The Singer's Gun

1

For reasons that were difficult to think about in any great detail, let alone explain to his wife in New York, Anton had rented a room on the island of Ischia for the off-season. In exchange for a hundred euros a month and the understanding that he’d wash his own towels, he was given a small blue-painted room overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea with the outline of Capri visible in clear weather against the edge of the sky. For the first few days the silence was miraculous, and he thought he might finally have found what he was looking for.

His wedding had taken place six days prior to his arrival on the island, after a long and frankly disastrous engagement: Sophie found a dress, bought it, had a panic attack when she tried it on at home, and canceled the wedding. This was a fantastically costly maneuver involving several dozen hours of therapy at three hundred dollars an hour and a mailing of two hundred uninvitations: “The wedding of Sophie Berenhardt and Anton Waker has been post-poned for personal reasons. Thank you for your understanding.” She informed him that there was no hyphen in “postponed,” took up meditation in addition to the therapy, and came to him a month later with the news that she’d had an epiphany: the wedding was meant to be. Two hundred and fifty all-new wedding invitations were mailed out, in shades of spring violet; the flowers blossoming in the corners of the invite, she told him, represented rebirth. Anton had just been reading about how violets pinned to a girl’s lapel in a certain era had represented lesbianism, but chose not to mention this. Two hundred and one RSVPs arrived without incident. She showed up at work during his lunch break in tears, clutching the two hundred and second. All it said was “We’re so glad for you! We’ll be there!” and it was only from someone’s obligatory aunt, but he knew before she spoke that the wedding was off again. She was scared, she said. It wasn’t him. She just needed more time.

“Because I really love her,” he told his friend Gary, in response to a question.

He canceled the hall and the caterer and sent out two hundred and fifty uninvitations in shades of blue. The wording on these was much the same, except that she removed the hyphen between “post” and “poned,” and then he added the word “indefinitely” right before he sent it to the printers, and then he had to sleep on the couch for two nights. They spent a polite six weeks avoiding the topic. He wasn’t sure what to do, but he told himself he’d always known she was flighty and should have seen this whole mess coming. Marrying her was the only course of action that seemed honorable. He was living in a strange limbo wherein he couldn’t remember if he loved her or not and he sometimes felt he was losing his mind. He took endless walks through the streets of Manhattan and didn’t sleep well. In the evenings while Sophie was working he spent a lot of time with his cat; Jim lay across his lap and purred while Anton read.

Their friends went to absurd lengths to avoid bringing up the wedding. Everyone was terrifically sympathetic. The therapy bills were stupendous. Topics of conversation seemed to change abruptly when they entered rooms where their friends were sitting. He tried to protect her from all this as best he could and to make things generally as pleasant as possible — coffee in bed in the mornings whenever feasible, flowers every Saturday — and he could tell she was trying to keep the mournful cello music to a minimum and tried to appreciate the effort. He sat on the sofa outside the closed door of her study with the cat on his lap and lost himself in the unspeakable beauty of her music.

“I don’t mean to state the obvious, but being in awe of some-one’s talent isn’t really the same thing as being in love with them,” Gary said, when Anton told him at the end of spring that Sophie was finally ready to get married again. “But what the hell, maybe third time’s the charm?”

“Third time’s more or less my outer limit,” said Anton, and tried to convey this to Sophie in much gentler terms later on (“I don’t want to pressure you, sweetie, but. .”) and she took it fairly well initially, but then played what sounded like funeral music in her study for days. When he cracked open the study door to see if she wanted to talk about it she just murmured, “I’m working,” without looking up from the score, which forced him to close the door again because they’d agreed that when Sophie was working no one could talk to her. He took long walks, read in cafés, went out for drinks with Gary and made very little progress on anything that week.

The manager of the hall he’d booked for the two previous wedding attempts laughed and hung up on him, so he booked a new hall that was slightly more expensive and had been his first choice from the beginning, mailed out three hundred new invitations with a completely different color scheme, agreed with Sophie that it would probably be best if she let him handle the RSVPs this time, and set about relaunching the catering, floral decoration, and wedding-music operations. Some of her old friends from Juilliard had a rock band on the side, so he booked them against his better judgment and tried not to think about what the music might sound like.

All three hundred guests RSVP’d in the affirmative almost immediately — most, he suspected, out of sheer curiosity — and Sophie seemed happy and uncharacteristically calm, although she was playing a lot of frenetic atonal modern music in the evenings. On the day itself she was a vision, dark curls and white silk and the plunge of her neckline, blue necklace on pale skin. It was an evening wedding in a church lit with nearly a thousand candles, and time skipped and moved strangely in the half-light. He was watching her float down the aisle, there were candles everywhere and so many roses that the scent and the candle smoke made him dizzy, she was beside him, they were listening to the priest and he couldn’t retain a single word that was being said. She was a mirage in the candlelight and he stood beside her in a kind of suspended animation, he was kissing her, Gary hadn’t forgotten the rings, I now pronounce you husband and wife. The band wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, his new wedding suit was less uncomfortable to dance in than he would have expected, they stayed at the reception til three in the morning, at intervals he heard himself laughing and he felt that he was observing the scene from some distance away.

Time seemed to be moving very rapidly now. He drank champagne and danced with his bride. His friend Ilieva put a flower behind his ear and he left it there for an hour. He felt strangely still inside through the whole thing, calmer than he thought a man getting married really should be — but it wasn’t until he was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean the next day, Sophie asleep in the seat beside him, that he realized he’d been confusing calm with indifference. He wasn’t, now that he thought about it, calm at all. Nor had he fallen out of love, exactly—indifference was the wrong word, it was something softer and more precise — but he also wasn’t at all sure that he should have married her. His exhausted bride slept on unaware.

He made his move on the island of Ischia. They arrived in the harbor village of Sant’Angelo in the late morning; a taxi let them off outside an archway beyond which no cars were allowed, and they dragged their suitcases down a cobblestone street to a pink hotel that stood by the water. It was a small two-story building with a half-dozen rooms on the second floor, the first floor taken up by a restaurant. There was no reception desk; the owner, a perpetually smiling man in his fifties named Gennaro, took reservations from a phone set up in a corridor by the door. The corridor led to the restaurant, and a flight of stairs led up to the rooms.

They checked in and spent the day wandering the streets of Sant’Angelo, and Anton thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. The village allowed no cars and couldn’t have accomodated them; the streets rising up from the harbor were open-air corridors between the pale walls of villas, rough cobblestones turning every now and again into stairs. There were walled gardens glimpsed through iron gates, vines spilling over the tops of plaster walls. They turned a corner and the sea was brilliant far below them, bright-painted boats bobbing in the harbor waters. Three cafés competed on a large open piazza, and from the hillside above the harbor their umbrellas were sharp white circles and squares in the sunlight. Sophie and Anton ate dinner in the hotel restaurant and went to bed early, and in the morning they went down to the piazza and sat for a while reading the paper and drinking coffee together.

“You know,” Anton said, as casually as possible, “I was thinking about maybe staying on a while.”

She looked up from her café latte.

“Our plane tickets are for Thursday,” she said. “We have to go back to Rome tomorrow.”

“I was thinking if I stayed here for a little bit,” trying not to emphasize the I too cruelly, failing, “I could get some traction on my book. You know, really write for a while.”

“You’re writing a book?”

“It’s a new kind of travel book. I’ve been meaning to tell you about it. I just can’t get going with it at home,” he said, “but the atmosphere here. .”

“A new kind of travel book,” she repeated.

“‘We stand in need of something stronger now,’” he said. He was quoting a book review he’d read in the New York Times a while back, but he surmised from her baffled stare that she hadn’t read it. He pressed on regardless: “‘A travel book that you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.’”

“That’s what you’re writing?”

“Well, I haven’t started yet. But here, you know, with no distractions. .”

“Well, if you can’t write it in New York City, Anton, you won’t be able to write it here either.”

“Bukowski,” he said. “I like that.”

“What?”

“Isn’t that what he said? Something about writing in the apocalypse with a cat clawing up your back? Anyway, I just think—”

“No, he said if you’re going to create, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood, and fire.”

“Oh,” he said.

She regarded him silently.

“As I was saying. I just thought. . I just think it might be nice,” he said, “after all we’ve been through, you know, it’s been so intense with the wedding and everything, all the cancellations, I thought maybe we should be apart for a while. I mean, when I say a while, not a long while, just maybe a couple weeks. Sophie, please don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.”

“You probably hate me,” he said. “Suggesting this on our honeymoon of all times.”

“No,” she said. She was digging in her purse.

“It’s okay, I’ll pay for your latte. Are you all right? Tell me honestly.”

“Fine,” she said absently, without looking up. Her handbag yielded a ferry schedule. She examined it for a moment, glanced at the antique gold wristwatch his parents had given her as an engagement gift, stood up from the table and started out of the piazza without looking at him. By the time he found a ten-euro bill in his wallet she was out of sight. He left the money on the table and ran after her, lunged through the door of the hotel and then realized at the bottom of the staircase that she hadn’t gone in. When he came back out into the sunlight, blinking, she was already halfway up the road that led out of the village. He caught up with her as she was getting into a taxi.

“Sophie, what are you doing?” He thought he’d never seen her so calm before and wondered if she somehow thrived on catastrophe.

She said something in Italian to the taxi driver, who nodded and started his engine. Somewhat at a loss, Anton climbed in beside her and closed the door.

“Sophie, come on, this is unnecessary. Your luggage. Your passport.”

“I carry my passport in my handbag,” she said, “and you can dispose of my luggage as you see fit.”

Sophie had nothing to say the rest of the way to the ferry terminal. He was on the shoreline side of the minivan; he stared out the window at the jumbled chaos of hotels and villas and the sea beyond, thinking of how beautiful the sea was and how much crassness and vulgarity lay between him and it. She had nothing to say at the ferry terminal either. She ducked away from his kiss and got on the ferry without speaking to him while he hung back uncertainly on the shore.

The way she departed: standing on the ferry moving away from him over the water toward the city of Naples, looking at him where he stood. She was half-smiling in a way that he felt was meant to convey something — sorrow, hope, reproach? — but he couldn’t bear it and so he turned away almost immediately, while her features and her half-smile were still clearly visible and the boat still loud in the water, and he realized later that this had been the moment when the cord had finally snapped between them.

He found himself repeating the motion at intervals in the weeks that followed, trying to recapture the clarity of that moment at the ferry terminal. Standing on the road near Sant’Angelo and looking out at the sea, for example, he would turn very slowly and deliberately away from the sunset, and he was invariably disappointed by the lack of finality in the movement.

For the first two weeks on Ischia he did very little. Once he had explained to the hotel owner that he planned on staying a few weeks or possibly longer and worked out an arrangement for the off-season—“You will help me watch the place, yes?” the hotel owner said — the question of what to do next hung overhead like a cartoon thundercloud. He was waiting for an event, and thoughts of it crowded out everything else. He had ideas about his travel book but was too distracted to write anything. The room was so small that he felt claustrophobic unless the doors to the balcony were open, but then the sea was too blue, the air was too bright, and before long he found himself down in one of the cafés on the piazza with a glass of coffee and the International Herald Tribune, reading and absorbing sunlight and doing the crossword puzzle and watching the boats. Anton had no books with him that he hadn’t already read, which was a problem, and there was an enormous amount of time to kill. He was startled by how much he missed his cat. He’d rescued Jim as a kitten two years earlier, and the cat had been an adoring orange one-eyed presence in Anton’s life ever since. He went for long walks up the stairs of the town, past houses and gardens terraced up the side of the hill, and spent hours sitting by the harbor at night. On clear nights Capri was a distant scattering of lights. He could see it from his room but preferred to be down by the harbor, where you could walk to a certain point at the edge of the piazza, turn away from Capri, and imagine that nothing stood between you and the north coast of Africa. He harbored vague notions of escaping to Tunisia.

“Are you having a nervous breakdown?” Gary asked, over a phone line crackly with enormous distance.

“No,” Anton said. He was leaning against a wall beside the pay phone in the Sant’Angelo piazza, looking out at the boats moving silently up and down in the harbor waves. Imagining the phone lines running under the Tyrrhenian Sea. The piazza was deserted. There were people inside a nearby café that was frequented mostly by fishermen, but the restaurants and shops were shuttered and dark. The wind off the water was cold.

“You’d tell me, right? Your best man and everything.”

“Of course,” Anton said. “The question’s not unreasonable.”

“What did you tell the office?”

“What did I tell the. .? Oh,” he said. “The office. They’ve probably figured it out by now.”

“You didn’t tell them you were abandoning your job?”

“Well, the job abandoned me first. And I didn’t know before I left that I wasn’t coming back again.”

“So you’re not coming back.”

“I don’t know.”

“You can see how a concerned friend might conclude there was something amiss,” said Gary. “Even if he hadn’t been your best man two weeks ago.”

“I could. Yes.”

“What’s your means of support over there?”

“I’m expecting some money soon. It isn’t expensive. I could last quite a while here.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Listen, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’ll call you later.” Anton hung up and walked to the edge of the piazza to look at the boats.

Anton’s job had faded out at the beginning of summer, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum, until he found himself alone in a dead-file storage room on the mezzanine level of the tower where he worked. The process began on the day his secretary disappeared, although it was far from clear at the time that things would snowball so quickly; this was near the beginning of June, and the third and final wedding attempt had just been scheduled for the end of August.

Anton was the head of a small research division at an international water systems consulting firm. Most of its projects to date had been in the desert cities, places like LasVegas and Dubai, where some impractical visionary had once touched a point on a map and said, Here. Never mind that the place touched on the map was uninhabited for a reason: “But there’s no water there,” some inevitable naysayer would protest, and this was where Water Incorporated eventually came in. There was also work done in other, less glamorous municipalities around the world, towns from Sweden to Montana with leaking aqueducts and purification issues. But the New York City contract was something unusual, and the details made Anton shiver when he read them: most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water that flow each day into the city of New York are supplied by two pipes, completed respectively in 1917 and 1935. The conduits have become so fragile over time that the supply can’t be interrupted in order to perform routine maintenance; the pipes are held intact only by the pressure of the water rushing through them, and the system leaks thirty-six million gallons of water per day. A third pipe has been under construction since 1970, but whether it will be completed before the older pipes fail is anyone’s guess. If the first two pipes were to fail before the third pipe is ready, then New York City would be rendered uninhabitable overnight, the supply of drinking water cut off. Water Incorporated’s contract called for studying the situation and coming up with recommendations on how to provide the residents of New York with a temporary supply of drinking water within twenty-four hours of a catastrophic pipe failure.

“All of you should be proud,” Anton’s director told the staff. “It’s your good work that brought us to this moment.” He was standing on a chair to address the troops. The New York City contract had been announced the day before and they were having an office party to celebrate. Anton was drinking wine with two of his staff: Dahlia, who he would have liked to drink with more often if he weren’t already engaged, and Elena, his secretary, who he’d been secretly in love with since he’d met her under criminal circumstances two and a half years earlier. “Now, as you can no doubt imagine,” the director said, “the systems we’ll be studying hold significant interest for terrorists.” He said terrorists in a slightly hushed tone, as if al-Qaeda might be holding a competing office party in an adjoining room. “We’re talking about the New York City water supply here. So in the coming weeks before the project commences,” he said, “we’ll be performing background checks on all staff who will be involved in the project. It’s a new regulatory compliance thing.”

Anton excused himself and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and stare at his own reflection in the mirror. A background check. He felt as pale as he looked. In the days after the office party life continued as normal, but three weeks later he arrived at work on a Monday to find that his secretary had vanished. An unfamiliar blond specimen was sitting in her cubicle.

