Abandoned curriculums
by Adam Jeffrey Jr.
Driving to work is black and clear in February and it doesn’t bother me. I have to be on the road by 4:15 and so I’m in the dark no matter what season it is. If it’s snowing I have to get up and go even earlier. I take the same stretch of rural road and I stay on it all the way to the school where I work. I make a total of three turns in my car in the fifty-four miles I drive to and from: one turn out of (into) my driveway, one turn to get into (out of) the parking lot of Leatherwood Middle School, and one more to get into (out of) my assigned parking space next to the grease dumpster.
The only thing I know for sure about myself is that I’m punctual. I know that I’m punctual because I pass the same seven cars on the same spots on the road every morning. I meet them at the stop signs or when we cross the bridges. But this means that these other people in the cars I pass are punctual, too. These are my punctual pals. And this means that punctuality must not be all that special. But I’d rather know something true about myself than be special.
In the morning, the stars and moon—when it’s not cloudy— look like cold white lasers. When the wind blows through the needles in the pines it sounds like a busy highway. Highways sound like pine needles and pine needles sound like highways. I tried to think of the sound the pine needles make as whispers but the sound is closest to the sound of speeding cars on the highway, unfortunately.
The ditches along the road I take are a lot wider and deeper than they look from inside the car. You have to get down in them to realize they come up to your shoulders in some places. Most people think that the lines on the road are maybe a yard stick long but really they’re more like eight feet.
I get to know the roadkill, too because I’ll notice it either getting more and more squished into oily smears on the asphalt or I’ll notice that it’s gone all together—taken by a scavenger. I haven’t hit anything yet but I’ve seen lots of spooky deer that I can’t tell whether they know what’s going on or not. It’s strange that they act like they’re seeing a car for the first time when you know that can’t be the case. We’re all wired differently.
There are speed traps and I know where they all are. I’m afraid of cops and their ignorance so I only wave at them in the dark on my way to work. I know they ought to be investigating the garbage bags.
Farmers have been finding these garbage bags full of viscera along the ditches of their fields. They say it looks like cow innards but sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know who or what the guts belonged to and neither do the cops. Sometimes I’ll pull over and check a garbage bag, but so far it’s just been trash.
I don’t have to be a first shift custodian at a middle school but I like having a ring of keys that lets me disappear into any forgotten closet. These places are full of old things that aren’t used anymore but haven’t been thrown away: broken furniture, dead computers, defaced textbooks. Feeling illusive is my way of feeling needed. It comforts me to know teachers and principals are wondering where I am all the time. There are closets that connect to storage rooms that have their own closets. Anterooms inside anterooms: a broken kiln, corroded 9V batteries caked inside their unopened box, laminated anthropomorphized animal posters, banker’s boxes with “DESTROY ON/AFTER 9/1/99” written on them, gym mats saturated with undead pheromones, culled library books stained with cafeteria food, stacks of overhead transparencies of frog anatomy: abandoned curriculums.
My favorite artifact is a can of salt from a grocery store that is no longer in business. The back of the can says that the salt does not supply adequate iodine which is a necessary nutrient. The can also says it contains sodium silico aluminate and yellow prussiate of soda.
I like opening the school: turning the lights on, unlocking the doors, checking the HVAC filters, checking third shift’s work in the bathrooms: Did they refill the paper towels and urinal cakes? Did they forget to empty the trash can by door eight? When the school is empty, it feels somehow the way a school should feel. I keep my radio low so it doesn’t scare me when Bruce, my boss, crackles on to tell me there’s been a spill or a child has vomited. Back when the kids were here.
We don’t know when the kids will be back but the building still needs taken care of. Plumbing still leaks. Ceiling tiles still get soaked with mold. The boilers could still explode. Ants still find ways in. Lightning flips breakers. Mice still steal snacks in teacher desks. Mice, whether the kids are there or not, still chew and shit and die in hidden places only I know about.
I’m still finding scuff marks from the dress shoes of all the people who attended the Veteran’s Day program last November. I made a scuff remover out of an old broom handle and tennis ball. The last human mess I cleaned up was a geisha fan of diarrhea in the bathroom across from the gym. The shitter had managed to spray an ornate design onto the wall behind the toilet in a great arc. I wanted to show it to Bruce before I cleaned it up. He came into the stall silent, I would say awestruck. He took out his phone and took a picture of the geisha fan of shit and stared at the photo there in his palm like he was reading tea leaves. Shit leaves.
“It looks like they used a stencil. It’s…symmetrical.” he said.
I have to use the elevator to take the floor waxer upstairs. I’m scared of the elevator. Not because it’s old and slow but because the inside is covered in moaning wood grain. You’ve all seen wood grain as a thousand yawning faces. But these change each time I get in the elevator. They aren’t faces you make with your mind. They’re faces that are actually there that take no imagination at all to see. It’s the worst part of my job.
Everyone I work with has an intellectual disability. Hattie wears Crocs to work and she won’t say certain words and has me fill in the blanks. Roger I think has Marfan syndrome and can’t read. Melinda has narcolepsy and counts her steps out loud from the pedometer she wears on her belt loop.
Yesterday I visited the The Computer Guy’s office which is next door to the closet I usually hide in. He was working on a computer he said needed wiped, restored, and re-enrolled. He said that some kid downloaded “puppy porn” on it. Things like, ”sex with dogs/woman and puppy sex/puppy has sex with woman.” The Computer Guy showed me a video he found of the kid who did this. The kid recorded himself dancing to Michael W. Smith’s “Place in This World.” The kid wasn’t really dancing because he had muscular dystrophy. He was sort of crawling around on his knees and elbows and rolling around to the music. I asked the Computer Guy how he found the video and he said that while he investigated who the culprit of the puppy porn was, he came across the kid’s video on the Internet. We watched the video four times in silence.
At the end of my shift I check on the Cutie in Mr. Hagedorn’s classroom. The Cutie has been sitting there on his desk since last March. It looks like a regular Cutie except it has darkened and hardened. The meat on the inside must have dried-out and left just the skin. I don’t dare throw it away. I want Mr. Hagedorn to find it when he finally comes back to work. I want him to feel ashamed and I want him to feel chilled by the sight of the rotten-from-the-inside-Cutie on his desk.
My duty is to contain all of these things in Leatherwood Middle School. I’m tasked with keeping the contents stowed and dustless. I’m the custodian of this place’s rooms and halls and closets and anterooms full of unneeded things. I have to keep the inside in and the outside out.
I don’t look forward to going to and from work in March. The worst part of the year is March. There’s a winter chill in the air but there’s something blowing that smells like the summer heat from far away. March is full of anxious weather that can’t decide what to commit to. It’s a feeling of a promise but is so far away from being kept. There is always that dread in the pit of my stomach that spring will not come.
There will still be the garbage bags to check. There will always be garbage bags to check.
Adam Jeffrey Jr. is a writer living in Franklin, Indiana