The Beginning of What

She steals the notebook from the man who sits at the library’s front desk. After, when she explains to her husband what she’s done, she finds she cannot quite explain what it was that made her do it.

“I was angry,” she tells him.

Her husband is eating quickly. She is not hungry like he is because by explaining, she finds she’s made herself angry again. “He says nothing. Just leaves his desk abandoned and leaves behind his little book. Every day. He stands there watching me and then he writes in it and so serious. So, I think, today I can teach him a lesson.” A lesson for the man who swipes IDs at the front desk of the library that she is paid to clean.

Her husband finishes another greasy flauta. She’d picked up food from Tres Hermanas on her walk home from work. His chewing, wet and slow, upsets her too. There is grease running from both wings of his mustache. She would not mind taking away this food from him, dropping it in the sink, stuffing it into the drain, and grinding it to pulp with the disposal. She is that angry.

“Estúpida,” he says. “Listen to yourself. You cannot even explain your own behavior to yourself. Una loca.” He shakes his head and chuckles. He inserts a fresh flauta, his third already, into a full mouth and says, “When he has you fired, then what will we do?”

She knows she is no una loca. Nor is she worried over her job. She has been deemed essential. Plus, if the man reports her, she will report him for leaving his desk unattended.

The man from work is a weak man. She knows from his skin and posture alone. Sad and grey and slouched. He is impolite. He is an indoor person. One of those men who lives in the basement and draws their pay and cares not for others so long as their car drives and their belly is full enough. He will do nothing but stew, complain about “the Mexican thief” on the computer in his basement.

“He needs to learn,” she says, reaffirming her decision to steal from the man. Though she is not sure what lesson exactly she is teaching him “He cannot just stare at me then write I don’t know what. I don’t know what, but we will see now.”

She flips through the stolen notebook’s pages. Maybe a third of the pages are written on, though most of the used pages contain only a few lines. She balks at reading. She expects there is little of interest, and she has a feeling that reading the journal would be a different kind of violation, more than the misdemeanor theft of it. She wishes simply that she could know if she herself features in any of his messy scribbles.

The front desk man is a boy really. He cannot be older than twenty-five. He always has the same flat ghostly gaze. Above a gully she walks past each day on her way to work and back home there is an old feral cat that rests in the shadow of a culvert pipe. The boy’s gaze is similar to that cat’s.

She can tell by the way he watches her today, while she wipes his desk yet again, that he knows she has stolen his journal. His eyes watch her like that. Like they would x-ray through her skull to the hidden thoughts inside it if such a thing were possible. She is suddenly a person with complications. No longer some inconvenient extension of the cloth she uses to wipe his desk.

Too bad my conscience is clean, she thinks, proudly.

Still, other than this new, invasive quality of his eyes, everything else remains the same between them. He stands back, his hands on the backrest of his highchair, and he watches her while she wipes his desk.

She has been cleaning this library for nearly a year. Since before the plague began. Since the plague began, nobody comes. Only a few dozen regulars. The odd student needing to use the toilet. The rare professor balancing a stack of books. That is it. Sometimes these people smile at her. A few say, Thank you. She appreciates these little kindnesses, however trivial. Because usually they look away, stay away. As if they are afraid to meet her eyes. As if she were una leprosa.

With barely a soul in the library, the job has grown even duller, her work even more useless. She is expected to clean every reachable surface on all three floors, every single day, with the same nauseating disinfectant spray. How many gallons of that putrid yellow chemical has she misted into the world? Thirty gallons? Forty? Sometimes she thinks of herself as a strange and rare animal capable of emitting a noxious, antiseptic mist on command. She sneaks about this labyrinth of books, alone, doing what her species does.

Mist, mist. The word seems to be the very sound her emission makes.

Some days, the days she likes her life a bit less, she does not mist. She goes from surface to surface wiping, wiping. But no mist. This pantomime of cleaning feels slyly rebellious. And rebellion feels like freedom. On these days she can better smell her own foggy breath inside her mask.

As she wipes the spray off his desk today, she looks at his feet. He has on dirty red sneakers. Very strange shoes. A relic, she imagines, of the life before he took his own useless job. ID swiper.

Swipe, swipe.

Their jobs are not so different, except he has a chair.

On the first page of his journal, the only page she’s read, is a single unexpected sentence. We danced tonight—bachata. The we, and the danced, but most of all the bachata.

