She frowned, confused, but righted her expression quickly. She fumbled out of her chair and followed him out of his office, but he never looked back, and kept walking right out the main door.
Iris paused and looked around at all the desks. She didn’t even know what they were doing, typing, talking. They didn’t get that far. She had the job before she walked through the door. Even before she saw the ad, while she was lying in bed awake in the summer muck, wondering how, wondering what, she had it.
When she showed up for work the following Monday wearing the same outfit, as yet unable to afford another one, the layout of the suite had changed. Now there was only one desk in the lobby area, equipped with a computer and telephone. She sat down at it and waited. From time to time she heard a door open or close, or bits of conversation from other offices, but no one came out. She checked the boss’s office, but he wasn’t there.
When the phone on her desk rang, she picked it up.
“Larmax, Inc. Hello?” She looked around, hoping for someone, anyone to bail her out.
“Can I help you?”
The man on the other end asked to be connected to accounting.
“One moment, please,” she said, and tucked the receiver into her desk’s empty top drawer, trying in vain to place it gently, so the person on the other end wouldn’t hear a thump or clatter.
She knocked on the first door she came to and walked in, panicked, before anyone responded. A woman looked up from her desk, annoyed.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry,” Iris said, “but who does someone talk to if they want to talk to accounting?”
The woman paused a few seconds. “Voicemail,” she said.
Iris returned to her desk and figured out how to forward the call to voicemail, whose voicemail she didn’t know. She decided then that this woman would be her go-to until the boss returned to fill her in on her duties. She wondered if she should go back and introduce herself. She felt like a trespasser, an unwelcome addition and she needed an ally.
A few minutes later, the boss arrived, disheveled, blaming traffic for his tardiness, and gave her a quick rundown of her tasks: Phones, faxes, errands. She wrote down everything he said, hungry for instruction.
He coached her on her inflection.
“When you answer, say, ‘Larmax, Inc.’ with an upward lilt. Not like it’s a question, just… do you see what I’m saying? Just, inviting. Right?”
She practiced in the car on her way home, in the shower, again and again until it was perfect, a coo, automatic.
The next day, she looked for that woman, to thank her for helping her out on her first day, but she never saw her. Every time she checked her office, it was empty.
As the months wore on, the number of people in the office seemed to dwindle. At least seemed to. She didn’t know what number they had started at. Over time, the number of sandwiches she fetched at lunchtime fell to five, then four, then the lunch orders stopped coming. She could park anywhere she wanted. The boss was frequently away, but there didn’t seem to be anyone in charge in his absence. She never learned any names because she never seemed to see anyone more than once, or never for more than a minute or two at a time. She got so used to saying, I’m sorry, he’s not in right now, may I take a message? that she sometimes said it even when he was there, right down the hall.
Some time later, he called from a business trip to tell her he wouldn’t be in that day, or the next day, and that he wasn’t going to tell her where he was so that she wouldn’t have to lie if anyone asked.
“You’ll just say you don’t know. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He hung up before it occurred to her to ask who he was avoiding, when they might call, or what she was to do in the meantime. She wouldn’t have asked anyhow. As long as her phone kept ringing, as long as she had a to-do list, as long as she had a place to go every morning and enough money to keep herself alive, and as long as she didn’t have to look directly at the earth’s edge, then nothing else mattered.
****
Iris blinks heavily and realizes she must have been in the shower a long time, because the water is freezing. The CD is back at the beginning, and Buddy Holly is singing about that crazy feeling again. She shuts off the water and rubs out the goosebumps on her arms.
She dries off and pads into the kitchen, where she sees that her grocery bag is still sitting by the door. She checks the milk and finds that it has gone lukewarm, so she pours it all down the drain, and she won’t eat the raisin bran dry, so really, it is as though she hasn’t run the errand at all. She wasn’t even at the store. She didn’t see anything.
DAY OFF
When he gets home, Neil drops his things in the kitchen and examines the contents of his fridge. He has an urge to cook something really elaborate and messy, like enchiladas suiza, and use every utensil and piece of cookware in the house, or something that would require a whole lot of chopping, like ratatouille. Just really fucking COOK, he thinks. But he doesn’t have any real food, just a box of mac n’ cheese and a mysterious Tupperware container he isn’t about to open. And he’s too tired to go to the store, and he’d resent his own whimsy when it came time to do the dishes anyhow, so he makes the mac n’ cheese and leaves it to cool on the counter.
He steps over to the couch and lies down, kicking off his shoes and letting them drop off the side with a thud. He rolls over onto his stomach and shuts his eyes— just for a second, he thinks, his eyeballs dry and throbbing. Tomorrow is his first real day off in weeks. He tries to think about what he’ll do with the time. He’ll run some errands, sure, but then what? He pictures himself strolling through some park with coffee and the paper, but he doesn’t know what park it’s supposed to be. Has he even been to any parks in town? He can’t even remember seeing any. He pictures himself going places, far away places, marching in step with the plump yellow sun, following its command as though he is the only one listening hard enough to hear it. His mind’s eye is filled with the glow of this imaginary sun, and he sinks into it, into a heavy sleep, the phone in his front shirt pocket pressing itself into his chest.
Iris decides to do laundry to clear her mind. If she focuses on a specific task, then she can forget that this day ever happened, and anything forgotten is not any thing at all. She throws clothes gathered on the bathroom floor into the hamper and hauls it all to the laundry room, detergent and jar full of quarters clutched to her chest.
She loads the laundry and sits on the floor watching her clothes swim like soapy anemones through the glass. The room is so warm and white that she loves to wait while the machines run, despite the multiple signs warning of toxic substances in the room. She can’t imagine there could be anything so toxic here, and what does toxic even mean? She breathes in the smell of other people’s soap and fabric softener, crumpled sheets of it haunting the corners of the room like dust.
When it is time to switch her clothes to the dryer, she finds that all three of them are filled with dry clothes that are cool to the touch. The clothes are a little stiff and musty, as though they’ve been sitting a long time. Someone has forgotten that they ever did laundry, or decided to simplify their life, right in the middle of a cycle, relinquishing material things once and for all. She could imagine herself doing the former, but not the latter. She pulls the clothes out of two dryers and stacks them on the folding table, loading her own in their place. It is always startling when she is reminded of the neighbors she sees so rarely. It is as though there is a silent understanding that no one will walk the halls at the same time. She feels awkward handling someone else’s underwear and children’s socks, so she goes back to her apartment after loading the quarters and pressing start.