My name is Teodor Bajrami. I am fifty-three years old. I have been cleaning the offices on floors four through eight of 1200 Meridian Parkway for nine years, four months, and eleven days. I am good at my job. The floors are clean. The windows are clean. The restrooms are stocked and sanitized. The waste bins are emptied every evening, even though they contain nothing, because they have never contained anything, because no one has ever worked in this building.

I knew from the second week. The first week I thought maybe it was a holiday, or maybe the company that rented the space was between projects. By the second week I understood. The desks had no personal items. The computers were on but running nothing — just login screens that nobody would ever log into. The coffee machine in the break room on the sixth floor brewed at 7:15 AM and 1:30 PM every day, and every evening I poured out two full pots of untouched coffee. The toilet paper in the restrooms was the same roll I had checked the day before. I started making small marks on the rolls with my thumbnail — tiny crescents in the paper — and every evening the marks were still there. Nobody had used the restrooms. The rolls were replaced on a biweekly schedule by the supply service. Fresh rolls replacing unused rolls. I put the unused rolls in the supply closet and the closet filled up. Eventually someone from the supply company took the extras away. I don't know where they went.

My paycheck comes from a company called Luminaire Services Group. I looked them up once. They have a registered address that turns out to be a mailbox service in the Shelf's commercial district. They have a tax ID. They have a bank account that pays me Φ3,200 every two weeks, which is actually slightly above market rate for janitorial work at this tier level. They have no other employees that I have been able to find. I am Luminaire Services Group's only product, and my product is cleaning a building where no one makes a mess.

I have thought about quitting. I thought about it seriously in year three, when the loneliness of it became a physical sensation — five days a week in a building of empty offices, the only sound my own footsteps and the hum of climate control. But then I realized something. I like the quiet. I like the ritual of it. I clean each desk as if someone will sit at it tomorrow. I check each restroom as if someone just used it. I vacuum carpet that holds no footprints and mop floors that show no scuffs and it is, in its own way, perfect. I maintain a perfect space. No one disturbs it. No one appreciates it. But it is clean, and I made it clean, and that means something even if the meaning is only mine.

My wife thinks I'm a little crazy. She says I could get a job cleaning a real building with real people and real messes. She's right. But real messes are just someone else's chaos, and I've had enough chaos. Here, in this empty building with its untouched coffee and its virgin toilet paper and its login screens waiting for users who will never come, I have found something I didn't know I was looking for. I have found a place where nothing goes wrong because nothing happens. And I keep it clean. And that's enough.