In the parking lot, she notes that the van is still gone, or gone again, and an instant later, she notices something on her windshield in the distance. She quickens her pace to the car and plucks a piece of thin brown paper out from under her windshield wiper. She opens her door and turns on the overhead light to read the penciled message:
It is later, and I’m not here. But you are.
She shoves the note into her glove compartment and looks around. She is alone. She starts the car and pulls out of the lot, confounded.
At red lights, she pulls the note out and re-reads it. She tries to remember if the handwriting matches the original note. Again, she asks herself, what am I after? She can’t with any certainty say what she could possibly want. She shoves the note away again, covering it up with a pile of CDs, and when she parks the car at home, she leaves it there.
She enters her apartment, mail in hand. She sifts through it and pulls out a power bill. The rest she drops in the kitchen trash. Her hunger is urgent, her whole body knotted, steeped in acid. She opens the cabinet over the sink and scans its contents: spaghetti, canned tuna, minestrone, Ziploc bags, and light bulbs. She settles on the soup and heats it in a small saucepan. While the minestrone swirls over the heat of the blue flame, Iris turns on the oldies station. They’re playing that song, they’re coming to take me away ha ha they’re coming to take me away, whatever it’s called, whoever it’s by. She hates gag songs, finds them disingenuous and unfunny, but she leaves it, expecting something better to follow. As she watches the soup begin to bubble, “Get Off My Cloud” comes on. Iris pours the soup into a white ceramic bowl. She turns off the burner, then turns it on and off again, checking, before crushing several saltine crackers into the bowl. She turns the radio up as she carries her soup out to the balcony, leaving the sliding door open. Some graffiti has been added to the opposite wall. Now, beneath the “Lery— were’s my money bitch” is some kind of signature, a star with an anarchy symbol jammed clumsily into its center.
She is impatient, and begins eating while the soup is still nearly scalding, but it is not so bad. She knows there is pleasure in the burnt tongue feeling she will have for the rest of the night. The numbness will make her feel invincible, capable of swallowing swords. She eats looking out at her street. In front of her, fifty feet away at her fourth floor level, a pair of electric blue sneakers hangs from the power line. She thinks they are a new addition, but can’t say for sure. She wonders how they got up so high. How many tries did it take, and where was she for the trying? Who spent a night hurling shoes up into the sky, hoping to catch something, settling, finally, for the power line?
“Get Off My Cloud” fades out and into “Open My Eyes” by The Nazz, and she thinks of what she might throw and where it might land.
When she gets to sleep, well after midnight, she sleeps deeply and long. Her dreams are not stories, but images one after another: droplets of condensation swelling on a glass of lemonade. Windmills clustered together on a yellow hill, spinning faster and faster, endlessly. A dry leaf on the sidewalk. A child’s thumb crushing it, grinding back and forth. A line of ants snaking across the bottom of an empty motel swimming pool. A rusted-out car in the middle of the desert. The sun, a runny yolk in the sky, dripping onto red dirt, little by little until there is nothing left of it, the sky extinguished as the last drop hits.
BIRTHDAY
Iris wakes up panting. She gets a handle on it, breathing slowly and deliberately, any vague memory of her dreams escaping little by little with each passing moment. It is Saturday, and she guesses by the depth of sunlight oozing through her window that the day has unfolded itself already without her. She sits up and looks at the clock on her bedside table. It is just after one o’clock. She is groggy, hung over from too much sleep. She drops her feet heavily onto the floor and blinks, letting her eyes adjust to the waking world.
The phone rings and Iris squints around the room. She walks out into the hallway, following the sound, and finds the phone on its charger on the kitchen wall.
“Hello?”
“Happy Birthday, sweetheart. You sound groggy. Were you napping?”
“Oh, Mom, hi. No, I was awake.”
Her mother’s voice is low and soft. It makes no exclamations. Iris is disoriented, realizing all at once that it is in fact her birthday, and that it has been a while, two months at least, since she has spoken to either of her parents.
“Any special plans?”
“Oh, I hadn’t really thought about it. I don’t really know.”
She hears the faint sounds of barking on the other end.
“Marvin,” her mother whispers, “Marvin, honestly.”
“How is Marvin?”
Marvin is the dog that came after Sebastian, an identical German shepherd. Though she knows he is a different dog, Iris, on the few occasions that she has seen Marvin, pretends that he is the same, imagining a long-shared history. She figures that it makes no difference to him what relationship she privately imposes.
“Cranky as ever. I thought we had gotten through the puppy stage, but he is still quite a little brat. That’s right, Marvin,” she murmurs away from the receiver, “I called you a brat.”
Iris smiles.
“So, you’re twenty-five now,” her mother says suddenly. “That’s the age I was when I married your father. I don’t mean that to pressure you— it’s just an observation. Actually, it seems an appallingly young age to me now. Just in general.”
“I don’t feel any pressure.”
“Good. I don’t want you to feel any pressure to do anything, ever.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s good.”
The two stand on opposite ends of the phone line, several hundred miles between them, each standing in the same pose, bent sideways, right elbow resting on kitchen counter, left hand holding receiver.
“Your father says happy birthday. He mouthed it to me. He just stepped out— taking some stuff to the Goodwill.”
“Oh. Tell him thank you.”
“I will.” Her mother pauses. Iris pauses with her.
“How’s the new place?”
“Oh well— ” her mother sighs, “I’ll tell you what… it’s just too big for the two of us. It’s just too much.”
“Really? Isn’t it like, an apartment? Two bedrooms, you said, right?”
“I don’t know… it’s just not… well there’s still so much space to think about. I never know where to go, where to find anything. But don’t worry about it— I promise we’ll tell you when we move again.” She laughs a quick, throaty laugh.
“Oh…” Iris says, remembering the move before this one, when they failed to share their new address with her until they’d been there a month and a half, after the Father’s Day card she’d sent to their old address came back marked return to sender.
“Are you well?” Her mother says abruptly, “would you tell me if you weren’t?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“Okay. Well. I don’t want to keep you any longer. Have a wonderful day, sweetheart.”
“Thank you.”
They hang up without goodbyes.
Iris sets the phone down and considers her kitchen counter. It is the same pattern linoleum as the floor, as though the contractor finished the floor of pale yellow squares, shrugged, and kept going. She scratches at a dark spot on the tile, a stain of indeterminate origin, but it is ingrained.
She thinks back over the past week, tries to remember writing down any dates or glancing at any calendars. The approaching date escaped her notice, as it has before. She doesn’t know if her forgetting is deliberate, or some kind of fateful favor. She knows it takes effort for her mother to call attention to it, as much as she would protest the notion. But she’s a new age today, stamped by a new number. She makes herself a cup of tea and repeats the words, birthday, birthday, birthday in her head while running her fingers lazily along the wall. She says the words silently to the point that they are only sounds, Birthday. Berth dae. Burthdais. The sounds stretch unuttered between her tongue and palate, still numb from last night’s soup. She lifts the tea to her face and lets the steam rise, clearing her sinuses, filling her head with clouds of hot oolong.