In the car, Iris begins to lose nerve. The air conditioner is broken, so she rolls her windows down. The wind blows hard in her ears and sets her hair flying as she rolls through the wide boulevards. It drowns out the radio, so all she hears is the flap and roar.
She is not even sure what she is doing. She should keep driving. She should go back home, where she can’t do any damage. She should count her blessings that she has a job, a home, a car, working lungs, and a beating heart.
But she makes the turn into the parking lot, parking her car at the far edge, against a strip of concrete filled in with low hedges. But instead of crossing the lot to the building, she steps down the small driveway into the residential area that overlooks the main street below.
She walks past bright, clean houses, small dogs yipping in yards. She steps out into the street to avoid sprinklers that douse the sidewalk, missing their mark, while the lawns gape, parched. In her sneakers, she is able to negotiate the heaving lumps in the sidewalk, where roots push up and out, unstoppable.
She turns down toward the main thoroughfare, and finds herself walking alongside the vacant lot, the one that didn’t used to be vacant. It is still empty. Emptier. The sign is gone.
I’m home. Are you?
I’m home. Where?
I’m home. So what?
She can see it sometimes, still, when she closes her eyes. She walks to the other side of the lot, her eyes never leaving the weedy ground inside the fence. There is no post. There is no hole in the ground. She grips the chain link in her fingers, searching for some sign of what she knows she saw, knows she did. The words exist only for her now. It is possible, probable, that no one else ever saw, because who else is looking off to the sides of things? Everyone she sees is facing forward, in motion toward a specific something. Her throat tightens and she swallows hard a few times, dry swallows, skin against skin.
She keeps walking, all the way to the hardware store several blocks west. She remembers it from a time her boss sent her to pick up a single 2-by-4, late on a Monday afternoon.
She wanders the aisles, sure of what she is looking for, but unsure of where it might be hidden. When she finds it, she approaches slowly, as though under surveillance. She can move so slowly that no motive can be assigned. She can move so slowly that any watcher would lose interest. This is where her power lies, and she is in just the right place now to claim it. She approaches the display, turns slowly on her heel to face it.
Iris doesn’t know anything about drills. She flags down a sales associate.
“Excuse me,” she says. “Can you tell me which drill bit will fit this one?” She holds the smallest power drill aloft, having chosen it for its smallish size, just the right fit for her purse.
“What kind of job is it?” he asks.
“The usual kind.”
“Um…”
“Just whatever will fit.”
“Okay,” he shrugs, and pulls a package from the wall. She snatches it from his fingers, pays, and ducks into the alley behind the store to assemble the thing, her back up against the hot painted brick wall, parts splayed out in the gravel.
By the time she arrives back at the office building, she is sweaty, thirsty, and made of steel. She creeps around to the back of the building, where she scans the parking lot for her boss’s car. She doesn’t see it anywhere. But the white van is there, dirtier still, and parked under a small diseased-looking tree, its slack branches laid out on the windshield and hood.
Iris climbs the stairs softly, stopping when a woman she’s never seen before passes her on the stairs carrying a stack of manila envelopes. She does not think it is beyond the realm of possibility that she is invisible when motionless. She has no evidence for or against. At the top of the stairs, she runs her hand over the jagged wall. It’s true that it opens up the space. It does feel easier to breathe.
When she unlocks the door, she is met with the bray of the burglar alarm, reassurance that the suite is empty, though her arrival is now announced. As she slips inside, she glances back to make sure that the door of 2B is closed before punching in the code.
She walks through the suite, checking each empty yet cluttered room. These rooms should be locked, she thinks.
She returns to the front lobby area right in front of her desk. It has to be the storage room— the official one. The back wall of that room. That is the shared wall, the wall against which her European colleague used to lean his chair. Who was on the other side then? What switch was made? To make sure she has the space right in her head, she steps out into the hall, faces her door. She visualizes the wall as it extends beyond the door and back into the room, both rooms, 2A and 2B. As she re-enters the suite, she traces the wall with her hand until she is inside the storage room. She finds the spot.
Crouching between the boxes and the smooth white wall, Iris takes the tool out of her bag. She visualizes her mark, then takes out her Sharpie to draw a wet black X. She flips the switch and watches the drill whir and spin before touching it to the center of the X. Once she has made a hole, made contact with the air on the other side, she runs the drill along its edges to enlarge the hole, make it swell beyond its borders, create new borders with each pivot of her wrist.
When she is finished, she switches the tool off, blows on the wall, and leans forward on her knees. She puts her eye to the hole and blinks. What does she see?
It is hard to make out. She sees the green chair. She sees the lavender carpet, the same carpet she is kneeling on. But her field of vision is limited. A hole any bigger would attract notice. Still, she can tell that the room is empty, even if she can’t see the whole room. There is a stillness. She unfocuses her eyes, and the air passing between the two rooms feels hazy and thin.
“There you are!”
The voice comes at her from behind and she jumps up onto her feet, letting the drill drop to the ground.
“Listen, I need this typed up within the hour— I’m already late.” Her boss, in only his shirt and tie, no jacket, extends his arm toward her, waiting. She takes the notebook pages from his hand.
“Thanks,” he calls back over his shoulder as he marches toward his office. “And make twelve copies!” She is still standing in the storage room.
She looks down at the pages in her hand. She leaves her things in the room and carries the pages to her desk. She sits down, and the leather sticks to her bare thighs. The air conditioning is turned up too high and she has no sweater. Every hair on her body stands on end. She turns on her computer, and it lights up with a soft chime. She lays the pages before her on the desk while the computer warms up. His handwriting is getting worse. She turns her head toward the hallway and wonders which door he came from. These pages are going to be difficult to interpret.
She begins typing. Once she is finished, and he has left for whatever he is already late for, she will reward herself by kneeling underneath the water cooler and sucking down water as fast as it will come. Until then, she is stuck to her chair.
Later, as her boss is walking out the door, he stops in front of her desk, where she sits brushing the keyboard with her two index fingers, the job done.
“You were late today,” he says.
Iris squints up at him.
“About that,” she begins, hoping he will reveal the tone of his comment before she has to finish the sentence.
“It won’t happen again,” he says, stepping on her line.
“No. No, it won’t.” She nods gravely, wondering if in fact he listens to any of his voicemail, ever.
“No. No it won’t.” He repeats, looking right into her eyes, and now she is not sure what they are talking about.