Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Why?”

“He was nice to me. Most people you work for in your life aren’t.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Broden said, “but I’d like to just get a little more background on you before we move on to Anton. I believe you did a semester at Columbia?”

“I was an astrobiology major.”

“Why did you drop out?”

“It was too much,” Elena said. “I’d never left the Canadian arctic before, and then all of a sudden I was in New York on a full scholarship, and it was just, I guess it was too much all at once. I’m sorry, it’s hard to explain. I was eighteen and I was alone in the city. I did badly in my first semester, so I thought I’d take a semester off.”

“But you never went back, did you?”

“No. I didn’t go back.”

“I see. We’ll just go through this quickly. So you left Columbia five years ago now? Six? And you began working in a restaurant, if memory serves. Was this immediately after you left school?”

“Yes,” Elena said.

“Was the restaurant your first job?”

“I was a waitress in my hometown back in high school. Then I went to Columbia, then I worked in a restaurant and posed for a photographer, and then I came here. That’s my entire employment history.”

Broden turned the page and continued to write. “And are you on a work visa, or do you have a green card?”

“My father’s an American,” Elena said. “I have dual citizenship.”

“How fortunate for you. Where was your father born?”

“Wyoming.”

“Nice state.” Broden kept writing. “Now, I know HR’s likely gone over this with you, but if you’ll just bear with me, I do need to ask you a few questions about Anton.”

“Do you work with them?”

“With. .?”

“With HR,” Elena said.

“I’m sorry, I must not have been very clear when we spoke on the phone. I’m a corporate investigator. I work in conjunction with the HR departments of various companies, but I’m a third-party consultant.” Broden looked up briefly, then returned her attention to the pad of paper. “Did Anton ever mention anything to you about his background?”

“You know, a guy from HR asked me that exact same question. Three times.”

“And what was your response?”

“That the extent of my knowledge of his background was the Harvard diploma on his wall, and no, he never talked about it.”

“He never spoke about his family at all? His cousin?”

“No, nothing about that. He never mentioned a cousin.”

“I see. And you never met his family, I assume.”

“I met his fiancée once at a company Christmas party. Does that count?”

“When did you first meet him?”

“Anton? A little over two years ago. At my job interview.”

“You’re certain that was the first time you ever met him,” said the investigator. “At your job interview.”

“Yes,” Elena said.

When Elena returned to her desk an hour and a half later a stack of interoffice envelopes had accumulated, but she didn’t open them. She stared at the cubicle wall for a while, and when she looked at her watch it was four fifteen.

“Slipping out early?” Graciela asked. She was a company messenger, one of two; she stood by the elevator with an armload of envelopes.

“Coffee break,” Elena said dully.

“You look pale. Maybe take the day off tomorrow. Call in sick.”

“Maybe.” The elevator arrived. Graciela pressed the lobby button. Elena pushed the button for the third floor.

“What’re you doing on the third floor?”

“Just wanted to say hello to someone who works down there,” Elena said. When the door opened she said goodbye and walked down the corridor quickly, turned a corner, looked both ways and slipped through an exit door. In the cold gray light of Stairway B, a man was sitting on the cement steps with his eyes closed.

“Excuse me,” Elena said.

He nodded wanly as she stepped around him, and when she looked back he had closed his eyes again. She heard the sounds of the mezzanine as she pushed open the door: the rush of water through exposed pipes overhead, the rattling of vents, the movement of air — an industrial hum with no beginning or end, constant as the ocean. The corridor was wide and empty with a drifting population of dust bunnies, dimly lit. She passed a number of doors before the file storage rooms began: Dead File Storage One, Dead File Storage Two, Dead File Storage Three. She stood for a moment in front of the closed door to Dead File Storage Four and then backed silently away and walked back toward the stairwell. The office worker was still sitting on the stairs. He nodded again but didn’t speak as she stepped around him. On the elevator between the third and twenty-second floors she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall.

“Took another unscheduled break?” her coworker asked. Nora occupied the desk closest to the elevators, where she took apparent pleasure in observing and commenting on the comings and goings of the department. Elena ignored her and went to her cubicle. The number on Broden’s card was apparently a cell phone. There was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings.

“I’m sorry,” she said when Broden answered. “I know your investigation is important, but I don’t think I can do this.”

“Why’s that?” Broden’s voice was mild.

“I know it’s a serious thing to lie about your credentials on your résumé, I know it’s fraud and I don’t agree with it, it’s not that I approve, it’s just that he was my boss for two and a half years and I almost consider him a friend, I can’t just spy on him and try to get him to say something and report back to you, I just—”

“Tell you what,” Broden said, “why don’t you come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it. I think it might help if I explained the situation more fully.”

When Elena had hung up the phone she stared at the document she was supposed to be proofreading, but her eyes kept skipping over the same paragraph over and over again. She closed her eyes, rested her elbows on her desk, and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. She wanted it to appear to any casual observer that she merely had a headache or was perhaps resting her eyes for a moment. The problem was more serious: she had forgotten how to read.

This happened almost daily and she was used to it — she understood it to be a side effect of being unable to stand her job — but lately it had been happening earlier and earlier in the day. The mornings went quickly but the afternoons were deadly. Time slowed and expanded. She wanted to run. By four P.M. she sometimes had to correct the same paper three times. She reread words over and over again, she broke them down into individual syllables, she stared, but if you stare at any word for long enough it loses all meaning and goes abstract. She had had this job for two or three weeks now, ever since she’d been exiled without explanation from Anton Waker’s research department, and it was becoming gradually less tenable each day.

“Elena?” Nora had a strong clear voice, like a singer’s. “Could you come here for a moment?”

When Elena went to her she had a document Elena had labored over that morning, lying on her desk like a piece of evidence. Nora weighed well over three hundred pounds and had beautiful long dark hair, but what was more notable about her was that she loved mistakes. Here in this dead-end department in the still brackish backwaters of the company, her power and her happiness lay in the discovery of errors. “Elena,” very patiently, as if addressing a child, “I’m not sure why you didn’t correct the spelling of this word. Were you under the impression that there’s a hyphen in ‘today’?”

“Oh. The writer’s British, he does that sometimes. Give it back to me, I’ll mark it.”