Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

He wanted to call out, perhaps to stop her, but it was too late; it occurred to him that any sudden noise or movement might be fatally distracting. The timing of his arrival on the scene was impeccable. As he stood below, cold sweat on his forehead, she casually removed her hand from the ladder. Eli closed his eyes for a second and then looked back at the street; a man passed on the other side, looking at his reflection in a long blank office-building window, and he thought to call out to him with the best high school French he knew— Help me, aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît, please— but what could another man do at this moment besides distract her into a lethal fall? She was well beyond anyone’s reach. He forced himself to look at her.

She took one careful, expert step out onto the tightrope. He closed his eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable: the loss of balance, unbearable teetering, nightmare wingless descent. Surely no one survived this. A rope with no safety net and cobblestones beneath; he could already see the conspiracy unfolding between the rope and the cobblestones and the siren call of gravity, blood pooling outward from the shattered white epicenter of her skull. His hands were clenched fists in his pockets. He wanted to scream. But no one, Zed had scrawled once in a letter from Africa several years ago, should have to die without a witness. Eli opened his eyes.

She took a second impeccable slow-motion step, and then another. Her face was unreadable and utterly calm. This nightmare, this conspiracy of terrible details: for the first time he began to notice what she looked like, beyond the obvious horror of watching her last moments on earth. It was hard to see her clearly from this angle, in this light, but she was wearing a red dress, and her hair was platinum-white: she shone like a signal in the high shadows above. An apparition, wingless angel, and the poetry of her balance: she moved so slowly. This was a terrible, nerve-shattering meditation she practiced. He couldn’t breathe.

In his mind’s eye he watched her falling and falling and falling in front of him, but she kept moving forward over the rope. One deliberate step after another and she was halfway across already, two-thirds of the way, unceasing, and then she reached out and grasped the fire-escape ladder across the alley from where she’d started, safe and balanced on the opposite railing. She hopped down to the fire-escape landing and then stood there looking down, almost directly above him. Safe.

There were tears on his face. His hand was trembling when he brushed them away, and his heart was beating too fast. He was furious. She climbed down the fire stairs in one continuous movement and dropped down lightly onto the top of a Dumpster. From there it was an easy leap to the cobblestones, where she’d left a shiny silver jacket and a pair of high-heeled boots in a bundle by the wall. She took off the ballet slippers and put them in a jacket pocket. It seemed that the zipper on her left boot was broken, but she had a shoestring that she tied around her ankle to keep it up. She looked up at Eli then and stared calmly at him while she pulled on the jacket. When she’d zipped it up she put her hands in her pockets and stood looking at him.

Strange creature: beautiful, he supposed. She had short hair that stood on end; a struck-by-lightning look, shocked colorless. This close, he saw that her eyes were green. There was a sweet, slightly decrepit smell about her, like hair gel and stale perfume and cigarettes.

“You were looking up my skirt,” she said flatly, in accentless English. She was slightly out of breath.

He stood frozen in her flat green stare; there was a look in her eyes that struck him as unhealthy. He swallowed hard, with enormous effort, and slowly shook his head.

“I wasn’t looking up your skirt. I was just standing here, and I saw you.” He felt dazed and sick, and his voice sounded strange to him.

“Right,” she said. “You were just standing there, looking up my skirt.”

Eli was in no mood to argue. He’d just seen her die, whether she was still breathing or not. He looked up at the tightrope, ingeniously knotted and suddenly innocuous; it could have been a clothesline. For a moment it wasn’t at all clear to him that it wasn’t a clothesline, that he wasn’t dreaming and wouldn’t wake up in a moment in his bed in Brooklyn with Lilia asleep beside him; he took a slow step backward, closed his eyes for a moment, and touched the fingertips of both hands fleetingly to his forehead. His shoulder came up hard against a brick wall.

“Did you cut your hair recently?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Eli said hoarsely. “I just don’t feel like talking to you anymore. I’m not feeling that well. If you’ll excuse me. .”

“No, wait,” she said, “did you cut your hair recently? Was it longer before?”

He stopped backing away and looked at her. There was a thoughtful quality to her stare; she was speaking slowly, like someone trying to recall a forgotten name.

“Yes,” he said. “It was longer before.”

“I’ve seen you,” she said. “I’ve seen you before somewhere.”

“I very much doubt that.”

“No, I’ve seen you before somewhere.” She smiled suddenly. “Oh God, oh God, it’s you, ” she said. “Of all people. Did you know Lilia once took a picture of you while you were sleeping?”

He couldn’t speak.

“Although in the picture,” she said, “you did have slightly longer hair. You’re the absolute last person I expected to run into here. Although I did think I might see you tonight.” She was moving past him, still smiling. “The club opens at nine,” she said. “I will see you there, won’t I? Lilia said she’d be there tonight.”

“Michaela,” he said. “Michaela, wait—”

But she blew him a kiss from just outside the alleyway, and when he walked out after her he couldn’t tell which way she’d gone, in all the narrow ancient streets.

Christopher left the city quietly, at an hour of the day when Michaela should have been home from school but wasn’t. She was smoking cigarettes behind the school gym as his car pulled out of the driveway and had only just arrived home as he approached the American border. She was tearing his note into furious pieces as he was entering the United States. He’d told Peter that he was leaving town for a few weeks and asked him to look in on Michaela occasionally. He convinced himself that the arrangement wasn’t unreasonable: it was true that Michaela was only fifteen, he thought, but his daughter was never in any trouble that he heard about and didn’t seem to need him anyway.

He was waved across the border and drove quickly into the United States, feeling lighter than he had in years. He was deep into upstate New York by evening. He spent that night in a beige-and-pink Ramada Hotel room that still smelled of new carpeting. He couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning he got up and spent some time looking at a map. The town of Leonard, Arizona was circled in green. He went to bed at four and woke two hours later from a dream of ringing pay phones, strangely rested. He was traveling again an hour later, driving quickly south.

Lilia was aware at times of a presence half glimpsed alongside her, evanescent, only indirectly apparent, like the stars you can see only when you look away. A blue car passed them on the highway, the driver staring indifferently at the road ahead, and she was unable to escape the impression that she’d seen him before somewhere. Or as she emerged blinking from a restaurant into the blinding noon sunlight, a man stepped into a hardware store across the street. Did he have the same profile as the driver who had passed them? The sound of a door closing quietly on an upstairs motel balcony, just at the moment she emerged from the room. Footsteps on the same balcony at four A.M. An inescapable feeling, as she pulled the cord on the pale motel curtains, of having just severed someone’s line of sight. A waitress seated Lilia and her father at a restaurant table, and she realized that an uneaten meal had been abandoned at the table beside them, along with a twenty-dollar bill; the waitress returned a few minutes later, puzzled, and began clearing it away, and it wouldn’t have been that remarkable except that she’d seen the same thing on a table in another town two days ago, and she couldn’t help but imagine that the same person had abandoned both meals just at the instant she’d walked into the restaurant.