Tucked safely between the bookshelves with her eyes closed, Iris feels this happening, but when the song ends, another doesn’t come on. There is no static, only silence. The room is filled again with the breath of objects, the imperceptible fidgeting of a stapler on the desk, of a sofa sinking on its springs.
She glances around her and is suddenly struck by the fact that this isn’t her room. She gravitated toward it instinctively, but — there’s no bed. There are none of her things. She doesn’t even recognize this room. She rises quickly and opens the shutters to find the same yard she looked out at just minutes before, only the sun is brighter, as though it’s moving in closer, illuminating and alienating her at once. She tries to open the window, but it’s locked, and she can’t find the latch.
On a hunch, she tries the door; it’s locked too.
“Hello?” she says, then louder, “Hello!” and at that, she hears Sebastian run to the door and begin to snarl, his growling erupting finally into a persistent bark.
She retreats back to the window, and she can just barely hear the voices outside again, whispering, chattering, but from the small window, she can’t see anybody, nor make out any words.
“Hello?” she tries again, toward the window this time, but the glass is thick, the sun full and blinding.
The sun isn’t going anywhere, and neither is she, and suddenly, she wonders if the dog on the other side of the door is Sebastian at all, but then she is awake in her own bed in her own apartment and her fear feels misplaced. It is dissipated but not gone. She lies back on her pillow, crickets chirping outside her city window, and does not fall asleep again.
SICK
The night turns over into morning and Iris sits up in bed. She can tell already that it will be a hot day, as the sun shines mercilessly bright rays into her room. Then her alarm goes off and she hits it before the second beep. She blinks slowly and winces. Her eyes ache. The relief of closing them lasts only until they open again. It is as though she has no control over the operation.
She walks into the kitchen to dig around for breakfast. There, she sees the empty milk bottle on the counter, the unopened box of cereal turned on its side. Her hunger pulls at her, the distinction between nausea and want blurred. She tears the top off the box and begins shoveling the cereal into her mouth, barely swallowing before pushing the next handful in. The urgency of her hunger finally recedes and she sets the box down on the counter. She coughs and a slimy chunk of bran flies back up her throat and into her mouth. She spits it out into the sink.
She slumps over to the couch, the little radio sitting where she left it. She picks it up and begins to examine it, peering into its holes, blowing more dust out of it. She stares at it, its speakers like big insect eyes, its cassette deck mouth. If it was his, it’s hers now, and though it fills her with a kind of satisfaction to have something of his, she isn’t sure why she took it, or what she plans to do with it, if anything.
She sits there, still turning the radio over in her hands and goes over the day as she expects it to unfold. Traffic. Park. Up the stairs. Alarm. Desk. Phone. Light of the computer screen. She will listen for any movement from the man next door, and it will come or it won’t. Or maybe it’s her turn now, and she’ll wait for any movement from herself. She will have messages or she will have a list of tasks and she will do them or she won’t or she will spend twenty minutes in the sickly green-lit bathroom while women bang on the door and she will not be able to operate the doorknob.
“I’m sorry,” she’ll say. “I’m trying, I am.” And when the banging grows more urgent, she’ll search the walls frantically for a window that will never materialize.
She tries to picture the man next door in his office, doing whatever he is doing, but his features are hard to delineate. It’s as though she’s never quite looking at him. She’s so intimidated by his presence that she can’t bring her eyes to focus on him. She stares into the radio’s face again, and tries to imagine his, but all she can conjure is his earthy smell, and the way he seems to fill space, even through a wall, in such a way that she can feel it in her own space. His face could be anybody’s. Inertia keeps her sitting, keeps her staring at the radio in her hands. She turns it on, turns the dial a notch and snowy static fills the room. She switches it off again, and puts the radio down.
A thought occurs to her, then. She gets up and goes into the kitchen, quickly outlining a brief speech in her head, and reaches for the cordless phone on the wall.
She dials the office until her own voice greets her, Thank you for calling…
At her own voice’s prompting, she dials 3 for her boss’s voicemail and again she is greeted warmly, this time by the boss. Everyone is so polite when they’re not there. At the tone, she gears herself up to sound pitiful.
“Hi,” she says, “it’s me. I am so sorry to do this, but I have an awful sore throat and a fever of a hundred and one. I don’t think I’m going to be able to come in today. Hopefully, I’ll be better tomorrow. Sorry.”
She drops the phone on the counter and leans on her elbows. The new emptiness of the day looms ahead like a fog. She expects to feel guilty. She expects the guilt to envelop her, encase her limbs. But this isn’t guilt. This is something else. This is something she could see herself doing more often.
She heads back to her bedroom and dresses in a pair of cutoffs and a white tank top, the sunlight pushing the walls of her small apartment inward. She combs knots out of her hair and wonders what she is dressing for. What could she do? What could be waiting for her? She’s sweating; it’s too hot already. Her cell phone rings on the floor and she picks it up.
“Hey, what’s up?” Mallory sighs.
“I called in sick.”
“Good for you. I got fired.”
They agree to meet at Ray’s in an hour, and Iris finishes getting ready. She swishes mouthwash while tying her shoes, humming through the stinging green liquid. She picks her big canvas tote bag from the top shelf of her closet and switches her belongings from her purse. She’s sitting on the closet floor with her makeup and billfold, her keys and gum wrappers in piles around her, thinking how long it’s been since she’s organized anything, her bedroom a jumble of hastily stashed clothes, cheap, falling-apart shoes, and dust bunnies illuminated by sunbeams, when a loud rush of hissing snow comes blaring through the open door. She jumps up and rushes back to the living room, where the little radio leans against the arm of the couch, pervading the room with white noise. She snatches it up and jabs the off switch hard. Off— it’s off this time— was it off before? The room is silent again, and Iris carries the radio back to her bedroom. She sets it on the dresser next to her stereo. She turns her stereo on, and Elvis is singing about suspicious minds. She looks at the radio beside her stereo, side by side, the one only two years old, black and a little imposing, her daily companion, the other one a flat gray, toy-like, and seemingly quite old, with a slightly bent antenna. She picks up the little radio, flips open the back and removes the batteries, tucking them away together in her top drawer as the horns swell brightly, trumpeting the day outside her smudgy window. She listens to the rest of the song standing against the dresser, her head resting on her folded arms.
She arrives at Ray’s Coffee Shop before Mallory and finds a table upstairs, looking out over the bottom level. This way, she can see her when she comes in, and she can watch people unnoticed. She can stare right down at their heads in this wooden room, the walls, floor, ceiling, and tables all the same shade of wood, like the place was carved out of a single tree, then filled with soft red couches and stacks of newspaper. Most of the customers are alone, spines curved toward computer screens, books, or newspapers. She remembers that she has not read a real honest-to-god book in possibly months.