The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  Elena remembered this part of the interview very clearly, and the part immediately afterward when they talked about recording devices, but later she couldn’t remember how she got home after the interview was done. She closed her eyes in her cubicle a day later and pressed her fingertips to her forehead, wishing herself almost anywhere else. There were tears on her face. Soon she would go down to the mezzanine level, where at that moment Anton was contemplating throwing his stapler through the window. In a moment she’d step through the door of Dead File Storage Four with a recorder in her handbag, and smile, and ask him questions about his life. It was Friday, and it was nearly five o’clock.

  4.

  Aria at twelve: she walked fast under the bridge with her hands in her pockets, a sheen of black hair falling to her waist, dressed in one of her father’s shirts with the sleeves rolled up, wearing pants a few sizes too big that had been left behind by a cousin on the other side, the Ecuadoran side that used to come up for long contentious visits before her mother was deported, and Anton’s mother murmured in his ear as Aria approached, “Be nice to your cousin, she’s having a rough time of it.” But the departure of Aria’s mother hadn’t changed her. Except for her clothes, except for her general air of neglect and the way she winced at even a passing reference to her mother, she retained an inner core unchanged from the one Anton had always known. She was infinitely confident. She was an expert thief. She shoplifted candy, bags of chips, fashion magazines. She wasn’t kind and she tolerated nothing, but she was capable of friendliness. She exuded courage and malice in equal parts.

  Anton was eleven. Aria was only six months older, but there were times when the space between them felt like years. He sat with his mother on the loading dock with a mug of coffee in his hands, watching his cousin approaching from the other side of the bridge.

  “Ari,” his mother said, in greeting.

  “Hi.” Aria ascended the loading-dock stairs, reached into her pocket and gave Anton a chocolate bar. He took it, knew it was stolen and was swept through with resentful admiration. He knew she didn’t give him chocolate bars because she liked him; she gave him chocolate bars to remind him that he was too chicken to steal his own.

  “Did you walk here alone?” Anton’s mother asked.

  Of course she had walked there alone. She lived a mile away, in a deeper part of Brooklyn that was less pleasant, farther from Manhattan, where the apartments were cheaper but had bars on every window and sometimes there were gunshots at night. Anton ate his chocolate bar and watched her surreptitiously in glances.

  “Sí,” she said casually, instantly widening the distance between them. Her Spanish was a sword that kept Anton at bay. When they were little he used to tag along behind her and beg for a way in, Teach me a word, teach me a word, but all he remembered at eleven was sí and the words for butterfly and dreamer (mariposa, soñador) and he wasn’t even completely sure about the word for dreamer anymore; he had moments when he thought it might actually be something else.

  “Where’s your dad?” Anton’s mother asked.

  Aria shrugged and sat down on the edge of the loading dock with them.

  “Are you hungry, love? You want some breakfast?”

  “Can I have some coffee?”

  “Of course.” His mother set her half-empty mug down beside Anton and stood up in one easy motion, disappeared into the shadows of the store. Alone with Aria, he stared out at the river in silence until his mother returned with a cup of coffee. Sunday mornings were the only time when his mother was all his, and he was frankly annoyed by the intrusion.

  They were quiet for a few minutes, drinking coffee in the May sunlight, and then Aria asked, “Can I have a job?”

  “You want to work here at the store?” His mother sounded startled. She expended an enormous amount of energy trying to get Anton to work in the store, and succeeded only to the extent that he grudgingly pushed a damp cloth around for an hour after school and complained almost continuously while he was doing it.

  Aria nodded.

  “What about school?”

  “After school. I meant part-time.”

  “Why do you want to work here?”

  “I just want to work.”

  “Why do you want to work, though, sweetie? You’re young.”

  “Independence,” she said. “It’s what I want.”

  The torment of the afternoons. Aria arrived around four, a half-hour after Anton got home from school, and swept the store. The store was more properly a warehouse, a vast dim space filled with fantastical objects: fountains, clocks, antique furniture, ancient oak doors, ornate mirrors and enormous picture frames, old claw-foot bathtubs restored to pristine cleanliness, delicate wooden birdcages from the century before last, wardrobes, an old iron spiral staircase that ended in thin air. Sweeping the store was an immensely tricky operation that could easily take upward of an hour. He watched her while she swept, while she polished the furniture, and he was seized up by a wild inarticulate longing to touch her hair.

  When Aria was done sweeping the floor and polishing a few pieces of furniture Anton’s mother always gave her twenty dollars, which was overly generous but no one had the heart to say anything about it (it’s Aria, for God’s sake, she has no mother), and in the beginning Aria always left after that, but then she started bringing her homework and staying later and later until it was impossible not to invite her to stay for dinner, and then Anton’s father always walked her home in the dark. Or sometimes she stayed over, on a foam mattress on the living room floor, until gradually she established an outpost in the room next to Anton’s that had previously been used for storage, and then days and even weeks passed when she didn’t go home at all. His mother fussed over her, insisted that she eat breakfast, bought her clothes that fit properly. He heard his parents talking late at night, their voices a soft murmur on the other side of the thin adjoining wall to the kitchen. He gathered that Aria’s father didn’t go home very often either. Aria’s father spent all his money on long phone calls to Ecuador. Words heard through the wall: He’s come undone. Anton didn’t know exactly what this meant, but he could imagine it as he lay still in the darkness of his bedroom. He had a nightmare about a man walking down the street toward him from a great distance away; as he drew near Anton saw that he wasn’t a man at all, just an empty suit walking by itself, and then the suit started unraveling around the edges until it fell down on the pavement in a pile of shredded fabric and thread at his feet, and Anton woke up gasping and tangled up in the sheets.

