Job 18:2

How long will you hunt for words?
Show understanding and then we can talk.

Marina is a ghost weaving through the spaces in between the hallways. She is silent & unnoticeable, almost forgettable. She carries a Swiffer mop & a large blue plastic bucket, which she hauls by the handle. I have known her as a housekeeper, & now I know her as the ghost she has been for the past few days.

Marina is a Filipina woman, stout in as graceful a way as I have ever seen. She wears faded soccer t-shirts, & I wonder if she would call them football t-shirts. I know in Europe they justifiably call it football but I don’t have a clue about the Philippines. I make a mental note to ask her about this. She also wears soccer shorts, usually falling just above browned knees, but it’s hard to say if these are worn because she’s into that kind of thing or just because they fit & they are cheap. After all, this is how I choose what clothing of my own to buy, how am I to decide who is different from myself? Okay sometimes it is obvious, obviously. But not in this case. Marina is acting quiet & secluded because life is hard to bear, I think, but I wouldn’t have the first idea how to approach this issue. Maybe I will say yes, I know life is hard, but will me knowing change her acceptance? Will it change mine?

This woman, whose age is indecipherable but who at one time told me she had worked construction for maybe fifteen or twenty years so I have assumed she is fortyish, this woman’s life is considerably & vocally tougher than mine, though. There are a small handful of stories that Marina has told me before she was a ghost that have clued me into this.

Story #1: In which, during my second week at this job, Marina’s aunt in the Philippines tripped & fell down the stairs at home. The way Marina tells it, her aunt was both unsure & afraid of the hospitals in her own country, & thus chose to stay at home with a broken hip. Yesterday at my CPR/First Aid training, Fireman Tom, whose head was shaped remarkably like a big toe, which I think I forgot to mention, had informed us that to stay immobile is the worse tragedy a human being can undergo. Circulation is vital, is key, Tom had said. The way Marina tells it, her aunt’s immobility caused her broken hip to infect or something perhaps more dire than that & which I don’t entirely understand because I am not a doctor, but her fall caused her to die at home within a matter of days. Marina had gone home to the Philippines that weekend, it was something like a 19 hour flight one way & at the time I was still very quiet & shy around these adults but I had wanted to cry for her & hug her around the shoulders. It only seemed appropriate.

Story #2: In which another unnamed aunt of Marina’s was duped into one of those internet scams where Nigerians or men posing as Nigerians try to take all your money. I have seen a news show about this with my father & I think it is funny because it showcases brilliantly the fallacy of human trust & at the time maybe that was something I was interested in. I do not tell this to Marina though, because no, seriously, this scam has taken thousands of dollars from a member of her own family. This story is one that makes her more angry than sad, but still it is perhaps made more sad because an after school special has become reality.

And now there is a Story #3: In which, maybe just last week though I am not entirely positive because even though I keep up on local news here & there I am far from being a BBCNews anchorman, a ship carrying hundreds of passengers capsized off the coast of the Philippines at the height of a typhoon. The way the other housekeepers tell it, which they have to because Marina suddenly is a ghost, Marina had a couple of cousins on that very ship. The ship was called Princess of the Stars. For some reason, this makes the story sadder. It’s possible this story isn’t entirely accurate, but I won’t be the one to ask Marina about it. Not today at least.

William does not show up for work this morning, & when it becomes steadily more clear that he will not show up at all, I am both ready & entirely unprepared. It is the slow season anyway. This will not be bad. I am not worried about things needing to get done that aren’t going to be able to get done. I ask myself what it is I am actually worried about. Maybe I am worried that I am going to be deathly bored today. Ah, then if that is it this won’t be too much of a different day after all.

Oh but the day looms ahead with a Death Valley sun that dizzies me within moments of exposure. Kris accosts me as I am busying myself to prepare a head-on plan of attack on organizing the cluttered & mildewed basement. She needs me to help her with something, but only because it requires heavy lifting. I have no problem with this. I tell her to wait one second so I can shoot off a couple steroid blasts. No, I don’t tell her this. I tell her Okay. It turns out what she wants is for me to take cardboard boxes full of old finance papers down from the top of a closet in the massage therapy room.

