Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“She doesn’t remember.”

He was silent, watching her.

“I know Lilia’s story,” she said. “I know why she was abducted, I know what happened to her before her father took her away, I know all the things that she can’t remember herself. I offered them to her in exchange for telling me about the accident, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t tell me about it, even though I could tell she wanted to know what had happened to her, and we argued horribly about it earlier. But she told you her story, didn’t she?”

“Yes. No. All of her story except that.”

“Tell me about the accident,” she said, “and I will tell you where she is.”

“I don’t want to use Lilia’s story as a bargaining chip.”

“But what else do you have?”

Eli looked at her across the table until she stood up and kissed him on the forehead and told him to meet her here again same time tomorrow and then maybe they could talk, and then she was gone in a blast of cold air through the closing glass doors. And it was hard to say later how any moment this ghastly could possibly become a routine, but he knew no one else in the city, and she knew where Lilia was. He waited for her every night after that in the all-night coffee house on the corner of St.-Laurent and Prince Arthur Boulevards, drinking coffee by the window and watching for her shape, for the platform boot emerging from the cab or the narrow figure walking slowly up the hill. She came in exhausted but strangely bright, sometimes feverish, glassy-eyed. She smiled wanly when she saw him, two or three or four A.M., and slid into the opposite chair. She had a curious smell about her at this hour, especially if she’d been in the VIP lounge on the second floor: hairspray, men’s cologne, her perfume. Other, subtler notes that he preferred not to identify too closely. Her hair had softened by this time of night, and her makeup was blurred. There was a loose, dangerous quality to her movements. Her face was flushed. It was sometimes a long time before she spoke.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course,” Michaela said, but in those moments her smile seemed empty, her eyes unfocused. He wanted to press her for Lilia’s location, to somehow force her to produce Lilia from thin air, but it was impossible: there was something broken in her, something exposed and open to the elements that made forcing her to do anything seem almost unthinkable. She claimed she didn’t know where Lilia was. Then she amended this and claimed that she did know where Lilia was but that she wouldn’t tell him unless he told her about the car accident. She claimed that Lilia was still in the city but that she wasn’t sure where. Then she claimed that Lilia was going to reappear at the moment they least expected, but the moment they least expected never seemed to come, and days passed slowly in the startling cold.

“Can I get you something?”

She wanted tea. A day or two earlier Eli had bought a dictionary and a phrasebook and figured out how to order tea in what he believed to be reasonably passable French, but the barista invariably replied in English no matter which language he tried to use. It seemed clear that this was a rejection of some kind, but he hadn’t decided whether it was a rejection of the English language or a rejection of him personally, and either way it was exhausting and he preferred not to think about it too much. He went to the counter and came back with tea and she sipped at it, looking away from him, her mind elsewhere. She looked out the window and told him again how she’d like to travel away from here, but in the week that he’d known her Eli had heard this monologue four or five times, and he was quickly running out of sympathetic comments. He could only nod and watch her light another cigarette.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Eli said. “How did Lilia know who you are?”

“What?”

“To write you the letter. You said she wrote to you from New York.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment. “It isn’t entirely accurate to say she wrote to me, actually.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. Her eyes were troubled. “It was a letter to my father. I got a call from the private investigative agency, maybe a month and a half ago. They said he’d left six months earlier and they didn’t have a forwarding address for him, and they didn’t know what to do with all his mail. I was hoping maybe someone had sent him money, so I went there and picked up his mail and opened all of it. It was mostly junk, but there was a letter from Lilia.”

“What did she write?”

“She requested a truce. She said she was tired of always being followed and watched.”

“She was being followed?”

“All her life,” Michaela said.

Lilia turned fourteen in a small city in Illinois, and her father gave her a camera. Her first shot was out the window of the chain restaurant where she was eating birthday cake, at the movie theater blinking across the wide evening street. Somewhere near Indianapolis she knelt down by the side of the road to take a picture of a sign with the paint peeling off— Farm-Fresh Corn and Tomatoes— and found beauty in the worn wood and faded lettering. She developed the film after that at one-hour photo places, loitering around shopping malls until the pictures were ready, and pored over them in the car, in a park, in the motel room at night. The pictures gave her a sense of continuity, of a record being constructed; she had been in flight for seven years now, traveling quickly, and it was a bright pleasure to have a means of capturing the flight path. She took pictures of signs, mostly, although not signs that could be traced easily to any particular place. She especially liked signs with misspellings, or with the paint peeling off. She liked taking very wide shots of deserted streets, and pictures of cars approaching from great distances away.

Lilia was allowed to take pictures of anything except herself and her father. “We must be careful,” he warned, “about the accumulation of evidence.”

Michaela was always running out of cigarettes. She coughed dryly sometimes, in a rasping way, and the spasms brightened the red veins of her eyes. Her eyes were almost always red, even when sober; she couldn’t sleep. She would do anything to avoid being alone at night with her insomnia, and Eli was willing to go to great lengths to avoid being alone in general; they sat together in the café at the corner, watching the gradual progression of night. The night passed through stages: first the crowds of beautiful strangers in the electric midnight, enthusiastic and painted and dressed for the clubs, then the fleet of mismatched taxicabs at the intersection, and later an inky blackness, these last few hours of night, four in the morning and the occasional drunken kid stumbling by with a slice of greasy pizza, a girl with fishnet stockings and vacant eyes weaving over the sidewalk, the cold amber of streetlights on pavement and ice. After the taxis passed, wave upon wave, the streets went quiet till morning. The city slept uneasily, under the sign of the cross: it shone in brilliant white high up on the hillside outside Eli’s hotel-room window, a charm over the wide blank streets and deserted sidewalks and shadowy parks.

Michaela laughed softly to herself, said something inaudible. She was an original, but slowly losing her mind, and it seemed to Eli that it was departing in pieces: the names of certain acquaintances, the linear connectors that hold thoughts together after dark, certain bridges of logic and convention, the part of the mind that knows when to let go and send the body sliding into sleep. She was dazed and tired in the afternoons, sharp and lucid in the evenings, and slipping into incoherence by three A.M.