A Superpower Some of the Time

It was the second time in one week.

Berenice, my co-worker from the front desk, had me locked in her sights, her stare so penetrating that it was making me uncomfortable. I forced a smile and nodded my head, as if returning a greeting, as if I hadn’t seen her for days, although we had been working together for hours already. Berenice didn’t flinch, her face showing no indication of having registered my gesture. It was then that I realized that she wasn’t looking at me but through me, straight through me, to whatever, on the other side, was more interesting, which is to say, anything whatsoever.

The first time was earlier in the week. I had recently clocked out and was crossing the street to the bus stop. After my day shift, I was feeling depleted, a little bit translucent even, and my Sketcher’s Steel-Toe Slip-On Work Shoes were heavier than usual. There was a young man, in his thirties perhaps, stepping into the crosswalk on the other side of the street. His face lit up as he saw me coming, his pace quickened, and he raised his arm to wave vigorously in my direction. My weariness evaporated immediately, and I felt restored, the spring back in my step. I didn’t recognize him, but it nonetheless felt like we were old friends, like we had a lot of catching up to do. I prepared for our embrace and thought of all the things that I wanted to tell him. It wasn’t until he called somebody else’s name, somebody over my shoulder, that I realized that he had been looking through me to the person directly behind me, someone named Camilo, infinitely more interesting than myself.

Two times in one week. It was enough to confirm a suspicion, the suspicion that I had acquired, upon stepping into the coveralls and embarking on this new life as a janitor, a superpower, that of invisibility. At work, I am less than a pedestrian, less than a citizen, less than a co-worker even, defined less by speaking than by being spoken to. Walking through the corridors of The Community Center, people generally don’t meet my gaze when we cross paths, nor do they, however, avert their gazes. They simply look through me, without registering my green blip on their radar screens. This would explain why clients are often startled when I engage with them, as if I had materialized out of thin air. “Oh, how long have you standing there?”

Most of the time this demotion comes as a liberation. I can dispense with niceties, with the high-maintenance falseness of most causal interactions, and focus on the business at hand, which is always twofold: cleaning and refining the details of The Grand Plan. I keep my little notebook in my back pocket at all times, and I take it out as needed throughout my shift to make adjustments to the blueprints.

"Perfil de un árbol," Liliana Porter, 1971.

At any time point, however, this superpower, my invisibility, which little by little I am learning to cherish, can be temporarily suspended, like today earlier in my shift. It is precisely for such occasions that I carry the walkie talkie.

“Clean up in the weight room. Over.” After receiving the message from the front desk, I switched off the yellow and black walkie talkie and reattached it to the belt loop of my coveralls.

The weight room is in the basement, and I was cleaning the bathrooms on the top floor, which is say as far away as possible without leaving the building. I had just done the floors and, still wet, The Community Center couldn’t have anyone slipping and injuring themselves, so I did what I have been instructed to do in such situations. I left the mop bucket in the doorway, with the mop handle propped up against the door jam, then placed the yellow “do not enter” and “cleaning in progress” signs, which we keep on the yellow and black Rubbermaid Cleaning Supply Pushcart especially for such occasions, at the entrance to the bathrooms.

I could already hear the sighs of impatience and protestations of the clients. When something goes wrong, I am suddenly visible again, solely responsible for satisfying their often capricious demands. At these moments, my facticity, my status as non-invisible matter, returns for my employers as well, which is why I carry around the yellow and black walkie talkie in the first place. In the conflict between the whims of a client and the needs of The Center, in the cases when they don’t coincide, it is the latter that wins out, so I left the clients to sulk in self-pity and headed for the basement.

For speed and discretion, I took the less travelled road, which is to say the back staircase. Fortunately, there were none of the lusty dry-humping adolescents that, on the weekends, often turn the back stairwell into their hook-up spot, stinking up the place with their musky pheromones, occasionally even leaving a stray undergarment or used condom in their wake.   

When I arrived on the scene, a weightlifter was waiting for me in the doorway. The way her hand was rested on her hip suggested that she was not only waiting but was also performing waiting, that is, signaling her displeasure over having been made to wait. I found her performance overdetermined, discrediting even, more for Broadway than cinema and, in any case, way over-the-top for the basement of The Community Center.

“Took you long enough,” she thundered at my approach. “The same thing happens at my office at the university downtown,” she said, shaking her head tersely from one side to the other and furrowing her brow. “It's impossible to get you people to do your job.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if I was dealing with a former colleague. As a doctorate student at The Almost Ivy League University, I had also had an office downtown. Then, upon graduating, I taught courses as a sessional lecturer for the Department for several semesters. Throughout this time, I was once again given an office, perhaps in the same building as my interlocutor, the same university. How many times, I wondered, had we crossed paths on the staircases without knowing it? How many times had we shared the same elevator? And, here we were, united once again, two people with the same profession, with the same formation, with a similar set of skills.

“Hell-o?” A voice startled me from my reveries. “You see, this is exactly what I’m talking about! Don’t just stand there. Do something!” She directed me to the scene of the catastrophe. There was a puddle of red liquid at the base of the treadmill. Apparently, someone had spilled their energy drink. I gave her my professional opinion: “It seems that someone has spilled their energy drink, and it is blocking access to the treadmill.”

I barely had a chance to finish the sentence. “How am I supposed to finish my work out if I can’t access the equipment?”

“I see,” I said, scratching my chin, performing my profession. “Well, in cases such as these, I think we’re definitely going to have to mop and then probably even have to do a little disinfecting.” I spoke slowly because, when dealing with childish people, you want to make sure to modulate so that they understand you.

“That’s just great! How long is that going to take? Do you have any idea how busy I am?” It didn’t take long for the lament of her own misfortune to evolve into a need to find someone to blame. “That’s the problem with you people. You want your paycheck but don’t want to work for it. What do you even call yourselves these days? Wait, let me guess, there has to be some type of special title? The age of euphemisms! Nowadays everybody is somebody important. Even a janitor… or, wait, what was it again? Let me guess. A Maintenance Professional? A Cleaning Connoisseur? A King Concierge? Custodian Supreme?”

Instead of answering her rhetorical questions literally, which had been my first impulse, I had decided to ask her about her office at the university downtown, about her department, certain that, if I dug a little further, I would find the common ground that would demonstrate that her use of the third-person plural actually concealed a first-person plural. I didn’t, however, get the chance. Having given discharged her pent-up aggression, having satisfied her urge and scratched the proverbial itch, the deepest one, where the knife drawer and brass knuckles reside, she had turned away and walked off, leaving me at the foot of the treadmill.

For better or worse, I went back to being invisible.