The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  She looked up from her café latte.

  “Our plane tickets are for Thursday,” she said. “We have to go back to Rome tomorrow.”

  “I was thinking if I stayed here for a little bit,” trying not to emphasize the I too cruelly, failing, “I could get some traction on my book. You know, really write for a while.”

  “You’re writing a book?”

  “It’s a new kind of travel book. I’ve been meaning to tell you about it. I just can’t get going with it at home,” he said, “but the atmosphere here . . .”

  “A new kind of travel book,” she repeated.

  “‘We stand in need of something stronger now,’” he said. He was quoting a book review he’d read in the New York Times a while back, but he surmised from her baffled stare that she hadn’t read it. He pressed on regardless: “‘A travel book that you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.’”

  “That’s what you’re writing?”

  “Well, I haven’t started yet. But here, you know, with no distractions . . .”

  “Well, if you can’t write it in New York City, Anton, you won’t be able to write it here either.”

  “Bukowski,” he said. “I like that.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that what he said? Something about writing in the apocalypse with a cat clawing up your back? Anyway, I just think—”

  “No, he said if you’re going to create, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood, and fire.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  She regarded him silently.

  “As I was saying. I just thought . . . I just think it might be nice,” he said, “after all we’ve been through, you know, it’s been so intense with the wedding and everything, all the cancellations, I thought maybe we should be apart for a while. I mean, when I say a while, not a long while, just maybe a couple weeks. Sophie, please don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “You probably hate me,” he said. “Suggesting this on our honeymoon of all times.”

  “No,” she said. She was digging in her purse.

  “It’s okay, I’ll pay for your latte. Are you all right? Tell me honestly.”

  “Fine,” she said absently, without looking up. Her handbag yielded a ferry schedule. She examined it for a moment, glanced at the antique gold wristwatch his parents had given her as an engagement gift, stood up from the table and started out of the piazza without looking at him. By the time he found a ten-euro bill in his wallet she was out of sight. He left the money on the table and ran after her, lunged through the door of the hotel and then realized at the bottom of the staircase that she hadn’t gone in. When he came back out into the sunlight, blinking, she was already halfway up the road that led out of the village. He caught up with her as she was getting into a taxi.

  “Sophie, what are you doing?” He thought he’d never seen her so calm before and wondered if she somehow thrived on catastrophe.

  She said something in Italian to the taxi driver, who nodded and started his engine. Somewhat at a loss, Anton climbed in beside her and closed the door.

  “Sophie, come on, this is unnecessary. Your luggage. Your passport.”

  “I carry my passport in my handbag,” she said, “and you can dispose of my luggage as you see fit.”

  Sophie had nothing to say the rest of the way to the ferry terminal. He was on the shoreline side of the minivan; he stared out the window at the jumbled chaos of hotels and villas and the sea beyond, thinking of how beautiful the sea was and how much crassness and vulgarity lay between him and it. She had nothing to say at the ferry terminal either. She ducked away from his kiss and got on the ferry without speaking to him while he hung back uncertainly on the shore.

  The way she departed: standing on the ferry moving away from him over the water toward the city of Naples, looking at him where he stood. She was half-smiling in a way that he felt was meant to convey something—sorrow, hope, reproach?—but he couldn’t bear it and so he turned away almost immediately, while her features and her half-smile were still clearly visible and the boat still loud in the water, and he realized later that this had been the moment when the cord had finally snapped between them.

  He found himself repeating the motion at intervals in the weeks that followed, trying to recapture the clarity of that moment at the ferry terminal. Standing on the road near Sant’Angelo and looking out at the sea, for example, he would turn very slowly and deliberately away from the sunset, and he was invariably disappointed by the lack of finality in the movement.

