Charleston went a good many places after terminating his employment as CEO of Thundercom Corporation. He bought a car with his savings, which consisted of nearly all of his earnings over the previous year, and grabbed the nearest freeway. He proclaimed in his heart that he would heretofore be the type of man who would never again work for a place like Thundercom Corporation, a declaration that seemed none too difficult to uphold inasmuch as Thundercom Corporation would never have him back anyway. He visited fourteen cities in sixty-four days.
Cincinnati had been significantly more urban than the hometown to which he had grown so accustomed over the years. Memphis had been greener. Topeka had been calmer. Other cities had their differences, too. But as Charleston left San Francisco, he felt himself unexpectedly drawn back home. He could not explain why. He could only explain that this was indubitably how he felt. He understood that some people might have viewed this as a compromising of his principles. But Charleston did not at all view it as such. He understood that his principles, like anything on a gravity-laden planet, will eventually slow in their trajectories. This did not compromise these principles. This simply changed them a bit. It was no one’s fault. It simply was what it was.
Wouldn’t it, after all, Charleston had reasoned at the time, be entirely unprincipled to uphold principles that are no longer essential to one’s well being?
These shifting principles made Charleston no more and no less the man that he had ever been. In truth, adhering to these principles, even as they changed, instilled in Charleston a sense of pride that he considered worth more than all the money Mr. Twytharp had ever paid him.
This pride was its own currency.
This pride made a man feel like himself.
So on the sixty-fifth day after terminating his employment as CEO of Thundercom Corporation, Charleston Sutterfeld returned from his travels across the United States of America to discover that his apartment had been emptied of all its contents but for his chair, his radio, and his telephone.
According to a document tacked to the door, the courts had ordered, just as Mr. Twytharp had threatened, repossession of all of the monies paid to him by Thundercom Corporation, which included all of the subsequent purchases made with said monies.
This left Charleston with the aforementioned chair, radio, and telephone. So Charleston turned on his radio and sat down in his chair. Had he anyone to call, he would have used his telephone, too.
Unbeknownst to Charleston as he sat in his chair, the car he had driven across the United States for the past sixty-four days before parking it in front of his apartment just moments ago was being repossessed as well. Yet, even upon discovering all of these essentially no-longer-existent things, Charleston did not waver in his conviction that returning home was the best thing for him to do.
For better or for worse, Charleston thought to himself after all those traveled miles, this is my home.
The next day, Charleston began looking for work.
I, he figured, will need more than a chair, a radio, and a phone.
He would need food. He would need rent.
In the days that followed, Charleston interviewed countless places all over town. But each and every hiring manager, upon the realization that he or she was speaking with the Charleston Sutterfeld—the one who had the black eye on the news and the one who used to be the CEO of Thundercom Corporation—would give the same look, eyes slightly a-pop, before shifting his or her demeanor over the brief span of a tidy pause. Thereafter, he or she would breeze through the formalities of the interview and tell Charleston, “We’ll be in touch.”
But they never were.
The first three times this happened, Charleston chalked it up to coincidence and bad luck. But times four through seventeen and beyond evidenced what Charleston could not help but suspect was a larger pattern. He could not know for sure, but he most certainly suspected Mr. Twytharp. Who else could manifest wrath in so far-reaching and systematic a manner as to ruin all future employment opportunities for a single man? If it was, indeed, the vengeful, little man-like thing’s doing, Charleston almost admired his thoroughness. A lesser being would not have been able to influence so many people in such a lasting manner over what really was only several months’ time. And this is mentioning nothing of the certainty that not one of these potential employers had ever actually laid eyes on—nor likely had ever even heard the shrill voice of—the legend of industry. It was amazing to Charleston that Mr. Twytharp, it seemed, didn’t even need to ask for what he wanted. He just got it.
All admiration aside, Charleston still needed to earn at least enough money to subsist. But he knew of nothing else to do other than what he had already been doing over the span of his seventeen interviews and counting while his pre-Thundercom monies dwindled: apply for more jobs and go on more interviews.
If Charleston had been convinced that it were only a matter of patience, he never would have gone back to work at Thundercom Corporation. But it hadn’t been a matter of patience at all. It had been a matter of need, a matter of thirty-seven dollars and twelve cents.This was the entirety of the money that Charleston had left in his bank account on the morning that he interviewed with Moorings Janitorial Services where, for the first time in four months of job hunting, the hiring manager did not so much as bat an eye at Charleston’s name. Sure, the interview had still been a breezy formality, but the sixty-three year-old Mr. Plitch—a man about whom everything was thick: his neck, his cheeks, his forearms, his smell, his voice—actually did “get in touch” not three days later.
“Charleston Sutterfeld, please,” Mr. Plitch’s voice had squeezed its plump way through the phone line.
“Speaking,” Charleston had replied.
Charleston had been lying on his apartment floor, which had been doubling as his bed. The room was dense with a thick stillness that sorrow and hopelessness bring with it.
“Sorry to call so early, Mr. Sutterfeld, but we have an opening at our B-two-two-eight-four site,” Mr. Plitch had explained. “You can start tonight, if you’re available.”
“I’m available,” Charleston had insisted.
