Last Night in Montreal (15 page)

31.

“Did you find her?” the bellboy asked.

It was early afternoon, and Eli had woken up only recently; he hadn’t noticed the bellboy board the elevator. He looked up, blinking, and remembered being given directions to Club Electrolite on his first night in the city.

“The girl you’re looking for,” the bellboy said.

“No. Not yet.”

“Where have you been looking?” the bellboy asked, just before the doors opened into the lobby.

“Everywhere,” Eli said.

In the afternoons he walked through Montreal with a map of the city folded up small in his jacket pocket. He walked for miles, moved in and out of the subway system, tried to look at everyone he could in case they might be Lilia. It was an effort to keep his head up, to look into the faces of passersby; his eyes watered from the cold and then his eyelashes froze, and he was forever blinking against the winter light. In the old city he walked the old narrow streets along the waterfront, stopping into a café every time he lost feeling in his feet. He left the first footsteps in pristine snow in the deserted parks; he lingered in English bookstores in Westmount and French bookstores in Mile End, on the theory that Lilia might buy books in either language and might be just as desperate to escape the cold as he was. Downtown he found a building that he thought Lilia might like, and he returned again and again, at first just in case she arrived to photograph it, and later on because it moved him. It was an old and very narrow building, three stories high and surrounded on three sides by a cracked parking lot, and it had been transformed almost entirely into an anime cartoon: on the east side was a woman screaming, with dark purple hair and furious pale-blue eyes. Her face took up the entire side of the building. On the west side a man stared west, blond and suspicious and narrow-eyed, partially obscured by a billboard advertising Cuban vacations, but it was the screaming woman who held Eli’s attention. She was screaming in fury, he realized, not fear. There could be no doubt when he studied her eyes. Eli couldn’t stand out in the street for very long in the cold, but he returned to the cartoon building over and over again, wishing he was a photographer, standing on nearby corners and looking up at it. The painted woman screamed out over the city, east toward the low brick apartment blocks of Centre-Sud, over the alleyways turned by graffiti artists into dark beautiful murals, over the dilapidated houses with their spiral staircases and strange turrets, the endless porn theaters and strip clubs, the people who walked on frozen sidewalks with their hands in their pockets and their breath turning to ice inside their scarves. She seemed like the only passionate thing in the landscape, and her fury gave him a certain kind of hope.

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.

32.

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.

Or perhaps it’s just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real? The witness, the man in the car in the parking lot told himself miserably, is not unimportant. (The couple was walking away from him now, toward Clara’s house.) He had been traveling alone for thousands of miles, and the only thing he was at all certain of at that moment was that he didn’t want to catch them anymore. He only wanted to watch their flight. Christopher raised his head from the steering wheel, rubbed his face with his hands, and decided that he needed to talk to Clara.

Two thousand miles to the north in another country, Michaela was sitting alone in her room. She was smoking fitfully, looking out the window. She had just turned sixteen, and she’d stopped going to school to celebrate. While she waited for her father to come back to her (she hadn’t seen him in a year), she began taking walks to the old city alleyways on weekends with a measuring tape. She had wished her whole life for a chance to walk on a high wire without a safety net. She had ideas involving alleyways and lengths of rope.

33.

Clara in the mornings: she came down the stairs in a bathrobe, yawning, the stairs creaking under her feet. In the kitchen she stood for a moment by the open back door. She lived on the edge of town, and all the backyards on her side of the street opened out into the desert, a landscape of cacti and dry grass and scrubby blue-grey sagebrush that kept going until it met the hazy outlines of the mountains far away. The collapsed wreckage of an ancient picket fence marked a rectangle behind the house, but the lawn had been overtaken two decades before by the desert.

She came away from the door to begin making coffee. Lilia watched her from the kitchen table; she liked to sit there in the mornings, partly to read in the warm kitchen light and mostly to drink coffee with Clara. Clara poured coffee beans into an ancient cast-iron grinder mounted on the wall, measuring by eye, and then turned the iron handle until the smell of ground coffee filled the room. On the rare mornings when Lilia slept later than Clara did, this was the sound that woke her up. Clara was moving efficiently in and out of cupboards, removing mugs and the coffeepot, she was boiling water on the stove. She used cloth filters in a battered plastic funnel the color of sand. She poured boiling water until the clear glass coffeepot was almost full and then poured the coffee into the biggest mug in the house. She stood at the counter, sipping it black, and then she poured a second cup for Lilia, this one with milk in it. It was only after she’d brought the mugs to the table and sat in the chair closest to the back door, only after she’d taken another look out at the beautifully degenerate back lawn and the sky overhead, only then was she prepared to wish Lilia good morning, to have her first conversation of the day. She would smile companionably at Lilia before that moment, but her solitude before her first cup of coffee was almost impenetrable.

