Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Not to be forward,” he said. He was holding a plastic cup of red wine and staring into the room with her. She wondered what he saw when he looked at the women. “But if you had any interest in being photographed again, I’m putting together a new book.”

“I would love to,” Elena said.

In the kitchen Caleb was leaning on a counter, holding a bottle of beer and laughing, talking to an older man whose face she couldn’t see. Elena stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway, watching him — he didn’t seem to notice her — but she couldn’t bring herself to go in. There was a door in the hallway with a sign that read W.C. in wooden-block letters. She slipped inside and closed and locked the door behind her, splashed cold water on her face until her skin was cold to the touch and stood leaning over the sink with water dripping from her hair. Her face in the mirror was utterly white. Coming to the party seemed to have been a colossal error; she wanted nothing in that moment but to stay alone with her thoughts. She spent some time fixing her water-smudged mascara with a scrap of toilet paper, then sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

There was a stack of books beside the toilet, and the second book from the top had a familiar blue spine. She pulled it out of the pile. Naked: New Photographs by Leigh Anderson. The girl on the cover lay facedown on the bed in Leigh’s apartment, naked but for a pair of very high heels. Elena flipped to page thirty-four and stared at her own face for a moment. She caught herself wondering if any of her old classmates had seen this book, and if any of them would recognize her if they did. “Do you think you’re invisible?” Broden had asked. I do, actually. Yes. Thanks for asking. She walked back out to the kitchen; Caleb waved when she came in and put his arm around her waist.

“Dell,” he said, “you’ve met Elena.”

The professor smiled, and Elena saw that he didn’t remember her. Some years earlier, in a different lifetime, he had written the initials LUCA on a blackboard and let the chalk fall to the floor.

“Elena,” he said carefully. “And what are you up to these days?”

“I’m a spy.”

“What?” Caleb’s beer was halfway to his mouth; he put the bottle back on the counter and looked at her, still smiling. “What’s that, honey?”

“Actually, I just quit my job today.”

“Oh,” Caleb said. “Wow. Congratulations, El, I know how much you hated it. Is everything all right? You seem a little. .?”

“I’m fine. Actually, I’m better than I’ve been in a while.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s good, then. How much notice did you give them?”

“None. I just walked out.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the professor said.

“You just walked out,” Caleb repeated. “So you, um, you have a new job lined up?”

“I’m posing for the photographer again.”

“Posing for the. . wow. The same one as before?”

She nodded and took the beer bottle from his hand, drank for a moment and gave it back to him.

“El, are you sure you want to do that again?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s just, I don’t know, it just seems a little sordid, doesn’t it?”

She was suddenly very tired. Her joints ached from miles of walking and she wanted to lie down. “Work is always a little sordid,” she said.

Anton received his diploma from Harvard and had it framed in a neighborhood far from where he lived. He was half-afraid he’d be laughed out of the frame shop, but the man behind the counter only nodded and told him to come back the next day to pick it up. Anton took his résumé to an employment agency with the full expectation of being thrown out of the office, but they placed him immediately in a low-level clerical position at Water Incorporated and he was promoted twice within the first six months. The transferability of his skills was truly startling; the confidence required to sell illegal documents was the same confidence required to sit in an office beneath a framed Harvard diploma and pretend he knew what he was doing until he learned the job.

“Con sult ing,” Anton’s father said, with what struck Anton as an entirely unnecessary emphasis on the part of the word that rhymed with insult. “What do you consult?”

“Well, we’re water system design specialists,” Anton said. He was having dinner at his parents’ apartment.

“Are you a water system design specialist?”

“No, I’m in a support division. I do research, produce reports for the sales teams, help prepare presentations, that kind of thing.”

“What qualifies you to do that?”

“Well, the same thing that qualified me to sell Social Security cards to illegal aliens, actually. A certain veneer of confidence combined with sheer recklessness.”

His father smiled. “Also, let’s not forget, I graduated Harvard,” Anton said, and his father laughed and raised his wineglass.

Anton met a cellist at a party that year, a spectacularly talented girl who didn’t know he’d never been to Harvard, and he proposed to her eight months later. Sophie and the job together formed the foundation of his new life; between the straight clean lines of a Midtown tower he rose up through the ranks, from junior researcher to senior researcher to VP of a research division. His dedication to the company was mentioned in his performance reviews. He directed his team and came home every night to a woman he loved in an apartment filled with music in his favorite neighborhood, until it all came apart at once and he found himself in Dead File Storage Four lying naked on the floor next to his former secretary in the summer heat.

“Do you know what’s strange?” Elena asked. Anton had turned the lights off in the room, and her skin was pale in the dim light through the windows.

“What’s that?”

“The building thinks I still work here.”

Anton propped himself up on one elbow to look at her face. “ I thought you still worked here.”

“I quit a week ago,” Elena said. She was gazing up at the ceiling. “That night I didn’t come to you.”

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered what’d become of you.” Wondered wasn’t exactly the right word. He had lain on his back on the floor till seven P.M. watching the door that didn’t open and thinking about the complete dissolution of the life he’d been building, and when he’d gone home that night he hadn’t even the energy to lie. “I just stayed late in the office,” he’d said when Sophie asked if he’d had another staff meeting.

“And my swipe card still works,” Elena said. “It’s been seven or eight days, but I can still get into the building at five o’clock to see you. I thought it would be deactivated, but the turnstile gates still open for me in the lobby.”

He was quiet.

“I thought I’d be locked out of the system,” she said, “but no one’s told the building I don’t work here anymore.”

“You haven’t worked here in a week, but you still come to see me at five?”

“Of course,” Elena said.

Anton lay down beside her again and held her close. She let her head fall against his chest. The breeze through the broken window was warm on his skin.

“That first time you came to me,” he said after a while. “That first afternoon.”

“What about it?”

“Why were you crying?”

She sat up and began reaching for her clothes. “Anton, has Aria spoken to you?”

“About. .?”

“Nothing,” she said. “What time is it?” She was standing up and getting dressed again, smoothing her hair. She turned on the floor lamp and its yellow light filled the room. He stood up, blinking.