She thinks about the original note. I am very busy. Don’t ask. Ask me later. I’m not here. If not him, then who? Is he lying, or is there something that escapes her? Is there any reason, she wonders, for her to think anything she thinks? What makes her decide anything? What is it that she thinks she knows? She washes her hands in cold water, running them around and around and around each other in pink liquid soap, and when she rinses them, she turns the faucet to warm. She holds her hands there until she stops feeling the water, and dries them under the air dryer. She watches the water droplets scatter across the backs of her hands.
When she returns from the bathroom, the door is open, and her boss is standing in the doorway, briefcase in hand.
“I just walked in and there was nobody here. The door was unlocked. I just walked in. That doesn’t seem right to me, does it seem right to you?” he says.
“I’m sorry,” she starts, “I just stepped out for a second.”
“What time is it? When did you get here anyway?” She notices then that he is blocking her way in.
“I just… I woke up early. I thought I’d come in and just, get a head start…”
“Oh,” he says. “Huh.” He squints at her. Then he turns and enters the office. She follows.
“Listen, I have some things I need you to do for me,” he calls over his shoulder. “I’ve got a big, big, big meeting in the conference room in one hour. I need bottled water, pens, coffee, the works.”
He stops at his office door and turns back to her. “Hold on. Hold on a sec.” He steps inside and closes the door behind him. She stands there for a minute, poised and ready, before finally giving up and returning to her desk.
Iris begins a data entry project left over from the day before. Transferring numbers from one spreadsheet to another, she falls into a rhythm. Twos and eights and fives lose meaning, becoming shapes, configurations of curves and lines. She holds a pen between her teeth as she moves her mouse back and forth across the mouse pad. The taste of plastic in her mouth helps her focus.
Then her computer makes a twinkling sound. Mail. She sits up straight. She opens her email box and a new message from her boss sits in bold at the top of the list. She glances back in the direction of his office and clicks it open:
Please don’t come in before 9:00am. And please don’t stay after 5:00pm. There is a way things are supposed to look. Surprises aren’t good. This is corporate talking. This isn’t me talking.
As she finishes reading, a new message twinkles from the computer’s small speakers. Again, from the boss, no subject:
This is what I need from you:
One dozen black ballpoint pens. Black or blue. Make it blue. If they don’t come in denominations of a dozen, get ten or twenty.
One dozen bottles of water. Same as above re: denominations.
One dozen cups of black coffee. Separate cups— not those big jug things— this isn’t a cafeteria. This may require several trips.
One dozen everything bagels. If they don’t have everything get onion.
As she reads this, her boss approaches her desk. She looks up and he hands her a credit card.
“You’d better go now,” he says. “I have to prepare my presentation.”
Iris grabs her purse and her boss opens the door for her. In the doorway, he stops her, touching her elbow.
“Receipts for everything, okay?”
Just then, the door to 2B opens up and the man steps out, dressed now, uniform-like in a white dress shirt and black pants. His eyes dart back and forth between Iris and her boss and he glides quickly past them, head down. Iris watches her boss’s eyes follow the man to the stairs, then snap back to her.
“Okay— be quick,” he says, then steps back into the office and shuts the door.
Iris hurries down the stairs and out the door just in time to see the white van pull out and turn right out of the driveway. She imagines that if she hurried, she could catch up to him, but she stops herself. Her life turning into a James Bond film just doesn’t seem like a plausible scenario. As Iris starts her car, she feels a headache coming on. She massages the space between her eyebrows, roughly, as though burrowing through the skin and into the pain’s center, and heads for the drugstore.
At the store, she picks up a case of water, a box of pens. It occurs to her that they probably already have pens in the supply closet, but she didn’t get a chance to look. In line at the checkout, Iris wonders just who her boss is meeting with. It’s been some time since the conference room has gotten any use. In the past, this was routine. The conference room had gravitas. It was to be tiptoed past once she had set up, and the meeting was in full swing. Her boss would wait in his office until everyone had arrived, Iris seating them and offering beverages. When people started to get impatient, Iris was instructed to knock twice, softly, as a signal that he should make his entrance. There was fun in it, she has to admit, like playing a part. Then the door would close, and what went on inside— it wasn’t her job to know. But how long has it been? She can’t remember the last time she felt truly useful. As the cashier rings up her purchases, Iris begins to get excited. She never knew who he was meeting with, so what does it matter now?
Iris then drives to the café, loads her trunk with cardboard trays of coffee, tops securely fastened, a white box full of bagels. She drives so slowly back to the office that people honk and yell at her from their car windows, but she doesn’t care. She is intent on not jostling anything. She eases into her parking spot so smoothly, she is liquid, the car is liquid, she is right on top of everything.
She starts by carrying one tray of coffee up to the office, balancing it carefully as she contends with the door. She approaches the conference room to begin setting up and finds a slip of paper on the round oak table:
Meeting moved off-site— last minute— talk next week— mea culpa.
Iris sets the tray down and sits. She pops the top off one of the coffees and drinks. She still has the credit card, she thinks. She could buy a ticket somewhere, to another state, another country. She could buy a boat, wherever one buys boats. She could just grab things and start buying them, how much for the streetlight, for the fire hydrant? She wonders if she could drink all of this coffee herself before it gets cold. She decides to try. She sits at the conference room table, drinking coffee until her blood is replaced by a continuous electric current, with no mass or volume at all.
POWER LINE
At the end of the day, Iris locks up the empty office. She leaves the coffee cups and bagels she nibbled for lunch on the conference room table. No one will see the mess. She’ll be the one to clean it up anyway. As she goes from room to room, turning things off, she notices things are a little… dingier than she thinks they used to be. There are smudges on doorknobs, a thin layer of dust on the carpet, and the wastebaskets haven’t been emptied recently. She remembers, just the other day, having lowered her foot into the trash, stamping it down to make room for more. When does the custodian come, she wonders. She can’t remember when she last saw him in the early evening, with his cart lined with spray bottles in holsters. She wonders, too, what would happen if he didn’t come anymore. How long would it take for filth to accumulate, and what if she started cleaning the place every day instead of answering the phone? Would her boss notice if she became the housekeeper instead of the receptionist? Would she, if it happened very gradually? She descends the darkened staircase and is out the door.