Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

He woke that night from a dream of the other Anton. The real Anton, or more precisely, the Anton who’d really gone to Harvard. In the dream he was the other Anton and he was walking down a street in a strange city, glancing at an unfamiliar reflection in a shop window, sitting down in an armchair and taking off his shoes, petting the head of an adoring golden retriever, moving to lift the receiver of a ringing telephone, hanging up his coat in a closet; all of the details, small and personal and utterly beautiful and mundane, that make up the fabric of a person’s life.

Time seemed to slow in the mezzanine office. Anton was chilled by the air conditioning. For the first time since he’d proposed to Sophie he found himself grateful for the impending wedding; he had a little over two months to go and there were things to be done, and having things to do gave the day some semblance of structure. He could only spend so much time reading newspapers. His inbox remained empty. He had a computer, but it was as marooned as he was; there was no access to a printer, the company network, or the Internet. Messages left with the IT department went unanswered. He played Solitaire for a few days and then stopped. There was a telephone on his desk, but it only ever rang when people called looking for a woman in Accounts Payable whose extension number differed from his by one digit. He sometimes tried to engage them in conversation, unsuccessfully.

Riding in the elevator was unpleasant. It was awkward boarding from the mezzanine, especially when there were people he knew in the elevator already and they said things like, “I didn’t know you still worked here” and “What the hell are you doing on the mezzanine level?”

He started telling people he’d been transferred to a different division, which seemed to raise more questions than it answered (“You’re trying to tell me you’ve joined the cleaning staff?”), so he started leaving at four, which largely eliminated the problem of running into people on their way out but raised a larger question: if he could leave at four without ramifications — he hadn’t seen his supervisors since shortly before he’d been exiled two weeks earlier, and he had stopped leaving messages for them as a matter of pride — then it logically followed that he could leave at three. Or one. Or noon. Or actually never arrive in the first place. He was interested to note that he was still being paid for his time; his paychecks were deposited into his checking account with metronomic regularity. This made him think that the situation might still be salvageable in some way, that there might be some hitherto unnoticed angle of approach that would move him back up to the eleventh floor, that if he waited long enough things might become clear. Look at the holiness of this empty room. He was unsoothed by philosophy. His corporate cell phone remained dead, so he bought a cheap new phone and told Sophie he’d lost the old one. He brought books to work with him, but he was frequently too upset to read and so spent a great deal of his time pacing the room or doodling on a legal pad or thinking about how glad he was about his decision not to invite any of his coworkers to the wedding. He tried doing sit-ups but always ended up lying on his back staring at the ceiling. Nothing was clear.

At the beginning of his fifth week in the mezzanine Anton brought his basketball to work. It was strange carrying it in the elevator instead of a briefcase. When he disembarked on the mezzanine level he dribbled it down the corridor to Dead File Storage Four, past a cleaning woman who glared and muttered something in Polish as he passed. He closed his office door behind him, took off his tie and tied it around his forehead like a sweatband, and then ran and dribbled the ball back and forth across the room for an hour or so, maybe longer, until he threw it hard against the wall and it bounced off the floor and sailed through a closed window with the most satisfying sound he’d ever heard in his life. He went to investigate, broken glass crunching under his shoes. It was about a four-foot drop from the window to a lower rooftop of the Hyatt Hotel and the ball was nowhere. After a long time he saw it — a bright dot far off on the roofscape, like a lost orange. He untied his tie from around his forehead and draped it over the broken edge of the hole he’d made, and the part of the tie that hung outside the window fluttered in the breeze. He invented a new sport: when he’d finished reading the Times and didn’t want to take a nap he sometimes wadded up sheets of newspaper and threw them through the hole in the window. The game was to throw them from as far back in the room as possible, ideally with one foot against the opposite wall. This worked reasonably well with several sheets wadded up together into a solid ball, less well with a single page. It was a question of weight; three sheets of newsprint seemed to be ideal. He’d been a decent pitcher as a kid but the hole was easy to miss even with the tie as a marker, and a snowdrift of crumpled paper rose up gradually over the broken glass.

Anton realized on a Friday that he hadn’t used his stapler in a while, so he threw that out the gap in the window too. It sailed through perfectly. And then he heard a sound behind him, and when he looked over his shoulder Elena was watching him from the doorway.

“I’ve often wanted to do that,” she said. “Throw my stapler out the window.” She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.

“It was a pretty good throw. I’m glad someone saw it. Where have you been?”

“The proofreading department. Twenty-second floor.”

“The twenty-second floor,” he said. “Do you ever hear construction up there?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “I think they’re renovating the floor above.”

The idea that he might not be stuck in the mezzanine forever made him happier than he’d been in weeks. Offices were being constructed on the twenty-third floor. Jackson had been telling the truth: Anton was moving up there. It was a large company, his supervisors were busy on the New York City water project, and it was a well-known fact that the IT department was perpetually overwhelmed — the fact that he’d been languishing in the mezzanine for weeks might have absolutely nothing to do with his background check after all. He might have just been temporarily misplaced.

“Why are you grinning like that?” she asked.

“No reason. How’d you know where to find me?”

“I know a girl in HR.” The way she said it made him imagine whole networks of assistants throughout the tower, names unmarked in the company directory, passing information silently from floor to floor. She sat down on his sofa. After a few minutes he came and sat down on top of his desk, a few feet away from her, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. She leaned back on the sofa and looked around the room. He could see that she’d been crying, but he couldn’t think of a way to ask what was wrong without embarrassing her. He thought perhaps she just wanted company — he couldn’t remember if she’d ever mentioned a boyfriend — and so tried to silently convey the impression that there was nothing he’d rather be doing than sitting on top of his desk staring into space with her.

“What’s in those filing cabinets?” Elena asked finally.

There were five or six old four-drawer filing cabinets in a far corner of the room. He had never opened them.

“I have no idea,” he said. “We’re just in storage together.”

She smiled but had nothing to say to this. They sat in silence for a while longer before his phone began to ring. It was Sophie. He heard himself telling her that he was going to be home late again. “Yes, another staff meeting. I know, this evening staff meeting thing is completely unreasonable, but what can we do? We’re right up against deadline for phase one of the — okay, sure, I’ll call you when I’m on my way home. I love you too.”