The Singer's Gun (9 page)

Elena Caradin James. Two and a half years later she lay on the floor of his office in a fever, a sheen of sweat on her skin. He touched her, her eyes closed, and he was brought back to that moment on the subway platform with such force that the memory rendered him breathless. He realized suddenly who she reminded him of. A photo of a girl on the front cover of one of his parents’ books.
What Work Is
: a collection of poems. He read the poetry once and liked it, but he was less taken by the poetry than by the cover: a photograph of a girl of about ten, with Elena’s stillness and Elena’s eyes. She stood between an enormous machine and a factory window, and you could see this in her face: she knew what work was, and she knew she wouldn’t escape it in this lifetime. She was facing the camera, half in shadow. When Anton was ten and eleven and twelve and even fifteen he sometimes took the book down from the shelf just to look at her face.

“It can’t have been an easy business,” Elena said.

“It was an easy business. I was good at it. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life.”

“Then why did you get out?” She was naked, resplendent in the August heat. A current of warm air moved through the broken window and passed over her skin.

“I don’t know, I just gradually didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“Why not? What changed you?”

“I don’t know. It was gradual.”

“If you could name one thing.”

“Well, there was a girl. Catina. I’d been thinking about getting out, but it was meeting her, it was talking to her . . . I didn’t know before her that I was really going to do it. Get out, I mean.”

“A girlfriend?” Elena asked. The recording device in her purse listened silently.

“No, not a girlfriend. I sold her a passport.”

Catina was reading a magazine when Anton came into the café. She looked up and smiled when he said her name, and he caught a glimpse of the page she’d been reading as she closed the magazine—the headline, “Who Was the Falling Man?” and a famous photograph. He’d seen it years earlier, and he recognized it at a glance. The picture was taken on September 11, 2001, at fifteen seconds past nine forty-one
A.M
.: a man, having jumped from one of the North Tower’s unsurvivable floors above the point of impact, plummets toward the chaos of the plaza below. He is falling headfirst. He will be dead in less than sixty seconds. One knee is bent; otherwise his body is perfectly straight, his arms close against his sides. He is executing a dive that will never be replicated.

“Did they figure out the guy’s name?” Anton asked. Catina looked blankly at him until he gestured at the magazine.

“Oh.” She shook her head. “They thought they knew. But the family wouldn’t concede it.”

“The family doesn’t think it’s him?”

“They don’t want it to be him. The guy in the picture’s jumping before his tower falls, so I guess they see something unheroic about it. They say their son wouldn’t have jumped.”

Anton shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to do,” he said. “I might’ve jumped.”

“I think the falling man’s . . . admire-able?”

“Admirable.”

“Admirable.” Catina spoke with a Portuguese accent; she had been in the country for four years now, working as an assistant to a Portuguese businessman, and her English was good but traces of Lisbon remained. “There was no way out, and he made a choice. The air was all flames. On flames?”

“On fire.”

“The air was on fire. He could pause . . . no, hesitate. He could hesitate and burn to death, or he could take control in those last few seconds and dive into the air. I like to think I would have done the same thing.”

Anton nodded and found suddenly that he couldn’t breathe. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and spent several minutes staring at his face in the mirror, trying to think about what he would do if he were marooned a hundred stories above the surface of the earth with the air on fire all around him. He went back out into the Russian Café and completed the transaction as quickly as possible. Outside in the sunlight he stood still on the sidewalk, watching Catina depart with the magazine rolled up in her hand, and then he walked away slowly in the opposite direction. He locked eyes with everyone he saw on the sidewalk. Some stared back at him, some ignored him, others glanced quickly and then looked away. At dinner with his parents a few hours later he pushed food around his plate and didn’t eat until his mother put her fork down and asked what was wrong with her spaghetti.

“No, the food’s good. I’m sorry. I’ve just been thinking a lot about the business.”

“What about it?” his father asked.

“Not
your
business. This thing with Aria.”

“Really,” Aria said.

“Oh,” his mother said, visibly relieved. She preferred not to discuss the family business in any great detail, but her niece’s forged-documents venture was fair game. “What about it?”

“I was thinking about this earlier in the day. Do you mind if I ask a hypothetical question?”

“I love hypothetical questions,” his mother said.

“How would a terrorist get into the country?”

“Well, he’d come in on a tourist visa, I imagine.”

“Or he’d get a friend in the country to come to me and Aria and get him a passport, and then he’d enter as an American citizen. Or if he were already here on his tourist visa, he’d buy a Social Security card directly from us and use it to get a job. You know, guarding a seaport. Or driving a truck that he could then pack with explosives. Or whatever.”

His father shrugged.

“So then what are we doing? What are we doing here? We—”

“Think of your aunt,” his mother said. “Don’t get worked up, sweetie. You’re helping people like your aunt.”