“Are there any massages scheduled today?”

I want to know this because the last time I went into this room to take things out of this closet, the masseuse came in. She was a stout woman in a very ungraceful way & she had not liked the idea of a too-tall boy with a sideways hat on & horribly unkempt facial hair suddenly standing in her business. She had asked me to leave, & I had obliged.

“Not until quarter to two.”

“Okay, good. Because the last time…”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay, good.”

As Kris & an old woman of a volunteer are sorting papers into recycling piles & keep piles, I am brainstorming some way to transport & dispose of all this recyclable paper. Because I am a mastermind & because William is not here so I have to be the Responsible Thinking Maintenance Man, I offer my brilliant idea. My brilliant idea is to use big black trash bags to throw all the paper into, which I will collect all at once when they have finished sorting through everything. I will take the bags & put them in the back of the golf cart. I will drive them around the other side of the building to the recycling dumpsters. This is my brilliant plan; I am proud.

After break I return to the massage therapy room & the idiocy of my brilliant plan is immediately evident. There is no way I will be able to lift big black trash bags full of condensed piles of paper. No, I will be able to lift them. Of course I will be able to lift them. I go for the first one I come across, & it rips immediately in my hand. I almost swear because that’s what I’ve become accustomed to doing when something goes wrong, but the volunteer will likely sue this company for irreparable emotional & possibly aural damage if I swear. I am tempted to swear anyway just to test her. Instead, I struggle heroically with this big bag & am able to wrestle it outside to where the golf cart waits. The next step is to lift this bag into the back. I grab it & lift. It rips mightily. I get a better grip. It scoffs at me & tears along its bottom. Papers are spilling lazily onto the pavement.

“Ah fuck you come on.”

I lift. It goes nowhere in any direction. Instead it rips again, this one smaller, like a little burp out the side of its mouth. I make sure the volunteer isn’t around.

“Shiiiiiit.”

I have to leave it & go back inside. The sun is too big & too fucking hot & I’m pretty sure I will fall down at any second. It occurs to me that maybe this will be another instance of insurance or workers comp or whatever. I am almost tempted to faint just to test this very adult system. I don’t know how much comp a worker will get for heat exhaustion, but I am not above testing it out. But these big fucking bags are still there, & they are black as death. It’s okay, I am reassuring myself, because I have come up with a new brilliant plan. This time I will take the papers out of the bags & put them in cardboard boxes until the bags are light enough to carry. It’s a more brilliant plan than the last one, admittedly, & I pat myself on the back. I make it look like I am just scratching my back, though, because I am back inside, around people. I know what I’m really doing, though. I know.

I grab for the papers inside one of the bags to begin the transfer from big bag to smaller box & immediately something sharp digs under my skin. A staple. A goddamn big fucking staple.

“ARRRRGGHH.”

This time the volunteer is right there, standing right next to me. She is old but she is probably admiring how young I am, probably she is going to make a move on my curvy, flexible, young spine. Probably she will tear it from my back just to say, “Ha! Now what!” I pull my hand out of the bag & already my middle finger is bleeding darkly. I squeeze it a little bit, suck on it a little bit. It’s still bleeding a dull/sharp pain. I am grumbling, I am wearing my hat sideways because that’s how I like it, & my facial hair refuses to sprout properly, & when this volunteer asks if I’m okay I say “Yea, yea, yea” kind of absent-mindedly & unbelievably coldly & go to the bathroom.

At the sink I realize what I have just done. This woman, she will probably call her lawyer when she gets home. She might even be calling her lawyer right now. She will be calling him because there is some punk kid here who was mean & indifferent to me, & look, all I was trying to do was give up my Wednesday morning to help out a non-profit organization. And there’s this kid here, & his hat is crooked & his facial hair, it’s fucking stupid looking, & all I wanted to know was if he was okay. He was mean to me! Mean! She will be crying at this point. I will have unintentionally put this retreat center in the poor house, & all because of this heat & these big black bags & this sun, Jesus Christ this sun is unbelievable today. And whoever did that shitty stapling job that left the staple hyper-extended so that I would cut my fingertip on it. I will blame this on them, & I will stand up in court to do it if I have to.