She sprays his desk with her yellow disinfectant a second time, eradicating permanently whatever contagious aspect of himself he’s spread across the plastic plane, slumped over it all morning, eyeing humans suspiciously.

Does he suspect she has it? If he suspects it, why does he not ask? Ask! she thinks.

She has given him a reason to speak finally, a real reason. A gripe. A greater motivation than politeness, friendliness, loneliness, guilt. Gripe. She realizes finally that this is why she’s done it, taken his book. Some playful urge to get just one emotive word from this false sentinel. Still, nothing comes. For months now. No word, no smile, no acknowledgement besides standing back.

Bachata? Really? She is surprised, curious. That night, after dinner, she starts to read the notebook in earnest. In addition to the first entry, it is the change in his eyes that convinces her to read it. Their new alertness. She decides his look is not an accusation, but closer to an inquiry.

Have you read it? the eyes were asking.

The first thing she learns is that he is living with a woman named Rosalie. Second, that he is very afraid of this stupid virus, or at least he was when the plague times started.

He was certainly more afraid of the virus then than she is. She has never been much afraid of this virus. Before this job at the library, she cleaned in a hospital in Albuquerque, and before that one in Santa Fe. The first for five years, the second for two. A virus feels practically imaginary compared to the average night cleaning an emergency room. The anguished face caused by a seized heart. Blood mist coughed up by burnt lungs. A man stabbed in the leg, wincing but quiet, listening closely for his name. Death did not haunt hospitals; it was more like the song that those left living inside swayed to.

Still, she kind of likes the way he writes about the virus and his fear of it.

She reads it aloud. “April 4th: The virus has a ghost presence. Every surface, every person is mysterious and may be possessed. Every time you leave the house you think about it, leaving the house. What new brush with death you might encounter unaware. Perhaps leaving the house has taken on the significance it always should have.”

“He’s so afraid of the virus,” she tells her husband. Her voice sounds more put off than she really is. 

Her husband is watching fútbol and eating noodles. He does not speak.

“Americans,” she says and chuckles. “They fear every single thing so much. This must be why he looks so tired each day.”

Her husband does not like the notebook business.

“So he believes in ghosts,” he says, though it is clear he is not paying her attention. The announcers’ voices are boiling up. The match is a replay from the World Cup two years ago. There has been a hand ball. France is granted a penalty kick. “Maybe what we all need is las brujas to get together and tell it to go away.”

“How can you watch this again?” she asks. “You know what happens.”

“Because they are the best,” he says. “In the world. When will you return this book?”

Her husband has started keeping a rough tabulation on their karma. Karma tabulation is his plague hobby. This started months ago when he asked her when she thought it would be time for them to have a child. His greatest fear is that the universe will punish them through their child. With each page she reads he says she is tempting fate. Really what he means is she’s further risking a curse upon their child, thereby delaying the child’s birth.

She no longer sees why they should have kids. She is too old. The world is too young. Her husband’s legs are no good. They have a child and then what? They teach it how to swim? Buy it new shoes every year? Watch it watch TV on their threadbare couch?

She starts to read another notebook passage aloud: “We drove ten hours to . . .”

Her husband grunts as he lifts his ailing body from their bed. He is overweight. She pauses reading to tell him this. He smirks back. The truth is she likes his size. But his legs. He works for a contractor. Right now, erecting a high school gymnasium. He spends the day on his feet and every evening on his ass or back, because his legs.

He puts on his robe and slides on his slippers and takes the dog for a second walk. He does not even like being in the room with her when she reads it. He feels like an accomplice. The karmic effect worse.

On the day she took the notebook, just before misting the boy’s desk, the boy stood abruptly, placed his notebook on the desk, right in front of her, right where she needed to clean, and briskly walked away. He will not report its theft because his ten minutes away from the desk would be considered inexcusable to their employer during what her husband calls El Gran American Plague. Everyone is on edge, every membrane porous to ghosts. The boy’s lapse in vigilance is just the kind of crack the ghosts like to slip through.

Like yesterday, she feels the boy’s alert eyes leering. But she has cleaned for too long, she has been watched by too many pairs of eyes to worry at the boy’s sidelong grays. She wipes a bit longer than normal, giving him time to watch. She smiles as she completes her task, hoping he sees the up curl of her lips despite her mask.

I am aware of the ghosts you fear, and I assure you they won’t bother you here, she thinks.

“No more ghost,” she says, facing him now. Her smile grows. “Have a good day.”