“Yes,” Aria said, “my dear departed mother.” She liked to say
departed
instead of
deported
, which was disconcerting, because as far as anyone knew her mother was alive and well and living in Ecuador.

“Yeah, I am. Hardworking illegal aliens who have no chance of getting citizenship, I know, I get it, but who else? Who else besides them?”

His parents were quiet. Aria watched him silently over the table.

“It was just something I was thinking about today. Actually, not just today, it’s been . . . it weighs on me,” Anton said.

“You have to do things that are a little questionable sometimes,” his father said. “It’s all part of making a living.”

“Yeah, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. I keep thinking there’s maybe something else I could be doing. I’ve been putting my résumé together.”

“Your résumé,” Aria said. “Your
résumé
? Really? You’ve only ever had two jobs in your life: selling stolen goods in your parents’ store and selling fake documents to illegal aliens.” His father’s jaw was tensing again; he didn’t like the word
stolen.
Anton’s mother was immune to accusations of theft, but disliked any suggestion of disloyalty; she was sipping water, watching Anton, her eyes cool over the top of her glass. Aria pressed onward: “Are your jobs on your résumé, Anton?”

“My education’s on my résumé.”

“Our high school’s on your résumé? Are you serious? If it weren’t for social promotion, you’d have been the only student in your graduating class.”

Anton extracted his wallet from his jeans. Folded behind the bills was a newspaper clipping; he had been carrying it around for months and it almost fell apart when he unfolded it. He passed it to his mother, who looked at it and frowned.

“A story about an alumni association meeting, Anton? You wanted me to read this?”

“Look at the end. There’s a quote from an Anton Waker, who just graduated Harvard. I was surprised, I mean, the name can’t be that common. And I was looking at it and thinking, you know, what if I’d gone to college? What opportunities, what jobs would be open to me that aren’t open to me now? I always thought I wanted to work in an office somewhere, be an executive of some kind.”

His mother was smiling. “You applied to
college
,” she said, and he almost winced against the delight in her voice.

“No,” he said, “I did something different. The guy they quote there, the other Anton—how old are you when you graduate college? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? He’s a little younger than me, but it’s close, it’s close. I could’ve taken a year or two off after high school—”

“Or four or five years off after high school,” Aria said. “I’m looking forward to hearing the explanation for that one.”

“So I just wrote a letter to Harvard,” Anton said, ignoring her, “requesting a copy of my diploma.”

There was a bad moment when he thought his mother might cry, but then she smiled and raised her glass to him instead. His father raised his glass too.

“To improvisation,” his father said.

5.

“That’s horrifying,” said Caleb, when Elena told him the story about the four-thousand-nine-hundred-year-old pine tree. “They just let him cut it down?”

“For a broken measuring tool. I can’t stop thinking about it. It was in a magazine I read today.”

“Christ.” He sounded genuinely moved. She had lit two scented candles in the bedroom while he was still at his desk: vanilla and jasmine, sweet and dizzying in combination. When the candles were lit she had taken her clothes off, but he was still fully dressed when he came to lie down beside her and didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t wearing anything. He wanted to hear about her day.

Elena didn’t want to talk about her day. She didn’t want to tell him about Broden. She could hear Caleb’s heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.

“So, I found out about my grant,” he said.

She sighed and pressed herself against him. He shifted away from her almost imperceptibly, ran his hand through her hair and turned his head briefly to kiss her forehead.

“Good news?”

“Very good.” He kept talking. She pressed the length of her body against him again, but so gently this time that it could easily have been mistaken for an accidental shifting of weight. He didn’t notice, or chose not to.

“Was that a no?” he asked finally.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The party,” he said. “To celebrate the grant renewal. Tomorrow at my professor’s house. You want to come?”

“Absolutely. Of course. I’m sorry I was distracted, it’s not that I wasn’t interested.”

“Has your job gotten any better?” he asked gently. “The proofreading?”

She didn’t want to think about work; she began stroking his arm instead of answering him. His arm tensed very slightly under her fingertips. Haptics: the science of studying data obtained by touch.

The slow agony of morning, cubicle life. Elena tried to concentrate on the documents she was reading, but she’d slept badly the night before and her exhaustion was a weight. She was on her third cup of coffee when Nora called her name.

“It isn’t that I think your work is bad,” Nora said. She was in the habit of offering unsolicited performance reviews. She held the document Elena had been proofreading the previous afternoon. “It’s just that I notice a certain lack of attention sometimes.”