  A memory of his aunt: Aria’s mother, Sylvia of the silver earrings and the long silk skirts. A family dinner, Thanksgiving perhaps, less than a year before her deportation. She was drinking too much and getting louder, lapsing in and out of Spanish. Aria’s father had his arm around her; every now and again he whispered urgently in her ear but she ignored him. Anton was ten and unsure of what to do with himself. He tried to meet Aria’s eye across the table in sympathy, but Aria was closed in on herself and mortified well beyond the point of eye contact. Sylvia slammed her glass down on the table, making a point; the sound made Anton jump. The other adults were trying to accommodate her, giving her space in their conversation, not pointing out how much wine she was consuming. She turned to Anton at a moment when everyone else was talking, and he was overcome by her. The wine on her breath, her perfume, dark hair. She was beautiful.

  “You think I’m a drunk,” she said confidentially.

  Anton stammered something, at a loss.

  “Well, I’m not.” She was already turning away from him, already lifting a glass to her lips. “I only drink in this desolate country.”

  Anton’s parents owned the store long before they had a child. Their apartment was in the back, and Anton’s life transpired in the vastness of the store’s interior. Playing under antique tables, standing on chairs to talk to marble statues who wouldn’t meet his gaze, hiding behind sofas with books when he was supposed to be sweeping or polishing. But at eleven his
life was changing so rapidly that he sometimes closed his eyes in the privacy of his bedroom and gripped his desk with both hands to steady himself. That was the spring when his aunt Sylvia was deported; pulled over for drunk driving in Queens on a Monday afternoon, blinking in the Ecuadoran sunlight on Tuesday morning of the following week. That was the summer when Aria arrived, circling the outskirts of Anton’s small family and then slipping in and half-stealing his parents. He would have hated her if he hadn’t already been half in awe, half in love. This was the year when certain aspects of his family’s business were gradually becoming clear to him, and it felt like waking slowly from a dream.

  There were the shipments, for instance, that arrived at three in the morning in unmarked vans. The vans pulled up to the loading dock in front of the warehouse and yielded their treasures: old furniture, entire marble fireplaces torn from walls, elaborate clocks. There was a crew that went out at one A.M. with wire cutters and crowbars and returned before dawn with ornate wooden railings from abandoned houses, 1920s-era school drinking fountains pried from the walls of condemned yeshivas, entire leaded-glass windows from boarded-up churches. Statues, chandeliers, mosaics pried meticulously from walls. And he’d been aware of all this forever, there’d never been a time when he hadn’t half-woken in the darkness to the sound of men moving heavy objects on the other side of the thin wall separating the apartment from the store, but at eleven he found himself thinking about the question of provenance. That was the year when he realized that the practice of receiving shipments at three A.M. was somewhat unorthodox; his best friend Gary’s father owned a small grocery store nearby, and he was aware that Gary’s father’s shipments arrived after the sun had come up. Anton and Gary discussed the matter at some length, sitting on the sidewalk outside the store sucking on popsicles.

  “Deliveries come in the mornings,” Gary said.

  “But three A.M.’s still the morning,” said Anton. “Just earlier.”

  “Three A.M.’s not the morning. My dad said morning’s when the sun comes up.”

  “Why would they call it three in the morning if it wasn’t the morning?”

  “It’s still dark outside. Everybody’s sleeping.”

  “Well, why can’t a delivery come early?”

  “I don’t know.” Gary was looking at his popsicle, considering the problem. “If it comes in the middle of the night I think it’s maybe not a regular delivery. I think then it’s maybe something else.”

  Later that day Anton sat on a crate at the back of the store, watching his father working on an old fountain, and it didn’t seem like an unreasonable question—“Dad, why do so many deliveries come at night?”—but his father didn’t seem to like it. The fountain was an enormous white stone basin with stone birds perched everywhere, and his father kept scraping the grime from delicate stone feathers and didn’t answer. The muscles in the back of his neck tensed up.

  Anton persisted. “The stuff we sell,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

  “What about it?”

  “Is it possible . . . is it ever . . .”

  “What? Is it ever what?”

  “Is it ever stolen? I mean earlier,” he said quickly, as his father set down the chisel and turned to him. “I mean not by us. I mean before it gets to us.”

  His father’s face was expressionless. He looked at Anton for a moment, turned away from him and resumed his careful work.

  “Sometimes you need to improvise,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that sometimes regular channels aren’t open to you, and then you have to improvise. Find your own way out. Think about it, Anton. What does it take to succeed in this world?” It was clear that he expected no answer from his son. “Finishing high school? A college degree? What if you had to leave high school to work? Money? Connections? What if you have none? Hard work? When everyone else in this frantic city is working just as hard as you are?”

