HEAVEN AND HELL

The Challenger had blown up in the bleak year between college and graduate school when he had a paper route to raise money toward tuition. The next morning, as he folded newspapers in his car, he occasionally stopped to study the tragic pictures and read some of the account. He could not help but think back a few years from that date to when all the planets had aligned one March night, and he, with a pair of binoculars and a telescope, stayed up to see the last of them, Mercury, rise minutes before the Sun. He looked over his bundle of inked pages, through the windshield and seeming haze of an ashy pyre, and tried to recall something of that kinder stellar geometry. Had the hopeful future he imagined pinned to the night sky only been a young man’s misreading of pinholes in a box lid?

By the time the Columbia broke up on reentry two decades later, he was back buried in darkness, toiling with his hands, and thankful the vapor glow of streetlights discouraged him from further celestial speculation.

MICHAEL LOUDEN-WEST did not like his job working part-time as a night janitor for a surgical equipment manufacturer, but it was an occupation that gave him a lot of time alone with little supervision. If “Hell is other people,” as Sartre once argued, then this line of work was a notch below Buddhist monk in the solitary pursuit of evading suffering. The staff was skeletal on the graveyard shift and oblivious to his comings and goings. Still, he was a conscientious worker, and became self-conscious if there was not enough work to keep him busy. The college graduate did not mind the unglamorous nature of his profession, and generally speaking being left to himself was a key draw to working in building maintenance. Consequently, he spent much of his downtime writing in his journal in the large supply closet.

He was eating his habitual bag of discount cheese puffs and drinking his requisite can of Big K diet soda when the closet door opened; it never failed to startle him. Eddy, the other night janitor, came in and pulled out his stashed can of beer from behind several bottles of industrial floor cleaner. Always nosey, he peeked down to spy what his coworker was working on. Michael closed his journal, prompting the man to shift gears.

“Heard you’re pulling up stakes?” he grunted.

“It’s my last night.” The writer’s response was clipped. He always kept his surface area to a minimum to dissuade probing questions.

Eddy sat down and took out a crinkled, half-used-up cigar from his pocket. On lighting it, he blew smoke up over rolls of paper towels to demonstrate disdain for his employer’s nonsmoking policy. His words followed the plaited swirl with disinterest. “So where’s it you’re going?”

“Stonesthrow.”

“College town, right? Lots of cute coeds. Those girls will drop their pants for the price of a dime beer. Or for free if you have a camcorder!”

The coworker weakly acknowledged the humorous remark.

Eddy was glummer after his second puff. “By the time they hang up their gowns and mortarboards, they’ll be a little more selective about who they part their pretty painted toenails for. And more discreet.” He pulled something out of his pants pocket. “See this?”

Michael looked over the unassuming bobby pin in the man’s hand.

The custodian boasted, “Found this in the men’s room. The one the suits use upstairs.” He shoved the hair accessory back out of sight, gloating some more. “I know the personal effects of every employee in this place: every stick of fruit gum and every pricey bottle of cologne. For all the dirt I dig up, I should go into blackmail and give up mowing yards on the weekends with my brother-in-law.”

Michael did not keep track of interoffice intrigues.

Eddy nudged the fellow janitor’s shoulder. “Did I ever tell you about the weirdest thing I found in the trash upstairs?”

The cornered man could do little more than endure the anecdote.

“I found photocopies in the copier room,” he stated gleefully. “They were too dark to keep, apparently, but not too dark to make out what was on the paper.” A wiry grin sprung to his face. “It was a copy of nine photo ID tags from the front office. There’s a hundred tags on the pegboard, but these were the tags of the nine hottest women who work here.” He leaned in with a piece of deduction. “Some sicko was starting a little fantasy picture gallery, you see. I bet once he got the contrast adjusted, he raced down to Kinko’s to get his masterpiece laminated!”

The reticent janitor smiled politely and crooked out the last of his cheese puffs.

Eddy rose to snub his cigar against the utility cabinet, punctuating the story with a postscript. “That photocopy was spooky, though. Like those spooky photographs of the nine student nurses. You know, the ones that Richard Speck guy killed. The guy who got a boob job in prison.”

It was difficult for Michael not to correct others on facts of his acquaintance. “Eight,” he interjected. “Eight student nurses.”

“But it was nine.”

“Eight,” the coworker reiterated. "Gerhard Richter created eight portraits. One for each nurse.”

Eddy had no idea to whom he referred, but begrudgingly accepted the correction on clearing away his contraband. He then turned to the door and, with as much sincerity as he could muster on the occasion, said, “Anyway, good luck. Wherever it is you’re going.”

On putting away his dust mop, Michael made one last tour of the warehouse. He had little curiosity about the medical equipment made there, although the titanium scalpels and forceps held a nacreous allure for him. Sometimes he found bits of fiber optic thread used in endoscopes on the floor when he swept up, which he ardently collected. A few morning people were beginning to trickle in. None in passing greeted him or bade him farewell—not that he had ever cultivated even a rudimentary degree of acquaintance with anyone upstairs.

Belinda, who worked in accounting, was about to speed by when she caught him at the door. She pouted in a friendly way. “I hear you’re leaving?”

Michael could always find one or two words for her. “Yes.”

“We are going to miss you.”

“We?” he echoed.

She grinned. “I mean me.”

His eyes darted over hers before landing on the door face.

The secretary was plainspoken. “Why didn’t you ever ask me out?”

“I’m sorry,” he blurted.

His reply fell somewhere between heartfelt regret and a forced apology. Belinda, not sure what to make of it, slipped by with a less confident smile.

