Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

This is what I need from you:

One dozen black ballpoint pens. Black or blue. Make it blue. If they don’t come in denominations of a dozen, get ten or twenty.

One dozen bottles of water. Same as above re: denominations.

One dozen cups of black coffee. Separate cups— not those big jug things— this isn’t a cafeteria. This may require several trips.

One dozen everything bagels. If they don’t have everything get onion.

As she reads this, her boss approaches her desk. She looks up and he hands her a credit card.

“You’d better go now,” he says. “I have to prepare my presentation.”

Iris grabs her purse and her boss opens the door for her. In the doorway, he stops her, touching her elbow.

“Receipts for everything, okay?”

Just then, the door to 2B opens up and the man steps out, dressed now, uniform-like in a white dress shirt and black pants. His eyes dart back and forth between Iris and her boss and he glides quickly past them, head down. Iris watches her boss’s eyes follow the man to the stairs, then snap back to her.

“Okay— be quick,” he says, then steps back into the office and shuts the door.

Iris hurries down the stairs and out the door just in time to see the white van pull out and turn right out of the driveway. She imagines that if she hurried, she could catch up to him, but she stops herself. Her life turning into a James Bond film just doesn’t seem like a plausible scenario. As Iris starts her car, she feels a headache coming on. She massages the space between her eyebrows, roughly, as though burrowing through the skin and into the pain’s center, and heads for the drugstore.

At the store, she picks up a case of water, a box of pens. It occurs to her that they probably already have pens in the supply closet, but she didn’t get a chance to look. In line at the checkout, Iris wonders just who her boss is meeting with. It’s been some time since the conference room has gotten any use. In the past, this was routine. The conference room had gravitas. It was to be tiptoed past once she had set up, and the meeting was in full swing. Her boss would wait in his office until everyone had arrived, Iris seating them and offering beverages. When people started to get impatient, Iris was instructed to knock twice, softly, as a signal that he should make his entrance. There was fun in it, she has to admit, like playing a part. Then the door would close, and what went on inside— it wasn’t her job to know. But how long has it been? She can’t remember the last time she felt truly useful. As the cashier rings up her purchases, Iris begins to get excited. She never knew who he was meeting with, so what does it matter now?

Iris then drives to the café, loads her trunk with cardboard trays of coffee, tops securely fastened, a white box full of bagels. She drives so slowly back to the office that people honk and yell at her from their car windows, but she doesn’t care. She is intent on not jostling anything. She eases into her parking spot so smoothly, she is liquid, the car is liquid, she is right on top of everything.

She starts by carrying one tray of coffee up to the office, balancing it carefully as she contends with the door. She approaches the conference room to begin setting up and finds a slip of paper on the round oak table:

Meeting moved off-site— last minute— talk next week— mea culpa.

Iris sets the tray down and sits. She pops the top off one of the coffees and drinks. She still has the credit card, she thinks. She could buy a ticket somewhere, to another state, another country. She could buy a boat, wherever one buys boats. She could just grab things and start buying them, how much for the streetlight, for the fire hydrant? She wonders if she could drink all of this coffee herself before it gets cold. She decides to try. She sits at the conference room table, drinking coffee until her blood is replaced by a continuous electric current, with no mass or volume at all.

At the end of the day, Iris locks up the empty office. She leaves the coffee cups and bagels she nibbled for lunch on the conference room table. No one will see the mess. She’ll be the one to clean it up anyway. As she goes from room to room, turning things off, she notices things are a little… dingier than she thinks they used to be. There are smudges on doorknobs, a thin layer of dust on the carpet, and the wastebaskets haven’t been emptied recently. She remembers, just the other day, having lowered her foot into the trash, stamping it down to make room for more. When does the custodian come, she wonders. She can’t remember when she last saw him in the early evening, with his cart lined with spray bottles in holsters. She wonders, too, what would happen if he didn’t come anymore. How long would it take for filth to accumulate, and what if she started cleaning the place every day instead of answering the phone? Would her boss notice if she became the housekeeper instead of the receptionist? Would she, if it happened very gradually? She descends the darkened staircase and is out the door.

In the parking lot, she notes that the van is still gone, or gone again, and an instant later, she notices something on her windshield in the distance. She quickens her pace to the car and plucks a piece of thin brown paper out from under her windshield wiper. She opens her door and turns on the overhead light to read the penciled message:

It is later, and I’m not here. But you are.

She shoves the note into her glove compartment and looks around. She is alone. She starts the car and pulls out of the lot, confounded.

At red lights, she pulls the note out and re-reads it. She tries to remember if the handwriting matches the original note. Again, she asks herself, what am I after? She can’t with any certainty say what she could possibly want. She shoves the note away again, covering it up with a pile of CDs, and when she parks the car at home, she leaves it there.

She enters her apartment, mail in hand. She sifts through it and pulls out a power bill. The rest she drops in the kitchen trash. Her hunger is urgent, her whole body knotted, steeped in acid. She opens the cabinet over the sink and scans its contents: spaghetti, canned tuna, minestrone, Ziploc bags, and light bulbs. She settles on the soup and heats it in a small saucepan. While the minestrone swirls over the heat of the blue flame, Iris turns on the oldies station. They’re playing that song, they’re coming to take me away ha ha they’re coming to take me away, whatever it’s called, whoever it’s by. She hates gag songs, finds them disingenuous and unfunny, but she leaves it, expecting something better to follow. As she watches the soup begin to bubble, “Get Off My Cloud” comes on. Iris pours the soup into a white ceramic bowl. She turns off the burner, then turns it on and off again, checking, before crushing several saltine crackers into the bowl. She turns the radio up as she carries her soup out to the balcony, leaving the sliding door open. Some graffiti has been added to the opposite wall. Now, beneath the “Lery— were’s my money bitch” is some kind of signature, a star with an anarchy symbol jammed clumsily into its center.

She is impatient, and begins eating while the soup is still nearly scalding, but it is not so bad. She knows there is pleasure in the burnt tongue feeling she will have for the rest of the night. The numbness will make her feel invincible, capable of swallowing swords. She eats looking out at her street. In front of her, fifty feet away at her fourth floor level, a pair of electric blue sneakers hangs from the power line. She thinks they are a new addition, but can’t say for sure. She wonders how they got up so high. How many tries did it take, and where was she for the trying? Who spent a night hurling shoes up into the sky, hoping to catch something, settling, finally, for the power line?