Last Night in Montreal

1

No one stays forever. On the morning of her disappearance Lilia woke early, and lay still for a moment in the bed. It was the last day of October. She slept naked.

Eli was up already, and working on his thesis; while he was typing up the previous day’s research notes he heard the sounds of awakening, the rustling of the duvet, her bare footsteps on the hardwood floor, and she kissed the top of his head very lightly en route to the bathroom — he made an agreeable humming noise but didn’t look up — and the shower started on the other side of the almost-closed door. Steam and the scent of apricot shampoo escaped around the edges. She stayed in the shower for forty-five minutes, but this wasn’t unusual; the day was still unremarkable. Eli glanced up briefly when she emerged from the bathroom. Lilia, naked: pale skin wrapped in a soft white towel, short dark hair wet on her forehead, and she smiled when he met her eyes.

“Good morning,” he said. Smiling back at her. “How did you sleep?” He was already typing again.

She kissed his hair again instead of answering, and left a trail of wet footprints all the way back to the bedroom. He heard her towel fall softly to the bedroom floor and he wanted to go and make love to her just then; but he was immersed so deeply in the work that morning, accomplishing things, and he didn’t want to break the spell. He heard a dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom.

She came out dressed all in black, as she almost always did, and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trash can before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined — later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn’t stood in front of the sofa at all — had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point.

Later he was certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate, but after a few too many nights of lying awake and considering things, the quality began to erode. In retrospect the sequence of events is a little hazy, images running into each other and becoming slightly confused: she’s across the room, she’s kissing him for a third time — and why doesn’t he look up and kiss her? Her last kiss lands on his head — and putting on her shoes; does she kiss him before she puts on her shoes, or afterward? He can’t swear to it one way or the other. Later on he examined his memory for signs until every detail seemed ominous, but eventually he had to conclude that there was nothing strange about her that day. It was a morning like any other, exquisitely ordinary in every respect.

“I’m going for the paper,” she said. The door closed behind her. He heard her clattering footsteps on the stairs.

HE WAS HUNTING just then, hot on the trail of something obscure, tracking a rare butterfly-like quotation as it fluttered through thickets of dense tropical paragraphs. The chase seemed to require the utmost concentration; still, he couldn’t help but think later on that if he’d only glanced up from the work, he might’ve seen something: a look in her eyes, a foreshadowing of doom, perhaps a train ticket in her hand or the words I’m Leaving You Forever stitched on the front of her coat. Something did seem slightly amiss, but he was lost in the excitement of butterfly hunting and ignored it, until later, too late, when somewhere between Andean loanwords and the lost languages of ancient California he happened to glance at the clock. It was afternoon. He was hungry. It had been four and a half hours since she’d gone for the paper, and her watery footprints had evaporated from the floor, and he realized what it was; for the first time he could remember, she hadn’t asked if he wanted a coffee from the deli.

He told himself to stay calm, and realized in the telling that he’d been waiting for this moment. He told himself that she’d just been distracted by a bookstore. It was entirely possible. Alternatively, she liked trains: at this moment she could be halfway back from Coney Island, taking pictures of passengers, unaware of what time it was. With this in mind, he returned reluctantly to the chase; a particular sentence had gotten all coiled up on him, and he spent an uneasy half hour trying to untangle the wiring and making a valiant effort not to dwell on her increasingly gaping absence, while several academic points he was trying to clarify got bored and wandered off into the middle distance. It took some time to coax them back into focus, once the sentence had been mangled beyond all recognition and the final destination of the paragraph worked out. But by the time the paragraph arrived at the station it was five o’clock, she’d left to get the paper before noon, and it seemed unreasonable by this point to think that something wasn’t horribly wrong.

He stood up then, conceding defeat, and began to check the apartment. In the washroom nothing was different: her comb was where it had always lived, on the haphazard shelf between the toilet and the sink. Her toothbrush was where she’d left it, beside a silver pair of tweezers on the windowsill. The living area was unchanged. Her towel was lying damply on the bedroom floor. She’d taken her purse, as she always did. But then he glanced at the wall in the bedroom, and his life broke neatly into two parts.

She had a photograph from her childhood, the only photograph of herself that she seemed to own. It was a Polaroid, faded to a milky pallor with sunlight and time: a small girl sits on a stool at a diner counter. A bottle of ketchup is partially obscured by her arm. The waitress, who has a mass of blond curls and pouty lips, leans in close across the countertop. The photographer is the girl’s father; they’ve stopped at a restaurant somewhere in the middle of the continent, having been traveling for some time. A slight sheen to the waitress’s face hints at the immense heat of the afternoon. Lilia said she couldn’t remember which state they were in, but she did remember that it was her twelfth birthday. The picture had been above his bed since the night she’d moved in with him, her one mark on the apartment, thumbtacked above the headboard. But when he looked up that afternoon it had been removed, the thumbtack neatly reinserted into the wall.

