The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  He didn’t look at her either, per their unspoken terms of engagement, but it occurred to him as he closed the office door that he’d had no occasion to ask her for anything yet, which struck him as odd. She had come to him for nothing; there had been no phone messages. As he sat down he noticed that his inbox was empty, for the first time in months. He remembered having reached the bottom yesterday afternoon, and he realized with a falling sensation that nothing new had been placed in it. He sat down at the desk, chilled by the air conditioning, and checked his voice mail. No messages. He had left his corporate cell phone in his desk drawer overnight. He tried to check his messages there too, but he couldn’t get more than a fast busy signal no matter which combination of buttons he pressed. He logged on to his company email, or tried to, and then spent some time leaning as far back as his chair would go, contemplating the error message on the screen. Access Denied.

  Jackson’s card was on his desk. Anton hadn’t really wanted to touch it since Jackson had left it there. He’d been moving his paperwork carefully around and over the card for the past several days in the hope that it might just disappear by itself. He looked at his screen another moment and then dialed Jackson’s number.

  “Anton,” Jackson said, in a tone implying that Anton was absolutely the last person he wanted to speak with that morning. “What can I do for you?”

  “Good morning, Jackson. Listen, I’m locked out of my company email account.”

  “I see,” Jackson said.

  “And my cell phone’s not working.”

  “Really?”

  “Since you were here a few days ago,” Anton said, “I just thought you might be in a position to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Well, I’m not a technical support person, Anton.”

  “Jackson, listen, my staff isn’t reporting to me. Let’s not pretend this is a technical issue.”

  Jackson was silent for a moment, and then Anton heard a soft click on the line.

  “Anton,” Jackson said very clearly, “have you thought any more about our conversation last week?”

  “Am I being recorded?”

  Jackson went quiet again, and then asked Anton if there was anything he’d like to add to last week’s conversation.

  “Nothing,” Anton said. “Absolutely nothing, Jackson, but thank you for asking. Sorry to bother you.”

  Anton hung up, spent some time staring at the diploma on his office wall, and then dialed Jackson’s number again.

  “Jackson, I’m sorry to bother you again. But I wondered if you could tell me what happened to my secretary.”

  “Your secretary? She isn’t at her desk?”

  “I meant Elena,” he said. “Elena James.”

  “Marlene is your secretary, Anton.”

  “Is that her name? My former secretary, then. She wasn’t fired, was she?”

  “Of course not. No. Her reviews were excellent.”

  “Yes, I know her reviews were excellent, Jackson, I wrote them. Was she transferred somewhere? A different department?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t divulge—”

  Anton hung up again and spent the remainder of the day reading and rereading the New York Times, drumming his fingers on his desk and staring into space, walking back and forth across the room with his hands in his pockets, writing his letter of resignation and then crumpling it up and throwing it across the room, wishing he were in Italy already.

  The stop before Ischia was the city of Naples. Anton and Sophie came in by train after sunset and emerged from the station into a broad curved cobblestone street where no one spoke English but the taxi drivers all insisted that they knew where their hotel was, and the streets glimpsed near the train station were dark and strewn with trash, ancient apartment buildings towering unlit. The driver took them at high speed through an intricate network of freeways, and the overpasses curving overhead had a futuristic and sinister gleam. As they sped around corners the city was fleetingly visible, a gray glimmering chaos of buildings clinging to the hillside as far as the eye could see, and then they were plunging down the hairpin turns of a narrow street, passing between buildings that appeared to have sustained some unrepaired shell damage during the course of the Second World War. The driver performed a harrowing U-turn and screeched to a halt before the Hotel Britannique. They checked in and ascended in silence to the room, where Sophie took a shower and Anton stood on the tiny terrace six stories above the traffic. He was looking out over a scattering of palm trees that stood across the street, down over the narrow section of city that descended from their street to the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Bay of Naples calm below. There were boats in the moonlight. He heard the bathroom door open in the room behind him and he realized that he and Sophie had barely spoken in hours, and not at all since they’d arrived in the city. Anton turned and through the gauze curtains she was a ghost in the steam, drifting across the room toward her suitcase, pulling a dress on over her skin. He parted the curtains and she stood barefoot and pensive before him, hair dripping dark water spots on the sky-blue linen of her dress. She looked at him and for an instant he thought he saw panic in her eyes.

  “I’m just tired,” she said quickly.

  It took him a second to notice that her eyes were red. Three months ago, he thought, he would have noticed that instantly.

  “That’s why you were crying?”

  “I just get tired sometimes,” she said.

  “I know you do. It’s okay.”

  She smiled and twisted her hair up behind her head, secured it with a clip, seemed unaware of her beauty as a few strands escaped and fell over her neck.

  “Sophie,” he said. She looked up. “Let’s go out and see the city.”

