Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

Anton nodded and found suddenly that he couldn’t breathe. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and spent several minutes staring at his face in the mirror, trying to think about what he would do if he were marooned a hundred stories above the surface of the earth with the air on fire all around him. He went back out into the Russian Café and completed the transaction as quickly as possible. Outside in the sunlight he stood still on the sidewalk, watching Catina depart with the magazine rolled up in her hand, and then he walked away slowly in the opposite direction. He locked eyes with everyone he saw on the sidewalk. Some stared back at him, some ignored him, others glanced quickly and then looked away. At dinner with his parents a few hours later he pushed food around his plate and didn’t eat until his mother put her fork down and asked what was wrong with her spaghetti.

“No, the food’s good. I’m sorry. I’ve just been thinking a lot about the business.”

“What about it?” his father asked.

“Not your business. This thing with Aria.”

“Really,” Aria said.

“Oh,” his mother said, visibly relieved. She preferred not to discuss the family business in any great detail, but her niece’s forged-documents venture was fair game. “What about it?”

“I was thinking about this earlier in the day. Do you mind if I ask a hypothetical question?”

“I love hypothetical questions,” his mother said.

“How would a terrorist get into the country?”

“Well, he’d come in on a tourist visa, I imagine.”

“Or he’d get a friend in the country to come to me and Aria and get him a passport, and then he’d enter as an American citizen. Or if he were already here on his tourist visa, he’d buy a Social Security card directly from us and use it to get a job. You know, guarding a seaport. Or driving a truck that he could then pack with explosives. Or whatever.”

His father shrugged.

“So then what are we doing? What are we doing here? We—”

“Think of your aunt,” his mother said. “Don’t get worked up, sweetie. You’re helping people like your aunt.”

“Yes,” Aria said, “my dear departed mother.” She liked to say departed instead of deported , which was disconcerting, because as far as anyone knew her mother was alive and well and living in Ecuador.

“Yeah, I am. Hardworking illegal aliens who have no chance of getting citizenship, I know, I get it, but who else? Who else besides them?”

His parents were quiet. Aria watched him silently over the table.

“It was just something I was thinking about today. Actually, not just today, it’s been. . it weighs on me,” Anton said.

“You have to do things that are a little questionable sometimes,” his father said. “It’s all part of making a living.”

“Yeah, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. I keep thinking there’s maybe something else I could be doing. I’ve been putting my résumé together.”

“Your résumé,” Aria said. “Your résumé ? Really? You’ve only ever had two jobs in your life: selling stolen goods in your parents’ store and selling fake documents to illegal aliens.” His father’s jaw was tensing again; he didn’t like the word stolen. Anton’s mother was immune to accusations of theft, but disliked any suggestion of disloyalty; she was sipping water, watching Anton, her eyes cool over the top of her glass. Aria pressed onward: “Are your jobs on your résumé, Anton?”

“My education’s on my résumé.”

“Our high school’s on your résumé? Are you serious? If it weren’t for social promotion, you’d have been the only student in your graduating class.”

Anton extracted his wallet from his jeans. Folded behind the bills was a newspaper clipping; he had been carrying it around for months and it almost fell apart when he unfolded it. He passed it to his mother, who looked at it and frowned.

“A story about an alumni association meeting, Anton? You wanted me to read this?”

“Look at the end. There’s a quote from an Anton Waker, who just graduated Harvard. I was surprised, I mean, the name can’t be that common. And I was looking at it and thinking, you know, what if I’d gone to college? What opportunities, what jobs would be open to me that aren’t open to me now? I always thought I wanted to work in an office somewhere, be an executive of some kind.”

His mother was smiling. “You applied to college ,” she said, and he almost winced against the delight in her voice.

“No,” he said, “I did something different. The guy they quote there, the other Anton — how old are you when you graduate college? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? He’s a little younger than me, but it’s close, it’s close. I could’ve taken a year or two off after high school—”

“Or four or five years off after high school,” Aria said. “I’m looking forward to hearing the explanation for that one.”

“So I just wrote a letter to Harvard,” Anton said, ignoring her, “requesting a copy of my diploma.”

There was a bad moment when he thought his mother might cry, but then she smiled and raised her glass to him instead. His father raised his glass too.

“To improvisation,” his father said.

“That’s horrifying,” said Caleb, when Elena told him the story about the four-thousand-nine-hundred-year-old pine tree. “They just let him cut it down?”

“For a broken measuring tool. I can’t stop thinking about it. It was in a magazine I read today.”

“Christ.” He sounded genuinely moved. She had lit two scented candles in the bedroom while he was still at his desk: vanilla and jasmine, sweet and dizzying in combination. When the candles were lit she had taken her clothes off, but he was still fully dressed when he came to lie down beside her and didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t wearing anything. He wanted to hear about her day.

Elena didn’t want to talk about her day. She didn’t want to tell him about Broden. She could hear Caleb’s heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.

“So, I found out about my grant,” he said.

She sighed and pressed herself against him. He shifted away from her almost imperceptibly, ran his hand through her hair and turned his head briefly to kiss her forehead.

“Good news?”

“Very good.” He kept talking. She pressed the length of her body against him again, but so gently this time that it could easily have been mistaken for an accidental shifting of weight. He didn’t notice, or chose not to.

“Was that a no?” he asked finally.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The party,” he said. “To celebrate the grant renewal. Tomorrow at my professor’s house. You want to come?”

“Absolutely. Of course. I’m sorry I was distracted, it’s not that I wasn’t interested.”

“Has your job gotten any better?” he asked gently. “The proofreading?”

She didn’t want to think about work; she began stroking his arm instead of answering him. His arm tensed very slightly under her fingertips. Haptics: the science of studying data obtained by touch.

The slow agony of morning, cubicle life. Elena tried to concentrate on the documents she was reading, but she’d slept badly the night before and her exhaustion was a weight. She was on her third cup of coffee when Nora called her name.

“It isn’t that I think your work is bad,” Nora said. She was in the habit of offering unsolicited performance reviews. She held the document Elena had been proofreading the previous afternoon. “It’s just that I notice a certain lack of attention sometimes.”

A certain lack of attention. Elena’s hands were shaking when she went back to her desk, but she wasn’t sure if it was from the coffee or because she had to see Broden over the lunch hour. Broden had told her to acquire as much information as possible but all she had acquired so far was guilt. And fears as strong as memories, as if the deportation had already occurred: the walk through the airport in handcuffs, an FBI agent on either side. The sequence of flights, NewYork to Washington, D.C. and then northward, the hours in Customs on the other side of the border before being released into the shadowless arctic summer with people whispering on every street.