by Ufuk Özden
Don’t we make a lovely trio with our dedication to doing nothing sane in a universe where there’s nothing truly sane to do? But then again, there’s nothing truly insane to do either.
“The clerks will be here anytime,” the janitor says. “Let me show you what I do for a living here.”
Pushing the Wrong Button Can Kill a Clerk
T he janitor unlocks a door on the entrance floor and the majestic trio of ours walks into a small room without a window. The air inside is stale enough to leave a sour taste in my mouth. The only source of light is a bright lamp on the ceiling. Its soothing light illuminates the bodies of a few flies on the floor.
As for the furniture, there’s a console by the wall installed with a series of big round buttons, a keyboard that looks more like a typewriter, small blinking lights, levers, and a few indicators with name plates on top of them. The whole setup seems to be a few decades old, dating back to the times when computer hardware was expected to look painfully ugly. There is a small LED screen on the console, which seems to be the most up-to-date equipment in the room. The bulletin board on the wall behind the console has been decorated with pieces of paper that were asymmetrically pinned down. The papers seem to have been printed out once upon a time, but what was once printed on them is now overwritten by handwritten notes in different colours.
The janitor pushes a few buttons; some of the lights on the panel go on, a needle on one of the indicators moves up and down.
“Let us see the purpose of this primitive machinery,” Baco murmurs.
“Soon enough, all shall be revealed,” says the janitor. “I’ll just need to concentrate once the clerks arrive,” he adds.
I ask him who the clerks are and what they are doing in this abandoned building begging for a mercy demolishment. He says he has no idea. He’s not allowed to enter the offices on the upper floors. He only makes sure that they get up there. Then he casually turns a knob with the radiating confidence of people who know what they’re doing.
“It’s time,” he says. We nod.
When the right button is pushed, the screen turns on, showing the main entrance where hundreds of people are waiting at the gates without a sound. I ask the janitor if he knows when they arrived. “I’ve never seen them coming but they’re always out there by the clock” he says as he switches to the camera showing the entrance hall behind the gates. He pulls a few switches and a dozen leather straps move down the rails on the ceilings. Pulling a small lever, he lowers the straps and takes a moment to observe the blinking lights on the panel.
“This is how I take them upstairs into their offices,” he says. “They put on the straps and the ride the rails.”
Baco asks if they’re incapable of walking up the stairs unassisted. “I don’t think they are,” the janitor says. “It’s just the way it has been here.” He then pushes a button and a brief and yet loud alarm goes off. The gates are opened, and a dozen clerks enter the building in a perfectly aligned single line. They stop and raise their left arms into the air and stand still like mannequins.
“There are two hundred and forty clerks to be transferred and only sixteen straps,” the janitor explains. “The power source of the rail network allows me to operate twelve straps simultaneously. The clerks have two seconds to hold on to their straps and two seconds to let them go. Then I should also consider the momentum to make sure that the acceleration and deceleration are manageable for clerks. I’ve perfected the transfer schedule to a point that I can move the straps on idle while the clerks are getting on and off. The timing is crucial as the rails do not always follow a straight line and if I miscalculate, they can crash into each other at thirty-five kilometres per hour.”
I ask him if there have been any accidents. “Not that I know of,” he says. “The clerks seem to hold on to the straps very tight. Unless I make a mistake, they should be okay.”
As the first dozen clerks hold on to their straps, the show begins. As the janitor mentioned, they do not seem to have any difficulty with this unorthodox method of transportation. They seem as comfortable as little monkeys, holding on to a branch with one hand while having a fruit for snacks and occasionally throwing their faeces at their neighbours with the other. The janitor pushes buttons like a crazed piano virtuoso. He can tell the position of every single strap on the rails by looking at the blinking lights and he knows exactly when to stop them or move them. The janitor declares that the last clerk has been transferred into his office and checks his counter. “Four minutes and twenty-six seconds,” he says. “Same as yesterday. Same as the last four years, precisely.” He tells us that he’s free until 5:00 PM except for a few routine cleaning and maintenance works to be done.
“With your meticulous work ethics, you would have made a very efficient craftsman in your darker ages,” says Baco. “Are you aware that most machinery can be programmed to repeat the same process without any errors and, most importantly, without any effort?”
The janitor says he doesn’t know how to program. He says that his little brother had dreams of making video games and he coded a few simple platform games on their father’s computer. “He learned it all from a few outdated magazines that my father had. Then he was killed in a mortar attack.”
Baco says that amateur deceased coders are irrelevant to the matter in hand. “I’ll redesign the transportation system,” he says. “so that we can focus on the play.”
I pat the janitor on the shoulder and tell him not to worry. “I think he likes you,” I say. “He just doesn’t know it.”