Eli knelt down on the floor, but it was a moment or two before he could bring himself to lift an edge of the duvet. Her suitcase was gone from under the bed.

Later he was out on the street, walking quickly, but he couldn’t remember how he’d ended up there or how much time had passed since he’d left the apartment. His keys were in his pocket, and he clutched them painfully in the palm of his hand. He was breathing too quickly. He was walking fast through Brooklyn, far too late, circling desperately through the neighborhood in wider and wider spirals, every bookstore, every café, every bodega that he thought might conceivably attract her. The traffic was too loud. The sun was too bright. The streets were haunted with a terrible conspiracy of normalcy, bookstores and cafés and bodegas and clothing stores all carrying on the charade of normal existence, as if a girl hadn’t just walked off the stage and plummeted into the chasm of the orchestra pit.

He was well aware that he was too late by hours. Still, he took the subway to Pennsylvania Station and stood there for a while anyway, overexposed in the grey atrium light, more out of a sense of ceremony than with any actual hope: he wanted at least to see her off, even if it had been four or five hours since the departure of her train. He stood still in an endless mirage of travelers passing quickly; everyone pulling suitcases, meeting relatives, buying water and tickets and paperbacks for the journey, running late. Penn Station’s ever-present soldiers eyed him disinterestedly from under their berets, hands casual on the barrels of their M16s.

That night there was a knock on his door, and he was on his feet in an instant, throwing it open, thinking perhaps. . “Trick or Treat!” said an accompanying mother brightly. She looked at him, started to repeat herself, quickly ushered her charges on to a more promising doorstep. The whole encounter lasted less than a moment (“Come on, kids, I don’t think this nice man has any candy for us. .”), but it remained seared into his memory nonetheless; afterward, when the thought of Lilia leaving seeped through him like a chill, he never could shake the image of that hopeful line of trick-or-treaters (from left to right: vampire, ladybug, vampire, ghost) like a mirage on his doorstep, no one older than five, and the smallest one (the vampire on the left) sucking on a yellow lollipop. He recognized her as the little girl from the fourth floor who sometimes threw temper tantrums on the sidewalk. She was three and a half years old, give or take, and she smiled very stickily at him just before he closed the door.

2

Lilia’s childhood memories took place mostly in parks and public libraries and motel rooms, and in a seemingly endless series of cars. Mirage: she used to see water in the desert. In the heat of the day it pooled on the highway, and the horizon broke into shards of white. There was a map folded on the dashboard, but it was fading steadily under the barrage of light; Lilia was supposed to be the navigator but 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. The dashboard clock marked slow-motion time. A mile behind her on the desert highway, a detective was following in a battered blue car.

Her father drove in silence, every so often blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief. This fever-dream place awash in light, in mirages, the sky white with heat along the horizon on every side, cars mirrored in phantom water on the highway ahead; she found later that most of her childhood memories had a hallucinatory quality, as a result of traveling some distance too far and driving through the desert a few times too often and changing her name so frequently that she sometimes forgot what it was, but her memories of the first year or two of travel were the least precise. Later she could never remember why they had started driving away from everything, and at first her father was rendered in the broadest possible strokes: the hand passing her a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate in the gas station parking lot, the voice soothing her in a motel room as he cut off all her hair and dyed it, but mostly as a silhouette in the driver’s seat, an impression, a voice; he knew the words to half the songs on the radio, and he said things that always made her laugh. He’d tell her anything about everything, except Before. He said it wasn’t really that important. He said they had to live in the present. Before was shorthand for the time before he started driving away with her, Before was a front lawn somewhere far to the north. More specifically, Before was her mother.

Lilia’s mother was asleep the night her daughter vanished. She didn’t hear the sound that woke Lilia up that night, the staccato of ice hitting the windowpane from outside. Lilia remembered that night the way dreams are remembered: it began with a sharp clear sound that pulled her out of sleep. She sat up in the darkness, and the sound came again. She opened the curtains but the glass was foggy, so she opened the window and let in the night. Her father was standing below on the lawn: grinning, he pressed a finger to his lips. She picked up her knitted wool rabbit from the floor and walked down the stairs as quietly as possible, the banister at shoulder height (she was only seven), and her mother was sleeping when she closed the front door behind her.

Fifteen years later in another country Lilia pressed her forehead against a windowpane in Eli’s apartment, looking out at an uncharted landscape of Brooklyn rooftops in the rain, and came to a somewhat unsettling conclusion: she’d been disappearing for so long that she didn’t know how to stay.

