Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“You don’t need to keep watch,” he said.

“I thought you were asleep.”

He was sitting up and pulling his boots on. Smiling the way he used to, before they were traveling to a new town every night.

“I was,” he said. “But you still don’t have to watch over me.”

They walked out together into the warm May afternoon. The Stillspell Motel faced the highway. It was flanked on either side by the Morning Star Diner and Stillspell Auto Repair, and the three buildings (all low-slung, old, and in need of renovations) formed a decrepit open horseshoe facing away from the town. Or if not a horseshoe, perhaps a stage: three buildings at more-or-less right angles and a parking lot between them, the highway blank and grey along the invisible fourth wall. Across the highway was a landscape of chaparral that seemed more or less infinite.

“Where are we?” Lilia asked.

“Town of Stillspell, apparently.”

“I meant which state.”

“Arizona. No. Wait. New Mexico. I’m almost sure we’re in New Mexico.”

“New Mexico,” the waitress in the Morning Star Diner confirmed brightly. She liked Stillspell, she said, although she did think sometimes about leaving. When she’d brought the food she installed herself not far from them, leaning on the side of a banquette, while Lilia slumped over her chocolate milkshake and tried to remember her current name. She hadn’t slept in far too long, and it was getting on into the evening. There weren’t that many people left here, the waitress said; the population had dropped so low that it couldn’t really be considered a town anymore. There was virtually no work here. It was almost a ghost village. But she had a job and a house, and she thought she might stay a while. She’d never really left, except when she was young and had run away with her boyfriend to Phoenix. But Phoenix was so big, and people weren’t friendly to her, and fourteen’s a bit young for that kind of thing, actually, and would they like some more coffee?

“No,” said Lilia’s father. “Thank you. But I’d be curious to know your name.”

“Clara,” said the waitress. “A pleasure.”

“Likewise,” he said, and gave her a fake name that Lilia immediately forgot.

“Are you staying long?”

“Oh, a day or two maybe,” her father said, “just to rest up a little. We’ve been traveling cross-country, Allie and I.”

“Allie,” said the waitress. “What’s that short for?”

“Alessandra,” Lilia said, and flashed an exhausted smile.

“Alessandra,” the waitress repeated. She flicked a strand of hair behind her left ear. Her hair was straight and red and went to her shoulders, and she had china-blue eyes. She liked the name: “Alessandra,” she said again. “Spanish, right?”

Lilia was tired, and the details of the night grew hazy. Her father and the waitress were talking about music. Lilia was falling asleep at the table; her father and Clara were talking for what seemed like a long time; later on she couldn’t remember how it had been decided that they’d be staying at Clara’s house that night instead of, say, in their paid-for room in the Stillspell Motel, but she found herself walking with Clara and her father down a cracked street in the moonlight, old houses silent on either side. A dog was barking in the distance. Lights were on in some houses; other houses stood silent and unlit. There were a few stores with boards over the windows.

Clara had a house like an optical illusion. A glance around the living room revealed her singular interests: she liked shoes, and the ocean, and things that flew. A dozen sets of stilettos were lined up at attention along one wall in the living room. The walls had pictures of winged things, hummingbirds and pterodactyls and rickety-looking antique airplanes. The house, in the meantime, left no doubt as to her vast and final passion. Every wall, every ceiling, every surface was blue. There were watercolor fishes swimming up the staircase. She told Lilia much later that she was happy never having seen a real ocean; she was afraid it wouldn’t live up to her expectations.

She’d hung blue silk curtains over the living room windows and they rippled, water-like, in the breeze of a fan. There was a fish mobile hanging from the ceiling. The house was old and big — her grandfather had bought it for a song, she said, a few years after the mine had closed, back when everyone was leaving all at once. Lilia pictured an old man standing in the desert singing, open and pleading with eyes as blue as Clara’s. Clara insisted on an immediate tour of the kingdom: later Lilia remembered trailing after them through stranger and stranger rooms, until she asked to take a bath and was left with towels and a bathrobe in the upstairs bathroom.