His days at Thundercom seemed somehow so distant that Charleston thought nothing of the building’s address, when given to him. And it had been so long since Charleston had walked that particular walk that at first the familiar sidewalks that led to the B2284 site did not jog his memory. After all, he used to walk this walk as a CEO whereas now he walked it as a janitor. But as he neared his destination, he had realized that he had indeed walked this walk many times before. A general sense of familiarity turned quickly into memory and before Charleston knew it, he was standing in front of The Thundercom Building. It was Monday night. It was 10:58 p.m., which felt a lot later than it actually was when it signified the start of one’s workday.
Charleston stood a long moment.
He imagined that his animosity should be much more rampant than it presently proved to be. He was certainly not happy about having to set foot in the Thundercom Building. He simply was not as unhappy as he figured he should be when postulating what he figured this moment should amount to, even though he was currently in the moment he was postulating and that moment was really perfectly mild. A bit tense, sure. But not much more so than the first day on any new job.
It’s not as though, he cited as a possible explanation for his lack of outrage, I am working for Thundercom Corporation. I’m simply working at Thundercom Corporation.
In truth, if Charleston was honest with himself, which he made a regular practice of being, he felt a fairly pronounced impulse to move toward the building. It felt like the very same impulse that called him back home from the fourteen cities. And Charleston had made the decision, some sixty-four days and eighteen job interviews ago, and while on what might very well be the top floor of the building he now stood in front of, to be henceforth a man of conviction.
Against his intellect, then, Charleston took a step toward the Thundercom Building. And after this first step, Charleston took a second step. Then a third and a fourth. Then he stopped counting and just kept walking.
A man of conviction, Charleston told himself, does not count his steps.
It was 11:00 p.m. exactly now and a man was waiting at the front door for Charleston. The man introduced himself as Mr. Plitch. This Mr. Plitch, however, was certainly not the other Mr. Plitch. Charleston knew this because the two men looked nothing alike. This Mr. Plitch was small, slight even, and had very small hands. Charleston would have smirked or smiled at the apparent redundancy of their names, but Charleston’s quick assessment of this Mr. Plitch suggested the man was imbued with not an ounce of humor over this or any other incongruous fact in existence. So Charleston just shook the man’s small hand. Up close, Charleston did grant a possible, passing resemblance to the bigger, thicker Mr. Plitch. It was perhaps the complexion. Or the wiry black hair. Or the round, almost-black eyes. Charleston satisfied himself to believe the two men were maybe half-brothers, or perhaps, better yet, cousins.
“This way, Mr. Sutterfeld,” muttered Mr. Plitch, whom Charleston quickly noticed was not a proponent of solid eye contact.
Charleston followed the slight man across the sweeping, immaculate, and unchanged lobby of the Thundercom Building. The lobby felt in some ways familiar and in other ways new.
Mr. Plitch guided Charleston to a modest, unblemished, and unmarked door tucked in a nook at the very back of the massive, open ground floor. The door opened onto a small room lined with neatly arranged cleaning supplies along one wall and a modest desk along another. In the room’s middle was a janitor’s cart, loaded with cleaning products and tools of the trade.
Mr. Plitch sat at the desk. He retrieved some papers from a standing file and gave them to Charleston along with a pen.
“Fill these out, please,” asked Mr. Plitch, motioning to a metal folding chair that took up the last of the scarce open space that the small room had to offer.
As Charleston sat down to start his paperwork, Mr. Plitch added, “Night shift’s a good shift.”
Charleston nodded.
Mr. Plitch nodded, too.
Then he started looking about the small room at a series of nothings-in-particular, shifting his gaze every seven or eight seconds to something else inconsequential. His breath was an erratic wisp that flirted right on the precipice of becoming a whistle. After a minute or so, once the silence grew too long for Mr. Plitch and he could no longer stand having nothing better to do, he offered…
“I’ll explain the job.”
Charleston nodded before turning his attention back to completing his paperwork. After another half a minute, Mr. Plitch added…
“It’s a good job.”
Charleston nodded again. But this time he added some words to his response, in the hopes that the spoken words would assuage what appeared to be Mr. Plitch’s growing anxiety…
“Sounds good,” Charleston offered.
“It is good,” Mr. Plitch added, right on top of Charleston’s words, as if to vary the pace of the semi-conversation and thereby to squelch any concerns that he was uncomfortable with silence.
Then the silence came back again.
Mr. Plitch was determined not to be the one to break it this time, though. In fact, Mr. Plitch waited so long this time that the silence was starting to become stillness. In fact, it grew so quiet and so still in this tiny little room that Charleston almost forgot that he was in the Thundercom Building.
“What’s your relationship with Thundercom?” Charleston finally asked.
While Charleston figured Mr. Plitch would have delighted at Charleston’s being the next person to speak, Mr. Plitch’s face quite contrarily soured with confusion as he offered a blank stare to Charleston.
“We clean their building,” explained the man, earnestly.
“Right, but…” Charleston trailed off before deciding not to dig any deeper.
Mr. Plitch, Charleston reasoned, does not seem the type of man who likes to analyze things too much.
This did not bother Charleston.
Men of conviction, Charleston reminded himself, can come in all forms.
