The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel Read Free Book Online Page A

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