And Chitz For All
By Raphael Stigliano
Those little frills that peel off the side of paper when you tear it out of a notebook? That’s chitz. One year, janitors at my middle school got so sick of cleaning up everyone’s chitz that they complained to the principal. The next day spiral-bound notebooks were outlawed, and our fates were sealed.
The ban didn’t do any good. The chitz kept turning up. In hallways, in classrooms, in bathrooms. Little fiddly scraps of paper scooted over tile like tumbleweeds, leaving trails of even fiddlier scraps too tiny to pinch between your fingers. The janitors pulled their hair and swept the floor but an hour later, chitz again. Where was it coming from? Nobody, not even the teachers, used spiral-bound notebooks.
The janitors declared war. They hired more custodial staff and armed them with vacuum cleaners. They occupied every classroom, taking shifts to keep the battleground under constant observation. But the second they turned their backs, more chitz blew in like dead leaves in dry wind.
So, the janitors tried a different tack. They gathered up chitz and brought samples back to their closets for a full forensic treatment. Paper quality, fingerprints, DNA swabs – they CSI’d those chitz, traced it to a specific type of notebook, and dispatched agents to every office supply store in the district.
“Hundreds of people shop here every day,” said the cashiers. “You must know this is absurd. Why don’t you just clean it up? Isn’t that your job?”
I know, now, what it means to be a janitor. To see my name embroidered upon the breast of a navy boiler suit. To watch my reflection in tile floors grow clearer with every swipe of the mop. Days contain lifetimes when your purpose is reduced to cleaning up other peoples’ messes. Can you really blame them—us—just once for saying no?
For lo, the janitors persevered. They would not back down until they had receipts. And then they had names.
The announcement crackled over the intercom right after the pledge of allegiance. We sweated in our metal chairs. The list went on for minutes. When it was done, fifty-six students were marched to the administrative office. On the floor outside we sat crisscross-applesauce, waiting to be called in. Chitz dotted the floor between our shaking knees.
My turn came close to the end. I had been in the office just once before, to pick up my student I.D. after missing the first day of school. That day, the fluorescents gave off a new, clean glow. Now a single bare bulb cast everything in weird angles and horror-flick gloom.
The principal looked tired. Loose hairs betrayed her army-tight bun. A mountain of crushed cigarette butts buried the ashtray on her desk. Behind her, a row of janitors stood with their arms folded. One of them caught my eye.
On a damp Wednesday in sixth grade, I threw up all over the biology lab during group worm dissection. My partners Heather and Dennis shrieked and fled, while those outside the splash zone hooted and flicked worm guts in my direction. From the safety of his desk, Mr. Hamilton just sighed. Only Janey Jaxton stepped forward to offer me a roll of paper towels. I took it and blotted puke from my uniform until a kindly janitor rode in with bleach, a bucket, and a smile.
That same smile glimmered from one of the faces lining the principal’s office. Perhaps I was not so alone.
“Sam, Sam, Sam,” the principal said in a voice like a paper shredder. “It’s been a long morning. You want to do this the easy way. Why did you buy the notebook?”
I didn’t know anything about any notebook. The principal reached into an overstuffed drawer and slid a receipt across the desk.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me about making this easy. We’ve seen the footage. We cross-referenced the last four digits with your mother’s Mastercard. Why did she buy you the notebook?”
My mom could have bought anyone that notebook. The trail was there but the proof was not.
The principal laughed. “You think I need proof? All I need is a confession. It doesn’t matter how we get it. Do you want to do this the hard way?”
I didn’t. Even after fifty shell-shocked students had exited the office before me, I was determined to hold resolute. A silent pact had formed in the hallway: nobody speaks; nobody plays along. They couldn’t give us all detention.
But nobody made eye contact on their way out of the office.
The principal sat back in her chair, creaking leather and tired bones. “The hard way it is.”