“Where’s Elena?” he asked.

The impostor, who was chewing gum, looked at him distastefully. “Who are you?”

“I’m Anton Waker. This is my office. You’re sitting at my secretary’s desk.”

“They didn’t tell me anything about an Anton,” she said. “They said I was supporting Louise and Jasper.”

“It’s Gaspar, not Jasper. I’m afraid you were misinformed. Where’s Ellie?”

“Who’s Ellie?”

“Elena James? My secretary?”

“I’m your secretary.”

“You just told me you weren’t.”

“But then you said I was misinformed,” she said. He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He sat for a while at his desk going through yesterday’s research reports, spent a half-hour on the phone with Sophie who was crying because someone had cut in front of her in line at the bakery and she hated people and why was everyone always so horrible and mean, and when he ventured back out a few hours later the new secretary was gone. He heard her voice from somewhere down the hall and walked in the opposite direction to avoid her. Later in the afternoon he asked Dahlia if she’d made progress on the report she was supposed to be writing, and she told him that actually she’d been told to report to Gaspar in the Compliance and Regulatory Affairs department from now on.

“But you don’t do that kind of work,” he said.

She was embarrassed but had no explanation. It was just what she’d been told. His other seven direct reports told him the same thing, awkwardly, with their eyes downcast. No one really knew anything. It was embarrassing. The sympathy in their eyes made him want to punch someone. He couldn’t very well go across the hall and speak to Gaspar about it (“So, what’s this I hear about my entire staff reporting to you now?”), and repeated calls to his supervisor were not returned (“I’m sorry, Anton, he’s still unavailable. Would you like me to take another message?”), so he spent the day in his office with the door closed, waiting for an explanatory memo that never arrived. When he left at five his staff was in a meeting that he hadn’t been invited to. He heard Dahlia’s laugh and the strange new secretary’s voice through the conference-room door. Anton felt very formal all the way home.

Sophie was working; he heard the cello through her study door. He turned on the television and turned it off again, ordered Malaysian takeout and ate alone in silence, read the morning’s newspaper for a while and spent time with the cat, ate a few spoonfuls of ice cream, sat for two hours in the living room spell-bound by Sophie’s music. He talked with Sophie about the day’s news headlines when she emerged from the study around ten o’clock, brushed his teeth, kissed her, slept fitfully, came back to the office at a quarter to nine. He was met at the doorway of his office by a man from HR. Jackson was about Anton’s age and of similar build, but always slightly better dressed. He had a way of smiling a beat too quickly, and Anton had always found him somehow suspect.

“Anton,” he said. His voice was hesitant. “It’s good to see you.”

“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?”

“Of course not. No. Her reviews were excellent.”

“Yes, I know her reviews were excellent, Jackson, I wrote them. Was she transferred somewhere? A different department?”

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge—”

Anton hung up again and spent the remainder of the day reading and rereading the New York Times, drumming his fingers on his desk and staring into space, walking back and forth across the room with his hands in his pockets, writing his letter of resignation and then crumpling it up and throwing it across the room, wishing he were in Italy already.

The stop before Ischia was the city of Naples. Anton and Sophie came in by train after sunset and emerged from the station into a broad curved cobblestone street where no one spoke English but the taxi drivers all insisted that they knew where their hotel was, and the streets glimpsed near the train station were dark and strewn with trash, ancient apartment buildings towering unlit. The driver took them at high speed through an intricate network of freeways, and the overpasses curving overhead had a futuristic and sinister gleam. As they sped around corners the city was fleetingly visible, a gray glimmering chaos of buildings clinging to the hillside as far as the eye could see, and then they were plunging down the hairpin turns of a narrow street, passing between buildings that appeared to have sustained some unrepaired shell damage during the course of the Second World War. The driver performed a harrowing U-turn and screeched to a halt before the Hotel Britannique. They checked in and ascended in silence to the room, where Sophie took a shower and Anton stood on the tiny terrace six stories above the traffic. He was looking out over a scattering of palm trees that stood across the street, down over the narrow section of city that descended from their street to the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Bay of Naples calm below. There were boats in the moonlight. He heard the bathroom door open in the room behind him and he realized that he and Sophie had barely spoken in hours, and not at all since they’d arrived in the city. Anton turned and through the gauze curtains she was a ghost in the steam, drifting across the room toward her suitcase, pulling a dress on over her skin. He parted the curtains and she stood barefoot and pensive before him, hair dripping dark water spots on the sky-blue linen of her dress. She looked at him and for an instant he thought he saw panic in her eyes.

“I’m just tired,” she said quickly.

It took him a second to notice that her eyes were red. Three months ago, he thought, he would have noticed that instantly.

“That’s why you were crying?”

“I just get tired sometimes,” she said.

“I know you do. It’s okay.”

She smiled and twisted her hair up behind her head, secured it with a clip, seemed unaware of her beauty as a few strands escaped and fell over her neck.

“Sophie,” he said. She looked up. “Let’s go out and see the city.”

On the street outside the night was subtropical, palm trees lit up against a deep blue sky. The sidewalk was narrow, cars and scooters passing so close that he could have reached out and touched them. Sophie clung to his hand. The street began a curve that didn’t seem to end. They kept walking uphill, the road turning and turning ahead of them, until Anton thought they should have gone in a complete circle. There was no breeze from the sea below — it was as hot here as it had been in New York when they’d left — and his shirt was wet against his back. It was a long time before they came to a restaurant. He pushed open the wooden door, and Sophie moved past him into the room without speaking. The sign read Ristorante, but it was more of a lounge; a dim space filled with tables that terraced down toward a small stage where a girl in a sparkly dress was singing in English. Anton thought she was pretty and wished for a moment that he could share this observation with his wife.

“She’s singing a New Order song,” Sophie said suddenly. “Listen.”

“I have this album,” Anton said. “I used to listen to it all the time.”

“I know, but she’s singing it at half-speed. Like a nightclub song.”

“Well,” he said, “it is a nightclub.”

“Do you hear an accent?” Sophie asked. She didn’t seem to have heard him. “I think she’s British.”

“I think you’re right.”

“She’s terrible,” Sophie said after a moment.

A waiter had appeared. Anton got Sophie to order for him in her phrase-book Italian, and the song finished to surprisingly fervent applause. The singer’s dress was very tight and seemed to be made entirely of sequins, so that she emitted shards of light with every movement. It hurt his eyes to look directly at her. Her hair was dark and pinned up elaborately. She wasn’t terrible, he thought. Her voice was sweet and a bit too young for her body.

“Now she’s singing old Depeche Mode stuff,” Sophie said, in the tones of a girl watching a scandal unfold, and he forced himself to avert his attention from the broken-glass dress and listen to the song.

“I like it,” he said. “I think it’s interesting.” He watched Sophie’s face, but she didn’t respond or look away from the girl. They were taking a ferry tomorrow to the island of Ischia.

“What I wish you could tell me,” Gary said at the beginning of Anton’s fourth week alone on Ischia, “is what you’re actually doing there.”

“I can’t talk about it,” Anton said. He’d been calling Gary almost every day since Sophie had left the island. He was bored and there was no one to talk to there.

“Are you waiting for something?”

“You know what’s strange,” Anton said, “and this will sound awful — but what I really miss is my cat. I miss my cat more than I miss Sophie.”

“Your cat?”

“Jim. I know it probably sounds strange, in light of everything, but he’s the one I keep thinking about.”

“You’re right, that sounds strange. Why don’t you come back?”

“I can’t. It’s a long story.”

“Is there some reason you’re avoiding New York?”

“Well,” Anton said, “now that you mention it.”

“You kill someone?”

“Please. I can’t even set mousetraps.”

“Affair with your secretary? Unpaid debt?”

“Can you think of anything more banal,” Anton said, “than having an affair with your secretary?”

“You were sleeping with her. Jesus.”

“Things happen,” Anton said. “Look, I’m not proud of it.”

“Christ. Your secretary. How did it start?”

“The way I noticed her,” he said. “It wasn’t the way you’re supposed to notice someone you work with.”

Elena in the evenings: she stood by the window at six thirty P.M., watching as the evening reflection of their office tower appeared on the side of the Hyatt Hotel. The hotel was a reflective wall of square panels no more than fifty feet away, a mirror on which the bright windows of their offices began to appear at nightfall, before five in the winter. This was the time of day when, just by looking out the window, Anton could see the movement of workers on the floors above and below him. They walked across their offices from one lit square to another, wavering like ghosts in the reflection. The exterior of the hotel was composed entirely of glass and revealed nothing of its secret life except when a window was opened, which was rarely. Once Anton looked out and a man was leaning out the hotel window smoking a cigarette, and the sight gave him a shock — he was so used to thinking of the hotel as a mirror that he’d all but forgotten about the hotel rooms and suitcases and transient human souls on the other side of the glass.

Elena liked to pause by the floor-to-ceiling window in the reception area on her way back from the water cooler and stand there for a moment, sipping from a paper cup. He knew this because he watched her through the window of his office, their reflections separated by an interior wall but side-by-side on the hotel’s dark glass. Sometimes she waved at him and then he’d wave back, but more often she didn’t seem to notice him at all and then he’d watch her unobserved. At the end of the day it sometimes made him sad to look at her. She was tragic in the way he found half the office girls he’d ever met tragic, especially the ones who didn’t come from New York. She was one of millions of girls who’d come there from elsewhere and somehow gotten stuck in the upward trajectory, lost in the machine; making photocopies and fetching coffee for other people from nine to five or nine to six or nine to eight five days a week, exhausted at the end of a workday that far too closely resembled the workday before, and the workday before, and the workday before that; young and talented and still hopeful but losing ground; bright young things held up by their pinstripes on the Brooklyn-and Queens-bound trains every weekday evening, heading home to apartment shares in sketchy neighborhoods and dinners of instant noodles from corner bodegas.

The new secretary never stood by the window, and if she had Anton wouldn’t have waved to her. When ten days had passed without Elena, without email access or an explanation or word from his supervisors, he called Sophie to tell her that some genius had called a six o’clock staff meeting and he’d be home late. He closed himself in his office with a bottle of water and a sandwich. It seemed at least possible that if Elena were elsewhere in the building, her new office might be on the side of the building that faced the hotel, in which case he hoped he might see her reflection after sunset.

Sometime after seven his office window began to appear faintly on the surface of the glass tower outside, like a photograph rising out of liquid in a darkroom. An hour later the image was clearer, and by nine o’clock — damn these endless summer evenings — Anton could see almost every window of his building reflected on the side of the hotel. He tried to watch every reflected window at once, but the angle was such that he could really only make out people on the two floors above and below him. Any higher and he could see only the reflections of fluorescent lights. Any lower and there were only windowsills and angled blinds, a potted plant in an office four floors down. As time passed most of the lights blinked out. Two floors above him a man was working late. The man paced by his window once, twice, holding a cell phone to his ear and gesturing with his other hand. Anton stood close to the glass, looking from window to window, but none of the brightly lit squares held Elena.

He called the company’s main number at nine thirty. He listened to a recorded voice reading names, but Elena’s name wasn’t in the directory. It was strange to think of her living off the company grid, invisible and out of reach. Typing somewhere under the radar, making unrecorded calls.

On Monday morning Anton arrived at the office to find Jackson talking to the new secretary — Maria? Marla? Marion? — and the new secretary looked away with an unsuppressed smirk as soon as she saw him. Jackson smiled.

“Good morning, Anton.”

“Jackson. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Anton was moving past Jackson into his office, but he stopped just inside. The room was utterly empty, the desk and chair and sofa gone, his computer. Only the telephone remained, adrift on the carpet, plugged into the jack that had been behind his desk. He lifted his diploma down from the wall and held it to his chest. Jackson was watching him from the door.

“If you were planning on firing me,” Anton said, “why didn’t you do it on Friday?”

“Oh, we’re not firing you. Can you think of any reason why we should?” Jackson’s eyes flickered over the diploma. “I just came to show you to your new office, actually. We’re reorganizing a little.”

“Why can’t I stay in my old office?”

“You’re being transferred to a new division,” Jackson said. “You’re aware that we’ve taken over space on the twenty-third floor?”

“I remember hearing something about that.”

“Well, we’d like you to head the new team up there,” Jackson said. He inclined his head for Anton to follow him and they walked out together, through the open workspace where no one looked up as Anton passed, beyond the glass doors to the corridor by the elevators, where Jackson pushed the down button and stood avoiding Anton’s eyes until Anton gave up trying to make eye contact and stared down at the carpet. When the elevator arrived Jackson pushed a button marked M between the lobby and the first floor.

“The mezzanine level,” Jackson said when Anton looked at him.

“You said the new division was on the twenty-third floor.”

“I’m afraid the offices up there aren’t ready yet,” Jackson said. “Still under construction. It will probably be a month or two before we can occupy the space, so we’re putting you in a temporary office space for now.”

“On the mezzanine level? Is that even a floor?”

Jackson managed a pained half-smile but had nothing to say to this. The elevator was descending. The corridor on the mezza-nine level was unusually wide, and covered in linoleum instead of carpet. Bare lightbulbs hung at intervals overhead and pipes were exposed along the ceiling. Anton was struck by the white noise of this place, an indeterminate rushing and whirring, the vibrating of engines — were they close to the boiler room? Some sort of enormous central pump? — and the movement of air and water through the pipes and the ductwork all around him. He thought it was like being in the depths of a ship. The doors down here were older than any he’d seen elsewhere in the building, battered wood with scratched-up brass handles.

Anton heard a sound ahead, shuffling footsteps and a rhythmic squeaking; a woman came around the corner, pushing a plastic cart full of cleaning supplies. Her ankles were swollen as wide as her knees, and she stared flatly at him through thick round glasses as he passed. It occurred to him that he had seen her on his floor a hundred times and that neither of them had ever said hello. He said Hello this time, softly, experimentally, but she didn’t answer him and her expression didn’t change. They passed doors marked Security and Building Services and then a series of doors marked Dead File Storage, one through three. Jackson paused at the fourth one, Dead File Storage Four, fumbling with keys. Anton didn’t find the name of the room particularly comforting from a career ascension standpoint.

“It’s much larger than your old office,” Jackson said.

This was technically true. The room was enormous and nearly empty, and Anton’s footsteps echoed on the linoleum floor. His desk, chair, and sofa were marooned at the far end of the room, which was otherwise unfurnished and very bright. At the end of the room farthest from his desk, a line of decrepit filing cabinets stood unevenly against the wall. There were four large windows, none of which had blinds.

“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 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.

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?”

“Overheated,” he said. He kissed her lightly and held her against him for a moment in the cool of the apartment. The air conditioner in the window rattled and hummed and spat a sporadic mist of water through its gills. He had changed his shirt before he came home; the one he’d worn all day smelled like the perfume Elena had been wearing. Fortunately, there had been dry cleaning to pick up. He’d retrieved his shirts from the cleaners on Amsterdam Avenue, doubled back a block, changed into a clean shirt in the restroom at Starbucks and shoved the old shirt into the bathroom trash with all the used paper towels. “How about you?”

“Fine,” she said. “Long rehearsal, but I think the pieces are coming together. How was the staff meeting?”

“Tedious. Sorry I’m late.” It was surprisingly easy to lie to her; he didn’t feel particularly guilty, which alarmed him. “What shall we do for dinner?” He kissed her again, she moved back toward the sofa, the conversation turned to whether it was a good idea to go to a sushi place when the temperature was in the 90s. He had certain concerns about raw fish in hot climates. He listened to their conversation as if from some distance, and was interested to note that his voice was utterly calm.

The worst thing about having an affair was that he was naturally good at it.

