Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"I tried to call you at home," Eilo said. "The message said your phone number's out of service."

"Yeah," he said, "it got cut off a few weeks ago."

"Gavin, what the hell's going on?"

"It's a long story, but my job's gone and I'm practically living at Starbucks."

"Jesus, Gavin. When I saw you four months ago you seemed fine."

"Four months ago I was fine," he said. This wasn't entirely true, when he thought about it, but at least four months ago he hadn't known that Chloe existed, and four months ago he hadn't been consumed by guilt. He was increasingly certain that he'd known Anna was pregnant.

"Did you read the paper this morning?"

" Which paper?"

"Y our paper," she said.

"Why? Should I?"

"Well," she said, "maybe not, if you haven't seen it yet. I'm not going to ask why you did it—"

"Wait," he said, "there's a story about me?"

" — But Gavin, if you want to come home—"

" Home? Eilo, you know how I feel about Florida—"

"I'm saying if you need a job," Eilo said, "my business is ex panding."

"Real estate? But I have no experience—"

"What I'm saying is that if you want to cut your losses, Gavin, if you want to leave New York for a while, if it's all come unglued and you don't really have a reason to be there at all anymore and it happens that your phone's been cut off, I can offer you a place to stay and a job."

"In Florida," he said.

"Gavin," she said, "why don't you go buy a copy of the paper and then call me back when you've had a chance to think about it."

He went out and bought the paper. He was on the front page. It was a brief story, three short columns below the fold, but there was his face, the photo from his employee ID card, and the headline was "Star Journalist Committed Fraud." For a moment he was flattered that they'd called him a star journalist, then he realized they just meant he'd been a journalist for the Star. He read the first few lines, about a promising young reporter who'd invented characters and written dialogue for them for his stories, and let his gaze slide over the paragraphs that followed— there they all were, Amy Torren and the others, a congregation of ghosts— and then he came upon a sentence that stopped him cold: "This episode is deeply regretted by everyone here at the New York Star , and marks a low in the 82-year history of the paper."

He was almost in tears when he called Eilo back. "They plagiarized the New York Times' s Jayson Blair apology," he said, before she could say anything.

"The what apology?"

Gavin was pacing back and forth by the newsstand. The sidewalk blurred and quivered before him. "That bit about marking a low in the history of the paper? Eilo, they lifted that from the T imes ."

"Gavin," she said, "what difference does it make?"

"Plagiarism matters," he said. "They teach you that on the first day of journalism school. Actually, you know what? Before journalism school. I think they covered that in maybe the ninth grade. It makes a difference, Eilo, believe me. I would never, I would never —"

"Gavin."

"I would never do it, Eilo. Yeah, I lied. I made up people who gave me quotes because real people are so goddamn disappointing, Eilo, real people have nothing good to say when something happens, you ask them for a reaction and they just stare at you like 'uh. ' and they can't string a sentence together, they're pitiful—"

"Gavin, I'm worried about you."

"Yeah, well." He meant for this to sound tough, but there was a lump in his throat. "It's all gone to hell," he said, and he forced a laugh but it sounded wrong. "I'm an unemployed guy with a bad reputation and no electricity."

"Gavin, I want to buy you a ticket to Florida," she said. "Will you come back down here for a while and stay with me?"

"Eilo," he said, "I can't let you—"

"You'd do the same for me," she said. "Go home and pack and I'll call you with your flight information, okay?"

G a v i n a r r i v e d home just as the locksmith was leaving. There was a notice of eviction on his apartment door and his first thought was that now Karen wouldn't be able to find him, but he'd been avoiding her since he'd lost his job and she hadn't called once. It occurred to him that she'd very likely seen the story in the Star by now. He stood looking at his apartment door for a moment, thought about tearing down the eviction notice, calling a different locksmith and pretending to be locked out, but he knew that locksmiths in Manhattan ran in the two-hundred-dollar range for lockouts and if he was going to lose his apartment anyway, why not today? He had the important things with him, the camera, the computer, his favorite hat.

Back out on the street he wandered aimlessly for a while. The city was pressing down upon him. He thought at that moment that he might've done anything to escape the gray of the city, his static life, and that thought— anything— made him stop in his tracks. It was the worst thought he'd had in a while, because what was left to lose? His hands were shaking. He sat on a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway until his cell phone rang.

"Eilo, I want to get out of the city today," he said. "Can we do that? I don't recognize myself."

"Well, I was going to ask if you wanted to come next week," she said, "but I suppose there's no reason why you couldn't fly down this afternoon. Does that give you enough time to pack your things?"

"I don't have things," he said, "so yes. Thank you."

"Hold on a moment." He heard the clatter of her typing and then she was quiet, reading a screen. "It looks like there's a flight departing LaGuardia in five hours," she said. "I'll book you a ticket."

She gave him the flight information and he wrote it on his hand, hailed a taxi and watched the city slip away from him. It was late spring but a cloud hung low over the streets and Manhattan had already turned into a ghost of itself, gray with tower lights shining high in the fog. At LaGuardia he paid for the taxi with a credit card. He bought an extra pair of socks and two cheap paperbacks in the terminal. He refused to look directly at the New York Star in the newsstand. He'd checked in hours early. He paced the length of the terminal and read both paperbacks cover to cover. It occurred to him in the airplane that he might never live in New York City again, and he was surprised to discover that the thought came as a relief. Night had fallen by the time the plane began the descent. The lights of Florida glimmered to the horizon, one suburb bleeding into another along the blackness of the Everglades.

Eilo met him at the baggage claim.

"Gavin, where's your luggage? Don't you have a suitcase?"

He shook his head. A crease of worry appeared on her forehead, but she was kind enough not to make further inquiries. The heat struck him when they stepped out of the terminal. The old dread came over him, childhood memories of dizziness and heatstroke, but in the cool of Eilo's air-conditioned car it was possible to forget all this for a moment. Eilo flicked between stations on the radio, her hand lit pale by the console lights. The interior of the car smelled faintly of lavender. The outskirts of Boca Raton bled into the outskirts of Sebastian and the streets became gradually familiar, except it seemed to him that Eilo was making all the wrong turns.

" Where are we going?"

"I've moved," Eilo said. He saw in the passing streetlight that she no longer wore a wedding ring.

"You and Mike.?"

"He met someone."

"I'm sorry. How long has it been?"

" Three months. We're not legally divorced yet." Eilo took an off-ramp that spiraled down into a dim wide street, made a sharp right turn and pulled up into the driveway of a low-slung brick house. The house looked large and Gavin supposed it was relatively nice, as houses went— he vastly preferred apartments— but when he got out of the car the air was filled with sound. After a moment he realized that the freeway was almost overhead, massive pylons rising up just beyond the backyard.