She lit a fresh cigarette as one of the janitors dialed. When the line connected, her gravelly voice melted to honey. “Hi Mrs. Burke. How are you? I’m here with your son.” She twiddled the cigarette between her fingers. Ash drifted to the rug. As one, the janitors watched it fall. “Well to be honest with you, Sam’s giving me a bit of trouble.”
Before I could protest a hand clamped over my lips. Rough fingers stank of lemon and disinfectant. The janitor must have been behind me from the moment I sat down, waiting for any sign of a fight. I raised my gaze to his. Grey eyes looked back with pity.
“We’ve had some issues around the building. Illegal substances. Contraband. We’re working overtime to root out the source, but we need full cooperation. And Sam just isn’t cooperating.”
I tried to scream. The hand squeezed tighter.
“Of course he is. But it’s the good kids you’ve got to watch the closest. I’m sure we can clear this up. All we need is permission to move ahead with our investigation. Do we have your permission, Mrs. Burke?” In the hazy light, her face diminished to wispy hair and a nicotine grin.
“Thank you. Nice to hear from you as well. I hope we’ll see you at the next PTA meeting. Mrs. Rizzo’s husband promised snickerdoodles… but of course, business first.”
The principal handed the receiver to a janitor, who slammed it back into its cradle. Then she finished her cigarette in one, deep drag. She made a lazy motion with her fingers. More ash drifted to the office floor.
Suddenly the hand disappeared from my mouth. I gasped for air, just as the principal let out her breath. Half a cigarette’s worth of smoke blew directly down my throat. I hit the tile, coughs tearing my chest in two.
“Search his locker. Get him out of my sight.” The principal stabbed out the cigarette on her nameplate and tossed it on the pile. “Next!”
We christened it D-Day. First, they searched our lockers. Then they searched our backpacks. With no results, they widened their search. They unearthed condoms, dime bags of weed, shoplifted snacks from the drug store across the street—and zero notebooks. The principal gave the order to move on to the teachers. Desks were ransacked, drawers emptied onto the tile. I’ll never forget passing by the teacher’s lounge as a janitor escorted a group of us to the bathrooms. Ms. Seymour, who supervised Mathletes, sat weeping on the floor, trophies shattered around her. The principal watched everything from doorways and corners, shrouded in cigarette smoke.
At home, my mother was distraught. Was it drugs? Alcohol? There were safer ways to make friends. Why did she shake paper scraps out of my backpack, clothes, and lunchbox when I came home? Why was she getting calls from other parents, asking if Sam was in with the bad crowd? She would never understand.
In the principal’s eyes, we were all the bad crowd.
With all our teachers in interrogations, an army of janitors took over the classrooms. They handed out dustpans and Clorox. If we insisted on trashing our school, then together we would clean it up. We washed graffiti from bathroom walls and chased trails of cigarette butts in the principal’s wake. Others in my contingent complained while we scrubbed soap scum from sink drains, but I didn’t mind.
Never before had I found a home in chess club, debate team, or organized sport, and I swooned to work among teammates. For the first time, I could be a part of something greater than myself. Meanwhile, chitz gathered in dunes and cascaded down stairwells. It was impossible to keep up. Squadrons with snow shovels piled masses of chitz into garbage bags and passed them in assembly lines down to the first floor, where school buses carted them to the docks to dump into the sea. On our breaks, we ate cold turkey sandwiches and applesauce. Lunch ladies stuffed chitz into the ovens. Miles of black smoke pumped into the autumn sky.
A local news van lurked on the corner, trying to catch loose lips during free periods. Minors couldn’t be interviewed without parental consent, but the janitors nodded grimly for the cameras. “Just doing our jobs,” was all they would say.
“Talk to me,” my mother wept. “I see the broadcasts. I’m on the parent forums. It can’t go on like this.” I couldn't describe how it felt, to stand alongside the janitors, Clorox in hand.
The next morning, the principal called assembly.
We waded single-file through waist-high chitz – only a thin trail of tile visible beneath our feet – to reach the auditorium. When the last pair of shoes had passed over, the chitz closed in as though we had left no trail at all.
