Written by Claire Ellerman
At 5pm every day, a medley of church bells rings out across the quiet campus. It’s a still campus and empty, no echoing laughter or bustling feet as students putter from class to class. In the air is a slight breeze with a biting chill, signaling the change of fall to winter when normally, students would forgo the t-shirts and layer on sweatshirts emblazoned with the college logo. Across this campus, the bells still ring. They creep into empty classrooms where dust has started to collect in the nooks of clustered desks, and a spider spins his web high on the ceiling. Down each flight of stairs, the sound tumbles. Down each flight of stairs, phantom footsteps fall only to be replaced by a lone custodian in the hall who lugs his mop bucket over old tiles. Bill’s bent slightly, his shoulders leaning forward as he walks. His eyes watch the ground where his work shoes squeak on the clean floor. With the sounding of the bells, he moves towards the breaker at the end of the hall where he’ll flip off the flights until tomorrow when the morning custodian comes to flip them back on. With no students in the classrooms, the schedule has relaxed. It isn’t until 8am, not 7, that someone comes in to dust the offices and vacuum the carpet on the top floors. It’s at 5, not 6pm, that this custodian decides to darken the building. He’s already cleaned the building to the right with its high, creaking stairs and the building to the left that’s warmer, newer. He always saves this one for last because he likes the decorations on the walls here. On the second floor, posters and photos of far off countries hang in the hallway. The photos sometimes have class trips from years past, when there were students to go on them. On the third floor, there’s movie posters that have been adapted from books, and there’s quotes from famous authors pinned on cracking plaster. Bill had been an English student once, before his daughter was born, and he had dropped out to support his girlfriend, now his wife, and their newborn baby. It’s been decades since then, and the words of Bronte, Austin, Twain, and Shelley are far removed from his thoughts.
Bill reaches towards the breaker and flicks off the lights one by one, starting with the top floor and working down. He imagines each classroom as it becomes bathed in darkness, how empty and cold it feels, until the hallway around him too grows dark. He shuffles down the hallway then and out the front door. Here he stops to pull out a tangle of keys. He locks the two heavy, wooden doors and turns. The sky is starting to darken around him, and the chill in the air has turned to frigid gusts. The custodian pulls his jacket tighter around his shoulders and then pulls the bucket behind him as he moves toward the maintenance truck parked a few steps away. It only takes a second to wedge the bucket in the bed, years of practice making the heft, swing, sit as simple as breathing, and Bill hunkers in the driver’s seat blowing on his fingers. He looks around from his place behind the windshield and imagines the throng of students that would usually be going to dinner at the commons or hurrying to a night class. He imagines two girls, one with dark hair like his daughter’s, walking side by side along the sidewalk by his truck. He imagines them laughing or chatting or deep in conversation. He imagines a young man across the street with his backpack heavy as he hurries back to his dorm.
Bill turns the key in his truck and listens to the engine rumble, the only sound on the now quiet campus. He pulls out of his spot and chugs along the narrow road. When he gets to the stop sign at the edge of the academic buildings, he looks back at the three towering stone masses. The students have been gone so long now that the emptiness of those walls has started to feel normal, but Bill remembers when the kind kids would smile at him as they passed. Bill remembers when he used to have his afternoon coffee with a group of philosophy majors and would listen to them in awe. He remembers the classes outside that would speak just loud enough for him to pause in work and listen to the discussions, taking mental notes to bring home to his wife and share what he learned at college that day. It was always an inside joke between them, but lately Bill had only learned that the coldest rooms were the loneliest and before long, they would grow colder and dustier without even a custodian to clean them.