She glances back at the open door, so close to her own they are practically kissing, a wall shared between the two offices. She cranes her neck to see if she can see anything else, and then she takes a step. One more step and she’s inside.
On one wall, a yellowing map of the United States is tacked up with push pins. Against the opposite wall sits a massive wing chair of deep green velour and a small side table topped with a lamp made from or made to resemble a horse’s hoof. She touches the coarse hair and flinches, certain that it is real. The office is barely the size of a studio apartment— not even. There is not even a place to put a bed. There is a vague smell of smoke, tempered some by the open window. There are no blinds, so the sun shines a blinding spotlight into the room.
Iris steps closer to the chair and reaches out to touch it, her hand brushing back the soft green fibers. She closes her eyes.
Then a muffled clang from the doorway cuts through the moment, and her arm shoots back to her side. She turns around slowly to find a young man, skinny, in jeans and a stained white T-shirt, a cardboard box dropped at his feet.
“Oh,” she murmurs.
He doesn’t say anything, and she looks not at him, but around him, at the edges of him. She remembers a middle school teacher who instructed her to look at her classmates’ foreheads if she got nervous while giving an oral report. She aims a little higher, a little off to one side. She is standing right in the sun’s spotlight and wants desperately to get out of it, so she makes her move, approaching the doorway quietly, her gaze still unfocused, taking nothing in. She edges past him awkwardly, his body monolithic in its stillness, and out into the hallway. She grabs for her doorknob, finding the office unlocked now. Someone has beaten her back from lunch while she stood spellbound in the other room. She sucks up the cool air and rests against the door, hears the other door slam shut. She would regret her boldness, and maybe it was misplaced, but she doesn’t want to regret. What she wants is to go back, to knock and be let in. To sit in the soft green chair and sink into a deep and dreamless sleep.
GOING OUT
Under duress, Iris has agreed to go out with Shawn, the man from the party, but she doesn’t know what Mallory was thinking. He is tall, appealingly rangy in a way, his brown hair a little overgrown, and he is dressed in that studied casual way of most older men— the ones she has met, anyway— a black T-shirt, charcoal gray suit jacket, and pressed jeans. He is also thirty-eight and a father of two, a fact she didn’t learn until tonight.
He is walking her home from a dark but relatively quiet bar just around the corner from her apartment, where she had two white chocolate martinis. She is not drunk, but she could be. As he asks her questions about herself, she half listens and half flips a switch in her mind, drunk/not drunk. She could argue either position. But it’s easier to blame it on drunkenness, this restless contrarian streak she feels taking hold.
“So, which do you prefer,” he asks, hands in his pockets, his jeans draping just so, “the city or the country?”
“I don’t know… neither?”
“Come on, you’ve got to pick one.”
“Water, then.”
“You mean, like the beach?”
“No, I… never mind.”
“No, what do you mean?”
“I thought I was telling a joke.”
“Oh. Okay, I think I get it.”
They walk in silence for a minute as a wailing ambulance passes, its siren fading in the distance just as quickly as it appeared.
“So,” he starts in again, “you never told me what you studied in college.”
“I didn’t go to college.”
“But, I thought you and Mallory were roommates?”
“Oh, I went. But it may as well have never happened. I remember almost nothing about it.”
“Yeah,” he says, “the past does have a way of disappearing on us. I never took pictures before the kids came along, then I had to. They changed every time I looked at them.”
He smiles at her, but she is watching their feet on the pavement, following the disjointed rhythm of their steps side by side. She stops walking and looks up at him as he stops too.
“That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.”
They arrive at her doorstep and she digs around in her purse for her keys. She finds them and gets the door open, then turns back to face him.
“Thank you,” she says.
He leans in to kiss her cheek, but she is caught off guard and swivels her head away, and his lips land in her hair. She exhales another thank you and rushes inside. She doesn’t look back.
THE LONG NIGHT
On this night, she fills the tub with hot water and lavender-scented oil that makes her skin feel like shiny fabric. She moves the radio into the bathroom and listens to the oldies station. It is request and dedication hour. She soaks, staring at the ceiling and listens as a man dedicates “Unchained Melody” to his fiancée:
“This is for you, Steph, because you’ll always be my baby.”
The familiar notes kick in and she vows once again that she will never love a man who would consider dedicating this song to her on the radio. Other songs included in this pledge are “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and “Let’s Get It On.” Not that this is a relevant concern at present, but she likes to remind herself that she has standards. She lowers her head into the water and lifts the drain plug with her big toe. Her body emerges as the water disappears down the drain, and she lies in the cold, empty tub for a few minutes. A woman calls in to request “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly and she closes her eyes, imagining this woman dancing in a plush carpeted living room with yellow walls, an army of small children dancing around her in a circle.
The bath was an attempt to lull herself gently to sleep and, like every other method she has tried, it has failed. She tried drinking warm milk before bed, but was unable to get past her conviction that warm milk, at its core, is revolting. She considered running to wear herself out, but abandoned that when it became clear, once she was standing in her living room dressed in jogging gear, that this would require her to run.
As she lies awake on this night, she begins to resign herself to the fact that sleep will only come to her suddenly or not at all, and this will most likely be a not-at-all night. First, there will be two to three hours of non-specific, low-grade panic. She will lie still and worry about everything from the depletion of the world’s natural resources to the fact that she cannot remember when she was last at the dentist. She will then fall into a sleep-like trance for an indeterminate amount of time, during which she will have dream-like visions. A recent vision had her sitting in a diner, resting her head on the lunch counter. She was about to fall asleep when the cook pulled a large tray out of the industrial-sized oven and placed it directly in front of her. She slowly lifted her head, and looked down to find a tray of warm sleeping animals. She picked up a squirrel and held its small face against hers.
At some point in the still-dark early morning, she will look at her digital alarm clock, but she will not note the time. She will then mentally walk herself through the coming day, from what she will wear to who will call the office and what she will say to them. Then her alarm will go off, and the day will begin just as she has planned.
BROKEN
When things in the office are broken, no one knows what to do. Or, no one quite does anything. When the printer is low on ink, everyone learns to accept the blank strip in the middle of the page. Everyone would rather pretend they can read the faded letters than go dig a new cartridge out of the supply closet. Just pull it out and shake it, someone will say, that’ll hold it for a while. Today, it’s the coffeemaker that’s broken. Someone must have put in a fresh filter, filled it with Colombian roast, pressed the red button, and walked away or gotten distracted, never to discover that the machine was possessed. That’s what must have happened, Iris assumes, when she walks into the break room and finds the counter drenched in proto-coffee and un-brewed crystals, the machine still spewing viscous brown sludge until she unplugs it. She lays paper towels out across the counter and watches them soak up the liquid instantly, until they are maxed out, floating above the still-wetness. She slides these into the trash and lays out another layer, then another, until the counter is dry, then runs a wet cloth over the surface, sinking her nails into the cool folds of cotton. As she is doing this, her boss walks in, returned from his travels, and for a moment she is sixteen again, working behind the counter at the Donut King and he is a customer, jangling the bells on the door with his arrival and surveying the offerings, wide eyed. She sets the rag down and looks askance.