The Cleaners (Faraway collection) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Ken Liu

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542025157

  Cover design by Micaela Alcaino

  Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds. Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.

  —“The Princess and the Pea,” Hans Christian Andersen, translated by H. P. Paull

  Gui

  Gui’s father ran the cleaning shop for twenty years before Gui was born, and then another twenty after. This wasn’t a place that laundered dresses and starched shirts; people went there and paid to get rid of unwanted memories. A neighborhood institution, really.

  When Gui took over, a year earlier, he had closed the doors for a week and cleaned the place from top to bottom, scrubbing every square inch. Even when you were a professional cleaner, layers of memories accumulated in the place you grew up. What was the point of keeping around riddles with no answers, locks with no keys? When the doors reopened a week later, there was a new sign over them: “A Fresh Start.”

  Other businesses along Pleasant Street in East Cradock, Massachusetts, had come and gone every few years, reflecting the advancing and receding tides of the economy: Brazilian grocery store, thrift shop, travel agency, computer repairer, tax preparer, bank branch (that later turned into the offices for a trio of bankruptcy lawyers), thrift shop again (that also promised to help you sell things online) . . . but this place had hung on like the mussels clinging to the pier down by the beach. Now it was bracketed on one side by James’s Tactical Supplies and on the other by A-Maze Escapes. Whatever the trendy currents were for how people wanted to spend their money, there was always the need to scrub off unpleasant mind-sheddings, to become a different person.

  The woman entered the shop on a chilly February Monday morning, the snow outside frozen in dirty gray clumps. He judged her to be fortysomething. Her coat, bright orange, ragged and lumpy, was zipped tight like a suit of armor. Her frizzy red hair was tied up in a messy bun that left her gaunt face unframed. Her brows were furrowed in a way that reminded Gui of the tracks left by seagulls on a deserted winter beach.

  She hesitated for a moment before approaching the counter. “I have a big job for you.”

  Gui waited, holding her gaze. He had found that being only twenty-one meant that customers didn’t always trust him right away. If he said nothing and allowed the awkward silence to stretch out between them, taut and brittle, customers tended to interpret his reticence as the gravity of experience.

  “I’ve never done this,” she said, putting her hands on the counter supplicatingly. He noticed that she didn’t wear gloves: not afraid of the pain of others, or, more likely, just inured.

  Gui nodded, retrieved a sheet of rates and terms, and pushed it toward her. He waited while the woman read it over.

  “You don’t do walls and carpets?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m a one-man operation. Whatever you need cleaned has to fit in my truck. I do everything here.”

  People rarely asked for whole-house cleanings unless they had something to hide or if it was for an estate sale. His parents had done many estates, but Gui refused them on principle.

  “Just as well,” she said. “I probably can’t afford a house-wide scouring anyway. But we—he had a lot of things.”

  So someone had died. He thought about refusing, but something about the way she held herself, alone but resolute, made him want to help. Besides, she wasn’t wearing gloves. Didn’t seem like the fussy type.

  “I can work through a lot if you’re willing to wait,” he said. “But I only do complete scourings. No selective washes.”

  Estates were among the most delicate and difficult of professional cleaning jobs. It wasn’t the quantity of the work, but the quality. Often, the family didn’t want deep cleaning of the deceased. They wanted editing. Wedding dresses, books, Christmas ornaments, furniture, collections of porcelain figurines—those objects had decades of memory deposits on them, all conflicting. What was a pleasant memory for one was also a source of jealousy and rancor for another. Everyone wanted the possessions to conform to the story they’d been telling themselves for years. Cleaning became the excuse to refight old wars, to reopen scabbed-over wounds, to relitigate settled truths. He had neither the interest nor the capability for such work.

  “That’s exactly what I want,” she said. Then, she pointed to the privacy clause. “This . . . this is absolute?”

  Gui gestured at the walls, empty save for a single abstract painting of entwined pastel swirls, like the smoke tendrils inside the disposal oven. “I never reveal my clients.”

  On reality TV shows like Cleaning Up after the Rich and Famous, the cleaners festooned their shops with photographs of celebrity clients who would bring a dress or an expensive handbag in for a cleaning after a night of indiscretion. But everyone understood that was entertainment, the kind of fake cleaning staged to generate gossip and web traffic. “The law does require that I make a report if I discover evidence of ongoing abuse or the commission of a crime,” he added.

  “And after—the memories are unrecoverable?”

  Gui didn’t mind the implied mistrust. There were unscrupulous cleaners who saved the dregs and sold them. There was a market for the anguish of others. Always had been.

  He decided to reassure her by walking her through his process. “Do you do much cleaning yourself?”

  She hesitated for a beat. “Just around the house.”

  “What do you use?”