The auditorium held enough folding chairs for the entire student body. Janitors directed us to sit. More guarded the exits. The principal waited at the podium. Gaunt hollows made caves of her cheeks. Her pantsuit draped her bones.
Like everywhere else, the room was dusted with chitz. But it did not pile in natural snowbanks along the walls. Groups of students with push brooms corralled every scrap into a ten-foot mound behind the podium. How I longed to stand among them.
The principal watched us file in. When we were seated, she tapped the microphone with a crooked finger. Speakers boomed.
“Good morning, students,” she whispered.
We mumbled a response. “I said, good morning, students,” she repeated. The janitors aimed their mops in our direction.
“Good morning!” we shouted back.
“That’s better.” The principal wheezed like desert wind. “Now. We have a troublemaker. Poisoning our air. Tormenting our hardworking custodial staff. Wasting all of our time.”
Chitz drifted from ceiling panels to tangle and squirm at our feet. The push brooms had fallen still. Even amplified, the principal’s voice could be drowned out by the slightest sound.
“Today we gather to see justice. Let this be a beacon of hope, and a warning to the bad seeds still in our midst. Yes: we have caught the culprit!”
We swam with whispers. The principal fumbled with a crumpled box. She shook out the last cigarette. When it was lit, she waved to the janitors with a shaking hand.
“Watch and learn,” she hissed into the microphone.
The auditorium doors burst open in a swirling flurry of white. Two janitors marched in, dragging between them the limp form of a girl.
It was Janey Jaxton, my shining symbol of rebellion, the first to speak up in the face of injustice. And it wasn’t just the vomit episode, either. When I had been booted from the baseball team after missing a game, Janey – cementing herself in my daydreams – campaigned for me like Atticus Finch. She launched sit-ins, inspired boycotts, and silk-screened t-shirts ridiculing the coach. I learned what it meant to love. And yet, when it was all over, she didn’t even recognize me in the halls.
Today she wore chains. An extension cord squeezed her fingers blue. She fell to her knees before the principal.
“Ms. Jaxton fancied herself a rebel.” The principal’s voice was softer than the hum of the speakers projecting it. “Thought she could make fools of us all. No tolerance here for mischief. Let Ms. Jaxton be an example to those of you still up to no good.”
She flicked her fingers. A half-inch cylinder of ash dropped from the cigarette between them. The janitors watched it hit the floor. One of them nearly lunged, mop at the ready, but the others held him back. Wait, their eyes seemed to say.
The principal inched aside. Someone produced another power cord, and they wrapped it around and around until Janey was bound to the podium. I thought about Houdini and imagined her daring escape. But she only swallowed a deep breath and raised her voice. The microphone caught every word.
“You’re not fooling anyone!” she cried. “We studied your stupid history textbooks! Mr. Faley taught us the word martyr! People will always use spiral-bound notebooks. There will always be chitz. You think this will clean up your mess? Who made this mess in the first place? Who—”
The janitors tipped the podium onto its wheels. Janey tipped with it. She kept talking as they rolled her backwards into the pyramid of chitz, but I had clamped both hands over my ears. No sound reached me—not even the quiet rush of my own thoughts.
The principal held out her cigarette lighter. A janitor took it, then plucked a falling thread of chitz from the air. He sparked the lighter and kissed paper to flame. When he dropped the flaming chitz onto the pile, it went up in a flash.
As one, the students surged forward. Some of us ran, only to collide with a wall of interlocked mop handles. We screamed. We pressed. The wall of janitors held strong. Reflected in her boiling eyes was the riot Janey had always wanted. Maybe that made it hurt less, to die.
I sat silently amid the chaos. If I could absorb every detail, the scene would become like a television screen. I could sit apart and study the orange blaze lighting the auditorium, the misshapen O of Janey’s mouth as her lips blistered and popped, the crowd of eighth graders buzzing with rebellion. I could review the record piece by piece. Then, perhaps, I could find my place in it.