The job, as the smaller Mr. Plitch described it, was to clean the building. Charleston had assumed as much, but Mr. Plitch insisted on walking Charleston through a four-hour training during which Mr. Plitch demonstrated the proper method for each phase of cleaning: from mopping, to dusting, to cleaning glass, to getting stains out of carpets, to changing light bulbs, and on and on.
“How we do what we do,” Mr. Plitch explained far too many times, “is as important as what we do.”
Charleston appreciated the thoroughness of the training, but could not help but feel the whole thing was just the slightest bit overdone. After all, he had not too long ago been the CEO of the very corporation he was about to clean (even if he had worked on a floor that only existed to a handful of people in this massive and overpopulated world) and had received considerably less training for that job than for this one.
“I can handle that,” Charleston explained after one of Mr. Plitch’s explanations, hoping this might abbreviate Mr. Plitch’s monologue some.
“Great” Mr. Plitch replied. And kept right on going.
Thirty-seven dollars and twelve cents, Charleston reminded himself.
Mr. Plitch would not be around often. He handled the day shift cleaning. And no one had ever handled the night shift cleaning before since all the building’s maintenance needs had been heretofore handled during the hours from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. But the building management had called the big Mr. Plitch not four days ago and asked him to add a shift—just one worker—to do one thorough cleaning, above and beyond the usual maintenance activities performed.
“Are the standard maintenance services proving insufficient?” the big Mr. Plitch had asked in his meaty voice.
“No,” the unidentified voice on the other end of the phone had explained. “We just want one, additional, thorough cleaning of the building. Floor by floor. One week per floor. Cleaning everything.”
“But what if it doesn’t take a whole week?” Mr. Plitch had queried.
But the voice on the other end of the phone had already gone. Replaced by an indifferent silence. Then a click. And a dial tone.
So Mr. Plitch had shrugged and started leafing through some resumes. He had not remembered ever getting Charleston Sutterfeld’s resume. But there it had been, two deep in his resume file.
Charleston was on his way home by 4:00 a.m. that morning, whereas typically his shift would end at 5:00 a.m. The small Mr. Plitch had felt Charleston was satisfactorily trained, however, and let his new employee head home early. Mr. Plitch had given Charleston his business card and a handshake.
“If you need something, you can call me during regular business hours,” Charleston’s new supervisor had explained to him.
“Your regular business hours or mine?” Charleston had asked.
“What?” Mr. Plitch had replied, confused and not at all getting Charleston’s semi-joke. “Regular business hours,” he had further demanded, almost gruffly.
Mr. Plitch is clearly the type of man, Charleston had commented to himself, who gets angry when he grows confused.
Charleston could not help but chuckle at how terribly ill-fitting a place the Thundercom Building was for a man who was uncomfortable with confusion.
The city was gentle and near silent as Charleston made his way home in those hours that could rightly be called either night or morning.
Charleston slept again on the floor of his empty apartment. He did not even listen to his radio. He wadded up into a pillow the few items of clothing he still had and he stretched the other remaining items out into a blanket.
Charleston slept straight through until evening, when he had to get up for work again.
Week one was the lobby.
The same lobby Charleston used to sit in to refresh his perspective.
Upon Charleston’s arrival, the Thundercom Building was empty and the cleaning cart was exactly where it had been the night before, fit snugly into a corner of the quiet, still room hidden at the back of the sweeping lobby.
Charleston wheeled the cart out into the lobby and decided to start with the large plate glass window out of which he used to sit and stare. He noticed that the window was considerably clean already, but he decided to give it a rubdown anyway, as it was his job to do so. He retrieved from the cart the window cleaner and the soft rag, just as Mr. Plitch had instructed him to do regarding window cleaning.
Charleston stood a moment before beginning. He felt both low and high in equal measure and at the exact same moment. He would have waited until he felt more high than low, but he felt quite confident that his feelings about this moment would simply never change. So it was, with an ambiguous heart, that Charleston sprayed window cleaner on the large pane of glass and started what he presumed was a new chapter in his presently quite confounding life.
The rag squeaked a gentle, falsetto groan as it pulled across the glass. Streaks of cleaner crescendoed before fading off into nothingness.
Charleston worked from the top left corner down, as he had been instructed. As he circled the rag across the translucent surface, Charleston found something he had not at all expected to find: a burgeoning sense of satisfaction. And it wasn’t just this window, either. Charleston also felt the same satisfaction, increasing in magnitude, when he cleaned the window next to it.
There was something very finite, something very clear about cleaning those two windows. And this something most certainly appealed to some other something in Charleston.
Charleston tested and found the exact same thing on the third window, after which he took a moment. He gazed upon the work he had completed: the clean windows which really weren’t that dirty to begin with.
These windows would be dirty again in the not too distant future.
But right now, they were clean.
And they were clean because he had cleaned them.
The math, thought Charleston, is downright elegant.
With a certain pluck he had not felt in more time than his memory could hold, Charleston started in on the fourth window and did not stop cleaning until all fourteen windows on the west side of the lobby were complete.
Next, thought Charleston, I will try the chairs.