The man felt the warmth in his blood blow off with her turning, so stepped briskly out the door to draw the graying dark around him.

It was an hour before daybreak. The janitor drove by the plate glass storefronts along his well-beaten path and pondered whether his impending change of address would make any difference. The reflection of him in his car, transposed over a long parade of tailored dummies, was akin to trying on different skins. Yet too many choices in life had made him indecisive, and indecisiveness had left with no choices at all. Regardless, he wanted to believe he was more than a loose affiliation of molecules, and somewhere down in the middle of the soup was one unswerving conviction that, entirely selfless or entirely self-serving, would settle his course in the world of men.

First light did little to pretty up the old rickety tenant house, but aesthetics were never the deciding factor in where the custodian lived. He hated his efficiency apartment, and had hated it for all the years he lived there. Moving never failed to be a traumatic experience, so when he was bound to relocate he consistently chose the shortest distance between two points. This meant his destinations were often as undesirable as they were convenient. In his current situation, he was obliged to suffer indoor carpeting (in view of having a dust allergy), a faulty kitchen faucet, and pest insects. He was fiercely private and reluctant to call the property manager, especially with a complaint that required repairmen entering his residence.

Michael was exhausted on entering the common hallway that morning, but in stopping by the bathroom he heard something in the wall that was alarming. It resembled a rat gnawing at drywall, but he knew it had to be his neighbor laboring to create a peephole.

The man in question, with whom he shared the bathroom, was the one thing that made this house unqualified in its misery. He was an evil individual who stole his hall mate’s mail and played malicious pranks. The janitor was infrequently sociable, as it was, yet despised the voyeuristic, foul-smelling neighbor to such a degree he timed trips in and out of his apartment to avoid contact with him. He even cleaned the man’s excrement off the toilet seat without protest.

From the acoustics, it was clear the odious tenant was not trying to bore his way into the bathroom but into an adjacent apartment, one that had been vacant for months. Perhaps someone had moved in. If so, it was undoubtedly a woman to elicit such industry from the depraved man. Michael had confronted the neighbor only twice about his behavior, and with a show of clinched lip emotion that betrayed his contempt; both times he endured increased harassment as a result. He nonetheless went around to the corner apartment to leave a note for the new resident.

The door to the residence was ajar, and in peering through the crack Michael saw nothing to indicate imminent occupancy. He stepped over the darkened threshold and up to an inoperable, nailed-to door, where a pinprick of light flickered in the puttied-up keyhole. Just as he drew a bead on the tip of the flittering tool the floorboard under his foot cracked loudly. The shadow of an eye swallowed the pinhole, and the custodian was quickly doubly over his tracks. He reached his apartment door before the peeping tom could stick his head out, and was safely behind his latch chain by the time the man made a sweep of the hall. Still, ponderous footsteps stopped outside his door; the evil neighbor was letting the meddler know he had him dead to rights.

When the bully returned to his hole, Michael looked over the boxes in his floor. He was at least relieved the packing part of his moving ordeal was behind him. Unsettledness was an apt description of his life in the small apartment, even without the current upheaval; yet it was always more camouflage than true chaos. There was method in his madness, though not always the spit and polish of final details. Things got done, if only by circuitous means and by elves working under the cover of darkness.

A potpie was placed in the microwave, and the six minutes of cooking time were used to doctor a piece of duct tape masking a hole in his shoe. Some years the indigent man made as little as seven thousand dollars, but he had become wily over the years in hiding his destitution. In this instance, he was employing Chaplinesque ingenuity in painting a piece of taped-over cardboard to match the tread on his sole. He could perhaps work more and afford better footwear, and even better groceries, but preferred working as little as possible and at jobs that required no intelligence and few interactions with others. He needed to constantly remind himself he suffered because he was an artist, not because he was a masochist.

His CD player was still out, and after finishing dinner, Schubert’s D887 String Quartet was inserted into its tray. With headphones on, he began to pitch back and forth from his waist at a steady clip. This was the most persistent of his tics, and with or without music it was the one thing he did each day that inexplicably completed him as a person. He was a creature of many repetitions, and executed his days according to rigid schedules that varied only gradually over time. From eating the same TV dinners to listening to the same music to watching the same videos to wearing the same clothes, he believed removing unpredictability from his day freed his mind for other things. On this occasion, he wanted the tranquil second theme of Schubert’s scherzo to purge his thoughts of the evil neighbor, and of Belinda.

The secretary and he had exchanged a few glances, but the shy janitor was always remorseful when his across-the-room stares turned into up-close-and-personal encounters. Poverty was his ready excuse for why he did not date—for why he did not do a lot of things. But this reason was never good enough to offset another round of self-recrimination when it came to women.

The headphones were removed at the scherzo’s conclusion and he began to pace up and down between boxes, speaking aloud in a delayed conversation with the secretary. “I am a coward,” he lamented. “A coward. There’s nothing I can say in my defense. Nothing you would understand. Nothing…” He moved over to retrieve what was left of a nearly empty two-liter bottle of Big K diet soda from his refrigerator. Four Valerian root pills to help him sleep were taken with measured-out gulps of drink, whereupon he resumed the apology. “There’s nothing I can say in my defense. Nothing you would understand. Nothing…” A Ranitidine tablet for his acid reflux was popped in his mouth with the last chug of soda. “But the next time will be different,” he assured her. “The next time.” The noise-muffling fan in the floor was switched on and he crawled into bed. His nervous body threaded the slipstream of the whirling blades, leaving his regrets to peel away from his cooling skin like hinges of singed paper. “The next time,” went the groove-worn mantra. “The next time… the next time…”

Chapter One. Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.