  For the first two weeks on Ischia he did very little. Once he had explained to the hotel owner that he planned on staying a few weeks or possibly longer and worked out an arrangement for the off-season—“You will help me watch the place, yes?” the hotel owner said—the question of what to do next hung overhead like a cartoon thundercloud. He was waiting for an event, and thoughts of it crowded out everything else. He had ideas about his travel book but was too distracted to write anything. The room was so small that he felt claustrophobic unless the doors to the balcony were open, but then the sea was too blue, the air was too bright, and before long he found himself down in one of the cafés on the piazza with a glass of coffee and the International Herald Tribune, reading and absorbing sunlight and doing the crossword puzzle and watching the boats. Anton had no books with him that he hadn’t already read, which was a problem, and there was an enormous amount of time to kill. He was startled by how much he missed his cat. He’d rescued Jim as a kitten two years earlier, and the cat had been an adoring orange one-eyed presence in Anton’s life ever since. He went for long walks up the stairs of the town, past houses and gardens terraced up the side of the hill, and spent hours sitting by the harbor at night. On clear nights Capri was a distant scattering of lights. He could see it from his room but preferred to be down by the harbor, where you could walk to a certain point at the edge of the piazza, turn away from Capri, and imagine that nothing stood between you and the north coast of Africa. He harbored vague notions of escaping to Tunisia.

  “Are you having a nervous breakdown?” Gary asked, over a phone line crackly with enormous distance.

  “No,” Anton said. He was leaning against a wall beside the pay phone in the Sant’Angelo piazza, looking out at the boats moving silently up and down in the harbor waves. Imagining the phone lines running under the Tyrrhenian Sea. The piazza was deserted. There were people inside a nearby café that was frequented mostly by fishermen, but the restaurants and shops were shuttered and dark. The wind off the water was cold.

  “You’d tell me, right? Your best man and everything.”

  “Of course,” Anton said. “The question’s not unreasonable.”

  “What did you tell the office?”

  “What did I tell the . . .? Oh,” he said. “The office. They’ve probably figured it out by now.”

  “You didn’t tell them you were abandoning your job?”

  “Well, the job abandoned me first. And I didn’t know before I left that I wasn’t coming back again.”

  “So you’re not coming back.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can see how a concerned friend might conclude there was something amiss,” said Gary. “Even if he hadn’t been your best man two weeks ago.”

  “I could. Yes.”

  “What’s your means of support over there?”

  “I’m expecting some money soon. It isn’t expensive. I could last quite a while here.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. Listen, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’ll call you later.” Anton hung up and walked to the edge of the piazza to look at the boats.

  Anton’s job had faded out at the beginning of summer, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum, until he found himself alone in a dead-file storage room on the mezzanine level of the tower where he worked. The process be
gan on the day his secretary disappeared, although it was far from clear at the time that things would snowball so quickly; this was near the beginning of June, and the third and final wedding attempt had just been scheduled for the end of August.

  Anton was the head of a small research division at an international water systems consulting firm. Most of its projects to date had been in the desert cities, places like LasVegas and Dubai, where some impractical visionary had once touched a point on a map and said, Here. Never mind that the place touched on the map was uninhabited for a reason: “But there’s no water there,” some inevitable naysayer would protest, and this was where Water Incorporated eventually came in. There was also work done in other, less glamorous municipalities around the world, towns from Sweden to Montana with leaking aqueducts and purification issues. But the New York City contract was something unusual, and the details made Anton shiver when he read them: most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water that flow each day into the city of New York are supplied by two pipes, completed respectively in 1917 and 1935. The conduits have become so fragile over time that the supply can’t be interrupted in order to perform routine maintenance; the pipes are held intact only by the pressure of the water rushing through them, and the system leaks thirty-six million gallons of water per day. A third pipe has been under construction since 1970, but whether it will be completed before the older pipes fail is anyone’s guess. If the first two pipes were to fail before the third pipe is ready, then New York City would be rendered uninhabitable overnight, the supply of drinking water cut off. Water Incorporated’s contract called for studying the situation and coming up with recommendations on how to provide the residents of New York with a temporary supply of drinking water within twenty-four hours of a catastrophic pipe failure.

