The rain started softly at first, an ambient patter against the windows of the library. Yu sat in the corner, staring at a faded yellow notebook on the table before him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked across the table at Li Na, who was busy untangling her earbuds.
“Do you think objects can have memories?” he asked abruptly. The question hung in the air, startling in its peculiarity.
Li Na paused, one earbud still in her hand. “What? You mean, like, memories of us using them?”
“Kind of. Like, cleaning supplies you use every day. Buckets, sponges, mops… the salty taste they leave in the air. It’s like they store all the dirt they ever cleaned up. Things we’ve long forgotten but they—somehow—they hold on to them.”
Li Na frowned, a small wrinkle forming between her brows. “That’s the weirdest thing you’ve said this week.” She stuck the earbud into her ear and gestured toward her phone. “I’m cramming before class, in case you’ve forgotten there’s a world outside your head.”
Yu broke into a small smile but said nothing. His thoughts often tread strange, labyrinthine paths, and he knew better than to expect Li Na’s understanding. Outside, the rain began to knock against the glass in earnest, and the library seemed to shrink, cocooned in dim light and muffled quiet.
The university’s janitor was a man whose presence was often felt but rarely seen. The students called him Lao Guo, though no one could confirm if that was actually his name. He shuffled through the halls with slow, deliberate movements, as though each step extracted the essence of silence from the floor. His tools—brooms, mops, and all the rest—seemed like extensions of his body, carrying with them a faint tang of something metallic and salty, oddly reminiscent of tears.
Yu found himself thinking about Lao Guo as he wandered the empty campus later that evening. Rows of dormitory windows glowed faintly in the rain-soaked night, but most were closed. He liked the quiet that descended after hours, liked imagining himself as the last witness to a secret life the campus lived when no one else was watching.
Near the academic block, he saw Lao Guo. The dim lamplight pooled around the janitor like a spotlight, illuminating the rhythmic swipe-swipe of his mop across wet tiles. Yu hesitated, then approached him.
“Good evening,” Yu began. His words sounded too formal, like a line rehearsed in his head.
Lao Guo didn’t stop mopping. “It’s always evening for people like you,” he said, his voice gravelly but patient.
“People like me?”
“You think too deeply about things,” Lao Guo replied, dipping the mop into a bucket. The water swirled, gray and opaque. “Makes you forget how to live simply.”
Yu’s curiosity outweighed his irritation. “Do you think objects have memories? I mean… you must clean the same spots over and over. Do you feel the things you clean remember?”
Lao Guo stopped abruptly and looked up, meeting Yu’s gaze for the first time. His eyes were a milky, impenetrable gray, the kind that seemed to record everything but reveal nothing. “What kind of memories would you want to leave behind, boy?”
The question caught Yu off guard. He stammered, “I—I don’t know. I guess I haven’t thought about it that way.”
Lao Guo smiled faintly, his teeth showing briefly like the edges of a crescent moon. He picked up his bucket and began to walk away. “You will,” he said over his shoulder.
Yu was still puzzling over the conversation two days later when he returned to the library. It was late again, and the campus was deserted. An unsettling itch coated his mind, a sense that he didn’t quite know where Lao Guo ended and the gray bucket began. He wondered aloud to Li Na, who was immersed in a dog-eared paperback this time.
“That janitor—doesn’t something about him feel… strange to you?” Yu’s elbows were on the table, his voice barely louder than the rain outside.
Li Na didn’t even look up. “You always find a way to make the most ordinary people sound weird. Honestly, just—”
“I’m serious. I think he knows things—about this campus, about all of us. Things we’ve forgotten. Isn’t it odd how everything he touches smells the same? That salty-clean smell, like something preserved over time?”
Finally, she looked up, her expression incredulous. “Yu,” she said slowly. “Lao Guo isn’t real. He died three years before you came to this school. Someone told me he collapsed in the gym, cleaning up after a volleyball game. I think he overworked himself or something. They said he never left the building.”
Yu’s blood ran cold. He grabbed his bag without a word, stepping too quickly into the rainy night. It wasn’t the thought of Lao Guo being a ghost that made him falter. It was the realization, distant but growing clearer, that the faint, salty tang on his hands had been there since their first meeting.