Emily St. John Mandel: Last Night in Montreal

Later he lit a candle in the bedroom and she lay beside him staring up at the ceiling. Sleep was out of the question. He waited, and after a while she began to speak again. A trajectory of cities, of places, of names. He wondered if she was telling the truth. There was no reason to suspect that she wasn’t. Her voice was nearly expressionless. I used to see mirages in the desert. Pools of water on the highway. We were driving in a small grey car. . She twisted onto her side, facing him, and her hand cupped the bone of his hip. A long stroke down the outside of his thigh. It was shadowless. I think the sand was almost white. We’d been driving for so long, and there was another car behind us. . She trailed off midsentence, stopped the motion of her hand. He held her close and touched her hair, kissed her softly on the forehead, Lilia, Lilia, it’s all right, shhh. . but she wasn’t upset, just absent, and he felt that she was slipping away from him. She smiled in the candlelight, but her eyes were unfocused. We must have driven through a thousand towns that year, and then we came into Cincinnati at night. .

He woke from a fitful dream of cars and deserts, a twilight kind of sleep. She was breathing beside him in the light of first morning, an arm extended over the tangle of sheets. Her lips were parted slightly, and he could see the movement of her eyes beneath her lids. Eli wondered what she was dreaming of and was shot through with sadness. He got up without waking her and went back to the café; the coffee was strong there, but the newspaper was failing him again, and he was still dazed and only half awake when he left. How could a story throw everything off so suddenly, so clearly? He felt the foundations breaking apart beneath them.

He found Thomas and Geneviève in the Third Cup Café and sat with them for a while trying to lose himself in complicated arguments, and then went to the gallery for an utterly uneventful four-hour shift. When he came home in the late afternoon she was in the bathroom. Judging by the razor blades on the edge of the bathtub, she’d long since finished shaving her legs; now she sat cross-legged in a foot of bathwater, removing her pubic hair with a pair of tweezers. This apparently required her complete attention; she barely glanced up at him when he entered the room. He’d seen her do this before, and it always unnerved him. He stood nearby for a second, watching her without comment, and then sat down on the toilet lid.

“That can’t possibly be making you happy,” he said.

She smiled.

“It makes me wince to look at it. Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said pleasantly. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

“That. . that doesn’t. .” he gestured toward her, but she didn’t look at him.

“What?”

“That, uh, that doesn’t hurt?”

“Oh,” she said. “No, not really.”

“It seems a bit obsessive, don’t you think?”

She didn’t reply.

He rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands in front of him, and stared between his wrists at the white tiled floor.

“I was just at work,” he said, “a little while ago. No one came into the gallery; it was just me standing there for four hours, staring at the walls.”

She was looking at him.

“And I was thinking about your story. And I couldn’t help but. . I was thinking about your story,” Eli said, “and I would be lying if I said it didn’t frighten me a little.”

She didn’t speak. Her face betrayed nothing. The small movements of her hand continued, silver tweezers distorted by ripples. The water was a lucid green.

“More than a little. The fact that you were abducted would be something unusual in itself, but it’s just. . it’s just,” he said, “that you always seem to leave. All of your stories are about you leaving.”

It gradually became clear that she wasn’t going to answer him.

“On the way home I bought you a pomegranate.” He leaned forward quickly to kiss her forehead and then sat back down on the toilet lid with her sweat on his lips.

“Thank you,” said Lilia. “That was nice of you.”

He watched her for a while in silence.

“Why do you like them so much?”

“Like what?”

“Pomegranates.”

“Oh.” There was a long pause, during which she became methodically more hairless. He was watching the point where the water touched her skin. Her limbs were slightly tanned, but the rest of her was a few shades paler. White stomach, green water, silver metal in her hand moving under the surface distorted by ripples, the meditative rhythm of her movements. She didn’t seem quite human; a pale clean-shaven creature, half mermaid, half girl. My aquatic love. The water, as always, was far too hot; a bead of sweat left a trail between her breasts. She looked slippery. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve just always liked them.”

“Are you evasive about everything?”

But she wouldn’t be drawn into an argument; she stopped tweezing, reached for the glass of water on the edge of the bathtub, sipped at it, held it to her forehead for a second, returned it to precisely the place where it had been before and took up the tweezers again, all without looking at him.

Eli couldn’t avoid the question anymore. He kept his voice as steady as possible and didn’t lift his gaze from the floor.

“I need to know if you’re going to leave me.”

She stopped then and set the tweezers beside the half-empty glass. She clasped her hands in the water and sat for a moment looking down at them.

“I might,” she said.

He stood up slowly and left the room. The apartment seemed foreign to him. He walked back and forth across the floor a few times, swiped his hand across his eyes, stood with his arms crossed in front of a window. He sat at his desk for a few minutes and then stood up again, opened a few books that he immediately closed, and finally settled on opening the window to the fire escape. Someone had left a book on the windowsill. He threw Delirious Things as far as he could into the empty air, realized what he was doing as the book left his hand and tried to catch it, too late; he swore softly and climbed out the window and spent some time looking for it from the fire-escape landing, peering down over the railing, but he couldn’t see it on the street below. He sat out there for a while longer, hoping someone below might pick it up and exclaim loudly enough for him to hear, at which point he could do something useful. People walked alone or in groups on the pavement, drove toward the Williamsburg Bridge or away from it, rode bicycles and carried on conversations; laughter carried up to the level of the fire escape. An airplane passed silently overhead. No one below seemed to pick up a book. Eli only went back inside when the sun began to drop below the level of the rooftops. A cold breeze was drifting off the river.

The apartment was silent. He found her in the bathtub, sitting cross-legged and staring down at her hands, the water grown cool around her. She was shivering, and it seemed she hadn’t moved since he left.

“I threw your book out the window,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She murmured something inaudible.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it. I just don’t want you to leave.”

“I know,” she whispered. “It’s not that I want to, Eli, it’s just that I’ve always. .”

“You’ve always what?”

“Try to imagine what it’s like,” she said. “I don’t know how to stay.”

“Come here.” He pulled her up out of the bathtub, threw a towel over her shoulders, and held her close to him. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest. She let her head fall on his shoulder, and the cold water in her hair seeped through to his skin. She let herself be led to the bedroom by his hand around her wrist; her pulse didn’t register against his fingertips. She eased herself down onto the bed, still without looking at him, and he saw for the first time that there were tears on her face. She pulled the duvet over her head and curled away from him.