The Cleaners (Faraway collection) Read online

  So he would also forget. Nothing he did would leave a mark, not unless he consciously and constantly reminded himself of it. He would lose that most unreliable, fragile, unwanted but also faithful witness of the very nature of existence, the exuviated skin of a mind growing through time.

  Am I much better off, though?

  She twirled the four-color pen, letting it tumble-walk across the back of her hand and catching it just before it fell. The periwinkle bands in the haze held bright gold specks, brighter than they had been in her deposits in a long time.

  She still couldn’t believe she had forgotten that episode from their childhood together. Though she had never gone out of her way to keep mementos, she had believed she remembered enough. The inevitable sediments felt to her vaguely unhygienic, an aspect of being human that was unpleasant, like crusted sleep in your eyes when you woke up.

  But she had forgotten; she hadn’t even known something was missing until Beatrice brought it back to her.

  What else had she forgotten? What other scars had healed over and vanished? What joys faded and then sloughed off? What other parts of herself had she left behind in the basements of long-ago rental units, the hands of strangers who picked through her moving sales, the trash heaps in landfills that slowly fermented and rotted in the rain, leaching her memory, along with the memories of millions of others, into sewers, rivers, ocean currents, to be carried to the deep abyss where pale ghost crabs skittered over them, attendants at the final oblivion?

  She looked at her cramped apartment, suddenly spacious because Lucas’s possessions had been removed—no, not his possessions. They were also hers. They had fused their lives and bought things together, during that time when he had claimed that she gave him strength, made him want to be a better man. She had been calling them his only because he had been the one who didn’t want to throw them out, not even when they had become worn and outdated.

  She paced back and forth across the apartment, picturing the ghostly outlines of everything that had been taken away by the cleaner, to be returned in another week: A Fresh Start.

  But did she want a fresh start? Did she want everything around her to be like the phones she cleaned at the warehouse, smelling faintly of the promise of emptiness, possibilities achieved at the price of erasure?

  She had invested so much of herself into this life with Lucas. Just because he had left didn’t mean that it had been wasted. She had lived through it; it was not a dream.

  “We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that we’re better than we remember.”

  She looked at the pen in her hand again, squeezing it tight, feeling that burst of enduring trust, a faith that had survived growing up, growing apart, growing into strangers who had fresh starts.

  Gui

  The woman strode deliberately around the corner of the workshop in which her goods were piled and then hesitated.

  Gui watched her, saying nothing. Clients sometimes changed their minds about cleaning. That was why he took his time on large jobs.

  She stopped in front of the gleaming wicker chair. After scrubbing, he had oiled and polished it with a soft cloth. She ran her hands over the woven strands, holding her breath. Then she let out a long exhalation. “You’re very good. This feels new.”

  He said nothing.

  Her hand lingered on the chair a moment longer before she took another couple of steps, stopping before a desk lamp. The base, a crystal vase encased in spiraling brass vines, was meant to serve as a souvenir display jar or perhaps a small terrarium. It was filled with pebbles and shells, bits of sea glass, a plastic aquarium boat, a few key chains, folded-up bits of paper, ticket stubs.

  “He bought this for me,” the woman said, as though speaking to herself. “But we both filled it. We tried to fill it with happy memories, to keep us going when things weren’t so good.

  “At first, we filled it quickly. Then the filling slowed and stopped. We began to reach in for jolts of comfort, of strength. But we did so only when things were really bad, and so they got coated with arguments, betrayals, deposits we’d rather forget.”

  Gui waited. He knew what she meant, but also didn’t.

  He thought about the recordings his parents had made for him over the years, first very few, and then many more, in higher and higher resolution, documenting every aspect of the cleaning process as well as their life together. It was meant to compensate for his condition, to help him remember. But the very act of conscious documentation cast a pall over everything. Watching himself and them felt like watching actors.

  She reached into the crystal and wrapped her fingers around a bit of green sea glass. Her whole body stiffened. She held that pose for a moment, eyes closed. Then she let out her breath slowly, her body relaxing.

  “It’s messy, but we filled it together. I put myself in it.” She turned to him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want the rest of it cleaned. I’ll pay you the full amount.”

  “When would you like to schedule the drop-off?”

  They worked out the details.

  Before she turned to leave, he stopped her. “Do you want the dregs?” He pointed to the bucket sitting unobtrusively in the corner.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t control everything. Some forgetting is healthy.”

  After she left, he took the bucket to the incinerator. Carefully, he placed the lumps inside, one after another, as though laying out offerings on an altar. He shut the door, turned it on, and watched through the glass viewport as the flames inside leaped to life. The sponges charred, deformed, collapsed, and then burst into brilliant flowers of color and smoke.

  He looked over at the scrubbing brush hanging on the wall. In the flickering light of the incinerator, he could see that the handle gleamed with a grayish shimmer, like a moth’s wings. It was the hue of his own deposits, mysteries he was himself powerless to decipher.

  He realized that he could not recall the color it held when his father had wielded it, for the hue of memory was impossible to capture with the camera. He wept then, knowing that he would not remember this moment in the future, feeling both the weight of freedom and the lift of oblivion.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Lisa Tang Liu

  Ken Liu is the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Award–winning author of The Dandelion Dynasty series and two short story collections, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He lives near Boston with his family.