  “All of you should be proud,” Anton’s director told the staff. “It’s your good work that brought us to this moment.” He was standing on a chair to address the troops. The New York City contract had been announced the day before and they were having an office party to celebrate. Anton was drinking wine with two of his staff: Dahlia, who he would have liked to drink with more often if he weren’t already engaged, and Elena, his secretary, who he’d been secretly in love with since he’d met her under criminal circumstances two and a half years earlier. “Now, as you can no doubt imagine,” the director said, “the systems we’ll be studying hold significant interest for terrorists.” He said terrorists in a slightly hushed tone, as if al-Qaeda might be holding a competing office party in an adjoining room. “We’re talking about the New York City water supply here. So in the coming weeks before the project commences,” he said, “we’ll be performing background checks on all staff who will be involved in the project. It’s a new regulatory compliance thing.”

  Anton excused himself and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and stare at his own reflection in the mirror. A background check. He felt as pale as he looked. In the days after the office party life continued as normal, but three weeks later he arrived at work on a Monday to find that his secretary had vanished. An unfamiliar blond specimen was sitting in her cubicle.

  “Where’s Elena?” he asked.

  The impostor, who was chewing gum, looked at him distastefully. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Anton Waker. This is my office. You’re sitting at my secretary’s desk.”

  “They didn’t tell me anything about an Anton,” she said. “They said I was supporting Louise and Jasper.”

  “It’s Gaspar, not Jasper. I’m afraid you were misinformed. Where’s Ellie?”

  “Who’s Ellie?”

  “Elena James? My secretary?”

  “I’m your secretary.”

  “You just told me you weren’t.”

  “But then you said I was misinformed,” she said. He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He sat for a while at his desk going through yesterday’s research reports, spent a half-hour on the phone with Sophie who was crying because someone had cut in front of her in line at the bakery and she hated people and why was everyone always so horrible and mean, and when he ventured back out a few hours later the new secretary was gone. He heard her voice from somewhere down the hall and walked in the opposite direction to avoid her. Later in the afternoon he asked Dahlia if she’d made progress on the report she was supposed to be writing, and she told him that actually she’d been told to report to Gaspar in the Compliance and Regulatory Affairs department from now on.

  “But you don’t do that kind of work,” he said.

  She was embarrassed but had no explanation. It was just what she’d been told. His other seven direct reports told him the same thing, awkwardly, with their eyes downcast. No one really knew anything. It was embarrassing. The sympathy in their eyes made him want to punch someone. He couldn’t very well go across the hall and speak to Gaspar about it (“So, what’s this I hear about my entire staff reporting to you now?”), and repeated calls to his supervisor were not returned (“I’m sorry, Anton, he’s still unavailable. Would you like me to take another message?”), so he spent the day in his office with the door closed, waiting for an explanatory memo that never arrived. When he left at five his staff was in a meeting that he hadn’t been invited to. He heard Dahlia’s laugh and the strange new secretary’s voice through the conference-room door. Anton felt very formal all the way home.

  Sophie was working; he heard the cello through her study door. He turned on the television and turned it off again, ordered Malaysian takeout and ate alone in silence, read the morning’s newspaper for a while and spent time with the cat, ate a few spoonfuls of ice cream, sat for two hours in the living room spell-bound by Sophie’s music. He talked with Sophie about the day’s news headlines when she emerged from the study around ten o’clock, brushed his teeth, kissed her, slept fitfully, came back to the office at a quarter to nine. He was met at the doorway of his office by a man from HR. Jackson was about Anton’s age and of similar build, but always slightly better dressed. He had a way of smiling a beat too quickly, and Anton had always found him somehow suspect.

  “Anton,” he said. His voice was hesitant. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Jackson. Good morning. Do you know where my staff went?”

  Jackson smiled. “I believe they’re all in a meeting. May I talk to you a moment?”

