She drops the receiver back on its cradle and, staring blankly forward, yanks the cord back out of the wall.
Iris could stand here, might stand here, forever, her arms at her sides and eyes bone dry. But eventually she swivels on her feet, steps in front of the desk and looks at it head on, as everyone who has ever passed her desk has seen it, as her boss saw it every day, or didn’t see it, rushing past her hello to attend to whatever pressing business lay before him. It seems so low to the ground. She sinks then to her knees, crawls underneath it, and lays her head on a nest of wires, to collect her thoughts.
There is a panic that doesn’t disrupt, but lives unnoticed in the body, that comes not as a shot from nowhere, but as a kind of liquid, released from within. As Iris lies beneath her desk, the only cover available, the panic, set loose from somewhere inside her, dormant for who knows how long, runs slowly, thickly through her veins. My job, she thinks, My job.
And on the underside of the desk, on the bare wood above her, unseen and forgotten by Iris in her fetal position, face pressed to the carpet: Hello and good luck with the earthquake.
But, she thinks, then. But— maybe no one knows she is here. Maybe no one has to know.
She reaches her arms out and slides forward, and as she emerges, half hidden beneath the desk and half splayed out under the fluorescent lights, she remembers that there is another place she has to look. She scrambles to her feet and rushes into the storage room.
Iris crouches down on the floor and lines up her right eye with the hole. She aims her gaze squarely toward the center of the room, and what she sees is… nothing. She is unable even to discern carpet or wall, or any texture at all— it’s just a wash of emptiness, nothing, no color even, she can’t even call it air. She blinks several more times, tries her left eye, wonders if she is losing her vision, and then she wonders if this is what she can expect to happen next. She will turn back to face her own office and find even the structure of the building gone, even the street, the whole landscape of the earth just a projection for which the unseen power source has been switched off. She would look down at her own body and find no body, she would look, and— there would be no she, no look.
While this series of events makes her blood pulse faster through her veins, causes her eyelids to flutter, she looks back from the hole and is relieved to find that she is still in a room. She stands again, her knees tattooed with carpet burn.
And then as she staggers back out in front of her desk, she hears noises coming from the hallway— footsteps, rustling fabric, clearing throats. She freezes, then edges slowly toward the door, which she opens very gently and pokes her head out of to find a line of people, waiting. Young and old, men and women, she eyes them one by one. They stand sixteen deep, reaching past the restrooms, almost into the shadows at the far end of the hall. The lineup starts at the door of suite 2B. She watches, waiting for any one of them to look up, but they are each thoroughly self-contained, consulting folders and notes, or arms crossed, waiting with beatific calm. At the front of the line, two feet in front of her at most, a young man stares at the closed door in front of him, straightening his tie. She doesn’t think any of them notice her.
Then the door opens and before the man can step forward, Iris jumps ahead of him and steps inside, shutting the door quickly behind her. She stands with her back to it for a moment, taking in what she sees before her.
A red-headed woman in her twenties stands in front of a glass desk. She looks up at Iris, startled, and smiles.
“Hello, are you first?”
There’s a knock on the door and Iris smiles tightly.
“I guess so,” she replies, then looks around past the receptionist’s desk, struck by its layout, the virtually identical similarity to her own office.
“Um, first for…” Iris blurts out.
“You’re here to interview, right?”
Still clinging to the door, both hands behind her back, wrapped around the doorknob, Iris asks, “How long have you been here?”
“I got in at eight-thirty?” she says, tilting her head in question.
“No, I mean, how… how long has this been here?” Iris is startled, as she suddenly feels her bare feet against the carpet and wonders if the woman has noticed.
“Um…” the woman looks around behind her, then turns back to Iris, “I don’t know… I’m new. Shall I lead you back to the conference room for your interview?”
Iris nods slowly, and lets go of the door. She glances down at the wall on her right, where the other side of the hole ought to be, and only because she’s looking for it, only because she knows where to look, she perceives the unevenness of fresh spackle.
She catches up to the woman, and follows as she leads her through another door, the door she couldn’t open, and down a well-lit hallway. She lags behind again, trying to envision where this space has come from, where it fits into the building as a whole, but her spatial sense is failing her. She keeps picturing the side of the building bulging with add-ons. But there could always have been other doors she never noticed, opening to places she could never visit. Iris continues behind her down the hallway, which she now notes is just like her hallway, and the red-headed woman approaches the door, which is just like her boss’s door, even the light is the same, the no smell in the air, the white of the walls, the lavender carpet, and in the moment it takes for the woman to get the door open, she is transported, and wonders if maybe she will work here now, or does work here now and maybe this is how these things are done.
When Iris reaches the open door, she finds the woman leaning out the window, her hands gripping the sill. Then she pulls her head back inside and turns to face Iris, her face frozen in bewilderment.
“He was here just a minute ago.”
“Who was?”
“My boss— he’s supposed to be conducting staff interviews all day— we’ve got a line outside— I… he was just here.”
Iris watches the woman’s expression shift from confusion to annoyance.
“And… you think he could have gone out the window?”
The woman shakes her head and wraps a hand around her chin.
“No, no, that’s ridiculous.”
Iris steps to the window then and glances out over the street, at the glass storefronts and rushing cars. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go.
“Well we’re going to have to do this later. I don’t know what to tell you.” The woman leaves the room, slowly shaking her head.
After checking out the window once more, Iris backs calmly out of the office and closes the door behind her, coolly down the hall, trying to figure out what her next move ought to be. She passes the receptionist’s desk, where the woman is staring at her computer screen, typing, with the telephone receiver clamped between her chin and shoulder. As she passes, Iris watches the woman, who could be her, who is her, essentially, and remembers the diner on the cliff, her place for so long and so long ago, and her fear that she would float up and off, and as she opens the door out into the hallway, she looks back at the receptionist, who for now remains a separate person, now scribbling something onto a notepad, and turns away quickly, for fear that she might find herself in the chair instead, with a fresh headache roiling.