  “Just the standard: alcohol and vinegar, maybe some oil of Mnemosyne after a bad night. I don’t use any chemicals I can’t pronounce.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t either. They don’t work as well as they want you to believe. Even oil of Mnemosyne can’t completely dissolve deposits more than a week old. Most people think commercial cleaners use something special to loosen old deposits, maybe the kind the police use to lift memory prints so they could be saved whole. The truth is that I scrape them off the same way you would, but I can do it for longer and harder because I don’t shrink back from the pain. That’s how I get everything out. The dregs are then destroyed the old-fashioned way: incineration.” He pointed behind him. The boxy oven loomed in the workshop in the back.

  “I have to warn you . . .” She paused, screwing up the courage. “Some of it was unpleasant, even harsh. It will sting.” Her voice softened. “It must be hard, to feel so much and to say nothing.”

  He took a deep breath. “Not really. I’m not sensitive.”

  “At all? Not even to your own deposits?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then . . . you can’t relive memo—” She stopped, realizing how personal she was getting.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been that way since I was born.” People thought of cleaners as extra sensitive, and the stereotype had some basis in reality. But he had his own niche.

  The woman nodded absentmindedly. He suspected that she alr
eady knew his quirk and merely wanted to hear him confirm it. It was how he had been able to stay in business as a one-man shop. The chain cleaners charged much less and had fancy machines that allowed their operators to home in on just one stain with inhuman precision. But word of mouth spread his name: the cleaner who couldn’t blab about your business because he couldn’t sense substantiated memories.

  She grabbed a pen off the counter and began to fill out the form. He watched as the list of objects to be cleaned grew under her hand: jewelry, clothing, furniture, suitcases, electronics. She ran out of room and asked for a second form. He wondered what sort of man the deceased had been that this woman would want to erase everything about him, to avoid having to come in contact with his ghost in the future. A lover? A spouse? A father? He always wondered; he never asked.

  “Do you intend to sell any of these after?”

  She paused. “Why do you ask?”

  “Collectors will pay much more for antiques if they have authenticating memories,” he explained. “After I’m done, they may be worthless.”

  She let out a bitter chuckle. “No. I’m keeping what I can use and donating the rest. Can’t afford to buy everything new. When can you do the pickup?”

  Gui unloaded the truck through the side door. The shop’s front doors were shut and locked. The windows were shuttered and barred. He always saved the big, deep cleanings for Sundays so he wouldn’t be interrupted.

  He pondered the objects scattered around him on the workshop floor: bedding, hand tools, stacks of chipped dishes, travel guides published more than a decade ago. It was best to start with something not too personal, to get into the flow of work. He settled on a wicker chair: low, roomy, in a style that was meant to be modern but became outdated the moment the chair was sold, the arms held out in a wide, empty embrace. He ran his finger over the woven rattan: a little rough, dry, the color dulled.

  He pulled the multijointed swing arm of the shop light down until it bathed the chair in bright, shadowless light. He kneeled down and examined the surface closely: the patches of deposits shimmered, a translucent haze like algae on the walls of an aquarium. He could see bands in two distinct patterns: a periwinkle base with speckles of dull copper, which he decided belonged to the woman, and a bright, angry crimson with tiny jet-black spots, the edges jagged and pulsing.

  “You can’t relive a memory that you didn’t have a part in creating. But you can still be affected by the moods and emotions in a stranger’s deposits.” That was his father, before he had accepted that Gui was different. “You can never tell how something feels to the hand of the owner. So be humble. Treat everything you clean with respect.”

  He could recall the words so clearly because he had heard them again that morning. He had been brushing his teeth as the video played in the background, the low-resolution recording streaked with pixelated artifacts.

  He dipped the pig-bristle brush into the bucket of oil of Mnemosyne and began to scrub over the tightly spaced strands. He wore no gloves so that he could see what he was doing better. He worked methodically, one filament at a time, as though he were coloring, painting, tracing a design. He took special care around broken strands and holes, lingering over the uneven edges the way dental hygienists cleaned around a filling. The repetitive motion was comforting, mindless work that produced tangible results. The tangy odor of the solution, somewhere between gasoline and pine tar, with a hint of spices and animal musk, gradually filled the air.

  He could see the rattan’s natural shine coming through slowly, the periwinkle and crimson deposits coming off in clumps and wisps, thin curlicues like solidified smoke. The dregs beaded at the tips of the bristles, each color refusing to blend with the other. He wiped them off the brush with a collection sponge, and when the sponge had turned a dark patriarch purple, like raw lamb’s liver, he dumped it in the burn bucket.

  “Some people are much more sensitive than others. When I was little, your grandmother used to beat me with her hairbrush. Whenever I touched that hairbrush, I would scream. Felt like holding a scalding panhandle. But she brushed her hair with it until the day she died. Said she liked the tingle.”

  Gui looked down at the handle of the scrubbing brush, the same one his father had used for forty years. It was the only thing he had not cleaned after he took over the shop. The desert ironwood had cracked in several places, but was otherwise as hard and polished as he had always remembered. He tightened his fingers around it. He felt nothing.

