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Of Sound and Soul

The cleaning boy at the museum would rarely look away from the floor as he robotically mopped the same shimmering-clean rooms over and over again for his entire shift. Even when he wasn’t cleaning, eye-contact with him was a rare (and uncomfortable) occurrence. He never talked much, if at all (which was fine by everyone that had previously attempted a conversation with him). This scrawny high-school dropout, failure incarnate, was unapproachable, and he was perfectly fine with that. There’s nothing he hated more than to share his existence with someone else. That’s one of the reasons why he chose the museum. The museum’s spacious and mostly empty rooms would get only a few visitors each day, unaware of the cleaning boy in the background, as lifeless as the statues upstairs and as invisible as the sign that says NO PICTURES PLEASE.

            He would turn off his mind and keep himself busy mopping in order to keep the existential crisis from creeping in. From time to time he would stop to catch his breath. Slouching, he would rest his hands on the mop and take a look at the visitors. He had an innate instinct to assume that every person thought they were better than him. If you were to, for a second, look in his direction, he would automatically resent you for judging him so harshly, how dare you. He assumed the same about this inhumanely pretty girl who suddenly showed up one day in the museum and afterward would show up a couple times a week and walk and sit around in her black clothes, brushing away her black hair and drawing in her little black notebook. She never talked or bothered anyone but the manager couldn’t stand her for some reason. Even the cleaning boy thought she was a little weird. He couldn’t help but feel like a nuisance when she was around. He tried to avoid her at first but with time she became as invisible as him.

            Unbeknownst to the cleaning boy, this girl was drawn to the museum for the same reason as he was. Both of them felt a strong urge to go, leave, but where to? There was this lurking fear in their heads that no matter where in the globe they flew to, they would never find home. Both of them hopelessly trapped in a huge world, could only find escape by being near the paintings. They could both see doors to the anywhere else, windows to landscapes of the subconscious mind, a piece of life concealed on canvas. Those orange mountains, the boy knew, were not to the north, nor the south. Those yellow and blue lights were not to the east, nor the west. When the cleaning boy first visited the museum (before he was the cleaning boy, back when he had a name) he was mesmerized by these paintings. He decided that if he was gonna have to mop floors for a living, he’d like to do it here. Bitterness overcame him soon enough, though. The man that hired him, the manager, was nice the first two days, but unleashed his abusive side once he discovered the cleaning boy’s meek, pathetic, squashable self.

            The cleaning boy would commonly wear headphones while working in order to stay sane. The sound of music could very faintly be heard whenever he was near. One day, as the girl was writing something down on her little black notebook, she heard a sound and turned around. There was the cleaning boy, oblivious to her presence. The sound got a little bit louder and the cleaning boy unconsciously sang along to it. The girl could hear how his vocal chords could not filter out his beautiful misery. The boy slowly left to another room, but the girl could still hear his low voice, one only heard by those strongly perceptive of sound and soul. She turned to a new page in her notebook, and she wrote.

            With time, the girl would show up more and more frequently. The cleaning boy couldn’t understand how she hadn’t gotten sick of the place. One night, while he was giving a final sweep to the museum in order to go home, he found the girl’s notebook lying on the ground beneath one of the paintings. He picked it up and didn't hesitate to snoop through it. He started with the first page, he saw random drawings, sketches of the statues upstairs, her versions of some paintings, and… a drawing of himself. It was unmistakable, there he was, sitting, with contemplative eyes, a mop on the floor. He turned the page, more drawings of himself. Drawings dating back to months ago. Drawings of him among familiar mountains and lights, looking straight ahead and sometimes slightly skyward. The last drawing showed him standing, his hair slicked back by the wind, proudly displaying the forehead’s scar which he had so persistently tried to hide with his hair his whole life, and he was wearing a leather jacket instead of the museum’s ugly orange uniform. There was also writing. The boy read, and learned, for the girl had come to understand that paradise is an intangible place and life is a state of mind.

            The following morning, the girl returned pale faced to the museum. The notebook was thankfully right were she left it, but the cleaning boy was gone. Before she arrived, the cleaning boy had quit the job, sold the few things he owned, bought himself a leather jacket, and fled, heading northeastern-southwest.