“And is the person who left the paper poorly stapled in this courtroom?”

“Yessir, s/he is.”

“Can you please point to who it was, Mr. Efford?”

And I will do it. I will finger the bastard because they made me be short to this poor woman. I will find out who did it, & I will not sleep until they are shackled or behind bars. Or at least until they are fired.

Back outside in the hallway by the massage therapy room, the volunteer, whose name is Sandy & who is actually, it turns out, a very kind, grandmotherly old woman, Sandy is picking up where I left off. She is bent at the waist, shoveling paper out of the bag & into the box. I approach her quickly, uncomfortable already at the prospect of facing the issue of such a spiritedly cruel response to such a kind, innocent question.

“Hey, sorry.”

Sandy turns her head, her waist still bent & her hands still moving papers from broken bag to cardboard box. Bag to box. Bag. Box. She is looking up at me backwards. Sandy is grinning at me.

“Jumped up & caught ya, huh?”

“Yea. Heh heh. Yea, looks like it.”

“Y’alright?”
“Oh yea yea, it’s nothing, sorry.”

She shakes the bag a little, visibly emptier & I figure if she can lift it & shake it around, I can at least put my sweat & staple-holed finger on hold to finish what I started.

“All set?”

“All set.”

~~

I am not looking forward to after lunch. After lunch I know I will be going to the basement to sort through all the crap down there & throw away anything that is garbage & set in neat piles anything that is not. I will have to meet up with April, who is almost 60 but who acts at least twenty years younger, all slim waist & noticeably hip older-woman blonde bob. Sometimes she gels her hair very slightly. Sometimes she wears something like a pantsuit, but she is even too young for something so adult as a pantsuit. Usually she wears skirts. She drives a black SUV & wears sunglasses tinted yellow.

I will have to meet with her after lunch so we can venture downstairs & figure out what everything is under the 60-watt bulbs. They should be at least 150 watt bulbs. I cannot see anything down there in clear contrasts, it is mostly shadows & corners. I should change those bulbs tomorrow. Maybe that will give me something to write about. Maybe I will be changing the bulbs & I will fall off the ladder or I will be electrically shocked. Maybe nothing will happen, but I will still write about it.

~~

Under the bulbs, April has given me instructions to sweep over here, stack these, throw out that, & she has gone upstairs. I sit down on an unused, old-fashioned ice cooler & lean to my right until my head is resting on a stack of boxes. I close my eyes. I open them & suddenly I am stricken with the confused fear of someone who realizes that where they are is incompatible with where they want to be. I am twenty years old. I have been to college & I am going to go back to college in just a few weeks. I am so young, too young to be in a basement with shitty bulbs sorting old picture frames from empty wine bottles. I should be reading & enunciating every thought I have with exaggerated hand movements. I should be with twentysomethings because I am they. I should plan a triumphant return. I should grow a better beard.

~~

At the end of the day, as I am returning to my room, I am showing signs of physical fatigue. I am sweating & red-tinted. The way I picture it, my hands are dragging on the floor. This may or may not be true. In the hall, I pass by Marina the ghost, who looks up as we pass each other. She sees me, not just a gray thing moving, but me, & I smile something that is meant to show relief & recognition of a day done. She smiles, she chuckles. The moment passes. I wonder if spirits ever forget they are spirits, & return as they once were? I wonder if I can make Marina the ghost remember when she was Marina?

I know that Marina the ghost is different from Marina because three weeks ago, before the boast crash & the typhoon & the Nigerian scam, she had given me a ride home. She had told me about construction. As we drove over a bridge maybe ten miles outside of Madison, she said, “I built this bridge.” Seriously. She had built that bridge. I remember telling her how amazing it must be to drive over a bridge you had built. I remember she had shrugged & said, “Yeah.” But she was smiling.

I know that Marina the ghost is different from Marina because during that same car ride, when we had entered New Haven, she had told me that she volunteers for the Pilot Pen tennis tournament. She volunteers as a chauffeur for the tennis stars. She had told me about driving the Williams sisters & Sharapova to their tennis matches. I remember telling her how amazing that must have been, driving the tennis stars around. “Yeah,” she had said. But she was smiling then, too.

