s pretending to have a bad knee. All night, she’s groaning and popping pills, talking about how she was a star athlete back in high school, which is probably at least a decade ago. She’s lost any muscle definition she had since then, gaunt through lack of exertion. But her knee is fine. I’ve seen her dancing to music on her phone, moving hips that she doesn’t have, or jogging to go meet someone who’s brought her nightly lunch. There’s nothing wrong with her knee except for a lack of motivation.
“See you on the next floor,” she calls after me.
Whatever floor I do next is the one she’ll patrol.
In the elevator, there are crumbs and a full cheese puff in the corner. I already cleaned inside here, and I wonder if she made the mess on purpose to try to put me in my place. She probably stole the cheese puffs from a breakroom. Somebody ought to be guarding her.
I go back to the lobby, partially to clean the mess and partially because I know L. will look for me on all the other floors before she finds me here. And then once she’s back on her stool, I’ll have at least an hour to clean in peace before she musters the energy to patrol again.
The breakroom we share with day-shift maintenance is disgusting, but I refuse to be the only one who cleans it. L. leaves food molding in the mini fridge until I throw it away. She’s never taken the trash out—I’m not sure she even knows where the dumpsters are. And she won’t claim several dirty sweatshirts and a hat that she left strewn across the table, even though they’re very clearly hers and smell like her too.
If it was up to her, she’d have me come over after work and clean her kitchen and bathroom, watching to be sure I got all the hard-to-reach places. Recently she brought in a little plant with green, heart-shaped leaves, “to warm the place up.” I dig into the soil and carefully bury a layer of salt, making sure to cover it completely and smooth the dirt back over. When she waters it, the salt will dehydrate the plant. It’ll slowly shrivel and brown without her knowing why. She can take it out into the sunlight, water it more or less, and give it a special fertilizer, but she won’t be able to stop its death. The only thing she can do is repot it, but I’d salt that one too. I have a lot of salt.
A WEEK LATER, I find a single cigarette in Mr. Buff’s desk. Maybe it fell out of the pack. Maybe it’s new. I give it the ol’ spritz to freshen it and put it back where I found it. I don’t know if he threw the rest of the pack away or smoked them, oblivious to the extra poison. His desk is otherwise unchanged, and I appreciate this consistency, his ability to be known.
In the next desk, Neck Massager is far less stable, still trying to find her own rhythms, her own set of preferences. Sometimes her desk is neat, but sometimes it’s in ruins: crumbs and papers, a half-eaten apple resting in the open air. She never eats the same kind of snack. It’s hard candy one day and unsalted cashews the next. For a week straight, there were greasy wrappers and salt packets in her trash. Then banana peels. Several bananas each day. So much potassium. She must have been eating nothing but bananas. Shitting bananas. Then, suddenly, no more bananas. Anybody would have gotten sick of them. So, it’s hard to conjure an image of her beyond her one consistency: the battery-powered massager in the back of her bottom drawer.
But Mr. Buff, I know. His neatness and protein powder point to a specific kind of man. You wouldn’t have to ask him what he was thinking. You’d already know that he wasn’t. And now that I have the cigarette problem pretty much under control, he’s almost ready for Sad Intern.
But I’m not sure she’s ready for him. She’s only become sadder this week. Her notes are increasingly full of doodles—more than just hearts and stars. Her latest is a small woman with clothes drooping off her body. The bottom half of her is almost liquified. Her mouth is a grim little line, and her eyes are the slightest pinpricks, as though a bright light just blinked on and she’s meeting its gaze. In the intern’s desk are new supplements: St. John’s wort, valerian root, and creatine.
I get up to make sure—and yes, Mr. Buff also has creatine. I knew it sounded familiar. But his is just loose powder that he can scoop out. Hers is bright blue and in capsules shaped like bears. I think of switching them. What a mystery it would be for the two of them, how their creatine changed overnight. They’d sit dumbfounded at their desks, slowly looking around the room, trying to puzzle it out, until they saw one another.
You? she would mouth.
“You?” he would say back, tilting his head for emphasis.
They’d laugh over the unsolved mystery and switch back, but after this they’d have a point of connection. They’d get coffee or go for a drink. It’d turn into dinner, more drinks, a late-night walk home. He’d stand at the entrance to her building. “Want to come in?” she’d ask, smiling, looking away, and then back at him.
That’d be it. She wouldn’t be sad anymore. She’d be Mrs. Buff. Maybe he’d take a little of her sadness for himself, incorporate it into his workout routine, and burn through it. Or maybe she’d always be a little sad, but she’d learn to live with it. She’d wake in the night and feel quietly unhappy, listening for some small sound, some change, that might light things up again. It probably won’t make any difference, but at least she’s trying to deal with the problem of how she feels. She isn’t just letting it consume her. She’s sad, after all, not pathetic.
