Emily St. John Mandel: The Singer's Gun

In an apartment on the bright sharp edge of New York, glass tower, Aria sat alone on a white leather sofa. She’d paid extra for noise-blocking windowpanes, and the silence in the apartment was all but absolute. A telephone lay on a marble table near her knees. She had been sitting there for an hour when it began to ring; the sound made her jump; she glanced at her watch and picked up the phone to look at the call display, which said italy and nothing else.

“It’s done,” Ali said.

“Thank you. We’ll speak again soon.”

The line went dead. Aria set the receiver down on the glass coffee table and sank back into the sofa. The room was large and bleached of color; white walls, white carpet, white leather, white phone. All of this was by her own design and usually the absence of color soothed her, but at this moment it was making her feel like a ghost. She closed her eyes again and realized that her hands were shaking. She was dizzy. After a long time she stood up and walked unsteadily to the bedroom, took her suitcase down from the closet shelf. She packed quickly, in a daze. She put on her coat and left the apartment.

Outside in the street Aria hailed a taxi. From a pay phone at La-Guardia Airport she called Anton’s parents’ apartment.

Anton’s father answered.

“Sam,” she said.

“Aria?”

“I’m going away,” Aria said. “I’m leaving tonight, and I’ll be gone for a while. You haven’t heard from me, okay?”

“Well, okay. Is something the matter?”

“Sam, I’m sorry. I’m just — I’m really sorry.”

“Has something happened?”

“Perhaps you’d better sit down.”

“Wait.” He was on a cordless phone. His wife was lost in a book in the living room. He carried the phone past her and closed the apartment door behind him, walked out through the vast dim warehouse to the loading dock and closed that door behind him too. Summer had finally broken; it was cold outside and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He stood on the loading dock with his back to the wall. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Tell me what you know.”

“Listen,” and her voice was choked, she didn’t sound like herself. It occurred to him as she began to talk, in a small part of his mind that remained rational and detached against the unspeakable thing she was explaining to him, that he had never known her to cry before. Even when she was eleven, when her mother was deported on a clear March afternoon. Strange child.

“I don’t understand,” he said after a moment. Her building was visible somewhere across the river in the mass of bright towers around the lost World Trade Center. She had pointed it out to him once, but he wasn’t sure now which one it was. Manhattan was as distant as another galaxy tonight, an indifferent constellation of tower lights.

“Sam, there was an accident.” And she began to explain it all over again, a complicated story about a deal gone wrong, a misunderstanding, a body that couldn’t be recovered without bringing both the FBI and the mob down upon them, but he was having a hard time listening or a hard time understanding, he wasn’t sure which. He held the phone to his face and stared at the river.

When the phone call was over he went back into the store and locked the loading-dock doors behind him. The door to the apartment was a shadow at the back of the vast room, and he couldn’t bring himself to pass through it again. On the other side of the door his wife sat reading. She would look up when he came in; he would kneel down beside her and begin to speak. He couldn’t do it yet. He turned on the lights over the back corner of the warehouse, where two figureheads he’d recently started restoring stood waiting for paint. Sam stood looking at them for a while. They were beautiful to him, and in a distant way he understood that it was important to stay busy for a little while, to keep his hands occupied even though they were shaking. From a supply cupboard in the back he fetched his paint and his chisels. He thought there might be a way of surviving Aria’s news.

One was saved from the sea near Gibraltor. She depicted a strong-faced woman arcing forward, her arms disappearing into the folds of her gown and her gown disappearing into the folds of carved waves. One was rescued from a shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope, barnacles adhering like stars in her hair. In her arms she cradled a fish. Both figureheads were women, but this was by no means a given. His mind wandered over other figureheads he’d read about as he worked. Some took the form of dragons, of lions, of princes and kings. The clipper-ship Styx had a figure of the devil. All the Corsair’s ships set out with a pegasus, and the nineteenth-century ship Flying Cloud bore an angel with a trumpet. During the reign of Henry VIII, the preferred British figurehead was the lion. The British privateer The Terrible had a skeleton at the helm. The French ship Revenant set sail with a corpse.

After a long time he caught himself staring blankly at the figurehead, unmoving, and he realized that his hands were shaking again. He glanced at his watch; it was eleven P.M. and the light under the apartment door had gone out. His wife was in bed. He had survived the first few hours. He blinked and leaned in close to his work. He had been removing the hard pale rings of ancient barnacles from the carved hair of the figurehead from the Cape of Good Hope. Delicate work with a blade-thin chisel. She had drifted to the bottom of the ocean in a cloud of silk and oranges, while a storm tore the surface of the sea far above. Pieces of the merchant ship had descended around her, ribbons of silk unfurling from the broken holds. Some men had drifted downward with the broken ship, he’d been told, but others rose up toward air with the oranges, climbing up onto the rocks and clinging there until the storm had passed, plucking floating oranges from the sea around them and setting off waterlogged for the nearest town. After a while he set down his chisel and began repainting the fish the figurehead held. He gave its scales a shimmering blue-green cast, and painted the inside of its gasping mouth a pink the shade of guavas.

At midnight Samuel Waker stopped painting and went outside to look at the river, at Manhattan shining on the other side. The East River moved over the bedrock riddled with the tunnels of deep underground trains and connected with the Hudson, flowing southeast past the Statue of Liberty, out of New York Harbor and out into the Atlantic. These night seas that circle countries: the Atlantic becomes the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar, and beyond the island of Sardinia the Mediterreanean becomes the Tyrrhenian Sea. On a Tyrrhenian island Anton sat on his hotel balcony, unblinking. In the room behind him Elena lay motionless, far from sleep. David Grissom had been dead for less than six hours. The moon was a crescent in a clear dark sky.

Anton closed his eyes. Far out over the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, a container ship was moving away from him.

When Broden left Waker Architectural Salvage she drove deeper into Brooklyn, east down Graham Avenue into a neighborhood that was bleaker, less expensive, where even now in this era of glass-tower condominiums all the windows still had bars. On the block where Elena had lived an organic grocery store had sprung up and also a hipster clothing boutique, asymmetrical dresses hanging bright between a run-down bodega and a hardware store. Broden parked by the boutique and walked down the block to Elena’s building, rang twice, but no one was home. She got back in the car and took an aspirin — she felt the beginnings of a headache — and turned left on Montrose Avenue. There was the subway, and a small bakery beside it. She parked and bought a couple of croissants before she drove back toward Manhattan. She couldn’t stop thinking about the dead girl in the shipping container, about the girl’s parents waiting for news of their child in some distant land. She called her daughter from the car, but it was getting late and Tova was already in the bath.