Lilia lay almost floating in the claw-footed bathtub, the water around her deep and green and still. There were extravagant fish painted freehand on the walls, intensely brilliant creatures of pure color, pure light, with watercolor-green seaweed floating between them in the deep. There was a rubber fish toy on a tiled shelf by the bathtub, smiling next to a rubber yellow duck. She lay still in the water for a long time, listening to the steady dripping of the tap. Her father and Clara were somewhere distant in the house. Their voices and laughter floated up the stairs.

In the morning Lilia woke in an upstairs guest bedroom. There were old-looking toy airplanes suspended from the ceiling above her head. Her father and Clara were up already, drinking coffee; later on her father left Lilia with Clara and a stack of pancakes and walked back to the hotel to get the car and the luggage.

“Someone came by looking for you the other night,” the desk clerk said helpfully.

“What?”

“Here, he left me his card.” The desk clerk dug around in the receipts for a moment and produced a plain white card with neat black type: Christopher Graydon, Private Investigator, an address in Montreal. It took Lilia’s father a moment to recover.

“Did he say anything?”

“Just that he was looking for you. He said he needed to speak with you as soon as possible.”

“Is he still here?”

“He left this morning.”

“He hasn’t been back?”

“No. He went off down the highway.”

“Which way did he go?”

The man stared curiously at him for a moment. “Well, I guess it was east,” he said.

The door to the motel room was swinging open. The room was subtly altered; Lilia’s father stood looking in, and it took a moment to see the disturbance that he sensed: a Bible was open on the bed, with a page ripped out. He didn’t know about Lilia’s habit of leaving messages and so didn’t understand why this was. What he did understand was that someone had been here. He stood for a while on the threshold, the detective’s business card in his pocket, and realized that he’d been saved the night before. It was never possible for him to look at Clara afterward without imagining that she was in some way protective, in some way divine, a patron saint of fugitives in a roadside café. He decided to stop traveling and stay by her side.

“Did you find her?” the bellboy asked.

It was early afternoon, and Eli had woken up only recently; he hadn’t noticed the bellboy board the elevator. He looked up, blinking, and remembered being given directions to Club Electrolite on his first night in the city.

“The girl you’re looking for,” the bellboy said.

“No. Not yet.”

“Where have you been looking?” the bellboy asked, just before the doors opened into the lobby.

“Everywhere,” Eli said.

In the afternoons he walked through Montreal with a map of the city folded up small in his jacket pocket. He walked for miles, moved in and out of the subway system, tried to look at everyone he could in case they might be Lilia. It was an effort to keep his head up, to look into the faces of passersby; his eyes watered from the cold and then his eyelashes froze, and he was forever blinking against the winter light. In the old city he walked the old narrow streets along the waterfront, stopping into a café every time he lost feeling in his feet. He left the first footsteps in pristine snow in the deserted parks; he lingered in English bookstores in Westmount and French bookstores in Mile End, on the theory that Lilia might buy books in either language and might be just as desperate to escape the cold as he was. Downtown he found a building that he thought Lilia might like, and he returned again and again, at first just in case she arrived to photograph it, and later on because it moved him. It was an old and very narrow building, three stories high and surrounded on three sides by a cracked parking lot, and it had been transformed almost entirely into an anime cartoon: on the east side was a woman screaming, with dark purple hair and furious pale-blue eyes. Her face took up the entire side of the building. On the west side a man stared west, blond and suspicious and narrow-eyed, partially obscured by a billboard advertising Cuban vacations, but it was the screaming woman who held Eli’s attention. She was screaming in fury, he realized, not fear. There could be no doubt when he studied her eyes. Eli couldn’t stand out in the street for very long in the cold, but he returned to the cartoon building over and over again, wishing he was a photographer, standing on nearby corners and looking up at it. The painted woman screamed out over the city, east toward the low brick apartment blocks of Centre-Sud, over the alleyways turned by graffiti artists into dark beautiful murals, over the dilapidated houses with their spiral staircases and strange turrets, the endless porn theaters and strip clubs, the people who walked on frozen sidewalks with their hands in their pockets and their breath turning to ice inside their scarves. She seemed like the only passionate thing in the landscape, and her fury gave him a certain kind of hope.