Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“Christ,” he said, “I didn’t know about Anya. I’m sorry.”

“Well, she always said she was going to. Has it been that long since we’ve spoken?”

“I guess it’s been a while,” Christopher said.

“Think about coming to work with me on this. If anyone can find her. .”

“I’ll think about it. May I borrow this?”

“Of course.”

He left the bar not long afterward. It was August in Montreal, and an airless day had turned to a perfect evening; there was a cool breeze from the distant river and Rue St.-Denis was alight, outdoor cafés spilling their light and voices out into the street, streetlamps shining down through the leaves of the trees that lined the sidewalk, and people everywhere: couples out walking in the twilight, girls with short skirts and multicolored hair and combat boots, young men with berets and goatees smoking cigarettes and walking somewhere quickly, slow-moving hippies with scarves wrapped over their dreadlocks and benevolent expressions, people eating dinner at small round tables on the sidewalk, everyone surreptitiously watching everyone else.

He walked slowly down the long slope to Rue Ste.-Catherine, in love with the city, the Bible in his shoulder bag. It was a lightweight book, mass-produced on thin paper to be stolen from an American motel room, but he felt the weight. He’d spent his childhood traveling too, and felt a certain empathy on that front, but it seemed to him later that he’d been seduced by her language. I wish to remain vanishing. He knew exactly what she meant. He walked home from the jazz club because the walk took two hours and he wanted to be alone, turning the phrase over and over like a polished stone in his pocket. He told himself as he walked that he was trying to make the decision but realized long before he got home that the decision had already been made.

His wife was in the kitchen, listening to the radio with the newspaper spread out over the table; she looked up and smiled when he looked in but had nothing to say. He smiled back at her and went to the dining room, flicked on the overhead light, opened the Bible on the table to read the note again. He felt less than tranquil. I do not want to be found. Later he went upstairs but he couldn’t sleep; he got up once to look in on his daughter, asleep under a quilt that had sheep all around the edges. Afterward he lay reading for a long time, an old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology that he’d picked up from a street vendor, listening to his wife moving restlessly around the house and turning the radio on and off in the kitchen. Something was bothering him; he put the book down on the bedside table and picked up the Bible again. The child’s handwriting obscured part of the Twenty-second Psalm. He read the psalm aloud once, and then recited the first two stanzas by memory to the plaster ceiling: “Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”

He heard his wife turn the volume of the radio up somewhere far away in the house, as if she was hoping to drown him out, but realized that she couldn’t possibly have heard him. The radio was abstract from this distance, soft static and inaudible voices. He glanced at the bedside clock; it was three-forty-five in the morning.

“If you don’t want to be rescued,” Christopher said aloud to the ceiling, “then why the Twenty-second Psalm?”

On Lilia’s twelfth birthday her father gave her a book of photographs: Life magazine’s collection of the most memorable images of the twentieth century. Women in bell-bottoms and big round glasses, antiwar banners above a sea of faces on the Washington Mall, cars full of families moving slowly across a 1930s field of dust. But there was a particular image that she turned to over and over again: the crater formed by the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert, in the final year of the Second World War. (“Not far from here,” her father said, glancing briefly over her shoulder and then back at the road. “No, we can’t visit it. It’s still radioactive.”)

The crater showed the aftermath of an ungodly heat: the center was purest black, the brightest black imaginable, and around the edges of this brilliant darkness was a shining ring. This was where the unimaginable heat of the explosion had changed the sand to glass, and the glass reflected the sky. The same force levels cities and creates mirrors in the desert. It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray. Tears came to her eyes in the passenger seat.

“Lilia, Lilia. Let’s stop driving for the day. Look, there’s a restaurant, let’s get you something to eat. .”

“Why aren’t there any pictures of me?” she asked later, sipping iced tea in the air-conditioned calm of a diner.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t most people have pictures? Of when they were kids?”

He looked at her for a moment and then stood up from the table. When she looked up he was leaning on the counter, talking to the waitress. He said something that made the waitress laugh and beckoned Lilia over.

“We’re in luck, Katie. They do have a camera here.”

“So what’re you doing traveling on your birthday, Katie?” the waitress asked. She had a cloud of blond curls and red lipstick, and she winked at Lilia while she handed the camera to her father. He motioned Lilia up on a stool and stood back.

“We’re going to visit my cousins,” Lilia said.

The waitress leaned on the counter to be in the picture, although she hadn’t been asked. Click “Much obliged,” Lilia’s father said. He handed Lilia the Polaroid, and she watched her face rise slowly out of milky white.

Eleven years later she knelt on Eli’s bed in Brooklyn and pinned the picture to the wall with a thumbtack.

Late at night Christopher liked to read Shakespeare sometimes, while he waited for his wife to come to bed or for sleep to overtake him, whichever happened first, and at three in the morning on an unremarkable night he caught himself reading and rereading a line from Romeo and Juliet: She is as a stranger in the world. He had met Peter in the bar only two or three nights earlier, and the line resonated strangely. There was a particular song playing on the radio a lot around that time; it had a lyric that he particularly liked, something about being a stranger in your own hometown, and he caught himself singing this line sometimes at quiet moments. His voice was unfamiliar. He’d never sung in his life, except under his breath at birthday parties, but these days he no longer entirely recognized himself.

Christopher was forty-five that year and felt somewhat older, but on the drive to work this morning he felt younger than he had in years. The Bible with the note from the missing child was in his bag on the passenger side. He hadn’t slept much — his wife had taken to coming to bed just before dawn lately, and she talked incoherently in her sleep — but he wasn’t tired, and he felt an enormous weight lifting from his shoulders when his leave-of-absence request was approved in the early afternoon. A week later he dragged the crate filled with Lilia’s case files into a dusty corner office at Peter’s agency and began attempting to settle in.

“A change is as good as a vacation,” his supervisor had said, a bit too meaningfully in retrospect, when the leave-of-absence request had been granted. This led him to suspect that he’d been becoming a stranger for longer than he realized, and perhaps slipping a little in general. He knew he was getting too tired these days, fading out perhaps, not as self-sustaining as he had been, and his hair was going grey above his ears. He told himself, sitting in the new office that afternoon, that this change was exactly what he needed. He put Michaela’s most recent school photograph in a desk drawer, spent a meditative few minutes arranging his notebooks and pens, pulled the first file from the crate, and began to immerse himself in the case. Like sliding into a lake.