Lilia wrote in her notebook:
This is life in a house.
Clara had never traveled, and was perfectly serene. She’d lived alone for years in her small desert town and enjoyed her independence, although now her face lit up when Lilia’s father entered the room.

When Lilia’s father was with Clara he no longer looked like he was being chased, and Lilia was old enough to recognize this as happiness, but she was already moving away again. She was almost sixteen, and fraught with restlessness. She had had the same name for months now:
Alessandra.
The name was beautiful, but it wasn’t hers. She loved her father, she adored Clara, she was desperate to leave. She walked for hours along the streets of this dusty outpost, she wandered out into the desert behind the house, she read endlessly and translated literature in and out of four languages, she lay awake at night and felt enclosed in the silent house. She had been thinking lately about traveling away on her own. But at that moment the kitchen was cool and pleasant and she was happy to be there, and Clara stood with her back to the kitchen table looking out the window above the kitchen sink, sipping her coffee for a moment before she brought Lilia a cup. She set the coffee down on the table in front of her, kissed Lilia unexpectedly on the forehead, smiled as she moved around the table to her favorite chair.

“Happy birthday,” she said. “I’ll bring home a cake tonight.”

In the evening Lilia father and Clara sang “Happy Birthday,” her father’s arm over Clara’s shoulders, and Clara pulled a cake triumphantly from a square white box. The cake was white, with
Sweet 16
across the top in pink icing. Later the three of them climbed out Lilia’s bedroom window to look at stars from the rooftop.

“It’s hard to imagine a place much quieter than this,” her father said. There was a dog barking somewhere far away, sporadically, but it only deepened the surrounding silence. Lilia held her hand up white against the stars and had the feeling of floating in space.

“It’s why I stay here,” Clara said.

“Are you ever going to leave?” Lilia asked.

Clara was quiet for a moment. “No. I mean, who can predict the future, but I don’t think so. I left a couple of times before, and I didn’t like it. Everywhere else was so . . . loud,” she said. “It was too loud out there, in every way. The people weren’t nice. No one knew my name. I didn’t like it. I don’t like traveling.”

They had been in Stillspell for five months and the next day they were leaving. Just for four days, one last little birthday road trip for old times’ sake, and then they were coming back to Stillspell forever.
Forever
is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable. They left in the morning; her father’s car pulled out of Clara’s driveway with the suitcases in the back, Clara waving from the porch; Lilia waved out the window until she was certain Clara couldn’t see her anymore, the car turning behind a row of decrepit storefronts at the end of the street, and then she settled back in the passenger seat with a guilty sense of rhythm restored.

“Where should we go, my lily?”

“The desert for a day or two. Then the mountains.”

“Brilliant plan.” He nodded toward the map folded on the dashboard. “What’s our course?”

Lilia took the map in her hands, marked with red lines drawn over the past nine years in motel rooms all around the continent, faded from nine summers of sun through the windshield. “Hard to say,” she said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the navigator?”

“I know, I know, but look how faded this map is . . .”

He glanced at it and laughed. “We should hang this one in the house,” he said, “and buy a new one for the road.”

Clara was turning to go back into the house when she saw another car approaching; this one was blue, and had foreign license plates. It pulled into her driveway as Lilia’s father’s car was turning out of sight. Clara stood by the door, obscurely afraid. A neighbor was trimming and trimming and trimming the adjoining hedge.

The man who emerged from the car was tall and stoop-shouldered, and he held a hat in front of his rumpled suit. He smiled as he approached her, but she didn’t smile back.

“Clara Williams?”

She nodded and glanced at the neighbor, who met her eyes above the hedge and then looked away quickly.

“My name is Christopher Graydon. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Not here,” she said.