Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

He realizes he doesn’t care. Of course he doesn’t care. When has he ever cared? He pretends to care so much that he almost fools himself into believing he really does. Almost.

He stows the key in the ignition but doesn’t turn it, instead pulling the blindfold out of his briefcase. He slips it onto his face, leans back, and presses the button. After a couple of seconds, a soft rattle starts up, followed by a low whoosh, then slowly another little rattle. He’s disoriented at first, trying to put an image to the noise, until it becomes clear to him that he’s listening to a rain stick tipping back and forth. He pictures the stick turning slowly against a hazy black backdrop. He spaces out to the image, but before long, he’s picturing the stick in someone’s hand, some intern in a gray studio, holding the stick up to a grungy microphone, and he starts laughing.

He keeps laughing, blindfolded in his car, in the vast, echoing garage, under the hulking twenty-story office building.

Revolutionary, he thinks, a revolution in personal regeneration and success. This makes him laugh even harder, until tears are rolling out from under the velvety fabric of the blindfold.

Iris climbs into her car in the dark garage and turns the ignition. It sputters as though out of habit or not up to the task after being abandoned for a weekend she spent holed up, hermit-like. She tries again and it starts with a coughing rumble.

She parks at the office, happily a whole fifteen minutes early, the traffic having been oddly light. She uses the time to grab a latte and a blueberry muffin down the street. Walking back to the office, the coffee cup warm in her hand and white paper bag clutched in her fingers, she is glad to be out. In these moments, out in the world, when it is obvious to anyone who she is — a worker, a working girl, a commuter, a morning person blending in seamlessly in line at the café— she relaxes. Everything has been decided, in these moments. It is easy to be in these places. It is so easy to walk the streets in the bright, cool morning sun, with rush hour traffic whizzing by and a destination straight ahead.

As she fiddles with the lock of the office door, she can’t help glancing at 2B. She noticed that the white van was in the same spot in the parking lot, collecting more and more debris from various flora, carried by the thick breeze. He hasn’t gone anywhere, not yet. She gets the door unlocked and the alarm shrieks until she punches in the code by touch, out of habit, her gaze still floating toward the other door. Unless he’s abandoned the car, she thinks. It could stay there forever, sink roots into the pavement, its owner long gone, and she would be the only one to notice.

Finally, she disengages from the door and puts her muffin and coffee down on her desk. She sets the office alight, the long fluorescent tubes activating behind grates across the ceiling, one to the next like dominoes falling, until the last one at the far end of the hall doesn’t light up, but flickers briefly and dies.

She sits behind her desk and pulls the muffin out of its crinkling paper while her computer turns on. Once again, there are no phone messages, but she is not too perturbed. It is just one less thing for her to bother with. No email either. A long line of one less things. She takes a slow sip of her coffee and rests her eyes on the desk in front of her. She reaches out her pinkie finger and tries to wipe dust from the grooves of her telephone key pad with the edge of her nail, but she can’t get in there. There are things that can’t be cleaned, things that stick around, untouchable and untouched. She eats her breakfast slowly, wholly contained in the bubble surrounding her neat and orderly desk, a shield of wood and snaking gray wires between herself and anything beyond.

She is still eating when her boss walks in, quickly shuts the door, and pauses. His back against the door, he looks to her with pleading eyes, she thinks at first, quavering and wide, his cell phone clutched to his chest. A purple vein appears on his forehead, bisecting his sweaty complexion. Gobsmacked, she holds his gaze, struggling to keep her own expression neutral yet open, ready to produce whatever reaction he expects from her. He looks on the verge of asking a question, but makes no sound. Finally, his uncertain mouth settles into a hard line and his eyes narrow.

“Don’t eat in here,” he says, shaking himself away from the door and hustling down the hall.

Iris finishes her last bite and shoves the paper bag into the wastebasket as her boss slams his door.

He has slammed his door on many occasions. He slams his door when the mail is late, even as he leaves stacks of it unopened on his desk. He slams his door when it starts raining, as though the weather is a personal affront. He slams his door, she thinks, just for the sound of it. It isn’t for her benefit. But she has never seen his face like that, his eyelids fluttering, looking to her, she thinks, for help more vital than he can express, before slamming his face shut, just like the door.

She sits, staring down the hallway until he re-emerges from his office and comes marching toward her desk.

“Listen,” he says, running both hands through his hair until it looks blown back by a rough wind. A rough wind made of grease.

“Yes?”

“We’re going to close early today. I mean, I’m going to close early today. And you can too. So I’m going to go, now. Okay? Right.” He punctuates this with a quick nod, then shuffles in his spot as though no direction holds what he’s looking for. No direction is the right one. Finally, he trundles down the hall back to his office.

Iris begins tentatively gathering her things, not yet ready to commit to the idea of leaving. She has an irrational suspicion that if she leaves, he will come looking for her at her desk, the preceding conversation wiped clean from his memory. It may not be wholly irrational.

Then she remembers that Friday was payday, and she never got her check. She just paid her utilities and credit card bill, and her account balance is down to approximately zero. She goes to her boss’s open door and knocks, standing sheepishly at the threshold.

“What?” he yells, his voice sounding as though it is coming from deep inside some hole.

Iris steps further into the room, still holding herself a little at bay in the doorframe. Her boss is hidden behind his desk.

“I was just wondering if I could get my check before you go?”

He pops his head up above the desk. “Check,” he repeats, as though the word is new in his mouth. “Right, right.”

He stands up and brushes off his pant legs, runs his hands compulsively through his hair again. “Right,” a definitive nod.

She waits while he rummages through his desk and finally pulls out a big leather binder, turns to a page near the end and writes out a fresh check in her name. Since she began working here, the checks have always been handwritten like this. Until this moment, she has never thought it odd, maybe because they usually just appear on her desk every other Friday in a crisp windowed envelope. Now she wonders why payroll isn’t filtered through corporate. For a second, a rush of questions she might ask raise themselves, Iris’s unfocused stabs at mental organization, like where is corporate and what is corporate and where is it you’re always going? But once the check is in her hand, the questions dissipate like blown dust, and really, the answers don’t matter much.

“Turn the lights off when you go.”

Iris looks up from the check in her hand and follows him out to the lobby, his gray suit jacket, briefcase, and clutch of folders a jumble in his hands.