Jackie’s been here for twenty-five years and he tells me: you get used to it. He says your nose learns to seal itself when you dive headfirst into an ocean of dust; your eyes develop nictitating membranes to keep the chemical sprays out; and your hands… they will grow their own gloves, invisible and tough and permanent.

I’ve been a janitor for three weeks and I thought I was made of stronger materials.

We play chess in the breakroom. Jackie asks me what my favorite piece is. I say the pawn because, you know, he’s the underdog; the odds are against him. Jackie identifies with the pawns too, but he finds nobility in their sacrifice, he sees beauty in their simplicity, in the fact that they’re always moving forward.

Jackie shambles from room to room, moving half as fast as me but somehow getting twice as much done. The night shift will mess with your head like that. Jackie smiles, the saddest face I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes I see that face and imagine we are the servants entombed alive with the pharaoh, polishing someone else’s gold while our oxygen runs out, dutifully preparing a grand feast for a god who will never be hungry.

But Jackie tells me that there is honor in this. A good day’s work. An honest living. That there is poetry in this.

But what kind of poetry lives in a can of orange naturalizer, the liquid breath of dragons? The mist dissolves every word creeping up my throat, overwhelms every idea.

They got me wiping my reflection from the glass, scrubbing the shadows off the walls. They got me so scared of my alarm clock that I can’t fall asleep any more, even when my muscles drain out from under my fingernails, my thoughts stream out of my ears, and I am left with nothing but two eyes that refuse to close for fear of what they might see. Is there really honor in this?

Or is that abstract notion the carrot they dangle in front of us pawns to move us across the board?

Jackie tells me you can’t think about it like that. He says that without us, the people who live and work in this building couldn’t function, that we keep the gears turning, and that it might not be glamorous, but it’s necessary.

And of course: he’s right. And maybe I am just a working class kid who somehow hustled my way into college and got delusions of grandeur. Maybe now I’m “too good” to go into the family business: a hundred generations of janitors and farmers and infantry and factory workers and pawns.

So I suck it up… and last for two more months. And on my final day, before a very uncertain future, I make a point to shake Jackie’s hand, and I say:

I’ve been thinking, man. I think the reason pawns can’t move backwards is because if they could, they’d kill their own kings in a heartbeat.

Instead, we are forced to keep moving, believing we can get to the other side and become royalty ourselves, but most likely dying on the way there, sacrificed for a cause we don’t even understand. I wish you… I wish you the best, man. I wish you horses and castles.

Jackie smiles, the saddest face I’ve ever seen,
and disappears into his work.