She fills and fires up the tea kettle, and then hears her phone ringing from her purse. She lowers the flame of the stove before going to answer it; the screen tells her it’s Neil.
“Hello?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Hello? Hello?”
Still nothing, and Iris sits down, listening as the silence takes the form of an underwater beat.
“Hello?” she tries one more time.
Then she turns up her phone’s volume, so the beat is more distinct, and gradually, she begins to think she hears soft breathing.
He’s asleep, she thinks, and covers the other ear so she can hear better.
It’s been a while since he’s pocket-dialed her. When it happens, she always stays on the line. Usually, she hears the rustling of his pocket, muffled voices, maybe the sound of a car door slamming. Now she turns in to face the couch cushions, and pictures Neil curled up like a cat beside her.
The beat she perceives sounds labored, somehow, as though it is coming up against resistance. It has force behind it, and she thinks the breathing sound is strained too. It strikes Iris how pitiful it might seem that she is clinging to this voyeurism as some proof of closeness, but she can’t help but cling, knowing all too well how easily he can slip away. Shortly after the accident, before they packed up the house and moved away, he started going for walks after dinner, long walks that would have him gone until very late. Iris always wanted to follow him, but she restrained herself, sensing that he wanted to be alone. She would lie in bed and imagine him scaling mountains, finding caves in forests she imagined could be found beyond the limits of their small town.
When he kept doing it in their new town, their parents came to accept that he needed to go off by himself. His therapist told them it was perfectly normal. His therapist told them to let him have this one private thing. That’s what Iris gleaned, at least, from listening in on her parents’ side of the phone conversations, crouched outside an open window, hugging Sebastian’s face to her hip with the mosquitoes buzzing.
Then one night, he didn’t come back. In the morning, their parents were struck dumb with worry. This time, Iris thought to listen in on the phone in her parents’ bedroom as her mother muttered unintelligibly to the police on the kitchen phone, her father standing back with arms crossed against the living room wall. The police told her to calm down. They took her name and told her they couldn’t file a missing persons report this soon, and they asked her, Finch, huh? Isn’t your boy the same one who’s always wandering at all hours? Her mother hung up then, and Iris listened to the dial tone for a minute.
When Neil walked through the front door a couple of hours later and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, he didn’t say a word to anyone. Their parents stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched him in silence, clutching their own hands. Iris was stepping out of the bathroom in her towel at the top of the stairs as he came up, and she was so startled to see him, as though she had already settled on the idea that he had run away for good, and she recalls now how un-startled he looked, how thoroughly aloof, as he walked past her into his room, and shut the door.
“Neil, can you hear me?”
The sounds seem to soften now, and she wonders if he was dreaming— like when a dog starts whimpering or kicking his legs in his sleep— or is dreaming still.
“Goodnight,” she says, and hangs up, as the kettle begins its high, mournful whistle.
DISINTEGRATION
There on the pristine Ikea couch, with stocking feet hanging off one side and his mouth open against the upholstery, Neil dreams that he is swimming toward a buoy that bobs in the distance, in water so murky he feels his body disappear beneath its surface, his arms only re-materializing as they reach up to stroke. His muscles pulse powerfully, arcing forward, up into the cool air, but as soon as they dip back down into the water, he feels lost, helpless as a ghost, his kicks theoretical at best, bringing him no closer to anything, his body a cloud of particles pressing together and releasing in a never-ending cycle.
Somehow, he reaches shore, and then, somehow, a city, where an undefined cataclysmic event has occurred. He finds himself pulling bodies out of buildings, running from rushing fireballs, punch-kick-shoving his way through the wreckage. He’s saving himself, and a growing pack of followers, out of the darkness.
When he finally wakes up, blinking fast and flicking his head from side to side until the realization of his body and couch dawns on him, he can’t piece together what was happening. The only image he retains is of himself, running, running into nothing and away from everything, and that too begins to fade as he perches himself up on his elbows and glances, puffy-eyed, at the cold macaroni on the counter.
SIGNAL
After folding and putting away the laundry, Iris gets ready for bed, and while she’s wandering through the apartment brushing her teeth, she pulls the little radio out of her purse. It’s so small and toy-like, a physical cartoon. She switches it on again and turns the dial slowly in search of a station, but still she finds only approximations— vague, formless music mostly drowned out by snow, quiet voices bulldozed by a steady crackle, and then nothing. She sets it down on the couch and returns to the bathroom.
In bed, Iris lies there, wanting sleep. And as the night grows darker outside her window, and sleep finally finds her, she sinks down again, into the place where her dreams have taken up residence.
In the old house, she finds herself in the overstuffed shed, the walls teeming with rusty tools, boxes for long-forgotten appliances, a pile, ceiling high, of Time magazines.
On the floor, next to an old, splintered yellow table, she finds a radio. It is not an old radio, but it has been forgotten. She runs her finger over the speakers and draws a line through the soft layer of dust. She leans down and blows, loosening a cloud of it. The dust settles all around, spread thin now, dissipated but not gone. She picks up the radio and cradles it in her arms, walks out the door into the house with the cord trailing on the ground.
She walks through the kitchen, where Sebastian still lazes on the kitchen table, past the picture window that looks out onto the yard. She hears voices coming from out there, frenzied little murmurings building in volume, but when she looks, there’s nobody there, and the voices have stopped. For a moment, she stands still, waiting for them to start up again, but they don’t. Sebastian follows her with his eyes as she continues down the hallway. In her room, with its flickering overhead lamp and shutters closed tight, she plugs the radio in between two heavy oak bookshelves and sets it on an empty shelf. The radio lights up. It’s been waiting for this.
She turns the dial slowly, stopping at each station, though nothing is coming in. With each turn of the dial, the static grows more opaque, a wall of sound that creates a kind of hush throughout the room, objects becoming even more still. The house stops creaking. There is no space in the air anymore.
Finally, the dial hits on something. Clear as water, a signal comes in. Iris backs away from the radio and sits on the cold floor. She pushes her body in between the two bookshelves and hums along, humming, You send me, darling you send me, honest you do, honest you do, honest you do, and the trees outside bend beneath the solid force of the wind. Everything bends ever closer to the ground.