Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

Then the door opens and before the man can step forward, Iris jumps ahead of him and steps inside, shutting the door quickly behind her. She stands with her back to it for a moment, taking in what she sees before her.

A red-headed woman in her twenties stands in front of a glass desk. She looks up at Iris, startled, and smiles.

“Hello, are you first?”

There’s a knock on the door and Iris smiles tightly.

“I guess so,” she replies, then looks around past the receptionist’s desk, struck by its layout, the virtually identical similarity to her own office.

“Um, first for…” Iris blurts out.

“You’re here to interview, right?”

Still clinging to the door, both hands behind her back, wrapped around the doorknob, Iris asks, “How long have you been here?”

“I got in at eight-thirty?” she says, tilting her head in question.

“No, I mean, how… how long has this been here?” Iris is startled, as she suddenly feels her bare feet against the carpet and wonders if the woman has noticed.

“Um…” the woman looks around behind her, then turns back to Iris, “I don’t know… I’m new. Shall I lead you back to the conference room for your interview?”

Iris nods slowly, and lets go of the door. She glances down at the wall on her right, where the other side of the hole ought to be, and only because she’s looking for it, only because she knows where to look, she perceives the unevenness of fresh spackle.

She catches up to the woman, and follows as she leads her through another door, the door she couldn’t open, and down a well-lit hallway. She lags behind again, trying to envision where this space has come from, where it fits into the building as a whole, but her spatial sense is failing her. She keeps picturing the side of the building bulging with add-ons. But there could always have been other doors she never noticed, opening to places she could never visit. Iris continues behind her down the hallway, which she now notes is just like her hallway, and the red-headed woman approaches the door, which is just like her boss’s door, even the light is the same, the no smell in the air, the white of the walls, the lavender carpet, and in the moment it takes for the woman to get the door open, she is transported, and wonders if maybe she will work here now, or does work here now and maybe this is how these things are done.

When Iris reaches the open door, she finds the woman leaning out the window, her hands gripping the sill. Then she pulls her head back inside and turns to face Iris, her face frozen in bewilderment.

“He was here just a minute ago.”

“Who was?”

“My boss— he’s supposed to be conducting staff interviews all day— we’ve got a line outside— I… he was just here.”

Iris watches the woman’s expression shift from confusion to annoyance.

“And… you think he could have gone out the window?”

The woman shakes her head and wraps a hand around her chin.

“No, no, that’s ridiculous.”

Iris steps to the window then and glances out over the street, at the glass storefronts and rushing cars. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go.

“Well we’re going to have to do this later. I don’t know what to tell you.” The woman leaves the room, slowly shaking her head.

After checking out the window once more, Iris backs calmly out of the office and closes the door behind her, coolly down the hall, trying to figure out what her next move ought to be. She passes the receptionist’s desk, where the woman is staring at her computer screen, typing, with the telephone receiver clamped between her chin and shoulder. As she passes, Iris watches the woman, who could be her, who is her, essentially, and remembers the diner on the cliff, her place for so long and so long ago, and her fear that she would float up and off, and as she opens the door out into the hallway, she looks back at the receptionist, who for now remains a separate person, now scribbling something onto a notepad, and turns away quickly, for fear that she might find herself in the chair instead, with a fresh headache roiling.

Out in the hall, all eyes turn to her and she stumbles. She’d momentarily forgotten about them. She turns back to the receptionist, who looks up and mouths, “I’m sorry,” before politely waving her off. Iris shuts the door behind her, clutching the knob on this side now, and clears her throat.

“There aren’t going to be any interviews today, so you can all go,” Iris announces, not making eye contact with anyone. She looks above them, to the side, around the edges of the crowd, and tries to slip quickly back through her own door. The man she cut in line grabs her bicep.

“I need this job,” he says, imploringly, and Iris lets her arm go limp.

“I know,” she says, still avoiding his eyes.

“I drove an hour to get here!” a woman near the back cries out.

The man grips her arm tighter and says, “Are you hiring?”

Iris looks into his wet, bloodshot eyes and the deep crows’ feet around them and feels her resolve draining from her body, her head hollow and fuzzy, until finally, a surge of adrenaline kicks in. She wrenches her arm out of his grip, and thrusts herself into 2A, shutting and locking the door behind her, which doesn’t stop people from knocking, or from turning and rattling the knob.

Iris abandons the door, breathing quickly, and returns to her boss’s office. She could stay here, watch and wait. She still has a key, some claim on the space. Some tie to something. She looks out the window at the row of cars in the parking lot. She turns away from the window and tries to imagine what she will do if she stays, how long she might keep herself awake, and that’s when her gaze settles on the rectangle in the carpet— the hatch, the trap door.

She drops to her knees and crawls over to it, lifting up the carpet flap to find the loose floorboard still loose. She pulls it up with her fingers and reaches down into the hole. She feels around, her palm hitting splintery beams of wood. She flattens herself on the carpet and reaches her head down into the hole, and is struck by the musty air, the mossy smell of old wood.

But she sees something. Beneath the knot of beams, the moldering guts of the building, there is a spot of light. Carefully, she leans in further, easing her shoulders through. She pauses, catching her breath, then reaches down lower, until she’s waist-deep in the floor, and finds that she’s able to pull herself deep into the interior, collecting soot and spider webs on her hands, in her hair, as she squeezes her body through this impromptu tunnel. She coughs, and a cloud of dust erupts before her eyes, now tearing. Finally, even her feet have disappeared inside the hole, and she balances herself like a gymnast, down the beams like a young monkey, and for a moment all is forgotten, there is only the physical challenge before her, and her focus is pulled by the light down below, growing, widening, as she slithers toward it, her limbs scraping against the jagged wood.

When the light is close enough for her to touch, she pushes further still, and finds that she’s able to stick her hand right through. She stretches her wrist as far as it will stretch, wiggling her fingers, until they touch what feels like burning sand. The surrounding wood is so dank and decrepit that she manages to break apart a space just big enough for her to squeeze her body all the way through, the wood crumbling further as she wiggles her legs as though she were swimming.

She tumbles out onto the sand, sneezes, and rises up onto all fours, sticky grime between her fingers, her dress torn from hem to hip.

Once on her feet, Iris digs her bare toes into the sun-soaked dirt. The sky is bright, the dusty terrain endless, like the surface of another planet. Squinting against the harsh sunlight, the only thing Iris can make out is a tall ridge in the distance, red and claylike. Along the top of it, massive, precarious-looking rocks jut toward the sun, casting a shadow that looks serrated against the sand, like shattered glass spread on a windowsill. She begins walking toward it, as a slow breeze builds, blowing her footsteps clean away as soon as she’s made them, so she leaves no mark, and in turn, nothing leaves a mark on her.