The afternoons assumed a particular rhythm. He waited all day for the sight of her: Elena arrived without fail a few minutes after five o’clock, pale and crisp in her summer work clothes. She stepped into the room quickly, she locked the door behind her and then she came to him smiling, removing her clothes as she crossed the floor, kicking off her shoes when she was close to him. He didn’t think he could regularly stay later than six without Sophie becoming suspicious, so his affair transpired every day in that delirious last hour that began at five o’clock. At six he put his clothes on and kissed her goodbye and went home to his fiancée. When he arrived at the apartment Sophie was usually in her study, and the notes of her cello swelled out through the closed door. He sat on the sofa and the cat jumped up on his lap. He closed his eyes and sat unmoving, dreaming almost, listening to his fiancée’s music. Filled with admiration at the extremity of her talent, this woman who came from nothing and rose to the level of the New York Philharmonic. Thinking of Sophie and Elena at the same time until one bled into the other, stroking the cat’s white stomach when it flipped over on its back in purring ecstasy. When Sophie came out of the study he tried to lose himself in her beauty at the instant she opened the door, but Elena skirted the horizon of his thoughts. She had seeped into him, she permeated the tissues of his body, he couldn’t think of anything without also thinking of her.

Sophie’s wedding dress hung in the bedroom closet. It was a white, enormous thing, voluminous under plastic, and he saw it every morning while he was getting dressed for work. He stared at it while he put on his tie. It hung still and heavy, a presence, a ghost.

3

Life on earth, as far as anyone can tell, arose only once. A little before Christmas, toward the end of Elena’s first and last semester at Columbia, a professor was explaining about the search for the holy grail of astrobiology: LUCA, he wrote on the board, and stood back for a moment to look at the letters. He leaned in again, punched a staccato period after every letter and then underlined the whole thing. He let the chalk fall to the floor and then turned to the class. A girl in the front row raised her hand.

“The Last Universal Common Ancestor?”

“The Last Universal Common Ancestor,” he said.

The Last Universal Common Ancestor: one cell that appeared four or five billion years ago, from which all life on earth is descended. The ancestor we have in common with violets, with blue whales, with cats and with ferns. The cell from which we and the starfish and the pterodactyls and the daffodils originated, DNA mutating and spinning out in all directions over the passage of millennia and becoming elm trees, goldfish, humans, cacti and dragonflies, sparrows and panthers, cockroaches, turtles and orchids and dogs. We evolved from the same cell that spawned the daisy, and Elena had always been soothed by this thought. Two days before the first time she went to see Anton on the mezzanine level, she was waiting in the lobby of an office suite on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7. She was staring into space thinking of daisies and starfish and birds when she heard her name.

“Elena,” said the investigator, “I’m Alexandra Broden.” She was a calm woman in a gray suit, with extremely blue eyes and short dark hair. Her office had a temporary, rented-by-the-hour look about it, generic photographs of sunsets and black-and-white forests on the walls and two stiff-looking little armchairs by the window, and there was nothing on the desk but a telephone and a banker’s lamp. Broden retrieved a pad of paper and a pen from a desk drawer, sat down in one armchair and gestured Elena into the other. It was no more comfortable than it looked. “Thank you for coming in to see me this afternoon.”

“You’re welcome,” Elena said. It wasn’t at all clear that she’d had any choice in the matter, but she decided not to bring this up. She sat on the edge of the seat, fiddling with the pearl ring she wore on her right hand. The investigator leaned back in her chair and watched her. “I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. There’s no sign on the door.”

“We’re just moving into the space.”

Elena nodded and looked at her ring. Eventually Broden flipped the first page of the legal pad over — it was already filled with notes — and said, “You were Anton Waker’s assistant?”

“I was, yes. For two years or so.”

“Until when?”

“Until just recently. I guess it’s been a couple of weeks.”

“You liked working for him?”

“I did.” Elena had the impression that Broden was writing more words than she was actually saying, but it was impossible to verify this. The notepad was tilted away from her.

“Why?”

“He was nice to me. Most people you work for in your life aren’t.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Broden said, “but I’d like to just get a little more background on you before we move on to Anton. I believe you did a semester at Columbia?”

“I was an astrobiology major.”

“Why did you drop out?”

“It was too much,” Elena said. “I’d never left the Canadian arctic before, and then all of a sudden I was in New York on a full scholarship, and it was just, I guess it was too much all at once. I’m sorry, it’s hard to explain. I was eighteen and I was alone in the city. I did badly in my first semester, so I thought I’d take a semester off.”

“But you never went back, did you?”

“No. I didn’t go back.”

“I see. We’ll just go through this quickly. So you left Columbia five years ago now? Six? And you began working in a restaurant, if memory serves. Was this immediately after you left school?”

“Yes,” Elena said.

“Was the restaurant your first job?”

“I was a waitress in my hometown back in high school. Then I went to Columbia, then I worked in a restaurant and posed for a photographer, and then I came here. That’s my entire employment history.”

Broden turned the page and continued to write. “And are you on a work visa, or do you have a green card?”

“My father’s an American,” Elena said. “I have dual citizenship.”

“How fortunate for you. Where was your father born?”

“Wyoming.”

“Nice state.” Broden kept writing. “Now, I know HR’s likely gone over this with you, but if you’ll just bear with me, I do need to ask you a few questions about Anton.”

“Do you work with them?”

“With. .?”

“With HR,” Elena said.

“I’m sorry, I must not have been very clear when we spoke on the phone. I’m a corporate investigator. I work in conjunction with the HR departments of various companies, but I’m a third-party consultant.” Broden looked up briefly, then returned her attention to the pad of paper. “Did Anton ever mention anything to you about his background?”

“You know, a guy from HR asked me that exact same question. Three times.”

“And what was your response?”

“That the extent of my knowledge of his background was the Harvard diploma on his wall, and no, he never talked about it.”

“He never spoke about his family at all? His cousin?”

“No, nothing about that. He never mentioned a cousin.”

“I see. And you never met his family, I assume.”

“I met his fiancée once at a company Christmas party. Does that count?”

“When did you first meet him?”

“Anton? A little over two years ago. At my job interview.”

“You’re certain that was the first time you ever met him,” said the investigator. “At your job interview.”

“Yes,” Elena said.

When Elena returned to her desk an hour and a half later a stack of interoffice envelopes had accumulated, but she didn’t open them. She stared at the cubicle wall for a while, and when she looked at her watch it was four fifteen.

“Slipping out early?” Graciela asked. She was a company messenger, one of two; she stood by the elevator with an armload of envelopes.

“Coffee break,” Elena said dully.

“You look pale. Maybe take the day off tomorrow. Call in sick.”

“Maybe.” The elevator arrived. Graciela pressed the lobby button. Elena pushed the button for the third floor.

“What’re you doing on the third floor?”

“Just wanted to say hello to someone who works down there,” Elena said. When the door opened she said goodbye and walked down the corridor quickly, turned a corner, looked both ways and slipped through an exit door. In the cold gray light of Stairway B, a man was sitting on the cement steps with his eyes closed.

“Excuse me,” Elena said.

He nodded wanly as she stepped around him, and when she looked back he had closed his eyes again. She heard the sounds of the mezzanine as she pushed open the door: the rush of water through exposed pipes overhead, the rattling of vents, the movement of air — an industrial hum with no beginning or end, constant as the ocean. The corridor was wide and empty with a drifting population of dust bunnies, dimly lit. She passed a number of doors before the file storage rooms began: Dead File Storage One, Dead File Storage Two, Dead File Storage Three. She stood for a moment in front of the closed door to Dead File Storage Four and then backed silently away and walked back toward the stairwell. The office worker was still sitting on the stairs. He nodded again but didn’t speak as she stepped around him. On the elevator between the third and twenty-second floors she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall.

“Took another unscheduled break?” her coworker asked. Nora occupied the desk closest to the elevators, where she took apparent pleasure in observing and commenting on the comings and goings of the department. Elena ignored her and went to her cubicle. The number on Broden’s card was apparently a cell phone. There was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings.

“I’m sorry,” she said when Broden answered. “I know your investigation is important, but I don’t think I can do this.”

“Why’s that?” Broden’s voice was mild.

“I know it’s a serious thing to lie about your credentials on your résumé, I know it’s fraud and I don’t agree with it, it’s not that I approve, it’s just that he was my boss for two and a half years and I almost consider him a friend, I can’t just spy on him and try to get him to say something and report back to you, I just—”

“Tell you what,” Broden said, “why don’t you come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it. I think it might help if I explained the situation more fully.”

When Elena had hung up the phone she stared at the document she was supposed to be proofreading, but her eyes kept skipping over the same paragraph over and over again. She closed her eyes, rested her elbows on her desk, and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. She wanted it to appear to any casual observer that she merely had a headache or was perhaps resting her eyes for a moment. The problem was more serious: she had forgotten how to read.

This happened almost daily and she was used to it — she understood it to be a side effect of being unable to stand her job — but lately it had been happening earlier and earlier in the day. The mornings went quickly but the afternoons were deadly. Time slowed and expanded. She wanted to run. By four P.M. she sometimes had to correct the same paper three times. She reread words over and over again, she broke them down into individual syllables, she stared, but if you stare at any word for long enough it loses all meaning and goes abstract. She had had this job for two or three weeks now, ever since she’d been exiled without explanation from Anton Waker’s research department, and it was becoming gradually less tenable each day.

“Elena?” Nora had a strong clear voice, like a singer’s. “Could you come here for a moment?”

When Elena went to her she had a document Elena had labored over that morning, lying on her desk like a piece of evidence. Nora weighed well over three hundred pounds and had beautiful long dark hair, but what was more notable about her was that she loved mistakes. Here in this dead-end department in the still brackish backwaters of the company, her power and her happiness lay in the discovery of errors. “Elena,” very patiently, as if addressing a child, “I’m not sure why you didn’t correct the spelling of this word. Were you under the impression that there’s a hyphen in ‘today’?”

“Oh. The writer’s British, he does that sometimes. Give it back to me, I’ll mark it.”

“Oh, I mark all the errors that I find.” The pleasure in Nora’s voice was unmistakable. Her eyes were alight; she was in her element. “I’ve told you that many times.”

“Okay, well, thanks for pointing it out. I’m going back to work.”

But Nora disliked having the game cut short. “If you’d ever like to borrow my dictionary, Elena,” she said sweetly, “you’re welcome to look up any thing you need.”

“I don’t need your dictionary. Thanks.”

“Well, but the thing is, Elena, you thought there was a hyphen in ‘today.’” All wide-eyed innocence now, the malice vanished like a passing cloud.

“No, I didn’t.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you saw it,” her voice incredulous now, “but decided not to correct it, even though you knew it was wrong?”

“Look, obviously I just missed it,” Elena said. “Are we done?”

“Elena,” spoken very seriously and reproachfully, like a CEO on the verge of firing a disobedient minion, although as far as Elena was aware Nora’s supervisory role was so nominal that she didn’t have the ability to fire anyone, “I know you haven’t been in your position for very long, but one thing that might not have been made clear to you is that it is our responsibility to correct every error that is made. That includes the errors that we don’t think are important enough to correct.”

“That’s cute, Nora. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to work.”

“Elena, just because I pointed out your mistake doesn’t mean that you have to get all pissy with me. I find it annoying.”

Elena went back to her cubicle, and some time passed in which she did no work whatsoever.

“What are you doing? Are you okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Elena said. A coworker was standing at the cubicle entrance. She realized she had been sitting for some time with her head in her hands. “Just a headache.”

“It’s five o’clock,” Mark said. “You could probably leave if you wanted to.”

“Right,” she said. “Thanks.” She was unsure what she was thanking him for, and Mark didn’t seem to know either. He stared at her for a moment through glasses so thick that his eyes were magnified, shook his head and turned away. It was the most he’d ever said to her. She picked up her handbag and left her desk in disarray. She descended to the marble lobby and down the steps that connected the tower to Grand Central Station, walked across the main concourse with its ceiling of stars. She stood packed in among strangers on a series of subway trains until one of them deposited her on a hot street in Brooklyn, the air still bright but the shadows slanting now, children drawing pictures of people with enormous free-form heads and stick arms on the warm sidewalk and men playing dominoes at a folding card table, speaking to each other in Spanish and ignoring her as she passed. Three keys were required to get into her apartment building. A metal grid door slammed behind her like a cage and there was a regular apartment-building door just behind it, then a little foyer with dusty archaeological layers of takeout menus and unclaimed mail rising up under the mailboxes, then another door after that. At the top of the stairs a fourth key was required to open the door to the apartment, where the first thing she saw when she came in was the tank of goldfish that Caleb kept on a table in the hallway, the five fish bright and perfect, the tank impeccably maintained.

“You know,” her mother said, “I wish your sister had your kind of ambition.”

“I don’t know that it’s ambition, exactly.” Elena was filling a kettle with water, the phone held between her shoulder and her ear. She hadn’t spoken with her mother in two or three months, and she was surprised by how much she’d missed her voice. “I’m not sure what it is. It’s more like a gene for escape. You’re either born with it or—” She placed the kettle on the stove and stood watching the blue gas flame as she listened. “No,” she said after a moment, “I think ambition makes you accomplish things, see things through. All I’ve done is leave and quit.”

“That isn’t a minor accomplishment,” her mother said. “The leaving part, I mean. All I’m saying is, when I look at your sister. .”

“I don’t know, it’s hard to think in terms of having accomplished anything at this point.” Elena listened for a few minutes, looking at her reflection in the darkened window. In the Northwest Territories it was two hours earlier, five o’clock in the afternoon, and her hometown was so far north that at this time of year the sun wouldn’t set at all. She imagined her mother sitting by the window in the blazing daylight, flecks of dust in the sunbeams and the dog sprawled out on the carpet, until the whistle of the kettle snapped her back to New York. Elena turned off the flame and poured hot water into an open container of instant noodles on the countertop. Her mother was still talking. “You don’t understand what my job’s like,” Elena said when her mother stopped to take a breath. “It isn’t really bearable. I was supposed to be a scientist, and now I’m just here working. My only accomplishment is that I left.”

“You’ve survived in that city,” her mother said, “for how long now? Eight years?”

“Eight years. Don’t say ‘that city’ like that. You make it sound like Baghdad. Is Jade home?”

“Your sister’s not feeling so well, actually.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“No,” Elena’s mother said mildly, “she doesn’t. She never tells me why not. Don’t take it personally, love, she’s been moody lately. How’s Caleb?” Elena’s mother had never laid eyes on either Caleb or New York City; both entities were the subject of frequent speculation and perpetual concern.

“Caleb’s fine. He’s studying.”

This provoked a brief silence, because the question of why Elena wasn’t studying too had never been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. Elena’s mother cleared her throat.

“Well,” she said, “take care, now.”

“Goodnight.”

The line went dead. When Elena’s mother ran out of things to say she signed off without preamble. There had been a time when Elena had been annoyed by this, but tonight she found herself admiring the decisiveness of the ending.

Outside the sky was growing dark. There was thunder, and when the rain began Elena opened the window as wide as it would go. The sounds of the storm filled the kitchen. She stopped thinking about Broden for a moment and picked up the newspaper, and she was eating noodles and reading the news when Caleb came in. She heard him stop by the goldfish tank and murmur something approving to the fish. His glasses fogged quickly in the warmth of the kitchen; he took them off and blinked at her from the doorway, his hair dark with rain.

“You had no umbrella?”

“It broke,” he said. He was smiling in a far-off distracted way that meant the research was going well. She raised her face to him when he approached her, but he kissed her forehead instead of her lips.

“Have you eaten?”

“I had a sandwich up at Columbia,” he said. “Instant noodles again?”

She nodded.

