Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“I’m curious. I’m thinking about going there.”

Thomas was giving him a dangerous look. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” asked Geneviève, who didn’t know about the postcard.

“Because it’s fucking cold,” Thomas said, without taking his eyes from Eli’s face. “That’s all anyone needs to know about it. You’d be insane to go there this time of year.”

“I doubt you’ve even been .” She was always ready to pounce on an opportunity to argue with anyone, but especially with Thomas. “You should go. It’s a city with a probably doomed language. The Quebecois are speaking French with an accent so ancient and frankly bizarre that the actual French can’t understand it. It’s like a fortress in a rising tide of English. It’ll be like research for you.”

“What do you mean, a fortress?”

“Imagine a country next to the sea,” she said, “and imagine that the water’s rising. Imagine a fortress that used to stand near the beach, but now it’s half underwater, and the water won’t stop rising no matter how they try to fight it back. Eventually, in the next century or so, it will more than likely rise over the top of the walls and overwhelm them, but for now they’re plugging the cracks and pretending it doesn’t exist and passing laws against rising water. I’m saying that French is the fortress, and English is the sea.”

“I don’t get it,” said Thomas, without looking up from his paper. “That’s a stupid metaphor.”

“I think I do,” said Eli quickly, trying to avoid losing them to another fight, but Geneviève had ignored Thomas anyway.

“You’ve spent your whole academic career thinking about dying languages,” she said. “Thinking about doomed languages, shamelessly romanticizing doomed languages, picking up girls with doomed languages, and imagining what life played out in a doomed language might be like. Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to live in a city with a doomed language?”

“I would,” he said. “I really would. Although I’m not sure that career is exactly the word for my academic situation. How cold is it?”

“Arctic,” she said, “but it’s worth it. There’s no place like it on earth. I try to go back there every year. It’s a great city.” She was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said, “provided you speak French.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Thomas asked. He was still flushed and still wouldn’t look up at her. “Eli, you can’t chase them. We talked about this.”

“Chase who? What are you talking about? What it means is certain laws are in place to protect the French language,” she said. “Like I said, it’s a fortress. Whether or not the scope of them is justified is somewhat controversial, but anyway, the English are more conservative, whereas the French. .”

This sparked an instant argument on the subject of cultural stereotypes; they barely noticed when Eli walked out. There was a bad moment out on the street, where the fact of her absence slammed into his chest and he had to sit on a park bench for a while until the exhaustion lifted enough for him to stand up and get home. He spent the afternoon staring at the bedroom ceiling.

An envelope arrived the following morning. It was postmarked Montreal, and Queen Elizabeth II half smiled against the sky-blue background of a stamp. The envelope contained a page torn from a Bible, with a child’s awkward ballpoint-pen letters scrawled bluely over the surface of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home. — Lilia. The page was thin and slightly yellowed, and it trembled in his hands. There was nothing else in the envelope, but a phone number was scrawled on the inside of the flap with the message Call me when you get to Montreal, and he recognized the handwriting and the return address, Michaela, c/o Club Electrolite, a street number on Rue Ste.-Catherine. He was still staring at the envelope when the phone rang.

“Hello, Eli,” his mother said.

He sank into the desk chair, closed his eyes, and lowered his forehead into the palm of his left hand. He clutched the phone white-knuckled with his right.

“Hi.”

“You sound strange,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

He told her that he was slightly tired. This seemed to be her cue. Did he know that it had been two months since he’d called her last? She was serious. Two months! She was only up in the Upper West Side, you know, not in Siberia, he could visit sometimes, or at least call, but any way. She just wanted to know how he was. How was the thesis coming? How was life in Brooklyn? She’d been out earlier, running a few errands, and on the way out of Zabar’s she almost got hit by a taxi. On a crosswalk, on the walk signal! Manhattan taxi drivers are homicidal. She was thinking of writing to the mayor. But anyway, her friend Sylvia’s daughter was having a baby, did he remember Sylvia’s daughter? Red hair? Blue eyes? Yes, everyone was excited. She was the one who was right between Zed and Eli, agewise. And that bloody tap in the bathroom had begun dripping again, but she wasn’t complaining. Because life’s too short to complain about small things, especially if you’re going to practically lose your life to a taxi on the way out of Zabar’s, c’est la vie, et cetera.

She faded in and out, like a shifting and unreliable radio signal. The monologue eventually subsided, and a silence settled over the line. He didn’t speak.

She began speaking again all at once, fast and nervous. She just worried about him, she said, out there in the boroughs like that. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed. Eli transferred the phone into his left hand and held the torn page in his right. He turned the page over to read the rest of the psalm. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. When he held it up to the window, Lilia’s childhood handwriting was a backward shadow on the other side of the page. His mother wanted to know if he’d heard from Zed lately; at last word he was headed for Ethiopia, although she couldn’t remember what he was doing there. It wasn’t that she entirely disapproved of Eli’s brother, although she wished he’d go to college; she was glad that he was seeing the world (incidentally, had Eli considered travel? Maybe a month or two abroad would do him good, perhaps focus him a little), but she worried about Zed. She did. She worried that Zed was getting too radical, too mystical (or was spiritual the right word? She was never sure what the difference was), just the way he wandered around biblical countries talking about God like that. Did he seem at all unhinged? Had he been heard from lately?

Eli turned the page over again. The first part of the psalm was partly lost under her handwriting, but he could still make it out: . . I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t heard from Zed for a while, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He doesn’t just talk about God, he talks about Buddhism and Taoism at least as much. What he suffers from—” He listened to his mother’s interruption for a second and then interrupted her. “No, he’s not an extremist, you’ve got it all wrong. I was going to say what Zed suffers from is a pathological sense of democ racy. He’s too democratic to even choose one individual religion to be extreme and radical about. He’s probably an atheist.”

This last sentiment triggered a longish pause, in which he imagined her switching the telephone from one ear to the other and mentally rewriting her will.