It’s raining. It doesn’t always rain, contrary to what some people think, but it is common. The clouds hang low in the sky. The Space Needle’s light isn’t visible, but neither is much else. Traffic crawls by on the 405. It has been said that every freeway called the 405 is at a standstill all the time, and that is probably true.
Umbrellas are everywhere. Some malls have public-use umbrellas at their entrances and exits. They aren’t generally stolen; people are too nice for that. Really, other than the snobbery, most people in Washington – state, not D.C. – are really very nice. Granted, there are some ghettos in the state, but it just doesn’t seem as bad as places on the news. It’s almost as if the Pacific Northwest is isolated from the rest of the country.
The building he stands in, like most in the city, is nondescript. It’s tall, grey concrete, with many stories. Two people, a man and a woman, exit the front doors and walk down the stone steps. Both hold umbrellas, extended, that cover their faces and shield them from the rain. Their walk is nearly synchronized as they reach the bottom of the stairs and turn right. The pair in perfectly tailored suits walks with a purpose, not talking, not caring to avoid the puddles; for once in their adult lives, they don’t seem to care about appearances. As they continue down the street, he takes his own umbrella and exits through the back door for “Employees Only” into an alley alongside the building. He turns left because they’re still too good to be seen with the likes of him, and continues down the block. His posture is slouched as he trudges along, though he felt the urge to stand tall. As he stepped up onto the curb of the next block, the seventh floor windows of the building they left explode outward in a fiery shower of glass shards, and he smiles.
~~~~
Bellevue was for rich kids. No, really. He was pretty sure if he tried to come downtown for anything but work, he’d be “asked” to leave. He couldn’t count the number of Lincolns or 5- and 7- series BMWs that rolled by pedestrians in perfectly tailored suits that cost almost his whole month’s pay.
Reuben hated suits – he’d complained nonstop about how he hated them as a child, when he’d had to dress up for church, and he hated them now. The tie was like a noose around his neck, ever tightening, he claimed. Never mind that if circumstances were different, he’d be wearing an ugly, fat janitor’s uniform, too. Edgar watched as Reuben leaned back in his chair, surveying the view before him. It really wasn’t as bad as his griping led others to believe; his seventh story office had huge picture windows that overlooked half of downtown Bellevue. Well, it did from an angle, if you leaned back far enough, as he was. Older buildings like the one that housed this office were closer to the outskirts of downtown; central Bellevue had been undergoing a facelift for the past decade and now boasted a variety of newer office buildings with modern designs. The rent in them was astronomical, though, even for downtown. The rain pelted against the glass, again, like most days. Edgar had learned to accept the rain, even though he didn’t care for it. It was as inevitable as the traffic that accompanied the rain all the way back across the I-90 bridge to his dingy apartment in Tukwila.
God, even the name was awful.
Reuben had it good – he had no business complaining. He didn’t have to clean up other people’s shit every day. Edgar glanced at the clock as he emptied a wastebasket into his barrel. Reuben cleared his throat pointedly and Edgar jumped, turning slightly to meet his gaze. Reuben gestured to the floor and Edgar, still holding the wastebasket upside down, looked down. He’d missed the barrel completely. He sighed, and crouched to gather the mess he'd made. Another hour, and this would all change. Maybe not the traffic that even now inched by on the streets below, but the rest of it.
He watched as Reuben slowly turned his seat to face his desk again and pretended to be very focused on cross-referencing something in the database with a client file. That farce was pretty standard for Reuben, though, and it frustrated Edgar to no end that he had to work far harder for less money. Papers sat on Reuben’s desk for weeks as a result of his pretending to work, the stacks mostly unchanging from one day to the next. They hadn’t gone paperless yet, and this would work to their advantage.
Reuben whined about losing his desk most: a lovely, L-shaped mahogany wood, made to look handcrafted, that probably weighed more than a baby elephant. It was his favourite thing in the office, and the one sacrifice he wouldn’t let the others forget about.
~~~~
It was funny, the things people shared with the janitors.
“Sam” got her interviews where “Samantha” did not. She complained about how she’d applied as both, staggering application and resume submissions to ‘prove’ the inequality. As a child, she’d wanted to grow up to rule the world – or at least a multinational corporation with underlings to do her bidding. Edgar hadn’t even batted an eye at that; it was too absurd to even consider. She said her teachers told her to make back up plans, and she had, she’d said. Sam insisted that she’d show all the silly boys that made fun of her dreams how foolish they were.
It took her years, most of her life to date, to discover that no one wanted her to be in charge because she was a girl. He found it typical, but depressing, that she never realized he was a “boy.”