3

The problem, Eli used to think before he met her, was that he’d never suffered, except insofar as everyone does: the stalled trains, the alarm clocks that don’t ring when they’re supposed to, the agony of being surrounded by other people who all give the impression of being way more prolific and considerably more talented than you are, wet socks in the winter, being alone in any season, the chronic condition of being misunderstood, zippers that break at awkward moments, being unheard and then having to repeat yourself embarrassingly in front of girls you’re trying to impress, trying to impress girls and failing, girls who can be seduced but remain unimpressible, girls who can’t be seduced and/or turn out to have boyfriends in the morning, girls, being alone, paper grocery bags with falling-out bottoms, waiting in line at the post office for a half hour and then being snapped at because you don’t have the right customs declaration forms to send the birthday gift to your perpetually traveling brother, waiting in line anywhere, phone calls from a disapproving mother who doesn’t understand, the crowd of overeducated friends who understand too much and can’t resist bringing up long-dead philosophers and/or quantum physics over an otherwise perfectly civilized morning coffee, girls, an overall lack of direction and meaning as evidenced in your inability to either finish the thesis, abandon the current thesis and write a different thesis altogether, finish the different thesis, or heroically give up the whole thing completely and go work at a gas station somewhere upstate, stepping in things on the sidewalk, lost buttons, most kinds of rain, standing in line at the grocery store behind the lady who just knows there’s a coupon in here somewhere, girls, and the sense that all of this adds up to a life that’s ultimately pretty shallow and doesn’t really mean that much, particularly in comparison to the older brother saving children in Africa. The situation wasn’t helped by the mind-numbing job; he was paid a reasonable salary to stand in an empty art gallery four days a week, surrounded by art that he found incomprehensible, and there had even been a time when he’d considered himself lucky to have found a job like that, involving standing instead of doing, but lately the state of standing still instead of doing things had begun to seem symptomatic to him.

“There’s this artist in Asia,” Eli said. “I know how to pronounce his name, but I won’t. Call him Q. What Q does is he strips down to his underwear, then he coats himself with honey and fish oil, and then he goes and sits next to a latrine in this rural village in China, and so of course then he gets covered in flies because he’s hanging out next to the latrine covered in all this honey and fish oil, and so he’s sitting there, all covered in flies and all greasy and stoic-looking, and a photographer takes pictures of him, and this is the thing. .” He realized that he was speaking too loudly and took a quick sip of water to calm himself. “The thing that gets me,” he continued in a quieter voice, “is that the pictures then sell for up to eighteen thousand apiece. Eighteen thousand dollars. For a photograph of a guy with a hundred or so flies on his skin. All he’s doing is sitting there in a G-string, with flies, staring off into space, and he’s considered an artist. He’s considered an artist.”

“Okay,” said Geneviève, “he’s considered an artist. And? Why would that bother you?” She was sitting across from him at the café table with an incredulous look on her face. He had been lingering at the Third Cup Café with Geneviève and Thomas for years now, discussing art and their Brooklyn neighborhood and the meaning of life, but it had been some months since he’d spoken at all passionately on any one of these subjects.

“It’s the word, I guess.” He was silent for a moment. Thomas had put down his magazine. “Yeah, it’s the word. Artist is the word we use for Chopin, for Handel, for Van Gogh, for Hemingway, these men whose art required a lifetime and unprecedented talent and blood and sweat, these men whose art eventually rendered them dead or insane or alcoholic or all of the above, and we use this same word, artist, for a guy who smears honey on his skin and then sits around till some flies show up and then gets his picture taken and makes eighteen thousand dollars for his efforts. If he were mentally ill and did the same thing, you’d lock him up. But because he issues a statement saying that sitting there covered in flies is an act of, of subversion against the, I don’t know, some kind of political statement against Chinese communism or Western capitalism or whatever, you call him an artist. And they’re all like that. Every single so-called artist at this so-called gallery I get paid to stand around in. There’s this other guy who dances naked around his tripod with the camera on a timer, and it’s supposed to represent, I don’t know, his African heritage or his joie de vif, and . .”

“Joie de vivre,” said Geneviève.

“Whatever.” He used a coffee-stained napkin to blot sweat from his forehead. “He’s just a blurred naked guy.”

“Maybe you just don’t get it,” said Geneviève helpfully.

“Jesus—” said Thomas, but Eli cut him off.

“No, she’s right. I don’t get it. I work in a gallery, I’m supposed to sell this shit, which I consider the work of frauds, I actually do sell this shit, which clearly makes me a fraud, and I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s good enough. I don’t believe we should be calling it art.”

“Then what is art?” Geneviève asked. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. It’s eleven A.M.; we can have this figured out by lunchtime.”

“Look, I’m not saying I know,” Eli said. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I just think you have to do more than take your clothes off in front of a camera. I think you have to have some talent, not just a clever conceptual idea. I think you have to actually create something. They’re artists because they issue statements saying they’re artists, not because of anything they actually do or produce, and that’s really where my problem begins. I’m not claiming to know the answer here.”

This quieted Geneviève — she only liked arguing with people who were willing to claim that they did know the answer, for the sheer pleasure of tackling them. At a loss, she got up and went to the counter for a coffee refill.

