Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“What time is it?” he asked.

“One A.M.”

“Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can I join the circus?”

“You can’t join the circus,” he replied, annoyed by the question but still grateful to be forced into conversation with her, remembering when he looked at her face that her latest school picture was still in a desk drawer at work. “We’ve discussed this, remember? A few weeks ago, when you sprained your ankle? The answer’s no.”

“That was six months ago.”

“Six months,” he said, and shook his head.

She was looking at him blankly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “the answer’s still no.”

“But why not?”

“You know why not. We already left the circus.”

When he said it aloud, he felt curiously bereft; he didn’t come home very often at all after that, even at night. When her parents didn’t come home Michaela sat in the living room, watching television alone late at night. One evening a commercial she didn’t like came on, and she threw a coffee mug at the screen. The screen cracked with a satisfying pop of light and went dark, and the mug rolled broken under the sofa. After that when she turned on the television the screen lit up but was blue and blank and had a jagged crackling dark line down the center. Days began to go by when she saw neither of them; she came and went in a house filled with large spaces and shadows, did her laundry sometimes in the evenings in the quiet basement, did her homework in her room at night. She pushed a shopping cart through the wide bright aisles of a grocery store a few blocks away, filling it up with microwave dinners and toaster waffles in a dozen flavors, and spent a great deal of time arranging these in the freezer. She wouldn’t have said that she was particularly unhappy; she valued her privacy, and the house was more peaceful without them. She rarely saw her father except in passing; coming out of the upstairs bedroom with a shirt over his arm, going through a box of his files in the dining room. Her mother was prone to coming home at unexpected times— the middle of the afternoon, three A.M., eight in the morning. She had very little to say, right up until the evening when Michaela came home and found her father sitting alone in the dining room with a half-eaten layer cake. The icing was pink.

“You missed the party,” her father said. He was leaning as far back as his chair would go without falling over, looking at his hands clasped on the table. He didn’t look up at her.

“My birthday isn’t for another week,” Michaela said. “I’m still fourteen.”

“It was a going-away party. Your mother left.”

“Left where? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “She didn’t tell me. She just brought home a cake and said she was leaving.”

“Did she say when she’d be back?”

“Well, that’s just it, pumpkin,” he said. “She was a little noncommittal on the subject of whether she was coming back again.”

“Did she say why?”

“Apparently I work too much.”

Michaela went up to her room then, and closed the door. She didn’t go to school the next day, or the day after that. It was much easier to drop out of school than she would have expected, but after a week her father got a phone call from the principal’s office and made her go back. A few days later he left a note on her bedside table ( Gone to U.S. on business, back in a couple weeks, keep going to school, will wire grocery money to your checking account, call Peter if you need anything) and disappeared. She was used to his business trips, which generally lasted three weeks; this time, however, she didn’t see him again for a year. When she told Eli this, some years later, he understood that she thought of the quiet dissolution of her family as having been more or less Lilia’s fault. Lilia had, after all, written her name in a Bible, and she did run out barefoot into the snow.

“You can see why I hate her,” Michaela said.

In a hotel room four or five stories above Boulevard Rene Levesque, in the harbor city of Montreal, Eli was trying to find a phone number. Michaela wasn’t answering her phone, and he wanted to reach Club Electrolite. He had called directory assistance three or four times, and although the operators themselves seemed flawlessly bilingual, some glitch in the system was causing the phone number to be given repeatedly in French, which was not a language he understood; all the languages he knew were dead or on life support. “Please hold for the number,” a sequence of operators had told him brightly, followed by a mechanical click, and then the same robotic cinq, une, quatre, trois, cinq, deux, etc. “Listen,” he was saying to the third or fourth operator, “I need this number in Eng—” but the French robot was already speaking, and he slammed down the receiver in disgust. His collection of obscure aboriginal languages had never seemed more useless. He was reluctant to call the hotel switchboard, because he thought the number he was looking for might belong to a strip club. He stood for a few minutes in the middle of the floor, disconsolate in the winter sunlight, and then moved to the window to look down at the anonymous street. He had arrived from New York City by train the night before. He held no Canadian currency. He didn’t speak the language.

He had arrived without luggage, the postcard and the envelope folded together in his jacket pocket with his toothbrush and his map. After thirteen hours of travel the train pulled into a shadowy underworld of tracks and cement platforms, three hours behind schedule, and stopped with a monumental hissing of brakes. He got out of the train and stood for a few minutes on the dim platform, at a loss. He’d had a prolonged disagreement with an imperfectly preserved Amtrak Café Car sandwich earlier in the day, and he still felt a little ill. Travelers moved past him, speaking French. He thought about just staying down here, on the level of trains and shadows, and then somehow sneaking onto the next train bound for New York City and arriving back in Brooklyn sometime tomorrow and just forgetting the whole thing, but decided he’d never forgive himself.

He took a deep breath and started in the direction of the escalators. Across the concrete twilight of the platform, the stairwells held a greenish, somewhat aquatic light. He stepped onto an escalator and traveled upward under exposed fluorescent lights into the cavernous grey of Station Bonaventure. He stood near the top of the escalator for a few minutes, not quite nauseated anymore, but — and this was almost equally uncomfortable — acutely aware of his lack of luggage. He put his hands in his pockets, in the absence of a luggage handle to hold on to, and this was when he realized that he’d left his cell phone on his desk in New York. He swore under his breath and began walking toward the nearest pay-phone sign.

This station was imposing, although he didn’t find it beautiful. Blue-and-white frescoes high up on the walls depicted heroic scenes involving swords and canoes. The words of an anthem he’d never heard were rendered in two languages, large enough to be read from below, but there was no other English. The insanity of the journey came over him like a chill. He wanted to go home. He was already wishing he hadn’t followed her here. At the pay phone he pulled the envelope from Michaela out of his pocket and dialed the number written on the inside of the flap. It was apparently a cellphone number: there was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings. It rang four or five times before an indifferent-sounding message clicked on: “This is Michaela. Leave a message.”