  On the street outside the night was subtropical, palm trees lit up against a deep blue sky. The sidewalk was narrow, cars and scooters passing so close that he could have reached out and touched them. Sophie clung to his hand. The street began a curve that didn’t seem to end. They kept walking uphill, the road turning and turning ahead of them, until Anton thought they should have gone in a complete circle. There was no breeze from the sea below—it was as hot here as it had been in New York when they’d left—and his shirt was wet against his back. It was a long time before they came to a restaurant. He pushed open the wooden door, and Sophie moved past him into the room without speaking. The sign read Ristorante, but it was more of a lounge; a dim space filled with tables that terraced down toward a small stage where a girl in a sparkly dress was singing in English. Anton thought she was pretty and wished for a moment that he could share this observation with his wife.

  “She’s singing a New Order song,” Sophie said suddenly. “Listen.”

  “I have this album,” Anton said. “I used to listen to it all the time.”

  “I know, but she’s singing it at half-speed. Like a nightclub song.”

  “Well,” he said, “it is a nightclub.”

  “Do you hear an accent?” Sophie asked. She didn’t seem to have heard him. “I think she’s British.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “She’s terrible,” Sophie said after a moment.

  A waiter had appeared. Anton got Sophie to order for him in her phrase-book Italian, and the song finished to surprisingly fervent applause. The singer’s dress was very tight and seemed to be made entirely of sequins, so that she emitted shards of light with every movement. It hurt his eyes to look directly at her. Her hair was dark and pinned up elaborately. She wasn’t terrible, he thought. Her voice was sweet and a bit too young for her body.

  “Now she’s singing old Depeche Mode stuff,” Sophie said, in the tones of a girl watching a scandal unfold, and he forced himself to avert his attention from the broken-glass dress and listen to the song.

  “I like it,” he said. “I think it’s interesting.” He watched Sophie’s face, but she didn’t respond or look away from the girl. They were taking a ferry tomorrow to the island of Ischia.

  “What I wish you could
tell me,” Gary said at the beginning of Anton’s fourth week alone on Ischia, “is what you’re actually doing there.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” Anton said. He’d been calling Gary almost every day since Sophie had left the island. He was bored and there was no one to talk to there.

  “Are you waiting for something?”

  “You know what’s strange,” Anton said, “and this will sound awful—but what I really miss is my cat. I miss my cat more than I miss Sophie.”

  “Your cat?”

  “Jim. I know it probably sounds strange, in light of everything, but he’s the one I keep thinking about.”

  “You’re right, that sounds strange. Why don’t you come back?”

  “I can’t. It’s a long story.”

  “Is there some reason you’re avoiding New York?”

  “Well,” Anton said, “now that you mention it.”

  “You kill someone?”

  “Please. I can’t even set mousetraps.”

  “Affair with your secretary? Unpaid debt?”

  “Can you think of anything more banal,” Anton said, “than having an affair with your secretary?”

  “You were sleeping with her. Jesus.”

  “Things happen,” Anton said. “Look, I’m not proud of it.”

  “Christ. Your secretary. How did it start?”

  “The way I noticed her,” he said. “It wasn’t the way you’re supposed to notice someone you work with.”

  Elena in the evenings: she stood by the window at six thirty P.M., watching as the evening reflection of their office tower appeared on the side of the Hyatt Hotel. The hotel was a reflective wall of square panels no more than fifty feet away, a mirror on which the bright windows of their offices began to appear at nightfall, before five in the winter. This was the time of day when, just by looking out the window, Anton could see the movement of workers on the floors above and below him. They walked across their offices from one lit square to another, wavering like ghosts in the reflection. The exterior of the hotel was composed entirely of glass and revealed nothing of its secret life except when a window was opened, which was rarely. Once Anton looked out and a man was leaning out the hotel window smoking a cigarette, and the sight gave him a shock—he was so used to thinking of the hotel as a mirror that he’d all but forgotten about the hotel rooms and suitcases and transient human souls on the other side of the glass.

  Elena liked to pause by the floor-to-ceiling window in the reception area on her way back from the water cooler and stand there for a moment, sipping from a paper cup. He knew this because he watched her through the window of his office, their reflections separated by an interior wall but side-by-side on the hotel’s dark glass. Sometimes she waved at him and then he’d wave back, but more often she didn’t seem to notice him at all and then he’d watch her unobserved. At the end of the day it sometimes made him sad to look at her. She was tragic in the way he found half the office girls he’d ever met tragic, especially the ones who didn’t come from New York. She was one of millions of girls who’d come there from elsewhere and somehow gotten stuck in the upward trajectory, lost in the machine; making photocopies and fetching coffee for other people from nine to five or nine to six or nine to eight five days a week, exhausted at the end of a workday that far too closely resembled the workday before, and the workday before, and the workday before that; young and talented and still hopeful but losing ground; bright young things held up by their pinstripes on the Brooklyn-and Queens-bound trains every weekday evening, heading home to apartment shares in sketchy neighborhoods and dinners of instant noodles from corner bodegas.

