Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“Okay,” she said. She stepped back just enough to let him in and then stood looking at him in the dim hallway, at the top of the stairs leading down to the dressing room, and he felt absurdly compelled to make small talk.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“It gets colder.”

“You’ve lived here all your life?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“From Chicoutimi,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“North. Very north.”

He nodded. “Even colder than here?”

“You like it here?” Veronique asked, perhaps not understanding.

“No.”

She stared blankly at him for a moment.

“You wait outside,” she said.

“Fine. Tell Michaela to hurry up.”

The door closed behind him and he stood in the alleyway again. He kicked at an empty vodka bottle and it shattered instantly; he was staring at the broken glass when Michaela emerged. They walked a few blocks together down St. Catherine Street, retreated into Montreal’s endless underground mall to escape the cold. She was pale and quiet, rubbing her wrists from time to time as they walked.

“I think the cruise ship’s still there,” she said suddenly. “I was thinking about going down there earlier.” They had stopped at the foot of a low flight of stairs between malls; a cellist had set himself up on an overturned milk carton and was playing Bach’s first cello suite. She was leaning against a wall, staring into space, and she had seemed so lost in the music that Eli was startled to hear her speak.

“Cruise ship?”

“There’s supposed to be this colossal cruise ship down at the harbor. I read it in the paper earlier.”

“Do you want to go see it?”

She shook her head. “I did. But it’s so cold out there.”

“How late did you work last night?”

“Five A.M.,” she said. “Bachelor party in the VIP lounge.”

“What kind of bachelor party?”

She gave him a look and started walking again. The cellist glanced up at her as they passed, and she smiled. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I hear music like this, and I understand why people love this place.” The music was fading behind them. He’d been down here before with her, and he’d thought sometimes that the underground mall seemed to go on forever; an eternity of Gaps and stores that sold cell phones and wheeled carts that sold muffins, broken here and there by food courts. The same restaurants reappeared every few minutes. McDonald’s, Sbarro’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s. Lilia remained vanishing. There was Christmas music on the sound system, but turned down too low to make out which language the lyrics were in.

“I’m tired,” she said. They stopped in a random food court, this one all white, and she sprawled loosely at a round white plastic table. She cut a strange figure in this pale underground place: black platform boots and a silver jacket, short white hair standing on end. Red lipstick, grey eye shadow, startling green eyes. She looked drawn and sickly in the fluorescent light.

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” he said, “going to see the ship.”

“It’s so cold outside. Imagine what it’s like down by the river.”

He nodded and didn’t speak for a while.

“My bed at home,” he said, “it has a figurehead attached to it. Talking about ships always makes me think of it.”

“Why does it have a figurehead?”

“I don’t know, it just does. It’s made out of a fishing boat, and my mother. . Michaela, listen. I’ve been here over a week, and I can’t afford to stay much longer. I want you to tell me where Lilia is.”

She smiled without looking at him. She seemed peaceful at that moment, untroubled, looking far away. “Look, my position hasn’t changed,” she said. “I need to know about the accident.” Michaela was rubbing her wrists again; she seemed to have returned from the VIP lounge with some mild rope burns.

“But you know where she is.”

“I won’t tell you where she is until you tell me about the accident. You know that.”

Michaela and Eli lapsed into silence beneath the fabric leaves of a synthetic tree, and the Christmas music on the sound system was a film of white noise over the surface of the day. At this hour of the afternoon, the food court wasn’t crowded. Passersby moved silently through a landscape of plastic tables and pale tiles, weighed down by their winter coats. A few of the other tables were occupied: blank-eyed office workers on lunch breaks ate greasy food from Styrofoam containers and stared into space. A pair of girls with Gap name tags picked at muffins and laughed nervously at a table nearby.

A food-court worker was cleaning tables. He gestured at a tray on Michaela’s table and said something to her; Eli watched her, waiting for her to respond, but she only looked at him. He repeated himself.

“Je ne parle pas français,” she said.

The man shook his head and retreated, the tray untouched.

“What did you just say to him?”

“I said, I don’t speak French. It’s a useful phrase around here.”

“You don’t speak French?”

“Not really. A few words. I never could. He could’ve just repeated himself in English.”

“He might not speak English. How can you live here without speaking French?”

“Exactly,” she said, still watching the food-court worker. “It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d never left the circus.”

He looked at her across the white plastic table, thinking of the couple who had laughed at him when he’d asked for directions in English on his first night in the city, and felt oddly that he was beginning to understand her.

OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ the cold deepened until the streets froze white. Michaela drank black tea at five in the morning, dazed with pills and insomnia but unable to sleep. Eli kept thinking that if he sat with her long enough, if she got tired enough in the small hours of the morning, if she kept talking and talking the way she did in this state, she’d slip; she’d say where Lilia was, where Lilia might be, if Lilia was still in this frozen city, if Lilia was even still alive, if Lilia had even ever actually existed in the first place, but instead she told him stories about terrorists and circuses.

“Did I ever tell you about the Second Cup bomber?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think you did.”

There had been a brief period during Michaela’s adolescence when cafés with English names had had a tendency to detonate, which she seemed to think squared nicely with the general drama of her teenaged years. She’d taken to spending a great deal of time in cafés around that period, in the hope of being caught up in something dramatic and historical and great, but then the solitary lunatic had been caught and jailed before another one exploded. She seemed disappointed by this. He stared at her, unsure whether she was telling the truth, and she launched into another story about her grandparents’ circus instead of telling him where Lilia was.

Her loneliness was like a third presence at the café table; they sat together by the hour, and both were aware that the moment he knew where Lilia was he would vanish back to New York and she’d be shipwrecked alone on the ice floe. She held her stories like currency and dispensed small change night by night. Notes on the circular qualities of obsession, like a snake tattoo forever biting its tail: the little girl scheming about dynamite and tightropes in her bedroom, the detective father obsessed with Lilia downstairs, the mother who brought home a cake and then disappeared forever. Michaela always had another story to tell him. Her stories were always in the margins of Lilia’s life. She was always about to tell him where Lilia was. And he was usually only too happy to sit with her indefinitely and avoid the hotel with its painfully empty bed and deadpan bellboys, but he sometimes fell asleep in his café chair with his chin on his chest, arms folded, drifting off into cold dreams about exploding cafés and cake and tightropes. She stayed with him, ordered more tea at intervals, glared with bloodshot eyes at the arrival of morning. He fell asleep to the sound of her voice, and sometimes when he woke up she was still talking.