Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

I pull the car into the driveway. Sit back. Try to relax. The day, I swear to God, has to be at least ninety-five degrees. Christchurch heat. Schizophrenic weather. Sweat is dripping from my body. My fingers are wet-rubber damp. I lean forward and twist the keys in the ignition, grab my briefcase, and climb out of the car. Out here, the air-conditioning actually works. I reach the front door and fumble with the lock. I breathe a sigh of relief when I step inside.

I stroll through to the kitchen. Angela, I can hear, is in the shower upstairs. I’ll disturb her later. For now, I need a drink. I walk to the fridge. It has a stainless-steel door in which my reflection looks like a ghost. I open the door and squat down in front of it for close to a minute, making friends with the cool air. The fridge offers me both beer and Coke. I take a beer, twist off the cap, and sit down at the table. I’m no heavy drinker, but I knock this bottle back in maybe twenty seconds. The fridge offers up another bottle. Who am I to say no? I lean back in the chair. Put my feet up on the table. Consider taking off my shoes. You know that feeling? A hot day at work. Stress for eight hours. Then sitting down, feet in the air, beer in hand, and you take your shoes off.

Pure bliss.

Listening to the shower upstairs, I casually sip at my second beer of the year. Takes me five minutes to finish this one, and now I’m hungry. Back at the fridge and to the slice of cold pizza I spied on my first trip. I shrug. Why not? It isn’t as though I need to watch my weight.

I sit back at the table. Feet in the air. The same thing works for pizza as it does for beer once you get those shoes off. Right now, though, I don’t have the time. I wolf down the pizza, pick up my briefcase, and make my way upstairs. The stereo in the bedroom is pumping out a song I recognize, but can’t name. Same goes for the artist. Nevertheless, I find myself humming along as I lay my briefcase on the bed, knowing the tune will be stuck in my mind for hours. I sit down next to the briefcase. Open it. Take the newspaper out. The first page offers up the sort of news that makes newspapers sell. Often I wonder if the media makes half this stuff up, just to inflate sales. There’s definitely a market for it.

I hear the shower turn off but ignore it, preferring to read the paper. It’s an article about some guy who’s been terrorizing the city. Killing women. Torture. Rape. Homicide. The stuff movies are made of. A couple of minutes go by and I’m still sitting here reading when Angela, wiping her hair with a towel, steps out of the bathroom surrounded by white steam and the smell of skin lotion.

I lower the newspaper and smile.

She looks over at me.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asks.

The sun is heading toward the horizon with only a few hours of life left today, it’s blinding her, making beads of sweat run down the inside of her dress and dampening the material. It glints off the polished granite gravestone, making her squint, but she refuses to look away from the letters that have been scripted across it for the last five years. The bright light is making her eyes water-not that it matters; her eyes always water when she comes here.

She should have worn sunglasses. She should have worn a lighter dress. She should have done more to prevent him from dying.

Sally clutches the crucifix hanging around her neck, the four ends of it digging hard into her palm. She can’t remember the last time she took it off, and she fears that if she did she would roll up into a small ball and just cry forever, spending the rest of her days unable to function.

She had it when the doctors at the hospital gave her family the news. She held it tightly as they sat her down, and with their somber faces told her what they had told countless other families who knew their loved ones were dying but who still held out hope. It was hanging over her heart when she drove her parents to the funeral home, sat down with the funeral director, and, over tea and coffee that nobody touched, shopped through coffin brochures, turning the glossy pages and trying to pick out something her dead brother would look good in. They had to do the same for the suit. Even death was fashion conscious. The suits in the catalogs were photographed hanging on mannequins; it would have been in bad taste to have had them on happy-go-lucky people smiling and trying to look sexy.

She has had the crucifix every day since, using it for guidance, using it to remind herself that Martin is in a better place now, that life isn’t as bad as it seems.

She has been staring at the grave for the last forty minutes, unable to move. Fifty feet away a set of oak trees form a partial barrier between her and a small lake which she guesses must almost be right in the middle of the cemetery. A few months ago some bodies were found in that lake. Every now and then the nor’wester will snap one of the growing acorns from the branches and throw it onto a gravestone, the clicking sound like that of a breaking finger. The cemetery is an expanse of lush lawn broken up with cement markers and, at the moment, mostly deserted, except for a handful of people standing in front of gravestones, all of them with tragedies of their own. She wonders whether more show up during the day, whether the graveyard has peak-hour traffic. She hopes it does. She doesn’t like the idea of people dying and other people forgetting. The grass is longer than usual, and messy around the gravestones and trees. Even the gardens are overgrown. There used to be a caretaker out here who would regularly steer his riding lawn mower like a racing car through the rows of graves, but then he retired or died, she can’t quite remember which, and in the following months nature has been reclaiming the land.

She doesn’t even know why she’s thinking such things. Caretakers dying, peak-hour traffic, people forgetting the dead. She’s always like this when she comes here. Morbid, all messed up, as if somebody has put her thoughts into a cocktail shaker and shaken the hell out of it. She likes to come here at least once a month, if likes is an appropriate word. She always, absolutely always, makes it here on the anniversary of Martin’s death, which is what today is. Tomorrow would have been his birthday. Or still is. She isn’t sure whether it counts once you’re in the ground. For some reason she can’t explain, she never comes here on his birthday. She’s sure it would induce the same result as if she were to take off her crucifix. Her parents made it out here earlier in the afternoon, she can tell by the fresh flowers next to her own. She never comes here with them. That is something else she can’t explain, not even to herself.

She briefly closes her eyes. Whenever she comes here, she always ends up dwelling on what she can’t figure out. The moment she leaves, things will be better again. She crouches down, caresses the flowers sitting in front of the gravestone, then runs her fingers over the lettering. Her brother was fifteen when he died. One day away from sixteen. One day’s difference between a birthday and a death-day. Probably not even that. Probably only a matter of half a day. How can it make sense that he should die at fifteen, almost sixteen? The other people planted in this location average sixty-two years old. She knows that because she added them all up. She walked from grave to grave, plotting in the numbers on a calculator and then dividing them up. She was curious. Curious as to how many years Martin was cheated of. His fifteen-sixteen years on this earth were special, and the fact he was mentally handicapped actually was a blessing. He enriched her life, and her parents’ lives. He knew he was different, he knew he was challenged, but he never understood what the problem was. For him, life was all about having fun. What could possibly be wrong with that?