"He always managed to act astonished when the package arrived a few days before Christmas."
Glen Williams of Robinsville, PA, USA, Night Janitor by Matthew Quick
Once they were gone, he emptied their home of everything but his bed, his desk, the clothes in his closet, kitchen table, refrigerator, washer, dryer, and two chairs, one for eating, and one for writing letters. Pictures, couches, wardrobes, the TV, mattresses, shelves of books, jewelry, the old upright piano, expensive chinaware, everything else, he carried, dragged, and pushed it all to the curb, making a mountain of stuff.
Strangers came and took most of it.
The trash men eventually removed the rest.
Glen Williams had lived with his parents his entire life, and he cared for them until the very end.
They had often called him a good boy.
The empty house was easily cleaned. Wash the floors. Make the bed. Disinfect the kitchen counters, toilet, bathtub, his plate, knife, fork, spoon, and mug. All of this was done daily in less than an hour.
He worked as a night janitor at the school down the street.
When he wasn't mopping the lunchroom floor or scrubbing doodles off desks or emptying trashcans, when he wasn't cleaning his parents' home, Glen would write letters to an imaginary friend named Sophia Lovely.
Sophia lived in Ottawa, where her family made the finest and most fragrant bubble bath in the world: Lovely Bubble Bath.
Each Christmas, Sophia would send Glen one large bottle, and he would use it on special occasions--times when he was feeling particularly lonely. If he used only 8.5 capfuls at a time, he could make the bottle last through 57 soaks in the tub. So he could bubble bath roughly every 6.4 days, and make his supply last until the next Christmas.
In actuality, he purchased the bubble bath at the town drug store and then wrapped and mailed it to himself along with a letter he would write with his left hand, so that it wouldn't match his handwriting. He sprinkled that letter with fancy-smelling oil he also purchased at the drug store. He sprinkled all the letters Sophia Lovely wrote him with fancy-smelling oil. He loved fancy-smelling oil.
He always managed to act astonished when the package arrived a few days before Christmas.
Then one year in the month of May, Sophia surprised him with a visit; she just showed up at his home in a women's business suit and wearing smart-looking glasses. There was a small red maple leaf pinned to her lapel. She had a suitcase in one hand and in the other was a bag that contained three large bottles of bubble bath.
Enough for 171 wonderful soaks.
When the sun went down, he explained that he was a night janitor and therefore had to work. Sophia said she would gladly keep him company. He smiled.
While he cleaned, she told him jokes that he already knew, but he laughed anyway just to be agreeable.
"How many elephants can you squeeze into a phone booth, eh?" she asked in her sexy Canadian accent.
He shrugged.
She said, "There are no phone booths aboot, now that there are cell phones!"
They laughed like hyenas.
It didn't take them long to get comfortable with each other, probably because they had been writing letters for so many years.
She told him that he should quit his job, travel to Ottawa with her, and work in the bubble bath factory.
"You'd just love Canada!" she said.
He began to believe that he might.
On the 17th night they spent together cleaning the Robinsville Elementary School, they made love behind a bookcase, under a life-sized papier-mâché polar bear that hung from the ceiling in Mrs. Bach's classroom, and then they drifted off to sleep.
When Glen woke up the next morning in his underwear, two-dozen third graders were staring at him and their teacher was screaming, "Shame on you! Shame on you!"
He was fired.
On hands and knees, he cleaned his parents' house obsessively for weeks, washing and waxing the floors, scrubbing and polishing the kitchen and bathroom until his knuckles bled and his nasal passages and throat burned from over exposure to cleaning product fumes.
He missed being a janitor, having something to do.
He went on a few job interviews but had a hard time answering the questions and was not hired.
He stopped writing; he stopped rationing, used upwards of thirty capfuls at a time, and began taking extremely long bubble baths that would last for days and days and days and...
A nosy neighbor called the police when, for five nights in a row, she failed to see Glen Williams' bedroom light illuminate his rectangular window.
The autopsy estimated that Glen Williams had died four days before the police found him. For a man his age, he'd been in relatively good condition. Both foul play and suicide were ruled out.
The official word: Glen Williams died of natural causes.
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Matthew Quick is the author of The Silver Linings Playbook and Sorta Like a Rock Star. www.matthewquickwriter.com
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Tuesday, 30 March, 2010
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