Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"A friend," Anna said.

The one true friend she'd ever had, when she thought about it. Chloe LaFleur, hair dyed bright pink and loops of steel through her ears and eyebrows and nostrils, Chloe who was trying to make herself as hard and spiked and dangerous-looking as possible, Chloe who skipped school with Anna and showed her how to use a can of spray paint and told her about punk music and death metal. They were inseparable in junior high until Anna transferred away. Anna told her about the Chemical Brothers and New Order, but they wanted different things out of music. Anna wanted steadiness and predictability, music with rules. Chloe wanted noise, Chloe wanted music she could listen to while she threw bottles against the underpass at the back of the park, Chloe wanted a soundtrack for destruction.

But Chloe was the one Anna could call crying from a pay phone because she'd run away from home again— because someone had thrown all her things out the window in a drunken rage, because her sister was at her father's house and Anna was alone with wolves, because someone had given her another bruise she'd have to lie about at school on Monday, all the countless reasons for leaving that could come up in a given evening— and Chloe was the one who'd tell her to come over no matter what time it was, Chloe would meet her in the park, Chloe would go with her to the tattoo parlor when she was high and wild, when everything was moving too quickly and she was desperate to mark this moment on her skin.

A month after Anna switched to the new school Chloe La Fleur moved to Indiana to live with her grandparents, and Anna didn't see her again. Still, she knew immediately what to name her baby when the nurse told her it was a girl. In the darkness of the residence hall at Holloway College she prepared a new bottle and leaned down to kiss her daughter's beautiful new skin.

La t e r t h e r e was Virginia in all its calm and its peace, before Liam came to her in the park and spirited her away again.

" Where are we going?" she asked, on the way out of town.

"You're under no obligation," Liam said. Driving five miles over the speed limit, glancing every so often in his rearview mirror. They were passing through fields dusted with snow, black skeletons of winter trees. "I'll drive you anywhere. But I want to go to Detroit, and I'd love for you to come along."

"What's in Detroit?"

"A gypsy guitarist," he said. "Someone I've been wanting to study with for a while."

Three or four blurred days of travel, then, but when they reached Detroit she found herself unprepared for the stasis of hiding. After a few cramped days in a motel they found a cheap one-bedroom apartment, and then the sensation of flight dissipated and days began to slide past without incident. She stared out the window at the winter snow, played with Chloe and sang to her, changed her diapers and prepared endless bottles, watched music videos, thought about enrolling in a GED program but didn't do anything about it, cleaned the apartment to techno music.

The small peculiarities of living with someone. When Liam shaved he left a fine dusting of hair in the sink. When she woke in the night she found herself staring at him in the darkness. The lines of his shoulder, his neck, the stillness of his sleeping face. I am someone who sleeps next to someone else in a queen-sized bed every night . She wondered if this was what being married was like. She didn't recognize her life and felt vastly old.

"Will your parents look for you?" he asked. He didn't think she was vastly old. He fretted about her age.

"No," she said. Even if anyone reported her missing, she told him, she'd run away three times before so the Florida police would have listed her as a runaway.

Liam found a job as a waiter. He hated it but was qualified for almost nothing else except teaching guitar lessons, which he said he couldn't stand the thought of. He came home exhausted and played his guitar alone in the living room, until at the beginning of their second week in Detroit he went from work to a housing project far from their apartment and returned home late in a state of elation. He lay on the bed, his clothes still smelling of the restaurant. Anna lay beside him with her head on his chest.

"Tell me what it was like," she said. Chloe was sleeping in the crib by the bed. She didn't like leaving the apartment but she did like hearing about the outside world.

"What part of it?"

"All of it. You leave the restaurant, you take the bus to the housing project, you walk up to the door. "

"I walk up to the door," he said, "the door of the tower, and I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing here? The place is desolate. A whole block of brick towers with small windows, leafless trees. There are all these dangerous-looking kids loitering out front in their huge puffy jackets. When I get close to the door they're staring at me and laughing, the girls sucking their teeth at me. So I have to go in then because if I turn around now I'm scared they'll jump me, maybe steal my guitar.

"So I go into this terrible dark hallway, it smells like urine and there's garbage lying around, step into the elevator and then up to the seventh floor. It's better up there, not as dirty. There's music playing somewhere, television voices behind the doors and it seems less dangerous, just another place where people live their lives, and I'm feeling awfully judgmental all of a sudden for being afraid of the building. So I find the apartment, 7M, and a woman answers the door—"

"How old is she?"

" Maybe fifty? I'm bad with ages. She opens the door with the chain still on and asks me who I am through the crack, so I tell her who I am and that I have an appointment. And she says, 'Oh, Stanislaus is so looking forward to meeting you,' with a very faint Eastern European accent, like this isn't her first language but she's been here a long time. She opens the door and I'm face-to-face with this really elegant woman, her hair and makeup all done, nice clothes. I'm standing here in t-shirt and jeans, filthy from the restaurant, and it's embarrassing all of a sudden, like I should have dressed up to meet them.

"And then Stanislaus comes in and he's a wreck, maybe sixty, he drags his leg and he winces like he's in pain, you can tell his nose got broken once or twice, but his wife brings him his guitar and he starts playing, Anna, and I can't tell you. he can do things I can't, and it made me think of Jack, actually, this thing he used to say—"

Anna shifted in the bed. She was afraid she might have put Jack in danger. She didn't regret coming to Holloway College because if she hadn't gone there she wouldn't have met Liam, but the mention of Jack's name always filled her with guilt. Chloe whimpered in her sleep in the crib by the bed.

"This thing he used to say," Liam said, "when we were in school together." He said this as if the time when he'd been in school with Jack were much more distant than three weeks ago, as if Liam's belongings weren't still scattered in the dorm room in South Carolina where Jack still slept every night. "We'd be listening to a musician, someone really good, and Jack would go, 'Damn, he has the music,' or 'She has the music'—"

"He used to say that in high school too, but I don't think I really understood what he meant."

"The way I think of it," Liam said, "it means the musician's a conduit. It means music's something that moves through him, like religion or electricity. I'm up there in a tower in the scariest neighborhood I've ever set foot in, all these kids waiting to rob me out front, and here's this man who comes into the room half-crippled, he's a bit gruff and he doesn't really have much to say to me, just asks for the money for the lesson up front and I'm wondering if coming to Detroit to study with him was a terrible idea, but then he sits down and starts playing and it's like nothing I've heard. This man, he's broken-down and poor and he lives in a hellhole, but he has the music."