There were 112 chairs on the west side of the lobby. They cut even, neat lines across the broad, smooth, muted carpet. As Charleston worked on the first chair, it occurred to him that part of what was so satisfying about cleaning that glass, and about cleaning this chair as well for that matter, was the definiteness of the job. He knew what needed doing and he knew how to measure whether or not it was done. Better yet, he knew how to measure where he stood at any given moment in relation to the job’s ultimately being completed.
For example, thought Charleston, I am currently one hundred and eleven chairs from completing my current task.
In this regard, cleaning was quite the opposite of what Charleston’s life had become in recent months: a semi-beast that operated according to its own irreverent logic and irrespective of Charleston’s comprehension. Granted, these chairs were scarcely dirty to begin with. But this did not change the larger truth that the only thing, in his present duties, that stood between Charleston and his knowledge of the merits of his efforts was the honesty of his assessment of his own work. Charleston knew clean and Charleston knew dirty. Thus, as long as Charleston kept the clarity of his perception unencumbered by personal bias or other perversions of his ability to observe, the ship that was Charleston would stay righted. And this was a deal that Charleston was completely comfortable making with himself. So it was that Charleston took solace in the sight of each chair coming clean, or cleaner than it had already been anyway, since the chairs weren’t that dirty to begin with.
After the 112th chair was clean, an event that transpired two hours and thirteen minutes after Charleston had started cleaning the first chair, Charleston allowed himself five minutes to relax in the satisfying and definite glow of his accomplishment before vacuuming the floors, despotting the carpet, detailing the baseboards, and dusting the receptionist’s desk.
With two minutes left before the 5:00 a.m. completion of his shift, Charleston took a seat in one of the 112 newly cleaned chairs on the west side of the lobby. He took a mental inventory of the things left to clean in the lobby, namely the whole east side, which was a mirror image of the west side, as well as the central lobby area. Charleston then took a moment to relax, to steep in the satisfaction of the day’s work, which was really a night’s work. He leaned back in his chair. He even closed his eyes. And he thought for a moment yet again about how he used to sit in these chairs, how he used to stare out these windows and into the parking lot whenever he needed a change of scenery. But in the earliest hours of this morning, Charleston did not want a change in perspective at all. Quite the contrary, he wanted this feeling he was feeling to never even threaten to go away: this satisfaction, this sense of completion, this sense of there being more to do in just this manner, this calm, placid opposite of tension. Charleston wanted this to stay, to hover, to cast itself as a permanent cloud forever shading, but not altogether eliminating, the warm glow of the sun.
Charleston awoke seventeen minutes later to the sound of the elevator doors opening, followed by a metal clank accompanied by a squeaking wheel.
Charleston sat up, groggily, and turned in the general direction from which the unquestionably familiar sound came, but both the sound and its culprit had yet to emerge from around the corner. As the clank and squeak began repeating and drawing nearer, Charleston strained to determine whether he was presently awake or asleep, the sound dropping him right back into a memory so acutely clear that it could just as easily be a dream. As the sound grew louder still, Charleston grew only more confident, dream or reality, as to who and what was about to round the corner.
And just as Charleston thought this thought…
In the selfsame gray jumpsuit, with what might as well have been the same grease still smudged on his face, and still steering the same rusty-wheeled metal tub via the wooden handle of his over-sized swab, the maintenance man cut a straight yet gradual line through the lobby without so much as noticing either Charleston or how much cleaner the west side of the lobby had become.
He had almost no affectation.
He was matter-of-fact as the stars.
He moved deliberately as the earth.
His gaze was as incurious as the wind.
Charleston stared stupidly at the passing relic of his not-too-distant memory as the maintenance man continued, at the turtle’s pace, right out the front door. He cut a straight line through the parking lot to its furthest end, where he loaded his metal tub into a van so nondescript that Charleston had not heretofore even noticed it in all the time he had spent both cleaning and looking out the front windows of the lobby.
Charleston did not think to speak. Not until the maintenance man was already climbing into his van. And even then, he could not think of anything specific to say. Not now as a janitor when then he had been CEO. Not after the fourteen cities in sixty-four days. Not after the repossession of nearly everything he owned. Not after the months of struggling to find a job. Not after Charleston returned to the Thundercom Building based solely on some inexplicable impulse that superseded all intellect and reason. Not after Mr. Plitch’s overly thorough training. Not after the tiny, still, and quiet room tucked hidden in the back of the enormous lobby. Not at 5:15 a.m. after a hard day’s work, which was really a hard night’s work. Not after all that Charleston had waiting for him at home each morning was the chair, the radio, and the phone. There would have been far too much to say. And there would have been far too few words in which to say it.
Charleston didn’t say anything because there was really nothing to say. This was not his fault, though. This was just how words worked. Or didn’t work. Instead, he pushed his cart back towards the quiet and still room hidden at the back of the enormous lobby, where he stored it just as Mr. Plitch had trained him to do.
As Charleston started his walk home along the near empty 5:20 a.m. streets of the city, it occurred to him that maybe there was one thing he could have said to the maintenance man. One thing that would not have betrayed Charleston’s desire to present himself honestly. One thing that would have leapfrogged the murky knot of factors, actions, and reactions that constituted Charleston’s life after Thundercom. One thing that would have cut immediately through to the visceral heart of Charleston’s reaction to seeing this veritable specter from another age. And that one thing would have been a question. And that question would have been this: Do you remember me?
