The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

That was the year Gary introduced Anton to cigarettes, which they felt conveyed a certain hard glamor. The technique was to squint into the distance and smoke as if you’d been smoking for so long that you hardly noticed the cigarette anymore and in fact had no idea how it had ended up in your hand. They practiced smoking under the bridge, separated from Anton’s parents’ store by several hundred yards and an array of enormous concrete pilings.

  “You know your cousin steals?” Gary asked once, when the cigarettes were lit. He passed one to Anton, who took it gingerly—the thing he didn’t like about cigarettes was that one end was hot—and used it to stall for time.

  “She’s fucked up,” he said, after he’d exhaled, when it became apparent that Gary was waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop her.”

  But he realized as he spoke that he didn’t really want to. Every time he thought of her he was shot through with strange envy. She was six months older but miles ahead.

  Aria had a way of staring at the river while she smoked her cigarettes. Standing in front of the store, under the awning when it was raining. One hand in her pocket, the other holding her cigarette, and she lit one cigarette after another and looked out at nothing, or at Ecuador.

  Anton’s and Aria’s sole chore around the apartment was to do the dishes, because his parents liked to read after dinner. When the dishes were done Aria usually disappeared into the demands of her private life, going out with friends who exchanged inscrutable jokes in rapid-fire Spanish or closing herself in her room and listening to music with the volume turned down low. She saved and saved and bought her own CD player. Anton’s father was willing to put down his book to have a conversation if he saw Anton hovering around, but there were two or three hours after dinner when his mother was lost to them; she read with all of herself, immersed, breathing language, and couldn’t be reached until she was ready to emerge.

  When he didn’t have plans with anyone he closed himself into his bedroom to read after dinner, or stayed with his parents in the living room. Anton resented the absence of a television, but there were things he read in books that took his breath away. His mother’s collection of travel guides never moved him, but Kirkegaard’s last words were Sweep me up. He read those three words when he was fifteen years old and his eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.

  It was his mother’s absence in the evenings that made Sundays important. When it was warm enough she sat with him on the loading dock in front of the store, watching the boats on the river and Manhattan on the other side. Anton would go out by himself around ten and after a few minutes she came to join him with two mugs of coffee, and they sat there together for an hour or so. They didn’t talk much; the point was contemplation and silence. In winter they drank coffee in the store, where there were two old chairs behind the counter that were too comfortable to sell, but it wasn’t the same as watching the river.

  “Does it bother you ever?” he asked her once. “The way we do things?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.” It was a Sunday morning, almost noon. He was fifteen years old and they were watching a Brooklyn-bound J train passing over the Williamsburg Bridge. The warehouse was so close to being under the bridge that at a certain point any approaching subway train disappeared overhead.

  “I know a lot of it’s stolen,” Anton said. “The stuff we sell.”

  “True,” said his mother. She had finished her coffee and she held the empty mug clasped loosely in her hands. She was looking at Manhattan, or looking through Manhattan at something else. There were moments when Anton’s parents seemed very far away from him.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “No,” she said. “Does that disappoint you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She was quiet for a while. “Your grandfather was an official in the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He was a well-respected man, one of those pillar-of-the-community types, but he was terrifically cruel in his personal life. I ran away at sixteen. Was he moral? He thought so. He operated a soup kitchen and a shelter for the homeless during the winter and probably saved lives. There are probably people alive today who were homeless in Salt Lake City in the ’60s, and they didn’t freeze to death in the winter because of him. Or my sister,” she said. “We’ve had a few misunderstandings, so you haven’t seen her since you were tiny, but she’s a wonderful woman. She was on welfare because she had three little kids to take care of, and her ex-husband never did pay child support. Once there was a bureaucratic error and she received two welfare checks for the same month. She spent the extra money on new winter coats and boots for the kids and a radio, and her ex-husband found out and threatened to report her for welfare fraud unless she stopped pestering him for child support. Was she immoral? Was what she did wrong? I frankly don’t believe so, my beloved child. My point is that it isn’t black-and-white, what we do or what anyone else does in this world.”

  “We deal in stolen goods.”

  “We deal in goods that would in all likelihood be destroyed anyway. We’re a salvage operation.”

  “But stolen. We don’t know they’ll be destroyed. Someone else might be planning to save them, and we don’t own them. They’re not ours.” He blinked and was humiliated to realize that he was ready to cry. He clenched his coffee cup with both hands to steady himself. Adolescence had made him embarrassingly emotional.

  “Anton,” she said, “sweetheart, I know it’s questionable. But we work hard. I’m at peace. Your father’s at peace. We sleep well at night. What are our options?”

  “Normal jobs?”

  “Normal jobs,” she repeated. Her voice held an edge. “You’ve never worked a normal job, Anton. What do you imagine it might be like?”

  “I don’t know. Less questionable.”

  “Well, most things you have to do in life are at least a little questionable,” she said. She stood abruptly, took his coffee cup from his hands and left him alone on the loading dock.

  11.

