The Singer's Gun

  “This is a very strange office,” Anton said.

  “It’s temporary,” Jackson said. “Larger, though, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. What is this new division? What will I be doing?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have the specifics. You should wait to hear from your supervisors.”

  “What do I do in the meantime?”

  “That’s between you and your supervisors,” Jackson said, and left Anton alone in the room. Anton went to the nearest window. He was on the same side of the tower as his old office, but so far down that the reflective glass wall of the hotel was blocked by a line of colossal air vents. His new windows were only four or five feet above a gravel rooftop. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, allow me to explain. I only wanted to work in an office, and some things weren’t possible by normal channels. This is all I ever wanted. There were certain shortcuts I had to take.

  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.

  2.

  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.”

  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 r
ead 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.

  Elena laughed softly and stood up from the floor. She put on her underwear and skirt, sat down again to button her shirt. When it was buttoned she stayed on the floor for a moment, combing her fingers through her hair in an effort to tame the disorder, and then began casting about for her shoes.

  “It’s all right,” she said, “you don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to. It’s an enormous question.”

  “No,” Anton said, “let me try to answer it, no one’s ever asked me that before. What was it like when I was growing up? It was wonderful, mostly. But I always wanted something else.”

  “What did you want?”

  “The same thing I want now,” he said. “A different kind of life.”

  There were soldiers on the trains that night. He didn’t know what had made him open his eyes so suddenly, but he looked up just as the nineteen-year-old with the M16 met his eyes, and then they both looked away quickly. There were fifteen or twenty of them, standing quietly among the rush-hour crowd. They left the train at 59th Street, a flood of green camouflage between blue-painted pillars. What was stirring to him was the way they left all together without speaking, the way a flock of birds will sometimes rise all at once from a field.

  Anton opened the door to his apartment on West 81st Street, his undershirt soaked through with sweat, and Sophie stood up from the sofa where she’d been reading and came to him. He was carrying a few shirts from the dry cleaners, and she took them from his hands before she kissed him.

  “How was your day?”