lisa used to exchange her fancy shoes for sneakers in the locker room. But it’d felt like a chopping, her hand the hatchet. You can’t clean in heels—that was among Fleming’s maxims the day she’d been hired. We can’t have any slipping and falling. No black heels, either, because there are scientific markings on some of the laboratory floors, and we can’t have them marred. Fleming had a thousand such bromides. These days, though, his attention is mostly elsewhere, and the discomfort of Elisa’s heels has become comfort; it keeps her awake, alive to sensation, if barely.

A long-defunct shower room serves as the janitorial closet. Zelda takes her traditional cart, and Elisa hers, which they stock from shelves they’re expected to keep in three-month supply. Then their eight cart wheels, plus eight more for the mop buckets, reverberate down Occam’s long white hallways like a slow-moving train to nowhere.

They have to be professional at all times; some white-coated men linger about the labs until two or three in the morning. Occam scientists are a strange subspecies of male whose jobs drive them to absolute distraction. Fleming teaches his janitors to promptly exit any lab they find occupied, and it happens periodically. When two scientists finally leave together, they squint in disbelief at each other’s watches, chuckling about the hell they’re going to catch from their wives, sighing at how they’d rather crash-land at their girlfriends’ pads.

They don’t censor these comments when they pass Elisa and Zelda. Just as the janitors are trained only to see Occam’s dirt and trash, the scientists are trained only to see the manifestations of their brilliance. Long ago, Elisa had indulged fantasies of workplace romance, of meeting that man who danced through the darks of her dreams. It was the notion of a silly young girl. That’s the thing about being a janitor, or maid, any type of custodian. You glide unseen, like a fish underwater.