The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  She was waiting in his office when he arrived, cross-legged on the sofa with her shoes on the floor, reading a copy of the Times that he hadn’t thrown out the window yet.

  “You look awful,” she said, when he came in and closed the door behind him.

  “Thanks. It’s hot out there. I might drop dead of heatstroke.”

  “I meant shaken,” she said. “You look shaken.”

  “Yes, well, I talked to Aria. Why didn’t you want to go home?” He sat on the opposite end of the sofa, some distance away from her, leaned his head back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

  “Caleb’s working late at the lab. It’s lonely in the apartment.”

  “Tell me about Caleb.”

  “He’s a scientist,” Elena said after a moment. “We met in my first year at Columbia . . . well, my only year, actually. He’s involved in the plant genome project. Would you believe he’s the only person I’m close to in this city? It’s so hard to make friends here. He’s known me since the week I arrived from the north.”

  “What does that mean, the plant genome thing?”

  “It means he’s mapping the genes of the Lotus japonicus. When that’s done, he’s moving on to geraniums. Other teams are working on cucumbers and tomatoes. I used to know what the point was, but I’m not actually sure I understand anymore. Anton, are you all right?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Do you love him?”

  “Kind of. I don’t know. Yes.”

  “Will you ever marry him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Elena said. “I think it’s almost over. He doesn’t want to sleep with me anymore.”

  “Clear evidence of insanity.”

  “It’s not him,” she said. “It’s the antidepressants he’s on. He can’t help it.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s an awful side effect. I didn’t mean to call him insane.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What’s it like,” he asked, “living three thousand miles away from your family?”

  “Four thousand. I miss them.”

  “Why don’t you live closer to them?”

  “Because I never wanted to live anywhere but here.”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

  “No, please stay.”

  They sat together in the quiet, listening to the city, until Anton stood up and went to the broken window. “Have you ever played basketball, Ellie?”

  “A little in high school. I was never that good.”

  “Me either. I realize this sounds a little crazy, but could I interest you in a game of basketball on the roof of the Hyatt Hotel?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  He was looking down at the lower roof of the Hyatt. It was connected to their office tower, no more than a four-or five-foot drop below his windows, but the windows of Dead File Storage Four were painted shut. Anton stood back for a moment, considering the problem, and then went to his desk. He picked up his tape dispenser and his telephone before settling on the computer keyboard. He disconnected the keyboard from the machine, acutely aware that Elena was watching him, went back to the window, held it in both hands and swung. Anton turned his face away at the instant of the impact but he felt a sting on the side of his face and he knew he’d been cut. Glass rained down the outside of the building. It wasn’t hard to break the rest of the glass away around the edges, and after a while all that remained were a few small shards wedged deep in the window frame. These he pulled out gingerly with his bare fingers and dropped out the window. The air-conditioning system was useless against the breach; the room was flooded suddenly with August, like a southern current moving through an undersea cave. He took off his shirt, folded it, put it over the window frame to guard against any stray shards, and then swung his legs over and dropped down to the rooftop in his undershirt.

  He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound the ocean makes. He’d looked down at this rooftop from the eleventh-floor window a thousand times and from that distance it had seemed like the smallest gap between towers, a tiny plateau between the dark glass of the Hyatt and the pale bricks of the Greybar Building, but out here in the sound and the darkness he was overtaken by the empty space around him. An expanse of gravel, lit only dimly from windows high above and from the sky that never darkens over the city of New York, passing clouds reflecting light back down from above. Some distance away on the rooftop, a row of colossal air vents rattled in the shadows. Crumpled-up paper lay all around his feet, every wadded ball of newsprint he’d ever thrown through the window. Two or three pieces of his stapler glinted in the half-light. He heard a sound behind him, and when he turned back Elena had dropped down from the window.

  “I’ll get the basketball,” he said.

  But when he found the ball it had lost most of its air, and anyway, the surface here was gravel. He held it in both hands as he came back to her, the rubber warm and too soft.

  “It’s lost air,” he said. “Want to break into a hotel room?” He gestured at the Hyatt across the rooftop, the line of blank windows so close. Elena hesitated.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “We’ll say it was my idea,” he said. “We’ll plead insanity. No wait, we’ll plead heatstroke.”

  “I’m afraid of being deported.”

  “Why would you be deported? You have a Social Security number and an American passport.”

  “I don’t want to take the risk,” she said.

  “Funny,” he said, “you never struck me as the risk-averse type.”

  She was silent. Her hair was illuminated by the light from the office windows above and behind her, a frizzy halo, but he couldn’t quite see her face. He looked up at the sheer tower walls rising all around them, towers of windows reflecting each other and the night.

  “Let’s go back inside,” he said. He gave her a leg up. She disappeared over the window frame. Anton stood outside for a moment longer in the heat before he followed her. Glass cracked softly under his shoes. The room was dark and so still that for a moment he thought she’d left.

