Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Jackson. Good morning. Do you know where my staff went?”

Jackson smiled. “I believe they’re all in a meeting. May I talk to you a moment?”

“If they’re my staff,” Anton said, “and they’re in a meeting, why wasn’t I invited to the meeting too? I’m supposed to be supervising them?” He hadn’t meant the last part to sound like a question.

Jackson continued to smile instead of answering, but his smile was strained; he had the look of a man who’d have prefered to be doing almost anything else. Anton closed the door of his office behind them. He wondered if this was the last time he’d ever sit behind his desk, and he glanced up at the diploma on the wall to steady himself. Jackson sat down on one of the chairs across from him.

“Anton,” he said, “I realize the timing of this is a little unfortunate, but. .”

“The timing of what?”

“As you know,” Jackson said, “we’ve been conducting some background checks recently.”

“Right, to prevent terrorist cells from infiltrating the office,” Anton said, but Jackson seemed not to find this as amusing as he did. “Well. Is there anything I can clarify for you?”

“There is, Anton. Listen, this might be awkward, but it would be best if we could speak as frankly as possible.”

“About. .?”

“Well, let’s start with your academic background.”

“Sure. Harvard.”

Jackson smiled again but it was a different kind of smile, one that Anton thought contained an element of sadness. “Right,” Jackson said. He stood up, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the front of his suit jacket. “Well, we’ll speak again about this soon. Did I hear a rumor that you’re getting married?”

“End of August,” Anton said.

“Congratulations. Are you going anywhere afterward?”

“Italy,” Anton said. “Rome, Capri, Ischia.”

“Ischia. Is that an island?”

Anton nodded. “In the Bay of Naples,” he said.

On the way in to the office sometimes, in the days after the first conversation with Jackson, Anton closed his eyes in the subway train and tried to concentrate on everything that wasn’t ruined yet. There was an idea he’d been thinking about for years now but especially lately, which was that everything he saw contained a flicker of divinity, and this lent the city a halo of brightness. Fallen, maybe, but beauty in the decrepitude, and it still seemed plausible in those days that everything might somehow fall back into place, that the background check might not have turned up anything of interest, that his original secretary might reappear at any moment. Easy to take refuge in the idea of holiness, with so much still possible and so much at stake.

The idea that everything might be somewhat holy had come originally from his mother, reading excerpts from a book on the philosophy of Spinoza on a Sunday afternoon. He was no older than twelve, and they were sitting together on the loading dock. She was reading him something impenetrable, he didn’t understand half the words and she glanced up and saw the blank look on his face. “Look,” she said, “I know the language is intense. None of the words are important, it’s the idea that matters: he’s saying God didn’t create the universe, God is the universe. Do you understand?”

“I do,” he said.

Look at my holy fiancée in the mornings, pale and darting-eyed as she anoints her face with creams and powders. Look at my holy one-eyed cat, rescued two years ago as a sickly kitten from an unholy doorstep on West 121st Street. Look at the holy trains that carry us down into the depths of this city, passing through stations that shine like harbors in the deep. Look at the holy trees down the center of Broadway, the holy newspaper lying discarded on the sidewalk, the holy cathedral of Grand Central Station where we pass each morning under a canopy of stars. Anton glanced up every morning as he crossed the main concourse. Its ceiling was a chalky green-blue upon which stars were pinpointed in lights, the shapes of constellations etched in gold around them. The constellations were backward; the artist had been influenced, the sponsors claimed after the fact, by a medieval manuscript showing the stars as seen by God from above. It was impossible to stop and look up at the ceiling in the blazing crowd, everyone rushing in different directions to different jobs, but the glimpses were nearly enough. Anton was aware of no place more beautiful in the city. The color of the ceiling always struck him as being more ocean-like than sky-like, and the stars made him think of phosphorus, which he’d read about but never seen. There was one morning in particular when he wanted to ask Elena if she’d ever seen phosphorus, but it was Thursday and of course Elena had vanished four days ago, and he was waging a war of attrition with his new secretary. She ignored him as he walked past her into his office that morning.

He didn’t look at her either, per their unspoken terms of engagement, but it occurred to him as he closed the office door that he’d had no occasion to ask her for anything yet, which struck him as odd. She had come to him for nothing; there had been no phone messages. As he sat down he noticed that his inbox was empty, for the first time in months. He remembered having reached the bottom yesterday afternoon, and he realized with a falling sensation that nothing new had been placed in it. He sat down at the desk, chilled by the air conditioning, and checked his voice mail. No messages. He had left his corporate cell phone in his desk drawer overnight. He tried to check his messages there too, but he couldn’t get more than a fast busy signal no matter which combination of buttons he pressed. He logged on to his company email, or tried to, and then spent some time leaning as far back as his chair would go, contemplating the error message on the screen. Access Denied.

Jackson’s card was on his desk. Anton hadn’t really wanted to touch it since Jackson had left it there. He’d been moving his paperwork carefully around and over the card for the past several days in the hope that it might just disappear by itself. He looked at his screen another moment and then dialed Jackson’s number.

“Anton,” Jackson said, in a tone implying that Anton was absolutely the last person he wanted to speak with that morning. “What can I do for you?”

“Good morning, Jackson. Listen, I’m locked out of my company email account.”

“I see,” Jackson said.

“And my cell phone’s not working.”

“Really?”

“Since you were here a few days ago,” Anton said, “I just thought you might be in a position to tell me what’s going on.”

“Well, I’m not a technical support person, Anton.”

“Jackson, listen, my staff isn’t reporting to me. Let’s not pretend this is a technical issue.”

Jackson was silent for a moment, and then Anton heard a soft click on the line.

“Anton,” Jackson said very clearly, “have you thought any more about our conversation last week?”

“Am I being recorded ?”

Jackson went quiet again, and then asked Anton if there was anything he’d like to add to last week’s conversation.

“Nothing,” Anton said. “Absolutely nothing, Jackson, but thank you for asking. Sorry to bother you.”

Anton hung up, spent some time staring at the diploma on his office wall, and then dialed Jackson’s number again.

“Jackson, I’m sorry to bother you again. But I wondered if you could tell me what happened to my secretary.”

“Your secretary? She isn’t at her desk?”

“I meant Elena,” he said. “Elena James.”

“Marlene is your secretary, Anton.”

“Is that her name? My former secretary, then. She wasn’t fired, was she?”