I make a mental note to mention the bridge & Sharapova. Maybe this mental note is not for me to write down later, though. Maybe this mental note is for me to fix Marina.

~~

At 5:30 I do not want to go have dinner alone in the dining room. Besides, it is always chicken or pasta. And salad. And more conversations with dry, nice but dry middle-aged women. I go for a walk instead.

It is a fortyish minute walk downtown, along the shoulder & away from the sun. Sometimes it takes longer when I play the game where I walk to the exact beat of whatever song is playing on my iPod. I am playing that game now, & realizing like I do every time I play this game that it is hard to make it look nonchalant.

These songs are hard to walk to because they go too slow for my pace:

a.) The untitled bagpipe track from Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

b.) “Detouring America With Horns” by Yo La Tengo.

c.) Pretty much anything by Joanna Newsom.

These songs are hard to walk to because they go too fast for my pace:

a.) “Worms of the Senses/Faculties of the Skull” by Refused, which I also realize is probably the greatest fucking song to walk to. Probably ever.

b.) “L.A. Blues” by The Stooges. This is one is kind of supposed to be a joke.

c.) “Gospel Plow” by Bob Dylan.

This song is perfect for my pace:

a.) “Check the Rhime” by A Tribe Called Quest. When this song comes on, I am sagging my body on one side & really getting into it. I am on the side of a busy road hamming it up because what the hell do I care if someone in Madison, Connecticut thinks I look like an ass? I think he looks like an ass. Fuck that guy.

~~

I find myself in Subway, a chain restaurant surrounded by little independently owned coffee shops, for dinner. I am in Subway for dinner for the same reason I went to a McDonald’s when I was in Florence four years ago. This reason is simply no reason at all.

I am eating silently & watching kids pass by the window, contemplating what new way I can write about them, these kids have black t-shirts that hug their ribs & their jeans are maybe ten sizes too small, which will be a reference to the Grinch that some people might get but others will not. I am eating alone & in line there is a woman with glasses & wrinkles tossed haphazardly across her face. She is talking to the man behind the counter, who has an accent that sounds out of place in Connecticut. I think it is fromsome place like Jordan or India. I have no idea if a Jordan accent sounds like an Indian accent, but I will act like I know when I write all this down.

“We don’t have a small size. We only have medium & large.”

“Oh. Oh. Then nevermind, I guess, yes um.”

“They are the same price. The small & the medium. They are – ”

“Oh really? Well um.”

“Yes. Would you like a medium?”

“Well um if they are the same…maybe…I don’t – LOOK WILL YOU GO SIT DOWN. TAKE THIS. TAKE THIS AND SIT DOWN.”

This last part the woman has directed at her daughter, who looks older than she acts & so I think she maybe has asperger’s syndrome or something. This is not meant to be offensive, I even tell myself as I think it at Subway. Last summer I worked with kids with autism & asperger’s syndrome. This girl seems like it is possible that she lives with something like this.

And this mother, this mother she has is a complete wretch of a mother. I should be this girl’s mother. I should approach them, because now they are sitting down & every now & then this mother is scolding her unassuming asperger’s daughter for the most asinine things. This girl is quiet, she is undeserving of such tense attention.

“Nag, nag, NAG. All you do is nag, you drive me up the wall. If you know how to order, then you do it. Last time we went out to eat you said you didn’t know how to order, & now suddenly you say you know how? Well, WHICH IS IT?”

The silences between her mother’s outbursts are so awkward that I feel like I should make some comment to ease it. I am all the way across the room, but I could do it. I will stand up to this woman because she is the parent I will never be. I will never be the parent who builds up their stress & releases it on their child. I will speak slowly & will discuss things with my child. I will not yell at my child in a Subway chain restaurant. I will especially not do this if my child has asperger’s syndrome. I will scold this woman right in her place because she is unfit for her motherhood & she can not see that she is unfit because she is on the wrong side of the mirror. She should see herself. I do not think she would like the way she is acting. Maybe I will tell her.

“You should see the way you are acting. I should be your daughter’s mother. You stay here, I will parent your child. You may thank me later.”