Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

“Aren’t you worried,” she asks, “that someone might complain… you know, about the wall? About you?”

He looks down at the piano again and rubs his hand in a slow circle over the slipcover.

“I don’t really think anyone will bother to complain,” he replies, “do you?” He looks up then and watches her unmoving face for a moment. She feels his eyes searching, imagines them like small rays of light trawling across her skin, but she can’t bring herself to meet his gaze before he turns around and steps back inside.

She doesn’t know who would complain. She doesn’t, in fact, know to whom one would complain. It’s not as though there’s anybody in charge here.

The home office always feels strange to Neil, like a neglected great-aunt’s house— a burden, a source of disquieting and inexplicable guilt. Not one solitary thing about the place has changed in the years he’s spent in Shaffer-Bruns’ employ, not the color of the walls, not the smell of the elevator, not the position of one single chair. Only the people have changed, the original Shaffer and Bruns having been replaced by a series of go-getters and benefactors of nepotism, bodies and hair slid into the same suits, the receptionist a vaguely different brunette every other month. His stomach flutters, his head pulsing. He only just flew back.

No, he remembers, it’s been a couple days. So why does he still feel like a foggy approximation of himself? Why does that tightness, that dryness in his blood stay with him?

Neil realizes he hasn’t been listening to the pitch, and straightens his posture, as though it signifies his investment in the meeting.

“What we have here,” Mason continues, “is a revolution in personal regeneration— more commonly known as sleep. But what we’re looking to do with this product is sell the idea of living up to one’s full potential. The idea of perfectly restful sleep as the key to personal betterment and success— not just a product, but an idea of what never was, but now might be.”

He listens, kind of. Mostly he is just sick, and thinking about the sickness. The place has obviously been cleaned within the last couple hours, because the scent of industrial-strength cleaning fluid burns his nostrils, but the place still looks dirty. A plastic plant sits next to him, its leaves covered in a thin layer of dust, his first clue it’s a fake. All these conference rooms are the same, he thinks. You can’t clean them enough— they always seem to be hiding something— why else would they need to be cleaned with goddamn pine-scented lighter fluid every day. His nausea is still in check, though, probably.

His attention drifts as his colleagues strategize, and he remembers lying in bed in the summertime as a kid, with the mosquitoes buzzing outside his window, how he’d kick off the sheets and revel in his nakedness, with just those hints of light coming through the blinds like lasers, that cumulative yellow glow. He would lie like that, feeling that he was waiting for something. But what age is he imagining himself to be. Six? Thirteen? And where— what window, what bed? He feels no physical connection to any of his former bodies.

“What does everyone want?” Mason pauses two seconds, one, two, before answering his own question, “to be his or her best self. To be free from the worry that he or she is languishing, squandering his or her time on earth. We have to get to the heart of these desires— which are also fears, can’t forget that.”

Listening now, quietly flustered, Neil wonders if he missed the introduction of the product, the actual physical object he’s to be selling. He makes eye contact with Mason and juts his chin upward.

“Finch?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, did I— what is this again?”

His colleagues exchange looks.

“We went over this at the beginning. It’s a sleep aid.”

“Okay, sorry. You mean, like, a pill?”

Mason puts down his laser pointer, sending the red light ricocheting across the table and against the opposite wall.

“Okay, let’s skip forward briefly so you can all get a feel for the product and then we’ll continue from there. Angela, could you bring in the samples?”

Mason’s assistant rises from the table and returns a minute later with a cardboard box, from which she distributes a collection of cellophane packages containing fluffy fabric eye masks with small speakers by both ears. Neil opens his and straps it onto his face with a Velcro strip in the back.

“Now press the button just above your right ear. No, your right. Okay, everybody got it? Okay, I’ve got mine on too now. Now what do you notice?”

Neil presses his button, and hears a gentle lap of water, a mild, slow wind, and then a sound he can’t identify, some kind of ambient, warped sound, like some inarticulate, anguished call.

“I hear crickets,” a new saleswoman says.

“I could fall asleep right here, no joke,” says another guy, “this is awesome.”

“I… uh… I’m not sure what this is supposed to be,” says Neil.

“I think you’ve got whale songs,” says Mason, “but more importantly, how does it make you feel?”

Neil pictures the room then, all of them facing each other around the big oblong conference room table, blindfolded.

“Um… good, I guess?” He listens to the plaintive wail, seemingly so far away, but really nestled right by his ear, and imagines himself marooned in a paddleboat on some murky sea. The room disappears for him, and he feels suddenly, palpably trapped.

“Good. Now keep these on for now, and let’s talk about where we go from ‘good’.”

At noon, Iris goes to the café for lunch. She orders a tuna salad sandwich and selects a table on the patio, right next to the wooden railing. Behind it: a thick row of greenery, then the sidewalk, then the street. She sits facing out to watch traffic, but the cars are blending together today. She is unable to latch onto their drivers, to focus on their faces long enough to imagine identities and destinations for them. They may as well be running independently, a thousand driverless cars careening toward the freeway onramp. She takes a bite of her sandwich, the bread toasted a deep brown, the filling too dry.

She has brought nothing to read. She reads the words, “Mike sucks” carved into the white metal table and wonders what Mike did and maybe he deserves this character assassination and maybe he doesn’t, but whoever wrote it wins or thinks they have won, she supposes.

A horn honks and jolts her out of her reverie, but all she sees is a blonde woman in her fifties parallel parking between two empty cars, no one else around, and she honks again, mad in general.

Iris turns her gaze away from the street and toward the planter that runs all the way along the railing, assorted greenery tangled together, a smattering of flowers. She tries to describe this view to someone in her head. It was beautiful, she begins to someone, not meaning it, starting something not worth finishing. She doesn’t know the names of any of these plants, any of these flowers, and she can’t tell where they begin or end, or who planted them, or when they will die. All these planned pockets of nature are indecipherable to her. It’s all just spilling yet contained. She squints against the sun and feels a headache rising from the base of her skull. She’s lost her appetite.

A hoarse laugh comes roiling from two tables down, and she turns to look, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. The old men are both laughing now. She didn’t even see them. They clutch their knees and lean backward into their laughter, crumb-filled plates and empty glasses piled between them. The laughter sounds painful, as though forced out with the last of their air. She didn’t hear the joke.