The principal didn’t watch. She just tossed her cigarette into the pile and reached for another. But she had smoked her last. Cued by some secret signal, the janitors turned on her. They closed in from either side, lifted her as easily as a cardboard cutout, and tossed her onto the pyre. There was a flash of heat. Her hair caught and sizzled. Then she was gone.
The janitors relaxed their barricade. The students fell still.
They ushered us from the auditorium and back to our classrooms as the fire spread.
Then it was over. We knew it because the janitors hijacked the intercom and announced, “It’s over. Together, we were able to clean up the chitz!” And applause should have echoed around the hallways, because the janitor in the doorway ordered us to applaud, but no sound traveled between the mountains of chitz.
Over the intercom, we heard a solitary page turn.
“In the absence of a principal, the custodial team will assume the role of interim director. We understand you have experienced trauma. It is never easy to witness a classmate’s death at the hands of an administrator. For everyone’s safety, a school-wide detention is now in effect. This will remain until we can be sure that no more insurrectionists remain. During this difficult time, students are invited to visit the Guidance Counselor in room 306 to discuss coping strategies.”
We clapped with Bolshevik zeal until our hands hurt. The janitor in the doorway was satisfied.
“But it’s not all bad news. Some of you have made your school proud. Anyone wishing to become a junior member of the custodial team may apply at the administrative office during free periods and lunch time.
“To the wolves in hiding, turn yourselves in. Nobody needs to end up like Ms. Jaxton. And to those who stepped back and let us do our job, you are the true heroes. Together, we were able to clean up the chitz!”
The intercom clicked off. A janitor stomped around to our desks, delivering paper applications for the custodial team. The top of the page showed a circular logo of a dustbuster and the legend, Together, we were able to clean up the chitz! I brushed some chitz off the page to read it.
The janitors were diligent in the auditorium. By third period, every speck of ash had been vacuumed away. The only evidence of the blaze were scorch marks where the principal had burned bright as a magnesium flare, and the odor of cigarettes. The room was already filling with chitz. I doodled designs for a poster memorializing Janey, then threw them away. Nobody needed a reminder that it could happen to us.
Dennis Meehan was the first junior janitor accepted. They announced it over the intercom. Brimming with pride and static, Dennis thanked his quarterback buddies, who had put their names as references. He most looked forward to using the floor waxing machine and including this on his college applications. When we were allowed to stop applauding, another janitor commandeered the intercom and read the warnings from a bottle of Windex.
The janitors loved the intercom. They took turns announcing transitions between classes, calling out students for littering, commentating on the cafeteria menu, and reviewing student essays. Mostly they reminded us that together, we had cleaned up the chitz. It didn’t matter that chitz still wriggled in through cracks in the molding and clogged the air conditioning vents. The ceiling panels in room 306 collapsed from the weight. The glass window in the door showed only white. The janitors announced that counseling would be paused indefinitely.
Soon, the rest of the football team joined the junior janitors. They were uniformed in navy boiler suits and tasked with supervising us as we cleaned the school. We polished windows, emptied trash bins, shook out doormats. Two junior janitors loomed as we chiseled old gum off the underside of desks. Never had our school been so clean. We did nothing about the chitz reaching almost up to our chests. There was no reason to. Together, we had already cleaned up the chitz.
At dismissal, the junior janitors shepherded us into the cafeteria and ordered us to push the tables aside. We asked if we could go home. They shook their heads. All-school detention wasn’t a punishment. Now that there was no more chitz, we were developing solidarity and a team-oriented mindset.
But there was no food. That hindered the mindset. Those with dependable parents had eaten their packed lunches thoughtlessly at noon. Others, who relied on hot lunch from the cafeteria, just went hungry. Some of us found snacks in our backpacks. We divided up fun size packages of M&Ms and broke granola bars in two, or gobbled them hastily when no one was looking. Some of us shoved handfuls of chitz into our mouths. Chewing packed the chitz into hard lumps that sat like rocks in our stomachs. But if we swallowed them dry, the edges scraped our throats. We learned to take a few scraps at a time and let them soften on our tongues. It didn’t fix the hunger, but it kept us from thinking about Janey.