“How was work today?” He was taking off his rain-soaked shirt and hanging it over a kitchen chair. His naked back had an unearthly pallor.

“Oh,” Elena said, “you know, an average workday. .” and realized that of course he didn’t know. Caleb didn’t hold a regular job, and to the best of her knowledge never had. “Well,” she said. He was staring at her, half-smiling, hoping for a punch line. “I guess you wouldn’t know, come to think of it.” She laughed quickly to make this last comment as joke-like and unresentful as possible. Caleb smiled back and retrieved a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. “Are you cold from the rain? I was just going to take a hot shower.”

“Oh?” He was pouring himself a glass of juice.

“You’re welcome to join me.”

“Oh,” he said again. He was quiet for a moment, looking into his glass. “No, you go ahead. I was actually going to do a little more work before bed.” He kissed her quickly on the lips, not insincerely, and left her sitting alone in the kitchen.

When Caleb left the room she threw the rest of the noodles away and drank a glass of water standing by the sink. The rain had stopped and the heat was again subtropical, moths beating soft wings against the window screen. Elena took the telephone into the bedroom, opened the top right-hand drawer, and extracted a scrap of paper from inside a blue sock. The paper had been folded years ago and was soft along the crease lines. On the piece of paper she’d written a phone number and also the address of a café on East 1st Street. She dialed the number quickly, refolded the paper and put it back in the sock and put the sock back in the drawer in the interlude before a woman’s voice answered.

“Aria,” she said, “I’m not sure if you’ll remember me. It’s Elena James.”

“Elena James,” Aria Waker repeated. She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You’re the Canadian.”

“Yes. Listen, I just—”

“Before you say anything,” Aria said, “I’m on a cell phone, and I don’t discuss business on cell phones anymore. Give me a land-line number where I can call you back.”

Elena gave her the number and the line went dead. The phone rang twenty minutes later.

“Yes,” Aria said, when Elena answered. The sound quality was tinny, and there was background noise. Elena thought she might be calling from a pay phone in a bar.

“There’s someone interviewing me,” Elena said. “Some kind of consultant, a freelance corporate investigator — at least, she says she’s a corporate investigator, but I don’t. . listen, I don’t know who she is, and she’s asking me questions about your cousin. About his background.”

“What kind of questions?”

“His family. Where he went to school. I don’t know anything about the school thing, it’s none of my business, but she’s asking questions about me too. My employment history.”

“You knew there were no guarantees,” Aria said, but her voice was gentle.

“Oh, it isn’t that. That’s not why I’m calling. I don’t. . Listen, I appreciate what you and Anton did for me, and I just thought you should know. She also asked me where I met him. Of course I told her I met Anton at my job interview, but she was insistent, she repeated the question twice. Am I being clear? She’s asking me about my employment history, she’s asking me about my immigration status, and she asked me when I met Anton.”

The line was quiet for a moment.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to Anton about this,” Aria said. “I’d like to bring it up with him directly.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you for calling me,” said Aria. She hung up the phone.

In the morning Elena woke before the alarm clock rang and lay for a while staring at the ceiling. Caleb was asleep beside her with his back turned. She couldn’t remember him coming to bed and realized she’d fallen asleep alone again. It was too hot in the room; the ceiling fan stirred warm air over the bed. She showered and dressed quickly, all in black (there was a feeling of dread), bought the daily croissants and coffee at the bakery by the Montrose Avenue L train station, and sat staring at her reflection in the window of the train. Somewhere under the East River she imagined the weight of the water over the tunnel, boats moving on the surface far overhead, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t open them until she heard the announcement for Union Square, where she switched to a train that took her north to Grand Central. She walked quickly across the main concourse, feeling lost in the crowd, and another day passed like a tedious dream.

At five o’clock Elena took the subway downtown to the World Trade Center area. She was early for her appointment; she stood looking down at the construction site for a few minutes before she crossed the street to the newly rebuilt Tower 7 and took the elevator up to the twelfth floor.

In the cool still air of the waiting room she turned to the magazines, and found a battered copy of the New York Review of Books in the pile. There was an article about trees, and she almost forgot about Broden for a moment. The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree. It grows somewhere in the western United States. She read this while she was waiting for Broden to appear, but even as Broden was opening the door to her office the details were growing hazy, and by the time she sat down on the same stiff chair she couldn’t remember where exactly the tree was — Utah? California? — and the fear was awful. Broden was sitting down across from her, flipping through notes. But location aside, Utah or California, the oldest known living thing on earth has been alive for four thousand six hundred years. Elena had paused when she read this in the waiting room, stared out at nothing for a moment and thought of that great expanse of centuries stretching halfway back to the end of the last ice age.

“Elena,” Broden said, “how’s your day going?”

“Badly,” said Elena. Nora had called her over to her desk four times and finally made her cry, and the thought of returning to the office the next morning made her want to go down to the street and hail a taxi and ask to be taken anywhere. To any other destination, any other life.

“Badly? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you for coming to see me again. Is it still hot out there?”

“Extremely,” Elena said.

The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree, but the tragedy of the story is that there was one even older. A geology student in Utah, determined to find an even more impressive specimen, went up into the mountains and staked out the biggest tree he could find. He had borrowed a corer, a tool used to take a pencil-sized core sample at the base of the trunk. He began drilling, but the corer snapped, and a park ranger gave him permission to cut down the tree to retrieve it.

When the rings were counted, the tree turned out to be four thousand nine hundred years old. In order to retrieve a broken measuring tool, a student had killed the oldest living thing on earth. Elena’s mind wandered. Four thousand nine hundred years ago, glass had just been invented in western Asia. The first cup of tea was being brewed in China. A band of wandering tribesmen at the eastern end of the Mediterranean was developing the first monotheistic religion, although some time passed before they came to be known as the Jews. An unknown Sumerian writer had just composed Gilgamesh. A pine cone fell to the ground and produced a minute sapling in the mountains, and you can count the rings yourself — four thousand nine hundred years after the pine cone fell, a thin dusty slice of the trunk hangs in a bar in Nevada.

“So,” Broden said, “let’s get down to business.”

Elena looked up, startled out of her thoughts. She couldn’t think of anything to say and so smiled weakly and said nothing. The office had changed slightly. A child’s drawing of a ballerina was framed on the wall behind the desk, and there was a pot of geraniums on the windowsill behind Broden’s chair with a little plastic flag reading “Happy Birthday!!” sticking out of the dirt.

“Was it your birthday?” she asked.

“It was. Listen, I didn’t mean to stress you out. I just wanted you to go down to the mezzanine level, say hello to Anton, engage him in conversation, ask what he’s doing down there. I was hoping he would volunteer something. An admission of guilt would make things much easier for us.”

“I’m sorry,” Elena said. “It isn’t that I don’t think it’s important, your investigation, it’s just that I’d feel like I was betraying him, spying on him like that, and we worked together for years, it just doesn’t seem. .”

“Doesn’t seem right?”

“To be honest, it doesn’t.”

Broden nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” she said. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a question of motivation. What if there were more at stake than just a fraudulent résumé?”

“Are you saying that he’s committed a crime?”

Broden looked at her for a moment, and then smiled. Elena shivered.

“Cold?”

“A little. The air conditioning in this building. .”

“It is a little cool in here,” Broden said. “I’d just like to go through your background one more time. Just to clarify a few points, and I believe that will bring us naturally back to the question at hand. After you graduated high school, you moved to the United States to go to college.”

“Exactly. Yes.”

“You were eighteen?”

“Yes.”

“You had a scholarship to Columbia?”

“And an offer of one at MIT. But I wanted to live in New York.”

“Quite an accomplishment,” Broden said. “Did you work while you were in school?”

“No. I worked after I left school,” Elena said.

“Tell me about that time,” said Broden. “After you left school.”

“Well, there’s not much to tell. I was washing dishes at a restaurant. Then I was a photographer’s model, and then I came here.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s go back a step. The time when you were posing for the photographer. What made you start doing that?”

“The posing? I don’t know, it’s hard to find a decent job without a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t make a lot of money at the restaurant. It was just extra income.”

“I understand,” Broden said. “It was something you could do without being legal in the United States.”

“Oh no, I, wait — I beg your pardon?”

“Did you mishear?”

“No, but perhaps you misunderstood. My father was born in Wyoming. I was born and raised in Canada, but I’m an American citizen.” Elena was flailing. The waters were rising and there was nowhere to go.

Broden sighed, and set the pad of paper down on the desk. “Do you ever get headaches?” She was examining her fingernails, which were cut very close and unpolished.

“I—”

“I get them in the evenings sometimes. After work, when I come home at night. My husband thinks it’s stress, but I think it’s deception.”

“I don’t—”

“And listen, let’s be frank for a moment, it’s not that the job itself isn’t stressful.” Broden stood up from the chair and moved behind it to the window, where she gazed out at other towers and the sky. “Believe me, it is. You’ve no idea what’s at stake here. But it isn’t the stress that wears at me, it’s the deception. This endless, juvenile, pathetic deception, when the facts of your life were so easily verified, when a copy of your father’s birth certificate was obtained so easily from Canada. And believe me, it’s not just you, everyone thinks they’ve somehow moved through life without leaving any kind of a paper trail. It’s frankly baffling to me.” She clasped her hands behind her back and craned her neck to look up at the bright blue sky between towers. “Is there any part of a person’s life that isn’t recorded? The major events require certificates: births, marriages, and deaths are marked and counted, and the rest of it can be filled in with a little research. Your country of residence and citizenship is a matter of public record, as is your education, the identities of your parents, and their countries of citizenship and birth. So tell me, Elena, has this American father of yours ever even set foot in the United States?”

“No, listen, there’s been some kind of a. . I’m not. . I’m an American, my father’s an American, we—”

“And yet both your parents were born in Toronto, and you attended Columbia University on an international student visa. Which would have become null and void, of course, once you dropped out of school.” Broden spoke without malice. She was stating a fact. “Everyone leaves a paper trail, Elena, even illegal aliens who can’t afford immigration attorneys. Do you think you’re invisible?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Elena was having trouble breathing.

“It isn’t easy being illegal here. I do understand that. It isn’t exactly easy immigrating here legally, either, especially if you’re a shiftless college dropout from some frozen little town north of the Arctic Circle. It isn’t quite ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ anymore, is it?” Standing in the late-afternoon sunlight with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the sky above Lower Manhattan, Broden looked perfectly serene. “It’s a little more like ‘Give us your wealthy, your well-connected, your overeducated and your highly skilled.’ I don’t like what you did, but I understand your difficulty.” She was quiet for a moment. “But at any rate,” she said, “we have something in common.”

“What’s that?” Elena’s voice was a whisper.

“We’ve both misrepresented ourselves.” Broden reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and held up a yellow-and-blue badge in Elena’s direction without looking at her. U.S. Department of State, Special Agent. “I’m not really a freelance corporate investigator, and you’re not really legal to work in this country.”

Elena’s hands were shaking. She clenched them together in her lap until her knuckles went white and when she tried to remember the conversation a few hours later this was the point where her memory faltered. What did she say then? Difficult to recall: something stammering and unconvincing along the lines of “There’s been a mistake” or “I think you’re mistaken,” something utterly inadequate to the catastrophe at hand.

“I work with the Diplomatic Security Service. We’re an enforcement arm of the State Department, and my specialty is passport fraud.” Broden turned away from the window and stood watching her. “It isn’t that I’m all that interested in you, to be perfectly frank. What I’m interested in,” Broden said, “professionally speaking, are your dealings with the syndicate from which you acquired your Social Security number and that gorgeous fake passport of yours. It’s the syndicate I’m interested in prosecuting, Elena, not you. So answer me honestly when I speak to you, cooperate fully in our efforts, and I’ll put you on track for a green card. You won’t be deported. Otherwise I’m afraid all bets are off in that department.” Broden was silent for a moment, watching her. Elena felt anchorless, as if she might float upward toward the ceiling. She was painfully aware of her heartbeat. “A response might be appropriate at this point,” Broden said. “Do you understand your choice?”

“It’s just,” one last attempt at deflection, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

Broden sighed and glanced briefly at the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention.

“I’m referring to the time,” she said, very patiently, “when you purchased a Social Security number and a fake passport from Anton Waker at a café on East 1st Street.”

Elena remembered this part of the interview very clearly, and the part immediately afterward when they talked about recording devices, but later she couldn’t remember how she got home after the interview was done. She closed her eyes in her cubicle a day later and pressed her fingertips to her forehead, wishing herself almost anywhere else. There were tears on her face. Soon she would go down to the mezzanine level, where at that moment Anton was contemplating throwing his stapler through the window. In a moment she’d step through the door of Dead File Storage Four with a recorder in her handbag, and smile, and ask him questions about his life. It was Friday, and it was nearly five o’clock.

4

Aria at twelve: she walked fast under the bridge with her hands in her pockets, a sheen of black hair falling to her waist, dressed in one of her father’s shirts with the sleeves rolled up, wearing pants a few sizes too big that had been left behind by a cousin on the other side, the Ecuadoran side that used to come up for long contentious visits before her mother was deported, and Anton’s mother murmured in his ear as Aria approached, “Be nice to your cousin, she’s having a rough time of it.” But the departure of Aria’s mother hadn’t changed her. Except for her clothes, except for her general air of neglect and the way she winced at even a passing reference to her mother, she retained an inner core unchanged from the one Anton had always known. She was infinitely confident. She was an expert thief. She shoplifted candy, bags of chips, fashion magazines. She wasn’t kind and she tolerated nothing, but she was capable of friendliness. She exuded courage and malice in equal parts.

Anton was eleven. Aria was only six months older, but there were times when the space between them felt like years. He sat with his mother on the loading dock with a mug of coffee in his hands, watching his cousin approaching from the other side of the bridge.

“Ari,” his mother said, in greeting.

“Hi.” Aria ascended the loading-dock stairs, reached into her pocket and gave Anton a chocolate bar. He took it, knew it was stolen and was swept through with resentful admiration. He knew she didn’t give him chocolate bars because she liked him; she gave him chocolate bars to remind him that he was too chicken to steal his own.

“Did you walk here alone?” Anton’s mother asked.

Of course she had walked there alone. She lived a mile away, in a deeper part of Brooklyn that was less pleasant, farther from Manhattan, where the apartments were cheaper but had bars on every window and sometimes there were gunshots at night. Anton ate his chocolate bar and watched her surreptitiously in glances.

“Sí,” she said casually, instantly widening the distance between them. Her Spanish was a sword that kept Anton at bay. When they were little he used to tag along behind her and beg for a way in, Teach me a word, teach me a word, but all he remembered at eleven was sí and the words for butterfly and dreamer (mariposa, soñador) and he wasn’t even completely sure about the word for dreamer anymore; he had moments when he thought it might actually be something else.

“Where’s your dad?” Anton’s mother asked.

Aria shrugged and sat down on the edge of the loading dock with them.

“Are you hungry, love? You want some breakfast?”

“Can I have some coffee?”

“Of course.” His mother set her half-empty mug down beside Anton and stood up in one easy motion, disappeared into the shadows of the store. Alone with Aria, he stared out at the river in silence until his mother returned with a cup of coffee. Sunday mornings were the only time when his mother was all his, and he was frankly annoyed by the intrusion.

They were quiet for a few minutes, drinking coffee in the May sunlight, and then Aria asked, “Can I have a job?”

“You want to work here at the store?” His mother sounded startled. She expended an enormous amount of energy trying to get Anton to work in the store, and succeeded only to the extent that he grudgingly pushed a damp cloth around for an hour after school and complained almost continuously while he was doing it.

Aria nodded.

“What about school?”

“After school. I meant part-time.”

