Last Night in Montreal (13 page)

“Are you all right?”

“Of course,” Michaela said, but in those moments her smile seemed empty, her eyes unfocused. He wanted to press her for Lilia’s location, to somehow force her to produce Lilia from thin air, but it was impossible: there was something broken in her, something exposed and open to the elements that made forcing her to do anything seem almost unthinkable. She claimed she didn’t know where Lilia was. Then she amended this and claimed that she did know where Lilia was but that she wouldn’t tell him unless he told her about the car accident. She claimed that Lilia was still in the city but that she wasn’t sure where. Then she claimed that Lilia was going to reappear at the moment they least expected, but the moment they least expected never seemed to come, and days passed slowly in the startling cold.

“Can I get you something?”

She wanted tea. A day or two earlier Eli had bought a dictionary and a phrasebook and figured out how to order tea in what he believed to be reasonably passable French, but the barista invariably replied in English no matter which language he tried to use. It seemed clear that this was a rejection of some kind, but he hadn’t decided whether it was a rejection of the English language or a rejection of him personally, and either way it was exhausting and he preferred not to think about it too much. He went to the counter and came back with tea and she sipped at it, looking away from him, her mind elsewhere. She looked out the window and told him again how she’d like to travel away from here, but in the week that he’d known her Eli had heard this monologue four or five times, and he was quickly running out of sympathetic comments. He could only nod and watch her light another cigarette.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Eli said. “How did Lilia know who you are?”

“What?”

“To write you the letter. You said she wrote to you from New York.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment. “It isn’t entirely accurate to say she wrote to me, actually.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. Her eyes were troubled. “It was a letter to my father. I got a call from the private investigative agency, maybe a month and a half ago. They said he’d left six months earlier and they didn’t have a forwarding address for him, and they didn’t know what to do with all his mail. I was hoping maybe someone had sent him money, so I went there and picked up his mail and opened all of it. It was mostly junk, but there was a letter from Lilia.”

“What did she write?”

“She requested a truce. She said she was tired of always being followed and watched.”

“She was being followed?”

“All her life,” Michaela said.

26.

Lilia turned fourteen in a small city in Illinois, and her father gave her a camera. Her first shot was out the window of the chain restaurant where she was eating birthday cake, at the movie theater blinking across the wide evening street. Somewhere near Indianapolis she knelt down by the side of the road to take a picture of a sign with the paint peeling off—
Farm-Fresh Corn and Tomatoes—
and found beauty in the worn wood and faded lettering. She developed the film after that at one-hour photo places, loitering around shopping malls until the pictures were ready, and pored over them in the car, in a park, in the motel room at night. The pictures gave her a sense of continuity, of a record being constructed; she had been in flight for seven years now, traveling quickly, and it was a bright pleasure to have a means of capturing the flight path. She took pictures of signs, mostly, although not signs that could be traced easily to any particular place. She especially liked signs with misspellings, or with the paint peeling off. She liked taking very wide shots of deserted streets, and pictures of cars approaching from great distances away.

Lilia was allowed to take pictures of anything except herself and her father. “We must be careful,” he warned, “about the accumulation of evidence.”

27.

Michaela was always running out of cigarettes. She coughed dryly sometimes, in a rasping way, and the spasms brightened the red veins of her eyes. Her eyes were almost always red, even when sober; she couldn’t sleep. She would do anything to avoid being alone at night with her insomnia, and Eli was willing to go to great lengths to avoid being alone in general; they sat together in the café at the corner, watching the gradual progression of night. The night passed through stages: first the crowds of beautiful strangers in the electric midnight, enthusiastic and painted and dressed for the clubs, then the fleet of mismatched taxicabs at the intersection, and later an inky blackness, these last few hours of night, four in the morning and the occasional drunken kid stumbling by with a slice of greasy pizza, a girl with fishnet stockings and vacant eyes weaving over the sidewalk, the cold amber of streetlights on pavement and ice. After the taxis passed, wave upon wave, the streets went quiet till morning. The city slept uneasily, under the sign of the cross: it shone in brilliant white high up on the hillside outside Eli’s hotel-room window, a charm over the wide blank streets and deserted sidewalks and shadowy parks.

Michaela laughed softly to herself, said something inaudible. She was an original, but slowly losing her mind, and it seemed to Eli that it was departing in pieces: the names of certain acquaintances, the linear connectors that hold thoughts together after dark, certain bridges of logic and convention, the part of the mind that knows when to let go and send the body sliding into sleep. She was dazed and tired in the afternoons, sharp and lucid in the evenings, and slipping into incoherence by three
A.M.

“What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.”

