Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

When Anton hung up Elena was watching him.

“I don’t know,” he said preemptively, “I just didn’t feel like going home right now. What time is it?”

“A little after five,” she said. “You could leave if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to. Are you hungry?”

“Maybe a little.” She made no move to get up.

“Come on,” he said. “That lunch place in the Metlife Building lobby stays open till seven.”

They ate expensive Metlife-lobby sandwiches picnic-style in the middle of the room, at the halfway mark between the desk and the broken window. It was the only part of the office that wasn’t too air conditioned; a warm breeze came in through the hole in the window. Anton had closed the door against the empty corridor, and he moved the floor lamp to stand watch above them. In a circle of lamplight they ate turkey on rye and drank iced tea, almost without speaking. When the sandwiches were gone Elena lay on her back, legs crossed, hands clasped under her head, and gazed at the ceiling.

“It must be late,” she said, after they’d been silent for a while.

“Where are you from?” Anton asked.

“You know where I’m from. I told you when we first met.”

“I know, but it’s a big country. Where exactly?”

“The far north,” she said.

“That’s not terribly specific.”

“It’s a town you’ve never heard of.”

“Try me. I read travel books for fun.”

“Inuvik,” she said.

“Inuvik,” he repeated. “You’re right, I’ve never heard of it. How would I get there?”

“From New York?”

“Where else?”

“It takes five flights to get there from here.”

“Five?”

“First you’d fly to Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Then from Washington to Ottawa. From Ottawa you fly to Edmonton. Then from Edmonton you fly to Yellowknife—”

“Yellowknife?”

“A small northern city.” She glanced at him; he made a motion for her to continue. “Then you fly from Yellowknife to Inuvik.”

“How long does all of this take?” And later it seemed that there was no forethought, no planning and no doubt. He was clearing away the sandwich wrappers and iced-tea bottles between them, moving them aside, lying beside her on the floor as if this were something that had been planned and agreed upon before-hand. She closed her eyes. He reclined on his side to look at her, so close that he could see the texture of the violet powder that she’d dusted over her eyelids that morning, the faint dark smudges around her eyes where her mascara had been washed from her eyelashes by tears that afternoon.

“A long time.”

He saw for the first time that she’d aged slightly in the two and a half years since he’d met her, or perhaps it was only that he’d never seen her so close before. The finest of lines fanned outward from the corners of her eyes. “How long?”

“Twenty-four hours,” she said. “Sometimes longer in winter.”

“How much longer?”

“Days. The northern airports close sometimes when the weather’s bad.” As she spoke she was drawing her skirt slowly up her legs, the material loose between her fingers. He reclined beside her, not breathing, looking at her pale blue underwear and the white of her thighs. She pulled the skirt up over her waist and then slowly, almost lazily, began unbuttoning her shirt. She didn’t open her eyes.

“A distant northern land,” he said. Her shirt was open; her fingers were unclasping her bra at the front. He rested the palm of his hand flat on her stomach. Her breath was rapid. “How long since you’ve been back there?”

“I haven’t,” she said.

“Haven’t what?”

“Haven’t been back.” His hand traveling lightly over her skin.

Anton said, “This place you’re from.” They lay side-by-side, no longer touching. He had turned off the lamp and a pale light came in from the night city outside. There was a breeze through the broken window.

“Inuvik,” she said.

“Why haven’t you been back?”

“I can’t afford the ticket.”

“How did you get from there to here?”

“Sheer willpower.” He laughed and rolled onto his side to stroke her hair away from her forehead. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Brooklyn,” he said. “I’m nowhere near as exotic as you. Elena, are you with someone?”

“Caleb,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have. .”

“No apologies. I’m breaking up with him anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s almost over.” She was sitting up, reaching for her bra. “Because all living things have a natural lifespan, and relationships are no exception. Because I don’t understand the way he thinks, and vice versa.”

Anton wasn’t sure what to say to this but felt it would be impolite to say nothing. “I’m sorry,” he repeated uselessly.

She laughed softly. “Stop saying that,” she said. “Anyway, getting back on topic, Brooklyn is exotic.”

“Not if you grow up there, believe me.”

“What was it like when you were growing up?” He couldn’t quite see her face in the dimness.

“You mean Brooklyn?”

“No,” she said. “I mean everything.”

And it struck him instantly as the most obvious, possibly even the most important question you could ever ask anyone— How were you formed? What forged you? — but no one had ever asked him that before, and for a second he found himself flailing in the dark. It was corrupt. It was beautiful. My parents were the best parents anyone could hope for, and also they were dealers in stolen goods. I was in love with my cousin. I was raised by thieves. I was often happy, but I always wanted something different. I used to walk down the street with my best friend Gary when we were nine, ten, eleven, twelve, not going anywhere in particular, just surveying our kingdom. Everyone in the neighborhood knew us and we sucked on popsicles that turned our tongues blue and all was right with the world. On Sundays my mother sat with me on the loading dock and we drank coffee together. There were over a thousand books in my childhood apartment.

Over a thousand books, shelved in no particular order. The shelves were a chaos of genres: the Oxford Italian-English dictionary stood alongside a biography of Queen Elizabeth I, poetry was mixed in with cookbooks, and a random sampling of twentieth-century fiction was interspersed with a fantastic collection of travel guides. Travel guides were his mother’s particular passion. Before Anton was born his mother had traveled the world, as she liked to put it, although technically she only saw as much of the world as could be reached by car from Salt Lake City. She drove due south at sixteen and didn’t stop moving for a decade: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, all the way down through Brazil and Argentina to the southernmost bit of Chile (this was where she met Anton’s father, an American working for a fly-by-night scuba-diving outfit that salvaged bits of shipwrecks off the rocks of Cape Horn), and she collected travel guides for every country she passed through. Later she began collecting travel guides for everywhere: Albania, Malawi, Portugal, Spain. She had a special passion for the places that no longer exist on maps: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the USSR. The Belgian Congo, East Germany, Gran Colombia, Sikkim.

“Why do you have so many?” Anton asked her once. He might have been ten.

“It’s important to understand the world,” she said.

After that he read through all of her travel guides, made a serious study of them, but later he remembered almost nothing except a few random phrases. The history of the Congo can best be understood as a series of catastrophes. While Gran Colombia is a hospitable nation, care should be taken to avoid certain sections of the countryside. Yugoslavia is a temperate country.