The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “You’ve survived in that city,” her mother said, “for how long now? Eight years?”

  “Eight years. Don’t say ‘that city’ like that. You make it sound like Baghdad. Is Jade home?”

  “Your sister’s not feeling so well, actually.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “No,” Elena’s mother said mildly, “she doesn’t. She never tells me why not. Don’t take it personally, love, she’s been moody lately. How’s Caleb?” Elena’s mother had never laid eyes on either Caleb or New York City; both entities were the subject of frequent speculation and perpetual concern.

  “Caleb’s fine. He’s studying.”

  This provoked a brief silence, because the question of why Elena wasn’t studying too had never been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. Elena’s mother cleared her throat.

  “Well,” she said, “take care, now.”

  “Goodnight.”

  The line went dead. When Elena’s mother ran out of things to say she signed off without preamble. There had been a time when Elena had been annoyed by this, but tonight she found herself admiring the decisiveness of the ending.

  Outside the sky was growing dark. There was thunder, and when the rain began Elena opened the window as wide as it would go. The sounds of the storm filled the kitchen. She stopped thinking about Broden for a moment and picked up the newspaper, and she was eating noodles and reading the news when Caleb came in. She heard him stop by the goldfish tank and murmur something approving to the fish. His glasses fogged quickly in the warmth of the kitchen; he took them off and blinked at her from the doorway, his hair dark with rain.

  “You had no umbrella?”

  “It broke,” he said. He was smiling in a far-off distracted way that meant the research was going well. She raised her face to him when he approached her, but he kissed her forehead instead of her lips.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I had a sandwich up at Columbia,” he said. “Instant noodles again?”

  She nodded.

  “How was work today?” He was taking off his rain-soaked shirt and hanging it over a kitchen chair. His naked back had an unearthly pallor.

  “Oh,” Elena said, “you know, an average workday . . .” and realized that of course he didn’t know. Caleb didn’t hold a regular job, and to the best of her knowledge never had. “Well,” she said. He was staring at her, half-smiling, hoping for a punch line. “I guess you wouldn’t know, come to think of it.” She laughed quickly to make this last comment as joke-like and unresentful as possible. Caleb smiled back and retrieved a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. “Are you cold from the rain? I was just going to take a hot shower.”

  “Oh?” He was pouring himself a glass of juice.

  “You’re welcome to join me.”

  “Oh,” he said again. He was quiet for a moment, looking into his glass. “No, you go ahead. I was actually going to do a little more work before bed.” He kissed her quickly on the lips, not insincerely, and left her sitting alone in the kitchen.

  When Caleb left the room she threw the rest of the noodles away and drank a glass of water standing by the sink. The rain had stopped and the heat was again subtropical, moths beating soft wings against the window screen. Elena took the telephone into the bedroom, opened the top right-hand drawer, and extracted a scrap of paper from inside a blue sock. The paper had been folded years ago and was soft along the crease lines. On the piece of paper she’d written a phone number and also the address of a café on East 1st Street. She dialed the number quickly, refolded the paper and put it back in the sock and put the sock back in the drawer in the interlude before a woman’s voice answered.

  “Aria,” she said, “I’m not sure if you’ll remember me. It’s Elena James.”

  “Elena James,” Aria Waker repeated. She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You’re the Canadian.”

  “Yes. Listen, I just—”

  “Before you say anything,” Aria said, “I’m on a cell phone, and I don’t discuss business on cell phones anymore. Give me a land-line number where I can call you back.”

  Elena gave her the number and the line went dead. The phone rang twenty minutes later.

  “Yes,” Aria said, when Elena answered. The sound quality was tinny, and there was background noise. Elena thought she might be calling from a pay phone in a bar.

  “There’s someone interviewing me,” Elena said. “Some kind of consultant, a freelance corporate investigator—at least, she says she’s a corporate investigator, but I don’t . . . listen, I don’t know who she is, and she’s asking me questions about your cousin. About his background.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “His family. Where he went to school. I don’t know anything about the school thing, it’s none of my business, but she’s asking questions about me too. My employment history.”

  “You knew there were no guarantees,” Aria said, but her voice was gentle.

  “Oh, it isn’t that. That’s not why I’m calling. I don’t . . . Listen, I appreciate what you and Anton did for me, and I just thought you should know. She also asked me where I met him. Of course I told her I met Anton at my job interview, but she was insistent, she repeated the question twice. Am I being clear? She’s asking me about my employment history, she’s asking me about my immigration status, and she asked me when I met Anton.”

  The line was quiet for a moment.

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to Anton about this,” Aria said. “I’d like to bring it up with him directly.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you for calling me,” said Aria. She hung up the phone.