“My parents were in a traveling circus,” she told him, gorgeous and exhausted and coming undone sometime between three and four o’clock in the morning. “Did I tell you that?”

“A couple of times, yes. It’s kind of unbelievable.”

“Isn’t it? A family of actual circus people. My grandparents too,” she said. “Both sides. Do you believe the desire to travel is genetic?”

“You sound like Lilia.”

Her name broke the conversation and they stayed together for a long time in silence. The moon was setting behind the rooftops on the other side of Boulevard St.-Laurent. They had had the same argument every night for a week: Michaela wasn’t going to tell him where Lilia was unless he told her about the accident. Strange limbo. Michaela lit a new cigarette off the end of the old one and then dropped the old one into the last few drops of her tea. She turned the still-warm glass between her hands for a while, smoking, looking down at the extinguished ashes. She smoked with the practiced elegance of a career smoker, one who was perhaps born holding a cigarette and doesn’t mind admitting that she smokes rather well.

“She traveled beautifully,” she said finally.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who actually literally chain smokes,” Eli said.

“She’s a bit like a ghost,” said Michaela, still thinking of Lilia.

“No, not a ghost. It’s the world that’s ghostly.”

“What was it like, living with her?”

“She was different than anyone I’ve ever . . . she had strange habits,” he said. “But there was something perfect about it.”

“All of it?”

“Of course not all of it. Nothing’s perfect all the time.”

“What, then?”

“The times we were alone. We spent a lot of time alone in the apartment, or out walking, and there was this silence that’d fall between us, and I know this sounds . . . I know this sounds stupid or absurd, but it was perfect. I can’t explain it any better than that. The silence was perfect.”

“Silence? What else?”

“We had these friends in Brooklyn—actually,
I
had these friends, she didn’t have friends, she came out of thin air with a suitcase— anyway, I had these friends who thought they were artists. Well, I don’t know, maybe they were. Maybe we were. I can’t judge it anymore, what we were doing there. I didn’t think that what we were doing was good enough at the time, but maybe it was. I don’t know.”

She watched him without speaking.

“You know what bothered me about it? Everyone was supposedly committed to the pursuit of truth and beauty, or at least one of those things, but no one was actually doing anything about it, and it seemed all wrong to me. The inertia, I mean. The inertia made everything seem fraudulent. There we were, talking about art, but no one was
doing
anything except Lilia. She was taking pictures. She spoke four languages.”

“Five.”

“You’re counting Russian? Anyway, what I’m saying is that no one was doing anything important except her. She worked as a dishwasher, she lived cheaply, she took beautiful pictures and translated things. She never made any money off it, it was just something she did. The point is, she never talked about it. She never seemed like she was posing. She never theorized or deconstructed. She just practiced her art, practiced it instead of analyzing it to death, and it rendered the rest of us fraudulent. There aren’t many people in the world . . .” He stopped talking and shook his head. He didn’t trust himself to continue.

Michaela was silent for a moment, looking down at her hands. “I have a picture she took,” she said finally, “if you’d like to see it.” She was reaching for her purse at her feet. She put it on the table, the fake leather gleaming under the café lights, pulled an envelope from a secret inside pocket and passed it to him.

The corners of the envelope were softened with wear. It held a single black-and-white photograph of Michaela and Lilia standing side by side before the mirror of a public washroom, a line of cubicle doors open behind them. Lilia held her camera just below her face with both hands. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her face was serious and still. Michaela, beside her, was smiling slightly, and both of them were watching Lilia’s eyes in the mirror.

“Where was this taken?” He couldn’t stop his voice from shaking. He was looking into Lilia’s eyes for a trace of something, remorse perhaps, but of course she could have been thinking of anything.

“Here,” she said. “In the washroom at the back.” She took the photograph from him, put it back in the envelope, and put the envelope back in the secret pocket in her bag.

28.

The year Michaela was fifteen, she lived alone. Her father was traveling in another country.

