Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

Sincerely,

Arthur Gonzalez

Administrative Director, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

“San Francisco,” Anton said. The room was silent. He carried the letter out to the balcony, where he read it again and then stood for a while looking out at the sea. After a few minutes of this he went back inside. His cell phone was flashing a low-battery warning on the desk, so he picked up the keys and his wallet and ran down the hotel stairs and around the corner to the piazza, where a tourist was using the pay phone. He stood nearby, impatiently shifting his weight, and realized that the page was still in his hand. He read it over a few times and then lost himself for a few minutes watching a passionate soccer game being played by boys on the beach. They were the children of fishermen, of restaurant workers, of the woman who ran the newsstand, and they played on the beach all day while their parents worked, an emotional society of small tanned boys in swim shorts who formed and broke alliances, went swimming individually and came back together again, organized themselves into soccer teams and then disbanded to pester their parents for ice cream.

“Ich vermiss dich so sehr,” said the tourist, on the phone.

He wanted to call Sophie and ask when exactly she had planned on telling him that she was moving to San Francisco. As per our telephone conversation of August 4th. He remembered August 4th. He had stood in front of his bathroom mirror that morning, extracted a piece of glass from his face with a pair of tweezers and held the shining transparent thing up to the light. Sophie had stood in the doorway and asked if he’d been shaving with glass and then hadn’t wanted to talk about it later. Had she really decided to leave him that day? But married him anyway? He’d gone off to work, she’d stayed home and placed a call to San Francisco and then behaved as if nothing was wrong that night? He was incredulous. The whole thing seemed pathetic. He was disgusted with both Sophie and himself. A yellow-and-blue boat was coming into the harbor.

“Ich werde niemals zu dir zurückkommen,” said the tourist. She was silent a moment, listening, and then hung up the phone without saying anything else and walked away toward the water. Anton moved in immediately and made the call, but their home phone number in New York had been disconnected. He called Sophie’s cell phone, but it went to voice mail and he didn’t want to leave a message. Anton hung up and dialed a different number but then remembered that he and Gary weren’t necessarily on speaking terms and hung up before Gary answered. He went to the fishermen’s café and read a newspaper until David appeared. It was a bleached-white day, cloudless, the sky so bright he couldn’t look at it.

“Mind if I join you?” David sat down across the table from him without waiting for an answer. He had green paint under his fingernails. He was carrying his own newspaper. He opened it, folded it carefully to expose the crossword puzzle, and ordered a beer from the waiter before he looked up at Anton again.

“What’s the matter?” David asked.

“Something I read.” The letter was still in Anton’s pocket. He unfolded it and gave it to David. “My wife,” he said. “I didn’t know she was going to leave me.”

David took the letter from him and read it through quickly. “She said nothing about it? No hint?”

“Nothing. I found the letter in her suitcase. I mean, to be fair, I guess I left her first.”

“Why didn’t she take her suitcase?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me to find it.”

“Are you all right?”

“More startled than anything.”

“I would be.”

“I mean, I was cheating on her ,” Anton said. “I didn’t think she’d. .” He trailed off and there was a silence, during which a fisherman climbed into his red-and-white boat and started slowly out of the harbor. “It’s all so pathetic,” he said. “I don’t know why we got married. It just seemed like the right thing to do, but why would either of us. .” The putt-putt of the motor played counter-point to the calls of the soccer boys on the beach.

“Hey,” David said, “I think Gennaro wants you.” Anton followed the direction of his gaze. The owner of the hotel was coming around the corner into the piazza. The white FedEx envelope in his hand shone almost painfully in the sunlight.

Anton felt as if the envelope were floating toward him, a glaring white rectangle that he found hard to look at dead-on. The wait was agonizing, so he stood up from the table and went to meet it.

“Good afternoon,” Gennaro said. “This envelope arrived for you. I signed for it, thought I’d give it to you in person.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.” It was addressed to an Ali Merino, care of Anton Waker. He recognized Aria’s handwriting. She’d used Gary’s father’s store for the return address. “It’s for a friend of mine,” he said. “He forgot some papers.”

“Ah,” said Gennaro. “A beautiful day, yes?”

“It is.” Anton raised the envelope to shield his eyes against the sun and tried to smile.

“Well,” Gennaro said awkwardly, “goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” He watched Gennaro recede for a moment before he returned to the table where David was sitting.

“Your package?” David asked.

“After all these weeks.”

“You going to open it?”

“No,” Anton said. Strange to have it before him after all this time, shining innocuously in the sunlight.

On the third Thursday of October in the city of New York, Elena stood on the corner of 81st Street and Columbus watching the slow progress of a moving truck parked halfway up the block. It had arrived an hour earlier and three men were carrying furniture and boxes between the front door and the truck. Five minutes earlier she had seen Sophie come out and speak to them. Sophie had left soon afterward, walking away down West 81st Street in the opposite direction. Elena counted to ten before she ventured up the hill. It was October 20th, but the forecast called for 85 degrees Fahrenheit, here in one of the last countries on earth that still used the Fahrenheit system. Her shirt was wet on her back. She made her way up the sidewalk in the deadening heat, and one of the movers winked as she approached.

“Hey,” she said, “you know where Sophie is?”

“She went out,” the man said. “Running an errand of some sort.”

“Oh, okay. I’m Ellie, I’m here about the cat. She told you I’d be coming?”

“No.”

“That’s strange. I’m Ellie—” She realized that she was repeating herself, but too late—“and I’m taking care of the cat for a couple days. He’s upstairs?”

“Who’s upstairs?”

“The cat?”

“Yeah, yeah, locked in the bedroom. Go on up.”

She ascended the stairs quickly. Inside the apartment a mover was taking apart a table in the middle of the room. He looked up and grunted when she said hello. It seemed to be possible to walk into apartments that people were moving out of without anyone saying much. Her heart was beating very quickly, and there was a disjointedness about the scene — she was crossing the room with the cat-carrying box, although she couldn’t remember reaching up into the closet to retrieve it, she was opening the door to the bedroom and closing herself in.

The bedroom was empty. The closet doors wide open, the bed and dresser gone, pale rectangles on the wall where pictures had hung. Jim was lying on the carpet by the window, absorbing sunlight. He raised his head and watched her with his one bright eye. She set the box down in the middle of the floor and opened the cage door, but it turned out that the cat wasn’t interested in being inserted into it. He began twisting away from her almost immediately when she grasped him, and he braced his legs on the edges of the opening. By the time she had forced him in headfirst and slammed the cage door shut her arms were stinging with scratches. Jim yowled once. When she looked in through the door he was crouched low, glaring with his single eye.