Accomplices

During the day the humans seem to have the advantage, but at night the tables turn to favor the raccoons.

From deep within the crevices of the trees, the gashes in the trunks, the hollowed-out knots where branches were once attached, they look out with their periscopes, studying the movements of the Hostile Ones, the humans. Whispering among themselves and twirling the ends of their whiskers with the tips of their long fingers, they watch as the humans enter and exit The Center, less and less of them as the sun falls lower and lower on the horizon, until the dripping slows to a halt and the faucet is shut off altogether, until the sun sinks below the treeline, a mess of rapidly shifting hues, first pinks and blues, then oranges and purples, and finally an ever deepening smear of ochre.   

The sky is now dark, and the humans have all abandoned The Center, leaving it vulnerable to attack, all except one, The Janitor, who haunts the dimmed hallways, phantasmagorical, ever uncertain of whose side he is on.

The raccoons recognize the moment when it comes along and correspondingly leave their hideouts, decked out in their customary face paint and grey and black trench coats, fresh from the dry cleaners or threadbare. It is the hour of the seize.

There is a perimeter of meandering footpaths that encircle The Center, lackadaisically, pell-mell, like a ribbon of red yarn, or green, on the floor after Christmas morning. A trashcan is situated at each point where the footpath pivots and veers in a new direction, however predictable or unexpected. The perimeter constitutes a first line of defense, unguarded at nightfall, which make the trashcans an easy target.

This is the site of the nightly harvest. Some of the raccoons keep watch while others roll up their sleeves and rummage through the trashcans, overflowing with treasures. Then they switch roles, and the treasure-hunters, the pockets of their trench coats weighed down with booty, become the lookouts. There is plenty to go around.

Sometimes The Janitor stands in the floor-to-ceiling windows of the mezzanine, as if he were smoking a cigarette, as if there was only one season and that season was autumn, as if he were an accomplice and couldn’t be otherwise.

Doesn’t he have an obligation, both professional and as a member of his species, to emerge from the double front doors to defend The Center, as if catapulted there by the floodlights beamed down from the rooftop, armed with a sharp-bristled broom to scare off the offenders and a dustpan as a shield?

The trashcans and their contents, however savory or repulsive, are the jurisdiction of The Parks Service. The Janitor has his own refuse to worry about, several floors of it, enough to keep his hands tied, and his moveable thumbs. It is hard enough, as it is, to make it to the end of his shift, to get all the work done in time. Besides, his loyalties lie elsewhere, as they always have. If not, he never would have left through The Hole in the Chain Link Fence in the middle of the night all those years ago. From an early age, the force of the circumstances turned him into a side switcher, a boundary crosser, a double agent.

Any trace of light, any smudge, has long been syphoned off, leaving the sky seamless, blank-faced, mute. The air is thicker, fleshier, more fragrant, and it weighs down on the roofs of the houses and the treetops. The raccoons breathe a little easier. The night, now ripening, is a shawl that they pull over their shoulders, a cloak, the perfect match for their trench coats.

Now that they have successfully penetrated the first line of defense, the Christmas ribbon, the winding footpath, the raccoons proceed to raid the inner sanctum, that is, the picnic tables in the grove of cypress trees behind The Center, the benches to either side of the main entrances, and the patio under the overhang of the mezzanine, ripe as they are for the picking, replete with low-hanging fruit, more gems and jewels for the gleaning.

With his yellow and black Rubbermaid pushcart, back and forth from the supply closet, dragging black trash bags behind him or pushing the mop mucket in front of him, The Janitor catches glimpses, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, of their advance, admiring their strategy and stealth, sympathizing with their cause, often conflating his subject position with theirs, as if the pane of glass that separates them did not exist, as if he were the one dispersing the trash instead of corralling it into bags.

"Little Hands," Liliana Porter.

He still remembers the words of Arturo, those words of warning, the morning of his first shift. The head janitor’s method for training him could be summed up in one word: non-interference. A champion of understatement, Arturo chose his words carefully, sparsely, only when necessary. Characteristically so nonchalant, so irreverent, so iconoclastic, a punk janitor if there ever was one, Arturo’s demeanor changed abruptly when he started talking about the raccoons.

 “Don’t you ever, and I mean ever, leave the side door open!” A vein that The Janitor had never seen before appeared on Arturo’s temple and disappeared into his hairline.

“Are you listening to me?” His question was puzzling, given that there was no indication that The Janitor wouldn’t have been listening.

Arturo continued with his diatribe, his admonition, “Push the trash bin outside and then close the door behind you, immediately. Only then, door closed, do you walk the trash bin to the curb. When you come back, you do the same thing for the next trash bin. Once the trash bin has crossed the doorframe, at that very moment, you close the door behind you, and you close it good. The door only stays open long enough for you to get the trash bin out of the building, not a second longer. None of this propping the door open and trying to take all the bins out at once. No, that won’t do, not at all. And, never, ever leave to door open while you go to the curb. No, you can’t turn your back on those little fuckers for a second.”  Arturo’s pupils were more dilated than they had been just a few seconds earlier. The Janitor was no longer sure who, exactly, Arturo was addressing.

