For the next forty-five minutes, he wandered the medical building, reading through lists of names on directories, riding the elevators up and down, and then out to the parking lot, where he dragged his fingertips against the wet backs of cars, taking his place at the building’s entrance just before his mother pulled up in the station wagon with Iris asleep in the backseat. He climbed into the front seat without a word.
“Same time next week?” she asked, looking out the windshield in her caramel-colored sunglasses as she made a circle around the lot to get out.
He nodded, and in the backseat, Iris tossed and muttered in her sleep, her torso tangled up in the seatbelt.
He exits the freeway, but thinks briefly, as he always does, that he doesn’t have to go home. He could keep going. No one will know if he keeps driving on through to the state line and beyond. He is not accountable to anyone. No one, in fact, has any idea where he is. He repeats this thought: No one on this planet has any idea precisely where I am right now.
And it calms him enough. It draws him home, like a beacon in the fog.
PART II
ROADBLOCK
Iris walks up the stairs to the office, but she hits a roadblock at the landing between the two flights: a baby grand piano. Four men are trying unsuccessfully to carry it up. One man, in canvas overalls and a backward baseball cap, is wedged in between the piano and the wall. They push and grunt, but the piano is stuck; the man is stuck too. Iris stands below them and stares.
Suddenly, the man nearest to her turns his head and calls over his shoulder.
“Why the hell is there no service elevator in this building?”
“I don’t know. Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault— didn’t mean to snap.”
“Motherfucker,” the stuck man stage-whispers.
“Okay,” the first man says, “everybody, very slowly, set it down.”
Gently, they crouch down, letting the piano rest at an angle, half on the landing and half on the top flight of stairs. The men breathe heavily. The stuck man removes his hat and tosses it up the stairs. His thinning brown hair is pasted to his forehead.
“Who needs a piano so bad?” another of the four men says, rubbing his face with one hand, the other still clutching the bottom edge of the piano.
Iris wonders how she will get up the stairs. There is no other way up, unless she is willing to go outside and enter the hair salon next door, climb the stairs to their roof if they have stairs to their roof, leap across to her roof, and hope that she can get in some way. And hope that she can make the leap in the first place. She doesn’t move.
The man who spoke to her digs through his pockets.
“Who has the delivery slip? I need the suite number.”
One of the other men finds a folded piece of yellow paper in his pocket and hands it to the first man, the apparent leader, who reads aloud.
“Okay… 1137 Hearst Place… Suite 2B. Would someone go knock on their door?”
The stuck man makes a helpless face, twisting his stuck torso behind the piano. One of the unstuck men takes a step away from the piano as if to continue up the stairs.
“I’ll go,” Iris says sharply. He stops.
“How are you going to get up there?”
“I’ll go,” she says again, lowering herself to her knees.
The men watch as she flattens her torso against the lavender carpet, brushing against it, close enough to smell the no smell of it as she crawls underneath the piano. She inches forward, letting the carpet burn her bare elbows and knees, and stops when she is completely enclosed between the four legs, the naked wood dangling splinters above her head.
She looks up at it. The wood is so bare, untouched by the black lacquer that coats all visible sides. She shakes her purse off of her shoulder and begins digging through it, contained as she is in piano-shaped shadow.
“Are you stuck?” someone asks.
She pulls her Sharpie out and uncaps it with her teeth.
On the naked wood, she writes, You won’t even know I’m here.
She zips the marker back into her purse and continues up the stairs. The light of the hallway feels warm against her skin, and like a lizard climbing a rock, she emerges from beneath the piano and rises to her feet.
She is poised to knock on the door of 2B when it opens, and the man inside comes out and marches past her, the rush of air between them causing her head to turn and her eyes to follow him toward the stairwell. Her body follows her eyes.
“Is this your piano?” one of the delivery men asks.
“Yeah, yeah, bring it on up, I’m in 2B.”
Iris stands behind him, facing the deliverymen. She makes a get-a-load-of-this-guy face at the stuck man, who returns her gaze with a what-are-you-gonna-do head shake. She swallows a laugh. She gasps it down her throat, mouth closed, and it works itself into a knot in her chest.
“Well, sir, we seem to have a problem,” the leader says, motioning toward the piano with both hands.
The man from 2B squints.
“Oh. Oh, okay.” He turns and disappears down the hallway and into his office. Iris has a notion to go to her office, but her boss is not around. She thinks he is supposed to be in Madrid this week, or… Malta? She only remembers the letter M. In any case, he is gone. It’s early yet. She has some time to spare. They all blink at each other.
The man returns with a sledgehammer.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” the leader says, hands up.
“Don’t worry,” he says, swinging the hammer slowly through the air like a batter cooling his heels at the plate.
The stuck man presses himself backward, creating a seal between his body and the wall. He swallows.
Iris watches from behind as the sledgehammer careens heavily into the stairwell, slowly at first, a test hit, sending plaster dust crumbling to the carpet. A few heads poke out of doors at the other end of the hall, but no one comes out. They are frozen in fear or confusion, or some mix of the two. Instantly, he swings it again, closer to the stuck man who tries to duck but is only able to bend slightly sideways and cover his head.
“What the fuck!” he yells into his arms.
“Don’t worry.” He swings again and again, building speed until he settles on a rhythm. The noise of each hit echoes into the next, and a ropy vein pulses in the man’s hairy forearm. Iris sees all his veins working overtime, purple and engorged. It occurs to her that he may not be able to stop as the wall begins to curve jaggedly inward. He has made his mark, but he keeps going.
Finally, he stops swinging. His arm hangs slack, weighted by the hammer.
“Okay, try now,” he breathes heavily, wiping his forehead with the other hand.
Iris stares at his back, his white shirt damp and clinging. The men stare at the new wall.
“I am not going to be held responsible for this bullshit! There are forms you’ve gotta fill out, because this is not my responsibility,” the lead deliveryman says, waving his arms toward the wall. More slowly, as though to a child, he repeats, “I am not. Responsible. For this.” He pauses, his breathing steadying. “And I want that in writing signed by you.”
“I know. Try it now.”
The leader turns to look behind him, then looks back up the stairs. The man smiles, open faced, above them, the sledgehammer dangling at his side.
The four men grip the underside of the piano again, the stuck man now able to move through the hollowed out space. Together, they tilt it around the bend at the landing and up the second flight of stairs. Iris backs up against the opposite wall to let them past as they continue down the hall to 2B, the man trailing behind them, holding the hammer with both hands behind his back.