Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

She keeps going, thinking briefly about the sunburn she must be incurring, but is she even outside? She looks up at the bleached sky, the close-up sun. It feels like sun, like air, and what can it be, if not only, exactly, what it feels like?

The longer she walks, the farther away the ridgeline seems, as though it’s receding in space intentionally, to keep her away. Maybe she’s just exhausted. The sky fades from white to a smoky tan as it bleeds into the earth. She is all alone out here, and remembers what her mother said to her when she was a girl, about walking alone, over a sink full of breakfast dishes:

Latch your focus onto something way off in the distance, like you’re not even there, like you already walked by a long time ago.

No one can hurt you if you’re not even there.

Iris swallows, and fixes her sights on the ridge, the only vertical entity on this horizontal plane, the jagged red against the bleached earth, remembering her mother’s hands plunged in the sudsy sink, her fine-boned hands always raw, and her thin lipped profile, her expression shrouded by bug-like sunglasses on walks through that old neighborhood, through the gauntlet of wary eyes, the shaking heads, hovering by their front doors and kitchen windows, closed off by the steel of her mother’s forward momentum. All at once, she misses her, and her father too, and Neil, Oh god, she thinks, what is it she wants to go back to? Not a place. It’s a snapshot she longs for, the ability to remain inside a still image of a blue-sky summer morning, to hold a feeling, to never lose it down the well of time…

…And then she hears the delicate trill of a piano, the opening strains of a song so beautiful, so heart-stopping in its familiarity. It’s coming from behind the ridge.

Iris takes off running, stirring up a breeze that dries her sweat, and the music swells louder, until she recognizes it, and is now running while singing barely audibly, somewhere in the back of her throat… You-oooo send me, darling, you-oooo send me…

She’s so lost in her body’s movement, in the music, in the sun burning through her skin, that she nearly runs right into the rock face, but veers left just in time to run alongside it, enclosed in its shadow like a magnet dragged across sheet metal, and when she turns the corner, there he is, playing, alone, cradled on all sides by low yellow dunes. Slowly, she comes up from behind, careful not to make any sound as she creeps around to face him, still whisper-singing, honest you do, honest you do, honest you do… though she doesn’t know she’s doing it.

The man from 2B stops playing when he sees her. He pulls his hands gently from the keys.

“Where are we?” she says.

“Underneath.” He leans away from the keys and slumps down on the bench.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. He gets up off the bench and settles into a well-worn spot in the sand, leaning into one of the piano’s legs.

Iris gets down on her knees beside him. The sand is hot at first, but the warmth it sends through her skin, the way it seems to massage her blood, is so soothing, she forgets the burn.

“There’s nothing up there anymore,” she says.

The man shakes his head.

“Let me stay.”

“No,” he shakes his head again, “you can’t. It’s not up to you, or me.”

All the emotions stirred up by the morning’s discovery converge, and an ache pulses in her breastbone, her eyes pleading.

“I’m here now,” she says, her voice breaking. A tear rolls down her face, under her jaw, and settles in the hollow of her throat.

He looks up at her and smiles, then looks back to the ground.

“There’s nothing to go back to,” she whispers.

She watches his fingernails as they trace parallel lines in the yellow sand, the yellow sand tracing parallel lines under his fingernails, and feels all at once that they are made up of the same stuff, she, he, the dry earth beneath them, and the building falling to pieces above. She thinks to reach a hand out, to place it over his, but the act seems superfluous.

They sit together in silence for a moment, until it’s broken by a loud buzzing followed by a twinkling chime. She instinctively pats her hands down her hips, but remembers her phone is back in the office. It’s as loud as if it were right there on her person.

“You’re going to want to get that,” he says.

“But, I don’t even…”

“You don’t know who it could be.”

They lock eyes, and Iris is overpowered by curiosity. It’s true. It could be anyone calling, anyone at all. She rises back onto her feet.

“I’ll be right back,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere.”

She runs in the direction of the ringing, back the way she came, around the ridge and through the dust, with the sun pressing down, all the while imagining that she is on rails. She can do anything, and assume the rails have been well laid, and will lead her to wherever it is she needs to go.

She finds the hole she crawled out of to get here and finds the wood sagging. She has to push with all her strength to reopen the hole and squeeze her way back through, the buzzing, the ringing, filling her ears. She pushes up through the grime and slime as though through the guts of a sea monster, every beam, every bolt shifting and sliding. The building’s interior is falling in on itself, melting almost, attaching itself to her flesh as she climbs up the barely holding rungs she just climbed down.

When she reaches the top, Iris heaves herself out onto the lavender carpet and sucks down air as she clamors for her purse. She punches her arm into its recesses and pulls out the phone, NEIL flashing on the screen.

“Hello?” she says, “Neil?”

She hears the beating of his heart, and behind it, a whirring of air.

“Neil, can you hear me?”

She hears a faint ding and a woman’s voice, garbled as though coming through tiny speakers. A silence follows.

“Neil!” she yells. “Neil! It’s me! Pick up, I’m here!”

“Hello?” he says, quietly, puzzled. “Iris?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m, oh, I guess I forgot to turn my phone off. We’re about to take off. I’ve got to go…”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m just going away for a while.”

“Where? Will you tell me, just once, where you’re going?”

“Can you hear that?” he says abruptly.

“What is it?”

“That’s the engine getting ready. Soon all you’ll be able to hear is wind rushing behind it.”

“Tell me where you’re going and I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

The fasten seatbelt sign lights up, and Neil’s heart flutters in anticipation.

“You know that feeling? The mounting altitude? The thinning air? Your ears pop, and for once, you’re inside your body completely? And it doesn’t matter where you’re going, because you’re only going up?”

“Neil, please? I miss you. You know that, don’t you? Tell me you know it?”

He doesn’t answer. She hears the rushing rumbling, and then silence. He’s gone.

Iris sinks back on her heels and tucks the phone back in her purse. Her hand lands on the little radio. This is what she came to do, to give it back, or to share it, if he’ll let her. She slings the purse across her chest and crawls back to the hole. She wipes her sweating hands on the carpet in preparation to climb back through to the underneath, not thinking any further than that, feeling only that she needs the land and the sun, and to get away from these walls, when the walls themselves begin to quiver and quake.

She jerks her head up and sees the light fixtures shaking, and, forgetting all earthquake protocol, she dives her head and arms into the hole as planned, but it’s too late. The beams she climbed down and up again have splintered and folded into each other like toothpicks, the space between them liquefied, collapsing in further with every shake of the frame.