“And this is what’s been bothering you lately?” Thomas asked while she was gone. “You’ve been a little off.”

“I don’t know. It’s not just the artists in the gallery. They’re only part of it. I got a letter from my brother the other day.”

“Zed?”

“He’s the only one I have.”

“I haven’t seen him around in forever. Where is he these days?”

“Africa somewhere. Working at an orphanage. Before that he was building a school in some village in Peru. In between he went hitchhiking in Israel. And the thing with those letters is, they come from these unbelievable places, and you know why?”

“Because he’s somewhere else. Are you feeling okay?”

“No, look, what I mean is the letters come from these unbelievable places because one day years ago he decided to travel, so he travels. He doesn’t talk about travel. He doesn’t theorize about travel. He just buys a ticket and goes. It isn’t the gallery that’s been bothering me, it’s the inaction,” Eli said. He was watching Geneviève returning to the table with her coffee. “All the theorizing we do. Everyone talks about being an artist, everyone theorizes about their art, but no one actually does anything. No one ever takes the leap.”

“What leap?” Geneviève asked. She was considering him over the rim of her coffee mug.

“They never do anything. We never do anything. I’m not saying I’m exempt from this. I always thought that once the thesis was done I’d be a writer and write, you know, really groundbreaking stuff in my field, but let’s be honest here, I’m never going to finish my thesis. I’ve been writing my thesis for six years, and I’ve been a third of the way in for four and a half of them. All I can do is talk about writing, theorize about writing, but I can’t take the leap, I can’t just write. But I still call myself a writer. What the hell do you call that, if not somehow fraudulent?”

“And the rest of us?” asked Geneviève dangerously. She hadn’t painted anything in a while.

Eli realized he was about to step on a land mine, and retreated.

“Sorry. I’m rambling. Ignore me,” he said. He drew a long breath. “Look, I’m not naming names here, I’m not saying I know anything, it’s just hard not to notice that none of us are actually. . I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Forget it.”

“It’s cool,” said Thomas warily.

“Why is it bothering you now,” Geneviève asked unpleasantly, “if you’ve been a third of the way in for that long?”

“It’s my birthday on Thursday. I’ll be twenty-seven, and it dawned on me: twenty-seven. It’s been six or seven years since I’ve been a promising academic, or a promising anything, actually, and I think my school’s actually forgotten about me. I always wondered what would happen when I failed to meet my last thesis deadline, and then when it happened. . my thesis deadline passed a year ago, and no one contacted me. No one. There was nothing. It’s like I’ve been struck from the school records, or like I don’t exist. And then when I think of Zed, doing things, I just don’t. . Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I think I’m going to go for the paper.”

“You can get it here.”

“And then sit in the park for a bit,” Eli said, ignoring this, “and then maybe go home and not write. Ciao.”

Thomas waved. And he did hear Geneviève’s whispered What the hell’s wrong with him? as he walked out of the Third Cup Café into the brilliant sunlight of Bedford Avenue, but he ignored it. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment and decided not to go to the park after all, then walked slowly in a diagonal line across the deserted intersection and under the blue awning of the Café Matisse. There was a girl who read books there whom he wanted to meet.

HIS THESIS DEADLINE passed like a signpost through a slow car window, like the last sign before the beginning of a trackless wilderness. For several nervous weeks after the circled date on the calendar, actually several nervous months, he had a falling sensation in his stomach every time the phone rang. It took some time to realize that no one was going to call him. He wasn’t about to call them. He ceased any pretense of being just on the verge of completing the document and immersed himself as completely as he could in research.

Eli never felt particularly calm, or that he was moving even remotely in the correct direction. Still, he felt that the research in itself wasn’t without merit: he’d become somewhat of an expert in the study of absence. Specifically, dead languages, or if not dead, then at least terminally ill. He studied small languages on the edge of extinction: the oldest languages of Australia, California, China, Lapland, obscure corners of Arizona and Quebec, fading out for exactly the reasons one might expect — colonization, the proliferation of residential schools and smallpox, the dispersal of native speakers over vast distances, etc. He’d grown used to watching girls’ eyes glaze over when he started talking about it; that Lilia actually seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, watching him seriously across a table at the Café Matisse, came as a bright and exuberant shock.

The majority of languages, he told her grandly, will disappear. Since she still seemed somewhat interested, Eli flashed his favorite statistics across the table like a Rolex: of the six thousand languages currently spoken on this earth, 90 percent are endangered and half will be gone by the end of the next century. An optimistic few hope to save a handful of them; most hope for nothing more than a chance to document a fraction of the loss. His work was part reconstruction, part thesis, part requiem, he told her. She listened quietly, apparently rapt, and asked intelligent questions just when he thought her interest couldn’t possibly be sincere. She said lightly that she was used to much more localized vanishing acts: individual people, motel rooms, cars. She wasn’t used to disappearance on a larger scale. Imagine, he said, losing half the words on Earth. Although what he was actually trying to imagine just then, as he said that, was what it might be like to kiss her neck. She nodded and watched him across the tabletop.

