Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"Eilo," he said, "you're living under the freeway?"

"We're not under the freeway," she said. "It's behind the house. And you can't hear it from inside. The place is completely soundproofed." She punched a code into a console by the garage door and went back to the car, got in and drove into the garage, and Gavin found himself alone on a suburban driveway. He was thinking about how he'd frame the image if he were taking a photograph. The bright square of the garage door opening at the lower left corner of the frame, darkness all around it and above.

After the negotiations were complete Daniel left Paul's house in the suburbs and drove his rental car back to the Salt Lake City airport. When he showed his boarding pass to the security agent he found that his hands were shaking. The visit with Paul had taken longer than anticipated; once he'd cleared security he had to half-run through the terminal, jostling people and apologizing, a gasping nightmare of bright lights and slow-moving people and distant elevator music. Daniel arrived at his gate at the last possible moment and as the plane rose out of Salt Lake City he stared down at Utah's sci-filandscape, abandoned planet. Unearthly forms of brown and white, high plateaus and long ridges with violet shadows lengthening alongside. He was having some difficulty catching his breath. Daniel was a large man and the run hadn't been easy.

He'd admired the landscape that morning when he'd flown in. He'd never seen this part of the country from the air before and he liked the austerity of it, the opposite of Florida's feverish greenery and lakes, but now on the return flight he was distracted by his calculations. The debts of his life were as follows: his rent, which was minimal, as his house was small and in a bad school district. His cellular telephone— Daniel considered landlines an extravagance— and his television. He watched only sports and the news, and had canceled the cable some time ago. Groceries and takeout food. He had pared all of these expenses down as far as possible, because on top of them he paid alimony and child support to two ex-wives and four children. He didn't take vacations and worked considerable overtime. There was no extra money and there never had been. He expected that the inheritance would cover the debt, but it had occurred to him that coming up with the extra money for the interest would likely require a second job.

Still, though, did it matter? The plane ascended into a cloud and Utah was lost beneath him. What was a second job in the face of a chance to erase a long-ago mistake, to make amends? He'd walked for ten years with terrible guilt and the thought of being free of this was exhilarating. Money is opportunity. He'd known this all his life. But he realized then why he was having such trouble catching his breath, well over a half-hour since his dash through the terminal: if you pay with money or you pay with your family, then what would happen to his children if he couldn't come up with the interest? His memories of Paul suggested that there were very few things that Paul was unwilling to do. He stared unseeing out the window into white.

The strangest thing about waking up in Eilo's house was the silence. In Gavin's apartment in New York he'd heard birdsong in the mornings from the tree outside his bedroom window, soft sounds of traffic from the streets. But now he woke in the mornings in a soundproofed house as closed as a space station, cool air humming through a vent in the wall. The carpets silenced his footsteps. He usually opened his bedroom window a crack to admit the outside world, just to be sure that it was there, and the noise of the freeway behind the house flooded in. The sound reminded him of the ocean.

In the mornings he showered, dressed, made himself breakfast in Eilo's vast kitchen, walked down the length of the house to the rec room that Eilo had turned into an office. She had bought four desks and a wall of filing cabinets in anticipation of future expansion, but the transition from rec room to office was incomplete. There was still a pool table in the center of the room, left behind by the house's previous owners, half-hidden under files and neat stacks of paperwork. Gavin and Eilo's desks were fifteen feet apart but she was miles away. By the time he reached the office she was usually on the telephone, and there was always a stack of folders waiting on his desk. Each one labeled with the address of a house slipping rapidly from its owner's hands.

E i l o c a m e into people's lives in the last few weeks before they left their foreclosed houses. Her business card identified her as an R.E.O. broker— she and Gavin had a halfhearted debate over whether she should change it to O.R.E.O., since R.E.O. somehow indicated "other real estate owned" and Gavin was troubled by the missing letter. Banks retained her to sell foreclosed properties. The first task of the R.E.O. broker, she told him, is to determine whether anyone's living at the property, and if so, Gavin, you offer them cash for keys. This means settling on a sum, a few thousand, for them to clean the place and leave. The goal is to sell the home as quickly as possible.

He shadowed Eilo for a week and observed the rituals of the transaction, and on the following Monday he went out on his own. Eilo and her husband had had three cars, for reasons that Gavin could never remember because the explanation was so tedious, and Eilo had somehow ended up with two of them. She gave him the keys to a little blue Kia that reminded him of a toy. Another task of the R.E.O. broker was to take photographs for the real estate listing. She gave him a digital camera and insisted he use it.

"It's the twenty-first century," she said, when she gave it to him. "In case you hadn't noticed."

"Yes," he said, "I'm painfully aware."

He drove out to Emory Street, where a couple had been slipping into financial perdition for some months. The property was far from Eilo's house, almost beyond the outer suburbs. The suburbs broke apart and subsided into disconnected gated communities strung along the wide road, each block a mile long, and then there were gaps between the walled villages with straggly trees and enormous signs advertising future developments, the occasional enormous church or synagogue, a sprawl of outlet stores. The outlets had been far out of town when Gavin was a kid, but now the city of Sebastian had come out to meet them.

The house on Emory Street was small and neat, the lawn an impeccable rectangle. He took a photograph of the house from the street— the camera had a maddening way of beeping when the picture was taken— and another of the freshly painted front steps with pots of roses on either side. He took unnecessary pictures of the neighborhood from his position on the front step until a woman answered the doorbell.

"I'm Gavin Sasaki from the real estate company," he said. "I believe you spoke with my colleague Eileen earlier in the day."

"Oh," she said. "Please, come in."

She was polite and embarrassed, a straightforward cash for keys transaction— they settled on two thousand dollars for her and her husband to clean and vacate the premises within thirty days— and he was gone in a half-hour with a camera full of photographs. There were two more stops to make but he suddenly couldn't stand it. He pulled off the freeway and drove into a mall parking lot, turned off the ignition and sat still for a moment. Missing New York and Barbès and Karen. With the air conditioning off the heat crept in quickly, so he got out of the car and crossed the white light of the parking lot to the mall.