Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

He cleared his throat before the tone. “Michaela,” he said, speaking too loudly, “this is Eli Jacobs. I’m in Montreal. I’m coming to the club tomorrow. I’ll. . I’ll do what you said, with the white flag and everything, I just. . I. . I hope she’s there. I hope she’s there.” He meant to sound stern but sounded nervous. He hung up fast, flustered, and stood for a moment in the phone booth with his eyes closed. Nothing he had known in Brooklyn seemed applicable here.

He forced himself to leave the station, walking out into the cold evening air. The street outside was all but deserted, urban in a way that reminded him of medium-sized cities everywhere; windswept plazas, hard angles of glass and concrete. Across the street, a low anonymous glass tower reflected lights and the sky. A few cars passed, boxy and random, and it took him a few minutes to recognize them as taxicabs. They weren’t yellow. There was, in fact, nothing identifiable about them at all; this was a random remnant fleet, grey Toyota Tercels and old blue Valiants, boxy red Fords with failing mufflers and squarish minivans with rust around the fenders, all with some variation on a taxi sign bolted to the roof. One or two slowed in front of him; he didn’t get in. He found their randomness unsettling. He thought about calling Geneviève for advice and decided against it.

A couple was approaching through the pools of amber streetlight, passing in and out of shadow and light. The man was telling a complicated story with elaborate hand gestures. The girl let out a high-pitched silvery laugh.

“Excusez-moi,” said Eli awkwardly as they drew near. They paused, receptive and looking at him, smiling. He thought for a second, but his high school French would go no further. “I’m looking for a hotel,” he said, conceding linguistic surrender. “Somewhere near here? Could you recommend anything?”

But he’d failed the password test: the air between them turned suddenly to ice. The girl’s smile hardened into a sneer. The man said something, but the only words Eli understood were anglais and américain. Whatever he said made the girl laugh again, but in a different, harder way, and they left him standing and walked onward. The man was resuming his story as they passed out of hearing range; the girl was laughing her original, silvery laugh. “Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to live in a city with a doomed language?” Geneviève had asked him once, some days or weeks ago in what may have been another lifetime. He stared down at the glittering sidewalk, blinking and at a loss, while the barely recognizable taxicabs kept passing like clockwork in front of him, over and over again like a looped reel with minor variations (Ford, Toyota, Toyota, Chevrolet) and it occurred to him that Thomas was right, that coming here had been a colossal mistake and also that he was somehow too far in already to back away from this place.

When he turned back toward the train station there was in fact a hotel attached to it: Le Hotel Reine Elizabeth towered just behind him. The fact of its existence somehow made him hate the walking couple even more; he could still see them in the distance, arm in arm. The lobby coincided with some uninformed ideas he had about what grand hotels might have looked like in Russia, circa 1960 or so: red carpets, gold-and-crystal chandeliers, businessmen in double-breasted suits, older women with sculpted hair and small handbags waiting stoically on ornate sofas here and there among the pillars. The room was warm with cigar smoke and conversation. He couldn’t understand a single word.

In the morning he spent a long time in the shower. When he got out he dug in his jacket pocket for the folded envelope and dialed Michaela’s number again. It went immediately to voice mail. He hung up without speaking and went down to the front desk to ask for directions. The lobby was much less pleasant in daylight. The concierge tactfully steered him away from Club Electrolite but recommended a number of fine restaurants and a jazz club nearby. A bellboy, apparently concluding that he was yet another American tourist here for the sex, pulled him aside and said he thought Club Electrolite was near the corner of Ste.-Catherine and Rue McGill but remarked that as far as he knew it was primarily a dance club with some go-go dancers, and that if Eli wanted to see some, ahem, danseuses nues perhaps (irritating wink here), he needn’t walk that far; he could, the bellboy said helpfully, simply make his way to Rue Ste.-Catherine, where apparently there were two or three strip clubs on any given block from here to the city limits. In both directions.

“No, I’m looking for a girl,” Eli said.

“Of course,” said the bellboy.

“No, a specific girl. I’m looking for a specific girl.”

“Aren’t we all?” said the bellboy. “Listen, go to Club Electrolite if you want, but you go a couple blocks east on St. Catherine Street around nightfall, you’ll see all the girls money can buy. But don’t go too far east or they all turn into transvestites by the time you get to Rue de la Visitation.”

Eli thanked him and set out for the address on the postcard. It was just past noon, but the sky was heavy and dark. It had begun to snow, and the sidewalk was slippery. He walked slowly, not particularly eager to arrive at his destination, and he’d walked a half block past the club before he realized his mistake and doubled back to find it.

Club Electrolite was a narrow four-story building of the same dirty grey stone as the buildings around it. A narrow alley ran along one side. A neon sign flashed the outline of a naked angel above the door, but all the windows were dark. He stood on the sidewalk, pulled at the door again, and for a moment wanted to fall to his knees: a sign on the door, miraculously bilingual, advised him that the club had switched recently to winter hours and would be open only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights until May.

That was the third Monday afternoon in December. He wandered back down the street to a warm café, at a loss now, and sat alone for some time with the remains of his thoughts.

IN THE LAST LIGHT of afternoon a few days later Eli took a walk to the river. Thirteen hours by train to the south New York City was etched in the brilliance of autumn, but here winter was well under way. It had snowed twice already in the days since he’d arrived, and the temperature seemed to be dropping by the hour. A white electric cross burned at night high up on the hill above the city; Eli, looking out from the window of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, thought that it was one of the loneliest visions he’d ever seen. He walked for entire afternoons through the frozen streets looking for Lilia, standing in places that he thought might attract her, sitting in coffee shops where he thought she might linger, reading the English-language press for clues on the city he found himself in, trying not to speak English in public except when ordering coffee. The businesses closed early here, but he found two coffee shops about a mile apart that stayed open all night, admitting freezing drafts every time the door opened. He thought of them as beacons in the night ocean and moved between them on alternate nights. Cold air seeped through the windows of every room.

He had read somewhere that there was a cruise ship docked at the port. He wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it, but it seemed like something Lilia might take pictures of, and on the fourth day he thought that walking there and then walking back to the hotel might take up a few hours, and he was desperate to distract himself; Club Electrolite was theoretically opening again that night, and he hadn’t decided what he was going to say when he saw her. He was walking slowly through the old city, moving south toward the harbor, when a movement high above him in an alleyway caught his eye: a girl was standing on the railing of a fire escape. She was balanced perfectly two stories above the cobblestones, one hand steadying her on the ladder above. For a confused moment he took her for a suicide, but at the instant he was about to call out to her, he saw the rope. It had been strung tight from building to building, tied expertly across the vertiginous span between fire escapes. He would have taken it for a makeshift clothesline, except for the girl. He saw the way she had aligned her thin body with the rope, the ballet slippers on her feet and the ferocity of her obvious intent, and he understood what she was going to do. He drifted a few steps into the alleyway and sank close against a brick wall, looking up.