  The day after he stole the singer’s gun Anton went down to the piazza and called Gary.

  “You want me to kidnap your cat,” Gary repeated.

  “Not kidnap, exactly.” Anton had purchased aspirin with great difficulty at a pharmacy near the hotel—the pharmacist didn’t speak English, which necessitated a brief game of charades at the counter—but his headache wasn’t entirely gone yet. The sharp light of afternoon made him want to go to bed with the curtains drawn, and the gun was a malignant presence in the top dresser drawer in the hotel room. “I mean, he’s my cat, it’s not like you’re stealing him.”

  “Oh, so I’m not kidnapping him in the technical sense of the word, I’m just breaking into your apartment, extracting your cat, and then putting it in a crate and shipping it to Italy. Cool.”

  “No, I’d send you my house keys. No break and enter involved.”

  “Oh, okay. That changes everything.”

  “Look, and I’d pay your expenses and all the shipping—we’re clear about that, right? I’ll throw in another fifty for your time if you want. A hundred. Make it a hundred, okay? A hundred dollars for two hours of your time.”

  “Thanks, but why don’t you keep the money and buy a new cat?”

  “Because I already have a cat. Jim isn’t replaceable.”

  “Yeah, look, it’s just a little crazy for me. Isn’t there anyone else you could call?”

  “You’re my best friend. Who else would I call?”

  “Sorry,” Gary said.

  “Two hundred. Would you do it for two hundred?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s crazy, Anton, I’m sorry. I’ve known you forever. And I gotta tell you, man, you’ve just been a little out there lately.”

  “Why? Because I miss my cat? I’ve been here for six weeks, Gary. It’s lonely as hell.”

  “No, because you left your wife on your honeymoon and now you want me to take the cat from her too, and all this
after you cheated on her with your secretary. You ever stop to think about what kind of a person you are?”

  “I do, actually. I think about it all the time.”

  “And you can still sleep at night? Because it’s just not admirable, Anton. It isn’t. And look, hey, you know I’m not one to judge, I’ve always been here for you, I was the guy you called and went for beers with every time she fucking canceled a wedding on you, man, but how could you leave your wife on your honeymoon?”

  “You don’t understand, there were—”

  “Oh Christ, let me guess. There were mitigating circumstances.”

  “Well, yes, there—”

  “How fucking mitigating could a circumstance possibly be?”

  “Pretty mitigating,” Anton said.

  “She cheated on you? She tried to kill you? What?”

  “No. Nothing like that. It wasn’t anything she did. Look, I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t tell me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anton said. “I just can’t.”

  The phone call ended badly and afterward Anton went to the café closest to the water. It was the only café on the piazza that still kept regular hours, the only one frequented by the fishermen; the other cafés were opening later and closing earlier as the supply of tourists dwindled and colder winds moved over the surface of the sea. He suspected that the nozzle on this particular café’s milk frother wasn’t cleaned very often—the lattes tasted slightly like yogurt—but the beer was decent and the grilled panini were good. He’d taken to watching the sunset from this place. Anton sat outside in the last light of afternoon, thinking about his cat and about all the things he should have said to Gary.

  Later he took a circuitous walk that lasted three hours and returned to the café after dark to get drunk. There were other lonely foreigners in the piazza that night. They came together as the café emptied out and shared three bottles of wine, and when the café had closed they sat together on a pier: Anton, a couple of Germans who spoke English, another American whose name he didn’t know. The Germans were catching an early flight back to Munich; after a while they went back to their hotel and then it was just Anton and the other American, some guy from Michigan. Anton sat on his hands and looked down at the water, the slick of lights on the surface. He was cold. The effervescence of the previous few hours was fading. He was starting to think about the singer and her gun and his far-off cat again.

  “I can’t remember your name,” Anton said finally. “Did you tell me?”

  “David Grissom.”

  “Anton Waker. Pleasure.” He reached sideways to shake David’s hand. “I’ve seen you around here a few times before tonight. Doing the crossword puzzle. Sketching stuff. I think we’re staying in the same hotel.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been here a few weeks.”

  “Long vacation?”

  “Staying here a while. Painting,” David said.

  “You know, that’s a skill I always wanted. I could never even draw.”

  “It’s an overrated talent.” David seemed uninterested in the subject. “Where do you live?”

  “Here. I used to live in New York, but I don’t think I’m going back there. You?”

  “No fixed address, as they say in the newspapers. I’ve been drifting around Europe for a while.”

  “What do you do, aside from traveling and painting?”

  “You know, I used to think that was the most banal question,” David said. “What do you do? I used to think it was synonymous with How much money do you make? But lately I’ve begun to think it’s the most important question you can ask someone. What do you do? What are you doing? What is your method of conducting your life, by what means do you move through the world? Important information, isn’t it? But I’m sorry, I’m rambling. Is that bottle empty? In answer to your question, I travel aimlessly and try not to think too much. I work odd jobs and paint still-life paintings and then throw out the canvases every time I move to a new place, unless I can sell them to tourists, which only happens if I paint landscapes. I’m going to ask what you do in a minute, bear with me, but first, what’s the most important question you’ve ever been asked?”

