Latrines

Behold again the stars.

The light. The stairs down. Down. There are no windows in the basement of the residence hall. The light comes from tubes that hum in the ceiling. It does not change, the same at five in the morning as at noon. He could work an entire spring semester down here and never once know what the sky was doing. He lets himself in with the key on the loop at his belt. The door shuts behind him. The hum of the fixtures, the only sound in the part of the building that is awake.

He fills the bucket at the mop sink. Warm water. It will be gray inside the hour. He wheels the cart down the tiled row to the elevator. The squeaky casters have needed oil since before he started this job and he has stopped hearing them. He begins on the third floor at the far end, where the rooms are worst, because the morning can only get better after those.

He works the stalls first. He doesn’t think much about what the weekend has left him. It’s the same every Monday. He mops. Wrings the mop. Sets the yellow sign across the door though no one will come for an hour. He does the work the way it needs done because there is no reason to do it the other way. A bathroom is clean or it is not. A great and shining institution cannot have filthy bathrooms, and so the bathrooms are clean. Who would clean them? And so he does.

It’s not the hardened waste or urine on the floor or vomit or hair or broken glass or cups or mud or the smell that beats him.

It’s the wall under the hand dryers.

The hot air throws water off wet hands and the water carries what is on them, and over the years it streaks down into the paint, a yellow bloom low on the wall in the shape of everyone who ever made the mark and walked out. He scrubs. He has scrubbed since September. He found the cabinet with the stronger chemical and used the stronger chemical. The bloom lifts a shade. It’s the color of piss, but it’s been scrubbed clean.

The supervisor is an older man who has been in the building longer than some of the faculty. He stops on his round and looks at the wall and tells him kindly to give it another go. The supervisor believes the wall comes clean. It is his building and his name on the schedule, and he cannot allow himself to believe it will never come clean.

Even though he knows only paint will make the wall white again, the boy gets back to it. He works the brush in tight circles. The chemical bites the back of his throat. The musty heat of the room comes up through his jeans. Above him the dryers wait their turn.

He scrubs it again.

It does not come clean.

Act I. No Windows