  In the morning Elena woke before the alarm clock rang and lay for a while staring at the ceiling. Caleb was asleep beside her with his back turned. She couldn’t remember him coming to bed and realized she’d fallen asleep alone again. It was too hot in the room; the ceiling fan stirred warm air over the bed. She showered and dressed quickly, all in black (there was a feeling of dread), bought the daily croissants and coffee at the bakery by the Montrose Avenue L train station, and sat staring at her reflection in the window of the train. Somewhere under the East River she imagined the weight of the water over the tunnel, boats moving on the surface far overhead, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t open them until she heard the announcement for Union Square, where she switched to a train that took her north to Grand Central. She walked quickly across the main concourse, feeling lost in the crowd, and another day passed like a tedious dream.

  At five o’clock Elena took the subway downtown to the World Trade Center area. She was early for her appointment; she stood looking down at the construction site for a few minutes before she crossed the street to the newly rebuilt Tower 7 and took the elevator up to the twelfth floor.

  In the cool still air of the waiting room she turned to the magazines, and found a battered copy of the New York Review of Books in the pile. There was an article about trees, and she almost forgot about Broden for a moment. The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree. It grows somewhere in the western United States. She read this while she was waiting for Broden to appear, but even as Broden was opening the door to her office the details were growing hazy, and by the time she sat down on the same stiff chair she couldn’t remember where exactly the tree was—Utah? California?—and the fear was awful. Broden was sitting down across from her, flipping through notes. But location aside, Utah or California, the oldest known living thing on earth has been alive for four thousand six hundred years. Elena had paused when she read this in the waiting room, stared out at nothing for a moment and thought of that great expanse of centuries stretching halfway back to the end of the last ice age.

  “Elena,” Broden said, “how’s your day going?”

  “Badly,” said Elena. Nora had called her over to her desk four times and finally made her cry, and the thought of returning to the office the next morning made her want to
go down to the street and hail a taxi and ask to be taken anywhere. To any other destination, any other life.

  “Badly? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you for coming to see me again. Is it still hot out there?”

  “Extremely,” Elena said.

  The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree, but the tragedy of the story is that there was one even older. A geology student in Utah, determined to find an even more impressive specimen, went up into the mountains and staked out the biggest tree he could find. He had borrowed a corer, a tool used to take a pencil-sized core sample at the base of the trunk. He began drilling, but the corer snapped, and a park ranger gave him permission to cut down the tree to retrieve it.

  When the rings were counted, the tree turned out to be four thousand nine hundred years old. In order to retrieve a broken measuring tool, a student had killed the oldest living thing on earth. Elena’s mind wandered. Four thousand nine hundred years ago, glass had just been invented in western Asia. The first cup of tea was being brewed in China. A band of wandering tribesmen at the eastern end of the Mediterranean was developing the first monotheistic religion, although some time passed before they came to be known as the Jews. An unknown Sumerian writer had just composed Gilgamesh. A pine cone fell to the ground and produced a minute sapling in the mountains, and you can count the rings yourself—four thousand nine hundred years after the pine cone fell, a thin dusty slice of the trunk hangs in a bar in Nevada.

  “So,” Broden said, “let’s get down to business.”

  Elena looked up, startled out of her thoughts. She couldn’t think of anything to say and so smiled weakly and said nothing. The office had changed slightly. A child’s drawing of a ballerina was framed on the wall behind the desk, and there was a pot of geraniums on the windowsill behind Broden’s chair with a little plastic flag reading “Happy Birthday!!” sticking out of the dirt.

  “Was it your birthday?” she asked.

  “It was. Listen, I didn’t mean to stress you out. I just wanted you to go down to the mezzanine level, say hello to Anton, engage him in conversation, ask what he’s doing down there. I was hoping he would volunteer something. An admission of guilt would make things much easier for us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elena said. “It isn’t that I don’t think it’s important, your investigation, it’s just that I’d feel like I was betraying him, spying on him like that, and we worked together for years, it just doesn’t seem . . .”

  “Doesn’t seem right?”

  “To be honest, it doesn’t.”

  Broden nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” she said. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a question of motivation. What if there were more at stake than just a fraudulent résumé?”

  “Are you saying that he’s committed a crime?”

  Broden looked at her for a moment, and then smiled. Elena shivered.

  “Cold?”

  “A little. The air conditioning in this building . . .”

  “It is a little cool in here,” Broden said. “I’d just like to go through your background one more time. Just to clarify a few points, and I believe that will bring us naturally back to the question at hand. After you graduated high school, you moved to the United States to go to college.”

  “Exactly. Yes.”

  “You were eighteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had a scholarship to Columbia?”

  “And an offer of one at MIT. But I wanted to live in New York.”

  “Quite an accomplishment,” Broden said. “Did you work while you were in school?”

  “No. I worked after I left school,” Elena said.