  “Never judge why someone wants to clean. All you can do is to help them the only way you can; do your job.” His father had raised the brush, glistening with dregs like dark, misshapen pearls, and offered them to him. “Touch it. Touch it so you know how to share in someone’s pain without being overwhelmed by it. Be careful. This may burn.”

  He knew that this moment had happened, not because he remembered it happening, but because he had watched himself in the recording that morning, like he did every morning. His mother had filmed the scene with her flip phone because it was his birthday, and she had wanted to preserve the moment for him, for later, for when he was older and neither his father nor his father’s tools would be around anymore.

  And he had reached out, terrified and thrilled both. He was a boy of eight but being entrusted with the work of a man. He braced himself, biting down on his lip so that he would not scream, no matter how it felt. His fingers connected with the dark globules at the ends of the bristles.

  In the recorded video, the boy didn’t scream. The stoic expression on his face turned to bewilderment before collapsing into disappointment. He had already known that he was different, that he couldn’t do what everyone else took for granted. But hope had not died until that moment. He had felt nothing.

  Gui kneeled before the chair, scrubbing and scrubbing as the bucket next to him gradually filled with dark liver lumps.

  Clara

  Clara rushed through the crowd in her lumpy, bright orange coat, the messy bun on her head bobbing like a pom-pom. Beatrice, her sister, was taking her out to lunch, and she was late.

  She was late because she had to line up to get her bag checked by security, wasting fifteen minutes. Clara tried not to feel resentful. Beatrice didn’t know how much trouble it was for her to leave the factory for lunch. She didn’t understand jobs where you had to clock in and clock out, where your employer viewed you as a potential thief. Beatrice was only in town for a meeting and had to fly out that afternoon, and she thought she was giving Clara, the poor sister whose life had turned into such a failure, a treat.

  They met at the trendy café Beatrice had picked. They didn’t hug—Beatrice never hugged, not since she was a teenager. They sat down, and Clara handed Beatrice her gift. It was hard to shop for Beatrice, who already had everything. But giving a gift mattered to Clara. It was a way for her to tell herself that she was still capable of giving, hadn’t made a mess of her life.

  “Get whatever you want,” Beatrice said, putting the package away in her purse without opening it. She took out a travel-sized bottle of sanitizer and cleaned the silverware and plates, wiping everything down with a disposable napkin.

  “What are you getting?” Clara asked.

  “The online reviews say that the seaweed salad and dumplings here are the best.” Beatrice never took her eyes off her phone screen as she scrolled through her messages.

  Clara stared at the dark ceramic back of her sister’s phone, Void Black®. It looked perfectly new, not a single scratch on it. She wondered briefly if it was one of the phones that she had cleaned herself at the factory and then decided that was unlikely. Beatrice preferred to buy things online. Less contact with people was always better.

  “How’s work?” she blurted, and instantly regretted it. Talking about work with Beatrice never went well. She found her sister’s ramblings about her clients’ schemes and plots incomprehensible, and Beatrice just assumed that Clara never wanted to talk about her job. But what else was there to talk about? For two peo
ple who had grown up together, they had remarkably little to converse about. They no longer knew each other at all.

  “It’s fine,” said Beatrice, absorbed in answering an email. “Just let me finish this. If the food gets here, start without me . . .”

  Clara decided she would order the lobster roll.

  Beatrice tapped away, her thumbs deftly sliding around the glass. “Can you believe the defendant would have the gall to claim that my client stole the idea from her? She says she has authenticating deposits, but she’s dragging her heels on giving me the laptop. She must be artificially aging the memory right now, and I need my useless assistant to expedite the request for production . . .”

  Clara’s hands still tingled, and she massaged them reflexively. Even with gloves, it was impossible to avoid stings completely at work. Phones came down on the conveyer belt, one every thirty seconds. It was her job to inspect and wipe off the residue from the workers in the distant factory-cities across the Pacific in which they had been assembled.

  The last phone before her lunch break had hurt her. Her mind had been drifting, and she had picked up the phone with her left hand directly instead of using tongs. Most phones, after all, were coated only in mild anxiety or mind-numbing boredom, perfectly safe to touch. Without examining it closely, she had given it a few wipes with the cloth in her right hand, soaked in the foul-smelling high-tech solution that was supposed to break down even the most crusted-over memory deposits. It had taken a few seconds for her mind to register the burning pain in her left hand, as though she were holding a live wire.

  Despair, exhaustion, the terror of loneliness, and the paranoia of failing. Climbing high, higher, even higher. A moon hung in a hazy sky, serrated at both ends like a broken tooth. A passing breeze redolent of chemicals that burned the nose. The factory laid out below like a model, a map. Thoughts of jumping, leaping into a wind that would lift her skinny arms like a bat’s wings, a wind that would never actually come. And then hurtling toward the earth, yearning for the ultimate peace.