Christopher was moving quickly. He was having strange dreams about cars and pay phones. He had never felt so clear. In a mountainous state in the middle of the country, he realized that he’d fallen into Lilia’s wake. He’d felt himself for a long time to be moving closer to her, drawing near as he circled outward from the town of Leonard, Arizona, but it still seemed faintly miraculous when the trail suddenly became clear. At first he didn’t believe it. But a woman at a quiet gas station said that yes, upon reflection, she did seem to recall a man and his daughter passing through yesterday morning with suitcases in the back of the car, and a clerk at a motel down the highway said the same thing. He trailed them down into Florida, through Miami, then up into a semiurban hinterland of highway overpasses and towns with wide empty streets, straggly palm trees, blank almost identical houses set far back from the street. He followed them silently, traveling alongside, propelled and haunted by visions and dreams. He moved alone and weightless over several Midwestern states, just behind or sometimes alongside the fugitives, just out of sight. He had always had an intuition stronger than any of his senses, and it seemed that it had hardened and crystallized into something formidable. What he found, and this was both disturbing and miraculous (that word again, but no other word came to him when he thought of it), was that after he’d seen them for the first time (emerging like apparitions from a chain restaurant in a small city in Illinois across the street from a movie theater on Lilia’s birthday, climbing back into their car, Lilia stopping first to take a photograph of the street) he always knew where they were. Sometimes he gave them a head start, to test himself: an hour, a day. He’d stay in his motel room, reading in solitude for long periods; he bought books in the towns he passed through, histories and biographies mostly, and left them behind in motel rooms when he was done with them. The only books he kept were a battered copy of
Bullfinch’s Mythology
and the two Bibles that Lilia had written in. The page that she’d written on had been torn out of one of them years earlier—he suspected his vanished wife—but he had a photocopy of the missing note folded into the back page. It was the Shakespeare that he went back to most frequently; he had been reading
Twelfth Night
back when he’d first taken Lilia’s case, and there was something soothing about the continuity. He would read for a while and later he would check out of the motel room and drive after them, and find as he traveled that he knew where they’d gone; sure enough, he’d see their latest car in a motel parking lot, or drive past on the street of the next town as they walked together. He felt that he could exist this way forever; just behind them, watching over them, traveling alongside, aware of their every move, able to bring them in at any time. He didn’t have to do anything. The connection was effortless. His family was suspended; it was as though they’d disappeared. Weeks passed when he didn’t think of them. It was a beautiful state of limbo to be in.

Six months after Christopher had left his daughter in Montreal he pulled over to the side of the road in Oklahoma after a full day of driving, a little lost, and stared hard at the horizon for a while to clear his head. That was the first time he realized how long he’d been gone; in the next town he wired money to his daughter’s checking account and kept driving.

29.

On Eli’s third week in the city he thought he heard Lilia’s name. It was one
A.M.
at the Café Depot, and he was waiting alone for Michaela to arrive; he looked up at the two girls speaking French at a nearby table, but waited until one stood up to leave before he made his approach.

“Excusez-moi,” he said awkwardly, to the girl remaining.

She looked up and smiled. “You sound like you’d prefer to speak English,” she said.

He found himself smiling back. “I would,” he admitted. “Thank you.”

“I’ve seen you here a few times,” she said.

“I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s just that I’ve been looking for someone in the city, a friend, and I thought I heard you say her name just now. Lilia?”

She shook her head, still smiling but puzzled, and then brightened suddenly.
“Lillian,”
she said. “Lillian Bouchard. We were just talking about her. That was the name you heard.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said. She extended a hand. “Ondine. Where are you from?”

“Eli.” Her hand was soft and warm in his own. “Visiting from New York.”

“New York,” she said vaguely, and he understood from her smile that she’d never been. “First time in Montreal?”

He nodded.

“Welcome to the city,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’d ask you to join me, but I’m meeting someone . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll see you again sometime. I hope you find her.”

“Thank you.”

He returned to his table and sat with his back to her, looking out at the cold grey street. He waited for Michaela every night until three
A.M.
, until four, knowing she would eventually appear. Or he sometimes stood against a wall at Club Electrolite, watching her movements on her tiny stage, looking for Lilia in the crowd. The crowd barely noticed her, and it occurred to him one night that she was as much a fixture as the stage she stood on. She was like the disco ball that spun near the ceiling, throwing light into the crowded darkness; one more expendable component of an endless night, her reflection ricocheting endlessly between mirrored walls. There were two other regular dancers there whom he’d been introduced to, Marie-Eve and Veronique, but to his eye they looked bored and stilted, no match for Michaela’s loose-limbed extravagance. When the sound and the humanity got to be too much he pushed open the staff door, nodded at the bouncer who sat reading Dostoevsky just behind it, and made his way down to Michaela’s dressing room. The building vibrated with dance music around him, and the pipes made strange noises; it was a little like being in the depths of a ship.