We leave Baco in the control room and spend the rest of the day cleaning the ground floor, replacing a bulb, and checking the mouse traps. The janitor says that the rats lurking in the building are too big for the traps. Apparently, it has the same effect as getting your finger stuck in a clothespin for those big fat buggers. “I don’t really mind seeing them prowling around,” he says. “I’m happy that the traps don’t really hurt them. I’ve seen enough random and brutal deaths.”
He goes silent as we clean the toilets. “It’s the body parts that disturb me the most,” he says. “It would have been easier had we been beings of light. If we would just kneel down and disappear when we die, you know. Some embodied form of consciousness. Even the religions would have made more sense then. We would have been pure minds tasked with following the divine commands. Following a checklist from above. But the bones, muscles, organs, tissues, and the skin take away all the magic. My little brother had this huge hole on his back when we recovered his body. It was the size of a watermelon. People were screaming at each other to be careful as we carried his body onto a truck. Bits of his organs were falling out through the hole on his back. It made me think that it was all there was. There was no immortal spirit crawling out of that hole.”
I nod and tell him about my anxiety, my cousin, and how I’ve come to embrace it. I tell him that it feels liberating to be stupid. The janitor shrugs. “To me, it sounds like you’re merely doing what you want to do. It’s a game that you’re playing. You can afford to play, and you feel safe while you’re playing it. You whistle in comfort and call yourself stupid for a chuckle. You feel like you somehow broke the game and figured out a way to play it by your own rules. It’s only your perception and I respect that but know that it isn’t that easy to be stupid. I don’t judge you, mind you, we all feel in the present. I’ve met people who were rescued from warzones, people who could eat two meals a week if they were really lucky. These days the very same people have been complaining about busses running late or bouncers who didn’t let them into the club. I guess I’ve just managed to keep my wits and remember what it felt like when anything could have been taken from me with a swipe of fate.”
“It’s the will to be and the will to want,” I say. “As for the rest, you’re saying that we’re simply jiggly bits piled on top of each other that are very vulnerable to bullets, and yet you preach about taming your feelings. Now, I see that we are a hormone and neuron soup with self-awareness. We’re merely
self-reflecting on the output. I’ve learned to watch myself doing things, speaking words, and making decisions. I am just an observer of myself with an illusion of self-control. All these conversations are meaningless. There’s nothing worth discussing in depth when it comes to emotions, abstract ideas, or concepts. We can talk, nod, curse all we want but we’re only slaves to serotonin.”
“If you say so,” the janitor says, and I don’t push him. We spend the rest of the day talking about the play. He dodges any questions about the play and keeps telling me that we need to focus on the stage design and costumes. He has a firm belief that once we look at what we’ve done, the words will flow like a river, drowning us in pure inspiration.
“Oh, by the way,” I say. “do you believe Baco’s story? Him being an alien?”
The janitor seems dazzled. “I did not think that he was being serious,” he says. “I’d assumed he was warming up for the stage by improvising. Do you believe him?”
“All that I know is,” I say, “that he’d better be an alien rather than the insolent weirdo that he seems like.”
When it’s five o’clock, we go back to the control room to find Baco sketching circuit designs in his notebook.
He asks the janitor if there are any resources for building circuits. Yes, there are. There’s a room in the basement with all the necessary resources and tools if you can dig tunnels into the layers of dust. There’s also a room filled with canned goods, a room with ancient radio equipment, and a room with a furnace for cremating the bodies in the event that leaving the building proves difficult. Apparently, the building was designed to provide shelter for high-ranking officials and citizens in wartime if necessary.
“Very insightful of them,” Baco says.
The janitor pushes buttons and transports all the clerks to the entrance hall in a few minutes. “Let’s get to work now,” he says with his lovely voice.
The Junkyard
T he janitor takes us his to workshop where he made wooden waves painted in different shades of blue, cottages with uneven roofs, stars with eyes, plush animals with random limbs attached to them, pistols with curved barrels, model rockets made of plastic pipes, and a medieval armour with LED lights attached to it. There’s an old diving suit made of an old stove next to a giant octopus with buggy eyes hanging down from the ceiling. Everything looks different than they’re supposed to in real life, and they look different for all the wrong reasons. There’s enough material to shoot at least two dozen low budget sci-fi and fantasy movies that could have even attracted a big audience in the seventies. Even today, you could sell them in DVDs to those who take a fancy to abysmally bad old movies.
The janitor opens his arms wide open as if he wants to cuddle up with his creations.
“I know that once we’ve built enough stuff the idea will come to us,” he says. “It’s all about the world building.” He tells us to grab whatever material we can get our hands on and do whatever our hearts desire to do with it.
“All these items seem to have been designed and made by a sixteen-year-old human,” Baco says. “I’ve seen a handmaiden’s uniform with a Nike logo on it. That stallion over there has zippers around its neck and limbs. Is this last play of yours intended for human children with poor cognitive skills?” The janitor runs to grab a plush mouse from a shelf and holds it right before our faces so that we can marvel at it. It’s a brown plush rat missing its whiskers and one of its rear feet.
