“How are you going to get it through the door?” she asks.
He stops and turns.
“What?”
“How are you going to fit the piano through your door?”
He turns back without answering her. Just then, the men stop. They set the piano down in the hall.
A voice calls out, “Sir?”
He flits down the hall and meets them in front of his door. Iris follows at a reasonable distance.
“What if you tilt it sideways?”
“No way.”
“But I measured. It should fit.”
“Well it looks like you measured wrong.”
They continue back and forth, even at one point attempting a sideways tilt to appease him, but the legs are too long, and don’t appear to detach. For a minute, they all stare at it glumly.
“I could make the doorway bigger.”
“No,” the formerly stuck man says emphatically.
Finally, a delivery slip is signed and the delivery men shuffle out, nodding to her as they pass. The man stands before his brand new piano and despondently taps middle C.
Iris begins to approach, but as she gets close, she hears the phone ringing in her office and feels compelled to answer it. He doesn’t look up as she squeezes past the piano and lets herself in. She disengages the braying alarm as quickly as possible and pounces on the ringing phone.
“This is Larmax, Inc., how may I help you?”
“What time is it?” her boss asks, yelling into the phone over the sounds of traffic.
“I–I don’t know!” she yells to match him. “I haven’t turned my computer on yet.” She presses the power button.
“It’s not nine. Go home and then come back at nine.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Milan. Until the end of the week. I have to go.” He hangs up.
Iris watches her computer screen come to life and glances at the time. It is 8:47.
When she pokes her head back out, the man is gone. The piano still sits in the corner between their two doors. She steps out into the hall.
There is no bench, so Iris stands while she runs her fingers lightly over the keys, too lightly, even, to make a sound. She drapes both hands over the keys and begins gently tapping her fingers against them, letting them dance across in silence. She never did learn to play piano. This way, she can play anything and it will sound beautiful.
She closes her eyes and listens to the sound of her fingers slipping on the ivory, slowly, across and back, until the door to 2B opens with a swift thud and she instinctively jerks her hands behind her back.
The man does not look at her as he steps out and unfolds a padded nylon slipcover, which he spreads across the piano, pulling it this way and that so it hangs evenly. Iris watches, curling her toes inside her shoes.
“What are you going to do with it?” she blurts out.
“Huh?” he says, smoothing a wrinkle.
“I was just wondering what it’s for.”
He stops adjusting the slipcover and stands up to face her.
“I’m not sure that I’m sure yet,” he says. “But it seemed like a nice, heavy thing to have.”
“Aren’t you worried,” she asks, “that someone might complain… you know, about the wall? About you?”
He looks down at the piano again and rubs his hand in a slow circle over the slipcover.
“I don’t really think anyone will bother to complain,” he replies, “do you?” He looks up then and watches her unmoving face for a moment. She feels his eyes searching, imagines them like small rays of light trawling across her skin, but she can’t bring herself to meet his gaze before he turns around and steps back inside.
She doesn’t know who would complain. She doesn’t, in fact, know to whom one would complain. It’s not as though there’s anybody in charge here.
SOUNDS OF SLEEP
The home office always feels strange to Neil, like a neglected great-aunt’s house— a burden, a source of disquieting and inexplicable guilt. Not one solitary thing about the place has changed in the years he’s spent in Shaffer-Bruns’ employ, not the color of the walls, not the smell of the elevator, not the position of one single chair. Only the people have changed, the original Shaffer and Bruns having been replaced by a series of go-getters and benefactors of nepotism, bodies and hair slid into the same suits, the receptionist a vaguely different brunette every other month. His stomach flutters, his head pulsing. He only just flew back.
No, he remembers, it’s been a couple days. So why does he still feel like a foggy approximation of himself? Why does that tightness, that dryness in his blood stay with him?
Neil realizes he hasn’t been listening to the pitch, and straightens his posture, as though it signifies his investment in the meeting.
“What we have here,” Mason continues, “is a revolution in personal regeneration— more commonly known as sleep. But what we’re looking to do with this product is sell the idea of living up to one’s full potential. The idea of perfectly restful sleep as the key to personal betterment and success— not just a product, but an idea of what never was, but now might be.”
He listens, kind of. Mostly he is just sick, and thinking about the sickness. The place has obviously been cleaned within the last couple hours, because the scent of industrial-strength cleaning fluid burns his nostrils, but the place still looks dirty. A plastic plant sits next to him, its leaves covered in a thin layer of dust, his first clue it’s a fake. All these conference rooms are the same, he thinks. You can’t clean them enough— they always seem to be hiding something— why else would they need to be cleaned with goddamn pine-scented lighter fluid every day. His nausea is still in check, though, probably.
His attention drifts as his colleagues strategize, and he remembers lying in bed in the summertime as a kid, with the mosquitoes buzzing outside his window, how he’d kick off the sheets and revel in his nakedness, with just those hints of light coming through the blinds like lasers, that cumulative yellow glow. He would lie like that, feeling that he was waiting for something. But what age is he imagining himself to be. Six? Thirteen? And where— what window, what bed? He feels no physical connection to any of his former bodies.
“What does everyone want?” Mason pauses two seconds, one, two, before answering his own question, “to be his or her best self. To be free from the worry that he or she is languishing, squandering his or her time on earth. We have to get to the heart of these desires— which are also fears, can’t forget that.”
Listening now, quietly flustered, Neil wonders if he missed the introduction of the product, the actual physical object he’s to be selling. He makes eye contact with Mason and juts his chin upward.
“Finch?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, did I— what is this again?”
His colleagues exchange looks.
“We went over this at the beginning. It’s a sleep aid.”
“Okay, sorry. You mean, like, a pill?”
Mason puts down his laser pointer, sending the red light ricocheting across the table and against the opposite wall.
“Okay, let’s skip forward briefly so you can all get a feel for the product and then we’ll continue from there. Angela, could you bring in the samples?”
Mason’s assistant rises from the table and returns a minute later with a cardboard box, from which she distributes a collection of cellophane packages containing fluffy fabric eye masks with small speakers by both ears. Neil opens his and straps it onto his face with a Velcro strip in the back.