Manuel liked to sit alone in the boiler room where no one would bother him. The maids and maintenance workers didn’t like him much, and if they saw him sitting around not working they would start to mutter. They preferred he stay out of sight so they didn’t have to think about him. It was better for both parties that he stay in the boiler room where he could read by the light of a single bulb high above. He sat in a straight-backed chair a few feet in front of the gasping boiler, the heat from it slow-roasting him into a drowsy stupor. Manuel had a book open on his lap, a book of beautifully depressing poems about lost love. They made him smile and sometimes cry; he imagined the young woman who owned this book reading in the middle of the night, too broken to find sleep easily. Poignant. That’s what these poems were.
With a sigh, Manuel put aside the worn book. He started counting, doing his daily math. It had been several weeks since he last worked, if he didn’t count nursing the shuddering boiler, which was too stubborn to die. But that wasn’t really his job. He just spent all of his time in the boiler room, and over the years had fidgeted with it, learning to keep it running through trial and error. The old janitor didn’t want the boiler to die, because then the hotel would have to send in a real repairman, and Manuel would be banished to the alley above, hunched over on a crate in the cold while the smokers periodically interrupted his reading. They would stare at him when he wasn’t looking, the more superstitious making the sign of the cross when he glanced at them. When the repairs eventually pulled the ancient boiler back to a semblance of life Manuel would return to his sanctuary. Now cold, it would take hours to slowly warm back to the oven he was used to.
The door at the top of the stairs opened, harsh light spilling down with a whirl of snow carried on the biting wind.
“We got one Manny. Room 117.”
That was the shift manager. He was gone by the time Manuel stood. He had just finished his count and decided it was overdue, so he wasn’t surprised that he had a day of work ahead of him. Stretching, Manuel gathered his cleaning supplies. The manager hadn’t said how bad it was, but he typically expected the worst.
Room 117. Identical to a hundred other rooms in this rundown hotel, unfit for anything but roaches. In a hundred rooms, 99 were probably occupied by prostitutes or drug addicts. Only 117 was different, at least for today. This was the room where someone came to die.
Manuel opened the door with his master key. Light spilled into the room from the late morning sun behind him, falling on the body hanging from the ceiling. He grunted softly. A suicide this time. More often it was overdose, but he saw a fair number of these as well. The manager checks the rooms at ten if the occupant fails to check out. He wakes up the late sleepers, or if they’re too drunk or high to rouse he throws them out. When he finds these, he calls Manuel. No one else would clean these rooms.
Manuel sighed and crossed the room to lean against the wall. He had to wait for the police to arrive. Experience told him that they would take the better part of an hour. The cop who came would dither over the scene for a moment before having paramedics cut the body down. Then Manuel would get to work cleaning the room so that it could be rented again, usually the next day. Manuel mentally ticked off what needed to be done. Hangings were generally easy. They lacked the destruction of the overdoses, or the sickening Rorschach blot of a shooting. Hangings were usually contained to the stains just below the swinging form where the body let go of dignity in passing. It happens to them all. Scrubbing the filth and removing the smell would take the most time here. Hangings were usually easy. But not this one. This one was young.
That wasn’t unusual - To see a young one. Manuel had seen plenty of forms small enough to be called children, just babies really. The overdoses were often just kids. But the hangings were usually old. Manuel didn’t really divide the deaths in his mind by type, except when considering how best to clean. He considered the suicides and the overdoses pretty much one and the same. Drugs may take a less direct path, the scenic route to suicide’s highway, but they both ended up the same.
He did however divide them in his mind by old and young. The old were often deliberate; the gunshots and the hangings. They planned. They wrote a note, sometimes pages and pages. They took time to load the gun, or tie the rope. They had a last drink. The young were not nearly so intentional. The young were reckless. They were the lion’s share of overdoses, along with the downed bottles of pills and the slit wrists. These were rushed. Done before hesitation could creep in, before reason could reassert itself. Manuel always noted the hesitation in the cuts, the fractured resolve of a child pulled along in the wake of surging emotions that he barely understood. If there was a note it would be hasty and short; a single plea, a tear marked cry to be stopped.