Three thousand languages, destined to vanish. He’d become obsessed with the untranslatable: his idea, and the subject of his thesis (or what had been a thesis, some years earlier, before it suddenly imploded and went unfinishable on him overnight), was that every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated. Not just a word but an idea, like the French déjà vu: perfect and crystalline in its native language, otherwise explainable only by entire clumsy foreign paragraphs or not at all. In Yup’ik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the Nawal: one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.

And if you accept this, he told her, this premise that every language holds something that exists in no other tongue, an entity far outweighing the sum of its words, then the loss takes on a staggering weight. It isn’t so much a question of losing three thousand words for everything. There aren’t three thousand words for everything; the speakers of Yup’ik have no reason to describe tigers in the high arctic; the speakers of the jungle languages need no language for the northern lights. It isn’t even so much about the words. His belief, the premise of the thesis, was that these are not just languages we lose in the gloaming, not just three thousand sets of every word, but three thousand ways of existing on this earth.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to get so pedantic about it.”

“It’s all right. It’s interesting,” she said.

She had been listening for a very long time. They’d met early in the afternoon, and it was almost evening now. It had been weeks since he’d first noticed her here, sitting quietly in the Café Matisse when he walked by the window or came in for a coffee. She came here often, and when they were here at the same time he liked to try to sit as nearby as possible. On this particular day, when he’d left Thomas and Geneviève at the Third Cup Café across the intersection, there were no empty tables when he’d wandered in— thank you, God — and in a catastrophe of blind courage he’d walked across to her table, insinuated himself into the opposite seat, and introduced himself. By some small miracle she’d smiled back and said her name instead of telling him to leave her alone and wait for his own goddamn table, and that had been six or seven hours ago. The café was quiet now, and the morning waitress had left for the day. The afternoon waitress was leaning on the countertop, staring out at the uneventful street.

“But what about you?” he asked. “You know I like dead languages, but what do you like?”

“Live languages,” Lilia said. “Reading, taking photographs, a few other things. Do you work in the neighborhood?”

“Yeah, a few blocks from here. I stand in an art gallery staring at the wall four days a week. You?”

“The wall? Not the paintings?”

“There aren’t that many paintings there — actually, there aren’t any— I don’t want to talk about my job,” he said. “I don’t like my job very much, to be perfectly honest. What do you do for a living?”

“I wash dishes. Do you like to travel? I went to New Mexico recently; have you been?”

“Several times. And what’s interesting,” he said, “is that we’ve been talking for hours now, and I hardly know anything about you. Where are you from?”

She smiled. “This will sound very strange to you,” she said, “but I’ve lived in so many places that I’m not entirely sure.”

“I see. Well. How long have you lived in New York?”

“About six weeks,” she said.

“And where were you just before that?”

“You mean where was I living when I boarded a train to New York?”

“Exactly. Yes. You arrived here from somewhere.”

“From Chicago,” she said.

He felt that he was finally getting somewhere. “You lived there for a while?”

“Not really. A few months.”

“Before that?”

“St. Louis.”

“Before that?”

“Minneapolis. St. Paul. Indianapolis. Denver. Some other places in the Midwest, New Orleans, Savannah, Miami. A few cities in California. Portland.”

“Is there anywhere you haven’t lived?”

“Sometimes I think there isn’t.”

“You’re a traveler.”

“Yes. I try to be as up-front about it as possible now,” she said.

He wasn’t sure what she meant but let it pass. “You said you liked live languages,” he said.

“I like translating things.”

“What do you translate?”

“Random things that I come across. Newspaper articles. Books. It’s just something I like doing.”

Four and a half languages not including English, she said, when pressed for more details. Español, Italiano, Deutsch, Français. Her Russian, she admitted, was shaky at best. Her wrist was warm beneath his fingertips.

“I envy you. I don’t speak any living languages except English. What else do you like?”

“I like Greek mythology,” she said. “I like that Matisse print over the bar. It’s the reason why I come here, actually.” She gestured at the opposite wall, and he twisted around to look. The Flight of Icarus, 1947: one of Matisse’s final works, from the time when he’d subsided from paint into paper cutouts and was moving closer and closer to the end of the line, unable to walk, his body slipping away from him. Icarus is a black silhouette falling through blue, his arms still outstretched with the memory of wings, bright starbursts exploding yellow around him in the deep blue air. He’s wingless, and already close above the surface of the water: Matisse would be dead in seven years. Icarus, plummeting fast into the Aegean Sea, and there’s a red spot on him, a symbol, to mark the last few heartbeats held in his chest.

“I like mythology too. When did you get interested in Greek legends?”

“Two days after I turned sixteen.”

