Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

When she unlocks the door, she is met with the bray of the burglar alarm, reassurance that the suite is empty, though her arrival is now announced. As she slips inside, she glances back to make sure that the door of 2B is closed before punching in the code.

She walks through the suite, checking each empty yet cluttered room. These rooms should be locked, she thinks.

She returns to the front lobby area right in front of her desk. It has to be the storage room— the official one. The back wall of that room. That is the shared wall, the wall against which her European colleague used to lean his chair. Who was on the other side then? What switch was made? To make sure she has the space right in her head, she steps out into the hall, faces her door. She visualizes the wall as it extends beyond the door and back into the room, both rooms, 2A and 2B. As she re-enters the suite, she traces the wall with her hand until she is inside the storage room. She finds the spot.

Crouching between the boxes and the smooth white wall, Iris takes the tool out of her bag. She visualizes her mark, then takes out her Sharpie to draw a wet black X. She flips the switch and watches the drill whir and spin before touching it to the center of the X. Once she has made a hole, made contact with the air on the other side, she runs the drill along its edges to enlarge the hole, make it swell beyond its borders, create new borders with each pivot of her wrist.

When she is finished, she switches the tool off, blows on the wall, and leans forward on her knees. She puts her eye to the hole and blinks. What does she see?

It is hard to make out. She sees the green chair. She sees the lavender carpet, the same carpet she is kneeling on. But her field of vision is limited. A hole any bigger would attract notice. Still, she can tell that the room is empty, even if she can’t see the whole room. There is a stillness. She unfocuses her eyes, and the air passing between the two rooms feels hazy and thin.

“There you are!”

The voice comes at her from behind and she jumps up onto her feet, letting the drill drop to the ground.

“Listen, I need this typed up within the hour— I’m already late.” Her boss, in only his shirt and tie, no jacket, extends his arm toward her, waiting. She takes the notebook pages from his hand.

“Thanks,” he calls back over his shoulder as he marches toward his office. “And make twelve copies!” She is still standing in the storage room.

She looks down at the pages in her hand. She leaves her things in the room and carries the pages to her desk. She sits down, and the leather sticks to her bare thighs. The air conditioning is turned up too high and she has no sweater. Every hair on her body stands on end. She turns on her computer, and it lights up with a soft chime. She lays the pages before her on the desk while the computer warms up. His handwriting is getting worse. She turns her head toward the hallway and wonders which door he came from. These pages are going to be difficult to interpret.

She begins typing. Once she is finished, and he has left for whatever he is already late for, she will reward herself by kneeling underneath the water cooler and sucking down water as fast as it will come. Until then, she is stuck to her chair.

Later, as her boss is walking out the door, he stops in front of her desk, where she sits brushing the keyboard with her two index fingers, the job done.

“You were late today,” he says.

Iris squints up at him.

“About that,” she begins, hoping he will reveal the tone of his comment before she has to finish the sentence.

“It won’t happen again,” he says, stepping on her line.

“No. No, it won’t.” She nods gravely, wondering if in fact he listens to any of his voicemail, ever.

“No. No it won’t.” He repeats, looking right into her eyes, and now she is not sure what they are talking about.

He maintains eye contact for a long moment before turning and opening the door out into the hall. When the door clicks shut behind him, she takes several long, full breaths. She gets up and hurries to the window that looks out over the parking lot and watches him get into his car, in his parking spot, his car which was not there before. She looked. She’s sure of it. As sure as a person can be, which is almost sure. In any case, he is gone now.

Iris drinks several cupfuls of water before returning to the matter at hand. She enters the storage room, settles in front of the shared wall, and lines her left eye up with the small hole, her palms pressed to the wall on either side as though holding it still. Perhaps, she thinks, she could lift it up like a garage door or push it aside like a curtain. She wants a way into his space, like he’s gotten into hers, without even seeming to try. Iris massages the wall with her palms, fostering its potential energy.

She blinks into the other room, her eyelashes brushing the upper edge of the hole. Her breath hits the wall and comes back at her, then back again, in an endless loop of humidity, a private tropical climate, one inch by one inch. Still, the other room remains empty, or, full of things that sit and settle as she is doing right now. Then there is the sound of a door opening, and thinking it is her boss returning, she pushes herself awkwardly up onto her feet and begins pretending to look for some office supply that she needs in order to do something or other, but no one comes, and she realizes it is 2B that someone has entered. She can hardly tell the difference between here and there.

Slowly, she lowers herself down again onto her knees and looks into the hole to see the man’s gray trousers and black dress shoes. He is standing still, and Iris wonders if he is thinking, or just unsure what to do now. She wishes she could see all of him. There might have been a better way of doing this. If she had any technical savvy, she could have installed a hidden camera. But this is her way, and it will have to do.

She keeps watching, as he disappears, and returns with a large cardboard box, into which he places several folders. He disappears again, and returns with a newspaper-wrapped bundle in the shape of a lamp, which he then places gingerly into the box before taping it shut. Then he walks off again, taking the box with him, and doesn’t come back.

Eventually, Iris pulls her face away from the wall, and for a moment, she forgets what she is waiting for— it’s just her, alone in a room. But, remembering herself, she stands up, runs out of the room to the hall window and looks down onto the parking lot.

She watches as he places the box in the white van, then pulls out a stack of flat boxes, which he hitches under his arm and carries back to the building. Iris rushes back to the storage room and takes her place at the wall.

When she hears the door, and sees his bottom half re-enter the frame, she watches breathlessly, an invisible barricade at her windpipe forged out of sheer concentration. She watches, and listens to the rustle of old paper, as the map comes down from the wall. He rolls it up with his fists at waist-level, seeming to amble casually through the space and out of view. When he comes back, the map is gone. He has a tape gun in hand, and begins putting together another box.

Iris lets out a strange squeak of a gasp, then ducks away from the wall.

The man stops.

“Hello?” he says.

She burrows her face up against the carpet, her eyes squeezed shut.

“Hello?” he says again.

Iris lifts up her face and slowly brings it up to the hole again. He is closer now, and seems to be advancing, slowly, but with intent, in her direction. When he stops, she looks down at his shoes, just inches from the wall. If one could look at both rooms with just a cross-section of the flimsy drywall between them, there she would be, knelt at the man’s feet, with him none the wiser.