A certain lack of attention. Elena’s hands were shaking when she went back to her desk, but she wasn’t sure if it was from the coffee or because she had to see Broden over the lunch hour. Broden had told her to acquire as much information as possible but all she had acquired so far was guilt. And fears as strong as memories, as if the deportation had already occurred: the walk through the airport in handcuffs, an FBI agent on either side. The sequence of flights, NewYork to Washington, D.C. and then northward, the hours in Customs on the other side of the border before being released into the shadowless arctic summer with people whispering on every street.

At one o’clock she went back to World Trade Center 7, sat in Broden’s office while Broden took notes. She found herself staring out the window at the blue sky and glass towers outside. Thinking of the far north, of exile and snow. Elena had been on the front page of her hometown newspaper when she’d made it into Columbia on full scholarship; imagine the stories if she came back in handcuffs. But would they bother to take her as far as Inuvik? Of course not. It was a two-thousand-dollar ticket. A shorter flight, then, hauled over the border to the closest major Canadian city. Abandoned in Toronto or Montreal at nightfall, still three thousand miles from home and New York City lost forever on the other side of a closed border, her name on a list at Customs, oh God.

“Elena.” Broden was leaning forward in her chair, and Elena realized from her tone that she had said Elena’s name more than once.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you have the tape?”

“Yes,” Elena said. It was in her handbag. She fumbled about until she felt the hard plastic edge of the case under her fingertips, and she unexpectedly burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I never do this. I never cry in front of people.”

Broden had produced a box of tissues from somewhere, and she passed it to Elena without a word. Elena pressed two tissues to her face and forced herself to be still. She stood up, straightened her skirt, and placed the tape on the desk on her way out of Broden’s office. She didn’t look back, but she felt Broden’s eyes on her as she left.

Strange to go back to the office, after such a meeting. Her reflection in the darkened window of the subway car, staring back at herself. At Grand Central Station she walked very slowly across the main concourse, the vast space filling up already even though it was only three in the afternoon, executives rushing to catch their trains home to Westchester County. In the elevator Elena pressed every button to buy time and the doors opened and closed on other people’s working lives; glimpses of beige carpets, white marble, dark wood, glass walls, a woman walking with a cup of coffee. On the twenty-second floor she left the elevator and opened the door to the office, walked past Nora without looking at her and went to her desk. The paper she was supposed to be proofreading blurred before her eyes. Nora’s voice was distinct over the top of the cubicles—“You know, Mark, when I write you a memo, you should
probably
read it”—and the fluorescent lights hummed softly overhead.

Elena put down her red pencil and closed her eyes. All her life she’d paid attention to last moments—the last moment before a catastrophe, the last moment before a surprise, the last moment before you open the envelope from Columbia University in the living room in your arctic hometown with your parents standing breathless in the doorway—and she’d come to recognize last moments when she saw them. This was the last moment she could stand to go on like this.

Elena took a page from her inbox, wrote
I QUIT
on the back in block letters, signed her name, and slung her handbag over her shoulder. She walked past Nora’s desk and dropped the piece of paper in Nora’s inbox, but Nora was preoccupied with insulting someone else and didn’t notice. By three forty-five
P.M
. she was outside in the haze of midtown Manhattan, as free and as lost as she’d ever been.

The party was in a brownstone on a tree-lined block off Broadway, high up on the island near the university gates. It was miles from the office but Elena walked there anyway, a slow northwestern movement across the span of a city and an afternoon. She would walk until the heat was overwhelming and then step into a Starbucks—there seemed to be one every three and a half blocks or so—and walk out of the air conditioning with a plastic cup of something sugary and frozen in her hand. The air was dense and heat waves shimmered over the street. She alternately sipped iced coffee and pressed the cold cup to her forehead as she walked, thoughts of Broden and Anton and the job she’d just quit and Caleb drifting together and sifting to white. The walk through Central Park was the hardest stretch; a few steps in and the sound of traffic vanished, the landscape closing in around her like an implosion. There was a weighted quality to the park, a hush, footsteps almost silent and her heart beating too fast, dragonflies gliding on imperceptible breezes under the pressing canopy of trees. There were few people here at this hour, in this heat: a woman pushing a red-faced child in a stroller; a runner almost staggering, streaked with sweat; a man sitting alone on a bench with his possessions in plastic bags around him, singing quietly and scattering seeds to a congregation of pigeons. Day fell into twilight, but twilight brought no relief.

When Elena emerged from the park at 110th Street her head was light and there was a confused shifting darkness at the center of her vision. She bought plantain chips and Gatorade in a tiny bodega and pressed on against the air. She was dizzy. Her breath was ragged. Caleb had given her the address but it took her a while to find the place, walking somnambulant along a tree-lined street until she saw the number, the door ajar. There were voices coming from inside. It took a few minutes to make it up the steps.