“Why do you want to work here?”

“I just want to work.”

“Why do you want to work, though, sweetie? You’re young.”

“Independence,” she said. “It’s what I want.”

The torment of the afternoons. Aria arrived around four, a half-hour after Anton got home from school, and swept the store. The store was more properly a warehouse, a vast dim space filled with fantastical objects: fountains, clocks, antique furniture, ancient oak doors, ornate mirrors and enormous picture frames, old claw-foot bathtubs restored to pristine cleanliness, delicate wooden birdcages from the century before last, wardrobes, an old iron spiral staircase that ended in thin air. Sweeping the store was an immensely tricky operation that could easily take upward of an hour. He watched her while she swept, while she polished the furniture, and he was seized up by a wild inarticulate longing to touch her hair.

When Aria was done sweeping the floor and polishing a few pieces of furniture Anton’s mother always gave her twenty dollars, which was overly generous but no one had the heart to say anything about it (it’s Aria, for God’s sake, she has no mother), and in the beginning Aria always left after that, but then she started bringing her homework and staying later and later until it was impossible not to invite her to stay for dinner, and then Anton’s father always walked her home in the dark. Or sometimes she stayed over, on a foam mattress on the living room floor, until gradually she established an outpost in the room next to Anton’s that had previously been used for storage, and then days and even weeks passed when she didn’t go home at all. His mother fussed over her, insisted that she eat breakfast, bought her clothes that fit properly. He heard his parents talking late at night, their voices a soft murmur on the other side of the thin adjoining wall to the kitchen. He gathered that Aria’s father didn’t go home very often either. Aria’s father spent all his money on long phone calls to Ecuador. Words heard through the wall: He’s come undone. Anton didn’t know exactly what this meant, but he could imagine it as he lay still in the darkness of his bedroom. He had a nightmare about a man walking down the street toward him from a great distance away; as he drew near Anton saw that he wasn’t a man at all, just an empty suit walking by itself, and then the suit started unraveling around the edges until it fell down on the pavement in a pile of shredded fabric and thread at his feet, and Anton woke up gasping and tangled up in the sheets.

A memory of his aunt: Aria’s mother, Sylvia of the silver earrings and the long silk skirts. A family dinner, Thanksgiving perhaps, less than a year before her deportation. She was drinking too much and getting louder, lapsing in and out of Spanish. Aria’s father had his arm around her; every now and again he whispered urgently in her ear but she ignored him. Anton was ten and unsure of what to do with himself. He tried to meet Aria’s eye across the table in sympathy, but Aria was closed in on herself and mortified well beyond the point of eye contact. Sylvia slammed her glass down on the table, making a point; the sound made Anton jump. The other adults were trying to accommodate her, giving her space in their conversation, not pointing out how much wine she was consuming. She turned to Anton at a moment when everyone else was talking, and he was overcome by her. The wine on her breath, her perfume, dark hair. She was beautiful.

“You think I’m a drunk,” she said confidentially.

Anton stammered something, at a loss.

“Well, I’m not.” She was already turning away from him, already lifting a glass to her lips. “I only drink in this desolate country.”

Anton’s parents owned the store long before they had a child. Their apartment was in the back, and Anton’s life transpired in the vastness of the store’s interior. Playing under antique tables, standing on chairs to talk to marble statues who wouldn’t meet his gaze, hiding behind sofas with books when he was supposed to be sweeping or polishing. But at eleven his life was changing so rapidly that he sometimes closed his eyes in the privacy of his bedroom and gripped his desk with both hands to steady himself. That was the spring when his aunt Sylvia was deported; pulled over for drunk driving in Queens on a Monday afternoon, blinking in the Ecuadoran sunlight on Tuesday morning of the following week. That was the summer when Aria arrived, circling the outskirts of Anton’s small family and then slipping in and half-stealing his parents. He would have hated her if he hadn’t already been half in awe, half in love. This was the year when certain aspects of his family’s business were gradually becoming clear to him, and it felt like waking slowly from a dream.

There were the shipments, for instance, that arrived at three in the morning in unmarked vans. The vans pulled up to the loading dock in front of the warehouse and yielded their treasures: old furniture, entire marble fireplaces torn from walls, elaborate clocks. There was a crew that went out at one A.M. with wire cutters and crowbars and returned before dawn with ornate wooden railings from abandoned houses, 1920s-era school drinking fountains pried from the walls of condemned yeshivas, entire leaded-glass windows from boarded-up churches. Statues, chandeliers, mosaics pried meticulously from walls. And he’d been aware of all this forever, there’d never been a time when he hadn’t half-woken in the darkness to the sound of men moving heavy objects on the other side of the thin wall separating the apartment from the store, but at eleven he found himself thinking about the question of provenance. That was the year when he realized that the practice of receiving shipments at three A.M. was somewhat unorthodox; his best friend Gary’s father owned a small grocery store nearby, and he was aware that Gary’s father’s shipments arrived after the sun had come up. Anton and Gary discussed the matter at some length, sitting on the sidewalk outside the store sucking on popsicles.

“Deliveries come in the mornings,” Gary said.

“But three A.M.’s still the morning,” said Anton. “Just earlier.”

“Three A.M.’s not the morning. My dad said morning’s when the sun comes up.”

“Why would they call it three in the morning if it wasn’t the morning?”

“It’s still dark outside. Everybody’s sleeping.”

“Well, why can’t a delivery come early?”

“I don’t know.” Gary was looking at his popsicle, considering the problem. “If it comes in the middle of the night I think it’s maybe not a regular delivery. I think then it’s maybe something else.”

Later that day Anton sat on a crate at the back of the store, watching his father working on an old fountain, and it didn’t seem like an unreasonable question—“Dad, why do so many deliveries come at night?”—but his father didn’t seem to like it. The fountain was an enormous white stone basin with stone birds perched everywhere, and his father kept scraping the grime from delicate stone feathers and didn’t answer. The muscles in the back of his neck tensed up.

Anton persisted. “The stuff we sell,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“What about it?”

“Is it possible. . is it ever. .”

“What? Is it ever what?”

“Is it ever stolen? I mean earlier,” he said quickly, as his father set down the chisel and turned to him. “I mean not by us. I mean before it gets to us.”

His father’s face was expressionless. He looked at Anton for a moment, turned away from him and resumed his careful work.

“Sometimes you need to improvise,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that sometimes regular channels aren’t open to you, and then you have to improvise. Find your own way out. Think about it, Anton. What does it take to succeed in this world?” It was clear that he expected no answer from his son. “Finishing high school? A college degree? What if you had to leave high school to work? Money? Connections? What if you have none? Hard work? When everyone else in this frantic city is working just as hard as you are?”

Anton was silent, watching him.

“All I’m saying is, it isn’t easy,” his father said. “It’s never easy. You have to be creative sometimes. You have to make things happen for yourself.”

Anton watched him for a while longer and then drifted out to the front of the store. There was a hundred-year-old bicycle there that he liked, leaning up against the doorframe. He didn’t dare ride it but he spent some time running his fingers over the rough texture of the metal, the dusty crossbar and the damaged seat, imagining someone else riding it a long time ago. He could see the river. He stood on the loading dock looking out at the water and the looming bridge above and the brightening spires of Manhattan on the other side, so close, so close.

That night his father came into his room to say goodnight. He kissed Anton on the forehead, as he had every night for as long as Anton could remember, and then he sat on the edge of the bed for a moment longer before he spoke.

“Everything I do,” he said, “all of this, it’s all for you and your mother. This is how I provide for you. Do you understand?”

Anton nodded.

“I love you,” his father said, and then he stood up quickly and left Anton alone.

“You just take it from the shelf,” Aria told him, in the summer when they were simultaneously thirteen. She was using the voice she reserved for small children and idiots. “You take it when they’re not looking, and then you don’t have to pay for it.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” They were standing under an awning across the street from the bodega. Anton’s knees were shaking.

“You don’t have to repeat yourself,” she said disgustedly.

“I just think. .”

“That stealing is wrong,” she said, with exquisite contempt. “I know, you’ve told me. Wait here.” She walked away from him across the street in the sunlight and came out of the bodega a moment later with a chocolate bar for each of them, just as casually as if she’d paid for them. Just as if it wasn’t Gary’s father’s store.

At fourteen Anton passed by Aria’s room one night and her door was open a crack, just enough to spill a wedge of light out into the corridor, and he found himself waiting there, listening, stilled, but all he could hear was a rhythmic sound like scissors closing.

“I know you’re there,” she said. “Can you come in here?”

He froze for a moment but there was nothing to be done but push open the door and find her there in her nightgown, sitting cross-legged in a dark pool of hair on the floor.

“Help me with the back,” Aria said, and held out the scissors.

Anton closed the door behind him and stood perfectly still. She was destroying something beautiful, and he felt that he should say something but he didn’t.

“I’m serious, Anton. Take the scissors.”

He took the scissors from her outstretched hand and knelt on the floor behind her. She had attacked her hair unevenly, from a number of angles, but at the back a section still hung straight and shining almost to the floor. He lifted the sheen and carefully cut it away in pieces, until her neck was visible and hot to the touch when his hand brushed accidentally against her skin. He swallowed hard.

“You’re ogling my neck,” she said pleasantly. “Pervert.”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse. He tried to even out her hair as best he could, but it still looked ragged when he was done with it and he was afraid to make it any shorter. He set the scissors down on the floor and they sat in silence for a moment, almost not breathing, so close that her nightgown touched his legs. Until he whispered, strained, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

“Nothing,” she said, the spell broken. She smiled over her shoulder, and then stood up and brushed pieces of hair from her nightgown. “I just wanted shorter hair. Goodnight.”

Anton closed the door behind him and then spent a fevered hour in his bed entertaining an alternative version of events in which she turned to him and pulled her nightgown off over her head.

“What is there to think about?” Aria asked. “We have both supply and demand.”

Anton was sitting on the loading dock of his parents’ store looking out at the river, eighteen years old. Aria stood nearby smoking a cigarette and explaining a business proposition. He had graduated high school the previous spring and his grades were superb but he’d applied to no colleges, and now summer was over and he was tired and trapped. He’d stopped smoking, which seemed like his only accomplishment in a while. He had grandiose ideas with no clear structure to them. He had no long-term plans but he found himself anxious for the future to start, whatever the future might entail. Aria had graduated a year earlier and it seemed implicitly understood that she wasn’t going to college either, although she spent most of her time rereading Machiavelli and it was obvious to Anton that she was smarter than him. What he wanted was to be an executive of some kind, to work in an office, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to school to achieve this. He had an idea that there had to be some easier, less expensive way, a different approach that might somehow be faster. He’d spent a lot of time trying to explain this suspicion to Gary, who was going to Brooklyn College next month and didn’t really understand what he was talking about.

Aria did understand. A part of her was always scheming.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds insanely dangerous.”

“As opposed to what, exactly? Dealing in stolen antiques?” A movement of her hand expressed her contempt of the warehouse behind them. Anton sighed. He wasn’t really sure about anything these days, especially how he felt about his parents’ business. His parents had recently started a new side business that he wasn’t supposed to know about. There was a new climate-controlled room behind a hidden door in the back of the warehouse basement where the fruits of far more serious salvage operations were sold: strange objects from protected archaeological heritage sites, paintings with missing paper trails, statues that had disappeared years earlier from looted museums in war zones.

“You grew up in the business,” she said. “You’d be fine.”

“You mean I have dishonesty in my blood? Thanks, Ari.”

“What, you think you don’t?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does it have to be hereditary? I think I want something different.”

“You poor sweet incorruptible soul. How are you going to earn the money for college?”

“I’m not sure I’m going, actually.”

“Well,” she said, “why don’t you just make some money, then, and decide whether you’re spending it all on tuition once you have it?”

Anton had no immediate response. He lay on his back to look up at the underside of the Williamsburg Bridge, dark steel bisecting the left side of the sky. Beyond the bridge clouds floated inscrutably over blue. Aria had become harder and harder to talk to lately, not that talking to her had ever been particularly easy. “Where did you get this idea, anyway?”

“From Jesús,” she said.

“The Jesús who used to work for my parents?”

“Yeah, him. I knew him my whole life. Anyway, he comes up to me right before he moves back to Mexico, asks if I know anyone who might want to buy his Social Security number from him. Says he bought it himself fifteen years ago and figures he doesn’t really need it anymore, and he thought someone else could use it. That’s where I got the idea. Think about it, Anton: there must be a million immigrants in this city whose chances of becoming legal are slim to none. Green cards are difficult. There are fees involved, you need a lawyer to make it all happen, the waiting list can be twenty years long depending on which country you’re from, and how are you going to survive in the meantime? Even marrying an American offers no guarantee — if you entered the country illegally, they can still break up your family and deport you. So they buy a Social Security card, they can then get a better job because they’re plausibly legal, we make a profit, and everybody wins.”

“And everybody wins!” Anton said. “I never knew you were such a philanthropist. Where do we get the numbers?”

“We make them up. I’ve done some research. The first three numbers correspond to the state in which the card was issued, and for New York State, that’s any number between 050 and 134. It’s a little more complicated, but the rest is more or less random.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

The business was a success from the first month and Anton loved his job for years. There was no career he could possibly have been better suited to, he thought at first, than the sale of fraudulent Social Security cards to illegal aliens in the city of New York. They were interesting. They came from everywhere. They were polite, as people on the margins of the world often are, and grateful for his services. The transactions were never boring, because every transaction carried the possibility of prison time, and they were never impersonal, because he was selling each and every one of his customers a future. He thought of himself as the last step before their new jobs, the last step before an office where a manager would glance at the Social Security card — the forgery flawless; Aria bought an expensive printer and acquired a credible facsimile of the official card paper from somewhere — before the employment forms were pushed across the desk.

Within a year they had expanded into the sale of American passports. Aria would tell him nothing about this side of the business. Anton understood that the passports were manufactured elsewhere, but he didn’t know where or by whom. Aria told him it was none of his concern and they had a series of unpleasant fights about it. The thought of unknown people being involved with their business made him profoundly uneasy.

“The less you know, the less risk there is for you,” Aria said reasonably. “The only people you’ll ever meet are our clients.”

Of all the people Anton met, all the Hungarian strippers and Chinese factory workers and Jamaican nannies, there was only one who ever scared him: Federico, a Bolivian architect with a high-pitched laugh who rambled for an hour about his tormented and visa-dependent love life (“But turns out she’s on a six-month visa, so back to Brazil at the end of June, bye-bye, and no more girlfriend! Just like that!”), then beckoned Anton close across the table and joked that he might just shoot him and run off without paying, ha ha! But this was Anton’s last week in the business, and the system had been perfected years ago: Anton ordered a ginger ale, which was code for catastrophe. The waitress, Ilieva, nodded and moved quickly behind the counter to make a quiet phone call. Anton listened to Federico talk about his girlfriend and wondered if Aria was back from Los Angeles yet. She’d been renting an apartment in Santa Monica under an assumed name and going out there every three or four weeks for reasons that seemed vaguely business-related, although she wouldn’t discuss her activities in any great detail.

“So when do I get the documents?” Federico asked, but Aria had already pulled up outside. She tapped her horn three times lightly as Anton stood up from the table.

“This is a sting,” Anton said softly. “Leave now and you won’t be deported.”

“What the. .?”

“Seriously, take off. You’ll be arrested in three minutes if you don’t.”

Federico went pale and left quickly. Anton gave a hundred dollars to Ilieva and got in Aria’s car and she berated him all the way back over the Williamsburg Bridge while he fiddled with the radio and the heat knobs. It was snowing. She was living near the store in those days, dressing the same way every other girl in the neighborhood dressed in the first few years of the twenty-first century: shapeless dresses made out of t-shirt material in eye-popping colors, low-slung leather boots and an asymmetrical haircut. He understood this to be a uniform; none of her income came from legal sources, and she didn’t especially want to draw attention to herself.

