Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

But there is something off. There is a new smell in the air, like metal, or smoke, a smell she can’t decipher, if it is even there at all.

Then she shifts her gaze away from her desk and sees it on the wall in her own handwriting: I will never be thirsty. Words that were previously hidden behind the water cooler, the water cooler that is now gone, poof. Iris stands up straight, her vertebrae unlocking so she stands taller, her neck stretched like a bird’s.

She goes up to the wall and runs her finger across the words, fixed like another coat of dried paint. She continues down the hall to the conference room. The round table and chairs are gone, the printer and fax machine too— just empty power outlets gaping their electricity.

She checks the storage room, flicking on the light and then flicking it quickly off again when she finds it bare. It’s all gone.

She checks every room, one by one, turning slowly around and around, scanning the emptied spaces.

She buries herself deep in corners where desks, boxes, file cabinets, and electronics once sat.

She goes back to the empty storage room and runs her hands along each white wall. Then she stands back to examine the shared wall, and finds it smooth, top to bottom, end to end, until her eyes settle on her small spy hole. It gives her a moment of calm, seeing a second thing she has made that is still here.

But it doesn’t last long, as she readies herself to open her boss’s door. First, she checks all the other rooms again. There has to be something, she thinks. How many bits of paper shoved in drawers, fat file folders and coffee mugs, wastebaskets filled with empty ink cartridges and broken pencil lead, particle-board and wood, picture frames and plants and pens and confetti shaken from hole punches and stacks sky high of receipts and records and things that must be kept, referred to, filed away or not, things broken and things fixed, things forgotten and things used, picked over, touched, all the germs and dust and stray wires that poke, sharp things and dull things, and there has to be some trace, she thinks, if only in the air, something she could feel clinging to her skin. But the space grows more vacuous every time she looks, checks back one more time, tries her luck that something might appear this time, anything she might have overlooked— all the things, things, things that blocked her, that amounted to a ruin growing up around her, are just air now.

And there is one place left to look. She kicks the pumps off of her sweaty feet. Though the air conditioner still blasts, it feels so hot, and Iris is panting with exhaustion. She stands in front of her boss’s closed door. She wraps her hand around the knob, taking care to remember everything that she’s doing. She doesn’t want to skip a crucial step.

Holding her breath, she turns the knob and steps inside. She lets her air out and stands slumped in the doorway. Her face betrays nothing. Her shock reserves must be tapped out, because she has no reaction to finding what she had to have known was waiting here.

She travels the perimeter of the office, scanning the walls for any sign of a trap door. Or anything. It doesn’t have to be a clue, just an object, any one thing, because it is starting to feel so empty that she doesn’t feel that she can ever leave. She will always be looking. She turns around and around, until she is dizzy, and the room seems to tip ever so slightly sideways. She thinks for a moment that maybe looking at it this way will do the trick, will tell her where to look. She finally stops when her legs wobble, threatening to pitch her down onto the floor.

She stumbles back out to the lobby, where her own desk sits untouched, business as usual. Then she notices that the phone on her desk, the phone that has barely rung in weeks, that anchors her desk, that is the main component of her job description— it’s unplugged. The wire hangs slack off the end of the desk. She picks up the receiver out of habit and grips it in her hand, listens, but of course, there’s only the sound of plastic pressed to her ear. But the motion gives her a moment of clarity. She finds the socket in the wall and when she gets a dial tone, punches in the speed dial code for her boss’s cell. A second after she dials, a soft chiming tune sounds in her ear, followed by a soothing feminine alto, I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please try again…

She drops the receiver back on its cradle and, staring blankly forward, yanks the cord back out of the wall.

Iris could stand here, might stand here, forever, her arms at her sides and eyes bone dry. But eventually she swivels on her feet, steps in front of the desk and looks at it head on, as everyone who has ever passed her desk has seen it, as her boss saw it every day, or didn’t see it, rushing past her hello to attend to whatever pressing business lay before him. It seems so low to the ground. She sinks then to her knees, crawls underneath it, and lays her head on a nest of wires, to collect her thoughts.

There is a panic that doesn’t disrupt, but lives unnoticed in the body, that comes not as a shot from nowhere, but as a kind of liquid, released from within. As Iris lies beneath her desk, the only cover available, the panic, set loose from somewhere inside her, dormant for who knows how long, runs slowly, thickly through her veins. My job, she thinks, My job.

And on the underside of the desk, on the bare wood above her, unseen and forgotten by Iris in her fetal position, face pressed to the carpet: Hello and good luck with the earthquake.

But, she thinks, then. But — maybe no one knows she is here. Maybe no one has to know.

She reaches her arms out and slides forward, and as she emerges, half hidden beneath the desk and half splayed out under the fluorescent lights, she remembers that there is another place she has to look. She scrambles to her feet and rushes into the storage room.

Iris crouches down on the floor and lines up her right eye with the hole. She aims her gaze squarely toward the center of the room, and what she sees is… nothing. She is unable even to discern carpet or wall, or any texture at all— it’s just a wash of emptiness, nothing, no color even, she can’t even call it air. She blinks several more times, tries her left eye, wonders if she is losing her vision, and then she wonders if this is what she can expect to happen next. She will turn back to face her own office and find even the structure of the building gone, even the street, the whole landscape of the earth just a projection for which the unseen power source has been switched off. She would look down at her own body and find no body, she would look, and— there would be no she, no look.

While this series of events makes her blood pulse faster through her veins, causes her eyelids to flutter, she looks back from the hole and is relieved to find that she is still in a room. She stands again, her knees tattooed with carpet burn.

And then as she staggers back out in front of her desk, she hears noises coming from the hallway— footsteps, rustling fabric, clearing throats. She freezes, then edges slowly toward the door, which she opens very gently and pokes her head out of to find a line of people, waiting. Young and old, men and women, she eyes them one by one. They stand sixteen deep, reaching past the restrooms, almost into the shadows at the far end of the hall. The lineup starts at the door of suite 2B. She watches, waiting for any one of them to look up, but they are each thoroughly self-contained, consulting folders and notes, or arms crossed, waiting with beatific calm. At the front of the line, two feet in front of her at most, a young man stares at the closed door in front of him, straightening his tie. She doesn’t think any of them notice her.