Hers is not the only car on the road, but every few blocks or so she finds herself alone at an intersection, waiting on a red light at a corner that looks and feels abandoned, stores with metal enclosures locked, empty bus shelters. She turns off the radio, cutting off Rod Stewart on I wish I’d never seen your face. Her eyes scan the desolate street and it feels like an aftermath to something she missed, as though everyone but she got the memo to evacuate, paper bags and soda cans like tumbleweeds skittering across the pavement. Then a car pulls up beside her and her white-knuckled giddiness wanes.
At the office, she gets the door unlocked, shuts off the burglar alarm, wanders from room to room flipping on all the fluorescent lights, turns on printers and copiers. The office fills with the sound of rebooting, mechanical buzzes and clicks. It is all but alive. Once the suite is aglow in that greenish wash that has come to look normal to her, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Artificial light gives no clues. There is just one window to the outside that is visible from her desk, just before the hallway. The window sits fifteen feet off the ground, facing the street.
Iris hoists herself up on her desk between the phone and computer. This window has bothered her for some time, though she only noticed it a few months ago. Too high for anyone to look out of, she cannot imagine what it is for. And yet, it was planned, blueprinted and built this way, a non-window that she only assumes looks out on the street because there is nothing on the other side of the wall in which it sits. If she’s figured right. It is not even seven, and her boss won’t be in until at least nine. She wonders if there might be a custodian’s closet somewhere in the building from which she might borrow a ladder. She could take full advantage of this time.
It occurs to her then, also, that she is definitely, unquestionably, the first person here. She is in a position to watch the door, see who shows up. She promises herself that she will pay attention today. Iris straightens her spine and rolls her shoulders forward and back. She stretches her arms upward, and at the moment she locks her fingers together over her head, a loud ringing shocks her onto her feet, and she thinks for one panicked second that she has caused it, nudged some invisible lever in the air. Her eyes dart around the room, looking for a source, until she realizes it is coming from outside the door. She inches toward the sound and listens as the ringing changes pattern after a minute, turning into a more insistent series of shrieks. Suddenly, the ringing stops and a distant, muffled male voice groans, “Fuuuuuuck…”
She opens the door a crack, and sees that there is no one in the hallway. Then she hears a radio switched on, barely audible news, traffic, weather, she can’t tell— there are only bright voices talking fast, and her eyes settle on the closed door of suite 2B.
After a while, poised in the doorway like this, the voices on the radio lose the pattern of human speech. All she hears is a prolonged static hum, then she realizes the station has been changed, and what she hears is music, but it’s so quiet, she can’t detect a melody. She fixes her eyes on the wall and enters into a state of semi-consciousness, letting the eggshell color of the wall blend with the lavender carpet to form a gauzy absence of vision. She thinks she could stay like this, looking and not looking, hearing and not hearing, for ages.
So she is startled when the door opens, and the man from 2B emerges in T-shirt and sweatpants, his cheeks darkly bristled. What Iris sees is only a streak of him as he passes, his beige and black and whiteness bleeding through the haze of the hallway, but this is enough. He pauses for only a second in front of her door, though he doesn’t turn to face her, and she pushes it swiftly shut. She stays where she is, her head against the door, and listens as he enters the restroom and shuts the door behind him.
Iris returns to her desk and switches her computer on. She imagines him then, in the bathroom, stripping naked and washing each individual body part in the shallow sink, drying himself with paper towels. Would he be able to wedge himself under the faucet to wash his back, his crotch? Does he drink water from the faucet too, or does he go without water, like a cactus, needing nothing? Her computer turns on with a languid ding and she has an impulse to get up and go back to his office while he is otherwise occupied, to steal something as evidence, or simply await his return. Then there is a knock at her door and she freezes, making no move to answer. She holds her breath, as though whoever has knocked might hear the difference.
“Hello?” comes her boss’s voice, “are you in there? I forgot my key.”
Iris exhales and jumps up to open the door for him. “It wasn’t locked…” she starts as he steps through the doorway. He takes off his sunglasses and jacket and holds these to his chest.
“Why are you here so early?” she asks, flustered, as he passes her, heading down the hall.
“Why are you?” he says, before disappearing into his office.
Iris spends the rest of the morning with her ears perked up like a dog’s, one focused inside, the other out. With her left ear, she listens for any movements in the hallway, but there is only the opening and closing of doors, and she can’t tell if any of them have been opened or closed by the man from 2B. Her right ear is trained toward her boss’s office, from which there has been no sound since he arrived. Her listening game collapses any time the phone rings. After transferring a call to her boss, she has to divide up her hearing all over again, which takes concentration. But nothing comes of it, and by lunchtime, she is ready to give up. She decides she will tackle the long-put-off file cabinet reorganization upon her return.
When she gets back, as she is tucking her leftover half-sandwich into the bottom drawer of her desk, she hears her boss’s voice booming, loud enough that she can hear through his closed door, “Exactly! That’s exactly what I said!”
Another voice responds then, but she can’t make out the words, only the sound. She quickly approaches the office, trying to interpret the back and forth chattering, but thinks better of it. It wouldn’t do to be caught holding a glass to the door.
She wants to stay and wait for the door to open, but she has to go to the bathroom. She hurries down the outside hall to the restroom and pees as fast as she can, washes her hands but doesn’t bother drying them. She shakes them in the air as she hustles back to the office.
But her boss is standing in front of her desk when she returns.
“Hey, listen,” he starts in immediately, “I need something from my car, but I can’t leave just now. Will you get something for me?”
“What is it?”
“It’s a box. It’s rectangular. It’s in the backseat.”
“Uh, sure.” And before she gets the words out, he’s pressing a car key with its dangling remote into her palm.
He’s too close to her all of a sudden, closer than she thinks they have ever been. She can see his pores, and the sparse blond chest hair peeking out the top of his striped dress shirt, and she takes a step back, avoiding his eyes, though she can’t avoid his scent, a chaotic swirl of mint, soap, a steely cologne, something that would come in a silver bottle, and underneath it all, the unmistakable smell of sweat that is never really masked.
“Good good, thanks,” he calls over his shoulder, and hustles back to his office.
In the parking lot, Iris’s gaze falls on the white van a few spaces down from her boss’s convertible. She glances around the lot before approaching it, but she finds that its windows are the tinted kind that block everything out. The windows must have been an add-on, because they don’t match the beat-up exterior, they’re so smooth and new-looking. She runs a finger along the dirty back door and chews on her bottom lip. Windows used to be simpler, she thinks. Windows used to break.