Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Suspect things.”

“Right.” She opened her eyes, sat on the edge of the sofa for a moment, stood up slowly and took a deep breath. “He doesn’t suspect things. Goodnight, Anton.”

He stood up and kissed her. She closed the office door behind her, and her footsteps were lost instantly in the white noise of the mezzanine. He glanced at his watch — ten thirty P.M. — and went to the broken window to retrieve his shirt. It was still damp with sweat. A jagged edge of glass had ripped a hole in the sleeve, and when he put it on there was a crumpled black streak across the front where the fabric had been pressed against the outside of the window frame. He looked to the back of the door where his spare shirt usually hung, but he’d worn it home the night before. On his way down in the elevator in the ruined shirt he decided that from now on it would be a good idea to have two shirts hanging on the back of the door at all times, and he felt suddenly exhausted by the command of detail that successful infidelity required.

Outside the city had fallen into a subtropical nightmare. It was even hotter on Lexington Avenue than it had been on the rooftop, and he moved like a sleepwalker through the heat-locked air. It was impossible to move quickly; it took Anton a half-hour to get to the open-till-midnight GAP in Times Square, another few minutes under the fluorescent lights with bored night-shift sales associates and dazed tourists before he left with a new clean shirt in a bag. Outside on the sidewalk he took his old shirt off in front of gawping tourists and buttoned up the new one, overexposed in the lights of Times Square. It was after eleven P.M. but he could see his shadow on the sidewalk.

“In dec ent,” a passing woman said to him, indignant under a cloud of bleached hair.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, struggling to remove the price tag from the new shirt. He threw the old shirt in a trash can before he buttoned up the new one and stepped out into the street to hail a cab, but there were no empty taxis traveling northward that night, and the new shirt was soaked to his back almost instantly. After a few minutes of waving at full taxis he gave up and descended into the 110-degree hell of the subway system, where he waited a long time for a train to arrive.

When he got home it was well past midnight. All of the lights were on in the apartment, and the door to Sophie’s study was closed. She was working. He stood for a moment with his ear to the door. She didn’t come out to greet him, and he fell asleep an hour later to the sounds of Bach’s First Cello Suite.

In the morning Anton woke and saw blood on the pillow, and remembered the sting on the side of his face as he swung the keyboard into the window. In the bathroom mirror he saw the cut, very small and swollen pink. He removed a tiny piece of glass. It came out clear and shining, a translucent bloody absence between the prongs of the tweezers. He held it up to the light for a moment and then flushed it down the toilet, and only then did he notice Sophie in the bathroom doorway.

“What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“You were shaving with glass?”

“I—”

But she’d stepped away from the door, she was making coffee in the kitchen, and when he tried to bring it up later her mouth tensed and she shook her head and turned away from him. This was the morning of August 4th. “That wasn’t glass ,” he told her twice. “That isn’t what you saw.” But she didn’t want to talk about it, that day or on any of the days that followed. The wedding was a silently approaching thing, like a hurricane spiraling closer over the surface of a weather map.

“Are you nervous about getting married?” Elena asked softly. It was almost six o’clock and time had been passing very quickly. In a moment she would stand up and put her clothes back on. In a week he would leave her and fly to Italy on his honeymoon.

“Yes,” Anton said.

He tried to imagine coming home to Elena instead of Sophie, tried to imagine light hair instead of dark on the pillow beside him in the mornings, his apartment with the study door flung open and no cello inside, the room converted into a second bedroom, an office, another place for reading books. Sophie living somewhere else, Sophie losing significance with time and fading eventually into the ranks of former girlfriends. He looked at Elena, but she was looking at the ceiling. She reached absently for her handbag, as she always did when they were finished, fumbled around for a moment and came out empty-handed, then reached in again and extracted a tube of Chapstick. She was biting her lower lip.

“Does your fiancée get along with your family?”

But what would life be, with the two of us alone for longer than an hour? Do we depend on the ghosts of the others, Caleb and Sophie, is it the thrill of stealing you from him that makes me want to take you on the floor of the office every afternoon at five ten? Elena was tense and still beside him. He was never sure what made her so ill at ease at these moments, but he assumed it was guilt. A few miles to the north in a basement laboratory, her boyfriend mapped the genome of the Lotus japonicus.

“Why are you always so curious about my family?”

“I don’t know. I just am. I feel like I don’t know you that well.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your family, for a change?”

“There’s not much to tell. My dad’s a social worker. My mother’s a nurse at the hospital.”

“Were you born in the north?”

“I was born in Toronto,” she said. “We went to the north when I was three.”

“Why?”

“There was a shortage of nurses and social workers up there. They wanted to be helpful. But I’ve been plotting my escape from the north for as long as I can remember. Let’s not talk about the north.”

“Okay. Do you have siblings?”

“I have a brother and a younger sister. We used to be close, but she lives at home with her baby and we have absolutely nothing in common anymore. Our brother’s a few years older. He works in a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories.” She was quiet for a while, looking away. “Weren’t you nervous? Selling Social Security cards like that?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, I was just thinking about it. I think I’d be afraid of getting caught.”

“I was afraid in the beginning,” Anton said.

“Do you remember the very first one ever?”

“Of course I do,” Anton said.

The first one ever was a red-haired girl with still gray eyes at an Irish bar near Grand Central, four weeks out of Ireland when Aria approached her. She was tired and pale, not sleeping well in a crowded apartment share in the Bronx. She wanted to be a pilot. She moved through the evenings efficiently, was as charming as possible and played up the accent a little and wore a tight shirt in order to obtain maximum tips, read aviation magazines at the library, took long walks through the city and wrote postcards full of half-truths to her friends in Belfast on her days off.

“It’s difficult to imagine going anywhere,” she said. “I can’t go home, or they won’t let me back into the country. I want to stay here, but I already miss them.”

“Miss who?” The fake Social Security card was in Anton’s wallet. His hands were steady but his legs were shaking, which always happened when he was desperately nervous.

“Everyone,” she said. “Even the people I didn’t talk to much, I miss them. My downstairs neighbor Blythe.” She took a slow sip of coffee. Anton glanced discreetly at his watch. He had envisioned this as a fast shadowy transaction, take the money and run, but he hadn’t factored her loneliness into the equation. They’d been in the coffee shop for nearly an hour and she seemed to be in no rush.