Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

Iris feels goose bumps rising on her forearms, but hesitates to touch the thermostat. Her synthetic leather pumps are filling with sweat, creating an embarrassing squeak when she walks, but those tiny bumps on her arms are rising up in mute defiance. Her ninety-nine-cent eyeliner is melting, a line of chocolate brown stamped now in the creases of both eyelids, but her lips are cold and chapped. Her body cannot agree with itself, and it is two minutes after two o’clock.

When the phone rings, a dull ache passes over her chest as her hand darts out to the receiver. She picks it up in a graceless clatter and coos the corporate-approved greeting, her index finger poised to transfer the caller to his or her desired department. Though her body cannot determine whether the office air is hot or cold, it is definitely dry, and she is fresh out of eye drops. After she has transferred the call to her boss, cloistered in his office twenty feet down the hall, she gets up to stretch her legs. She crosses in front of her desk, which sits next to the front door, a way-station. Facing the door, she bends over, halving and doubling herself at once, pulling her calf muscles tight. Her lank black hair tumbles down to her ankles, hiding her face like a curtain. Behind her, a fluorescent light flickers, casting intermittent shadows onto the closed doors that line the narrow hallway of office suite 2A. She unfolds herself and returns to her chair, where she glances again at the clock on her computer. 2:04.

Suddenly, a door down the hallway opens and the departing sales director emerges carrying a cardboard box filled with framed photos, a small flower vase, and probably more than a few office supplies. As she approaches, a woman of forty with chin-length, prematurely gray hair and a long, slow stride, Iris sits up straighter, unsure of whether she ought to stand.

The woman arrives at the lobby and pauses in front of Iris’s desk, the cardboard box perched on her hip like a child. Iris looks up at her expectantly, a woman with whom she has never exchanged more than a few sentences.

“So,” the woman sighs.

“Yes?”

“You’ll tell him I left?”

Iris nods, maintaining eye contact.

“Thank you.” She smiles slightly, inscrutably, then continues out the heavy white door, closing it behind her with a firm click.

Iris stares at the door. From the conference room at the far end of the hallway, the heavy silence is broken by the stalled motor sound of a fax coming in. She closes her eyes and tries to will them to wetness before going to retrieve it.

It is Monday morning, and Iris is compiling her boss’s phone messages from over the weekend, the strays left on the central voicemail instead of his personal line. At his request, she has listened to the messages, transcribed them in Arial, his chosen official font, and printed them out. She is stapling the pages when he emerges from his office carrying the telephone from his desk, the cord wrapped tightly around the base. He stops in front of her desk and holds the telephone up delicately, like a server with a tray.

“What,” he asks, raising his faint blond eyebrows, “am I supposed to do with this?”

“I’m sorry?”

“It doesn’t work. I mean, it works but it doesn’t. Tell me, what is a telephone for?” The corners of his thin lips turn up slightly, his response to her response already planned.

“Um, for talking… and listening… to people,” Iris tries. It doesn’t matter what she says— he’ll coax the right answer out of her if she guesses wrong.

He snaps his fingers and points down at her. His tie is off already, an indicator of his stress level. Iris checks his stubble and is relieved to find it under control.

“Precisely. For listening. But I can’t listen properly if there’s a buzzing in the background, a buzzing that goes away if I shake the cord…” he demonstrates, waving the cord back and forth in a tight motion, “…but then comes right back as soon as I stop, you see?” He drops the cord. “So what am I supposed to do with it?”

“Do you want me to order you a new phone?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, I will.”

Iris extends her hand with the transcribed messages, thinking the matter solved, but her boss’s gaze is focused somewhere on the wall behind her. He still has the phone perched on his right hand.

“Here,” she says, “your messages?”

“Right,” he says, refocusing on her and taking the pages with his left hand. He sets the phone down a moment to scratch the back of his neck up and down several times.

“I’m not going to throw this away,” he continues, “even though it’s useless. It’s too big. It’ll take up my whole wastebasket, I mean. And it might be good for something sometime. I could use the plastic, or the wires. Somebody could. I’m putting it in storage.”

With this, he turns and opens the door directly facing Iris’s desk, the room inside pitch dark, and sets the phone on the floor just on the other side of the wall. He then shuts it softly, scratches the back of his neck again and ambles back to his office.

Iris looks at the door. The storage room was not always a storage room. It was once an account manager’s office, an older, vaguely European man who always dressed in three-piece suits and carried a handkerchief in his breast pocket, a smirking throwback. She never knew where he was from, didn’t ask because she enjoyed guessing, though she encountered him rarely, close as he was in proximity.

There were a couple of times, on slow mornings before anyone else had arrived, that he stood by her desk and pontificated while drinking his coffee, each time on the same topic. Were these lectures titled, presented in an auditorium with programs and refreshments afterward, they would be called, You Must Travel, My Dear or How to Be Young.

“How old is it that you are now, my dear?”

“Twenty-four,” she would answer.

“Let me tell you one thing. Do not get married. Do not buy a house. It is a waste of your time and of your energy.”

“That’s two things.”

“You should not live in one place. You should wake up and not know what city you are in. Do not spend your money on practical things. Your only expense should be your shoes. Do not have a home, but wear Louboutins, do you see?”

“Okay.”

“When I was your age, I was living in Prague. I was an apprentice to a cabinet maker, but I was in the discotheque every night, and by the next summer I was in Madrid.”

“Cabinets still?”

“What? No, no, no, you are not taking my meaning,” he would sigh. Then he would finish his coffee and go back to his office, returning with a stack of invoices for her to fax out.

But since he left some months ago, his office has become the holding pen for broken appliances, unneeded papers, and surplus office supplies. These are the things that are no longer things, but not yet trash. They are to be forgotten, but reserved. She is not sure whose anxiety is manifested in the storage room, but because she sits across from it every day, she feels that it is her problem to ignore. Iris looks at the door, now kept closed at all times to keep the clutter out of anyone’s field of vision. Who knows where all these things were kept before. Opportunity begets utility. The space became, and now it is filling.

She never found out why he left or where he was going. She must have been out sick that day. She must not have been paying attention.