Charleston got home just as the sun was starting to warm the sky to blue. He ate his dinner, which was more like a breakfast according to the clock. He turned on his radio and lay down in his bed, which was really just a corner of the floor. Charleston closed his eyes just as he had at the end of his shift, but this time sleep would not come. It did not help that Charleston’s night was actually morning. But even more burdensome was a tiny little gnat of a thought that flitted about his head all the way home and that now would not let him drift off to sleep.
Why do I care, the tiny gnat queried, whether or not the maintenance man remembers me?
Charleston’s inability to answer this question caused the gnat to postulate yet another question, this one too unanswerable…
Why was the maintenance man there at five-thirty in the morning?
From here, the gnat ran amok, flooding Charleston’s sleepless brain with a fervor of unanswerable questions, one after another...
Was this his new shift? Did they change his shift from Friday afternoon to Tuesday night, or Wednesday morning—depending on how you looked at it? And if they changed his shift, why did they change his shift? And if they didn’t change his shift, then how long had he been doing two shifts? Or was it more than two shifts all this time? And if so, how many? Three? Four? Five?
Has there been some sort of change to the giant cogs that prompted a change in the maintenance schedule? Or did the maintenance man have other responsibilities he was tending to? And if so, what were those responsibilities? Did they have any connection to the giant cogs?
Did the maintenance man work regularly at this hour? Or was there some sort of emergency last night?
Charleston got out of his bed, which was actually the floor, and sat in his chair, which was actually a chair.
If there had been an emergency, wouldn’t I have noticed it?
Did the maintenance man work for Moorings Janitorial Services? Or for Thundercom Corporation? Or was he an independent contractor? How much money did he earn? And how much knowledge did he have? About the building? About the eighty-seventh floor? About the giant cogs?
And how many people in the world knew about the eighty-seventh floor? Did Mr. Plitch know? Had Moorings Janitorial been contracted for eighty-six weeks of cleaning on my project or eighty-seven? Or more?
Charleston stood up and went to the window. He was looking for a distraction, which he momentarily found watching the morning occurring in the world in the street below and imagining the details of each passerby’s life. What were their names? What were their jobs? What were their aspirations and had they achieved any of them? How many had never left this city? How many were transplants? And of those transplants, why had they moved here of all places?
Just as soon as this little game brought Charleston’s scattershot thoughts into a focus only afforded mental digression, so did one single such passerby snap Charleston right back into his spiral of questions. It was a man who, in truth, didn’t even look familiar. There was something in his posture, rather. Something reminiscent in the curve of his shoulders and the angle of his head as the man had stopped along the sidewalk and started staring up into the morning sky. His arms at his sides, his neck tilted back, his eyes squinting slightly into the mix of baby blue and cloud that was the sky. There was a curiosity to the pose and a simultaneous unanswerability to whatever it was that the man was seeking in the unthinkably huge, unrestricted sky. Both of these things culled an odd analogue from Charleston’s memory, which he saw now, in his mind, with the clarity that only memory can allow. He closed his eyes and he saw it sure as sin: the maintenance man standing and staring, arms at his sides, neck angled back, eyes squinting in consternation at the top of one of the giant cogs as Charleston crossed the eighty-seventh floor on his way to Mr. Twytharp’s office after the sudden ocean had been drained and Helena Birnbaum’s dignity needed to be defended.
Charleston had barely noticed it at the time. But he should have. Because the maintenance man never stopped working in his gradual, steady way.
If the maintenance man stopped working, Charleston realized, then he had to have noticed something. Something unusual. Something unexpected.
And if there were two things that Charleston had never noticed on the eighty-seventh floor during his year as CEO of Thundercom Corporation, it was something unusual or something unexpected, albeit aside from the initial strangeness of the floor and its residents as a whole.
But as regards the operations of the floor, Charleston assured himself, which was all the maintenance man was concerned with, everything had always been remarkably consistent.
In this moment, Charleston felt the sudden cessation of the selfsame pull that had brought him back home and back into the Thundercom Building. The pull was not gone, though. Rather, it was only now becoming wholly present. Much like gravity. So common and unrelenting as not to be felt at all.
Looking out his window onto the passing traces of the lives passing by in the street, Charleston did not know why, but he nevertheless knew that the giant cogs and his need to understand them had, for some reason, only grown all the more elemental to him over the past several months. He had hoped, in his deepest heart, that all of this was over. But he had, quite frankly, been a fool.
Charleston delved into his near-empty closet and rifled through the pants he had worn two nights ago and in their front left pocket he found, right where he had left it, the business card of a one Mr. Quincy Plitch.
I did not realize, thought Charleston, that he had a first name.
While it would have been safe to assume that Mr. Plitch, like veritably every other human being on the planet, had a first name, Charleston, for some reason, had apparently not assumed accordingly. In fact, Charleston had not assumed accordingly for either Mr. Plitch he had met.
Charleston checked his watch. It was not yet 9:00 a.m.
