There was once a man. A Billionaire Man. He lived alone in a great estate filled with things of great beauty, some functional, some pure form, some both. He acquired the things, manifested by so many wonderful, skilled and creative people that he never got to meet. He never gave them a second thought. He was afraid of them. He lived as a recluse because he was afraid of everything. Everything. He could touch his many beautiful possessions only with gloves upon his pale, bony hands. He regarded them in silence.
Every day a team of women would enter his house and clean. Laundry clean, Cutlery clean, Dust clean and many, many more including the most difficult: Floor clean. The Floor cleaning women, after sweeping every nook thoroughly, would then arm themselves with a mop and buckets of hot water and start applying elbow grease with a throw of their hips, giving them all quite the work out. They developed great skill at cleaning the floors. All the Cleaners had Jobs for Life.
However, after only 6 months tops at this job, one by one, the Floor cleaners would die, all of them, silently and with speed. From vigorous beginnings, and passing a certain peak point of ability, the Floor cleaners all just seemed to evaporate (ironically) into - dust. Billionaire Man began to notice this was happening on a cyclical basis because every month or so, he became more afraid of his floors. He sensed they were not quite as clean as before because the replacement Floor cleaners needed time to come up to scratch and build their strength. There would be a golden era of a month or so when enough newbies would have acquired the necessary level of performance but there was definitely a less-than-ideal pattern of imperfection.
One of the Floor cleaners, FC33, tried as she might to make up for the deficit between disappearing Floor cleaners and the efforts of those in training. With a hitherto unseen resolve, she spent 6 months at her peak condition encouraging and training the new ones but eventually, humans being humans and things changing all the time, there were no new recruits. She had become the last and only Floor cleaner alive in Billionaire Man’s house. Finally, it became clear that FC33’s health was going downhill fast and she collapsed one day at work.
Dust cleaner DC21 was first on the scene and together with a couple of Laundry cleaners. They picked her up, leaving her mop dripping on the floor and carried her to a daybed in the Cleaner’s Room, where they left their coats and hats. The Head of Cleaning HC1 realised that crisis was at hand. He felt it his duty to tell Billionaire Man and so sent him a message under his door that said ‘We are down to our last Floor cleaner. She hasn’t got long.’ A half hour later, and HC1 was summoned to Billionaire Man’s private door, through which nobody entered other than he and in which he lived for months on end with all his fears around him, endlessly battling, fighting, struggling to survive.
“Bring her to the door” he said.
The cleaners brought FC33, now approaching the end stage of her life, to the Private door. They knocked. They heard him approach the other side of the door.
“How can you die on me? Why have you all died on me? Don’t I give you a Job for Life and doesn’t that fulfill your needs?” Billionaire Man railed.
FC33, eyes flickering open, gathered her strength, “I hope you don’t think it’s because we get tired of doing the same thing every day?”she asked
Billionaire Man could be heard thinking that thought.
“I hope you don’t think we’re ungrateful for the Job?” she whispered. They all held their breaths (except for FC33, she was cherishing whatever she could get) and listened. “I hope……. you know that we are all……. so sorry……. we couldn’t stay and keep……. working.” Her voice was too weak now. DC21 leaned over to hear the breath coming from the still moving lips….
“I am disappointed. You have betrayed me.” Billionaire Man’s voice was soft and high. There was silence for a full minute. “Well?” He asked “What have you got to say?”. After a beat, DC21 stood up and came to the crack of the door. On the other side Billionaire Man recoiled, sensing this person, so close to his Private door. “Well?” he hissed.
“FC33 has just passed. Her last words in reply to your question were ‘We die not because we are angry or unhappy or ungrateful but because we cannot bear the weight of your unhappiness. We cannot bear to see how someone who appears to have everything, lives with such fear and hatred in his heart. Your legacy is a crushed soul that never lived truly. We don’t want to live in your world but we all need Jobs for Life. We have served. We die knowing that we had meaning and purpose in our lives and that we loved people and that we were loved. You have helped us educate our children so that they will do this too but not by serving people like you who doesn’t want to know but by serving each other. ’” She said all that and took her last breath (not surprisingly).
On the other side of the door, Billionaire Man opened his face in a silent scream and scuttled back to the dust, just like a cockroach.
Chur x
Imaginative, poignant, and full of meaning. Thanks for this.
when one's heart is empty, they usually clean ALONE.