She is still eating when her boss walks in, quickly shuts the door, and pauses. His back against the door, he looks to her with pleading eyes, she thinks at first, quavering and wide, his cell phone clutched to his chest. A purple vein appears on his forehead, bisecting his sweaty complexion. Gobsmacked, she holds his gaze, struggling to keep her own expression neutral yet open, ready to produce whatever reaction he expects from her. He looks on the verge of asking a question, but makes no sound. Finally, his uncertain mouth settles into a hard line and his eyes narrow.
“Don’t eat in here,” he says, shaking himself away from the door and hustling down the hall.
Iris finishes her last bite and shoves the paper bag into the wastebasket as her boss slams his door.
He has slammed his door on many occasions. He slams his door when the mail is late, even as he leaves stacks of it unopened on his desk. He slams his door when it starts raining, as though the weather is a personal affront. He slams his door, she thinks, just for the sound of it. It isn’t for her benefit. But she has never seen his face like that, his eyelids fluttering, looking to her, she thinks, for help more vital than he can express, before slamming his face shut, just like the door.
She sits, staring down the hallway until he re-emerges from his office and comes marching toward her desk.
“Listen,” he says, running both hands through his hair until it looks blown back by a rough wind. A rough wind made of grease.
“Yes?”
“We’re going to close early today. I mean, I’m going to close early today. And you can too. So I’m going to go, now. Okay? Right.” He punctuates this with a quick nod, then shuffles in his spot as though no direction holds what he’s looking for. No direction is the right one. Finally, he trundles down the hall back to his office.
Iris begins tentatively gathering her things, not yet ready to commit to the idea of leaving. She has an irrational suspicion that if she leaves, he will come looking for her at her desk, the preceding conversation wiped clean from his memory. It may not be wholly irrational.
Then she remembers that Friday was payday, and she never got her check. She just paid her utilities and credit card bill, and her account balance is down to approximately zero. She goes to her boss’s open door and knocks, standing sheepishly at the threshold.
“What?” he yells, his voice sounding as though it is coming from deep inside some hole.
Iris steps further into the room, still holding herself a little at bay in the doorframe. Her boss is hidden behind his desk.
“I was just wondering if I could get my check before you go?”
He pops his head up above the desk. “Check,” he repeats, as though the word is new in his mouth. “Right, right.”
He stands up and brushes off his pant legs, runs his hands compulsively through his hair again. “Right,” a definitive nod.
She waits while he rummages through his desk and finally pulls out a big leather binder, turns to a page near the end and writes out a fresh check in her name. Since she began working here, the checks have always been handwritten like this. Until this moment, she has never thought it odd, maybe because they usually just appear on her desk every other Friday in a crisp windowed envelope. Now she wonders why payroll isn’t filtered through corporate. For a second, a rush of questions she might ask raise themselves, Iris’s unfocused stabs at mental organization, like where is corporate and what is corporate and where is it you’re always going? But once the check is in her hand, the questions dissipate like blown dust, and really, the answers don’t matter much.
“Turn the lights off when you go.”
Iris looks up from the check in her hand and follows him out to the lobby, his gray suit jacket, briefcase, and clutch of folders a jumble in his hands.
“Wait,” he says, pausing in front of her desk. “Don’t turn off the lights.”
“Okay.”
He looks into her eyes, lowering his chin, as though waiting for her to say something else to assure him that she has understood. She keeps nodding.
“I’ll know if you turn them off. If I come back and find them off, then I’ll know.”
“Right. Of course.” Iris folds up the check into a small rectangle and tucks it into the barely functional front pocket of her skirt.
“Good,” he says, halfway out the door, “good,” and he’s gone. She rushes to the window and watches as he hurriedly climbs into his convertible and drives away. She pulls the check out of her pocket and smoothes it, returning to her desk to slip it into her wallet.
Alone in the office now, Iris opens the door to the darkened storage room. She kneels down to peer through the hole in the wall, and is met by a wash of whiteness. It takes her a moment to perceive the texture of fabric, and another to realize that she is looking at a shirt. She pulls her face back. His breath— if it is his breath— moves the fabric ever so slightly in and out, against his skin, against the wall, and there is nothing else to see. He is blocking whatever else might be happening. She brings her ear to the hole, hoping to hear his breath, but no luck. She brings her mouth to the hole and breathes, and wonders if he feels a draft.
“Hello?” she tries.
No answer comes.
She tries again, louder: “Hello?”
Nothing.
It occurs to her that if she were to push her finger through the hole, supposing her finger was long enough, she might find the shirt empty, hung as a decoy, the man having escaped to some hidden room, one she has not yet managed to penetrate. This thought stops her. There is no end to what she doesn’t know. If she were to fashion a hook and catch hold of the shirt, yank it down, another could be hanging just behind it, out of her reach, a self-regenerating series of veils.
Then there is a rumble of motion on the other side of the wall, and her view is suddenly unblocked. She looks into the empty room, lavender carpet, white walls and nothing else. Sun filters in through the shadeless window. But there is no sign of him.
“Hello?”
After a long silence, from somewhere, a voice, his voice, quietly says, “Please…”
“Please what?”
“Please… don’t.”
“Don’t what? I can barely hear you.”
“Please, don’t worry.”
“What?”
And he doesn’t answer. She stares through the hole for a while longer, but nothing else happens.
Iris gets up and pulls a blank sheet of paper from a package by the door and brings it back to her desk.
With her Sharpie, she writes on three lines:
Please don’t go yet.
My name is Iris.
I want to talk to you.
Her hand shakes as she writes the third line, and then, hovering over the paper, the marker in her hand suspended a centimeter above the page, she quickly writes out her phone number, and then blows on it to dry the ink. When she runs her fingers over the words and they don’t smudge, she rolls the paper into a tight baton and goes back to the storage room, dampening the note slightly with her sweating palm. She kneels down, and watching her hands closely, pushes the paper through the hole. She thinks she hears it land against the carpet, and waits for a moment for a possible retrieval, but none comes. She stays kneeled there for a little longer, listening for anything. Finally, her knees cramping, the skin pressed painfully against the floor, she leaves the room and closes the door behind her, squeezing the metal handle, hot in her fist.