The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “Overheated,” he said. He kissed her lightly and held her against him for a moment in the cool of the apartment. The air conditioner in the window rattled and hummed and spat a sporadic mist of water through its gills. He had changed his shirt before he came home; the one he’d worn all day smelled like the perfume Elena had been wearing. Fortunately, there had been dry cleaning to pick up. He’d retrieved his shirts from the cleaners on Amsterdam Avenue, doubled back a block, changed into a clean shirt in the restroom at Starbucks and shoved the old shirt into the bathroom trash with all the used paper towels. “How about you?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Long rehearsal, but I think the pieces are coming together. How was the staff meeting?”

  “Tedious. Sorry I’m late.” It was surprisingly easy to lie to her; he didn’t feel particularly guilty, which alarmed him. “What shall we do for dinner?” He kissed her again, she moved back toward the sofa, the conversation turned to whether it was a good idea to go to a sushi place when the temperature was in the 90s. He had certain concerns about raw fish in hot climates. He listened to their conversation as if from some distance, and was interested to note that his voice was utterly calm.

  The worst thing about having an affair was that he was naturally good at it.

  The afternoons assumed a particular rhythm. He waited all day for the sight of her: Elena arrived without fail a few minutes after five o’clock, pale and crisp in her summer work clothes. She stepped into the room quickly, she locked the door behind her and then she came to him smiling, removing her clothes as she crossed the floor, kicking off her shoes when she was close to him. He didn’t think he could regularly stay later than six without Sophie becoming suspicious, so his affair transpired every day in that delirious last hour that began at five o’clock. At six he put his clothes on and kissed her goodbye and went home to his fiancée. When he arrived at the apartment Sophie was usually in her study, and the notes of her cello swelled out through the closed door. He sat on the sofa and the cat jumped up on his lap. He closed his eyes and sat unmoving, dreaming almost, listening to his fiancée’s music. Filled with admiration at the extremity of her talent, this woman who came from nothing and rose to the level of the New York Philharmonic. Thinking of Sophie and Elena at the same time until one bled into the other, stroking the cat’s white stomach when it flipped over on its back in purring ecstasy. When Sophie came out of the study he tried to lose himself in her beauty at the instant she opened the door, but Elena skirted the horizon of his thoughts. She had seeped into him, she permeated the tissues of his body, he couldn’t think of anything without also thinking of her.

  Sophie’s wedding dress hung in the bedroom closet. It was a white, enormous thing, voluminous under plastic, and he saw it every morning while he was getting dressed for work. He stared at it while he put on his tie. It hung still and heavy, a presence, a ghost.

  3.

  Life on earth, as far as anyone can tell, arose only once. A little before Christmas, toward the end of Elena’s first and last semester at Columbia, a professor was explaining about the search for the holy grail of astrobiology: LUCA, he wrote on the board, and stood back for a moment to look at the letters. He leaned in again, punched a staccato period after every letter and then underlined the whole thing. He let the chalk fall to the floor and then turned to the class. A girl in the front row raised her hand.

  “The Last Universal Common Ancestor?”

  “The Last Universal Common Ancestor,” he said.

  The Last Universal Common Ancestor: one cell that appeared four or five billion years ago, from which all life on earth is descended. The ancestor we have in common with violets, with blue whales, with cats and with ferns. The cell from which we and the starfish and the pterodactyls and the daffodils originated, DNA mutating and spinning out in all directions over the passage of millennia and becoming elm trees, goldfish, humans, cacti and dragonflies, sparrows and panthers, cockroaches, turtles and orchids and dogs. We evolved from the same cell that spawned the daisy, and Elena had always been soothed by this thought. Two days before the first time she went to see Anton on the mezzanine level, she was waiting in the lobby of an office suite on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7. She was staring into space thinking of daisies and starfish and birds when she heard her name.

