Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Oh?” He was pouring himself a glass of juice.

“You’re welcome to join me.”

“Oh,” he said again. He was quiet for a moment, looking into his glass. “No, you go ahead. I was actually going to do a little more work before bed.” He kissed her quickly on the lips, not insincerely, and left her sitting alone in the kitchen.

When Caleb left the room she threw the rest of the noodles away and drank a glass of water standing by the sink. The rain had stopped and the heat was again subtropical, moths beating soft wings against the window screen. Elena took the telephone into the bedroom, opened the top right-hand drawer, and extracted a scrap of paper from inside a blue sock. The paper had been folded years ago and was soft along the crease lines. On the piece of paper she’d written a phone number and also the address of a café on East 1st Street. She dialed the number quickly, refolded the paper and put it back in the sock and put the sock back in the drawer in the interlude before a woman’s voice answered.

“Aria,” she said, “I’m not sure if you’ll remember me. It’s Elena James.”

“Elena James,” Aria Waker repeated. She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You’re the Canadian.”

“Yes. Listen, I just—”

“Before you say anything,” Aria said, “I’m on a cell phone, and I don’t discuss business on cell phones anymore. Give me a land-line number where I can call you back.”

Elena gave her the number and the line went dead. The phone rang twenty minutes later.

“Yes,” Aria said, when Elena answered. The sound quality was tinny, and there was background noise. Elena thought she might be calling from a pay phone in a bar.

“There’s someone interviewing me,” Elena said. “Some kind of consultant, a freelance corporate investigator — at least, she says she’s a corporate investigator, but I don’t. . listen, I don’t know who she is, and she’s asking me questions about your cousin. About his background.”

“What kind of questions?”

“His family. Where he went to school. I don’t know anything about the school thing, it’s none of my business, but she’s asking questions about me too. My employment history.”

“You knew there were no guarantees,” Aria said, but her voice was gentle.

“Oh, it isn’t that. That’s not why I’m calling. I don’t. . Listen, I appreciate what you and Anton did for me, and I just thought you should know. She also asked me where I met him. Of course I told her I met Anton at my job interview, but she was insistent, she repeated the question twice. Am I being clear? She’s asking me about my employment history, she’s asking me about my immigration status, and she asked me when I met Anton.”

The line was quiet for a moment.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to Anton about this,” Aria said. “I’d like to bring it up with him directly.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you for calling me,” said Aria. She hung up the phone.

In the morning Elena woke before the alarm clock rang and lay for a while staring at the ceiling. Caleb was asleep beside her with his back turned. She couldn’t remember him coming to bed and realized she’d fallen asleep alone again. It was too hot in the room; the ceiling fan stirred warm air over the bed. She showered and dressed quickly, all in black (there was a feeling of dread), bought the daily croissants and coffee at the bakery by the Montrose Avenue L train station, and sat staring at her reflection in the window of the train. Somewhere under the East River she imagined the weight of the water over the tunnel, boats moving on the surface far overhead, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t open them until she heard the announcement for Union Square, where she switched to a train that took her north to Grand Central. She walked quickly across the main concourse, feeling lost in the crowd, and another day passed like a tedious dream.

At five o’clock Elena took the subway downtown to the World Trade Center area. She was early for her appointment; she stood looking down at the construction site for a few minutes before she crossed the street to the newly rebuilt Tower 7 and took the elevator up to the twelfth floor.

In the cool still air of the waiting room she turned to the magazines, and found a battered copy of the New York Review of Books in the pile. There was an article about trees, and she almost forgot about Broden for a moment. The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree. It grows somewhere in the western United States. She read this while she was waiting for Broden to appear, but even as Broden was opening the door to her office the details were growing hazy, and by the time she sat down on the same stiff chair she couldn’t remember where exactly the tree was — Utah? California? — and the fear was awful. Broden was sitting down across from her, flipping through notes. But location aside, Utah or California, the oldest known living thing on earth has been alive for four thousand six hundred years. Elena had paused when she read this in the waiting room, stared out at nothing for a moment and thought of that great expanse of centuries stretching halfway back to the end of the last ice age.

“Elena,” Broden said, “how’s your day going?”

“Badly,” said Elena. Nora had called her over to her desk four times and finally made her cry, and the thought of returning to the office the next morning made her want to go down to the street and hail a taxi and ask to be taken anywhere. To any other destination, any other life.

“Badly? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you for coming to see me again. Is it still hot out there?”

“Extremely,” Elena said.

The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree, but the tragedy of the story is that there was one even older. A geology student in Utah, determined to find an even more impressive specimen, went up into the mountains and staked out the biggest tree he could find. He had borrowed a corer, a tool used to take a pencil-sized core sample at the base of the trunk. He began drilling, but the corer snapped, and a park ranger gave him permission to cut down the tree to retrieve it.

When the rings were counted, the tree turned out to be four thousand nine hundred years old. In order to retrieve a broken measuring tool, a student had killed the oldest living thing on earth. Elena’s mind wandered. Four thousand nine hundred years ago, glass had just been invented in western Asia. The first cup of tea was being brewed in China. A band of wandering tribesmen at the eastern end of the Mediterranean was developing the first monotheistic religion, although some time passed before they came to be known as the Jews. An unknown Sumerian writer had just composed Gilgamesh . A pine cone fell to the ground and produced a minute sapling in the mountains, and you can count the rings yourself — four thousand nine hundred years after the pine cone fell, a thin dusty slice of the trunk hangs in a bar in Nevada.

“So,” Broden said, “let’s get down to business.”

Elena looked up, startled out of her thoughts. She couldn’t think of anything to say and so smiled weakly and said nothing. The office had changed slightly. A child’s drawing of a ballerina was framed on the wall behind the desk, and there was a pot of geraniums on the windowsill behind Broden’s chair with a little plastic flag reading “Happy Birthday!!” sticking out of the dirt.

“Was it your birthday?” she asked.

“It was. Listen, I didn’t mean to stress you out. I just wanted you to go down to the mezzanine level, say hello to Anton, engage him in conversation, ask what he’s doing down there. I was hoping he would volunteer something. An admission of guilt would make things much easier for us.”