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.