Since Mr. Quincy Plitch had been so adamant about calling exclusively during regular business hours and since Charleston was not certain that 8:47 a.m. was universally considered part of the regular business hour cycle, he decided to play things safe and wait thirteen minutes to make his call.
Charleston climbed back into his bed, which was really the floor, and pulled over him the sheets, which were really his clothes. He closed his eyes. But the locomotive that was the giant cogs would not let his mind relax.
Charleston stood up and went back to the window. But the contents of the street below were now but a buzzing distraction.
Charleston sat down in his chair and turned on the radio. But the music was just a noise that did not bring him any closer to those cogs.
Charleston decided to eat. But somewhere between the living room and the kitchen and some moments later, he found himself standing idly in the hallway and lost in a ferociously happenstance trail of thoughts.
Finally, at 9:01 a.m., Charleston picked up the phone. He had decided to use a conservative interpretation of “after 9:00 a.m.” for regular business hours, just to be safe.
“Hello,” the thin voice of Mr. Quincy Plitch came through the phone.
“Mr. Plitch, this is Charleston Sutterfeld.”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Plitch.
Charleston waited a moment to see if Mr. Plitch cared to add any introductory niceties to the conversation, but clearly he did not. So Charleston got right down to things.
“I was wondering if you knew of anyone else who is in the building at the same time that I am in the building?” asked Charleston, choosing any one starting point from the myriad questions flooding his brain.
“Why?” answered Mr. Plitch, unexpectedly.
“Why?” repeated Charleston, confused.
“I asked you first,” Mr. Plitch replied, flatly.
“Well, I saw someone is why and…”
“Yes, then. There was someone else, it seems.”
Charleston took pause and decided to attempt a different approach.
“The man I saw, I wanted to make sure that I really saw him.”
Now Mr. Plitch grew confused.
“Well, did you see him?” asked Mr. Plitch.
“I believe so, that’s what…”
“Then it seems you saw him,” cut in Mr. Plitch.
As frustrating as the man was, Charleston nevertheless found quite enviable the simplicity with which Mr. Plitch viewed the world. Charleston regrouped one last time and decided that he clearly needed to really focus the question he was asking of Mr. Plitch. So Charleston considered a few of his voluminous thoughts and came up with one, simple, single question to ask.
“Mr. Plitch,” Charleston started in somewhat slowly, “I guess what I’m trying to ask you is: Do you know who this man is…? The man that I saw, that is.”
Mr. Plitch thought for a moment about his answer. He sighed. He stopped himself. But then he finally started himself again, and answered Charleston’s question.
“Yes,” stated Mr. Plitch.
Then it fell silent.
“Well, who is he?” asked Charleston, keeping his questions simple. “He appeared to be a maintenance man.”
“Then he must be a maintenance man.”
“Does he work for Moorings?”
“I would think so. If he was a maintenance man. Was he dressed as a maintenance man?”
“Yes. He was,” replied Charleston, growing exasperated with Mr. Plitch. “That’s why I suspected he was a maintenance man.”
Mr. Plitch did not reply.
“Can you tell me this man’s name, perhaps?” added Charleston.
“Why?” answered Mr. Plitch.
“Why?” asked Charleston, rhetorically.
“I asked you first,” came the reply, which Charleston should have anticipated and sidestepped by keeping his questions focused and not at all rhetorical.
“So I will know what to call him, when I see him,” Charleston redirected.
“Oh,” answered Mr. Plitch. “No. I can’t tell you his name.”
“Why not?” asked Charleston.
“Why not?” asked Mr. Plitch, rhetorically.
But Charleston allowed Mr. Plitch his rhetorical question, permitting a brief silence to set in for Mr. Plitch to think.
“Hold on, please,” said Mr. Plitch.
He set the phone down on some sort of hard surface and walked away. A moment later, the thick voice of the thick Mr. Plitch came through the phone.
“What’s the problem, Mr. Sutterfeld?”
“There’s no problem,” answered Charleston. “I just had a question. About a man I saw in the building while I was in the building.”
“You should not have seen any man in the building,” answered Mr. Plitch.
“Oh,” said Charleston. “But I did.”
“There is no other man who comes into the lobby between the hours of eleven p.m. and five a.m. Of this I am certain.”
“Oh,” answered Charleston. “This was shortly after five a.m. Maybe five-fifteen a.m. or so.”
“Your shift ends at five a.m., Mr. Sutterfeld.”
“Of course. I was just finishing up.”
“Finishing up is unacceptable, Mr. Sutterfeld. Unless it happens before five a.m.”
“My mistake, then. Nevertheless, I’m curious as to who this man is…”
“Well, now you know to be gone earlier,” Mr. Plitch cut in. “Let’s not have this happen again.”
The thick Mr. Plitch hung up.
So Charleston hung up, too.
By 3:00 a.m. on that Thursday morning, which was really Charleston’s Wednesday night, Charleston could no longer endure the now Herculean-seeming task of cleaning the already-pretty-clean lobby of the Thundercom Building. It had taken all the will power he could scrape from the dregs of his being just to get through the windows and thirty-two chairs. Each plate of glass didn’t even seem dirty enough to Charleston to really merit cleaning the window again. But he had done it. And the chairs were cleaner than the windows. But Charleston had cleaned them, thirty-two of them anyway, before he had convinced himself that a short break might replenish his patience and his drive.
