Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“That’s why I try to avoid having too many friends,” David said. “Unreliable species.”

“Not as bad as family.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You don’t have a family?”

“Not really,” David said.

“I envy you, man. I wish I didn’t have a family.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” Anton said, “I don’t. I wish I had a different family.”

The evening after the thirtieth anniversary dinner at Malvolio’s, Anton took the subway out to Brooklyn. He was tired. His footsteps were heavy on the steel steps up to the loading dock, and his planned speech evaporated when he stepped into his parents’ warehouse. There was the stone fountain just inside that had been there for a decade, sold at last, tagged, waiting for transport. He stopped to touch it — Look at this holy work of art, these holy stone birds along the edge of this basin — and ran one finger over the ecstatic curved spine of a finch. He thought he was alone but when he looked up Aria was already watching him. She was behind the counter, leaning on it, the New York Times spread out under her elbows.

“How could you do this?” It wasn’t at all what Anton had meant to say.

“Anton,” she said, not unkindly, “grow up.”

“It’s not—”

“You’re not really going to say It’s not fair , are you?” They were again thirteen, standing under the awning across the street from Gary’s father’s store; she was explaining how to shoplift but he was a baby and she was disgusted with him, You just take it from the shelf and then you don’t have to pay for it. The things she was stealing were different now, colossal: entire futures, perhaps lives, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed when her crimes became so enormous. It occurred to him that perhaps he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Aria,” he said, “this is my life. I’ve done something different. No one else in our family—” he was about to say has ever gone to college , but stopped himself just in time. “Aria, listen, I’m getting married, I’m going to have kids someday, and they’ll go to good schools because I have an office job and I can support that, and they will never have to do anything even remotely corrupt.”

“You’re saying they won’t have to do what you did.”

Anton sensed a trap but nodded anyway.

“Except that you didn’t have to do what you did either.” He had stepped on the tripwire; the trap snapped shut. “What were your grades like in high school?”

“I hate rhetorical questions.” Anton couldn’t look at her.

“Straight A’s,” Aria said. “You could have done anything. You always said you wondered what life would be like with a college degree, well, you could have gone to college. You had the grades. They have scholarships for kids with grades like yours. But you didn’t go to college, did you?”

Anton had no answer to this.

“The way I live is my decision,” she said. “The way you live is yours. No one ever forced you to be corrupt.”

His father was approaching from the back of the warehouse. He was holding a paintbrush in his hand, tipped with paint the color of poppies. “Are we back on the blackmail thing again?” his father asked.

Anton rested his hand on a stone bird to steady himself. “Yeah, Dad, we’re back on the blackmail thing again.” The curve of stone wings beneath his fingers.

“Well, she’s family, Anton. No getting around it.”

“She’s your niece. I’m your son.”

“She’s as much my daughter as—”

“Anton,” his mother said. “Ari, Sam, what is this?” She had appeared from somewhere in her work clothes, a streak of dust across her shirt. She was twisting a damp rag between her hands. “I heard you all the way in the back.”

“This blackmail thing again,” his father said. “Talk to him, Miriam.”

“Oh, Anton, it’s an important deal for her, you know that. I don’t know why you won’t help her.”

“Well, I don’t have a choice but to help her out, Mom, that’s the thing. That’s actually what blackmail is , in case no one ever told you.”

“Don’t speak that way to your mother.”

“Okay. Okay.” Strange to realize, looking at the three of them, that he didn’t want to see them again. No, that wasn’t it; it was more that not seeing them again was suddenly, staggeringly, absolutely necessary. “Tell you what,” Anton said, “I’m getting married in three weeks.”

“Well,” his mother said, “assuming Sophie doesn’t—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. I’m getting married in three weeks, and I don’t want to see you there. Any of you.” He forced himself to meet their eyes. They were staring at him, uncomprehending but starting to understand. “I don’t want any of you to come to my wedding. You are not invited. You are not people who I want to see again. Do you understand me? I’m done.” His mother was weeping. The look in his father’s eyes. “I love you,” Anton said. His father made an indecipherable sound. “I love you. All of you. I just can’t, I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to live the way you live anymore. I can’t.” He was at the threshold, backing out. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” They stood frozen in place, and something broke in him at the instant he turned away.

But they came to his wedding anyway, of course. They were family. He saw them sitting far back in the last row of the church — not Aria, just his parents, his mother in her favorite yellow dress — and they slipped away before the reception.

Anton sat with David on the pier on Ischia until it was too cold to sit there anymore and the wine was completely finished, then he excused himself and crossed the piazza to the pay phone. He started to dial the Santa Monica number and then remembered that she’d said she’d be back in New York by now. Her phone rang for some time before she picked up.

“Anton,” she said. She had taken to pronouncing his name ironically lately, in italics, because he had hung up on her four or five times in a row. “What time is it there?”

“Aria, my darling. Any news?”

“Yeah. We’re in production.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m too tired to be kidding you. You woke me up.”

“Only, what? Seven weeks late?”

“Six. You know I’m sorry about the delays you’ve been through. Believe me, it’s not that convenient for me either.”

“You didn’t have to leave your wife on your honeymoon.” The moon was setting.

“Yes, well, if I’d known the delay would be this long I would have done it differently, but nine more days and then it’s over. The package will arrive on Friday of next week. That evening your contact will come to your hotel. You’ll meet him at the restaurant downstairs at ten P.M.”

“The restaurant downstairs isn’t open at ten P.M.”

“He’ll be there anyway.”

“How will I know it’s him?”

“His name’s Ali. I’ll have more details on Thursday. Just go down and meet him, give him the package, shake hands and you’re done.”

“Aria, I want twenty thousand dollars.”

“Are you drunk?”

“A little, but that’s beside the point. What am I supposed to do after the transaction’s done? I’ve lost practically everything. I do this transaction, and then what?”

“What do you mean, and then what? You do this transaction, and then you’re done. You can come back to New York.”

“With no wife and no job? What am I coming back to, exactly?”

“Not my problem,” Aria said.

“Do you know what these weeks have cost me? I used to have a job I loved—”