  “Elena,” said the investigator, “I’m Alexandra Broden.” She was a calm woman in a gray suit, with extremely blue eyes and short dark hair. Her office had a temporary, rented-by-the-hour look about it, generic photographs of sunsets and black-and-white forests on the walls and two stiff-looking little armchairs by the window, and there was nothing on the desk but a telephone and a banker’s lamp. Broden retrieved a pad of paper and a pen from a desk drawer, sat down in one armchair and gestured Elena into the other. It was no more comfortable than it looked. “Thank you for coming in to see me this afternoon.”

  “You’re welcome,” Elena said. It wasn’t at all clear that she’d had any choice in the matter, but she decided not to bring this up. She sat on the edge of the seat, fiddling with the pearl ring she wore on her right hand. The investigator leaned back in her chair and watched her. “I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. There’s no sign on the door.”

  “We’re just moving into the space.”

  Elena nodded and looked at her ring. Eventually Broden flipped the first page of the legal pad over—it was already filled with notes—and said, “You were Anton Waker’s assistant?”

  “I was, yes. For two years or so.”

  “Until when?”

  “Until just recently. I guess it’s been a couple of weeks.”

  “You liked working for him?”

  “I did.” Elena had the impression that Broden was writing more words than she was actually saying, but it was impossible to verify this. The notepad was tilted away from her.

  “Why?”

  “He was nice to me. Most people you work for in your life aren’t.”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Broden said, “but I’d like to just get a little more background on you before we move on to Anton. I believe you did a semester at Columbia?”

  “I was an astrobiology major.”

  “Why did you drop out?”

  “It was too much,” Elena said. “I’d never left the Canadian arctic before, and then all of a sudden I was in New York on a full scholarship, and it was just, I guess it was too much all at once. I’m sorry, it’s hard to explain. I was eighteen and I was alone in the city. I did badly in my first semester, so I thought I’d take a semester off.”

  “But you never went back, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t go back.”

  “I see. We’ll just go through this quickly. So you left Columbia five years ago now? Six? And you began working in a restaurant, if memory serves. Was this immediately after you left school?”

  “Yes,” Elena said.

  “Was the restaurant your first job?”

  “I was a waitress in my hometown back in high school. Then I went to Columbia, then I worked in a restaurant and posed for a photographer, and then I came here. That’s my entire employment history.”

  Broden turned the page and continued to write. “And are you on a work visa, or do you have a green card?”

  “My father’s an American,” Elena said. “I have dual citizenship.”

  “How fortunate for you. Where was your father born?”

  “Wyoming.”

  “Nice state.” Broden kept writing. “Now, I know HR’s likely gone over this with you, but if you’ll just bear with me, I do need to ask you a few questions about Anton.”

  “Do you work with them?”

  “With . . .?”

  “With HR,” Elena said.

  “I’m sorry, I must not have been very clear when we spoke on the phone. I’m a corporate investigator. I work in conjunction with the HR departments of various companies, but I’m a third-party consultant.” Broden looked up briefly, then returned her attention to
the pad of paper. “Did Anton ever mention anything to you about his background?”

  “You know, a guy from HR asked me that exact same question. Three times.”

  “And what was your response?”

  “That the extent of my knowledge of his background was the Harvard diploma on his wall, and no, he never talked about it.”

  “He never spoke about his family at all? His cousin?”

  “No, nothing about that. He never mentioned a cousin.”

  “I see. And you never met his family, I assume.”

  “I met his fiancée once at a company Christmas party. Does that count?”

  “When did you first meet him?”

  “Anton? A little over two years ago. At my job interview.”

  “You’re certain that was the first time you ever met him,” said the investigator. “At your job interview.”

  “Yes,” Elena said.

  When Elena returned to her desk an hour and a half later a stack of interoffice envelopes had accumulated, but she didn’t open them. She stared at the cubicle wall for a while, and when she looked at her watch it was four fifteen.

  “Slipping out early?” Graciela asked. She was a company messenger, one of two; she stood by the elevator with an armload of envelopes.