This one had been deliberate. A young man, surely not yet twenty-five. He had dark wavy hair and a large hooked nose. He wore a white t-shirt and jeans. None of that told Manuel anything about the way the boy had lived or died, but details screamed at him. The rope was perfectly coiled in a hangman’s noose, the kind of coil that took practice. It wasn’t a belt, or a scarf, it was a thick sturdy rope tied to the ceiling fan. On the bed was a jacket, neatly folded. It was folded. Manuel couldn’t believe it. Years of cleaning up deaths, following in the wake of that pale horse, and he had only seen someone fold their clothes twice. Both men as old as electricity. One had carefully folded his clothes in a pile and changed into a gray suit. The other left his clothes next to the door in a suitcase and left this world as naked as the day he entered it.
Manuel stepped forward, a little closer to the still form. Reaching out a hand to touch the folded coat, he held back. Manuel never disturbed the room before the police took the remains. Resting next to the coat was a sheet of paper, folded in half. Manuel nodded. This one had thought to leave a note, though only a single sheet. One page, to tell the world why he left it. He always lingered over these, the words that someone felt were important enough to mark his ending. This time spent cleaning up the physical remnants of a passing was time for him to ponder the life that had ended. Why had they felt the need to turn away from life? Why seek oblivion? He looked at their belongings, their choice of method, and their words, piecing together a life from the fragments left behind. The book he had waiting in the warmth of the boiler room had been left behind as one such fragment. He noted the title of the dogeared book and went out to buy a copy that same day. He needed to know what poems resonated so strongly that a young woman wanted their words on her lips as her life bled away into the warm bath water.
Manuel reached out, wanting to read the words left by this young man. Before his fingers touched the paper, the tinkling of shattering glass jarred him back. He glanced to the door quickly, but it had come from the back of the room. Pulling away, Manuel crossed in front of the boy to walk to the back of the room. Opposite the entry at the far end of the room was the alcove just outside the bathroom. The mirror above the sink was shattered, probably around a fist. Manuel had seen it before. he had been startled by some glass falling, the shards settling in a new formation. Manuel looked into the broken mirror. Cracks separated his reflection into jagged divisions, fragments. He looked at these pieces and saw what he felt others must see. Brown skin under graying hair. An old face with older eyes looking out. In one shard of mirror he could see over his shoulder the boy, still waiting. For a moment, a wave of tremendous emotion rose in Manuel. He had never married, he had no more family. No one to deal with the mess left behind. When I pass, Manuel thought to himself, I will do it cleanly. I will not leave a mess for some poor man to clean up.
Closing his eyes to the reflection of a face he did not want to see, Manuel turned away. He needed to know why. Why did this child, so young, feel the need to do this? He had to know. Why? Why did he do this? Why did he keep going? If this poor child felt that death was better than why did he keep pushing, getting out of bed to face the boiler room and these places of grief? Striding to the bed he grabbed up the sheet and scanned it quickly. Then he sat down on the bed. He put his head in hands, inches from the dangling feet of the boy. For the first time in many years, Manuel wept. He did not weep for the boy, but for himself. The letter read:
I am sorry for causing a mess. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble. I’m so very sorry for so much. I’ll be going now. Thank you.
When the police arrived to take away the young man, Manuel was standing against the wall as he always was. When they had gone, he knelt to the ground below where the boy had hung and began scrubbing the carpet. The note tucked in his breast pocket had given him no answers. He had no idea what happened in this child’s life to make him so apologetic for being alive. He would never know why this young man had chosen to die. But still, he had an answer of sorts. He wasn’t the religious type. He couldn’t say a prayer for their soul, wouldn’t know what to say if he could. But he could remember. He could look on them, and read their words. He could clean up the mess they left behind so that others wouldn’t have to. He hoped that this gave them a little dignity, because it was all he had to give.