For all her complaints of the world of suits and how she would never be one of them, she certainly blended in now: short trendy haircut with highlights, tailored suits, trim figure from spending her nights working off the frustration of dealing with them. Reuben was the same as everyone else. She loved to brag that she let him think he was in charge – just like those before him – when in reality he was completely under her thumb. If men like that thought they were in charge and that everything was their idea, they became incredibly easy to manipulate, Sam advised Edgar on multiple occasions, as though imparting some great wisdom to the lowly janitor before her. Reuben had been easy pickings; his power trip tendencies were easily exploited by mention of an overheard plan to replace him. Whether that conversation had ever actually happened wasn’t important; it gave her an out. Maybe the next company would be smart enough to see her potential and give her the position she deserved, she said, as though corporate espionage was a skill to be desired.
~~~~
Edgar was nervous. He couldn’t help it. He was always nervous. His palms would get sweaty at the first mention of deadlines or crunch times. That was why he’d dropped out. He never told his parents; they’d have been devastated. Better to let them think it was the economy’s fault that he wasn’t doing anything with his degree…the degree he never got. Thankfully, he’d had Reuben.
Edgar and Reuben had met in college; they’d been in several of the same classes, and both sat in the back of the room, though for different reasons. Edgar sat in the back to keep his stress levels lower because no one would call on him in the back. Reuben wanted to screw off all the time, sleeping in class or trying to hit on the girls that sat too close. He’d thought himself one of the “cool kids” as though that hadn’t died out in high school.
They’d kept in contact, though Edgar never knew why. It had saved him though when he’d found himself jobless and quickly running out of options to pay for a roof over his head. DSHS didn’t care for single, childless men like it did single mothers. Reuben had put in a good word for Edgar with the building manager, which was how he’d gotten the job in the first place. “Facilities Manager,” like it wasn’t the messy, god-awful job it’d always been when people called it “janitor.” At least there had been some honesty once.
Now, it was all layers. Layers of political correctness and fluffing covered everything. Reuben and Sam were right; he was underpaid. If he quit, he would be ineligible for unemployment. It would be so much easier if work just didn’t exist anymore.
~~~~
The worst they’d be hit with would be negligence, but Edgar had a suspicion it’d really only be himself that wound up scrutinized. Reuben wouldn’t be quite so willing to go through with it otherwise. Thankfully the building was the sort to have the anti-suicide windows, ones that didn’t open and were just there for decoration and to see the outside world but never touch it, which only served to add to the feeling of being trapped. Those windows would factor in nicely.
They’d planned carefully, allowing for even those that might be in the office late to have left. The one rule had been no deaths. They didn’t need that on their hands, didn’t want anyone looking too hard because they had a death to investigate.
Reuben had been very angry when he’d first caught wind of the home office’s plans to remove him from his post as boss of their local franchise. He’d thrown a proper tantrum, one that Edgar had had to clean up after, as always. He’d put so much of his own time and livelihood into this crappy job, to little end. He hated the politics of these rich people determined to cut everyone off at the knees in order to save themselves a few bucks. Selfish bastards. He’d show them, and they’d never know – provided Reuben’s ego didn’t get in the way.
~~~~
Edgar tapped his fingers on his janitor uniform’s khaki pants as he leaned against the wall in the supply room. It was a bit bigger than a standard janitor’s closet, but that was because the building had so much space to clean that they needed tons more space to hold all the stuff for it. He glanced at the clock on the wall, then at his watch, trying to gauge how accurate the wall clock was. He waited impatiently, expecting someone to walk through the door and ask him why he wasn’t working. Couldn’t waste even a few minutes of their time, after all. Time is money, and all that.
A minute later – he knew, he’d been watching the clocks – the door did open, but it wasn’t his supervisor. Sam poked her head in and eyed him expectantly.
“What’s wrong?” Edgar tensed immediately, heart pounding, eyes flicking over her shoulder to see if he could spot anything out of place.
“Are you ready?” Sam brushed a speck of lint off the shoulder of her tailored blazer as though the speck was his question.
“Yeah. Yes. We have thirteen minutes by my watch, but it’s more like twelve by the wall clock. Twelve and a half, maybe.” He glanced at his watch again, then at the clock on the wall. Sam blew out a breath, ruffling her bangs.
“Great. Don’t screw it up.” She turned, began to pull the door shut behind her.
“Sam?”
“What?” Her voice, like her movements, was impatient, clipped. Edgar recoiled slightly, took a breath.
“Are you…sure?”
She hesitated for just a moment before her face twisted into a smirk, eyes raking over his janitor’s cart.
“Oh, yes.” She shut the door behind her, leaving him alone in the room once more. He glanced down at the cart, at all of the bottles of fluids with warnings plastered on the labels.