  “Coffee break,” Elena said dully.

  “You look pale. Maybe take the day off tomorrow. Call in sick.”

  “Maybe.” The elevator arrived. Graciela pressed the lobby button. Elena pushed the button for the third floor.

  “What’re you doing on the third floor?”

  “Just wanted to say hello to someone who works down there,” Elena said. When the door opened she said goodbye and walked down the corridor quickly, turned a corner, looked both ways and slipped through an exit door. In the cold gray light of Stairway B, a man was sitting on the cement steps with his eyes closed.

  “Excuse me,” Elena said.

  He nodded wanly as she stepped around him, and when she looked back he had closed his eyes again. She heard the sounds of the mezzanine as she pushed open the door: the rush of water through exposed pipes overhead, the rattling of vents, the movement of air—an industrial hum with no beginning or end, constant as the ocean. The corridor was wide and empty with a drifting population of dust bunnies, dimly lit. She passed a number of doors before the file storage rooms began: Dead File Storage One, Dead File Storage Two, Dead File Storage Three. She stood for a moment in front of the closed door to Dead File Storage Four and then backed silently away and walked back toward the stairwell. The office worker was still sitting on the stairs. He nodded again but didn’t speak as she stepped around him. On the elevator between the third and twenty-second floors she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall.

  “Took another unscheduled break?” her coworker asked. Nora occupied the desk closest to the elevators, where she took apparent pleasure in observing and commenting on the comings and goings of the department. Elena ignored her and went to her cubicle. The number on Broden’s card was apparently a cell phone. There was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when Broden answered. “I know your investigation is important, but I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Why’s that?” Broden’s voice was mild.

  “I know it’s a serious thing to lie about your credentials on your résumé, I know it’s fraud and I don’t agree with it, it’s not that I approve, it’s just that he was my boss for two and a half years and I almost consider him a friend, I can’t just spy on him and try to get him to say something and report back to you, I just—”

  “Tell you what,” Broden said, “why don’t you come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it. I think it might help if I explained the situation more fully.”

  When Elena had hung up the phone she stared at the document she was supposed to be proofreading, but her eyes kept skipping over the same paragraph over and over again. She closed her eyes, rested her elbows on her desk, and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. She wanted it to appear to any casual observer that she merely had a headache or was perhaps resting her eyes for a moment. The problem was more serious: she had forgotten how to read.

  This happened almost daily and she was used to it—she understood it to be a side effect of being unable to stand her job—but lately it had been happening earlier and earlier in the day. The mornings went quickly but the afternoons were deadly. Time slowed and expanded. She wanted to run. By four P.M. she sometimes had to correct the same paper three times. She reread words over and over again, she broke them down into individual syllables, she stared, but if you stare at any word for long enough it loses all meaning and goes abstract. She had had this job for two or three weeks now, ever since she’d been exiled without explanation from Anton Waker’s research department, and it was becoming gradually less tenable each day.

  “Elena?” Nora had a strong clear voice, like a singer’s. “Could you come here for a moment?”

  When Elena went to her she had a document Elena had labored over that morning, lying on her desk like a piece of evidence. Nora weighed well over three hundred pounds and had beautiful long dark hair, but what was more notable about her was that she loved mistakes. Here in this dead-end department in the still brackish backwaters of the company, her power and her happiness lay in the discovery of errors. “Elena,” very patiently, as if addressing a child, “I’m not sure why you didn’t correct the spelling of this word. Were you under the impression that there’s a hyphen in ‘today’?”

  “Oh. The writer’s British, he does that sometimes. Give it back to me, I’ll mark it.”

  “Oh, I mark all the errors that I find.” The pleasure in Nora’s voice was unmistakable. Her eyes were alight; she was in her element. “I’ve told you that many times.”

  “Okay, well, thanks for pointing it out. I’m going back to work.”

  But Nora disliked having the game cut short. “If you’d ever like to borrow my dictionary, Elena,” she said sweetly, “you’re welcome to look up any thing you need.”

