Emily St. John Mandel: The Singer's Gun

“You’d tell me, right? Your best man and everything.”

“Of course,” Anton said. “The question’s not unreasonable.”

“What did you tell the office?”

“What did I tell the. .? Oh,” he said. “The office. They’ve probably figured it out by now.”

“You didn’t tell them you were abandoning your job?”

“Well, the job abandoned me first. And I didn’t know before I left that I wasn’t coming back again.”

“So you’re not coming back.”

“I don’t know.”

“You can see how a concerned friend might conclude there was something amiss,” said Gary. “Even if he hadn’t been your best man two weeks ago.”

“I could. Yes.”

“What’s your means of support over there?”

“I’m expecting some money soon. It isn’t expensive. I could last quite a while here.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Listen, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’ll call you later.” Anton hung up and walked to the edge of the piazza to look at the boats.

Anton’s job had faded out at the beginning of summer, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum, until he found himself alone in a dead-file storage room on the mezzanine level of the tower where he worked. The process began on the day his secretary disappeared, although it was far from clear at the time that things would snowball so quickly; this was near the beginning of June, and the third and final wedding attempt had just been scheduled for the end of August.

Anton was the head of a small research division at an international water systems consulting firm. Most of its projects to date had been in the desert cities, places like LasVegas and Dubai, where some impractical visionary had once touched a point on a map and said, Here. Never mind that the place touched on the map was uninhabited for a reason: “But there’s no water there,” some inevitable naysayer would protest, and this was where Water Incorporated eventually came in. There was also work done in other, less glamorous municipalities around the world, towns from Sweden to Montana with leaking aqueducts and purification issues. But the New York City contract was something unusual, and the details made Anton shiver when he read them: most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water that flow each day into the city of New York are supplied by two pipes, completed respectively in 1917 and 1935. The conduits have become so fragile over time that the supply can’t be interrupted in order to perform routine maintenance; the pipes are held intact only by the pressure of the water rushing through them, and the system leaks thirty-six million gallons of water per day. A third pipe has been under construction since 1970, but whether it will be completed before the older pipes fail is anyone’s guess. If the first two pipes were to fail before the third pipe is ready, then New York City would be rendered uninhabitable overnight, the supply of drinking water cut off. Water Incorporated’s contract called for studying the situation and coming up with recommendations on how to provide the residents of New York with a temporary supply of drinking water within twenty-four hours of a catastrophic pipe failure.

“All of you should be proud,” Anton’s director told the staff. “It’s your good work that brought us to this moment.” He was standing on a chair to address the troops. The New York City contract had been announced the day before and they were having an office party to celebrate. Anton was drinking wine with two of his staff: Dahlia, who he would have liked to drink with more often if he weren’t already engaged, and Elena, his secretary, who he’d been secretly in love with since he’d met her under criminal circumstances two and a half years earlier. “Now, as you can no doubt imagine,” the director said, “the systems we’ll be studying hold significant interest for terrorists.” He said terrorists in a slightly hushed tone, as if al-Qaeda might be holding a competing office party in an adjoining room. “We’re talking about the New York City water supply here. So in the coming weeks before the project commences,” he said, “we’ll be performing background checks on all staff who will be involved in the project. It’s a new regulatory compliance thing.”

Anton excused himself and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and stare at his own reflection in the mirror. A background check. He felt as pale as he looked. In the days after the office party life continued as normal, but three weeks later he arrived at work on a Monday to find that his secretary had vanished. An unfamiliar blond specimen was sitting in her cubicle.

“Where’s Elena?” he asked.

The impostor, who was chewing gum, looked at him distastefully. “Who are you?”

“I’m Anton Waker. This is my office. You’re sitting at my secretary’s desk.”

“They didn’t tell me anything about an Anton,” she said. “They said I was supporting Louise and Jasper.”

“It’s Gaspar, not Jasper. I’m afraid you were misinformed. Where’s Ellie?”

“Who’s Ellie?”

“Elena James? My secretary?”

“I’m your secretary.”

“You just told me you weren’t.”

“But then you said I was misinformed,” she said. He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He sat for a while at his desk going through yesterday’s research reports, spent a half-hour on the phone with Sophie who was crying because someone had cut in front of her in line at the bakery and she hated people and why was everyone always so horrible and mean, and when he ventured back out a few hours later the new secretary was gone. He heard her voice from somewhere down the hall and walked in the opposite direction to avoid her. Later in the afternoon he asked Dahlia if she’d made progress on the report she was supposed to be writing, and she told him that actually she’d been told to report to Gaspar in the Compliance and Regulatory Affairs department from now on.

“But you don’t do that kind of work,” he said.

She was embarrassed but had no explanation. It was just what she’d been told. His other seven direct reports told him the same thing, awkwardly, with their eyes downcast. No one really knew anything. It was embarrassing. The sympathy in their eyes made him want to punch someone. He couldn’t very well go across the hall and speak to Gaspar about it (“So, what’s this I hear about my entire staff reporting to you now?”), and repeated calls to his supervisor were not returned (“I’m sorry, Anton, he’s still unavailable. Would you like me to take another message?”), so he spent the day in his office with the door closed, waiting for an explanatory memo that never arrived. When he left at five his staff was in a meeting that he hadn’t been invited to. He heard Dahlia’s laugh and the strange new secretary’s voice through the conference-room door. Anton felt very formal all the way home.

Sophie was working; he heard the cello through her study door. He turned on the television and turned it off again, ordered Malaysian takeout and ate alone in silence, read the morning’s newspaper for a while and spent time with the cat, ate a few spoonfuls of ice cream, sat for two hours in the living room spell-bound by Sophie’s music. He talked with Sophie about the day’s news headlines when she emerged from the study around ten o’clock, brushed his teeth, kissed her, slept fitfully, came back to the office at a quarter to nine. He was met at the doorway of his office by a man from HR. Jackson was about Anton’s age and of similar build, but always slightly better dressed. He had a way of smiling a beat too quickly, and Anton had always found him somehow suspect.

“Anton,” he said. His voice was hesitant. “It’s good to see you.”