Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

“Is there coffee?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not working.” She shrugs in the direction of the coffeemaker.

“Did you try hitting it?”

He steps in front of her and gives the machine an open-palmed slap. The plastic hinge of the lid comes loose with a pop.

He sends her to the café with a five dollar bill and a list of three desirable espresso drinks, of which she is to choose one. He says he feels like being surprised, but not too surprised. She is happy to be sent outside. She steps out of the building and onto the sidewalk, the breeze blowing her hair into her face. She clutches the money in her fist and squints against the sun, smoothes her hair back. It flies forward again.

This neighborhood is hers and not hers. She comes here five days a week, drives here, knows where to find the nearest dry cleaners, record store, place to buy gum. But she is a visitor, still. She has never walked these streets in flip flops, or passed an afternoon wandering through these shops. And if she didn’t work here, she would never see these streets again. There just wouldn’t be any reason.

She orders him a large hazelnut latte and waits for it, perusing the stacks of weeklies by the door. One cover promises a definitive list of the 100 best pop records of all time, but she can’t bring herself to pick it up.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches as a man and woman stare at each other across a table. She thinks she detects traces of contempt in their stares, in the hard silence between them, but their demeanors could be warped by the nature of her peripheral gaze. The barista sets the cup up on the counter and Iris grabs it.

As she is pushing open the swinging glass door, she hears the man say softly to the woman, “Calm down.”

When she returns, her boss is sitting at her desk, squinting intently at her computer screen. She puts his coffee and change down in front of him and stares, deliberately letting the change clatter against the desktop. She fiddles with her fingernails and waits until it seems he will never notice her. She considers laying her palms on the desk and staring him down, but she doesn’t. He could look up at any moment.

“Sir?” she finally says.

He blinks as though waking from a hypnotic state and looks up at her.

“Oh, oh,” he says, noticing the coffee cup, “Great, great— I’ll be done here in one second. My computer’s acting screwy again and I had to check something.”

He clicks the mouse and gets up from her chair, awkwardly extricating himself from the tight space between desk and wall. She stands aside as he gathers the pile of coins and drops them in his pocket. He takes a gulp of coffee and winces.

“Jesus Christ— why does it have to be so damned hot?” He sticks his tongue out as though air will ease the burn. Iris notices the dryness of his mouth, the wind-burned rawness of his lips.

“Tell me about it,” she says, and then wonders why she said it.

He turns, still grimacing, and hurries off in the direction of his office.

She sits down, sets down her purse, and checks the inbox at the edge of her desk. At the top of the stack, she finds a letter in her boss’s handwriting, written on blue-lined notebook paper, with a post-it note stuck on it: Please type and mail thanks! She opens a fresh document on her computer and sets to typing, struggling to interpret certain words in his uniquely tight and sharply angled lettering:

Dear Mr. Leonard,

I enjoyed speaking to you on the phone last week, and am very interested in pursuing the project we discussed. We are prepared to propose a liberal budget for phase one— to say the least— if you wish to do business with us.

However, I was frankly surprised to learn that you have also been in talks with Dimwell, Inc. I understand that you wish to “keep your options open” as it were, but in order for us to feel secure in proposing the figure we are prepared to propose, we need you to make up your mind.

In closing, what’s it going to be, Mr. Leonard? Us or them? I await your response with bated breath.

Sincerely,

Your partner??

She reads this through only after she has finished typing it, and wonders whether this is all meant to go in the letter, or whether her boss was venting for his own benefit. She doesn’t know if this is the way business is done, has nothing to compare it to, so she is in no position to ask if he really wants this sent. Of course he does. The note said so. She prints it on company letterhead and stamps it with his signature, a stamp he had made after he calculated the amount of time he had spent signing things in his life. At least three years and one month, he said, though she doesn’t know how he came up with that figure. She finds the address in the contacts database, prints it on an envelope, affixes it with a forty-four cent American flag stamp, folds the letter inside, and slides it into the outgoing mail tray on the wall by the door. Later today, the mailwoman will place the letter in her satchel with all the others, carry it around with her for the rest of her route before dropping it at the post office where it will spend a few mysterious days in the system, being carted from one place to another before winding up on a plane, then a truck, in a box, in a bag, before it arrives, perhaps a little weathered, on Mr. Leonard’s desk. She tries to imagine all the movements and actions necessary to transport this letter across state lines, the hands of each person who will touch it. She sees the placement of their calluses, the rings on their fingers, hangnails or none, nails chewed or painted. Then the phone rings, and it all vanishes.

At the end of the day, Iris switches off her computer, arranges her desk so everything is parallel, stapler, scotch tape, telephone. She sets the code on the phone so that when people call, her recorded voice will say, Thank you for calling Larmax, Inc. If you know your party’s extension, please enter it now. Otherwise, please leave a message. Thank you. She thinks the second thank you sounds abrupt and redundant, but there didn’t seem to be any other way to end it. The idea of saying goodbye on a recording unnerved her for some reason, like she would be turning herself into a ghost.

She stands up from her desk and looks down the empty hallway. Her boss has been closed up in his office all afternoon. The others, she hasn’t seen.

“Good night,” she calls out quietly, and makes her way out the door.

Walking toward the staircase, she hears a door open and shut, then footsteps on the carpet, catching up to her own. She doesn’t look back, and she doesn’t look up as she feels this person’s presence beside her, and they both turn down the stairs.

They are walking side by side now, and she lets her gaze slide upward, just for a second, to confirm her inkling that it is the man from 2B. He seems shorter walking beside her like this, closer to her own height. He looks a little feverish, his dark hair greasy, but she is stirred by his scent, like dirt, like he has been digging, has only just climbed out of the earth. He stares out into the middle distance, though there is none. There is only the wall ahead. She quickly shifts her gaze to her opposite side, to another wall, the painted and re-painted banister, the very edge of the carpet where no vacuum cleaner can reach, a gray line holding the stairs in, insulating the building in whispers of dust that pile up and will continue to pile. There could be an echo here, she thinks. If I said something, it might echo back.

They turn in unison at the landing and continue down the second flight, Iris watching the stairs ahead of her now, and the pointed toes of her shoes as they cross each one, down and down. All she hears is the rustle of his jeans.