He says nothing. How come he never speaks? This may be what upsets her most. Perhaps he assumes she does not actually speak English? However thick her accent is, for she cannot hear the accent herself, she has never failed to say to him, thank you, when he rises from his chair and moves it out of her way, have a good day when she rolls her cleaning cart away. Perhaps he thinks she is like a parrot. That the words she says mean nothing to her. They are just memorized sounds.

Since last year, when she was let go from the hospital in Albuquerque on an unproven suspicion of stealing insulin—which she had in fact stolen as a spur of the moment favor for a friend—her English has much improved.

This was not without great effort. She started to make herself speak the language more at home as well as at the library. Whisper-chatting in the quiet, cavernous, book-filled building with whoever would give her the time of day. Typically, this meant playing therapist for an old translator from Bogota, a greying man in a bumpy marriage and regular patron of the library. Or else flirting with Jerry, the security guard, a heavy smoker from Pittsburgh who liked to ask her about the women in Nicaragua.

Working on her English was a karmic trade proposed by her husband. It was not that learning the language benefited the universe in any way. Rather, learning the language was actually a sacrifice of her selfhood, a self-punishment. The karmic logic was lost on her but if they had a child, she did agree that English would help it. And so, she borrowed English learning books from the library, then children’s books, and then what a woman at the help desk called novelas juveniles. Self-punishment indeed.

She had read in one English learning manual that you will know you’ve learned the language well when you start to dream in the language. Until then your natural language will be the only reality, the new language merely a mirror’s reflection. And this is true. Her entire world remains constructed of Spanish, and it feels like she is trying to build a life size English replica while looking only at a mirror. The only way to understand what any of it means is to look back at the real world, the Spanish world, and compare the poor model she’s built to reality. As she reads, she must translate what she sees in the mirror into its real world correspondents.

So it goes over the weekend as she reads the boy’s journal, translating months old paragraphs slowly inside her mind. She finds some of his words difficult: androgynous, Ritalin, narcissistic, vocation, asap. Sometimes she does not understand odd abbreviations: aka, b/c, etc.

She looks for herself in his words but does not find herself. There is almost nothing about the library either. In fact, it is almost all about Rosalie. At first she imagined a daughter. Then leaned towards a crush. But it is clear now Rosalie is his beloved.

From April 17th: Rosalie has been chasing a fly around the apartment. She needs to catch it alive to feed it to the spider that’s been living in the corner of our room for weeks. “Do earthworms have blood?” she asks Alexa. This has nothing to do with her fly hunt except that apparently spiders only eat insects with blood. She assures me she has no intention of feeding earthworms to the spider. She’s merely interested.

April 23rd: If I were to go to confession, one sin I would have to confess to is when I make coffee in the morning, I often put fewer grounds in Rose’s funnel, to save grounds, to save money. Very often she doesn’t even finish her coffee. Plus, I don’t know that she (or anyone) could actually taste the difference. I have reasons is what I’m saying.

May 17th: On a walk Rose says, “No one should have to live life again. I hope when I die that’s it. Or maybe that I become a salamander. We should do a poll. We should poll everyone and ask if they want an afterlife, if they want to start all over when they die.”

She shows her husband this entry and says, “What do you think?”

He squints. He is good at English; he speaks it all day at work. But the handwriting is difficult. “Como mi padre. When he was annoyed,” her husband says eventually, and then: “You kill me, he’d say. If I live again, I’ll come back as you and learn to mind my business.”

She tsks. “Es un poco dulce.”

“You think he’s cute? Keep reading. You’ll see. The boy will teach you a lesson yet.”

Would he? She has begun to think not. If he knows she has his notebook, why would he punish her now, more than a week after she took it? Plus, having taken a glimpse at his life she believes he is not the type to punish.

Though he’s only filled one-third of the notebook, a few dozen pages, it takes her two weeks to read all the entries. He veers between topics, which makes it both difficult to understand the language and his moods. Or perhaps it means his moods are chaotic.

He seems to be aware of this himself.

May 30th: The clouds cast hulking shadows, but slender bands of light squeeze through and roam the sidewalk. These bands of light are like the moments of joy in life. They drift through the city in the same way joy drifts through me. The mind is plagued by its own weather systems. Bands of light find you and you glow for no reason. Everything is great or at least good. What makes you happy becomes clear: love, life, food, color! It all comes together. But then it moves on. Seconds later a cloud is overhead and you are covered in grey watching the crisp line of sunshine slide up the block, away from you. The memory of joy remains fresh, but the feeling is gone, so the memory seems false, as if the sun is something added on top of reality, that covers reality in light then vanishes, leaving us cold and naked and true. Sometimes I chase the sun, catch up to it. Sometimes I wait for it to come back. But it always keeps roving.