  Anton was silent, watching him.

  “All I’m saying is, it isn’t easy,” his father said. “It’s never easy. You have to be creative sometimes. You have to make things happen for yourself.”

  Anton watched him for a while longer and then drifted out to the front of the store. There was a hundred-year-old bicycle there that he liked, leaning up against the doorframe. He didn’t dare ride it but he spent some time running his fingers over the rough texture of the metal, the dusty crossbar and the damaged seat, imagining someone else riding it a long time ago. He could see the river. He stood on the loading dock looking out at the water and the looming bridge above and the brightening spires of Manhattan on the other side, so close, so close.

  That night his father came into his room to say goodnight. He kissed Anton on the forehead, as he had every night for as long as Anton could remember, and then he sat on the edge of the bed for a moment longer before he spoke.

  “Everything I do,” he said, “all of this, it’s all for you and your mother. This is how I provide for you. Do you understand?”

  Anton nodded.

  “I love you,” his father said, and then he stood up quickly and left Anton alone.

  “You just take it from the shelf,” Aria told him, in the summer when they were simultaneously thirteen. She was using the voice she reserved for small children and idiots. “You take it when they’re not looking, and then you don’t have to pay for it.”

  “I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” They were standing under an awning across the street from the bodega. Anton’s knees were shaking.

  “You don’t have to repeat yourself,” she said disgustedly.

  “I just think . . .”

  “That stealing is wrong,” she said, with exquisite contempt. “I know, you’ve told me. Wait here.” She walked away from him across the street in the sunlight and came out of the bodega a moment later with a chocolate bar for each of them, just as casually as if she’d paid for them. Just as if it wasn’t Gary’s father’s store.

  At fourteen Anton passed by Aria’s room one night and her door was open a crack, just enough to spill a wedge of light out into the corridor, and he found himself waiting there, listening, stilled, but all he could hear was a rhythmic sound like scissors closing.

  “I know you’re there,” she said. “Can you come in here?”

  He froze for a moment but there was nothing to be done but push open the door and find her there in her nightgown, sitting cross-legged in a dark pool of hair on the floor.

  “Help me with the back,” Aria said, and held out the scissors.

  Anton closed the door behind him and stood perfectly still. She was destroying something beautiful, and he felt that he should say something but he didn’t.

  “I’m serious, Anton. Take the scissors.”

  He took the scissors from her outstretched hand and knelt on the floor behind her. She had attacked her hair unevenly, from a number of angles, but at the back a section still hung straight and shining almost to the floor. He lifted the sheen and carefully cut it away in pieces, until her neck was visible and hot to the touch when his hand brushed accidentally against her skin. He swallowed hard.

  “You’re ogling my neck,” she said pleasantly. “Pervert.”

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse. He tried to even out her hair as best he could, but it still looked ragged when he was done with it and he was afraid to make it any shorter. He set the scissors down on the floor and they sat in silence for a moment, almost not breathing, so close that her nightgown touched his legs. Until he whispered, strained, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

  “Nothing,” she said, the spell broken. She smiled over her shoulder, and then stood up and brushed pieces of hair from her nightgown. “I just wanted shorter hair. Goodnight.”

  Anton closed the door behind him and then spent a fevered hour in his bed entertaining an alternative version of events in which she turned to him and pulled her nightgown off over her head.

  “What is there to t
hink about?” Aria asked. “We have both supply and demand.”

  Anton was sitting on the loading dock of his parents’ store looking out at the river, eighteen years old. Aria stood nearby smoking a cigarette and explaining a business proposition. He had graduated high school the previous spring and his grades were superb but he’d applied to no colleges, and now summer was over and he was tired and trapped. He’d stopped smoking, which seemed like his only accomplishment in a while. He had grandiose ideas with no clear structure to them. He had no long-term plans but he found himself anxious for the future to start, whatever the future might entail. Aria had graduated a year earlier and it seemed implicitly understood that she wasn’t going to college either, although she spent most of her time rereading Machiavelli and it was obvious to Anton that she was smarter than him. What he wanted was to be an executive of some kind, to work in an office, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to school to achieve this. He had an idea that there had to be some easier, less expensive way, a different approach that might somehow be faster. He’d spent a lot of time trying to explain this suspicion to Gary, who was going to Brooklyn College next month and didn’t really understand what he was talking about.

  Aria did understand. A part of her was always scheming.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds insanely dangerous.”

  “As opposed to what, exactly? Dealing in stolen antiques?” A movement of her hand expressed her contempt of the warehouse behind them. Anton sighed. He wasn’t really sure about anything these days, especially how he felt about his parents’ business. His parents had recently started a new side business that he wasn’t supposed to know about. There was a new climate-controlled room behind a hidden door in the back of the warehouse basement where the fruits of far more serious salvage operations were sold: strange objects from protected archaeological heritage sites, paintings with missing paper trails, statues that had disappeared years earlier from looted museums in war zones.