At eight o’clock the lights powered down with a sound like a missile falling out of the sky. We nested in blankets of paper scraps and fell asleep to the oceanic rustling of a thousand middle schoolers.
Morning came fast. We woke to white on all sides. The chitz piled over our heads.
I rose, blind hands outstretched, and stumbled and bumped until I found a cafeteria table. Paper slipped beneath my feet as I climbed.
My head broke through like a periscope. A level horizon of chitz filled the cafeteria from wall to wall. Above the surface, intercom sounds bounced off the ceiling and disappeared into the chitz. “…pride in the work we have already done. A reminder to all junior janitors that the custodial lounge is always open. Together, we were able to clean up the chitz!”
Chitz continued to fall. I burrowed back to solid ground.
There was no navigating the building. We were snowblind. Some art kids produced a spool of red yarn and began stringing it down halls as a superhighway. I followed it hand over hand. All I could see was the person in front of me disappearing into the fog of scraps. No one knew where the yarn would lead. We turned a corner, traversed a hallway, climbed a staircase. At the landing I expected to break through. We never did. The line led upstream and we swam its path.
We climbed in mute agreement. The chitz swallowed up voices and never gave them back. Sometimes a great rumbling shook the floor and the rustling grew so loud you could scream. Walls stuffed to bursting, or ceilings threatening to cave.
I tried to map our route. This staircase would lead to another floor. And there, what? A classroom? Where I was sure would be a wall, the red yarn led me down another staircase. After the third landing I noticed that no figure shook the chitz ahead. The thread was taut. No motions moved it but my own. How far behind had I fallen?
I stopped walking. A long pause passed before the chitz fell still around me.
“Hello?” The word barely reached my ears.
In the quiet came an alien peace, like the car radio stuck between programs. I had never thought to press my ear to the speaker and live in the static. No direction but forward. No movement but my chest. No louder sound than my thoughts. No hunger, pain, expectation, disappointment—no janitors, no Janey—no one in the world but me. What a relief it would be for no one to matter but the self.
Paper shifted to my right. Someone passing through the chitz. How could a person wander so blindly? Without my thread I would never have taken another step.
Janey would have pulled the poor soul to safety. I waited for them to pass. When it was quiet again, I took up the thread and went on.
An hour passed, or maybe four. I touched nothing but thread and chitz and my own body. There had been no furniture and no walls, only floor and forward. So, when the thread ended abruptly, tied in a bow around a knob, I nearly walked into the door. Letters printed on frosted glass read Custodial Lounge.
There were voices on the other side. I knocked.
A janitor opened the door. “I remember you. Sam, right?”
It was him again, with that smile that could clean up anything. “Take a seat. I’ll get you an application.”
The next area had been done up like a waiting room. Dividers blocked off the rest of the lounge. Behind them, glasses clinked. I picked out a distinct voice—Heather, from the statistics class I flunked last spring. She had been a good friend of Janey’s. The smell hit me then: Chinese food. Fry oil and soy sauce and fresh, white vinegar.
The floor was spotless. I stepped inside.
The janitor unholstered a dustbuster and ran it over my clothes, my arms, my hair, and the floor at my feet. When he was done he disappeared behind the dividers.
I sat next to a potted plant. The food smell was overpowering. My stomach made sounds like scraping inside of a drum. I had not eaten except for a few handfuls of paper the night before. My last real meal was a ham and cheese sandwich prior to that. My mother packed me an apple, too, but I threw it in the trash. Too healthy. She was out there somewhere, beyond the school walls. Did she still think of me?
The janitor returned with a clipboard and red sharpie. The application was a single sheet of notebook paper, ripped in a clean line along the perforation. Neatly handwritten, it read:
Together, were we able to clean up the chitz?
Yes
No
I marked Yes and handed it back to him. He nodded and stuck out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”
Behind the first row of the dividers, the janitor opened a coat closet to reveal a row of navy boiler suits. On the backside of the door hung a mirror. “Go ahead and try one on. Don’t worry about the size. If the sleeves are long enough, the waist is too low. If the shoulders aren’t narrow, the collar is tight. I don’t know who designed these things.” He tugged uncomfortably at his crotch. “I’ll give you some privacy.”
