Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

" Thank you," Gavin said. He returned to his desk with a strange feeling of floating. No one could prove that no investor had said those words to him but he still felt sick every time he thought about it. Amy Torren was the name of his eleventh grade English teacher.

As days passed without incident it seemed that both this and the

Floridian woman whose name wasn't Chloe had passed under the radar. But the point, Gavin realized, wasn't whether the woman who'd climbed into the cab with Lander was an investor, or even whether he'd gotten away with referring to her as such when he wrote dialogue for her and gave her a name. The point was that Gavin had opened a door, cracked it just slightly, and he could see through to the disgrace and shadows on the other side. If you tell a lie it's easier to tell another. An abyss yawns suddenly at your feet. At night he went home and stared into the flickering blue of the television and felt almost nothing.

Th e s e c o n d round of layoffs came without fanfare. The first time, Julie told him, when he'd been in Florida, there'd been an anguished speech in the middle of the newsroom by the executive editor, who'd stood on a chair to be better seen but hadn't been able to make eye contact with anyone. Two weeks later the second round was well under way before anyone realized what was happening. The executive editor's assistant called the victims one at a time and asked them to drop by the office, and eleven people didn't come to work the next day. The executive editor sent out a regretful memorandum that began with the words "As you may have noticed. " and included the phrases "online content" and "a changing media landscape." The word "rightsizing" was used. There was a regrettable possibility, the memo concluded, of future cuts.

Gavin read it twice, put on his fedora and went for a walk. He'd always thought of the newspaper as a ship sailing over a digital sea. Now that it was obvious the ship was sinking he didn't know what to do with himself, he couldn't imagine not being a newspaperman and in Karen's absence the newspaper was all he really had. Everyone he'd liked had been laid off now except Julie. He sometimes caught himself composing letters in his head. Dear Chloe, dear Anna, I wish I knew where you were. I have failed in my responsibilities. The thought of you keeps me up at night. It was raining in his apartment and he kept forgetting to shave in the mornings. The newsroom an ocean of empty desks. He sat in front of his computer, marooned.

"I've been meaning to ask you," Julie said. "I don't remember seeing an Amy Torren on the list of Alkaitis's victims."

"Oh, the investments were under her husband's name."

"Okay," she said, with an air of relief. "What's her husband's name?"

" Jacob Fischer," Gavin said. It was just the first name that came to him. Fischer was the man in his eighties who'd lost everything to Alkaitis and cried on the phone.

G a v i n ' s n e x t story was about cuts to funding for playground maintenance in the Bronx. He traveled far north on the subway to reach a desolate neighborhood where wind moaned around the corners of low brick buildings. It was cold and he spent an hour standing by a playground on a street that scared him, trying to get suspicious mothers to talk to him about broken swing sets. That was when the mothers showed up at all— more often it was gangs of half-feral eight-and nine-year-olds who hit the swing set with sticks and threw rocks at the slide, stared blankly at Gavin when he tried to talk to them and snickered as they walked off. They knew about lone men in playgrounds.

He stood at the edge of the playground, alone after forty-five minutes of trying to get people to talk to him, and tears came suddenly to his eyes. The slide was rusted. There were broken bottles in the grass. Was this the sort of place where his lost daughter might play, in whatever transitory postforeclosure hellhole she might have landed in?

Gavin took the train back to the newsroom, where he wrote the story and then stared for a long time at the blinking cursor on the screen. A memory of Karen, lying beside him on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. One of their last happy Sundays together, late in the third month of her four-month pregnancy. They'd told Eilo and Karen's parents but almost no one else. Sunlight angled through a window and caught in her hair. Had that only been two months ago? If it's a girl, we'll name her Rose, she said. If it's a boy, Thomas.

As local parent Rose Thomas put it, "It's really the children who are suff ering. The cuts in playground funding have been a nightmare for us."

Gavin read the quote over and over again. Seeing the words on the screen made them real, even though he hadn't sent them to anyone yet, even though this could still be undone. There had been two lapses now but turning back was still possible. There could still be an evening years or decades from now when he might look back at a strange period far earlier in his career, a few shadowy months before the Pulitzer but after his fiancée had left him when he'd started to slide but pulled himself back just in time, two stories with small lies in them and then no more after that.

But everyone knew there would be more layoffs at the newspaper and the story as written was a dud, filler, a flightless bird, all facts and budget numbers and no humanity. The Rose Thomas quote was exactly the sort of thing a concerned parent would say. When you came down to it, he thought, it was a question of names again, the same as that shadow across his Florida story had been. It was something he'd said, and he was almost certainly a father. Did it matter, did it actually matter that the words on the screen had been said by a parent named Gavin Sasaki, not a parent named Rose Thomas? He hadn't slept well since Florida. He was so tired tonight.

"Go home," Julie had said, two hours earlier. She usually stayed much later but tonight she said she had a headache. She'd walked past his desk with her coat over her arm, going home to cook dinner in a microwave and listen to classical music with her eyes closed. "We're probably about to get laid off anyway." This had put him into a tailspin. But now a curious calm had come over him, and nightmare seemed excessive. He closed his eyes for a moment and then retyped it: The cuts in playground funding have been awful. It was eleven p.m. and he was almost alone here, the few night production people quiet at their desks, a janitor emptying trash cans.

Rose Thomas walks the two blocks from her public housing unit to the neighborhood playground every morning. She moves slowly, her four-year-old daughter, Amy, at her side. Ms. Thomas would like to take her daughter to play somewhere else, but there's nowhere else to go.

"I'll never understand why they thought they could cut funding," Ms. Thomas said on a recent morning, pushing her daughter on a swing. "Is having a safe place for my child to play really too much to ask?"

Gavin had taken a few photographs of the playground. Not for the story— the paper would send a freelance photographer with a camera made in the current century— but for himself. He had the film developed later that week and he spent some time at his desk looking at the images, the rusted swing sets, paint flaking from the monkey bars. If his daughter was in the care of a stranger in Florida, then what had become of her mother? He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Anna. He'd been playing a concert behind the school with his high school jazz quartet, he remembered. She'd thrown a paper airplane at him through the dark.