Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

In short, she dwelt for some time in the hinterland between sheer paranoia and reasonable suspicion, but she didn’t mention it to her father. It was only since the town of Leonard that she’d sensed this shadow traveling alongside her, and while it was possible that she was imagining it, it was equally possible that she had conjured her pursuer out of the ether with a phone call. She remembered the cool plastic of the receiver against her face, the crackle of static down the wires, the clicking sounds as the Arizona pay phone forged a fragile link with a telephone somewhere in southern Quebec, and she wondered if her mother’s phone was tapped. It didn’t seem unreasonable; Lilia watched enough television to think it more than plausible that calls to a kidnapped child’s home of origin might be recorded or followed up on and traced at the very least. On an ocean of static, she had sent up a flare.

Lilia spent some time wondering whether her father had noticed the new pursuer. It occurred to her after a while that even if he suspected the same things she did, he might not notice the difference — he had always been aware of shadows, although it had never been clear whether they were real or not. He had always hidden his child in the backseats of moving automobiles. He had always glanced over his shoulder and beaten nervous waltz rhythms on the steering wheel with his hands, driven through the night and taken looped circuitous routes to throw off potential pursuers, thought up names and alibis and procured forged driver’s licenses and birth certificates when necessary, managed the web of interlinked bank accounts that kept their tenuous existence afloat. He had always been followed by shadows and ghosts; whether or not they were real was almost incidental. The waters were always rising behind them, and he was always carrying her to higher ground. The realization made Lilia’s heart swell awkwardly with love and guilt, and she couldn’t bring herself to mention this latest shade. He didn’t mention it either, but then, he also didn’t stop: they no longer stayed anywhere for more than two or three nights. There were motel rooms, diners, endless chain restaurants, pasta cooked in hotel kitchenettes, hours of highway passing under the wheels. They lingered only rarely; an hour in a park, instead of an entire afternoon. An hour in a library, instead of a day. When she emerged from gas station washrooms, he was waiting outside the door. He didn’t let her stay alone in the car in parking lots anymore; Lilia walked beside him into every gas station, every store. He was always beside her. She was seldom alone. She noticed lines on his face that hadn’t been there before. And sometimes she had the impression, walking back through the parking lot to the car with an armload of groceries and magazines, of being watched through one of the other windshields.

It was a long time before Eli could bring himself to leave the hotel that night. He spent the evening lying in bed at the hotel with a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside door handle, staring up at the ceiling. At eight o’clock he ordered a room-service dinner. He ate a dinner roll and a forkful of chicken, suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of eating, put the tray outside in the hallway, and ordered a cup of coffee. This he drank standing at the window, looking down at the grey roofscape and the deserted street below. The idea of seeing Lilia again was disconcerting. He had been dwelling increasingly on the way she’d walked out; since she’d left without her suitcase but it had been gone from under the bed, she had to have planted it somewhere the night before — the janitor’s closet by the front door? The basement of the building? A locker at the train station? The premeditation was awful. Horrific to think of her sleeping beside him that last night, already packed for departure and planning on disappearing in the morning. He stood for a long time in the shower, perfectly still in the stream of scalding water; he put on a new shirt that he’d bought on St. Catherine Street earlier and stood for a long time staring motionless at his face in the mirror. “This is what I came here for,” he told his reflection, but his reflection didn’t look convinced. He set out for Club Electrolite at ten o’clock, but when he stepped outside the day’s trampled snow had frozen on the sidewalk into a sheet of uneven dark ice. It was midnight before he came to the door.

The main dance floor of Club Electrolite was vast and shadowy, with a few small round stages for go-go dancers scattered at regular intervals across it. The mirrored walls gave a queasy impression of infinity. Spinning lights illuminated pale clouds of dry ice that hissed from the corners of the room, and a scattering of disco balls threw shards of light back from the ceiling. The darkness was old here; it had always been night. He checked his coat and moved slowly through the crowd, past the bar, onto the dance floor. He didn’t feel like drinking. He made no effort to dance. He stood near a speaker, hands in his pockets, and the music was so loud that he thought he might die. His clothing moved in the gale of sound. He wanted to lie down and let the sound wash over him. He wanted to surrender. He tried to look at every face in the crowd, but Lilia was nowhere.

There was a boy standing near him with a trumpet, playing barely audible counterpoint to the techno beat. He was thin and strung out, wild-eyed in the lights. His hair stood on end. Whoever was in charge of the lighting clearly liked him; a spotlight caught his trumpet in a long gleam of light. Eli stood watching him, hands in his pockets, wondering what to do. There was only one go-go dancer tonight; Michaela was clad in black vinyl, gyrating on a stage near the center of the room. She writhed and shimmered, intoxicated by herself. He realized that she couldn’t see him in the crowd and realized at the same moment that he’d forgotten the white flag. For a moment something was breaking inside him, and he pressed both hands to his forehead and closed his eyes, but all wasn’t lost after all — an idea caught him and he moved toward the blue-lit bar on the far wall. The bartender had left a white towel on the bar; he ordered a drink and then the moment her back was turned he slid the towel quickly from the counter and slipped back into the crowd. He made his way to a place not far from Michaela, trying to look at every face at once in case Lilia might be here, and raised the white towel with both hands over his head. A spotlight, moving over the crowd, caught the towel and transformed it into a rectangle of ultraviolet light. He looked up at it, awkwardly conspicuous, and then back at the dancer. Michaela was watching him, expressionless, still dancing. She raised one thin arm over her head and snapped her fingers in the air.

The music lowered slightly, and the MC’s smooth voice broke over the melody. The room was flooded suddenly in black light, and every white t-shirt in the room and Eli’s improvised flag turned violently luminescent.

“Bon soir, madames et monsieurs. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, et bienvenue à Club Electrolite. We have a special message this evening. . our lovely dancer ce soir, notre Michaela, would like to welcome Eli Jacobs to the club.”

The MC’s smooth voice continued in French. Eli lowered the bar towel and stood stunned and helpless while the swirling of lights resumed and the crowd (mostly drunk, only half aware that there’d been a brief interruption) again began moving to the rising beat. The spotlight trained on him, however, didn’t move. Eli didn’t move either; he stood frozen and illuminated, singled out. Someone tapped his shoulder; he turned, and the bartender snatched her towel from his hand and shouted something at him in French. It was hard to see her clearly through the haze of light as she walked away from him. When he looked back Michaela had vanished from the pedestal stage; it stood abandoned and suddenly unlit. An arm emerged from the crowd and set an empty beer bottle on its surface. The boy with the trumpet resumed his inaudible melody.