  Elena was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. Her breathing seemed shallow when he came to her, and her skin was clammy to the touch.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I just don’t deal with heat very well.”

  “The heat’s deadly.” He sat on the floor beside the sofa, near her head, and kissed her hand. Her sweat was salty on his lips. He heard himself asking, “Do you think he knows?” and felt clichéd and a little tragic. All the dangerous joys of the five o’clock hour had dissipated; the room had depressurized and gone dim.

  “I don’t think so.” She didn’t open her eyes. “I usually get home before he does anyway. If I don’t, I tell him I’m out with friends.”

  “And he never suspects anything?”

  “Caleb isn’t stupid, he just, I don’t know, we’ve known each other for so long and he’s so distracted by his work, he doesn’t—”

  “Suspect things.”

  “Right.” She opened her eyes, sat on the edge of the sofa for a moment, stood up slowly and took a deep breath. “He doesn’t suspect things. Goodnight, Anton.”

  He stood up and kissed her. She closed the office door behind her, and her footsteps were lost instantly in the white noise of the mezzanine. He glanced at his watch—ten thirty P.M.—and went to the broken window to retrieve his shirt. It was still damp with sweat. A jagged edge of glass had ripped a hole in the sleeve, and when he p
ut it on there was a crumpled black streak across the front where the fabric had been pressed against the outside of the window frame. He looked to the back of the door where his spare shirt usually hung, but he’d worn it home the night before. On his way down in the elevator in the ruined shirt he decided that from now on it would be a good idea to have two shirts hanging on the back of the door at all times, and he felt suddenly exhausted by the command of detail that successful infidelity required.

  Outside the city had fallen into a subtropical nightmare. It was even hotter on Lexington Avenue than it had been on the rooftop, and he moved like a sleepwalker through the heat-locked air. It was impossible to move quickly; it took Anton a half-hour to get to the open-till-midnight GAP in Times Square, another few minutes under the fluorescent lights with bored night-shift sales associates and dazed tourists before he left with a new clean shirt in a bag. Outside on the sidewalk he took his old shirt off in front of gawping tourists and buttoned up the new one, overexposed in the lights of Times Square. It was after eleven P.M. but he could see his shadow on the sidewalk.

  “Indecent,” a passing woman said to him, indignant under a cloud of bleached hair.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he said, struggling to remove the price tag from the new shirt. He threw the old shirt in a trash can before he buttoned up the new one and stepped out into the street to hail a cab, but there were no empty taxis traveling northward that night, and the new shirt was soaked to his back almost instantly. After a few minutes of waving at full taxis he gave up and descended into the 110-degree hell of the subway system, where he waited a long time for a train to arrive.

  When he got home it was well past midnight. All of the lights were on in the apartment, and the door to Sophie’s study was closed. She was working. He stood for a moment with his ear to the door. She didn’t come out to greet him, and he fell asleep an hour later to the sounds of Bach’s First Cello Suite.

  In the morning Anton woke and saw blood on the pillow, and remembered the sting on the side of his face as he swung the keyboard into the window. In the bathroom mirror he saw the cut, very small and swollen pink. He removed a tiny piece of glass. It came out clear and shining, a translucent bloody absence between the prongs of the tweezers. He held it up to the light for a moment and then flushed it down the toilet, and only then did he notice Sophie in the bathroom doorway.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “I cut myself shaving.”

  “You were shaving with glass?”

  “I—”

  But she’d stepped away from the door, she was making coffee in the kitchen, and when he tried to bring it up later her mouth tensed and she shook her head and turned away from him. This was the morning of August 4th. “That wasn’t glass,” he told her twice. “That isn’t what you saw.” But she didn’t want to talk about it, that day or on any of the days that followed. The wedding was a silently approaching thing, like a hurricane spiraling closer over the surface of a weather map.

  “Are you nervous about getting married?” Elena asked softly. It was almost six o’clock and time had been passing very quickly. In a moment she would stand up and put her clothes back on. In a week he would leave her and fly to Italy on his honeymoon.

  “Yes,” Anton said.

  He tried to imagine coming home to Elena instead of Sophie, tried to imagine light hair instead of dark on the pillow beside him in the mornings, his apartment with the study door flung open and no cello inside, the room converted into a second bedroom, an office, another place for reading books. Sophie living somewhere else, Sophie losing significance with time and fading eventually into the ranks of former girlfriends. He looked at Elena, but she was looking at the ceiling. She reached absently for her handbag, as she always did when they were finished, fumbled around for a moment and came out empty-handed, then reached in again and extracted a tube of Chapstick. She was biting her lower lip.

  “Does your fiancée get along with your family?”

  But what would life be, with the two of us alone for longer than an hour? Do we depend on the ghosts of the others, Caleb and Sophie, is it the thrill of stealing you from him that makes me want to take you on the floor of the office every afternoon at five ten? Elena was tense and still beside him. He was never sure what made her so ill at ease at these moments, but he assumed it was guilt. A few miles to the north in a basement laboratory, her boyfriend mapped the genome of the Lotus japonicus.