She pushed the door open and slipped into the foyer. The crowd was larger than she’d thought it would be, but she recognized no one. The living room looked more or less the way she would have expected a professor’s living room to look: deep red walls hung with African masks, bookshelves overflowing their contents onto side tables and chairs. Caleb was nowhere. Elena wanted to sit down, her legs were aching, but every chair and sofa seemed taken. She settled for leaning against a wall in dazed silence. The room was well air conditioned; her sweat dried on her face. She thought she recognized a face or two in the crowd, old classmates from her astrobiology days, but no one she’d been close to or whose names she remembered—had she been close to anyone besides Caleb at school? It was unclear in retrospect, and no one here seemed to see her. More people were coming in from outside, and everyone seemed to know each other. The room was becoming more crowded and she was becoming more alone.

“Ellie?”

The photographer was grayer than she remembered, but with the same appraising eye. Her initial impression, when she’d met him for the first time three years earlier, was that he had the look of a man who’d seen too many naked women in his lifetime.

“Leigh,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“My wife teaches up at Columbia. We’re friends of Dell’s. Are you okay? You’re a little flushed.”

“Fine. A little hot. The temperature out there . . .” She gestured weakly.

“I know, it’s brutal. Here’s to air conditioning.” He raised his glass. “What brings you to the party?”

“My boyfriend’s working on the plant genome thing.”

“You’re dating a professor?”

“He’s a Ph.D. candidate.”

“What’s his name?”

“Caleb. Caleb Petrovsky.”

“Tall, kind of lanky? Light brown hair, falls in his eyes a little?”

“You know him?”

“We were just introduced. Didn’t realize he was yours.”

“Is he here somewhere?”

“He’s talking to Dell in the kitchen.”

Elena nodded and sipped her Gatorade, suddenly not at all sure that she wanted to see Caleb after all. He would ask how work was, she would tell him she had quit her job, he would look at her strangely and they’d fall into an awkward silence, et cetera. She contemplated slipping out. Across the room, a girl she remembered from a long-ago biology class was holding court in a circle of men; she caught “—but if you focus just on the chloroplast—” before Leigh cleared his throat.

“Not to be forward,” he said. He was holding a plastic cup of red wine and staring into the room with her. She wondered what he saw when he looked at the women. “But if you had any interest in being photographed again, I’m putting together a new book.”

“I would love to,” Elena said.

In the kitchen Caleb was leaning on a counter, holding a bottle of beer and laughing, talking to an older man whose face she couldn’t see. Elena stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway, watching him—he didn’t seem to notice her—but she couldn’t bring herself to go in. There was a door in the hallway with a sign that read
W.C.
in wooden-block letters. She slipped inside and closed and locked the door behind her, splashed cold water on her face until her skin was cold to the touch and stood leaning over the sink with water dripping from her hair. Her face in the mirror was utterly white. Coming to the party seemed to have been a colossal error; she wanted nothing in that moment but to stay alone with her thoughts. She spent some time fixing her water-smudged mascara with a scrap of toilet paper, then sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

There was a stack of books beside the toilet, and the second book from the top had a familiar blue spine. She pulled it out of the pile.
Naked: New Photographs by Leigh Anderson.
The girl on the cover lay facedown on the bed in Leigh’s apartment, naked but for a pair of very high heels. Elena flipped to page thirty-four and stared at her own face for a moment. She caught herself wondering if any of her old classmates had seen this book, and if any of them would recognize her if they did. “Do you think you’re invisible?” Broden had asked.
I do, actually. Yes. Thanks for asking.
She walked back out to the kitchen; Caleb waved when she came in and put his arm around her waist.

“Dell,” he said, “you’ve met Elena.”

The professor smiled, and Elena saw that he didn’t remember her. Some years earlier, in a different lifetime, he had written the initials
LUCA
on a blackboard and let the chalk fall to the floor.

“Elena,” he said carefully. “And what are you up to these days?”

“I’m a spy.”

“What?” Caleb’s beer was halfway to his mouth; he put the bottle back on the counter and looked at her, still smiling. “What’s that, honey?”

“Actually, I just quit my job today.”

“Oh,” Caleb said. “Wow. Congratulations, El, I know how much you hated it. Is everything all right? You seem a little . . .?”

“I’m fine. Actually, I’m better than I’ve been in a while.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s good, then. How much notice did you give them?”

“None. I just walked out.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the professor said.

“You just walked out,” Caleb repeated. “So you, um, you have a new job lined up?”

“I’m posing for the photographer again.”

“Posing for the . . . wow. The same one as before?”

She nodded and took the beer bottle from his hand, drank for a moment and gave it back to him.

“El, are you sure you want to do that again?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s just, I don’t know, it just seems a little sordid, doesn’t it?”

She was suddenly very tired. Her joints ached from miles of walking and she wanted to lie down. “Work is always a little sordid,” she said.