Charleston sat down in the freshly cleaned thirty-second chair. He stared out the window and onto the Thundercom parking lot just as he had done so many times before as CEO, as well as once before on his first full day as a janitor, which was technically his second day on the job if you count the day he was trained by Mr. Plitch.
Yesterday, Charleston reminded himself, this was all poetry.
But today, which was really the middle of the night, it was whatever the opposite of poetry is.
The clarity and the calm that had greeted him on that first day of cleaning had been untraceably stomped out and replaced by the unrelenting and monolithic windmill that was the giant cogs. Charleston still had more than two hours before the maintenance man might possibly be squeaking and clanking his way back through the lobby. So until then and in order to maintain his proximity, albeit limited, to the cogs, Charleston decided he would sit. Because he did not think he had it in him to clean any more. Not right now. And by 3:22 a.m., he had grown convinced that he would not be capable of doing any more work at all tonight, which was really this morning. Having been completely unsuccessful in his efforts to sleep the previous night, which had really been the previous day, Charleston had already been exhausted by the time he arrived at work yesterday morning, which really was night. Now he was far beyond mere exhaustion. He felt like there was a fever somewhere deep down in his brain.
Charleston sat for four minutes, trying to slow his mind.
By 3:27 a.m., Charleston felt this fever expanding.
By 3:31 a.m., the fever was more of a mania.
So it was that Charleston told himself, with confidence, that it was the mania and not the man that was keeping him in this lobby, in this janitor’s jumpsuit, in this ungodly hour to be working. It was the mania and not the man that would not let go of the cogs. It was the mania and not the man that would not rest until it found the maintenance man. And it was most definitely the mania and not the man that could wait no longer and decided instead to go find the maintenance man somewhere amongst the eighty-six or eighty-seven floors of the Thundercom Building.
It was the mania and not the man that prompted Charleston to walk over to the elevators. And it was obviously the mania and not the man that pressed the up button. And it was absolutely the mania and not the man that stabbed the same button twenty times with Charleston’s index finger and yelped aloud in ire when the button neither illuminated nor did it cause the elevators to so much as consider moving. And it was laughably the mania and not the man that took Charleston to the stairwell, opened the door, and looked up eighty-six (and maybe eighty-seven) flights of stairs coated in absolute and pitch black darkness.
“Hello!” the mania called out.
But the sound just echoed and died somewhere up the eighty-six or eighty-seven floors.
“Maintenance man!” the mania tried again.
But these words died just like the initial salutation did.
Charleston waited, though, for something to break the silent response to his queries. And when nothing did, Charleston went back to the lobby and ransacked the janitor’s cart until he found a flashlight.
The thin circle of light was just barely enough to offer the shape of each metal and concrete step. Charleston’s footsteps clopped and pinged in a series of echoes that swelled to a cacophony before falling silent once Charleston stopped at the second floor.
Charleston painted the thin circle of light across the wall until he found the handle to the door to the second floor. Charleston reached out and took the cold metal into his hand and turned. But the doorknob did not budge. Charleston tried again. A thin, muted semi-click sounded, but the doorknob, and consequently the door, did not give an inch.
“How am I,” Charleston asked aloud and of no one in particular, “supposed to clean the other floors if I cannot even get to them?”
Not that I planned on cleaning the second floor right now, he continued in his head, but what about when I do?
Charleston stood a moment, at a loss.
Then he decided to check the third floor as well. Just in case this one door was not representative of all doors. Charleston clanked and thumped up another flight only to find that the door to the third floor was exactly like the door to the second floor: unforgivingly locked.
And then a brief moment of panic struck…
What if the door to the first floor is now the same as the doors to the second and third floors?
Charleston’s footsteps clamored quickly back down the two flights of stairs and he hurriedly took the first floor doorknob in his hand. He closed his eyes. He inhaled and held. He turned the door knob…
Click-clack.
The knob gave.
The door released and came open with a pull.
Charleston exhaled and stepped back into the lobby. He went back to the thirty-second chair on the east side of the lobby and he sat back down. He calmed his breath and let his panicked heart slow back to a normal beat. Then he tried to assemble the new data he had just accrued into something meaningful.
Why would the first door be unlocked, he puzzled, but the second and third doors locked?
Does this mean that every door other than the first door is locked?
Or does this simply mean that some doors are locked and some doors are not?
Charleston was starting to grow agitated.
And most importantly, is there any way to find the maintenance man that is simpler than climbing eighty-six or eighty-seven flights of stairs to what might prove to be eighty-five or eighty-six locked doors?
Charleston puzzled over this for quite some time.
For about an hour, actually. At which point he checked his watch to find that it was 4:51 a.m. And at this, Charleston reasoned that there was indeed a simpler way to find the maintenance man.
I could wait twenty-four minutes, he proposed to himself, until five-fifteen a.m.
So that’s what Charleston did.
In the interest of job security, however, he put away the janitor’s cart first. And he left the Thundercom Building at exactly 5:00 a.m., just as the thick Mr. Plitch had stipulated was necessary.