  The new secretary never stood by the window, and if she had Anton wouldn’t have waved to her. When ten days had passed without Elena, without email access or an explanation or word from his supervisors, he called Sophie to tell her that some genius had called a six o’clock staff meeting and he’d be home late. He closed himself in his office with a bottle of water and a sandwich. It seemed at least possible that if Elena were elsewhere in the building, her new office might be on the side of the building that faced the hotel, in which case he hoped he might see her reflection after sunset.

  Sometime after seven his office window began to appear faintly on the surface of the glass tower outside, like a photograph rising out of liquid in a darkroom. An hour later the image was clearer, and by nine o’clock—damn these endless summer evenings—Anton could see almost every window of his building reflected on the side of the hotel. He tried to watch every reflected window at once, but the angle was such that he could really only make out people on the two floors above and below him. Any higher and he could see only the reflections of fluorescent lights. Any lower and there were only windowsills and angled blinds, a potted plant in an office four floors down. As time passed most of the lights blinked out. Two floors above him a man was working late. The man paced by his window once, twice, holding a cell phone to his ear and gesturing with his other hand. Anton stood close to the glass, looking from window to window, but none of the brightly lit squares held Elena.

  He called the company’s main number at nine thirty. He listened to a recorded voice reading names, but Elena’s name wasn’t in the directory. It was strange to think of her living off the company grid, invisible and out of reach. Typing somewhere under the radar, making unrecorded calls.

  On Monday morning Anton arrived at the office to find Jackson talking to the new secretary—Maria? Marla? Marion?—and the new secretary looked away with an unsuppressed smirk as soon as she saw him. Jackson smiled.

  “Good morning, Anton.”

  “Jackson. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Anton was moving past Jackson into his office, but he stopped just inside. The room was utterly empty, the desk and chair and sofa gone, his computer. Only the telephone remained, adrift on the carpet, plugged into the jack that had been behind his desk. He lifted his diploma down from the wall and held it to his chest. Jackson was watching him from the door.

  “If you were planning on firing me,” Anton said, “why didn’t you do it on Friday?”

  “Oh, we’re not firing you. Can you think of any reason why we should?” Jackson’s eyes flickered over the diploma. “I just came to show you to your new office, actually. We’re reorganizing a little.”

  “Why can’t I stay in my old office?”

  “You’re being transferred to a new division,” Jackson said. “You’re aware that we’ve taken over space on the twenty-third floor?”

  “I remember hearing something about that.”

  “Well, we’d like you to head the new team up there,” Jackson said. He inclined his head for Anton to follow him and they walked out together, through the open workspace where no one looked up as Anton passed, beyond the glass doors to the corridor by the elevators, where Jackson pushed the down button and stood avoiding Anton’s eyes until Anton gave up trying to make eye contact and stared down at the carpet. When the elevator arrived Jackson pushed a button marked M between the lobby and the first floor.

  “The mezzanine level,” Jackson said when Anton looked at him.

  “You said the new division was on the twenty-third floor.”

  “I’m afraid the offices up there aren’t ready yet,” Jackson said. “Still under construction. It will probably be a month or two before we can occupy the space, so we’re putting you in a temporary office space for now.”

  “On the mezzanine level? Is that even a floor?”

  Jackson managed a pained half-smile but had nothing to say to this. The elevator was descending. The corridor on the mezza-nine level was unusually wide, and covered in linoleum instead of carpet. Bare lightbulbs hung at intervals overhead and pipes were exposed along the ceiling. Anton was struck by the white noise of this place, an indeterminate rushing and whirring, the vibrating of engines—were they close to the boiler room? Some sort of enormous central pump?—and the movement of air and water through the pipes and the ductwork all around him. He thou
ght it was like being in the depths of a ship. The doors down here were older than any he’d seen elsewhere in the building, battered wood with scratched-up brass handles.

  Anton heard a sound ahead, shuffling footsteps and a rhythmic squeaking; a woman came around the corner, pushing a plastic cart full of cleaning supplies. Her ankles were swollen as wide as her knees, and she stared flatly at him through thick round glasses as he passed. It occurred to him that he had seen her on his floor a hundred times and that neither of them had ever said hello. He said Hello this time, softly, experimentally, but she didn’t answer him and her expression didn’t change. They passed doors marked Security and Building Services and then a series of doors marked Dead File Storage, one through three. Jackson paused at the fourth one, Dead File Storage Four, fumbling with keys. Anton didn’t find the name of the room particularly comforting from a career ascension standpoint.

  “It’s much larger than your old office,” Jackson said.

  This was technically true. The room was enormous and nearly empty, and Anton’s footsteps echoed on the linoleum floor. His desk, chair, and sofa were marooned at the far end of the room, which was otherwise unfurnished and very bright. At the end of the room farthest from his desk, a line of decrepit filing cabinets stood unevenly against the wall. There were four large windows, none of which had blinds.