“Let me stay.”
“No,” he shakes his head again, “you can’t. It’s not up to you, or me.”
All the emotions stirred up by the morning’s discovery converge, and an ache pulses in her breastbone, her eyes pleading.
“I’m here now,” she says, her voice breaking. A tear rolls down her face, under her jaw, and settles in the hollow of her throat.
He looks up at her and smiles, then looks back to the ground.
“There’s nothing to go back to,” she whispers.
She watches his fingernails as they trace parallel lines in the yellow sand, the yellow sand tracing parallel lines under his fingernails, and feels all at once that they are made up of the same stuff, she, he, the dry earth beneath them, and the building falling to pieces above. She thinks to reach a hand out, to place it over his, but the act seems superfluous.
They sit together in silence for a moment, until it’s broken by a loud buzzing followed by a twinkling chime. She instinctively pats her hands down her hips, but remembers her phone is back in the office. It’s as loud as if it were right there on her person.
“You’re going to want to get that,” he says.
“But, I don’t even…”
“You don’t know who it could be.”
They lock eyes, and Iris is overpowered by curiosity. It’s true. It could be anyone calling, anyone at all. She rises back onto her feet.
“I’ll be right back,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere.”
She runs in the direction of the ringing, back the way she came, around the ridge and through the dust, with the sun pressing down, all the while imagining that she is on rails. She can do anything, and assume the rails have been well laid, and will lead her to wherever it is she needs to go.
She finds the hole she crawled out of to get here and finds the wood sagging. She has to push with all her strength to reopen the hole and squeeze her way back through, the buzzing, the ringing, filling her ears. She pushes up through the grime and slime as though through the guts of a sea monster, every beam, every bolt shifting and sliding. The building’s interior is falling in on itself, melting almost, attaching itself to her flesh as she climbs up the barely holding rungs she just climbed down.
When she reaches the top, Iris heaves herself out onto the lavender carpet and sucks down air as she clamors for her purse. She punches her arm into its recesses and pulls out the phone, NEIL flashing on the screen.
“Hello?” she says, “Neil?”
She hears the beating of his heart, and behind it, a whirring of air.
“Neil, can you hear me?”
She hears a faint ding and a woman’s voice, garbled as though coming through tiny speakers. A silence follows.
“Neil!” she yells. “Neil! It’s me! Pick up, I’m here!”
“Hello?” he says, quietly, puzzled. “Iris?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m, oh, I guess I forgot to turn my phone off. We’re about to take off. I’ve got to go…”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m just going away for a while.”
“Where? Will you tell me, just once, where you’re going?”
“Can you hear that?” he says abruptly.
“What is it?”
“That’s the engine getting ready. Soon all you’ll be able to hear is wind rushing behind it.”
“Tell me where you’re going and I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
The fasten seatbelt sign lights up, and Neil’s heart flutters in anticipation.
“You know that feeling? The mounting altitude? The thinning air? Your ears pop, and for once, you’re inside your body completely? And it doesn’t matter where you’re going, because you’re only going up?”
“Neil, please? I miss you. You know that, don’t you? Tell me you know it?”
He doesn’t answer. She hears the rushing rumbling, and then silence. He’s gone.
Iris sinks back on her heels and tucks the phone back in her purse. Her hand lands on the little radio. This is what she came to do, to give it back, or to share it, if he’ll let her. She slings the purse across her chest and crawls back to the hole. She wipes her sweating hands on the carpet in preparation to climb back through to the underneath, not thinking any further than that, feeling only that she needs the land and the sun, and to get away from these walls, when the walls themselves begin to quiver and quake.
She jerks her head up and sees the light fixtures shaking, and, forgetting all earthquake protocol, she dives her head and arms into the hole as planned, but it’s too late. The beams she climbed down and up again have splintered and folded into each other like toothpicks, the space between them liquefied, collapsing in further with every shake of the frame.
She lurches up onto her knees, onto her feet, and runs for the front door to find it moving, a cacophony of garbled voices building just outside. She stands still for a moment, until the door is struck with a series of loud thumps and she flinches. Another smack and the door pops a hinge.
She panics, thinking there’s nowhere to go, no way of escaping, and suddenly, with a great sucking sound, the walls drop several inches. She loses her balance, experiencing vertigo as the whole building sinks slowly, lopsidedly, toward the weeds around its perimeter and the burning tar smell of the parking lot fills her nostrils.
She scrambles back up onto her feet, and, not quite at her eye level, but not too far up, there is the window, the window she stared up at all that time, wondering what it was for, what it looked out on.
It’s been waiting for this.
Her desk behind her has toppled into a heap, kindling, she thinks, as she hooks a foot up onto the aluminum windowsill and heaves herself up, so she is teetering on its edge. She gives the screen a strong push and watches it loosen and flap downward, landing with a scrape on the pavement.
It did look out. She could’ve had a view all this time, if only they’d put it just a little lower, where she could see. Would it have helped? Out there, everything looks the same as always. The pavement glittering just barely in the sun, the stores’ window displays, sylph-like mannequins and brightly colored signs, traffic lights red, yellow, and green, the café where she had her lunch nearly every day, operating as usual. She thinks she can make out the two old men at their chessboard.
And there too is the vacant lot, and the sign that used to be.
I’m home. Are you?
I’m home. Where?
I’m home. So what?
Not there, but still there in her memory, and that counts for something. The window frame shakes and Iris holds on for balance and then realizes, there’s no reason to hold on. There’s nothing up there anymore.
It’s not so far down, she thinks, and without even daring herself, without waiting another moment, she leaps, and for the seconds she’s flying, she feels it too, the rush of air, the cloud wall filling her ears, the feeling that her body is her one and only home, and that that’s as it should be, as it is and ever was.
She lands with a bone-loosening thud, but keeps going, her momentum too great to do anything but run, her bare soles picking up the city, taking her path with her as she goes.
Behind her, the building continues caving in on itself, but no one seems to notice. It sinks faster into the earth, sucked in as though the pavement were quicksand, gradually disappearing under the black tar of the parking lot into unknown earth, while people walk by on their way to appointments, meetings, and lunches. Soon, it will be just an empty space, to be filled or not, for the weeds to overgrow or wilt away.
As she runs, Iris clips the ear of a dog on a leash, startling his owner, who nearly drops the cup of coffee she’s just bought. The woman collects herself and squints into the midday sun in an effort to figure out what’s just happened, but Iris is long gone, the dog howling after her, into the wind.