“That’s very specific. You got a book for your birthday?”

“No, someone I knew was talking about the story, so I read it as soon as I could. I don’t really know Matisse, but I like that print. I like the story,” she said. “I think it’s the saddest of all the Greek legends.” She blinked; her voice seemed suddenly tired. “What time is it?”

“Late,” he said. “Probably eight o’clock or so. May I walk you home?”

HER HOME was a rented room with a window that looked out on an airshaft, a brick wall three feet from the glass. Night fell at one-thirty in the afternoon. The times when he came to her in that room he had the feeling of stepping into a cave, or stepping outside time. She slept on a mattress on the floor. A suitcase, opened against the wall, held a jumble of clothes and a battered manila envelope. She had a Polaroid from her childhood pinned neatly to a wall: Lilia in a diner, twelve years old in the summertime in a faroff Southern state, leaning over the countertop with the waitress.

Lilia: she had ink stains on her fingers, and the most beautiful eyes. She wore a silver chain necklace but wouldn’t say where it was from. She was obsessed by the topography of language: she followed the maps of alphabets over obscure terrains, parted the shifting gauze curtains between window, fenêtre, finestra, fenster and peered outward, wrote out long charts of words and brought home books in five languages. She maintained a secretive, passionate life of study. She was without precedent; Eli had dedicated his life before her to not being alone, he had surrounded himself with other people for as long as he could remember, but he had never known anyone remotely like her.

She had a mind like a switchblade. She sometimes stayed up all night. She worked four or five nights a week washing dishes at a vast Thai restaurant near the river, where Manhattan shone across the dark water at night. She returned from the restaurant at midnight with an aura of dish soap and steam, peanut oil, kitchen grime, her face shiny with exertion and her eyes too bright. She stayed up reading till morning, her lips moving as she struggled with the Cyrillic alphabet, and crawled into bed beside Eli at dawn.

Her hair was dark and cut unevenly, in a way that he found secretly thrilling; he knew that when it got too long she cut it herself, fast and carelessly, not necessarily in the presence of a mirror. The effect was rough but she was pretty enough to pull it off. She had scars on her arms, a faint and complicated pattern of lines suggesting a long-ago accident involving a great deal of broken glass, visible only under certain lights; she never talked about them, and he could somehow never bring himself to ask. She had four or five unevenly spaced freckles on her nose, like Lolita. She gave the impression of harboring enormous secrets. She had been traveling alone from city to city, in his understanding, since she was no older than sixteen or seventeen years old. She alluded occasionally to her father in New Mexico and she talked to him on the phone sometimes; her father had a girlfriend, and they had two small children together, but Eli was never sure if there was anyone else. The existence of a mother, for example, was far from clear. When he asked, she said she’d never known her mother and then went quiet.

She moved in with him at the midpoint: three months after he walked her home from the Café Matisse and three months before she disappeared. Cohabitation held certain surprises. She had a specific way of living that seemed to him at once erratic and ritualistic and frequently caused him to wonder about her sanity — a faint unease came over him while sitting beside the bathtub, for example, chatting and watching her shave her legs, change razor blades, and then shave her legs again. She would pause occasionally to sip from a tall glass of water that sat on the edge of the bathtub next to four or five bottles of shampoo, which she used in rotation. She could disappear with her camera for hours, particularly in thunderstorms; her shift at the restaurant ended no later than midnight but on stormy nights she came home at three or four in the morning, hair plastered to her forehead, soaked to the skin. He would have suspected her of cheating in those times except that it was clear from the condition of her clothing that she hadn’t been indoors all night. She’d extract herself from layer upon sodden layer of clothing, happy and shivering and her skin cold to the touch, and then she’d spend an hour or so in a steaming-hot shower and sleep in until at least noon. She had no explanation for these evenings except that she liked walking in rainstorms and her camera was waterproof. He was desperately curious but never asked where she went. He tried not to press her for too many details, about her scars or her family or anything else; she’d come from nowhere and seemed to have no past, and it seemed possible, even in the beginning when everything was easy, that the tenuous logic of her existence in his life might collapse under close examination. He didn’t want to know.

“What I want,” she said quietly, on the third night he spent with her, “is to stop traveling and stay in the same place for a while. I’m starting to think I’ve been traveling too much.”

And for Eli — frustrated, aimless, working at a job he didn’t particularly like, failed scholar, unable to decide whether he was a writer or a latent genius or just an academic fraud — the idea of traveling too much was unimaginably exotic, and he pulled her close and fucked her again and imagined staying beside her forever. But that was only the third night she spent with him.

She was easily distracted. She had a photographer’s fascination with quality of light. An upside-down CD reflecting rainbows on the bedroom ceiling, a glass of red wine catching the light of a candle, the Empire State Building piercing white against the sky at night. She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies. She was sublimely abnormal, and very frequently unnerving, but she was his psalm; what a live-in lover offers you, ultimately, is the unprecedented revelation of not being alone. She slipped so easily into the folds of his life. Her few belongings vanished into his apartment.