“Anton, answer me. Seriously, what happened? Why did Ilieva call?”

“I told you, he made a joke about shooting me. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.”

“Christ,” she said. “This was one of yours, wasn’t it? I didn’t screen this guy. So tell me, was there any screening involved whatsoever? You didn’t ask him anything before you met with him, did you?” Anton decided not to dignify this with a response. “Stop fucking with the radio,” she said. “All I’m saying is that if he was crazy enough to shoot you, he could just as easily have been FBI.”

“He wasn’t FBI. He was just some lunatic with a fucked-up sense of humor.”

“Are you even listening to me? You’re lucky I was in town. I’ve been out in LA half the week.”

“Where are we going?”

“The store. I have a new batch of cards for you.” They were leaving the bridge under a deep gray sky.

“No passports?”

“One passport. The rest just want cards, because they’re fucking cheapskates. Anton, seriously, I think you should carry a gun.”

“What? I’m out of the business anyway. You know this is my last week.”

“For your own protection.”

“Do you carry one?”

“Not on a regular basis,” she said.

“You own a gun. Are you kidding me?”

“We’re gangsters, sweetheart.”

“We’re a gang of two, Aria. You watch too much television.”

“We’re not a gang of two. You know other people work with us on the passport side. Anyway, all I’m saying is, we’re selling an illegal product to illegal people, and things get a little sketchy sometimes. It might not be a bad idea.”

“Illegal people. Illegal people? Did you actually just say that?”

Aria ignored him. She had pulled up behind the warehouse; he got out of the car and followed her around through the side entrance into the shadowy interior, where his father was polishing a bronze sculpture of an angel in a 1920s flapper dress. Aria disappeared into his parents’ apartment in the back.

“Surprised to see you during the day,” his father said. “Doing well?”

“I’m great. Some crazy Bolivian just threatened to shoot me.”

His father whistled softly. “Rough business.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m getting out.”

His father grunted, but didn’t respond to this.

“Dad, have you ever owned a gun?”

Aria was emerging from the back with a ziplock bag.

“There she is,” his father said.

“Dad? Have you ever owned a gun?”

“Here you go. Five cards,” Aria said, “and one card-passport combo. They’re all scheduled for this week.”

Anton gave up on the gun question. “What times? You know I’m nine to five at the company.”

“Yes, I know you’re nine to five at the company, you poor corporate drone. Here’s your schedule.”

He glanced at it quickly and folded it into his pocket. “So much for my weekend,” he said.

Aria gave him a smoky-eyed glare — every hipster girl in the neighborhood was wearing eye shadow the color of gunpowder that season — and turned away from him. She was furious, and had been for some weeks now. It was in the lines of her shoulders, the angle of her head, the way she leaned with exaggerated calm against the counter to look over the store’s order books, the efficient flick of her pen over a completed delivery.

“You sure have left her hanging,” his father said, without looking up from the bronze. He was buffing a tarnished wrist. The sculpture was half-dark and half-shining from his efforts, like a woman stepping out of shadow. “Walking out on your business partner like that.”

“I don’t want to live like this anymore. I’m sick of doing illegal things.”

“What we do for a living bothers you that much?”

“It has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with my family, Christ, haven’t we been over this enough? It’s just me. It’s just me. And another thing,” Anton said, on his way out the door. “I will never carry a fucking gun. Both of you, you hear me? I’m not stooping that low.”

His father didn’t respond to this. Aria was pointedly not looking in his direction. Anton walked out and headed for the subway station. It was the middle of the day and the platform was mostly empty. Alone near a pillar, he glanced at the schedule again and then thumbed quickly through the cards. He opened the passport. It was perfect, as always, and he wondered for the thousandth time how Aria acquired her passport blanks and how the passports came out so perfectly, who else worked on the passport side of the business and whether or not they could be trusted. There were parts of the business that were closed to him and always had been. The girl in the picture stared solemnly back at him. She was pretty, with short blond-brown hair and gray eyes. Elena Caradin James. Place of birth: Canada. Citizenship: United States of America.

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.

6

Anton received his diploma from Harvard and had it framed in a neighborhood far from where he lived. He was half-afraid he’d be laughed out of the frame shop, but the man behind the counter only nodded and told him to come back the next day to pick it up. Anton took his résumé to an employment agency with the full expectation of being thrown out of the office, but they placed him immediately in a low-level clerical position at Water Incorporated and he was promoted twice within the first six months. The transferability of his skills was truly startling; the confidence required to sell illegal documents was the same confidence required to sit in an office beneath a framed Harvard diploma and pretend he knew what he was doing until he learned the job.

“Consulting,” Anton’s father said, with what struck Anton as an entirely unnecessary emphasis on the part of the word that rhymed with insult. “What do you consult?”

“Well, we’re water system design specialists,” Anton said. He was having dinner at his parents’ apartment.

“Are you a water system design specialist?”

“No, I’m in a support division. I do research, produce reports for the sales teams, help prepare presentations, that kind of thing.”

“What qualifies you to do that?”

“Well, the same thing that qualified me to sell Social Security cards to illegal aliens, actually. A certain veneer of confidence combined with sheer recklessness.”

His father smiled. “Also, let’s not forget, I graduated Harvard,” Anton said, and his father laughed and raised his wineglass.

Anton met a cellist at a party that year, a spectacularly talented girl who didn’t know he’d never been to Harvard, and he proposed to her eight months later. Sophie and the job together formed the foundation of his new life; between the straight clean lines of a Midtown tower he rose up through the ranks, from junior researcher to senior researcher to VP of a research division. His dedication to the company was mentioned in his performance reviews. He directed his team and came home every night to a woman he loved in an apartment filled with music in his favorite neighborhood, until it all came apart at once and he found himself in Dead File Storage Four lying naked on the floor next to his former secretary in the summer heat.

“Do you know what’s strange?” Elena asked. Anton had turned the lights off in the room, and her skin was pale in the dim light through the windows.

“What’s that?”

“The building thinks I still work here.”

Anton propped himself up on one elbow to look at her face. “I thought you still worked here.”

“I quit a week ago,” Elena said. She was gazing up at the ceiling. “That night I didn’t come to you.”

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered what’d become of you.” Wondered wasn’t exactly the right word. He had lain on his back on the floor till seven P.M. watching the door that didn’t open and thinking about the complete dissolution of the life he’d been building, and when he’d gone home that night he hadn’t even the energy to lie. “I just stayed late in the office,” he’d said when Sophie asked if he’d had another staff meeting.

“And my swipe card still works,” Elena said. “It’s been seven or eight days, but I can still get into the building at five o’clock to see you. I thought it would be deactivated, but the turnstile gates still open for me in the lobby.”

He was quiet.

“I thought I’d be locked out of the system,” she said, “but no one’s told the building I don’t work here anymore.”

“You haven’t worked here in a week, but you still come to see me at five?”

“Of course,” Elena said.

Anton lay down beside her again and held her close. She let her head fall against his chest. The breeze through the broken window was warm on his skin.

“That first time you came to me,” he said after a while. “That first afternoon.”

“What about it?”

“Why were you crying?”

She sat up and began reaching for her clothes. “Anton, has Aria spoken to you?”

“About. .?”

“Nothing,” she said. “What time is it?” She was standing up and getting dressed again, smoothing her hair. She turned on the floor lamp and its yellow light filled the room. He stood up, blinking.

“Ellie?” He touched her shoulder, but she still didn’t look at him. “About what? Has Aria spoken to me about what?” But she shook her head again and made a small but final motion with her hand, leaned over awkwardly to put on her shoes.

“Ellie, please.”

“I ran into her on the street a few days back. She asked how you were and said she needed to tell you something. That’s all. It’s none of my business.” She didn’t meet his eyes. “That’s all,” she repeated.

“Well.” He was watching her closely. She retrieved a tube of lipstick from her handbag and applied it quickly, pressed her lips together once. “I’ll see her tonight,” he said. “There’s a dinner thing uptown.”

“A dinner thing?”

“It’s my parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.”

“Thirty years of marriage.” There were tears in her eyes. “Did they ever cheat on each other?”

“Elena. .”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll see you on Monday, if my swipe card still works.”

“Please call me if it doesn’t work. I’ll be here.”

“Goodnight,” she said, and left very quickly without kissing him goodbye.

His parents’ thirtieth anniversary dinner was at Malvolio’s Ristorante on the Upper East Side. He’d been there once some years ago for an event gone hazy in memory — Gary’s birthday? — and had forgotten exactly where it was but nonetheless arrived early. Anton didn’t feel like sitting at the table alone. He was waiting on the sidewalk out front when Aria pulled up in a silver Jaguar and gave her keys to the valet. He whistled softly.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” She was dressed expensively, wearing a silk neck scarf that made him think of flight attendants.

“Is it new?”

“This year’s model.” They watched the Jaguar recede.

“Whoever said crime doesn’t pay doesn’t know you very well.”

Aria laughed as she led him into the cool of the restaurant. “I want to talk to you about something,” she said when they’d been seated. Their table was in a back corner of the room, far from other customers.

“I thought you might.”

She glanced at him strangely, but continued. “I know this is forward of me,” she said, “but are you certain. . is the wedding going through this time?”

“It is,” he said.

“And you’re definitely going to Italy afterward?”

“That’s the plan.”

“In that case, I have a proposition,” she said. “I think you’ll find the terms attractive.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“I’ve been working on a major deal. It involves multiple clients, and they’re willing to pay me a lot of money. The catch is,” she said, “the deal has to be done in Europe. They’re unwilling to risk coming to the United States in the present political climate without the benefit of my product, if you know what I mean.”

“So they have the wrong passports.”

“Are you trying to get me arrested? Speak a little louder, I don’t think they heard you in the kitchen. Anton,” she said, “I could really use your help with this. You’re going to Europe on your honeymoon.”

“True, but I’m also out of the business. I’m a respected junior manager at a major consulting firm.” Anton couldn’t help but think about Dead File Storage Four as he said this, and tried to focus on the old eleventh-floor office instead. The details of his old office were already slipping away from him. He was no longer absolutely sure, for example, what color the carpet had been. In his memories it shifted unsteadily between gray and blue.

“There would be a substantial commission,” Aria murmured. “Ten thousand dollars.”

He whistled softly. “What are you doing for them?”

“Plausible deniability, Anton. You don’t really want to know.”

“You’re right, I really don’t. Why can’t you go to Europe yourself?”

“I’ve got some things I need to do here,” she said. “I can’t leave just now.”

“I appreciate the offer,” he said, “but—”

“There’s practically no exposure, Anton. We can set it up so that you’re plausibly innocent throughout the whole transaction. You go to a hotel in Europe, you receive a package from me addressed to a third party care of your name and room number, that third party approaches you that evening and introduces himself as a friend of mine, you hand it over to him without opening it, and a short time later a wedding gift gets wired to your bank account. It’s that easy. You couldn’t possibly be having your wedding at a better time, incidentally.”

“Glad it’s convenient for you. But seriously, Ari, you call that no exposure?”

“It’s ten grand,” she said. “For accepting a FedEx package and then handing it to someone. You’re a respectable corporate drone on his honeymoon. You have no criminal record whatsoever. You’ve been out of the business for long enough that no one’s paying any attention to you, and you never even have to know what’s in the package.”

“Aria,” he said after a moment, “I don’t want to do it. I’m sorry. I’m out of the business.”

“I’m family,” she said.

“And I’m not judging you. It’s a hell of a business you’ve built for yourself, I mean, I sure as hell don’t drive a Jaguar.” She didn’t smile. “I just don’t want to be a part of it anymore. That’s all.”

She was quiet; she sipped her water; she rested her chin on her hand for a moment and stared into space.

“This is the deal of my career, Anton,” she said softly. “It would launch me into a whole new sector.”

“What’s wrong with your old sector?”

“I think it’s almost time to get out of it,” she said. “These people are in the import-export business. It’s an area I’m interested in.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Aria smiled, seemingly at nothing and no one in particular, and toyed with a corner of the tablecloth as she spoke. “I can’t imagine how uncomfortable it would be for you,” she said, “if Sophie were to find out that you didn’t actually go to Harvard.”

“What?”

“Do this one last thing for me,” she said. “Do this one last thing, and then you’re finished. I’ll consider you retired. You’ll never have anything to do with my business again.”

“You’re blackmailing me.”

“I’m helping you to avoid a supremely awkward explanation. Didn’t Sophie work nights as a waitress to put herself through Juilliard? And here you just cheated your way into your career. Do you think she’ll be very understanding?”

He was staring at her, wordless.

“Because I’m not at all sure that she will,” said Aria. “Poor motherless Sophie, playing the cello at nine in her trailer park in California while her father worked two jobs to support his kids. Sophie, who’s had a job since she was what, eleven? Twelve? I have enormous respect for her for that reason alone, Anton, but don’t you sense a certain, well, a certain lack of open-mindedness when it comes to, shall we say, alternative means of securing an income? She’s—”

“Shut up,” he murmured, “just shut the fuck up. Sam and Miriam are here.”

His parents had entered the restaurant. His mother was wearing the vintage yellow dress she wore only on special occasions in the summertime, an enormous amber brooch resplendent on the front. His father beamed under his summer fedora. They were laughing as they crossed the room. “It’s so lovely to see you both,” his mother said. They were kissing Anton and Aria and sitting down at the table; his mother was rummaging in her beaded purse for a tissue and blotting sweat from her forehead; they were talking about a restored garden fountain they’d just sold that morning, the white marble one they’d had for so long. They’d had a good week.

“I can picture it,” Anton said. “I remember it exactly. Stone birds all around the edges. Beautiful piece.” He felt like throwing up but kept his voice as bright as possible. I’d just like to thank the Academy. “How long have you had it?”

“Ten years,” said Aria. “I remember when we got it in. You remember how much Sophie liked it when she first came into the store?”

Anton smiled painfully. His father had intercepted a passing waiter and was ordering wine.

“How is Sophie?” his mother asked.

“Excellent,” Anton said. “She’s doing well these days. She sends her regards, by the way, and her regrets and her congratulations.”

“Quite a combination,” his mother said. “Regrets, congratulations, regards.”

“She couldn’t get out of rehearsal tonight, otherwise she’d be here.”

“Ah, is that it. Sir, may we have some menus? Thank you,” his mother said. “She feeling a little calmer these days?”

“Miriam,” his father said. The two canceled wedding dates had been difficult to explain to Anton’s mother, who had some trouble understanding why anyone would hesitate even momentarily to marry her only child. The wine was being poured, and a basket of bread had appeared on the table. His father raised his glass of wine, so everyone else raised their glasses too. “To marriage,” he said. He reached across the table to hold Miriam’s hand.

“Thirty years,” said Aria. “Congratulations.”

“Congratulations,” Anton repeated. “Happy anniversary.”

“Thank you,” his mother whispered. She was smiling, radiant. There were tears in her eyes.

“And to Anton and Sophie,” his father said.

“To Anton and Sophie.” Aria looked Anton in the eye and smiled as she spoke. “August 28th?”

“The 29th,” Anton said. “The wedding’s August 29th.” His throat was dry. He put down the wine and drank half a glass of water without stopping for breath. It was already August 3rd.

The appetizers were arriving. Aria, utterly at ease beside him, speared a white circle of mozzarella and ate it in pieces from the fork, talking about something — he was having trouble hearing, and also he wanted to kill her and his head was light — and his father said, “And then the next thing I know—” and Aria was laughing but he’d missed the joke. Anton couldn’t concentrate. Things were difficult to grasp.