Once, in Albuquerque, about to quit her job, she decided instead to take the bus from the hospital, out of the city, to a lot not far from a trail that climbed the Sandias. In her scrubs and sneakers, she lumbered up some two thousand feet until she could see the whole city and the patches of shadow the big solitary clouds cast over whole neighborhoods, as if the clouds were boats, their shadows nets, and the people schools of fish. She had felt so small there. And to feel small felt good, freeing. She feels that freedom again now reading the boy’s entry, even if from time to time a shadow might net her.

She is surprised by how much she likes reading the journal. She likes it enough she starts to think she might in fact like the boy. She tells her husband that she enjoys reading the journal, reads him the cloud passage. Her husband dubs the boy maricón soñador.

“He has an interesting mind,” she says. “And he seems to really love his Rosalie.”

Her husband continues to insist the boy will turn her in.

“But listen,” she says, and she begins to read. “August 28th. It has been a slow awakening for me this summer. In a selfish way. An awakening to the banal life that lies before me, my slow rejection of a society that will reject me in turn. I was not sure of this before, but now I am. I don’t think of this as bleak, though there are moments it feels like it is. The only real bleakness would be a life without Rosalie.”

“Does that sound like a boy who would turn on me out of nowhere?” she asks her husband. The dog is on his lap, and he is running a finger up and down its nose.

“I have no clue,” her husband says. “Are you a member of his society?”

When she wipes his desk now her smile feels less forced, her thank yous sound truer. He seems to notice these subtle changes. His face begins to soften. Then he begins to bow. Some inexplicable and chilly barrier is thawing.

While she walks around the library, mist misting, she recalls an entry written in July, during la segunda ola.

Evil. There is so much evil in the world, stored up in so many people. It is contagious. Evil is the real plague. Pent up and leaking from every crevice of this country. It is frightening because of its power and because it is not going anywhere. Not until we all die. It is our lifeforce. What could possibly stop us from releasing our fury? I almost hope it happens. We deserve it.

What he calls evil she calls evil too. Thinking you are big when you are small. Thinking you are right when you are nothing. It is this evil she once thought she sensed in his heart. But here he is aware of it, aware of the thing she thought he’d most deny. Perhaps she had mistaken what was in his heart for what was on his mind. Or what was in his heart for what is in the heart of his country. His country, for it has never felt to her like her country. Her jobs have been hers. Her apartments, hers. Her home, hers. Her husband, hers. Her towns and even whole cities, hers. But this country has never felt like hers. And this boy who lurks behind her, watching coldly while she cleans seemed to know this. She felt it in each silent morning exchange. His country. But now that she has his secrets, she sees that while he knows this, at least he wishes it were otherwise.

So, she decides to return the notebook. She tells her husband.

“I’m going to return the notebook,” she says.

He is reclined on their cushy chair, watching a documentary on TV.

“Engineered as undetectable, they are cloaked in rhetoric that aims to misdirect, obfuscate, and downright bamboozle all of us, all the time,” the TV says. The program cuts from a close-up of the speaker, an old woman with curly grey hair, to the president at a lectern, to the burning twin towers, then back to the president, hugging the flag.

Her husband looks up. “Okay,” he says, and turns back to the TV.

His phone chimes. He grunts it from his pocket and starts pressing at the screen. She is watching him, waiting for him to chastise her, warn her, ask about her plan. She has none.

He looks back up at her. “What?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says.

The next day she wipe wipes her way across the surfaces of the first floor on her daily route to his desk. As she approaches his desk, she takes the journal from underneath the cart, puts on a smile, and starts to wave the book in the air, as if it were a book he’d lent her and she’d read and loved.