It always seemed later on that he loved her, at least partially, because she rendered him fraudulent. He talked about traveling, but she had traveled. He talked about photography, but she took photographs. He talked about languages, but she translated them. He felt that if she were a screenwriter she’d write screenplays instead of talking about screenplays and sketching outlines of screenplays and analyzing screenplays the way Thomas did. If she were a dancer, he felt that she’d dance. What he liked best were the times when they went into the café and none of his friends were there, so they could sit together and read the paper in blissful silence. Or the afternoons when he sat at his desk and measured sentences, written and then deleted in equal measure, or did research while she sat in the armchair nearby and studied Russian texts, her lips moving soundlessly over the words. And life settled into a state not far from perfection, until he found the lists.

One: a list of names, ten pages, beginning and ending with Lilia. Most names had arrows that trailed out into the margins, where the names of places were noted in small print: Mississippi, south Kansas, central Florida, Detroit. Two: a list of words in a number of languages, which could’ve meant anything at all. He recognized the Spanish word for butterfly and the German word for night—mariposa, nacht— but the rest were incomprehensible to him. Like the list of names, the paper looked old and the handwriting was evolutionary; the beginning parts of both lists were in awkward childish block letters, which became smaller and more refined as the lines progressed. Three: a list of words and phrases. This third list was longer and of a different genre; no evolutionary transformation was in evidence, and all the languages represented were ailing or dead. He only knew this because he recognized whole phrases from his notebooks. These pages were uncrumpled and new-looking. He went through this last list over and over again but could detect no pattern in the phrases she’d copied. There were words from five continents. Her suitcase also contained six or seven books and a weathered business card for a private investigator in Montreal, but it was the lists that interested him.

“I was just collecting the words,” she explained. “I didn’t meant to plagiarize, I just liked the way they looked. I wanted to save them on the page,” she said. “Like pressed flowers in a book.”

He found this perfectly understandable. He liked patterns too. But the rest of it, my love, these other pages. .

“I make lists,” she said, stating the obvious. “I always did.” He’d brought the papers to her in a panic—Lilia, what is this, tell me what this means— but she refused to be anything but calm. He was pacing distractedly around the apartment; she sat in the armchair, regarding him quietly. She was interested to know why he’d gone through her suitcase in the first place.

He forced his voice to be steady. “I’m curious about the names.”

She began to tell him a story in bed that night, a long story about deserts and aliases and driving away, motel pay phones and a blue Ford Valiant in the mountains. She spoke in measured tones, her hands moving ceaselessly over his skin. He listened, at first incredulous and then shocked into belief, but he wasn’t too caught up in the words to notice that she was tracing the contours of wings over his shoulder blades.

4

There is a word in the Dakota language, gender-specific and untranslatable, that expresses the specific loneliness of mothers whose children are absent. Eli told Lilia the word once when they were lying in bed together, and it was hard not to think of her mother when she heard it.

Lilia’s mother said once in an interview that she wished she could forget her daughter. (The interview aired on Unsolved Cases. It’s on record somewhere, although Lilia can’t quite bring herself to watch it again.) It was a cruel thing to say, but touchingly pragmatic. She had a daughter who disappeared: this is the kind of catastrophe that marks a person forever afterward, as indelibly as a missing limb.

On the night her daughter disappeared it was late November, and a heavy snowfall had blanketed the lawn. Just before Lilia left the house for the last time a sound startled her out of sleep, or perhaps she was lying awake already. When the sound came again she climbed out of bed and went to the window, the floorboards cold beneath her feet. She opened the window and the air outside was exquisitely cold, the lawn brilliant with snow and moonlight, and beyond the lawn the forest rose up like a wall. Her breath was pale in the frozen air. Her father was standing in the snow beneath the window; he waved to her and smiled and pressed a finger to his lips. Shh. She turned back into the room, clutching her bunny (it was blue, and its eyes were startled round buttons that gleamed dark in the half light), and she made her way out into the silent hall. A bare floorboard creaked softly as she passed her half-brother’s room. He lay still, but he wasn’t sleeping; he listened to her footsteps recede unsteadily on the stairs. Lilia skipped the ninth stair which sometimes creaked and tiptoed through moonlight on the landing, the banister railing at shoulder height. Down through the shadows of the living room, then the silent kitchen. She unlocked the front door and ran out barefoot into the snow.

Her father came forward to meet her; in an easy swooping movement he lifted her up into his arms, and she dropped the bunny as her feet left the ground. My lily, he kept saying, Lilia, my dove. . He hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half, but he remembered how to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. He kept saying her name as he took her away from there, Lilia’s bandaged arms around his neck and her heart beating fast against his shoulder, teeth chattering in the cold. She closed her eyes against his shoulder. He carried her quickly across the lawn and into the forest, where everything was silent and waiting and dark; the air was a little warmer here, and no snow penetrated the branches on the forest floor. The only snow here was on the driveway, a pale ribbon winding down between the trees. To her brother, watching from the window on the staircase landing, it was as though the forest closed behind them like a gate.

