Four Months Hard Sweeping

Esme specialized in detail work. After the main crew passed through with electric vacs, Esme followed, sweeping out the nooks and crannies, cleaning the smaller surfaces, the benches, and tables, the counters and screens, every leaf of the plastic maples trees. "Go slow," she said by way of instructions. "Carefully — from left to right, from up to down."

Yeah, whatever. I tried at first, I really did, but it seemed so pointless. I mean you sweep today, and tomorrow you've just got to do it all over again. So my mind wandered. Esme kept scolding me and asking me to do things over. "Too sloppy, be more careful, go slow," she repeated in a constant irritating chorus.

We were in the middle of the grove tackling one of the trees with hand brushes, when I spotted Lisel and Glory talking, strolling right toward me. I ducked behind a tree trunk. Esme chuckled. "Don't worry. They no see you." And she was right — they walked right by me, but never looked at me. How could they not see me?

I was distracted, trying to figure it out. All afternoon I tried to figure it out as other people I knew walked by me without blinking. You'd think they'd notice someone in bright orange.

The next day Esme and I were sent to recover items from the collapsed section of a nursery school that had been caught in Dust-storm Tina. It had been all over the media — people up in arms accusing the school board of building too close to the surface — the school board blaming the building contractors for faulty construction. Three teachers and 25 kids dead. The items had been brought into a clean room set up close to the collapse. They looked pathetic and a little creepy under their shrouds of dust. It was just Esme and me doing the detail work. We were alone in the room all day long. Esme wouldn't let me take my mask off this time. Full kit, she said, you never knew where a bit of blue glue, or black-green could be hovering.

It was my job to immerse the items one by one in a series of vats filled with various cleaning solutions. Some of the cleaning stuff looked disgusting and reeked like vomit. I wanted to get it done fast and get the hell out of that room, but again Esme insisted otherwise and so I fell into a slow, robotic pace. I had to inspect each item to identify the dust. Items covered in blue glue were taken up by wooden tongs (never your gloved hands because the blue glue would stick to your gloves) and dumped into a vat of hot fat that dissolved the blue. Anything with red streaks went into the vinegar vat. Anything with grey or white went into plain soap and water. Anything with violet splotches went into one of the smelly solutions. And anything with even a smidgeon of black-green was deemed irretrievable. I packed those in vacuum containers. These items would be removed later and burned as fuel in the city furnaces. Once the items had soaked in their various vats, Esme would take each out, rinse them in clean water and wipe them off with a soft cloth.

I was soon bored and sleepy. I kept yawning under my mask. I can't tell you how much time went by. It could have been 10 minutes or three hours. I don't know. Then I heard humming. It took me a while to figure it out; it was coming from Esme. She hummed and muttered ever so slightly as she worked. She'd pick an item out of the vat with her strainer and then talk to it — like she was talking to a baby. She scooped up a dollhouse table and its four miniature chairs, and crooned to them: "There, there, it's all right now my little chicks." She dropped them gently in the rinse vat and asked them: "Doesn't that feel nice?" And then she picked them out one by one from the water and meticulously dried every inch of them. Her soft cloth caressed the beat-up plastic as if it were something rare and fragile. And then she placed furniture on the clean tray — the table in the middle, the four chairs tucked in around it, just waiting for the dolls to come in and set the table or for the dead children to come back and play.

***

In the evenings we had to endure group sessions. Monday's lecture was about the importance of civil obedience, of the communal commitment and vigilance against ever-encroaching dust and decay. Tuesday evening we all slept through the procedures of maintaining a dust-free zone. It was kindergarten stuff that. Wednesday's session was entitled, "Dust and your Health" and the gruesome images and medical horror stories were a big hit with my fellow convicts. Thursday was "National Sweeper Day" and they told us in nauseating detail about Mrs. Elba Maroni who swept the children's park in Little Etna every day — morning, noon and night— for 30 years, thus keeping the black lung stats in Little Etna's children under 5%. They gave her a medal — a month before she died of emphysema. I've heard these types of sweeper-hero stories all my life — so barely listened. It was bullshit — no one really important or really smart ever became a sweeper. Friday night was marginally better. We went through safety drills to prepare us for emergencies in the field: what to do if you get blue glue in your eyes or black-green on your skin. "Kiss your face good-bye," murmured the guy beside me. But in fact there was stuff you could do — and I found myself listening.