Emily St. John Mandel: The Lola Quartet

"It's a nightmare we can't wake up from," neighbor Sarah Connelly said. "I keep thinking of her playing hopscotch on the street the way she used to in the summertime, and I just can't believe she's gone."

The day after the story came out Gavin was summoned into a conference room. Julie was there, along with the editor-in-chief and, unnervingly, the directors of the personnel and legal departments. All four stared at him as he sat down. Gavin sat on one side of the confer ence room table, and the four of them sat on the other. He wasn't sure where to look. For a long moment no one spoke, until Julie cleared her throat.

"Gavin, I spoke with Jacob Fischer this morning," Julie said.

Gavin opened his mouth, but didn't speak.

"The Alkaitis investor who lost his retirement," Julie said, apparently interpreting his silence as confusion. " Turns out he doesn't have a wife."

"You can't be serious," Gavin said. It was difficult to summon the appropriate tones of incredulity and lightness, but he managed. "The woman I quoted, Amy Torren, she said she was Fischer's—"

"Aren't you curious to know why I was speaking with him?"

"I—"

"I called him because the dead girl's mother called the paper last night," Julie said. She was looking at him as if she'd never seen him before. He noticed that she was very pale. "The mother of that girl who died in the fire in Brooklyn. Apparently the dead kid didn't play hopscotch."

"Well, look," Gavin said, "the neighbor said she used to play hopscotch all the time. Maybe she played hopscotch while the mother wasn't home."

"She was in a wheelchair," Julie said.

It was clear from the way she was looking at Gavin that everything was over, absolutely everything, so Gavin stood up from the table and left the room without saying anything else. He went back to his desk, picked up his bag and fedora and walked out of the newsroom without speaking to anyone. Outside the air was very bright, and he pulled his fedora low over his eyes. It was only one in the afternoon. He couldn't face his empty apartment yet, the leaking shower and the piles of paper on the floor, so he turned south and walked all the way down to Battery Park City, stood looking out at the Statue of Liberty for a while before he turned inland and wandered into the Financial District. He lingered in various bars and small parks all day. In the evening he made his way home through the darkening city, let himself into his apartment and sat for a while on his sofa staring at the opposite wall. The dripping from the shower made a constant, almost musical sound. He was drunk, drifting in and out of sleep. It seemed improbable that he was no longer a newspaperman. It seemed like something that might have happened to somebody else.

On the day Gavin lost his job in New York, Daniel was sitting alone in a meth dealer's living room in the outer suburbs of Salt Lake City. He hadn't played a musical instrument of any kind in ten years.

Daniel had lived in this house for a time just after high school, a few miserable long months after he'd driven up from Florida when he'd worked every day for his uncle's construction firm and fretted constantly about providing for a baby who had turned out not to be his and gone for long jogs in the deepening evenings with the neighbors casting suspicious glances at him. The jogs were meant to clear his head but they'd only made him uneasy. Moving through the streets toward or away from this house that he didn't particularly want to return to, wondering what he was going to do about the baby and the girl, feeling in those moments like the only black man in the entire washed-out state.

But the house had been subjected to a gut renovation, and the interior was unrecognizable to him now. The room where he sat was a white rectangle where two stiff gray sofas faced one another under track lighting, a wall of windows looking out over an aggressively landscaped backyard. From the tint of the sunlight he could tell that the glass was one-way, that if anyone were outside on the empty white gravel pathways they'd see only a mirror if they tried to look in. The falling-down wooden fence he remembered from all those years ago had been replaced by a high stone wall. He had the disoriented thought that he was perhaps in the wrong house altogether.

He'd come here to negotiate, but the negotiations hadn't even begun and already he was tired and shaken. Two hours earlier in the Salt Lake City airport the call had come through that his grandmother had died in Florida, and the sense of being in the wrong place was overwhelming. He wanted nothing more than to return to the airport and fly home. He'd been shown in by an enormous unsmiling man who'd told him to take a seat, that Paul would be right with him, but Paul hadn't appeared and it had occurred to Daniel that he might be killed here. He wasn't stupid enough to carry his service weapon— the enormous unsmiling man had frisked him just inside the door— and he felt defenseless without it. Through the mirrored glass the sky held a greenish tint, sunlight weak on the carpet.

He had been waiting for an hour and twenty-two minutes now, and the silence of the house was absolute but he knew it wouldn't be possible to leave. Inside this house there were other people, he was certain of it, other people waiting as silently as he was or carrying out their business on the other side of soundproofed walls. He thought it likely that the man who'd frisked him was standing outside the door. It was possible that he was being observed. He looked around for a camera and didn't see one but that of course meant nothing. Daniel closed his eyes and thought of his children.

New York City was cold. It was early April, but in the world outside the apartment the rain was streaked with snow. When Gavin wasn't looking for jobs online or handing out résumés he was reading the papers— although not his paper— and everything was wrong: there were stories about people waiting hours to get into job fairs, increasing strains on the food-stamp program. There were suicides and lost fortunes, hungry children and people who had slipped down into new, previously unimagined dwellings: a van in the parking lot of a grocery store in Queens, a boat on the oil-bright surface of the Gowanus Canal, a relative's garage in Westchester County. He understood, reading these stories, how easy it was to sink.

Gavin had never been very good with money. He had several thousand dollars of credit-card debt that he'd been carrying around for a while, and it was growing at a rate that he wouldn't have thought possible. On the day he lost his job he'd already accidentally fallen a month behind on rent, a matter of forgetting to mail a check to the landlord— Karen had always taken care of this— and when his paychecks stopped coming he began paying credit cards off with other credit cards. His checking account balance was dwindling. He had no savings.

All of his friends had either been associated with the newspaper or he'd met them in journalism school. Gavin didn't try to contact them. He was aware that he was a disgrace to his profession. None of them called him, which was unsurprising but disappointing nonetheless. For the first time in his life he had too much time on his hands and he was afraid of it, the empty hours echoing all around him with nothing to think about but failure, so he went out of his way to establish a routine: he spent the day drinking coffee and searching for jobs online or sitting in the park and circling jobs he wanted to apply for in the classifieds, and then in the evening he boarded a southbound F train and traveled deep into Brooklyn to listen to music at Barbès, a narrow sliver of an establishment between a tanning salon and a sandwich shop.