Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

He knew that if he went to Julie, she would tell him to cut the quote. The story worked without it but the quote was the grace note, the quote was sublime. It was evening now, lights gleaming softly on the empty desks. He wished Silas were here.

Gavin submitted the story, went home to eat takeout food and stare at his television. He didn't sleep well. In the morning he sat at his desk again, reading the paper, and the last few lines of the piece filled him with dread.

But for residents of the houses closest to the canals, the matter has become more pressing. "We thought we were coming closer to nature," said Lemuria Gardens resident Chloe Silas, "but all along nature was creeping closer to us."

Ei l o, " G a v i n said, "do you think I should be looking for the girl?" It had been only two weeks since he'd returned from Florida, but it seemed much longer. It was a particularly dark March in New York that year. The rain was unceasing. He hadn't been sleeping well. He had dreams where Anna was in some unspecified trouble and it was entirely his fault but he couldn't find her, and other dreams where he was losing his job. He had taken to staying in the newsroom for twelve hours at a time to escape the emptiness of the apartment and his own racing thoughts, but he couldn't concentrate on his work. Silas's desk remained empty. He hadn't realized how much he'd depended on Silas, his jokes and his freakish grasp of grammar, his company in the cafeteria at lunchtime. They went out drinking twice, but without the shared newsroom there wasn't much to talk about.

"I don't know, Gavin. I'm not sure what I'd do in your place," Eilo said.

"And you've never heard anything about what became of Anna?"

"Nothing," Eilo said. "No rumors, no sightings. I heard her sister Sasha had a gambling problem, but that was years ago already."

The clamor of the newsroom was all around him. Usually this was his favorite place in the world but today the sound jangled his nerves.

He f e l t that he was slipping, but it wasn't just him. The city of New York had gone dark so quickly, and at times Gavin was dazzled by the speed of the fall. Because it hadn't actually been that long since he'd been walking hand in hand with Karen down Columbus Avenue and they'd come upon a newsstand with a New York Magazine cover that read "The Second Gilded Age" in gold letters, and the headline had seemed perfect to him. This is the second gilded age, he'd tell himself, looking around at his fellow diners at expensive restaurants or studying photographs of $1.3 million one-bedroom apartments in the windows of real estate offices. The phrase fit the era. But within months the stock market had plummeted and banks were collapsing, everyone was losing their jobs and there were food shortages in the soup kitchens, and the second gilded age seemed distant.

J u l i e p u t him on the team covering the Jonathan Alkaitis story. The investment adviser had cheated unsuspecting investors of billions in an elaborate Ponzi scheme until his daughter had turned him in to the authorities. In that time of collapse and dissipation the stories all but wrote themselves— there were charities that had lost everything overnight, former senior executives who'd taken up employment at Starbucks, entire families living in motel rooms— but the Alkaitis story wasn't coming together. Everyone already knew the bare facts, the staggering sums lost and the collapse of charitable foundations, the ruined retirements, the litigations and blame. Gavin needed a quote, a good one, but none of Alkaitis's victims had anything to say that was worth printing or that hadn't already appeared in another paper. Proud old men in business suits averted their eyes and brushed past him on the sidewalk, which made Gavin feel despised and invisible. A twenty-one-year-old recently deprived of his trust fund gave a quote that made Gavin close his notebook and walk out of the room—"I can't believe I have to work for a living now. I mean, who the fuck works ? It is so unfair " — and one or two people all but snarled as they turned away from him. Gavin talked his way into a series of offices and was escorted out of all of them. A woman laughed bitterly and said "Fuck you think my reaction to losing my retirement savings is? Go fuck yourself" before she hung up on him. One man who had lost everything, a retired businessman in his eighties, broke down and began to sob when Gavin called him. "It's okay," Gavin kept saying, "listen, it's going to be okay. " but the man kept crying. Gavin listened until he couldn't take it anymore and gently placed the receiver of his desk phone back on the cradle. He thought all evening about the man weeping into the dial tone and couldn't sleep that night.

On the morning of a particular deposition he stood for two hours under low gray skies outside the law office where several of Alkaitis's victims were being interviewed, lying in wait, but he kept seeing the same people who'd refused comment on all his other attempts. Until a man came through the doors whom he recognized from his research— Arnold Lander, former COO of a midtown consulting firm, an investor who'd lost a little under two million dollars— but who was the woman by his side? She looked about twenty, extravagantly blond with red lipstick, and he realized he'd seen her earlier. She'd been waiting on the sidewalk for a while too, before she'd gone inside to wait in the lobby. She hadn't been in the deposition hearing, then. It was beginning to rain, the first fat drops before the cloudburst, and she was holding a newspaper over her head. Her heels clicked sharply on the sidewalk.

"Excuse me, Mr. Lander," Gavin said, "may I have a moment?"

"No comment," Lander said, without looking at him. He was hailing a cab. He was a tall man, imposing in a dark coat.

"Mr. Lander, please, if I could just—"

"You want a comment?" The woman's voice was high-pitched. She sounded like a child. "It's a nightmare that we can't wake up from."

"Don't talk to him," Lander snapped. "What did I tell you about reporters?"

"Wait," Gavin said, "what's your name?" But the rain had turned to a cold downpour and they were gone, half-running toward a cab that had stopped on the corner. "Excuse me!" he shouted, "please, wait—" The door closed and the car pulled away into a river of taillights.

He looked up photographs of Arnold Lander later at his desk. Lander's image was everywhere— charity balls, a corporate website, various industry events— but who was the woman? She'd appeared to be a solid thirty years younger than Lander. She certainly wasn't the wife in the most recent charity ball photo, but that had been a year ago already. A daughter, secretary, mistress, fourth wife? He'd helped her into the cab, Gavin remembered, but perhaps an older man might do that for a secretary? Men of a particular era and class were taught to treat certain women like porcelain. Gavin knew it was the era he himself belonged to — fedoras! Mechanical cameras! Good table manners! — but this thought was a digression. What mattered was that the author of the perfect quote had walked away from him and he had no idea who she was.

"I need the Alkaitis story," Julie said. "You just about done?"

But for Alkaitis's victims, the disaster continues to unfold. Amy Torren and her husband lost their life savings. "I feel like I'm caught up in a bad dream," she said of Alkaitis's deception. "It's just a nightmare that we can't wake up from. I feel like there's maybe less good in the world than I thought there was. It's hard to take in, to be honest with you. I don't know how I'm going to aff ord my mother's medical expenses now."

"Hell of a quote," Julie said, when he saw her in the staff kitchen the next morning. He was helping himself to his third cup of coffee. He hadn't slept.