Charleston walked, then, a good twenty feet into the parking lot and sat down on the pavement, not too far, he imagined, from where he had been thrown out of the building on the day he resigned his post as CEO.
It was still cool, as mornings more often than not seem to be.
It was still dark, too.
There was nothing else at this moment that Charleston could think to do. So he waited.
Until 5:17 a.m. At which point, Charleston was stupefied. Not only had there been no sign of the maintenance man at 5:15 a.m., but there had been no sign of him at 5:16 a.m. or 5:17 a.m. either. And here Charleston sat, looking like a fool.
As he debated how long to continue looking like a fool, it finally occurred to Charleston to check on the maintenance man’s van, which a simple glance about revealed was nowhere present in the parking lot.
Charleston considered the weight of this fact, but decided that it really offered little to no information of significance.
The man could have walked to work, reasoned Charleston.
Maybe he only takes his van on days when he needs his large metal tub. And maybe he didn’t need his tub today.
Charleston stood up and walked over to the vacant spot where the van had been parked the previous night, which had really been the morning, as though it might provide some additional access to the maintenance man this morning, which was essentially Charleston’s evening.
Surely, Charleston reassured himself, accentuating the positive, if he was not present this morning, which is really my evening, then he ought definitely be present tomorrow morning, which will again be tomorrow evening by my clock.
After all, the building needs to be maintained.
“How am I supposed to get to the other floors?” Charleston demanded through his phone and in a tone a bit too harsh for a three-day-old employee to take with his new boss.
“You don’t need to get to the other floors,” the thick Mr. Plitch coughed back, tersely.
“Not today,” Charleston refused to relent, “but what about next week when I clean another floor?”
“You just clean, Mr. Sutterfeld. We will handle the rest.”
“And there are no lights in the stairwell.”
“Mr. Sutterfeld, it is your job to clean.”
“But nothing’s dirty,” Charleston demanded, knowing he had long since lost his composure.
“Who cares?! Who cares?!” Mr. Plitch semi-screamed erratically. “You are paid to clean! Do you not want to clean?!”
Charleston was startled and resultantly slowed down by the tenuous nature of Mr. Plitch’s anger.
“I want to clean,” Charleston said.
A year and a half ago, this statement would have been a little too close to lying for Charleston, inasmuch as he was really only interested in cleaning as a means to an end, namely so that he could find and then talk to the maintenance man. The act of cleaning for its own sake held no true interest for Charleston, so to say that he wanted to clean was a bit of a stretch. But men of conviction sometimes stretch when they have to stretch. And Charleston was nothing now if not a man of conviction.
“Because if you don’t want to clean…” Mr. Plitch threatened.
“I want to clean,” Charleston reiterated, speaking each word clearly and sharply to eradicate any and all confusion.
“Then clean!” belched Mr. Plitch as he slammed down the phone.
Beneath the mounting weight of his exhaustion and his frustration, Charleston felt low. He lowered himself to the floor beside the telephone, which wasn’t really his bed even though it technically utilized the same floorboards. He took a breath and tried to slow himself down under the pinwheel whirlwind into which he had been dropped by the lucid memory of those damn giant cogs.
A night’s rest, Charleston muttered in his steadying mind as it flirted with pushing off into the elegant drift that is sleep, might well put an end to all of this madness, even though it’s really a day’s sleep.
But in the moment right before sleep, Charleston’s mind flashed. Perhaps it was reflected sunlight from the street outside. Perhaps it was his sputtering mind. Charleston did not know. But the black he usually saw behind his closed eyes was replaced with a sudden flash of red that lasted little more than a sustained instant. A flash of red that forced Charleston’s eyes back open and his mind into an almost frenzy. An almost frenzy that led him scrambling into his bedroom closet. A bedroom closet that led him to its back corner and a crumpled, wadded pair of suit pants bought before Charleston’s tenure at Thundercom Corporation and, as such, a crumpled, wadded pair of suit pants that was not repossessed as part of Mr. Twytharp’s legal action. A crumpled, wadded pair of suit pants that Charleston just so happened to wear on his last day as CEO of Thundercom Corporation. A crumpled, wadded pair of suit pants with a tear in its right pant leg. A crumpled, wadded pair of suit pants that also still held in its front left pocket the remote device that Charleston had previously used, every day as CEO, to turn on the Thundercom elevator’s red light and ride the elevator freely about, including to the nonexistent eighty-seventh floor. The remote device for which Charleston had paid a 200-dollar deposit. A 200-dollar deposit from his albeit meager pre-Thundercom savings, which just might have rendered the device irretrievable by the vengeful and avaricious Mr. Twytharp and his desire to unmake what he believed he had made of Charleston Sutterfeld. Or was it a simple oversight? Charleston wondered. But this seemed discordant with more or less everything Charleston had come to know of his former boss. Perhaps it was a challenge, then, Charleston posited. This seemed at least perhaps plausible, what with the humanish side that Charleston knew Mr. Twytharp to ever-so-rarely show. For whatever reason, the remote device was still there. The remote device that would lead Charleston anywhere he would like to go, in pursuit of answers to any questions he cared to ask, in the at least eighty-seven story Thundercom Building.