  “I don’t need your dictionary. Thanks.”

  “Well, but the thing is, Elena, you thought there was a hyphen in ‘today.’” All wide-eyed innocence now, the malice vanished like a passing cloud.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that you saw it,” her voice incredulous now, “but decided not to correct it, even though you knew it was wrong?”

  “Look, obviously I just missed it,” Elena said. “Are we done?”

  “Elena,” spoken very seriously and reproachfully, like a CEO on the verge of firing a disobedient minion, although as far as Elena was aware Nora’s supervisory role was so nominal that she didn’t have the ability to fire anyone, “I know you haven’t been in your position for very long, but one thing that might not have been made clear to you is that it is our responsibility to correct every error that is made. That includes the errors that we don’t think are important enough to correct.”

  “That’s cute, Nora. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to work.”

  “Elena, just because I pointed out your mistake doesn’t mean that you have to get all pissy with me. I find it annoying.”

  Elena went back to her cubicle, and some time passed in which she did no work whatsoever.

  “What are you doing? Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Elena said. A coworker was standing at the cubicle entrance. She realized she had been sitting for some time with her head in her hands. “Just a headache.”

  “It’s five o’clock,” Mark said. “You could probably leave if you wanted to.”

  “Right,” she said. “Thanks.” She was unsure what she was thanking him for, and Mark didn’t seem to know either. He stared at her for a moment through glasses so thick that his eyes were magnified, shook his head and turned away. It was the most he’d ever said to her. She picked up her handbag and left her desk in disarray. She descended to the marble
lobby and down the steps that connected the tower to Grand Central Station, walked across the main concourse with its ceiling of stars. She stood packed in among strangers on a series of subway trains until one of them deposited her on a hot street in Brooklyn, the air still bright but the shadows slanting now, children drawing pictures of people with enormous free-form heads and stick arms on the warm sidewalk and men playing dominoes at a folding card table, speaking to each other in Spanish and ignoring her as she passed. Three keys were required to get into her apartment building. A metal grid door slammed behind her like a cage and there was a regular apartment-building door just behind it, then a little foyer with dusty archaeological layers of takeout menus and unclaimed mail rising up under the mailboxes, then another door after that. At the top of the stairs a fourth key was required to open the door to the apartment, where the first thing she saw when she came in was the tank of goldfish that Caleb kept on a table in the hallway, the five fish bright and perfect, the tank impeccably maintained.

  “You know,” her mother said, “I wish your sister had your kind of ambition.”

  “I don’t know that it’s ambition, exactly.” Elena was filling a kettle with water, the phone held between her shoulder and her ear. She hadn’t spoken with her mother in two or three months, and she was surprised by how much she’d missed her voice. “I’m not sure what it is. It’s more like a gene for escape. You’re either born with it or—” She placed the kettle on the stove and stood watching the blue gas flame as she listened. “No,” she said after a moment, “I think ambition makes you accomplish things, see things through. All I’ve done is leave and quit.”

  “That isn’t a minor accomplishment,” her mother said. “The leaving part, I mean. All I’m saying is, when I look at your sister . . .”

  “I don’t know, it’s hard to think in terms of having accomplished anything at this point.” Elena listened for a few minutes, looking at her reflection in the darkened window. In the Northwest Territories it was two hours earlier, five o’clock in the afternoon, and her hometown was so far north that at this time of year the sun wouldn’t set at all. She imagined her mother sitting by the window in the blazing daylight, flecks of dust in the sunbeams and the dog sprawled out on the carpet, until the whistle of the kettle snapped her back to New York. Elena turned off the flame and poured hot water into an open container of instant noodles on the countertop. Her mother was still talking. “You don’t understand what my job’s like,” Elena said when her mother stopped to take a breath. “It isn’t really bearable. I was supposed to be a scientist, and now I’m just here working. My only accomplishment is that I left.”