He disappeared again. There was a sudden sound of shattering glass. For a moment the party silenced. Then it resumed amid raucous laughter. I slipped a boiler suit off its hanger and wiggled in. It fit perfectly.
I gazed at myself in the mirror. A janitor stared back.
“There he is!” the other janitor cried. He held both hands behind his back. “Our newest recruit. You ready?”
I wasn’t. Not yet. I had to know if he recognized me from a certain vomit-strewn biology lab. He hadn’t seen the other boys flicking worm guts at me, shaking scalpels in my face. Two years had passed. That’s a lot of mops, buckets, and tearstained children. “Do you remember—”
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t say anything, though. Let’s go meet the troops.”
The former teachers’ lounge was small. I had been inside once before, when I stayed after school for the first meeting of the student newspaper. Mrs. Mahoney had laid out newspapers from every local publication, from the Probe to the Gazette. Once everyone arrived, we would make a list of what we liked about each issue, to decide exactly what kind of student newspaper we wished to craft.
No one else showed up. After twenty minutes I helped Mrs. Mahoney carry the newspapers to the teachers’ lounge. We dumped them in the recycling bin. Then she sat down and closed her eyes. No one else was around. It felt inappropriate to be in this small room alone with a teacher, no lesson plan or agenda to remind us of our roles. Just two people and a bunch of recycled newsprint. Mrs. Mahoney kept her eyes closed for a long time. Student newspaper was canceled for the rest of the year.
Now, jam-packed with people, the lounge felt smaller than ever. Bodies in boiler suits filled every inch of space. The desks had been removed. Instead, there was a buffet table overloaded with trays of Chinese takeout.
Someone clinked a knife against a glass and the room went quiet.
“Custodial heroes,” my janitor announced. “Put your hands together for a new addition to our glorious department. Sam Burke!”
The crowd hooted and hollered, but applause was sparse. There was nowhere for anyone to set down their plate.
My janitor revealed a lanyard clipped to a plastic ID card, and an ice-cold bottle of champagne. Condensation speckled the green glass. The card read Sam Burke: Junior Janitorial Staff, below my yearbook photo from the grade before.
He looped the lanyard around my neck. Then he wrapped his fingers around the bottle. “To spotless desks, untouched floors, recycling bins that are always empty—and never cleaning up chitz again!” he shouted. The cork shot from between his fingers and ricocheted off an air vent.
I wasn’t old enough for champagne, so they poured me a Dixie cup of grape juice. I finished it in one swallow and dove in after the egg rolls.
Congratulations came from all sides. “You’ll be a great addition,” Joe Fabrizio mumbled with a full mouth. It was the first time we had spoken since field day, third grade.
“Young people are the future,” grinned a janitor I recognized from behind a weedwhacker. She slapped me on the back so hard I coughed.
Heather was filling a Styrofoam cup with egg drop soup. “You look good in the suit,” she winked. “Glad you made it. There’s something out there in the halls. Not everyone comes back. That’s why we put up the thread.”
I remembered the shape shuffling past me in the stairwell and shuddered. Hang on. They put up the thread?
“Recruitment techniques. Custodial’s a good team. How do you think we were able to clean up the chitz?”
I shoveled food onto my paper plate until it buckled under the weight. A mountain of rice, orange chicken oozing with sauce, egg rolls so hot they burned your fingertips. I had amassed drunken noodles and broccoli beef and buried my face in the steam.
Heather stood there while I ate. I told her I was sorry about Janey. It must have sucked watching her burn to death at assembly.
“It was awful,” Heather agreed. “But I learned a lot from the experience.”
I asked if it felt bad to join the custodians after they had killed her best friend. She shook her head. “The principal killed her, remember? The janitors were following her orders. And anyway, we avenged her death, like, immediately.”