  “Why are you always so curious about my family?”

  “I don’t know. I just am. I feel like I don’t know you that well.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about your family, for a change?”

  “There’s not much to tell. My dad’s a social worker. My mother’s a nurse at the hospital.”

  “Were you born in the north?”

  “I was born in Toronto,” she said. “We went to the north when I was three.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a shortage of nurses and social workers up there. They wanted to be helpful. But I’ve been plotting my escape from the north for as long as I can remember. Let’s not talk about the north.”

  “Okay. Do you have siblings?”

  “I have a brother and a younger sister. We used to be close, but she lives at home with her baby and we have absolutely nothing in common anymore. Our brother’s a few years older. He works in a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories.” She was quiet for a while, looking away. “Weren’t you nervous? Selling Social Security cards like that?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know, I was just thinking about it. I think I’d be afraid of getting caught.”

  “I was afraid in the beginning,” Anton said.

  “Do you remember the very first one ever?”

  “Of course I do,” Anton said.

  7.

  The first one ever was a red-haired girl with still gray eyes at an Irish bar near Grand Central, four weeks out of Ireland when Aria approached her. She was tired and pale, not sleeping well in a crowded apartment share in the Bronx. She wanted to be a pilot. She moved through the evenings efficiently, was as charming as possible and played up the accent a little and wore a tight shirt in order to obtain maximum tips, read aviation magazines at the library, took long walks through the city and wrote postcards full of half-truths to her friends in Belfast on her days off.

  “It’s difficult to imagine going anywhere,” she said. “I can’t go home, or they won’t let me back into the country. I want to stay here, but I already miss them.”

  “Miss who?” The fake Social Security card was in Anton’s wallet. His hands were steady but his legs were shaking, which always happened when he was desperately nervous.

  “Everyone,” she said. “Even the people I didn’t talk to much, I miss them. My downstairs neighbor Blythe.” She took a slow sip of coffee. Anton glanced discreetly at his watch. He had envisioned this as a fast shadowy transaction, take the money and run, but he hadn’t factored her loneliness into the equation. They’d been in the coffee shop for nearly an hour and she seemed to be in no rush.

  “Your downstairs neighbor.”

  “Blythe. She must’ve been in her fifties. Lived alone, dunno if she was ever married or had kids. I never heard anyone come by to see her. She never went out except to go to work, this insurance office down the street. She listened to talk radio all day on the weekends, so there was always voices coming from her place, and I’d hear them all day long. When I first moved into the place it drove me crazy, I mean, this woman’s radio was never off, but then after a while I didn’t mind anymore. It was nice, I mean, I lived alone too, and always hearing someone talking, it makes you less alone.” She blinked and sipped at her coffee again. “What about you? Were you born here?” He realized that she must have very few friends in this city.

  “Albany,” he lied. His hands were sweating. The lunch-hour crowd was thinning out. He wished she’d stop talking and ask for the card. He was wearing
reflective dark glasses that made her look like a ghost across the banquette.

  “Is Gabriel your real name, then?”

  “Of course,” Anton said. He had thought up the alias with great difficulty.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty,” she repeated. “Twenty.”

  “Yeah. Um, think of flight school.” He could see the doubt in her eyes. He tried to look as serious as possible, in an effort to appear somewhat older than eighteen. “I mean seriously, whatever my name is or how old I actually am, think how much easier it will be with a Social Security number.”

  “I could get in without one,” she said. “I did the research.”

  “Still,” he said, “I can’t help but think it might be easier if the question didn’t come up, don’t you?”

  She looked at him flatly for a moment and then sighed. “Christ,” she said. “Okay. How do we do this?”

  He leaned toward her over the table; she leaned close, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that her breath smelled of licorice. “Give me the envelope,” he said very softly. “There’s only one bathroom here, and I’m going to go in there and count the money while you go up to the counter to pay for your coffee, and then I’m going to leave. If the count was correct, then when you go in there after me your card will be taped to the back of the toilet tank.”

  “Like in that Godfather movie with the gun,” she said. “I like that.”

  In the bathroom he counted the money and put it in his wallet. From his wallet he took out the Social Security card, double-checked the name on it and put it in the envelope. There was condensation on the toilet tank, a cold porcelain sweat. He tried four times, but the tape he’d brought with him wouldn’t stick; the envelope kept falling, the tape kept coming away wet and glueless. He was at a loss for a moment until he remembered the gum. He found the last stick in his pocket and chewed rapidly, contemplating the toilet, then stuck the gum to the back of the tank, stuck the envelope to the gum, and opened the bathroom door half-expecting a SWAT team. The girl was paying at the counter. He walked out behind her back and away down the street in the opposite direction of home, his heart pounding. It was a mile before he doubled back toward the Williamsburg Bridge and his parents’ store. He took a circuitous route home amid the warehouses.