Her room wasn’t large. There was a long counter with a sink, a chair beside a very small rickety table, and a clothing rack on wheels in the corner. Behind the clothing rack was a child-sized mattress, on which Michaela usually slept; it had a single sheet, a flat stained pillow, and an old quilt with little white sheep frolicking around the edges. He had a vision of Michaela as a very small child, lying under the sheep quilt in peaceful sleep, and on bad days the thought brought tears to his eyes. When he couldn’t stand the crowd on the dance floor he went down to her dressing room and sat there for an hour, two hours, three, trying to concentrate on the idea of Lilia and thinking instead of Michaela on the stage until her stiletto footsteps sounded softly on the worn carpet outside, until the cheap door opened and she closed it behind her and sank into the chair by the makeup counter. She had a way of absorbing the light when she came into a room. It didn’t make her brilliant; she emanated a certain quality of darkness, clear and vivid, a kind of negative light.

“You didn’t want to wait at the coffee shop?” she asked without looking at him.

“It’s too cold to go up there. I’ve been walking all day. I wanted to make sure you had a place to stay tonight.”

“Oh, it’ll get colder. Have you seen my pills? Did Jacques bring them?”

“They’re in the bag under the sink. Do you have a place to stay?”

She shrugged, not paying attention, pulling pill bottles from the paper bag that Jacques had brought and reading the labels. As far as Eli knew, she had no permanent address; she maintained a number of casual lovers and slept at their apartments sometimes. On other nights she slept in her dressing room. She was addicted to a complicated array of prescription medications, which the owner of the club helpfully provided. “He takes care of his assets,” was all she’d say when asked about this odd arrangement, and she refused to elaborate. The owner, Jacques, came into her dressing room in the evenings with brown bags of pills from the pharmacy, cans of soda, greasy takeout food. She picked halfheartedly at the food and threw most of it away. Jacques was a tall, sad-eyed man with a seemingly limitless collection of silk shirts and a resigned expression. Around him Michaela was quiet, almost muted; she said
merci
when he gave her the pills and the food and the soda and said little else. Jacques carried himself with an air of long-suffering calm and said almost nothing himself. He didn’t appear to have noticed Eli, which gave Eli the impression that he was far from the first guest to take up semiresidence in Michaela’s dressing room, and then he spent hours and days wondering why he was upset by this.

“I wanted to offer,” Eli said, “if you wanted to, you could stay in my hotel room. I’ll sleep on the carpet.”

“I don’t stay in hotel rooms.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s okay.” At length she selected two bottles from the paper bag that Jacques had brought her and swallowed a pill from each. “I have to go up to the VIP lounge in an hour anyway. I think I’ll just sleep here tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s too cold to go outside.”

He stood up awkwardly. “I’ll meet you here tomorrow, then.”

“Fine. Don’t come till afternoon.”

He stopped by the door. “Did Lilia used to wait for you like this?”

“Goodnight, Eli,” Michaela said.

The cold outside felt like death to him. He walked as quickly as possible toward the hotel, composing a letter to Lilia in his head.
I want to find you. I want to disappear with you. I want to find you, and in the finding to make you disappear into me. I want to be your language. I want to be your translator. I want to be your dictionary. I want to be your map. I wish, I wish, I wish I knew where you are tonight.
In the hotel room he wrote all of this down on hotel stationery, crumpled it up and threw it away. The words brought her no closer to him.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
Michaela was worn and sleepy, a night creature blinking in the winter light. He met her at the side door of Club Electrolite and then had to wait while she ran back downstairs to get something she’d forgotten to put in her handbag. He paced back and forth in the frozen alleyway, jumped up and down to try to unthaw his feet, did a few jumping jacks and had to stop because the cold hurt his lungs, finally knocked on the door again. Another dancer opened it.

“Veronique,” he said, “I’m just waiting for Michaela. Could I wait inside?”

She had stringy blond hair and a suspicious way of looking at him, and he hadn’t been sure in their previous meetings whether or not she spoke English. She hesitated. He shivered impatiently in the landscape of grimy ice.

“Okay,” she said. She stepped back just enough to let him in and then stood looking at him in the dim hallway, at the top of the stairs leading down to the dressing room, and he felt absurdly compelled to make small talk.

“It’s cold,” he said.

“It gets colder.”

“You’ve lived here all your life?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“From Chicoutimi,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“North. Very north.”

He nodded. “Even colder than here?”

“You like it here?” Veronique asked, perhaps not understanding.

“No.”

She stared blankly at him for a moment.

“You wait outside,” she said.

“Fine. Tell Michaela to hurry up.”

The door closed behind him and he stood in the alleyway again. He kicked at an empty vodka bottle and it shattered instantly; he was staring at the broken glass when Michaela emerged. They walked a few blocks together down St. Catherine Street, retreated into Montreal’s endless underground mall to escape the cold. She was pale and quiet, rubbing her wrists from time to time as they walked.