“Turn your back on whom?” The Janitor’s question startled Arturo from his reveries.

“What?”

“Turn your back on who? I said.”

“Those little fuckers, the raccoons.”

It took a little prying, but eventually The Janitor got to the bottom of the matter, the chip on Arturo’s shoulder, the reason to the madness.

Once upon a time, in a Community Center far, far away, Arturo was taking the trash out at night, and he propped the door open with a dustpan, so as not to have to open the door again when he returned for the next trash bin because, hey, who wants to do more work than they have to, right? As he did so, a little fucker darted indoors to the motherload, the trash room where all the big bins are stored, dripping with sticky goop, in all their crusty glory. Arturo grabbed the broom hanging on the rack on the inside of the door and prepared himself to shoo the raccoon out of the trash room and cajole it back outside, into the steamy night, where it belonged. One by one, he displaced all the items in the trash room but, to his surprise, his furry friend was nowhere to be found.

It was then that Arturo noticed that the door to the stairwell was open, the stairwell that leads to the immense basement, with its gymnasium, laundry room, winding corridors, and storage closets. Following a tenuous trail of smudges down the stairwell, smudges that Arturo determined could only be paw prints, he was disconsolate to find that the doors to the corridor, gymnasium, and laundry room were open: The Little Fucker could be anywhere.

The Animal Control Unit didn’t arrive until morning. Arturo was anxious to discover the raccoon’s hiding place, which he had been unable to locate, despite having spent the better part of the night attempting to do so. To everybody’s surprise, the Animal Control Unit came up empty-handed, which was even more surprising if you think that the search that lasted hours. There was simply no trace of an infiltration, which is the word they used. Before leaving, the Agents interrogated Arturo as to how many chemicals, in the form of the fumes of cleaning products, he inhales during a shift and recommended that he not work so hard, especially when the weather gets so hot and muggy.

Ever since that first shift, when Arturo warned him about The Little Fuckers, The Janitor has never been able to get the image out of his head. Sometimes, in the basement, late at night he flips on a light switch and perceives a stirring just outside his field of vision. Yet, for as fast as he turns his head, he never catches a glimpse.

At the very end of the basement corridor, in the building’s outer reach, there is a supply closet, bigger than the rest because it is where the Zamboni Industrial Electric Walk-Behind Auto Floor Scrubber sleeps for the night, where it gets plugged in for charging. It is one of the last stops of his shift, the last bead on a long string of menial tasks, right before he takes the trash to the curb on his way out of the building. Outside the door of the supply closet, in the very corner, the last most recondite corner of the building, there is often a little bed of leaves. Occasionally, he sweeps them up and dumps them into the trash bin, but they always return. More leaves are always there waiting for him in the corner when he unplugs the Zamboni at the start of his next shift.

It isn’t hard to venture an explanation, something about the air currents in the building, a draft that seeps into the hallway from the vast gymnasium, with its vaulted ceilings, something about the debris from underneath the bleachers and how it coagulates, in the currents of air, and forms eddies on the floor. It wouldn’t be hard to for find a reasonable hypothesis, a viable description, but it wouldn’t alter this sensation that The Janitor gets, on a pre-rational level, that The Bed of Leaves is where the raccoon sleeps, the one from all those years ago, the one who, what’s more, coordinates the sieges on the outside on the building from within, the intellectual author, the drafter of the blueprints, the mastermind, so greatly advantage by his intimate knowledge of The Hostile ones, the humans.

And, occasionally, after a particularly long shift, after having inhaled, perhaps, the chemicals of too many cleaning products, after working too hard on such a hot and muggy night, an impulse overtakes him, a wild impulse, inhuman in nature, to lay down there in that bed of leaves, his rightful home, and rest at last, leaving his scent on the surface of every leaf. He longs for the coolness of the floor, the softness of the leaves, convinced that their musty fragrance conceals what for him could only be a restoration. It is often the last thing he thinks, if it can be said to be a thought at all, before turning on his heels and heading back up the stairs towards the exit.

The siege is mostly over by the time The Janitor finishes his shift. The lines of defense have all been breached. The picnic tables and benches and trash cans have all been harvested. There is only one more thing let to do before the shift ends, both that of The Janitor and that of the raccoons: it is time to take out the trash.

They are waiting for The Janitor when he opens the side door to remove the trash bins from the building. Neither scared nor surprised by his presence, they nonetheless keep a safe distance. Coming out from the shrubs, they rub their hands together in anticipation, wide-eyed, attentive. His own personal cheering section, they watch, with singularity of attention, as he takes the first trash bin to the curb, then the second, and finally the third. It is at this point, after the third and last bin, that The Janitor part ways with them. When he turns his back and walks off, they will make a run for the bins, the Grand Finale, the hard-won prize, the end of their shift.

The Janitor is too tired to turn and look over his shoulder, too complicit. Sticking to the shadows, his small frame sunk deep in his trench coat, dark circles under his eyes, very dark, he walks, light-footed, toward the bus stop, toward all the tired signs, all the empty signifiers, and crosses the line once again, a traitor once again, into yet another exile of sorts.