Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

Erica’s voice trembled a little. She went upstairs to the dance floor and danced ferociously. She was beautiful. Lilia followed her up there and watched her for a while, leaning against a wall, not sure what to do with herself, and then she moved to join Erica in the throng. Thinking as she danced that she could just get a refund on the ticket, that this one time perhaps she could stay, and knowing even in the midst of these thoughts that it was hopeless: if she didn’t leave now she’d only leave later, and Erica danced with her eyes closed, sweat and tears shining on her face. Lilia danced in front of her for a few minutes, but Erica refused to look at her. Later they sat together in the mezzanine of the bar and argued about courage and bus schedules. The second-to-last time Lilia ever saw her.

The last time Lilia saw her she drifted away around the corner, the way newspapers drift when they’re caught in slow wind. Every detail of the moment was clear to Lilia later, when she closed her eyes in a departing bus and tortured herself with the scene: Erica disappearing around the corner in the watery predawn light. The striking, final lines of the apartment buildings of this particular neighborhood, the kind of low ugly buildings that look to stand a fair chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust with their freight of cockroaches intact. The sidewalk shining a little, cement fraught with crushed glass, the neon lights of the restaurant across the street. A police siren in the distance. A decrepit woman passing by on the opposite sidewalk, shuffling unevenly and pushing a cart heaped with cans and old clothing. The quiet stoicism of a man across the street, leaning on the wall of the restaurant. One hand in his pocket, the other on his cane. Watching her, perhaps, from under his fedora.

The day after Lilia’s sixteenth birthday Lilia’s father drove through the morning and afternoon. Mirages shimmered on the desert: pools of water appeared on the highway ahead, and the mountains broke from the horizon and floated between the earth and the sky. The heat was unspeakable. She was profoundly happy. Her father drove in silence, every so often blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief. The dashboard clock marked slow-motion time. They stopped that night in a town the color of dust where the only restaurants were a McDonald’s and a Taco Bell and the Denny’s attached to the motel, and the waitress who took their breakfast order there in the morning looked hungover, pale and blinking. Her father studied the map across the table, leaning in close to peer at the faded lines.

“We could be in the mountains by afternoon,” he said. “Just another few hours of desert.”

Lilia was supposed to be the navigator, but the map had been folded on the dashboard of the car for nine years now, and it was fading under the barrage of light. Entire states were dissolving into pinkish sepia, the lines of highways fading to grey. The names of certain cities were indistinct now along the fold, and all the borders were vanishing. Her seat-belt buckle was searing to the touch. She put on dark glasses and stared out the window. This fever-dream landscape awash in light, in mirages, the sky white with heat along the horizon on every side, cars reflected in phantom water on the highway far ahead. Everything drowning in light and false water, borders irrelevant and disappearing fast, all edges blunted in the brilliant light; she closed her eyes in the heat of the day and realized that she was thinking for the first time in several months of her mother. There was always a place in Lilia’s mind where her mother existed as a shadow, or perhaps it was the other way around; not a memory, exactly, more of a ghost. It seemed possible sometimes that Lilia was the one who was haunting her, even from this far away. She was disappearing into sunlight in a secondhand car two days after her sixteenth birthday, and her mother was inconsolable in the distance.

Lilia’s mother asleep the night she went away; she didn’t hear the sound that woke her daughter up that night, the sharp clear percussion of ice hitting the windowpane from outside. That night Lilia’s father put her in the car and wrapped a blanket around her and they drove for a hundred miles through the dark, well over the border; he had their passports ready, and they were waved across. In the northern United States he pulled over and retrieved a silver thermos from between the seats. He unscrewed the top and poured out a plastic cup of hot chocolate and placed it steaming in her hands. Lilia took it without a word. She hadn’t seen him in years, and she was too shy to speak to him yet; she looked down at the gauze bandages and then closed her eyes instead of answering when her father asked if she was okay, and her father touched her face to make her look at him.

“It will be all right,” he said. “I promise.” She stared up at him and sipped the chocolate and nodded. Her memories of that night held no trace of regret.

But nine years later she closed her eyes in a car in the desert, and despite the happiness of the moment she was shot through with doubt. It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping was imminent; after this one last birthday road trip they were going back to Stillspell, to Clara’s house in the desert, Clara’s creaky staircases and blue rooms and morning coffee.

“Aren’t you looking forward to staying there?” her father asked. “Not traveling anymore?”

“I’m not sure I know how to stay,” Lilia said.

“Did she ever give you an explanation?” Michaela asked. She had hair like cartoon lightning, hard and spiky; she ran her hands through it and it stood on end. She had dyed her hair that afternoon. Black hair, black bustier, black vinyl miniskirt. Everything about her reminded Eli of midnight. He sat at the small wooden table behind her, watching her reflection, overwhelmed by her presence, her ferocious green eyes, trying to think of something to say. The palms of his hands were pressed to the tabletop, and he could feel the vibration of the music upstairs.

“How late did you sleep?” he asked instead of answering her. He had left her asleep on the carpet the previous morning, walking back to the hotel past the amused stares of desk clerks, up to the dim early-morning grey of the room, where he’d fallen asleep instantly on top of the covers. In the early afternoon he sat for a long time in a café not far from Club Electrolite, composing a rambling letter to Zed. He’d gone so far as to buy a number of stamps, but it wasn’t clear to him whether he would mail it; the envelope was folded in half in his jacket pocket, along with the page from the Gideon Bible that Lilia had written on as a child, and from time to time — he never took his jacket off anymore, even indoors — he would reach into his pocket and run his fingers over the envelope just to be sure it was still there.

“I don’t know,” she said, “midafternoon. Then I got up and dyed my hair.”

“It looks nice,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.” She was drawing a dark pencil outline around the edges of her lipstick. “Do you think anyone would miss me if I didn’t go out?”

“No one would miss you,” he said. “You’re like a part of the night.”

Anyone else would have taken that badly, but she was smiling as she set her lip-liner pencil down on the countertop. They were quiet for a while, Eli looking down at the ruined surface of the table. Someone had stubbed out a great many cigarettes on the wood, over a long period of time; the surface was scarred with dark craters and lines.