  “The most important . . .?”

  “It’s a subject that interests me,” David said. “I used to start conversations the regular way—you know, Hi, how are you, how ’bout this weather we’re having—but then a few years ago, around the time my wife died, I developed an allergy to small talk. So lately I’ve been starting with that question, and I find it makes all the conversations I’m in more interesting. Also, I’m drunk.”

  “It’s a good question.” Anton was quiet for a moment. “A girl in New York asked me something once. She said, What was it like when you were growing up?”

  “What was it like when you were growing up. That’s good. That’s very good. I’ll remember that one. What do you do?”

  “Me?” Anton raised the wine bottle to his lips, drank for a moment and set it back on the pier. “Nothing good. Nothing at all, actually. I’m not doing anything but waiting. Can’t we just ask each other what we used to do? Because the present, well, I have to tell you, I don’t like the present very much.”

  “I used to sell cocaine to art school kids in Michigan,” David said.

  “Really?”

  “Not a bad business,” David said. “I only left Detroit because my wife died.”

  “I’m sorry about your wife. I used to work at a consulting firm,” Anton said, “but I think it’s safe to say that that career’s more or less over. Now I’m just waiting to perform a transaction. I’ve been waiting for a while now.”

  “What kind of transaction?”

  “One I’d rather not do,” Anton said. “It’s nothing, actually. I just have to give a package to someone, and after that I’ll be free. The waiting’s killing me, though. I’m not sure there’s anything much worse than this.”

  “Really? You don’t think there’s anything much worse than sitting on a pier on the southern coast of Italy drinking wine?” David was smiling. “How drunk are you, exactly?”

  “Drunker than I’ve been in a while. I meant there’s nothing much worse than this limbo,” Anton said. “This waiting. All this waiting, and I have nothing to go back to once the waiting’s done. There’s nothing left in New York City. It isn’t just that my marriage is over, it’s that it never should have started in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking. She was a once-in-a-lifetime person, but that doesn’t mean I should have married her. There’s nothing left there for me there except my cat and a girl I had an affair with once.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “The girl? I don’t know. A little. Yes. Okay, the thing is, I miss her, but not as much as I miss my cat.”

  “Your cat.”

  “Jim. He’s not just any cat, I rescued him when he was a little kitten. I was walking one night with Sophie, my wife, back when we were still just dating. It was raining, and there was this little wet shivering kitten in a doorway. He almost died. Lost an eye to infection. I tried to get my best friend to kidnap him and ship him over just now, but he wouldn’t do it.”

  “That’s why I try to avoid having too many friends,” David said. “Unreliable species.”

  “Not as bad as family.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You don’t have a family?”

  “Not really,” David said.

  “I envy you, man. I wish I didn’t have a family.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You’re right,” Anton said, “I don’t. I wish I had a different family.”

  The evening after the thirtieth anniversary dinner at Malvolio’s, Anton took the subway out to Brooklyn. He was tired. His footsteps were heavy on the steel steps up to the loading dock, and his planned speech evaporated when he stepped into his parents’ warehouse. There was the stone fountain just inside that had been there for a decade, sold at last, tagged, waiting for transport. He stopped to touch
it—Look at this holy work of art, these holy stone birds along the edge of this basin—and ran one finger over the ecstatic curved spine of a finch. He thought he was alone but when he looked up Aria was already watching him. She was behind the counter, leaning on it, the New York Times spread out under her elbows.

  “How could you do this?” It wasn’t at all what Anton had meant to say.

  “Anton,” she said, not unkindly, “grow up.”

  “It’s not—”

  “You’re not really going to say It’s not fair, are you?” They were again thirteen, standing under the awning across the street from Gary’s father’s store; she was explaining how to shoplift but he was a baby and she was disgusted with him, You just take it from the shelf and then you don’t have to pay for it. The things she was stealing were different now, colossal: entire futures, perhaps lives, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed when her crimes became so enormous. It occurred to him that perhaps he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

  “Aria,” he said, “this is my life. I’ve done something different. No one else in our family—” he was about to say has ever gone to college, but stopped himself just in time. “Aria, listen, I’m getting married, I’m going to have kids someday, and they’ll go to good schools because I have an office job and I can support that, and they will never have to do anything even remotely corrupt.”

  “You’re saying they won’t have to do what you did.”

  Anton sensed a trap but nodded anyway.

  “Except that you didn’t have to do what you did either.” He had stepped on the tripwire; the trap snapped shut. “What were your grades like in high school?”

  “I hate rhetorical questions.” Anton couldn’t look at her.

  “Straight A’s,” Aria said. “You could have done anything. You always said you wondered what life would be like with a college degree, well, you could have gone to college. You had the grades. They have scholarships for kids with grades like yours. But you didn’t go to college, did you?”

  Anton had no answer to this.

  “The way I live is my decision,” she said. “The way you live is yours. No one ever forced you to be corrupt.”