She attempts to clean up her face with tissue and more makeup. The apartment feels exceedingly quiet, every sound muffled by carpet and insulated walls. Nothing she does makes any sound. She stamps her foot on the bathroom floor to interrupt the quiet, but it is a pitiful scuff against the vast silence within these walls. “Fuck,” she says, restless. The clock on her cell phone reads 8:50 and Mallory lives a good twenty minutes away. As late as she is, she can’t seem to hurry. She tries, but the simple mechanics of movement seem to require so many steps. Everything requires a separate motion, bending to adjust a shoe, picking up a purse, running fingers down strands of hair, catching them in tangles. She is maddeningly aware of all of it. And then, she stops. She drops her purse on the bathroom floor, leaves her reflection hanging in the mirror, and goes back out to the living room, where she tries to call Mallory, but no one picks up.
She opens the wine and pours herself a tall mug, standing at the counter. She is trying to clean up the mess of Federico’s bowls with her toes, collecting the stray bits of cereal when the expected call from Mallory comes, and Iris leans on the counter and picks up, bracing herself.
“Uh, hi,” Mallory says, “what time is it where you are?”
“I’m really sorry. There was this dog, and…”
“Right,” she interrupts curtly, startling Iris.
“I know. I really am sorry…”
“Well come now then.”
“I just, I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”
“Jesus H.,” Mallory whispers, “this poor guy drives all the way over here— ”
“What guy?”
“Ugh, he’s a co-worker of Nathan’s— Alan, very cute, tall…”
“Mallory, I’m not a good project for you. You ought to know that by now.” Iris sips her cheap wine and feels its granules clinging to her top row of teeth.
“Oh, for crying out loud. It’s dinner. It’s drinks. It’s conversation, nothing easier in the world.”
“I know. I know that. But, just stop trying so hard.”
“I’ll stop trying once you start trying at all,” Mallory almost hisses now, quietly. Iris hears the whoosh of a sliding glass door. “I’m sick to death of explaining you to people.”
“So don’t.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t.”
Neither says anything for a few moments and Iris wonders if this is a fight, and what she’s supposed to say now.
“I said I was sorry,” she tries.
“Yeah. Look, I don’t care what you do, it’s just— we’re going to be old someday and I’m afraid you’ll wind up some lonely old bat.”
“Because it would reflect poorly on you?”
She hears the click of Mallory’s cigarette lighter.
“No. Maybe.”
“Why don’t you give up, then?”
“Maybe I should have asked myself that very question a long time ago.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Oh, chill out, forget I said anything. Just come have one drink? Just one?”
“I can’t. I’ll… I’ll talk to you later or something.” Iris hangs up, afraid of what she might say to push Mallory over the edge into writing her off completely.
She pulls the phone away from her ear, and Mallory says, “Oh for fuck’s— ” before Iris hits the button, cutting her off.
She drinks alone, standing on her balcony. More new graffiti has sprung up on the opposite walclass="underline" a jagged row of pointy stars of varying sizes that stretches along the whole side of the building, like a child’s drawing of the night sky. She looks up to compare, but the stars above are few and patternless.
A second mug of wine makes her drowsy, and she all but sleepwalks to her bed, managing only to remove her shoes and jeans before crawling under the covers, and she’s out.
For several hours, Iris is a slab of meat on the bed, her consciousness totally absent. Iris has left the building. She might as well be dead if not for the invisible fog of her breath and the small spot of drool on her pillow. But in the earliest morning, when the sun is daring itself to come up again, the lights inside of her fade back in.
* * *
It is cold in the dusty alley beside the house where Iris stands watch. It is late at night, but there are no stars in the sky.
Way out in the middle of the yard, her father is standing in front of the fig tree, staring up at the wide expanse of its spidery branches, its leaves in crackling piles at his feet. An axe dangles from his right hand.
Iris steps up a little closer, quietly, so he won’t hear her. When she gets to the back porch, she sees her mother’s face in the kitchen window. She’s watching too.
Slowly, her father raises the axe and drives in hard into the trunk, but the sound it makes is a metallic clank, harsh, and echoing like a tuning fork.
Iris looks to her mother, who still watches intently. She’s inside. She didn’t hear just how loud it was. Sebastian comes around the side of the house and sits at attention by Iris’s feet. She reaches down and rubs behind his ears.
Her father rears back with the axe a second time, swings with all his strength and this time, the sound of struck metal sounds, then reverberates, louder and louder out into the night. Iris covers her ears, and Sebastian rises to his feet and begins bucking his head forward and back, then he stops and lets out a clipped howl.
Her father drops the axe and steps slowly backward, as the tree vibrates before him as though electrified.
Iris creeps away, back against the side of the house. The tree is still ringing its warped, tinny ring, the only sound in the whole sleeping neighborhood. She approaches the street, running her fingers along the side of the house. Her fingertips are covered in soot as she looks out and sees neighbors’ lights turning on, and some windows opening. She presses her back to the side of the house in an effort to merge with it, to limit her exposure. She turns her face away from the light of the neighbors’ windows, more switching on, one by one— she can feel their glow on her neck, and on the backs of her bare arms.
With the sound growing, lowering so Iris can feel it weakening her knees, and the lights flicking, flicking, she feels utterly stuck. There will be no moving from this spot, not now, not ever, and then she thinks, where is my brother?
This sudden thought moves her to look back toward the street, but then the street is gone. In a second it’s all gone. Even she is gone, a slab of meat on the bed once more, with the dawn rising outside.
REVOLUTIONARY
The CEO of Creationeers Tech looks like a turtle. He’s saying something, but Neil has a hard time listening, distracted by his little chin and beaky mouth.
“Mr. Finch?”
“Yes?”
“You can tell me a little bit about it now, if you’re ready.”
“Of course, absolutely,” Neil says. Yeah, just say whatever affirmative words come to your lips, asshole, yes, most assuredly, he thinks, blinking fast. He closes his eyes briefly to settle them down.
Neil pulls out his briefcase and plops it down onto the shiny oak desk with a thump that makes the CEO, Mr. Krebs, jump in his seat a little.
“What we have here,” he says, “is a product meant to revolutionize the effects of sleep.” He pulls out the puffy blindfold and holds it out across the table, displaying it as though his palm were a silver tray. Mr. Krebs takes it and turns it over in his hands, his face expressionless.
“Do you want to try it first, or do you want me to tell you more about it?”
Mr. Krebs looks up and nods, “Please, go on, go on.”
“All right. Well— the product doesn’t have a name yet, that’ll be up to you, but essentially, what it does is block out light while providing a soothing white noise effect for the user. It’s meant to create an ideal sleep space, to put the user in… into that space.”