Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

He came down to Michaela’s dressing room in the evenings and lay on his back on the carpet, or sat on the chair by the table behind her while she prepared herself for the night, reading the English papers, studying his map. Sometimes he stretched out on the floor and fell asleep while she was performing; he seemed to have fallen into limitless exhaustion. It was always possible for him to fall asleep. He had dreams about ice cubes. He was almost always cold. Once he woke up and she’d turned off the lights in the room. A candle flickered between them on the carpet, melting into a grimy plate. She was lying on the other side of the candle, still dressed in tight vinyl, her hands over her eyes. The room smelled of hairspray and candle smoke.

“What time is it?”

She turned her head to look at him. “Three A.M.,” she said. “You’re awake.”

“Barely.” His neck was stiff. “You’ll burn this place down.”

“It’s on a plate, Eli. Did you ever read about the Gnostics?”

He sat up slowly, looking at her. Her face was barely visible in the dimness.

“Yes,” he said. “How many pills have you taken?”

“Lilia used to talk about them.”

“The pills?”

“The Gnostics. She never talked about them with you?”

“Maybe once,” he lied, obscurely jealous. Michaela smiled.

“They appeared seventeen years after the death of Jesus Christ. She talked about these stories. Prophets walking the streets of Je rusalem, her words, not mine. .”

“They’re not her words,” he said. “They’re from a book I own. I didn’t know she read it.”

“Anyway, I like them. The Gnostics believed that none of this is real,” she said. “None of this seems real to me.”

“It’s the pills,” he said.

“No, it’s everything. This life, these pills, Club Electrolite, this dressing room. How could there be a city like this in the world? How could it possibly be so cold? What I mean is that every light is too bright for me. Every sound is too loud.”

“It’s late,” he said quietly. “You must be exhausted. You should go to sleep.”

Her eyes were shining. “You move like a ghost over the surface of the world,” she said. “Am I right?”

He realized that she was talking about him specifically, and also that she was somewhat more unhinged than usual, and said, “I’m not sure.”

“The thing is,” she said, sitting upright and holding her knees to her chest, “the thing is, I can’t sleep anymore. Days go by sometimes if I don’t send myself to sleep with all these white little pills. And I used to think I could find some kind of peace in this city. I had a job that I liked. .” Eli propped himself up on one elbow to watch her face in the guttering candlelight. Her voice was somnambulant.

She talked on through the night, while Eli listened and eventually fell asleep again on the carpet, and her voice was a current through fitful dreams. When he woke up she was still talking, lying on her back, and the candle was drowning in a pool of wax. There were no windows here, no natural light to give a clue as to the hour of the night, of the morning, but he had a sense of having been asleep for some time. She was mumbling, whispering, and he couldn’t understand her.

“Michaela.” She fell silent and turned her head to look at him. There was a cold draft from somewhere and he couldn’t keep his eyes open. His throat was dry. “What time is it?”

She sat up slowly and fumbled in the darkness for her purse. After a moment she extracted her cell phone, and her face was lit blue for a moment when she looked at the screen.

“It’s six-thirty,” she said. “No, six-thirty-five. I’ve been awake for two days.” She put her cell phone back in her bag and sat there with her legs outstretched on the carpet in front of her, slumped over and looking at her hands, shaking her head, a ghost in the half light. She was barefoot.

“Do you have any sleeping pills?”

She nodded and gestured toward the purse. He thought perhaps she was crying, but it was impossible to tell in the dimness. The candle was a flicker of blue in a pool of melted wax. He could barely make out her face.

“What’s the worst thing you could imagine happening?” she asked suddenly. She was watching his struggle with the child-proof cap.

“I don’t know. I’m too tired for rhetorical questions.”

“It’s not rhetorical, it’s theoretical. There’s a difference.” Her voice cracked, and she coughed once. “My throat’s dry.”

“I’ll get you some water. What’s the worst thing you could imagine?” He succeeded in opening the cap and mea sured three white dots into the palm of his hand. He stood up and moved stiffly to the counter. It took a minute to find the glass he’d seen there earlier. The tap gurgled invisibly in the darkness. He held his hand under the cold water until he began losing feeling in his fingertips and then touched his wet fingertips lightly to his forehead before he returned to her. A trick Zed had taught him; the cold water on his forehead made him feel awake.

“Never falling asleep again. Now tell me yours.”

He knelt beside her on the carpet and touched her wrist. He placed the pills in her hand.

“Take these. I have some water for you.”

“I need the water first. Tell me yours.”

“Here’s the water.”

“Tell me.”

“I hate being alone.” He took a sip of water and passed her the glass. She drank almost all of it and swallowed all three pills at once. “Where’s Lilia tonight?” He spoke very softly.

“Close,” she said. “She’s very close.” She finished the glass of water, set it down empty on the carpet, and then lay down beside it. She turned over on her side toward the candle, away from him. He stayed beside her.

“What would change if you knew about the accident? What difference would it make?”

“I just want to know,” she said. “I want to know what happened to my family. My father disappeared earlier this year, did I tell you that? He sold the house and left, and I don’t know where he is anymore. You never expect both of your parents to just vanish like that. It’s a missing piece.”

“But what happens when you have the final missing piece? Are you happy then? Can you stop taking pills? Do you stop entertaining bachelor parties in the VIP lounge on weekends? Does the knowledge solve anything?”

“Then I can sleep,” she said. She closed her eyes. “Please don’t raise your voice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will you stay with me a minute?”

“Of course.”

He stayed beside her until her breathing slowed, then he stood and groped in the dimness for the clothing rack. Under it, behind it, the sheep quilt was crumpled on the child-sized mattress. He pulled the quilt out and spread it over her, blew out the candle, and felt his way out of the room in absolute darkness.

In a small town in New Mexico, more of a truck stop really, a detective wearing a battered fedora sat in a car in a parking lot. He was watching a particular couple emerge from the Morning Star Diner: a man he’d been following for some years, and a waitress. The man was forty-seven years old that year, according to Christopher’s records; he had a benevolent, somewhat weathered look, and brown hair that fell just below his ears. The woman was younger, with straight red hair and an old-fashioned blue-and-white waitressing uniform. She was holding a square white box. The detective remembered that it was Lilia’s sixteenth birthday tomorrow and decided that Clara must be holding her birthday cake.

They paused for a moment outside the diner, the man pulled the waitress close against him, and they kissed briefly in the warm end-of-day light. The detective slowly lowered his forehead to rest on the steering wheel and stayed that way for some time with his eyes closed. He had been following them for five years now, but he was no longer sure why. The helpless observer: everyone knows that Icarus fell into the sea. But only one book he’d ever read on the subject remarked on the possible existence of witnesses: wandering with his flock on a hillside not far from the ocean, a shepherd looked up in time to watch the disastrous, improbable flight — the at-first-awkward beating of wings as the child and the father moved like the spirit of God over the face of the water, the small shape that grew exultantly smaller as it flew closer and closer to the sun, until Icarus was so far away that the shepherd could no longer see him, only knew where he was from the way the father kept looking anxiously up into the sky, and then the scream from an almost unfathomable distance above, an unseen sense of faltering far overhead and then the fall, the coming apart of wax and feathers, that fast awful descent into the sea; the father moving down through the air to catch his child, too late. The cloud of feathers drifting up as Icarus broke the surface of the water, and the father circling desperately in the beaten air overhead. The shepherd, watching all of this from a slight distance, leaning on his staff while his sheep scattered like clouds. Awestruck, stunned, perhaps already composing the story he’d tell his wife that evening in his head, but at ease in the often uncomfortable awareness of being an extraneous figure in a world-historical event. His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas; someone has to remember them.