  “If they’re my staff,” Anton said, “and they’re in a meeting, why wasn’t I invited to the meeting too? I’m supposed to be supervising them?” He hadn’t meant the last part to sound like a question.

  Jackson continued to smile instead of answering, but his smile was strained; he had the look of a man who’d have prefered to be doing almost anything else. Anton closed the door of his office behind them. He wondered if this was the last time he’d ever sit behind his desk, and he glanced up at the diploma on the wall to steady himself. Jackson sat down on one of the chairs across from him.

  “Anton,” he said, “I realize the timing of this is a little unfortunate, but . . .”

  “The timing of what?”

  “As you know,” Jackson said, “we’ve been conducting some background checks recently.”

  “Right, to prevent terrorist cells from infiltrating the office,” Anton said, but Jackson seemed not to find this as amusing as he did. “Well. Is there anything I can clarify for you?”

  “There is, Anton. Listen, this might be awkward, but it would be best if we could speak as frankly as possible.”

  “About . . .?”

  “Well, let’s start with your academic background.”

  “Sure. Harvard.”

  Jackson smiled again but it was a different kind of smile, one that Anton thought contained an element of sadness. “Right,” Jackson said. He stood up, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the front of his suit jacket. “Well, we’ll speak again about this soon. Did I hear a rumor that you’re getting married?”

  “End of August,” Anton said.

  “Congratulations. Are you going anywhere af
terward?”

  “Italy,” Anton said. “Rome, Capri, Ischia.”

  “Ischia. Is that an island?”

  Anton nodded. “In the Bay of Naples,” he said.

  On the way in to the office sometimes, in the days after the first conversation with Jackson, Anton closed his eyes in the subway train and tried to concentrate on everything that wasn’t ruined yet. There was an idea he’d been thinking about for years now but especially lately, which was that everything he saw contained a flicker of divinity, and this lent the city a halo of brightness. Fallen, maybe, but beauty in the decrepitude, and it still seemed plausible in those days that everything might somehow fall back into place, that the background check might not have turned up anything of interest, that his original secretary might reappear at any moment. Easy to take refuge in the idea of holiness, with so much still possible and so much at stake.

  The idea that everything might be somewhat holy had come originally from his mother, reading excerpts from a book on the philosophy of Spinoza on a Sunday afternoon. He was no older than twelve, and they were sitting together on the loading dock. She was reading him something impenetrable, he didn’t understand half the words and she glanced up and saw the blank look on his face. “Look,” she said, “I know the language is intense. None of the words are important, it’s the idea that matters: he’s saying God didn’t create the universe, God is the universe. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” he said.

  Look at my holy fiancée in the mornings, pale and darting-eyed as she anoints her face with creams and powders. Look at my holy one-eyed cat, rescued two years ago as a sickly kitten from an unholy doorstep on West 121st Street. Look at the holy trains that carry us down into the depths of this city, passing through stations that shine like harbors in the deep. Look at the holy trees down the center of Broadway, the holy newspaper lying discarded on the sidewalk, the holy cathedral of Grand Central Station where we pass each morning under a canopy of stars. Anton glanced up every morning as he crossed the main concourse. Its ceiling was a chalky green-blue upon which stars were pinpointed in lights, the shapes of constellations etched in gold around them. The constellations were backward; the artist had been influenced, the sponsors claimed after the fact, by a medieval manuscript showing the stars as seen by God from above. It was impossible to stop and look up at the ceiling in the blazing crowd, everyone rushing in different directions to different jobs, but the glimpses were nearly enough. Anton was aware of no place more beautiful in the city. The color of the ceiling always struck him as being more ocean-like than sky-like, and the stars made him think of phosphorus, which he’d read about but never seen. There was one morning in particular when he wanted to ask Elena if she’d ever seen phosphorus, but it was Thursday and of course Elena had vanished four days ago, and he was waging a war of attrition with his new secretary. She ignored him as he walked past her into his office that morning.