“You seem a little out of it,” his mother said finally. “Everything okay?”

“Prewedding jitters?” his father asked.

“No, actually, I’m being blackmailed by my cousin,” Anton said.

Aria shot him a look, which he ignored, but he felt it graze his cheek.

“Blackmailed,” Sam repeated. “Really?”

Aria shrugged.

“Really,” said his mother. “Aria, please explain.”

“Well,” said Aria, “I’m conducting a transaction.” She leaned forward across the table and dropped her voice to a murmur. She repeated the details about the ten-thousand-dollar wedding gift and the FedEx package at the Italian hotel, but added that her plans depended on Anton’s involvement in the initial transaction — the successful completion of this deal would open up a particularly profitable segment of the import-export business, which was where she’d been wanting to focus her attention for some time. Aria wasn’t entirely sure, she had to admit, why anyone would consider her request for assistance even faintly unreasonable under the circumstances.

“Under what circumstances?”

“You left me hanging,” she said. “I’ve been through three business partners since you left the business, and none of them worked out.”

“How is that my fault? And she’ll tell Sophie about Harvard if I don’t do it,” Anton said.

His parents were silent. Miriam looked at her wineglass, twisting the stem between two fingers and her thumb. Sam nodded and stared into space, considering the situation.

“Well,” his mother said, after some time had passed, “she is family, Anton.”

“What? Mom. She’s blackmailing me.”

“Listen,” his father said quietly, “I can’t say I’m down with the coercion aspect, but it does seem fairly low-risk if you think about it.” He speared a tomato slice, and looked contemplatively at the wall behind Anton and Aria as he talked. Anton glanced over his shoulder. There was a mural on the wall, painted long ago and cleaned rarely since, a greasy waterscape of gondolas and dim canals. “You sign for a package, you give the package to someone without opening it, in the worst-case scenario you deny all knowledge of its contents, and in any event you get ten thousand dollars wired to your bank account. Do you know what she’s sending you?”

“No.”

“There you go,” his father said, as if that resolved everything. “You keep it that way and come home with a nice little nest egg for your life with Sophie, you don’t even know what you did, you help out your cousin at great personal gain and virtually no personal risk. Why not?”

All three were looking at him. Aria was smiling slightly.

“You’re only going along with this,” Anton said to his mother, “because you don’t want me to marry Sophie.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” his mother said. “Why wouldn’t I want my only son to marry a girl who’s canceled the wedding twice?”

Anton’s father raised his hand for silence; the waiter was approaching.

“Who ordered the chicken parmesan?” the waiter asked.

“Me,” Anton said, without taking his eyes off his mother’s face. She was looking at the waiter.

“I’m the veal,” she said helpfully.

“Linguine?” asked the waiter.

“Over here,” said Anton’s father.

“And you must be the steak.”

“I am,” said Aria. “Grazie.”

“Listen,” his father said when the waiter was out of earshot, “it seems like a fairly smooth transaction.” He was winding pasta around his fork. “I’m not going to lie to you, I think you’d be a fool not to do it.”

“Well, that’s exactly it, Dad, actually. I don’t have a choice but to do it.”

“But why wouldn’t you want to?” his mother asked. “I know you lead a different kind of life these days, but ten thousand dollars, love.”

“You don’t understand, I don’t have a—”

The waiter was approaching again; Anton fell silent and clenched the tablecloth with both hands under the table.

“Fresh pepper, sir?”

“Thank you,” Anton’s father said. He leaned back in his chair to allow the pepper mill unrestricted access to his plate.

“Because that was the whole point of Harvard,” Anton said when the waiter was gone. “So I wouldn’t have to do this kind of thing anymore.”

“But you didn’t go to Harvard,” Aria said reasonably.

“But she doesn’t know that.”

“A marriage has to be based on honesty, sweetie,” his mother said. She put down her fork and held her husband’s hand for a moment on the tabletop.

“Thirty years,” Aria said. She raised her wineglass. “To Sam and Miriam.”

“Thank you,” his mother whispered. They raised their glasses again. Anton raised his glass too, but he couldn’t make himself speak. He set the glass down next to his plate and tried to concentrate on dinner. Look at this holy chicken parmiggiano, this holy salt shaker, the starched purity of this tablecloth. Behold the holiness of my family, serene and utterly at ease in their corruption, toasting thirty years of love and theft in a restaurant on an island in a city by the sea.

Anton paid for dinner. Outside Malvolio’s Aria said goodbye and he stared at her flatly until she shrugged and climbed into her silver Jaguar and disappeared into the river of red taillights that flowed south down the canyon of Park Avenue. When Aria was gone his parents kissed him and thanked him for a wonderful evening, said goodnight and walked east holding hands. Anton stood on the corner of Park Avenue and 53rd Street, dazed, a little lost. He glanced at his watch, nine thirty but the summer light was endless — it was twilight still, not night, and the city was hazy. He began to walk south, in the opposite direction of home. After a few blocks he took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a cell number from memory as he crossed 49th Street.

“Where are you at this moment?” he asked when Elena answered.

“The Starbucks downstairs from the office.”

“Alone?”

“Caleb’s working.”

“You didn’t want to go home?”

“Something like that.”

She was waiting in his office when he arrived, cross-legged on the sofa with her shoes on the floor, reading a copy of the Times that he hadn’t thrown out the window yet.

“You look awful,” she said, when he came in and closed the door behind him.

“Thanks. It’s hot out there. I might drop dead of heatstroke.”

“I meant shaken,” she said. “You look shaken.”

“Yes, well, I talked to Aria. Why didn’t you want to go home?” He sat on the opposite end of the sofa, some distance away from her, leaned his head back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

“Caleb’s working late at the lab. It’s lonely in the apartment.”

“Tell me about Caleb.”

“He’s a scientist,” Elena said after a moment. “We met in my first year at Columbia. . well, my only year, actually. He’s involved in the plant genome project. Would you believe he’s the only person I’m close to in this city? It’s so hard to make friends here. He’s known me since the week I arrived from the north.”

“What does that mean, the plant genome thing?”

“It means he’s mapping the genes of the Lotus japonicus. When that’s done, he’s moving on to geraniums. Other teams are working on cucumbers and tomatoes. I used to know what the point was, but I’m not actually sure I understand anymore. Anton, are you all right?”

“Not really,” he said. “Do you love him?”

“Kind of. I don’t know. Yes.”

“Will you ever marry him?”

“I don’t think so,” Elena said. “I think it’s almost over. He doesn’t want to sleep with me anymore.”

“Clear evidence of insanity.”

“It’s not him,” she said. “It’s the antidepressants he’s on. He can’t help it.”

“I’m sorry. That’s an awful side effect. I didn’t mean to call him insane.”

“It’s okay.”

“What’s it like,” he asked, “living three thousand miles away from your family?”

“Four thousand. I miss them.”

“Why don’t you live closer to them?”

“Because I never wanted to live anywhere but here.”

He nodded, but didn’t speak.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

“No, please stay.”

They sat together in the quiet, listening to the city, until Anton stood up and went to the broken window. “Have you ever played basketball, Ellie?”

“A little in high school. I was never that good.”

“Me either. I realize this sounds a little crazy, but could I interest you in a game of basketball on the roof of the Hyatt Hotel?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

He was looking down at the lower roof of the Hyatt. It was connected to their office tower, no more than a four-or five-foot drop below his windows, but the windows of Dead File Storage Four were painted shut. Anton stood back for a moment, considering the problem, and then went to his desk. He picked up his tape dispenser and his telephone before settling on the computer keyboard. He disconnected the keyboard from the machine, acutely aware that Elena was watching him, went back to the window, held it in both hands and swung. Anton turned his face away at the instant of the impact but he felt a sting on the side of his face and he knew he’d been cut. Glass rained down the outside of the building. It wasn’t hard to break the rest of the glass away around the edges, and after a while all that remained were a few small shards wedged deep in the window frame. These he pulled out gingerly with his bare fingers and dropped out the window. The air-conditioning system was useless against the breach; the room was flooded suddenly with August, like a southern current moving through an undersea cave. He took off his shirt, folded it, put it over the window frame to guard against any stray shards, and then swung his legs over and dropped down to the rooftop in his undershirt.

He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound the ocean makes. He’d looked down at this rooftop from the eleventh-floor window a thousand times and from that distance it had seemed like the smallest gap between towers, a tiny plateau between the dark glass of the Hyatt and the pale bricks of the Greybar Building, but out here in the sound and the darkness he was overtaken by the empty space around him. An expanse of gravel, lit only dimly from windows high above and from the sky that never darkens over the city of New York, passing clouds reflecting light back down from above. Some distance away on the rooftop, a row of colossal air vents rattled in the shadows. Crumpled-up paper lay all around his feet, every wadded ball of newsprint he’d ever thrown through the window. Two or three pieces of his stapler glinted in the half-light. He heard a sound behind him, and when he turned back Elena had dropped down from the window.

“I’ll get the basketball,” he said.

But when he found the ball it had lost most of its air, and anyway, the surface here was gravel. He held it in both hands as he came back to her, the rubber warm and too soft.

“It’s lost air,” he said. “Want to break into a hotel room?” He gestured at the Hyatt across the rooftop, the line of blank windows so close. Elena hesitated.

“I can’t,” she said.

“We’ll say it was my idea,” he said. “We’ll plead insanity. No wait, we’ll plead heatstroke.”

“I’m afraid of being deported.”

“Why would you be deported? You have a Social Security number and an American passport.”

“I don’t want to take the risk,” she said.

“Funny,” he said, “you never struck me as the risk-averse type.”

She was silent. Her hair was illuminated by the light from the office windows above and behind her, a frizzy halo, but he couldn’t quite see her face. He looked up at the sheer tower walls rising all around them, towers of windows reflecting each other and the night.

“Let’s go back inside,” he said. He gave her a leg up. She disappeared over the window frame. Anton stood outside for a moment longer in the heat before he followed her. Glass cracked softly under his shoes. The room was dark and so still that for a moment he thought she’d left.

Elena was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. Her breathing seemed shallow when he came to her, and her skin was clammy to the touch.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I just don’t deal with heat very well.”

“The heat’s deadly.” He sat on the floor beside the sofa, near her head, and kissed her hand. Her sweat was salty on his lips. He heard himself asking, “Do you think he knows?” and felt clichéd and a little tragic. All the dangerous joys of the five o’clock hour had dissipated; the room had depressurized and gone dim.

“I don’t think so.” She didn’t open her eyes. “I usually get home before he does anyway. If I don’t, I tell him I’m out with friends.”

“And he never suspects anything?”

“Caleb isn’t stupid, he just, I don’t know, we’ve known each other for so long and he’s so distracted by his work, he doesn’t—”

“Suspect things.”

“Right.” She opened her eyes, sat on the edge of the sofa for a moment, stood up slowly and took a deep breath. “He doesn’t suspect things. Goodnight, Anton.”

He stood up and kissed her. She closed the office door behind her, and her footsteps were lost instantly in the white noise of the mezzanine. He glanced at his watch — ten thirty P.M. — and went to the broken window to retrieve his shirt. It was still damp with sweat. A jagged edge of glass had ripped a hole in the sleeve, and when he put it on there was a crumpled black streak across the front where the fabric had been pressed against the outside of the window frame. He looked to the back of the door where his spare shirt usually hung, but he’d worn it home the night before. On his way down in the elevator in the ruined shirt he decided that from now on it would be a good idea to have two shirts hanging on the back of the door at all times, and he felt suddenly exhausted by the command of detail that successful infidelity required.

Outside the city had fallen into a subtropical nightmare. It was even hotter on Lexington Avenue than it had been on the rooftop, and he moved like a sleepwalker through the heat-locked air. It was impossible to move quickly; it took Anton a half-hour to get to the open-till-midnight GAP in Times Square, another few minutes under the fluorescent lights with bored night-shift sales associates and dazed tourists before he left with a new clean shirt in a bag. Outside on the sidewalk he took his old shirt off in front of gawping tourists and buttoned up the new one, overexposed in the lights of Times Square. It was after eleven P.M. but he could see his shadow on the sidewalk.

“Indecent,” a passing woman said to him, indignant under a cloud of bleached hair.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, struggling to remove the price tag from the new shirt. He threw the old shirt in a trash can before he buttoned up the new one and stepped out into the street to hail a cab, but there were no empty taxis traveling northward that night, and the new shirt was soaked to his back almost instantly. After a few minutes of waving at full taxis he gave up and descended into the 110-degree hell of the subway system, where he waited a long time for a train to arrive.

When he got home it was well past midnight. All of the lights were on in the apartment, and the door to Sophie’s study was closed. She was working. He stood for a moment with his ear to the door. She didn’t come out to greet him, and he fell asleep an hour later to the sounds of Bach’s First Cello Suite.

In the morning Anton woke and saw blood on the pillow, and remembered the sting on the side of his face as he swung the keyboard into the window. In the bathroom mirror he saw the cut, very small and swollen pink. He removed a tiny piece of glass. It came out clear and shining, a translucent bloody absence between the prongs of the tweezers. He held it up to the light for a moment and then flushed it down the toilet, and only then did he notice Sophie in the bathroom doorway.

“What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“You were shaving with glass?”

“I—”

But she’d stepped away from the door, she was making coffee in the kitchen, and when he tried to bring it up later her mouth tensed and she shook her head and turned away from him. This was the morning of August 4th. “That wasn’t glass,” he told her twice. “That isn’t what you saw.” But she didn’t want to talk about it, that day or on any of the days that followed. The wedding was a silently approaching thing, like a hurricane spiraling closer over the surface of a weather map.

“Are you nervous about getting married?” Elena asked softly. It was almost six o’clock and time had been passing very quickly. In a moment she would stand up and put her clothes back on. In a week he would leave her and fly to Italy on his honeymoon.

“Yes,” Anton said.

He tried to imagine coming home to Elena instead of Sophie, tried to imagine light hair instead of dark on the pillow beside him in the mornings, his apartment with the study door flung open and no cello inside, the room converted into a second bedroom, an office, another place for reading books. Sophie living somewhere else, Sophie losing significance with time and fading eventually into the ranks of former girlfriends. He looked at Elena, but she was looking at the ceiling. She reached absently for her handbag, as she always did when they were finished, fumbled around for a moment and came out empty-handed, then reached in again and extracted a tube of Chapstick. She was biting her lower lip.

“Does your fiancée get along with your family?”

But what would life be, with the two of us alone for longer than an hour? Do we depend on the ghosts of the others, Caleb and Sophie, is it the thrill of stealing you from him that makes me want to take you on the floor of the office every afternoon at five ten? Elena was tense and still beside him. He was never sure what made her so ill at ease at these moments, but he assumed it was guilt. A few miles to the north in a basement laboratory, her boyfriend mapped the genome of the Lotus japonicus.

“Why are you always so curious about my family?”

“I don’t know. I just am. I feel like I don’t know you that well.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your family, for a change?”

“There’s not much to tell. My dad’s a social worker. My mother’s a nurse at the hospital.”

“Were you born in the north?”

“I was born in Toronto,” she said. “We went to the north when I was three.”

“Why?”

“There was a shortage of nurses and social workers up there. They wanted to be helpful. But I’ve been plotting my escape from the north for as long as I can remember. Let’s not talk about the north.”

“Okay. Do you have siblings?”

“I have a brother and a younger sister. We used to be close, but she lives at home with her baby and we have absolutely nothing in common anymore. Our brother’s a few years older. He works in a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories.” She was quiet for a while, looking away. “Weren’t you nervous? Selling Social Security cards like that?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, I was just thinking about it. I think I’d be afraid of getting caught.”

