Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

When Iris gets back to the office, she notes the mangled wall at the top of the stairs, but the piano has disappeared from the hall. Airlifted, demolished, vaporized, plucked in the span of a lunch. She stands in the space it had previously occupied and leans forward to press her ear against the door of 2B, but the door is all she hears.

Inside her office, she quickly checks the window that looks down over the parking lot. The white van is gone, so the man must be gone too. But where did the piano go?

She drops her bag onto her desk and steps into the hall again. She stands for a moment, facing 2B’s door, before trying the doorknob. It doesn’t open at first, leading her to presume it’s locked, but she jerks the knob hard one last time and it pops open with a scuffing sound, as though she’s broken through something. Startled but not displeased, Iris steps inside.

Not much has changed, though the place seems neater, boxes tucked away somewhere. The only evidence of a Murphy bed is a skinny rectangular outline in the wall that she wouldn’t even notice if she weren’t looking for it. And for the first time, she notices another door, in the wall farthest from 2A and painted the same color so it blends in seamlessly, a closet maybe, or leading to a whole other room, but when she tries it, it won’t open. Even when she shakes and pulls with all her strength, caring little whether she breaks the knob clean off, it won’t open.

Finally she lets go and pulls her sweating hands away. She turns around then, catching her breath, and her gaze settles on a little radio, the little radio she’s heard him play day after day, morning after morning, sitting on the windowsill. She picks it up and turns the dial a few times, each tick bringing her to a different quality of static, some crackling, some hissing, some barely audible at all.

She turns it off, and only then notices how dusty it is. She blows on it, and a cloud of dust disperses and floats down to the carpet. She clutches it to her chest, and before she quite takes note of what she’s doing, she’s left the room, closing the door behind her, stepping back inside her own office, and dropping the radio in her purse, glancing about with forced casualness, as though someone might be watching.

Before she leaves at the end of the day, she checks the window again, seeing that the white van has returned, in a different spot now. After setting the alarm and locking up, she stops at the door of 2B and nestles her face at its edge, where she can squint into that thin space that leads directly into the room. She narrows her eyes and imagines she can see him in there, or at least the rough shape of him, and that he can feel her on the other side of the door.

She thinks about knocking, but something stops her. She stands back, hanging there for a moment before backing away slowly, turning just as she reaches the top of the stairs.

On the way home, she stops at the grocery store to pick up milk, cereal, lettuce, iced tea, and trash bags. She grips her penciled list against the steering wheel as she pulls into the parking lot, the sweat from her palm wilting the gas station receipt paper. Her palms sweat when she drives, just like her mother’s do. As a child riding in the passenger seat, she watched her mother wipe her hands off on her jeans at every stop light. When she noticed Iris looking, her mother would laugh nervously and look away, every time. How much sweat on every trip downtown, to the store, to the dentist, over and over through the years, how many small laughs, how many sheepish looks between them have been exchanged and forgotten? On longer trips, it was her father who always drove, her mother looking out the window, right temple pressed to the glass, her eyes turned to the road. Iris wipes her hands off under her seat and puts the car in park.

In the brightly fluorescent lit store, she picks a basket from the stack and starts down the bakery aisle to admire the decorated cakes before attending to her business. The lights, the expansive artificiality of them, make her feel like it is 3:00 in the morning, though the aisles are packed with workers on their way home. It makes her think of disasters, and of preparations for long car trips, driving toward safety, into the night.

Disaster is another word whose meaning is probably a little different from the meaning she ascribes to it. The word brings up images of blank faces and closed doors. She can’t quite imagine what the beginning of a disaster would look like. She wonders, if she were ever in a position to witness one unfolding, if she were right there in the middle of it, would she recognize it?

She stops in front of the bakery case, cupcakes sitting in perfect rows of color and sheet cake decorated with gritty butter-cream flowers, so close behind glass, she can just feel her finger running along the icing, digging down into the spongy center, finally burying her hand wrist-deep. The smell of the bakery aisle does something to her. The smell is right there. It resets her senses. She takes one more deep breath and joins the throngs.

In the cereal aisle, Iris picks up a box of raisin bran and places it in her basket. She idly glances off toward the produce section, wondering what else she might need, and her eyes stop at the teeming rows of melons. There, a man in a navy blue suit, a man just the right height, with just the same thinning reddish blond hair and verging on sickly-pale complexion, and just the same delicate profile as her boss is concentrating on cantaloupes, holding them up one by one and gently squeezing them, bringing them close to his face and breathing them in. He is so involved in what he is doing that Iris decides it is safe to take a closer look.

She takes a few steps forward, lining herself up with the condiment aisle, eye level with the Worcestershire sauce and spicy brown mustard. She closes her eyes for a moment and sniffs, but the smells are contained, bedlam if they were to mix. She imagines a grocery store with no packaging, with everything right there to touch and smell and hold and lick, tidal waves of spaghetti sauce and hills of crackers and chips and croutons to crunch in one’s fists and her breath slows and maybe she is just hungry…

But it couldn’t be him, could it? He’s in Milan until the end of the week. That was today that he said that, wasn’t it? She tries to put the days of the past week in order by what she was wearing, but then she can’t remember what she wore the day before yesterday, and then the man who may or may not be her boss starts to walk away— no cantaloupe selected, not even carrying a basket— and she follows him at a safe distance, ducking behind a soda display when he turns slightly, and that is when she knows it is him. It is the look in his eyes, somehow both confident and confused, as he looks back at the produce section, as though he does not know why he came into the store in the first place, and he is certainly going to have a word with someone about it.

He walks out of the store and Iris stands up from behind the display. The grocery list seems to have fallen from her hands somewhere in the store and she can’t remember everything else she needed, so she just gets milk, the raisin bran’s natural companion, and checks out.

At home, she sets her purse and plastic grocery bag by the door and kicks off her shoes. She puts on a Buddy Holly CD and starts to run a shower, letting it run until it is scorching hot, then adding cold until it is just right. She steps out of her clothes, leaving a puddle of fabric on the bathroom floor and turns up the stereo. Buddy Holly sings Rave on, it’s a crazy feeling, and I know it’s got me reeling, and she steps in, letting the water rush over her head and down her face, and then the water is all she hears.