That was true. But perhaps they could have avenged her death to start with, and then she needn’t have died. And what then? Janey wouldn’t have liked the janitors any more than she had the principal. Even now I imagined her, crouching outside the custodial lounge with her fingers on a detonator. She would have sooner died than join them.
In fact, she had.
Heather was losing interest. “Look. Janey was a troublemaker. It was going to happen sooner or later. I’m getting some more soup. You want some?”
I didn’t. I was beginning to think all of those macerated egg rolls might just bubble up inside me like a volcano. “Wait,” I told her. There was something I had to say.
I don’t know what made me tell Heather. Maybe it would go a little way towards cleaning up after myself, even if it was too late to make a difference. Janey would never have done what I had. But if she had, she would have owned up to it.
“My mom did buy me that notebook,” I whispered. “The one they questioned me about on D-Day. I used it for Civics class. The paper was so cheap that you could barely turn a page without it tearing and sending a confetti of chitz all over the floor.” Of course I had never bothered to clean up after myself. That’s what janitors were for. Now that I understood why what I had done was wrong, becoming a janitor was my chance to atone. Clean up someone else’s mess for once. Make things a little bit better for the next guy.
It felt good to say it all out loud. But Heather was laughing. “Okay, bud.” She patted me on the head. “Here’s what you need. Go get in that line over there. Let off some steam. You’re among friends now. Even better—you’re among janitors.”
She pointed to a corner where crowded bodies hugged a door frame. Before I could ask what the line was for, Heather left me for the buffet. Well, fine. I would do as she said. But first I needed some air.
There was a rule about schools. All the windows were supposed to be bolted shut for safety reasons. If the windows could open all the way, someone might fall out, or sniper scopes could find you through the gap, or seasonal allergens could get in. There were lots of dangers about open windows. But in the lounge, five stories up, teachers were allowed fresh air. Now it was the custodial lounge. Since I was a custodian, I cracked a window.
Fresh air popped open my lungs. More than twenty-four hours had passed since I stepped outside. It felt like longer. I took another deep breath. Cold leeched away my nausea.
With a few more gulps of air inside me, I headed for the crowded corner, soggy paper plate in hand. A janitor blocked my path. “ID?” I showed her my badge. She nodded and took my plate. Then she stepped aside with a paternal wink. “Have fun in there.”
At the front of the crowd, a featureless metal door had been propped open. A clear plastic curtain blocked the room beyond. “Get in line, buddy,” grunted a junior janitor with a head shaped like a football. His face was unfamiliar. Were the janitors recruiting from other schools now? I ignored him and pressed forward. More voices complained. “Just looking,” I promised. “I’m not a cutter.”
Nearer the front, there was a sound I had not heard for a long time. Zippers? That wasn’t it. Then I saw movement through the plastic curtain. White flecks spun like flurries of snow. I recognized the noise: paper, tearing against wire ribs. Spiral, unbound.
The room must have once been a janitor closet—actual custodial territory, unlike the annexed lounge. Metal piping and machinery decked the walls. In one corner, a metal drum rattled and hummed. Stacked columns of wire-bound notebooks towered to the ceiling on all sides. Between them, a frantic dance took place.
Three bodies moved in ill-fitting boiler suits. Each held a notebook, taken from one of the stacks. Hands grasped wire, fingers gripped and tore. The motion was a full body effort. Arms arced over heads. At the zenith paper flew in zipper-bit fragments. There was no pattern, no recurring steps. What the figures shared was the fervent energy of the possessed. Reach, grip, tear.
And the chitz flew.
A whistle sounded. Three gutted notebooks hit the ground, little more than twisted wire and a cardboard cover. The figures grinned at each other, bent at the waist, hands propped on knees, breaths heavy, artificial wind licking sweat-matted hair in a snow globe of chitz. I recognized them all. One of them had waited with me in cross-legged terror outside the principal’s office. One of them had held the broom that swept the chitz that made the pyre that killed Janey. One of them ate lunch with me every day. They had been my friends. Now I couldn’t remember their names. That made me a poor friend, I realized between heartbeats.