  “Tell me about that time,” said Broden. “After you left school.”

  “Well, there’s not much to tell. I was washing dishes at a restaurant. Then I was a photographer’s model, and then I came here.”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s go back a step. The time when you were posing for the photographer. What made you start doing that?”

  “The posing? I don’t know, it’s hard to find a decent job without a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t make a lot of money at the restaurant. It was just extra income.”

  “I understand,” Broden said. “It was something you could do without being legal in the United States.”

  “Oh no, I, wait—I beg your pardon?”

  “Did you mishear?”

  “No, but perhaps you misunderstood. My father was born in Wyoming. I was born and raised in Canada, but I’m an American citizen.” Elena was flailing. The waters were rising and there was nowhere to go.

  Broden sighed, and set the pad of paper down on the desk. “Do you ever get headaches?” She was examining her fingernails, which were cut very close and unpolished.

  “I—”

  “I get them in the evenings sometimes. After work, when I come home at night. My husband thinks it’s stress, but I think it’s deception.”

  “I don’t—”

  “And listen, let’s be frank for a moment, it’s not that the job itself isn’t stressful.” Broden stood up from the chair and moved behind it to the window, where she gazed out at other towers and the sky. “Believe me, it is. You’ve no idea what’s at stake here. But it isn’t the stress that wears at me, it’s the deception. This endless, juvenile, pathetic deception, when the facts of your life were so easily verified, when a copy of your father’s birth certificate was obtained so easily from Canada. And believe me, it’s not just you, everyone thinks they’ve somehow moved through life without leaving any kind of a paper trail. It’s frankly baffling to me.” She clasped her hands behind her back and craned her neck to look up at the bright blue sky between towers. “Is there any part of a person’s life that isn’t recorded? The major events require certificates: births, marriages, and deaths are marked and counted, and the rest of it can be filled in with a little research. Your country of residence and citizenship is a matter of public record, as is your education, the identities of your parents, and their countries of citizenship and birth. So tell me, Elena, has this American father of yours ever even set foot in the United States?”

  “No, listen, there’s been some kind of a . . . I’m not . . . I’m an American, my father’s an American, we—”

  “And yet both your parents were born in Toronto, and you attended Columbia University on an international student visa. Which would have become null and void, of course, once you dropped out of school.” Broden spoke without malice. She was stating a fact. “Everyone leaves a paper trail, Elena, even illegal aliens who can’t afford immigration attorneys. Do you think you’re invisible?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Elena was having trouble breathing.

  “It isn’t easy being illegal here. I do understand that. It isn’t exactly easy immigrating here legally, either, especially if you’re a shiftless college dropout from some frozen little town north of the Arctic Circle. It isn’t quite ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ anymore, is it?” Standing in the late-afternoon sunlight with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the sky above Lower Manhattan, Broden looked perfectly serene. “It’s a little more like ‘Give us your wealthy, your well-connected, your overeducated and your highly skilled.’ I don’t like what you did, but I understand your difficulty.” She was quiet for a moment. “But at any rate,” she said, “we have something in common.”

  “What’s that?” Elena’s voice was a whisper.

  “We’ve both misrepresented ourselves.” Broden reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and held up a yellow-and-blue badge in Elena’s direction without looking at her. U.S. Department of State, Special Agent. “I’m not really a freelance corporate investigator, and you’re not really legal to work in this country.”

  Elena’s hands were shaking. She clenched them together in her lap until her knuckles went white and when she tried to remember the conversation a few hours later this was the point where her
memory faltered. What did she say then? Difficult to recall: something stammering and unconvincing along the lines of “There’s been a mistake” or “I think you’re mistaken,” something utterly inadequate to the catastrophe at hand.

  “I work with the Diplomatic Security Service. We’re an enforcement arm of the State Department, and my specialty is passport fraud.” Broden turned away from the window and stood watching her. “It isn’t that I’m all that interested in you, to be perfectly frank. What I’m interested in,” Broden said, “professionally speaking, are your dealings with the syndicate from which you acquired your Social Security number and that gorgeous fake passport of yours. It’s the syndicate I’m interested in prosecuting, Elena, not you. So answer me honestly when I speak to you, cooperate fully in our efforts, and I’ll put you on track for a green card. You won’t be deported. Otherwise I’m afraid all bets are off in that department.” Broden was silent for a moment, watching her. Elena felt anchorless, as if she might float upward toward the ceiling. She was painfully aware of her heartbeat. “A response might be appropriate at this point,” Broden said. “Do you understand your choice?”

  “It’s just,” one last attempt at deflection, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

  Broden sighed and glanced briefly at the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention.

  “I’m referring to the time,” she said, very patiently, “when you purchased a Social Security number and a fake passport from Anton Waker at a café on East 1st Street.”