Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

She scoots her chair back against the wall, stands up, and heads to the conference room. She pulls a fresh sheet of paper out of the fax machine and sits down at the big oak table, marker in hand.

Dear Neighbor, she begins.

Where are you, what do you, who, she writes quickly and instantly crosses it out.

I’m sorry, she begins, on a fresh sheet, but can’t think of a way to finish the sentence, or why she has started it this way. I’m sorry I’m sorry I she writes before pushing it aside.

She lays out another, and stares at it for a long time. What am I after, she whispers out loud.

Dear you, she writes, slowly, deliberately, holding the paper tightly against the table.

What are you doing in there? All I want is to know.

— Next door

She folds the note into an envelope and writes 2B on the back. She clutches the envelope in her hands until it is past five, then wonders if it’s okay for her to go. There’s been no sign of her boss, and his keys are still here. Finally, she decides that he must know what he’s doing, and he can’t expect her to do anything she wouldn’t normally do. She turns everything off, all the lights, all electronics. She sets the alarm and locks up. In front of 2B, she gets down on her knees and slides the envelope underneath the door, listening to the paper as it crinkles against the soft, nubby carpet. She walks slowly toward the stairwell, still hoping that she will hear something, anything out of the ordinary, anything opening, closing, unlocking, beginning. She pauses at the top of the stairs before continuing down and out into the parking lot, where her boss’s car still sits, a few spaces down from her own.

Neil leans his chest against the hotel’s front desk while the woman behind the counter fills a folder with pamphlets and maps and room service menus. He thinks of stopping her, of telling her he’s only going to be here for twenty-four hours and is unlikely to stray beyond the convention halls and ballrooms on the lobby level— if he even makes it that far— but she’s moving so quickly, her hands zipping and shuffling through the standard procedure that he can’t bring himself to jump in. He see-saws back and forth on his heels, bouncing his chest lightly on the marble desk and back again, the height of it making him feel small, and a little ridiculous. The woman towers over him, brandishing her stapler, her keys on an elastic band around her wrist. He looks up at her like a bored child.

“Finch!” a voice calls out behind him, and a moment later, there’s Mason slapping his back.

“Mason, how are you?”

“Good good, glad you decided to show this year.”

“Yeah well, it’s compulsory, isn’t it?”

“Right, right.”

The two look past each other, smiling their studied, mellow smiles, nodding at nothing, their tongues probing their back teeth.

“You check out the event schedule yet? I’m leading the ‘Knowing the Consumer’ talk this year. You should check it out— 4:30 in the main ballroom— there’ll be hors d’oeuvres, shrimp I think, maybe some little sandwiches.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Seriously though, it’s something you should check out.”

“Right,” Neil says, still smiling, his eyes darting up to the woman behind the counter, still fussing papers about, “I will be there.”

“Cool— hey and the mixer’s at 8:30, in the lounge. You’ll be there, right? They were asking about you last time. I told ’em you were sick.” Mason laughs and Neil thinks he can see a cavity on one of his molars. He’s reminded again, looking at Mason’s weak chin and shaving nicks, though he’s technically Neil’s boss, that he’s a few years younger. He tries to think of something jocular to say.

“Say, you think Beaudry’ll be there?” Neil says, taking the folder and key card from the woman and picking up his bag, already edging his way to the elevators, though rooted enough, his toes just rising ever so slightly inside his shoes. “That guy owes me a drink.”

“Ken Beaudry?” Mason squints back at Neil as he steps forward and hands the woman his credit card. “You didn’t hear?”

“No, what?” He hears the elevator ding and has to mentally restrain himself from backing away and crossing the whole lobby to meet it before it’s summoned away again.

“About the car accident?”

“No…”

“About three months ago? T-boned in a goddamn intersection. He walked away from it, but he refused to go to the hospital, said he was fine— dropped dead a few hours later. Internal bleeding.” He annunciates bleeding, like it’s a medical term Neil might not be familiar with.

Neil hears an elevator again, and he wonders how many there are, how fast they can move. He wonders what floor he’s on, but doesn’t want to open up his folder and look just now.

“Why… why didn’t I know that?” he asks.

Mason shrugs, “I don’t know. I thought everybody knew.”

“Oh, I’m, uh… I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“Terrible.”

Mason gets his folder, and Neil hears the elevators dinging again, several at a time it sounds like now. It’s like they never stop picking people up, dropping them off, up and down and up, plodding along.

“Well, I’ll see you later, then?” Neil says, beginning his slow approach, though he still doesn’t know just where he’s going.

“Hold up, I’ll come with you,” Mason says, rolling his black suitcase behind him.

“Sure, great,” Neil smiles.

Waiting for the elevator, they find that they’re both on the fifteenth floor. They watch the numbers overhead as they light up one by one.

“Oh check it out— this is one of those hotels that has no thirteenth floor. I didn’t know that was still a thing.”

“This hotel was built in the fifties, if I remember correctly,” Neil says. “It was a thing then.”

“No shit?”

“This was where a lot of Motown artists always stayed when they passed through here— before it was bought out.”

“Oh yeah? How do you know this stuff?”

Neil shrugs and gives Mason a weak half-smile, and keeps watching the numbers as they pass twelve and go straight to fourteen. When they land at fifteen, Neil makes sure to get out first, mildly annoyed as Mason keeps walking right alongside him.

“It’s gonna be a good time, man,” Mason says, stopping at his door, “but don’t get too wasted tonight— ‘The Tao of the Sale’ is at 8:00 a.m. Hey, see you down there.”

Neil nods back to him and laughs, though nothing’s funny. It just comes out, some kind of hiccup of good cheer. He continues on to his own room, feeling suddenly odd about being so high up. The windows he can see at the far end of the hall don’t look out at anything. It’s just grayish white sky. The hallway is so wide, and he drags his feet a little against the brown and darker brown checked carpet, spotting stains as he goes. He imagines for an instant that the whole hotel is empty, that it’s just him rattling through the arid halls.

When he gets to his own room, he throws his things on the floor and sits on the tightly made hotel bed, across from an abstract portrait of a violin, its pieces broken apart in right angles, but hovering over a hazy ochre backdrop. He wonders how much something like that costs. Did it come from some big box store, from a bin next to the picture frames, or is there an artist somewhere who’s cornered the dull hotel art market? He gets up and examines the painting for a signature, but finds none.

Over the bed is another one, a portrait of some fishing village done in the Impressionist style, little blotchy fishermen by a big blotchy sea, surrounded by smudgy little huts, the whole tableau bathed in the persistent sunlight creeping in through the Venetian blinds. He notices it isn’t centered, and lifts up an edge with his index finger, finding a jagged circle of chipped paint on the wall behind it.