“Now press the button just above your right ear. No, your right. Okay, everybody got it? Okay, I’ve got mine on too now. Now what do you notice?”
Neil presses his button, and hears a gentle lap of water, a mild, slow wind, and then a sound he can’t identify, some kind of ambient, warped sound, like some inarticulate, anguished call.
“I hear crickets,” a new saleswoman says.
“I could fall asleep right here, no joke,” says another guy, “this is awesome.”
“I… uh… I’m not sure what this is supposed to be,” says Neil.
“I think you’ve got whale songs,” says Mason, “but more importantly, how does it make you feel?”
Neil pictures the room then, all of them facing each other around the big oblong conference room table, blindfolded.
“Um… good, I guess?” He listens to the plaintive wail, seemingly so far away, but really nestled right by his ear, and imagines himself marooned in a paddleboat on some murky sea. The room disappears for him, and he feels suddenly, palpably trapped.
“Good. Now keep these on for now, and let’s talk about where we go from ‘good’.”
THIEF
At noon, Iris goes to the café for lunch. She orders a tuna salad sandwich and selects a table on the patio, right next to the wooden railing. Behind it: a thick row of greenery, then the sidewalk, then the street. She sits facing out to watch traffic, but the cars are blending together today. She is unable to latch onto their drivers, to focus on their faces long enough to imagine identities and destinations for them. They may as well be running independently, a thousand driverless cars careening toward the freeway onramp. She takes a bite of her sandwich, the bread toasted a deep brown, the filling too dry.
She has brought nothing to read. She reads the words, “Mike sucks” carved into the white metal table and wonders what Mike did and maybe he deserves this character assassination and maybe he doesn’t, but whoever wrote it wins or thinks they have won, she supposes.
A horn honks and jolts her out of her reverie, but all she sees is a blonde woman in her fifties parallel parking between two empty cars, no one else around, and she honks again, mad in general.
Iris turns her gaze away from the street and toward the planter that runs all the way along the railing, assorted greenery tangled together, a smattering of flowers. She tries to describe this view to someone in her head. It was beautiful, she begins to someone, not meaning it, starting something not worth finishing. She doesn’t know the names of any of these plants, any of these flowers, and she can’t tell where they begin or end, or who planted them, or when they will die. All these planned pockets of nature are indecipherable to her. It’s all just spilling yet contained. She squints against the sun and feels a headache rising from the base of her skull. She’s lost her appetite.
A hoarse laugh comes roiling from two tables down, and she turns to look, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. The old men are both laughing now. She didn’t even see them. They clutch their knees and lean backward into their laughter, crumb-filled plates and empty glasses piled between them. The laughter sounds painful, as though forced out with the last of their air. She didn’t hear the joke.
When Iris gets back to the office, she notes the mangled wall at the top of the stairs, but the piano has disappeared from the hall. Airlifted, demolished, vaporized, plucked in the span of a lunch. She stands in the space it had previously occupied and leans forward to press her ear against the door of 2B, but the door is all she hears.
Inside her office, she quickly checks the window that looks down over the parking lot. The white van is gone, so the man must be gone too. But where did the piano go?
She drops her bag onto her desk and steps into the hall again. She stands for a moment, facing 2B’s door, before trying the doorknob. It doesn’t open at first, leading her to presume it’s locked, but she jerks the knob hard one last time and it pops open with a scuffing sound, as though she’s broken through something. Startled but not displeased, Iris steps inside.
Not much has changed, though the place seems neater, boxes tucked away somewhere. The only evidence of a Murphy bed is a skinny rectangular outline in the wall that she wouldn’t even notice if she weren’t looking for it. And for the first time, she notices another door, in the wall farthest from 2A and painted the same color so it blends in seamlessly, a closet maybe, or leading to a whole other room, but when she tries it, it won’t open. Even when she shakes and pulls with all her strength, caring little whether she breaks the knob clean off, it won’t open.
Finally she lets go and pulls her sweating hands away. She turns around then, catching her breath, and her gaze settles on a little radio, the little radio she’s heard him play day after day, morning after morning, sitting on the windowsill. She picks it up and turns the dial a few times, each tick bringing her to a different quality of static, some crackling, some hissing, some barely audible at all.
She turns it off, and only then notices how dusty it is. She blows on it, and a cloud of dust disperses and floats down to the carpet. She clutches it to her chest, and before she quite takes note of what she’s doing, she’s left the room, closing the door behind her, stepping back inside her own office, and dropping the radio in her purse, glancing about with forced casualness, as though someone might be watching.
Before she leaves at the end of the day, she checks the window again, seeing that the white van has returned, in a different spot now. After setting the alarm and locking up, she stops at the door of 2B and nestles her face at its edge, where she can squint into that thin space that leads directly into the room. She narrows her eyes and imagines she can see him in there, or at least the rough shape of him, and that he can feel her on the other side of the door.
She thinks about knocking, but something stops her. She stands back, hanging there for a moment before backing away slowly, turning just as she reaches the top of the stairs.
DISASTERS
On the way home, she stops at the grocery store to pick up milk, cereal, lettuce, iced tea, and trash bags. She grips her penciled list against the steering wheel as she pulls into the parking lot, the sweat from her palm wilting the gas station receipt paper. Her palms sweat when she drives, just like her mother’s do. As a child riding in the passenger seat, she watched her mother wipe her hands off on her jeans at every stop light. When she noticed Iris looking, her mother would laugh nervously and look away, every time. How much sweat on every trip downtown, to the store, to the dentist, over and over through the years, how many small laughs, how many sheepish looks between them have been exchanged and forgotten? On longer trips, it was her father who always drove, her mother looking out the window, right temple pressed to the glass, her eyes turned to the road. Iris wipes her hands off under her seat and puts the car in park.
In the brightly fluorescent lit store, she picks a basket from the stack and starts down the bakery aisle to admire the decorated cakes before attending to her business. The lights, the expansive artificiality of them, make her feel like it is 3:00 in the morning, though the aisles are packed with workers on their way home. It makes her think of disasters, and of preparations for long car trips, driving toward safety, into the night.
Disaster is another word whose meaning is probably a little different from the meaning she ascribes to it. The word brings up images of blank faces and closed doors. She can’t quite imagine what the beginning of a disaster would look like. She wonders, if she were ever in a position to witness one unfolding, if she were right there in the middle of it, would she recognize it?