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 He settled on a wicker chair: low, roomy, in a style that was meant to be modern but became outdated the moment the chair was sold, the arms held out in a wide, empty embrace.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.