Already, the chitz dissipated. In a matter of moments each scrap lifted away into the HVAC system. A direct freeway to every other room in the school.
The three figures clapped each other on the backs. Someone pulled aside the curtain. A voice shouted, “Next!” And the line moved gleefully forward.
My head was filling up with chitz now. The nerve endings that should have let my brain tell my muscles to move were paper, nonconductive, blowing in a chilly air-conditioned breeze. Air waves could have carried me through narrow passages to be deposited on desks, nested in hair, collected in backpack pockets, accumulated with a million identical siblings in great peaks on tile floors. And if those floors cracked under the strain of our countless featherweight faces, if they collapsed and brought down the building with whoever was left inside it, it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t ask to be torn out of a notebook.
Was that what it meant to be a janitor? This wasn’t me. One crappy notebook was different. I wasn’t like the rest of them, reveling in a mess too big to ever clean up. Even so I wanted to be in the room. I wanted it the same way I wanted the smell of the Chinese food, a want so physical it’s unmistakable from need. Someone else would clean up when we were done. There had to be someone else, a power higher than the janitors or the principal. The great vacuum cleaner in the sky.
We had killed Janey to clean up this mess. It hadn’t worked. Someone else would be next.
We. The word boomeranged around my brain. I was a janitor now. Whatever Heather wanted to think, we had killed Janey, all of us. She didn’t die for what she believed in or to protect us or for anything that mattered. She died in a sweaty auditorium surrounded by middle schoolers who sat in our chairs until it was too late—if we even stood up at all.
Suddenly I was at the open window. My hands rested on the frame. I forced it the rest of the way open and took a deep breath. Before all of this, it had been October. Now, the autumn wind smelled like paper. I would never escape that smell.
Five stories down would be swift. I closed my eyes. Then I grasped the frame of the open window and climbed through.
The drop came swift and straight. Not the lilting descent of paper on a breeze: I fell like a pigeon punched out of the air by a bullet. Wind roared in my ears. What would it feel like to die? Would I feel the impact, as a red crunch of pain unzipped the meat from my skeleton? Or would it be over before I knew it—darkness beyond feeling, beyond thought, the blissful slate of eternal static?
I never found out. My plummet ended in a soft, scratchy bed. For a moment I thought I was back at home. Any moment my mother’s hands would touch my shoulder, shaking me gently awake. “Open your eyes,” she would say in the voice that only mothers know. “You were having a bad dream.”
I opened my eyes.
The window was no more than ten feet above me. Honestly, it might have been six. Faces peered out of it. Heather, and another janitor, their mouths agape in shock.
White worms drifted across my vision. Chitz. What else? My fall was broken by a solid floor of chitz. I rolled over and the paper shifted underneath me, crawling into the gaps between my sleeves and skin.
The chitz extended to the horizon in every direction. Here and there, rooftops and chimneys broke through the surface. There were no streets or sidewalks or fire hydrants or rose bushes or mothers to prune them. Everything was buried in chitz.
So this was what it had all built towards. The janitors got what they wanted. No one remained to stub out cigarettes on freshly disinfected desktops, or scuff their cleanly waxed floors. Most importantly, no janitor would ever clean up chitz again. From the top of the food chain, they—we—looked down on the town we had conquered. Together.
“One of our newest janitors has just taken a plunge,” came a muffled announcement from above. “But don’t you worry about him, folks. He’s going to be A-OK. Coming up, we have some announcements about what’s next for the custodial team. But first, we’re going to talk bleach, bleach, bleach.”
Their words marched from the open window, scented by lo mein, carried on currents of paper-starched air. They echoed between ranges of towering chitz mountains and soared over a horizon of crinkled white curls, already tinged orange with sunset. The janitors’ words climbed high over a paper landscape. Then they fell into the sea of chitz, where they disappeared completely.
The new world was as peaceful as a snowy morning, bereft of honking school buses and juvenile laughter. Here, no children played. No sound was made. And nothing moved but paper on the wind.
~~~
