DREAM
She is driving through the desert, some desert. There are no other cars on the road, and her destination is clearly ahead, but remote. She does not know when she started driving. She has been driving, always, bent in this same position, and there is no time to stop.
When she finally finds herself at the house, she is surprised. She didn’t know this was where she was headed. Her body knew, her hands and feet knew where to turn the steering wheel, where to step on the gas and brake. Only her mind was left out of the process.
But now, here she is. It has been so many years, but it is exactly how they left it. She remembers the horses standing in their corral, the sun reaching through their bodies so they were warm to the touch and gleaming, sweat foaming at the edges of their nylon blindfolds, and the way they stared forward without seeing as she ran her hand down their cheeks. Between the house and the corral, the yard stretched out, its magnitude deceptive. It didn’t look like much, but when she was there, there was no place else; there was a feeling of acreage.
Iris parks in the long gravel driveway and gets out of the car. Standing before the house now, she can sense that something is wrong. Time hasn’t left the house untouched after all. The paint is cracking, the front door rusted at the edges. The nut trees in front are overgrown, gnarled into and around themselves. How long has it been? The corral is empty, now.
She approaches the door, which she finds unlocked, and enters, calling softly, “Hello? Hello?”
There is no answer. When she turns the corner, into the kitchen, she is startled to see her childhood dog lounging on the breakfast table, his tail lazily brushing the dusty blond wood. Sebastian looks up at her and emits a small whine, and she takes a seat at the table. She looks into his stately German shepherd face and remembers the time she successfully fried an egg on the hood of her father’s pickup truck. He wasn’t mad. He just scraped it off and told her to feed it to Sebastian on the back porch. He licked up every morsel, and laid his head in her lap in gratitude.
She senses that he will disappear if she touches him. But she can’t help it. She leans down and kisses him between the eyes.
Iris wakes up to find that she has fallen asleep with the lights on, fully dressed, and hanging off of the couch. It is as though sleep has hit her with a thunderous slap. She stands up, blinks the spots away, lets the blood run back to her extremities. It’s been happening like this. But sudden sleep is better than none at all.
She travels the perimeter of her apartment, flicking off each light, until there is only the moonlight edging in between the curtains. In her bedroom, she takes off her blouse and wool slacks and leaves them where they lie, unhooks her bra, and crawls into bed in only her underwear. As she lies still in her bed, the night breeze jangling a neighbor’s wind chimes, she tries to remember the dream. She can feel that there was one. She can feel dusty air lifting off her skin, and the hot white sun, though long gone, is burning somewhere inside her.
NUMBERS
When she arrives at the office this morning, she finds that there are thirty-three messages in her voicemail box. The first twenty-nine are a misguided fax machine. She sits through each high-pitched squeal until the system gives her the option of erasing it. Three more are from her boss, who has just landed in Europe. The messages are each about five minutes apart. In the first one, he angrily asks where she is. In the second message, he apologizes for the previous message, explaining that he miscalculated the time difference, but to please call him when she gets in. In the third one, he apologizes in advance for his impatience, but explains with increasing ire that he needs her to call him right away. The thirty-third message is another fax machine.
She quickly dials her boss’s cell phone. He picks up after two rings, and it sounds as though he is at some kind of sporting event or street riot. He yells into the phone:
“Thank God! Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”
“Okay.” She has her pen poised over a fresh yellow post-it note.
“Okay.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, it’s very loud here— I’m in a meeting.”
“Okay. What do you need?”
“I need you to call the Spirgarten hotel in Zurich, and ask them two questions. One: In what room is Mr. Franz Vilmar staying, and Two: what is their fax number.”
“Do you need me to fax something to Mr. Vilmar?”
“Yes, obviously. In the file cabinet directly to the left of my desk, you will find a folder marked, Miscellaneous. The piece of paper in the very front of this folder, the first paper you see, needs to be faxed to Mr. Vilmar post-haste.”
“Okay, do you have the number for the hotel?”
“I… hold on.”
She listens as he yells something unintelligible. There is a crash, and it sounds as though the phone has been dropped. Suddenly, her boss is back on the line, “Hello? Hellohellohello?”
“Yes?”
“Okay, I don’t have the number. Just forget it. Or find the number or something. I have to go.” He hangs up.
She looks up Spirgarten online, and finds seven hotels in Zurich under some variation of that name. She finds the paper— a list of names she doesn’t recognize in two long columns, and starts calling.
It makes her feel momentarily exotic to send faxes and make calls to far-flung locales. She feels privileged to know the appropriate country codes. But she also knows that she’s just pressing the same numbers in a different pattern.
REMEMBER
Iris’s older brother, Neil, is a traveling salesman. Not door to door. He sells to the people who sell, finds backers, gets products licensed. He has explained it all to her on more than one occasion, but she tends to tune out before he’s done. She calls him a traveling salesman, though he has some other, more modern-sounding title, because she thinks it suits his persona. Every time she talks to him, he is in a different city, talking up different wares, be they fist-sized juicers or a wrinkle cream that promises, finally, to stop time. He is always at the airport, in a cab, in a wind tunnel, waiting for the train that’s just pulling in. He answers the phone, Hello? Yeah, I can hear you! What?!
When he finds himself en route to her city, he sometimes calls to arrange lunch, or dinner, or breakfast if that’s all he can squeeze in. He always knows where to go.
I can’t believe you’ve never been, he says. Elvis fucking Presley used to eat here, I swear to god. You didn’t know that?
He always has an anecdote at the ready, something he read somewhere, though sometimes she can’t imagine where, but doesn’t press.
This used to be a fabric store, back in the ’50s.
Today they are supposed to be having lunch at a Mexican place that was once a speakeasy during the prohibition era.
I hear they still have the tub that was used to distill gin in the back, no joke.
The restaurant is a long narrow hallway. Iris sits waiting at a table against the curved, peach stucco wall, the warmth from the kitchen wafting over her from behind splintered, white saloon doors. A vase in the middle of the table holds two fake daisies, drooping away from each other like a plastic letter M. She glances out at the parking lot again. Her phone rings and she looks down at it in her hand for a moment before answering.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I’m sorry. You know I’m sorry— I couldn’t get away.”
“How am I to know you’re not lying? How would I know if you were just avoiding me, forever?”