Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

It wasn’t the accident itself that broke her, but the way he surrendered to it. It seemed, no matter how she tried to reconfigure the moment in her memory, that the detective looked sideways at the car forcing him off the road with a calm, almost eager expression. He was ready for the accident. There was a fleeting moment when he met Lilia’s eyes, just at the end: he smiled and allowed himself to slide over the edge. He made no discernible effort to stay on the road.

Michaela rose from the floor of the dressing room and left the room without speaking, picking her jacket up off the floor as she went, pulling it on over her lopsided wings. Eli followed her up the stairs, lost her in the crowds on the dance floor, and found her again on the frozen sidewalk outside, shivering and speaking into her cell phone. “I don’t care,” she said, “meet me there anyway.” She put the cell phone in her jacket pocket and looked at him as if they’d never met.

“Michaela?”

“Eli,” she said.

“Who were you talking to?”

She looked at him without answering. There was a blankness about her. He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

“I told you the story,” he said. “Now you have to tell me where she is.”

“I don’t know. She was here the night you came.” She began walking away from him with stiff, tottering steps; he reached out to steady her, and they walked together arm in arm. “She was in the dressing room that night, before I brought you down there. I guess I should’ve brought you down sooner, before she had a chance to leave.” She stopped, pulled her arm away from his, fumbled in her jacket pocket. “She said she’d wait for me in the dressing room till I came back,” she muttered. “Fucking liar.” She extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her jacket.

“People fail you,” he said impatiently. “It’s a chance you take. Where’s Lilia?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “She left. She was supposed to be in my dressing room when you. . fuck, ” she said. The lighter was clicking uselessly. “You have a light?”

There were two matchbooks in his pocket. He didn’t smoke but had at some point acquired the habit of compulsively collecting promotional matchbooks from restaurants.

“You want Le Gamin matches or Café Universale matches?”

She gave him a blankly vicious look, like a wild creature deprived of food. He gave her both matchbooks.

“Your pronunciation’s terrible,” she said when the cigarette was safely ignited. They’d made slow, wavering progress to a street corner; the light changed to red just as they reached the edge of the sidewalk, and he watched her shivering and smoking. He took her arm again and she leaned into him silently.

“I’m sorry, Michaela,” he said uselessly. “It’s an awful story.” The cold was agonizing; he’d never imagined this quality of wind. It was possible to imagine his blood freezing under his skin, and there was ice in his eyelashes. It was eleven P.M. on a Sunday, and Rue Ste.-Catherine was all but deserted. Neon signs flickered from behind the barred windows of clubs. Girls Girls Girls. Danseuses Nues.

“I need to find Lilia,” he said.

She laughed. “You’d be amazed at how many people have said that in her lifetime. I don’t know where she is.”

“You have to know, you promised to tell me. Is she still in the city?”

She didn’t answer. They’d crossed the street and were heading slowly downhill, past the Musique Plus building, past electronics stores and closed cafés. They were passing into a surreal public space that he’d walked past many times without venturing into, a sweeping expanse of concrete and terraced steps. It was lit by regularly spaced black lampposts, each holding five round orbs of blue light. In the midst of all this was a rectangular pool, utterly still and locked in dark ice.

Michaela seemed exhausted; she was leaning on his arm, breathing heavily. She broke away from him to walk slowly up the steps, sat down haltingly about halfway to the top. She stayed there in an apparent daze, smoking, while he shivered up and down and tried to figure out what to do. Her teeth were chattering. After a couple of minutes he sat beside her, wrapped his arms around his body, and tried to convince himself that he would someday regain feeling in his toes.

“Well, look,” he said, “when did you see her last?”

She opened her box of cigarettes, extracted one delicately, and then lit it expertly with the remains of its predecessor. She tossed the old one away, toward the street; he watched it smolder for an instant on the ice. She didn’t seem likely to answer him, so he tried another tack.

“What’s this place called?”

“Place-des-Arts. It’s nicer in summer.” She removed the cigarette from her mouth, studied it while she exhaled, reinserted it languidly, all without looking at him.

“I think,” said Eli, “that we should probably keep moving. It can’t be more than twenty degrees out.”

She glanced at him briefly. “I don’t know Fahrenheit.”

“It’s no warmer in Celsius. The point is that we’re going to die out here. We should go,” he said, but Michaela was weeping. She swept tears away from her face with one shaking hand and held the cigarette loosely with the other. Ashes drifted to the snow.

“I always thought I wanted to know what happened,” she said.

“Hey,” he said helplessly, “it’ll be all right. We just have to keep walking. We’ll go somewhere, my sailor, we’ll go to the café, I’ll buy you tea. .”

She was pulling herself up by a metal railing, shaking her head.

“I don’t want tea, ” she said.

He held her shoulder to steady her, and her silver jacket was shining in the blue lights of the plaza. He looked away from her, toward the long expanse of Rue Ste.-Catherine. A nightmare of locked doors and closed restaurants and buzzing neon signs, panhandlers begging to be rescued from the cold, wrong city, and he wished to be absolutely anywhere else. He wished he had never walked into the Café Matisse in Brooklyn, or at least that he’d waited for his own table instead of sitting down with Lilia. He wished he had been paying attention on the morning she’d left and stopped her on her way out the door. He wished, if those previous wishes had failed, that at least he hadn’t followed her here. An eternal half-life in Brooklyn, he thought, an eternal half-life of posers and unfinished manuscripts and fake artists and failed scholarship and guilt-inducing phone calls from his mother and letters from his unmatchable and unsurpassable brother would have been better than an hour of this.

“I don’t understand how you can live here,” he said.

“I can’t. I’ll be leaving soon.” She started up the steps, and he stepped close to hold her arm again. There was a layer of ice over everything; they were passing slowly over the concrete plaza away from Rue St.-Catherine, stepping carefully, Rue Ontario deserted on the other side. “Do you know what Lilia said about this city?”

The name still made his heart constrict in his chest.

“What did she say about it?”

“She said she’d traveled one city too far. She said she wished she’d never left New York.”

And there in the concrete plaza, the weight of centuries and continents lifted away from him into the night; he was suddenly, absurdly, fantastically light. She wished she’d never left him. This could all be undone. He could have leapt into the air just then and never landed, but he stayed on the ground and seized her shoulders instead.

“Please tell me where she is.”

“You’ll go back to Brooklyn with her,” she said, “and I’ll still be here.”