Out in the hall, all eyes turn to her and she stumbles. She’d momentarily forgotten about them. She turns back to the receptionist, who looks up and mouths, “I’m sorry,” before politely waving her off. Iris shuts the door behind her, clutching the knob on this side now, and clears her throat.
“There aren’t going to be any interviews today, so you can all go,” Iris announces, not making eye contact with anyone. She looks above them, to the side, around the edges of the crowd, and tries to slip quickly back through her own door. The man she cut in line grabs her bicep.
“I need this job,” he says, imploringly, and Iris lets her arm go limp.
“I know,” she says, still avoiding his eyes.
“I drove an hour to get here!” a woman near the back cries out.
The man grips her arm tighter and says, “Are you hiring?”
Iris looks into his wet, bloodshot eyes and the deep crows’ feet around them and feels her resolve draining from her body, her head hollow and fuzzy, until finally, a surge of adrenaline kicks in. She wrenches her arm out of his grip, and thrusts herself into 2A, shutting and locking the door behind her, which doesn’t stop people from knocking, or from turning and rattling the knob.
Iris abandons the door, breathing quickly, and returns to her boss’s office. She could stay here, watch and wait. She still has a key, some claim on the space. Some tie to something. She looks out the window at the row of cars in the parking lot. She turns away from the window and tries to imagine what she will do if she stays, how long she might keep herself awake, and that’s when her gaze settles on the rectangle in the carpet— the hatch, the trap door.
She drops to her knees and crawls over to it, lifting up the carpet flap to find the loose floorboard still loose. She pulls it up with her fingers and reaches down into the hole. She feels around, her palm hitting splintery beams of wood. She flattens herself on the carpet and reaches her head down into the hole, and is struck by the musty air, the mossy smell of old wood.
But she sees something. Beneath the knot of beams, the moldering guts of the building, there is a spot of light. Carefully, she leans in further, easing her shoulders through. She pauses, catching her breath, then reaches down lower, until she’s waist-deep in the floor, and finds that she’s able to pull herself deep into the interior, collecting soot and spider webs on her hands, in her hair, as she squeezes her body through this impromptu tunnel. She coughs, and a cloud of dust erupts before her eyes, now tearing. Finally, even her feet have disappeared inside the hole, and she balances herself like a gymnast, down the beams like a young monkey, and for a moment all is forgotten, there is only the physical challenge before her, and her focus is pulled by the light down below, growing, widening, as she slithers toward it, her limbs scraping against the jagged wood.
When the light is close enough for her to touch, she pushes further still, and finds that she’s able to stick her hand right through. She stretches her wrist as far as it will stretch, wiggling her fingers, until they touch what feels like burning sand. The surrounding wood is so dank and decrepit that she manages to break apart a space just big enough for her to squeeze her body all the way through, the wood crumbling further as she wiggles her legs as though she were swimming.
She tumbles out onto the sand, sneezes, and rises up onto all fours, sticky grime between her fingers, her dress torn from hem to hip.
Once on her feet, Iris digs her bare toes into the sun-soaked dirt. The sky is bright, the dusty terrain endless, like the surface of another planet. Squinting against the harsh sunlight, the only thing Iris can make out is a tall ridge in the distance, red and claylike. Along the top of it, massive, precarious-looking rocks jut toward the sun, casting a shadow that looks serrated against the sand, like shattered glass spread on a windowsill. She begins walking toward it, as a slow breeze builds, blowing her footsteps clean away as soon as she’s made them, so she leaves no mark, and in turn, nothing leaves a mark on her.
She keeps going, thinking briefly about the sunburn she must be incurring, but is she even outside? She looks up at the bleached sky, the close-up sun. It feels like sun, like air, and what can it be, if not only, exactly, what it feels like?
The longer she walks, the farther away the ridgeline seems, as though it’s receding in space intentionally, to keep her away. Maybe she’s just exhausted. The sky fades from white to a smoky tan as it bleeds into the earth. She is all alone out here, and remembers what her mother said to her when she was a girl, about walking alone, over a sink full of breakfast dishes:
Latch your focus onto something way off in the distance, like you’re not even there, like you already walked by a long time ago.
No one can hurt you if you’re not even there.
Iris swallows, and fixes her sights on the ridge, the only vertical entity on this horizontal plane, the jagged red against the bleached earth, remembering her mother’s hands plunged in the sudsy sink, her fine-boned hands always raw, and her thin lipped profile, her expression shrouded by bug-like sunglasses on walks through that old neighborhood, through the gauntlet of wary eyes, the shaking heads, hovering by their front doors and kitchen windows, closed off by the steel of her mother’s forward momentum. All at once, she misses her, and her father too, and Neil, Oh god, she thinks, what is it she wants to go back to? Not a place. It’s a snapshot she longs for, the ability to remain inside a still image of a blue-sky summer morning, to hold a feeling, to never lose it down the well of time…
…And then she hears the delicate trill of a piano, the opening strains of a song so beautiful, so heart-stopping in its familiarity. It’s coming from behind the ridge.
Iris takes off running, stirring up a breeze that dries her sweat, and the music swells louder, until she recognizes it, and is now running while singing barely audibly, somewhere in the back of her throat… You-oooo send me, darling, you-oooo send me…
She’s so lost in her body’s movement, in the music, in the sun burning through her skin, that she nearly runs right into the rock face, but veers left just in time to run alongside it, enclosed in its shadow like a magnet dragged across sheet metal, and when she turns the corner, there he is, playing, alone, cradled on all sides by low yellow dunes. Slowly, she comes up from behind, careful not to make any sound as she creeps around to face him, still whisper-singing, honest you do, honest you do, honest you do… though she doesn’t know she’s doing it.
The man from 2B stops playing when he sees her. He pulls his hands gently from the keys.
“Where are we?” she says.
“Underneath.” He leans away from the keys and slumps down on the bench.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. He gets up off the bench and settles into a well-worn spot in the sand, leaning into one of the piano’s legs.
Iris gets down on her knees beside him. The sand is hot at first, but the warmth it sends through her skin, the way it seems to massage her blood, is so soothing, she forgets the burn.
“There’s nothing up there anymore,” she says.
The man shakes his head.