“This is a play,” he says. “And plays are magical. The audience becomes one with the stage, they build a new temporary reality based on what they see on it. I can give this mouse a story, hopes, fears, and dreams. Then no one will see it for what it really is. It’ll become a pure being in the shape of ideas and feelings.”
Baco shrugs. “Go ahead then,” he says. “Turn this poorly made model of rodent into a pure being. I also doubt that you’re using the correct terminology.” The janitor seems to calm down as he lowers his plush mouse and says that he can only do it once we finish building the world for the last play. He knows that we’ll know once we have driven in the last nail. Then the floodgate of inspiration shall open, and we’ll get drowned in the waters of enlightenment.
“During the war, my aunt used to make these puppets out of shoes-” the janitor begins before Baco extends his arm to grab the plush mouse from his hand and slap him in the face with it.
“You’ve been deliberately narrating a selection of your memories to evoke feelings of empathy in the hope of supporting your irrelevant arguments. Do not disrespect that you of the past who had understandably suffered. You are no longer the same you, and shoe puppets have nothing to do with what you have done here. You strike me as a human enjoying a sense of safety, finding happiness in a constantly repeated task. But the boredom has caught on. You cannot hope to beat boredom by justifying your poor workmanship and lack of inspiration by a war that you’ve obviously survived. You cannot praise your mediocrity forever. Yours is not a path to self-actualisation but one that leads to eternal procrastination.”
“Fuck you,” the janitor says and grabs his mouse back from Baco’s hand. One of its front legs falls off.
“No, fuck you, and fuck your moustache,” I say. “We’re the only ones who’ve come here to help you and you’re trying to oppress us because we’re sceptical of your fool’s errand.”
Baco nods at me. “You would have made a competent beta in a wolf pack,” he says calmly. “I’m going to consume a moderate amount of alcohol and masturbate.” He walks away leaving us in the silence that hurts. The janitor walks around the room, grabbing random items off the shelves and inspecting them. He checks the walls, moving his finger over the cracks.
I tell him that I once had a ghost who painted the walls with an aubergine, but she eventually faded away. He chuckles. He says that there is no such thing as a ghost. It’s just traces of the things that we keep doing over and over again. When you repeat an action enough, it leaves a trace.
“I see a few ghosts of myself all the time,” he says. “When I stand still and look, I eventually see them. They fade away but new ones take their place. Like shadows lagging behind.”
I nod and smile. A part of me always wanted to believe that there were things in the universe that we could not explain. I loved to entertain the idea of a place below our comprehension. But Baco and the janitor have shown the error of my ways. Fuck them both, sincerely, for I could have been making arrangements to be on a fancy bus with proper dampers, imagining that The Trip was indeed a trip to the eternal life.
The janitor smiles when I tell him about my past expectations. “Funnily enough,” he says, “I came here on a bus.” He was on a bus to see his mother. When he was midway, his father called him to tell him that his mother had died of a cerebral haemorrhage. He just sat tight without knowing what to do. “I have to say this, I don’t know how to deal with deaths outside a war,” he says. “It was easier when death came from bullets, bombs, or mortar fire. We’d embraced those as natural causes of death. We could move on. We were somehow convinced that people could only be killed and would never die on their own. Once the war ended, we found out that people could die anyway anyhow. And somehow, that came down as a shock to me.”
I ask him whether this revelation made things harder for him in the long run. He nods. He says things were at least more conceivable, if not easier, when death seemed avoidable. “We would hide, duck, run, and hope that our snipers were better than theirs. It was somewhat easier to comprehend. The thought of a vein cracking open inside one’s head made me feel helpless in a way that I wasn’t familiar with.”
The janitor says that once he’d heard the bad news, he decided to stay on the bus. He wrapped himself up in his jacket when the bus arrived at his stop. When they arrived at the final destination, he bought another ticket from the driver. The bus moved on, driving day and night, on the highways, and through the cities. He just sat in his seat watching the landscape change until it no longer mattered.
He got off the bus and walked through the gates to meet a clerk. Without a word, the clerk handed him a booklet and walked out. It said “All There’s Worth Knowing” on the cover. “The first page had only three items,” the janitor says. “The first one was telling me that under no circumstances, was I allowed to go above the ground floor. However, I was free to use any item or facility at will on the ground floor and in the basement. The second item said that I was to find my salary on the fifteenth day of each month in the first drawer that I would open. The last item on the page was about the rails. He was expected to conduct a smooth operation on the weekdays. It’d said that there was no room for error and his performance was sure to affect any potential raises in his salary. All the other pages explained how to operate the rail network and repair it if something dared to go wrong. Quite an orientational training.