Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

It occurs to her then, also, that she is definitely, unquestionably, the first person here. She is in a position to watch the door, see who shows up. She promises herself that she will pay attention today. Iris straightens her spine and rolls her shoulders forward and back. She stretches her arms upward, and at the moment she locks her fingers together over her head, a loud ringing shocks her onto her feet, and she thinks for one panicked second that she has caused it, nudged some invisible lever in the air. Her eyes dart around the room, looking for a source, until she realizes it is coming from outside the door. She inches toward the sound and listens as the ringing changes pattern after a minute, turning into a more insistent series of shrieks. Suddenly, the ringing stops and a distant, muffled male voice groans, “Fuuuuuuck…”

She opens the door a crack, and sees that there is no one in the hallway. Then she hears a radio switched on, barely audible news, traffic, weather, she can’t tell— there are only bright voices talking fast, and her eyes settle on the closed door of suite 2B.

After a while, poised in the doorway like this, the voices on the radio lose the pattern of human speech. All she hears is a prolonged static hum, then she realizes the station has been changed, and what she hears is music, but it’s so quiet, she can’t detect a melody. She fixes her eyes on the wall and enters into a state of semi-consciousness, letting the eggshell color of the wall blend with the lavender carpet to form a gauzy absence of vision. She thinks she could stay like this, looking and not looking, hearing and not hearing, for ages.

So she is startled when the door opens, and the man from 2B emerges in T-shirt and sweatpants, his cheeks darkly bristled. What Iris sees is only a streak of him as he passes, his beige and black and whiteness bleeding through the haze of the hallway, but this is enough. He pauses for only a second in front of her door, though he doesn’t turn to face her, and she pushes it swiftly shut. She stays where she is, her head against the door, and listens as he enters the restroom and shuts the door behind him.

Iris returns to her desk and switches her computer on. She imagines him then, in the bathroom, stripping naked and washing each individual body part in the shallow sink, drying himself with paper towels. Would he be able to wedge himself under the faucet to wash his back, his crotch? Does he drink water from the faucet too, or does he go without water, like a cactus, needing nothing? Her computer turns on with a languid ding and she has an impulse to get up and go back to his office while he is otherwise occupied, to steal something as evidence, or simply await his return. Then there is a knock at her door and she freezes, making no move to answer. She holds her breath, as though whoever has knocked might hear the difference.

“Hello?” comes her boss’s voice, “are you in there? I forgot my key.”

Iris exhales and jumps up to open the door for him. “It wasn’t locked…” she starts as he steps through the doorway. He takes off his sunglasses and jacket and holds these to his chest.

“Why are you here so early?” she asks, flustered, as he passes her, heading down the hall.

“Why are you?” he says, before disappearing into his office.

Iris spends the rest of the morning with her ears perked up like a dog’s, one focused inside, the other out. With her left ear, she listens for any movements in the hallway, but there is only the opening and closing of doors, and she can’t tell if any of them have been opened or closed by the man from 2B. Her right ear is trained toward her boss’s office, from which there has been no sound since he arrived. Her listening game collapses any time the phone rings. After transferring a call to her boss, she has to divide up her hearing all over again, which takes concentration. But nothing comes of it, and by lunchtime, she is ready to give up. She decides she will tackle the long-put-off file cabinet reorganization upon her return.

When she gets back, as she is tucking her leftover half-sandwich into the bottom drawer of her desk, she hears her boss’s voice booming, loud enough that she can hear through his closed door, “Exactly! That’s exactly what I said!”

Another voice responds then, but she can’t make out the words, only the sound. She quickly approaches the office, trying to interpret the back and forth chattering, but thinks better of it. It wouldn’t do to be caught holding a glass to the door.

She wants to stay and wait for the door to open, but she has to go to the bathroom. She hurries down the outside hall to the restroom and pees as fast as she can, washes her hands but doesn’t bother drying them. She shakes them in the air as she hustles back to the office.

But her boss is standing in front of her desk when she returns.

“Hey, listen,” he starts in immediately, “I need something from my car, but I can’t leave just now. Will you get something for me?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a box. It’s rectangular. It’s in the backseat.”

“Uh, sure.” And before she gets the words out, he’s pressing a car key with its dangling remote into her palm.

He’s too close to her all of a sudden, closer than she thinks they have ever been. She can see his pores, and the sparse blond chest hair peeking out the top of his striped dress shirt, and she takes a step back, avoiding his eyes, though she can’t avoid his scent, a chaotic swirl of mint, soap, a steely cologne, something that would come in a silver bottle, and underneath it all, the unmistakable smell of sweat that is never really masked.

“Good good, thanks,” he calls over his shoulder, and hustles back to his office.

In the parking lot, Iris’s gaze falls on the white van a few spaces down from her boss’s convertible. She glances around the lot before approaching it, but she finds that its windows are the tinted kind that block everything out. The windows must have been an add-on, because they don’t match the beat-up exterior, they’re so smooth and new-looking. She runs a finger along the dirty back door and chews on her bottom lip. Windows used to be simpler, she thinks. Windows used to break.

She sees that she has drawn a distinct line in the dirt, and without thinking, she picks it up again, running her finger all along the back, then slowly walking around to the side, dragging her finger just above the wheel wells, across the hood and back around, so a thin, shaky white line seems to divide the van into two horizontal pieces held together by a row of sharp teeth. She stands back and looks at it, surprised at her impulse, but it can’t be undone now. She wipes her finger off on the inner hem of her skirt and backs away a few paces before retrieving the box from the convertible’s open backseat, just sitting there, warm from the sun. She doesn’t even need the key. The box is so light it could be empty, and she carries it under one arm back to the building.

Back in the office, she knocks on her boss’s closed door. He doesn’t answer.

She knocks again, and waits. When he doesn’t answer the third knock, she opens the door to find nobody. He or they have slipped off somehow, in the two minutes she was outside. Was it longer than that? He must have gone the instant she disappeared down the stairs.

She feels momentarily compelled to open the box and empty its mystery contents onto the lavender carpet, but thinks better of it. Instead she sets it on his desk, with a brief note on top: Here, the keychain splayed out beside it.

The rest of the day passes slowly. There are no more phone calls. As the clock edges past three, she realizes just how long she has been here and feels like her mouth is drying out. She decides that if her boss comes back she will shoot him some kind of look. The office feels emptier than ever. Her knees bounce under the desk as she coils the phone cord around her index and middle fingers, uncoils it, coils it again. She listens in vain for the man next door, pictures him in homey scenarios: folding laundry, cooking dinner, falling asleep like a kitten, trying not to, his eyelids slipping, his head jerking up, resistant. It occurs to her that he could be asleep right now. She could open his door and find him curled up in the green chair, a line of drool glistening on his jaw. If she were to open the door.