“I think the cruise ship’s still there,” she said suddenly. “I was thinking about going down there earlier.” They had stopped at the foot of a low flight of stairs between malls; a cellist had set himself up on an overturned milk carton and was playing Bach’s first cello suite. She was leaning against a wall, staring into space, and she had seemed so lost in the music that Eli was startled to hear her speak.

“Cruise ship?”

“There’s supposed to be this colossal cruise ship down at the harbor. I read it in the paper earlier.”

“Do you want to go see it?”

She shook her head. “I did. But it’s so cold out there.”

“How late did you work last night?”

“Five
A.M.
,” she said. “Bachelor party in the VIP lounge.”

“What kind of bachelor party?”

She gave him a look and started walking again. The cellist glanced up at her as they passed, and she smiled. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I hear music like this, and I understand why people love this place.” The music was fading behind them. He’d been down here before with her, and he’d thought sometimes that the underground mall seemed to go on forever; an eternity of Gaps and stores that sold cell phones and wheeled carts that sold muffins, broken here and there by food courts. The same restaurants reappeared every few minutes. McDonald’s, Sbarro’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s. Lilia remained vanishing. There was Christmas music on the sound system, but turned down too low to make out which language the lyrics were in.

“I’m tired,” she said. They stopped in a random food court, this one all white, and she sprawled loosely at a round white plastic table. She cut a strange figure in this pale underground place: black platform boots and a silver jacket, short white hair standing on end. Red lipstick, grey eye shadow, startling green eyes. She looked drawn and sickly in the fluorescent light.

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” he said, “going to see the ship.”

“It’s so cold outside. Imagine what it’s like down by the river.”

He nodded and didn’t speak for a while.

“My bed at home,” he said, “it has a figurehead attached to it. Talking about ships always makes me think of it.”

“Why does it have a figurehead?”

“I don’t know, it just does. It’s made out of a fishing boat, and my mother . . . Michaela, listen. I’ve been here over a week, and I can’t afford to stay much longer. I want you to tell me where Lilia is.”

She smiled without looking at him. She seemed peaceful at that moment, untroubled, looking far away. “Look, my position hasn’t changed,” she said. “I need to know about the accident.” Michaela was rubbing her wrists again; she seemed to have returned from the VIP lounge with some mild rope burns.

“But you know where she is.”

“I won’t tell you where she is until you tell me about the accident. You know that.”

Michaela and Eli lapsed into silence beneath the fabric leaves of a synthetic tree, and the Christmas music on the sound system was a film of white noise over the surface of the day. At this hour of the afternoon, the food court wasn’t crowded. Passersby moved silently through a landscape of plastic tables and pale tiles, weighed down by their winter coats. A few of the other tables were occupied: blank-eyed office workers on lunch breaks ate greasy food from Styrofoam containers and stared into space. A pair of girls with Gap name tags picked at muffins and laughed nervously at a table nearby.

A food-court worker was cleaning tables. He gestured at a tray on Michaela’s table and said something to her; Eli watched her, waiting for her to respond, but she only looked at him. He repeated himself.

“Je ne parle pas français,” she said.

The man shook his head and retreated, the tray untouched.

“What did you just say to him?”

“I said,
I don’t speak French.
It’s a useful phrase around here.”

“You don’t speak French?”

“Not really. A few words. I never could. He could’ve just repeated himself in English.”

“He might not speak English. How can you live here without speaking French?”

“Exactly,” she said, still watching the food-court worker. “It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d never left the circus.”

He looked at her across the white plastic table, thinking of the couple who had laughed at him when he’d asked for directions in English on his first night in the city, and felt oddly that he was beginning to understand her.

OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ
the cold deepened until the streets froze white. Michaela drank black tea at five in the morning, dazed with pills and insomnia but unable to sleep. Eli kept thinking that if he sat with her long enough, if she got tired enough in the small hours of the morning, if she kept talking and talking the way she did in this state, she’d slip; she’d say where Lilia was, where Lilia might be, if Lilia was still in this frozen city, if Lilia was even still alive, if Lilia had even ever actually existed in the first place, but instead she told him stories about terrorists and circuses.

“Did I ever tell you about the Second Cup bomber?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think you did.”

There had been a brief period during Michaela’s adolescence when cafés with English names had had a tendency to detonate, which she seemed to think squared nicely with the general drama of her teenaged years. She’d taken to spending a great deal of time in cafés around that period, in the hope of being caught up in something dramatic and historical and great, but then the solitary lunatic had been caught and jailed before another one exploded. She seemed disappointed by this. He stared at her, unsure whether she was telling the truth, and she launched into another story about her grandparents’ circus instead of telling him where Lilia was.