As she waves the book, she is considering how to tell him that she cannot explain what got into her to make her take it. She had this anger towards him that she cannot really explain. But perhaps he knows the feeling—a feeling of distrust towards the people who watch you and say nothing. It was his notebook itself perhaps that led her to the notebook theft. I thought you were watching me, judging me, recording me. I assumed you did not like me, did not trust me or want me near you, she would tell him. I am a cleaning machine to you. That is what I thought. I wanted to teach you a lesson that I am more, she would say. But then I read some. Yes, I am sorry. But I did. And now I see how you love this woman—Rose. Rosalie. Is she your wife, this woman, Rosalie? It made me think about my marriage and when I was really mad with love for my husband. She would tell him how when she read from the notebook out loud to her husband that he told her ‘That boy is a dreamer.’ We should all be dreamers, shouldn’t we? She would leave out her husband’s maricón. She would say, because part of her thinks this is true, that her husband got jealous from her reading his notebook. Because I told him how impressive what you write can be, she would say. Like the weather section. The sun beams and clouds. Have you ever been to Albuquerque? She felt the sweat of her hands accumulating in the palms and fingertips of her latex gloves. I am sorry. She was going to apologize, and he was going to forgive her and receive his notebook and write in it again, maybe about her. She knew that. She would tell him, I know you will have to write about this, about me. Say anything you want. I know that what I did was wrong. But I did it. And now I like you better than I could have imagined. Isn’t that good at least?

But, as she nears his desk, with his journal so obviously in her hand, the boy lurches forward, stands abruptly, pushes his chair back from the desk, and instead of receiving his journal and listening to her petition, stunned but grateful, he walks away.

Hadn’t he seen it? He must have. She cannot believe this. If she leaves it for him without explanation, he will know that she stole it and he will form his harsh judgements before she’s explained a thing, and I must do this now, she thinks. I must explain myself.

So, she will leave the notebook on the desk and follow him, explain herself to him, wherever it is he’s off to, discreetly. She goes to put the journal on the desk. As she does, she sees right in front of the keyboard a shiny yellow clot of phlegm. Right in the middle of the desk. Right where she wipes every single day. He is sick. Sick during a plague and leaves me this yellow phlegm to clean.

Was it meant for her? Does it matter? What’s the difference between careless and cruel? He either saw I had his notebook and he spit, or he thinks I have his notebook and he chose to leave his spit. His sick slimy spit. Gleaming.

She places the notebook on top of the loogie and rubs it in.

“¡Maricón!”

She leaves the notebook on the smeared goo and speedwalks after him. She sees him walk into the distant bathroom.

Little maricón, she thinks. He is just as bad as I thought. He is worse. Sick little devil. Her husband was right. He is a sick little maricón who pretends to know about love when really all he cares about is himself. Clean up my spit he says. Rotten little. She will tell him. She will go in there and tell him exactly who he really is.

****

Three weeks after his journal disappeared, he finds it returned, right where he’d left it three weeks before. When he saw the cleaning lady approaching, he’d left his desk before she got too close (which she always did) and started to spray her irritating mist unnecessarily upon him and his peace. Besides, he’s sick. He was doing her a favor.

It feels strange, almost like a punishment, to find his journal returned now, after what’s just happened, about which, tonight, he will write: October 14th: Rosalie and I split a bottle of wine last night and I was feeling a bit sick today. Sneezy, snotty, queasy. When the cleaning lady came with her bottle of toxic mist I left for the bathroom. She gets so close and I’m sick. Plus, I’ve seen her a dozen times maskless. If I don’t have the plague, I don’t want to catch it. So, a quick poo. I was on the toilet, wiping when she came in. She’d followed me across the building. When I came out of the stall, she was standing there looking at me like I’d wronged her. I washed my hands, waiting for her to say something, but she said nothing. So, I said, “What do you want?” And she said, “What is wrong with you?” And I said, “Why did you follow me into the men’s bathroom?” And she said, “Why do you never speak to me?” And I said, “About what?” And she goes, “All what you’re writing down, in your book. Why not say it out loud?” I can’t explain what I was thinking. It was the rush of the puzzle being solved. I walked up to her. She didn’t move. I wanted to grab her by the neck, but I didn’t. Instead, I pulled my mask down below my chin and I put my mouth right near her face and I said, “Where is my journal?” Breathing out each word separately. “I know you took it.” She thought I was going to hit her, I think, so I stepped back and pulled my mask back up. “What is wrong with me?” I said. “What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?” “You are just like I thought from the beginning,” she said. “From the beginning of what?” I said. But she said nothing. So I left her there in the bathroom and went back to my desk, where I found my journal covered in her spit and only now do I find myself thinking, What did she mean, from the beginning?

____
Sam Schieren lives in Richmond, Virginia. His work has been published in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. "The Beginning of What" was selected by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah as runner up in the 2021 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction.