Emily St. John Mandel: Last Night in Montreal

He was well aware that he was too late by hours. Still, he took the subway to Pennsylvania Station and stood there for a while anyway, overexposed in the grey atrium light, more out of a sense of ceremony than with any actual hope: he wanted at least to see her off, even if it had been four or five hours since the departure of her train. He stood still in an endless mirage of travelers passing quickly; everyone pulling suitcases, meeting relatives, buying water and tickets and paperbacks for the journey, running late. Penn Station’s ever-present soldiers eyed him disinterestedly from under their berets, hands casual on the barrels of their M16s.

That night there was a knock on his door, and he was on his feet in an instant, throwing it open, thinking perhaps. . “Trick or Treat!” said an accompanying mother brightly. She looked at him, started to repeat herself, quickly ushered her charges on to a more promising doorstep. The whole encounter lasted less than a moment (“Come on, kids, I don’t think this nice man has any candy for us. .”), but it remained seared into his memory nonetheless; afterward, when the thought of Lilia leaving seeped through him like a chill, he never could shake the image of that hopeful line of trick-or-treaters (from left to right: vampire, ladybug, vampire, ghost) like a mirage on his doorstep, no one older than five, and the smallest one (the vampire on the left) sucking on a yellow lollipop. He recognized her as the little girl from the fourth floor who sometimes threw temper tantrums on the sidewalk. She was three and a half years old, give or take, and she smiled very stickily at him just before he closed the door.

Lilia’s childhood memories took place mostly in parks and public libraries and motel rooms, and in a seemingly endless series of cars. Mirage: she used to see water in the desert. In the heat of the day it pooled on the highway, and the horizon broke into shards of white. There was a map folded on the dashboard, but it was fading steadily under the barrage of light; Lilia was supposed to be the navigator but entire states were dissolving into pinkish sepia, the lines of highways fading to grey. The names of certain cities were indistinct now along the fold, and all the borders were vanishing. Her seat-belt buckle was searing to the touch. The dashboard clock marked slow-motion time. A mile behind her on the desert highway, a detective was following in a battered blue car.

Her father drove in silence, every so often blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief. This fever-dream place awash in light, in mirages, the sky white with heat along the horizon on every side, cars mirrored in phantom water on the highway ahead; she found later that most of her childhood memories had a hallucinatory quality, as a result of traveling some distance too far and driving through the desert a few times too often and changing her name so frequently that she sometimes forgot what it was, but her memories of the first year or two of travel were the least precise. Later she could never remember why they had started driving away from everything, and at first her father was rendered in the broadest possible strokes: the hand passing her a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate in the gas station parking lot, the voice soothing her in a motel room as he cut off all her hair and dyed it, but mostly as a silhouette in the driver’s seat, an impression, a voice; he knew the words to half the songs on the radio, and he said things that always made her laugh. He’d tell her anything about everything, except Before. He said it wasn’t really that important. He said they had to live in the present. Before was shorthand for the time before he started driving away with her, Before was a front lawn somewhere far to the north. More specifically, Before was her mother.

Lilia’s mother was asleep the night her daughter vanished. She didn’t hear the sound that woke Lilia up that night, the staccato of ice hitting the windowpane from outside. Lilia remembered that night the way dreams are remembered: it began with a sharp clear sound that pulled her out of sleep. She sat up in the darkness, and the sound came again. She opened the curtains but the glass was foggy, so she opened the window and let in the night. Her father was standing below on the lawn: grinning, he pressed a finger to his lips. She picked up her knitted wool rabbit from the floor and walked down the stairs as quietly as possible, the banister at shoulder height (she was only seven), and her mother was sleeping when she closed the front door behind her.

Fifteen years later in another country Lilia pressed her forehead against a windowpane in Eli’s apartment, looking out at an uncharted landscape of Brooklyn rooftops in the rain, and came to a somewhat unsettling conclusion: she’d been disappearing for so long that she didn’t know how to stay.

The problem, Eli used to think before he met her, was that he’d never suffered, except insofar as everyone does: the stalled trains, the alarm clocks that don’t ring when they’re supposed to, the agony of being surrounded by other people who all give the impression of being way more prolific and considerably more talented than you are, wet socks in the winter, being alone in any season, the chronic condition of being misunderstood, zippers that break at awkward moments, being unheard and then having to repeat yourself embarrassingly in front of girls you’re trying to impress, trying to impress girls and failing, girls who can be seduced but remain unimpressible, girls who can’t be seduced and/or turn out to have boyfriends in the morning, girls, being alone, paper grocery bags with falling-out bottoms, waiting in line at the post office for a half hour and then being snapped at because you don’t have the right customs declaration forms to send the birthday gift to your perpetually traveling brother, waiting in line anywhere, phone calls from a disapproving mother who doesn’t understand, the crowd of overeducated friends who understand too much and can’t resist bringing up long-dead philosophers and/or quantum physics over an otherwise perfectly civilized morning coffee, girls, an overall lack of direction and meaning as evidenced in your inability to either finish the thesis, abandon the current thesis and write a different thesis altogether, finish the different thesis, or heroically give up the whole thing completely and go work at a gas station somewhere upstate, stepping in things on the sidewalk, lost buttons, most kinds of rain, standing in line at the grocery store behind the lady who just knows there’s a coupon in here somewhere, girls, and the sense that all of this adds up to a life that’s ultimately pretty shallow and doesn’t really mean that much, particularly in comparison to the older brother saving children in Africa. The situation wasn’t helped by the mind-numbing job; he was paid a reasonable salary to stand in an empty art gallery four days a week, surrounded by art that he found incomprehensible, and there had even been a time when he’d considered himself lucky to have found a job like that, involving standing instead of doing, but lately the state of standing still instead of doing things had begun to seem symptomatic to him.

“There’s this artist in Asia,” Eli said. “I know how to pronounce his name, but I won’t. Call him Q. What Q does is he strips down to his underwear, then he coats himself with honey and fish oil, and then he goes and sits next to a latrine in this rural village in China, and so of course then he gets covered in flies because he’s hanging out next to the latrine covered in all this honey and fish oil, and so he’s sitting there, all covered in flies and all greasy and stoic-looking, and a photographer takes pictures of him, and this is the thing. .” He realized that he was speaking too loudly and took a quick sip of water to calm himself. “The thing that gets me,” he continued in a quieter voice, “is that the pictures then sell for up to eighteen thousand apiece. Eighteen thousand dollars . For a photograph of a guy with a hundred or so flies on his skin. All he’s doing is sitting there in a G-string, with flies, staring off into space, and he’s considered an artist. He’s considered an artist .”