“I was afraid in the beginning,” Anton said.

“Do you remember the very first one ever?”

“Of course I do,” Anton said.

7

The first one ever was a red-haired girl with still gray eyes at an Irish bar near Grand Central, four weeks out of Ireland when Aria approached her. She was tired and pale, not sleeping well in a crowded apartment share in the Bronx. She wanted to be a pilot. She moved through the evenings efficiently, was as charming as possible and played up the accent a little and wore a tight shirt in order to obtain maximum tips, read aviation magazines at the library, took long walks through the city and wrote postcards full of half-truths to her friends in Belfast on her days off.

“It’s difficult to imagine going anywhere,” she said. “I can’t go home, or they won’t let me back into the country. I want to stay here, but I already miss them.”

“Miss who?” The fake Social Security card was in Anton’s wallet. His hands were steady but his legs were shaking, which always happened when he was desperately nervous.

“Everyone,” she said. “Even the people I didn’t talk to much, I miss them. My downstairs neighbor Blythe.” She took a slow sip of coffee. Anton glanced discreetly at his watch. He had envisioned this as a fast shadowy transaction, take the money and run, but he hadn’t factored her loneliness into the equation. They’d been in the coffee shop for nearly an hour and she seemed to be in no rush.

“Your downstairs neighbor.”

“Blythe. She must’ve been in her fifties. Lived alone, dunno if she was ever married or had kids. I never heard anyone come by to see her. She never went out except to go to work, this insurance office down the street. She listened to talk radio all day on the weekends, so there was always voices coming from her place, and I’d hear them all day long. When I first moved into the place it drove me crazy, I mean, this woman’s radio was never off, but then after a while I didn’t mind anymore. It was nice, I mean, I lived alone too, and always hearing someone talking, it makes you less alone.” She blinked and sipped at her coffee again. “What about you? Were you born here?” He realized that she must have very few friends in this city.

“Albany,” he lied. His hands were sweating. The lunch-hour crowd was thinning out. He wished she’d stop talking and ask for the card. He was wearing reflective dark glasses that made her look like a ghost across the banquette.

“Is Gabriel your real name, then?”

“Of course,” Anton said. He had thought up the alias with great difficulty.

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty,” she repeated. “Twenty.”

“Yeah. Um, think of flight school.” He could see the doubt in her eyes. He tried to look as serious as possible, in an effort to appear somewhat older than eighteen. “I mean seriously, whatever my name is or how old I actually am, think how much easier it will be with a Social Security number.”

“I could get in without one,” she said. “I did the research.”

“Still,” he said, “I can’t help but think it might be easier if the question didn’t come up, don’t you?”

She looked at him flatly for a moment and then sighed. “Christ,” she said. “Okay. How do we do this?”

He leaned toward her over the table; she leaned close, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that her breath smelled of licorice. “Give me the envelope,” he said very softly. “There’s only one bathroom here, and I’m going to go in there and count the money while you go up to the counter to pay for your coffee, and then I’m going to leave. If the count was correct, then when you go in there after me your card will be taped to the back of the toilet tank.”

“Like in that Godfather movie with the gun,” she said. “I like that.”

In the bathroom he counted the money and put it in his wallet. From his wallet he took out the Social Security card, double-checked the name on it and put it in the envelope. There was condensation on the toilet tank, a cold porcelain sweat. He tried four times, but the tape he’d brought with him wouldn’t stick; the envelope kept falling, the tape kept coming away wet and glueless. He was at a loss for a moment until he remembered the gum. He found the last stick in his pocket and chewed rapidly, contemplating the toilet, then stuck the gum to the back of the tank, stuck the envelope to the gum, and opened the bathroom door half-expecting a SWAT team. The girl was paying at the counter. He walked out behind her back and away down the street in the opposite direction of home, his heart pounding. It was a mile before he doubled back toward the Williamsburg Bridge and his parents’ store. He took a circuitous route home amid the warehouses.

“It’s messy,” Aria said. “I don’t like it.” They were sitting together on the loading dock at the end of the day. The metal loading dock was still warm from the sunlight but a cool breeze was blowing in off the river.

“What’s messy about it?” Anton was feeling a little defensive about the Godfather technique.

“Anyone could walk into the bathroom and grab the card before she does. Just come up with a better idea.”

“What if I can’t?”

“You got straight A’s in high school,” she said, and muttered something in Spanish under her breath.

The solution came to him when he was out with Aria and his parents for someone’s birthday, his mother’s perhaps, at a restaurant in Chelsea. Anton observed the mechanism of paying: the bill arrives, tucked discreetly into the check folder. Cash is placed in the folder, and even from the next table those bills could be ones, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds — God bless America and her monochromatic green bills! — and the check folder is taken away and returned with change. If the count is correct, there must be a signal: perhaps the waitress, your co-conspirator, brings a glass of red wine to the table and that’s how you know to discreetly hand off the envelope with the Social Security card. Later, as the business expanded, perhaps also a passport. Using a waitress made the moment of transaction difficult to observe, and if the customer were stopped later by the police, the quality of the product was high enough that unless the transaction itself had been witnessed, the most a police officer would reasonably be able to accuse them of would be carrying their Social Security card and passport around with them, which was not recommended but not illegal. “We’ll stop doing business in this country,” Aria said, “when it’s no longer legal to carry our product.”

“It’s never legal to carry our product,” Anton pointed out. “And what other country would we do business in?”

He flew to Italy the morning after his wedding.

Sophie posed for pictures in front of the Colosseum, next to a gladiator with a digital wristwatch. She stood in front of the Trevi fountain while he took picture after picture after picture of her, trying to use up the whole roll.

“Excuse me,” she said to a passing tourist, “would you mind taking a shot of the two of us?” Anton was putting the lens cap on the camera as she spoke, and neither Sophie nor the photographer noticed it as the shot was taken. He wanted no photographic evidence that he had ever been in this country.

On the island of Capri she noticed the lens cap.

No, he said, of course it hadn’t been on the whole trip. Yes, he was positive. No, seriously, he said, he’d just put it back on after the last set of pictures. It’s all right, she needn’t be sorry for doubting him. No, hey, it was a fair question. He loved her too. No, he really did. Shh, shh, don’t cry. The Norwegian tourist who’d been taking their picture gave the camera back in the emotion of the moment, inexplicably apologetic, and the picture wasn’t taken after all.

On Capri Sophie wanted to see the Blue Grotto. It cost thirty-five euros to board a vessel that carried them out along the formidable shoreline. Anton held Sophie’s hand and looked up at the fishermen’s saints, small figurines wedged into dark rocks above them at impossible heights. Look at this holy island, these saints bestowing blessings from high up on the rocks. Patron saints of luck and strong netting, of tides and fish. Sophie held his hand and looked down at the water.

When they reached the grotto two other boatloads of tourists were already there, the boats idling in the choppy waters a few yards from the shore, and it seemed that it was another twenty-five euros to climb out into a little rowboat that transported two tourists at a time into a small space between the rocks and the sea. The men rowing the tourists into the underworld were friendly and animated, but the whole operation reminded Anton of a conveyer belt — extract money from tourist, insert tourist into cave, return tourist to boat — and he was put off by the unexpectedness of the extra fee. But Sophie wanted to do it; she paid the extra money and waited her turn patiently on the lower deck while Anton watched the progression of tourists in and out of the cave. Most of the tourists who came back were smiling but to his eyes they all looked faintly disappointed, like the crowds he’d seen trickling out of the Sistine Chapel a few days before. “I’ve heard about the Blue Grotto all my life,” he heard one of them say to another, but he didn’t hear the reply. When Anton looked down at the lower deck again Sophie had vanished and there was a flash of near panic when he thought she might have somehow slipped overboard, but then he looked over in time to see her duck her head as the rowboat carried her under the rocks. It seemed she was gone for a very long time.

Anton held on to the railing while he waited for her, the boat tossing in the wakes of the other vessels around them. He closed his eyes and felt in that moment that he could disappear here in this brilliant light so far from Brooklyn, his parents and Aria four thousand miles away.

“Wake up, sleepy. Are you really that bored?” Sophie had appeared beside him.

“No, just enjoying the sun. How was it?” She looked different from most of the others, more alive; he realized that she wasn’t disappointed.

“You should’ve gone,” she said. “It was beautiful and blue.”

“Beautiful and blue,” he repeated. He kissed her and tried not to think about Ischia.

In the morning they woke early in their hotel room on Capri. Anton opened the curtains and sunlight glanced over the tiled floor. Sophie hadn’t slept well. She was tired and moody and she didn’t want to talk to him. They ate breakfast in incompatible silence and took a taxi to the ferry. Back in Salerno there were a few dead hours. They wandered the streets amid groups of tourists, walked in and out of stores, sat for a while in a café where the waiters greeted them in English. Sophie bought an unattractive skirt. Anton lied and told her he liked it, but she accused him of insincerity and then he had to lie about lying. The train was an hour late leaving Salerno. They sat in a compartment across from a middle-aged woman who spoke even less English than Anton spoke Italian, which he wouldn’t have thought possible. When the train was forty-five minutes late the woman tapped her watch and made an exasperated face. “Italia,” she said. She shook her head and rolled her eyes. Anton nodded. Sophie was reading a biography of Jim Morrison, frowning slightly, ignoring them both.

They arrived after dark in the city of Naples.

A memory: nine years old on a cold morning in Brooklyn, waiting for the school bus with his mother in the rain. Usually Anton waited with Gary, but Gary was home sick that day and his mother didn’t like him waiting alone. The neighborhood was rougher back then. She stood over him with an enormous purple umbrella that a customer had left behind in the store.

“Why would anyone want to be a school bus driver?” Anton asked. His parents encouraged the assumption that he might grow up to be anything, and at nine things were possible that became less possible later on. It was still plausible that he might grow up to be an astronaut, for example, or the king of an as-yet-undiscovered country.

“You just make decisions as you go along, my magnificent child,” his mother said. “A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.”

Years later on an island in the Bay of Naples he walked a discreet distance away from the outdoor café where his new wife sat drinking coffee, waved reassuringly at her, and called Aria on his cell phone.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m on Ischia.”

“I’ll call you back. Are you calling from your cell phone?”

“There’s no phone in my hotel room. It’s a very small hotel.”

“Well, then find a pay phone and call me back at home,” she said. “You know I don’t discuss business on cell phones. I’m at the Santa Monica apartment.”

“I don’t have the number there,” he said. She gave it to him and hung up.

He went back to the newsstand and bought a phone card. There was a pay phone on the edge of the piazza, by a low stone wall.

“Anton,” Aria said, “there’s been a slight delay.”

“How slight?”

“Three weeks.”

“Are you out of your mind? You want me to stay on this island for three weeks?” Sophie was watching him, holding a glass of coffee. She waved when he looked at her. He forced his face into a weak facsimile of a smile, raised his hand and turned his back on her.

“Four at the most,” she said. “I’m sorry, Anton. It’s out of my hands.”

“Four? Aria, I’m sorry, listen, I can’t. . Aria, I can’t do this. We go back to Rome tomorrow. We fly home Thursday night.”

“Well, you don’t have to do it,” Aria said. “It’s of course your decision.”

“But if I don’t, you’ll tell Sophie. . you’ll tell Sophie. .” He was beside himself. He looked over his shoulder again, watching Sophie pretending not to be watching him. She sipped her coffee, gazed out at the harbor, glanced fleetingly at him where he stood with the red pay-phone receiver against his face. Aria was silent.

“Aria,” he said, “we’re family. My parents took you in.”

“And then we entered into business together,” Aria said, “and stayed in business, until you abandoned me, and now I’m asking you to do this one last thing.”

“I don’t want to do this. I’m sick of—”

“I know you don’t want to do this,” Aria said. “I’m perfectly aware of that. It’s a question of what you want to do least: perform this one last transaction, or explain to Sophie that you’re a fraud. Which is it going to be?”

He looked over his shoulder. On the other side of the piazza, Sophie sipped at her coffee and looked up at the clouds.

“My commission will be what?”

“Twelve thousand dollars for the extra trouble, secrecy, and an exit.”

“I want fifteen.”

Aria was silent for a moment and then said, “Fine. Fifteen.”

“I also want payment in advance.”

“Half now, half when the transaction’s complete.”

“Okay. I do this one last thing for you, and Sophie will never hear anything about Harvard, and I’m out of the business. Swear on something you believe in. Do you believe in anything?”

“No,” she said, “but I swear anyway. No, wait. I swear on my financial independence.”

“That’s the highest thing you believe in? Financial independence?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Jesus Christ. Three weeks?”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, possibly four.”

He hung up the receiver, closed his eyes for a moment and took several deep breaths, and then took the phone card out of his pocket and redialed.

“Four weeks,” he said, when Aria picked up. “What am I supposed to do here for four weeks?”

“You sound tense,” she said mildly. “Don’t you like Ischia?”

“I’m about to leave my wife on our honeymoon. Wouldn’t you be a little edgy?”

“As I was saying, it’ll be the easiest deal you ever played in your life. In three weeks a man will come to the hotel and introduce himself to you. You give him the package, you fly home, buy some roses for your wife, and you’re done.”

“I think this will take a little more than roses, Ari.”

“Spend some of the commission on her, then. One of those ten-thousand-dollar I’m-sorry-I-left-you-on-our-honeymoon rings from Tiffany’s.”

“Oh God, let’s not talk about rings. Who’s the client?”

“Do you want back in the business?”

“No,” he said.

“Then don’t ask me who my clients are.”

“Fine.” Anton hung up the phone and stood for a moment in the sunlight, watching the movement of boats in bright water. The boats in the Sant’Angelo harbor were painted every conceivable color, two colors per boat; yellow with blue trim, red with green, white with red. The light was too bright, the colors a kaleidoscope, sunlight piercingly brilliant off the surface of the sea. He wanted to be sick. He felt Sophie’s eyes on him from across the piazza and the thought that he’d considered leaving her anyway made the moment no easier. Three weeks. He walked to the newsstand with its supply of German newspapers, its British tabloids, its daily allotment of two International Herald Tribunes, paid for one and brought it back to Sophie. She took the front section.

“Who were you calling?” she asked. She was skimming the headlines.

“The office,” he said. “I told them I’d check in.” Check in to what, exactly? He imagined his telephone ringing endlessly on his desk in Dead File Storage Four, the empty room, the drift of paper beneath the window, dust gathering on the telephone and pigeons flying in to investigate from the world outside. Elena flashed through him, eyes the color of storm clouds, and he opened the paper but couldn’t read. His eyes skipped twice over the same paragraph. Two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.

“You know,” he said, as casually as possible, “I was thinking about maybe staying on a while.”

Sophie looked up from her café latte.

“Our plane tickets are for Thursday,” she said.

The morning after Sophie left Ischia he woke up lonely from a dream he couldn’t remember and lay staring at the blue ceiling for some time before he got up. He opened the shutters and the sea was awash in light, Capri a far-off shadow on the edge of the cloudless sky. Down on the piazza were too many tourists, calling out to their children in languages he didn’t understand or reading newspapers at the café tables, so he went back to the restaurant at the hotel and ate pasta and grilled squid at a table by the window, looking out at the ocean. In Sophie’s absence he felt an enormous amount of space around him.

She would be in Rome today, unless she’d changed her flight. He glanced at his watch and imagined her eating breakfast somewhere, alone at an outdoor café with a clear glass of coffee, reading the International Herald Tribune. The thought was almost unbearable even though he was enjoying his solitude, so he went back down to the piazza to call his best friend from the pay phone that stood beside the low wall by the harbor.

“Gary,” he said, “I think I’m alone again.”