He maintains eye contact for a long moment before turning and opening the door out into the hall. When the door clicks shut behind him, she takes several long, full breaths. She gets up and hurries to the window that looks out over the parking lot and watches him get into his car, in his parking spot, his car which was not there before. She looked. She’s sure of it. As sure as a person can be, which is almost sure. In any case, he is gone now.
Iris drinks several cupfuls of water before returning to the matter at hand. She enters the storage room, settles in front of the shared wall, and lines her left eye up with the small hole, her palms pressed to the wall on either side as though holding it still. Perhaps, she thinks, she could lift it up like a garage door or push it aside like a curtain. She wants a way into his space, like he’s gotten into hers, without even seeming to try. Iris massages the wall with her palms, fostering its potential energy.
She blinks into the other room, her eyelashes brushing the upper edge of the hole. Her breath hits the wall and comes back at her, then back again, in an endless loop of humidity, a private tropical climate, one inch by one inch. Still, the other room remains empty, or, full of things that sit and settle as she is doing right now. Then there is the sound of a door opening, and thinking it is her boss returning, she pushes herself awkwardly up onto her feet and begins pretending to look for some office supply that she needs in order to do something or other, but no one comes, and she realizes it is 2B that someone has entered. She can hardly tell the difference between here and there.
Slowly, she lowers herself down again onto her knees and looks into the hole to see the man’s gray trousers and black dress shoes. He is standing still, and Iris wonders if he is thinking, or just unsure what to do now. She wishes she could see all of him. There might have been a better way of doing this. If she had any technical savvy, she could have installed a hidden camera. But this is her way, and it will have to do.
She keeps watching, as he disappears, and returns with a large cardboard box, into which he places several folders. He disappears again, and returns with a newspaper-wrapped bundle in the shape of a lamp, which he then places gingerly into the box before taping it shut. Then he walks off again, taking the box with him, and doesn’t come back.
Eventually, Iris pulls her face away from the wall, and for a moment, she forgets what she is waiting for— it’s just her, alone in a room. But, remembering herself, she stands up, runs out of the room to the hall window and looks down onto the parking lot.
She watches as he places the box in the white van, then pulls out a stack of flat boxes, which he hitches under his arm and carries back to the building. Iris rushes back to the storage room and takes her place at the wall.
When she hears the door, and sees his bottom half re-enter the frame, she watches breathlessly, an invisible barricade at her windpipe forged out of sheer concentration. She watches, and listens to the rustle of old paper, as the map comes down from the wall. He rolls it up with his fists at waist-level, seeming to amble casually through the space and out of view. When he comes back, the map is gone. He has a tape gun in hand, and begins putting together another box.
Iris lets out a strange squeak of a gasp, then ducks away from the wall.
The man stops.
“Hello?” he says.
She burrows her face up against the carpet, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Hello?” he says again.
Iris lifts up her face and slowly brings it up to the hole again. He is closer now, and seems to be advancing, slowly, but with intent, in her direction. When he stops, she looks down at his shoes, just inches from the wall. If one could look at both rooms with just a cross-section of the flimsy drywall between them, there she would be, knelt at the man’s feet, with him none the wiser.
“Hello?” he mutters softly this time, and Iris is close enough to hear it.
“Are you leaving now?” she answers, then covers her mouth.
“Who said that?”
“…me.”
“Where are— ”
Iris doesn’t have to answer, because he quickly figures it out himself. He lowers himself to the floor, and his eyes lock onto her one.
“What did you say?”
“I asked if you were… leaving.”
“I’m trying something,” he says, after a moment.
“What?”
“I’m just trying something. You’ll see.”
“Have… have you really been living here?”
He sits up then, so her view stops at the bend of his waist, the tuck of his white shirt.
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“I know I don’t have to.”
“I’ve got it under control.”
She watches his breath move the thin fabric of his shirt.
“This is my wall, you know,” he says.
“Only that side is,” she says. “This side is mine.”
He laughs then, a quiet, raspy laugh.
“True enou— ”
“— Where are you going?” she interrupts.
“Nowhere. Not just yet.”
“Oh.”
For all the times she’s longed to talk to him like this, her mind is racing, clawing for anything to say.
“Where did you come from?” she asks, finally.
There’s a pause between the rooms.
“What are you after?” he asks.
“I…” she begins. She can’t remember when she noticed the office next door was empty. She only noticed when it filled again, an anchor materialized, as though formed out of the air, for her to grab onto. But there was someone there before him, before her even, and another before that. When did she start needing an anchor? Walls lined with closed doors have trained her after all this time to perceive the weight of things she can’t see. She closes her eyes and feels his weight on the carpet fibers on the other side of the wall.
“What are you after?” she counters.
His face is right there, though he doesn’t look at her— she sees only the corner of his mouth and his rough chin.
“I can’t explain it to you.”
“Try.”
“I’ve been trying to figure it out for a long time.”
“If you tell me who you are, and what you’ve come here for,” Iris begins carefully, “I’ll listen.”
“I know,” he whispers, and Iris watches his mouth.
“Can I come over there?” she whispers back.
And before he can answer, the phone rings, and it triggers a reflex in her, snapping her out of the smallness they’ve created.
“Hold on,” she says, “hold on— ” her heart beating fast.
She jerks her head back from the wall. She takes a deep breath and scrambles to her feet to get to the phone.
“Larmax, Inc., how can I help you?”
“Um, hi. I don’t know if this is the right number,” a woman says.
“Um,” Iris echoes, “how can I help you?”
“I’m calling about the job? The opening for a receptionist?”
“I’m the receptionist.”
“Oh. Huh. What number is this?”
“487-2359.”
“Hold on.”
Iris listens to the rustling of paper.
“Oh,” the woman comes back on the line, “my mistake,” and hangs up.
Iris hangs up in turn and goes back to her water, but it goes down the wrong way when she takes a sip and leaves her coughing, a knot unfurling in her chest. Another phone rings somewhere else on the second floor, then another somewhere closer, but hers stays silent. She sits, shoulders hunched, on the edge of her desk for a long moment; her throat is raw again.
She returns to the storage room and kneels down at the hole.