Far from the house, beyond the wall of the forest, a car started down by the road; Lilia’s mother stirred uneasily in her sleep as it receded. Her brother turned away from the window and returned to his bed.

This was her escape. It was recorded in newspapers.

5

In the morning Eli left her sleeping and went alone to the café where he’d met her. He bought a coffee and a newspaper and took a seat in the corner, trying to sink into the clatter of voices and coffee cups. He spent a few minutes staring at the date on his newspaper before he glanced at the headlines, hoping that reading today’s date in typeface might have a steadying effect. He reread the front page a few times but couldn’t concentrate on it well enough to open the first section. He turned to Arts and Leisure: certain musicals were sweeping Broadway and might stay there forever, certain others were failing and would soon disappear, some films were brilliant and others were not, and none of it seemed to matter much. He refolded the paper and looked for a while at the print of Icarus on the opposite wall, trying to decipher her by association, but Icarus persisted in falling through the clueless blue. Eli pulled his notebook out of his bag and then put it back in again. He abandoned his coffee and went back to the apartment.

She wasn’t there, and he wondered about her whereabouts through a torturous day. She came back in the evening and was vague about where she’d been, as always. She’d been at a bookstore, she said, and then a park, and then walking, and then another park, and before all that she’d seen Geneviève on the street. Lilia didn’t like Geneviève very much and suspected this was mutual, but when Geneviève was fired up about something she couldn’t restrain herself from discussing it with the first person she happened to come across, so she’d swept Lilia into the nearest café.

“It was almost malicious,” Lilia said. “I kept on having to order things because we were there for so long. She talked about string theory through two cups of coffee and a scone, and I still don’t really know what string theory is.”

“It involves strings,” he said tiredly. “I think they sort of waver.”

He sat on the couch and pulled her close to him, relieved and peaceful and restless in equal measure, while she asked about the wavering. He didn’t know, he just had an idea that they wavered. Metaphorically wavered? Were they metaphorical strings? He wasn’t sure. Maybe. He didn’t know much about physics. Actually, he didn’t know anything about — she didn’t even like scones, she said, interrupting him. They were just there, and she couldn’t bring herself to drink another cup of coffee. But it was a good afternoon, she said, despite Geneviève; she’d found a Russian edition of Delirious Things. He’d never heard of it. She repeated the title in Russian, taking obvious pleasure in what he could only assume was an impeccable pronunciation, and got up to show it to him. The Cyrillic alphabet spiked inscrutably at him from the cover above an artfully blurry black-and-white photograph that may or may not have depicted a girl in a nightgown walking over hot coals, or perhaps walking on water. It was Great Russian Literature, she said. In the absence of any knowledge of Russian, he was in no position to contest this.

“It’s late,” he said finally. He’d been holding her on the couch while she lapsed into quiet, flipping through the first few pages. He was half asleep, almost dreaming, her warmth against him; he was breathing the scent of her latest shampoo, like cinnamon and violets.

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.

Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking. He carried the plate back to the bedroom and set it on the bedside table to grope for the flashlight under the bed. He took off his shoes, his belt, his jeans, left them in a heap on the floor, held the flashlight between his teeth and climbed under the duvet like a man entering a cave. He reached out for the blue plate and then turned to her, and her face was illuminated in the dimness.

“Don’t leave me,” he whispered. “Stay, I’ll buy you pomegranates. I won’t throw any more of your books out the window, I promise.”

She smiled faintly, still in tears.

“Here,” he said, “hold the flashlight.”

She sat up and took it from him, the duvet a tent between their heads. He sat cross-legged with the plate on his lap and tore the pomegranate apart, juice running down his hands and wrecking the sheets. He began to feed her pomegranate beads, two or three at a time, and she stopped weeping long before her lips were stained red.

6

Lilia left her mother’s house a little after midnight. Her half-brother Simon was the first one downstairs in the morning; he woke up shivering just before dawn. A cold breeze filled the house; the front door, closed imperfectly, had blown open after she’d left, and also a kitchen window was broken. A glass of water was frozen solid on his bedside table.

He climbed out of bed and pulled his quilt over his shoulders like a cloak. It trailed heavily behind him down the stairs, gathering dust. The linoleum of the kitchen floor felt like ice on his bare feet; he almost immediately lost feeling in his toes. The kitchen door was wide open, and snow had drifted over the threshold. At that hour the air outside was suffused with the greyish light that comes over northern landscapes just before the sun rises, when everything seems tired and somewhat unreal. He stood just inside the door, clutching the quilt around his shoulders and staring out at the lawn, and even though the scene outside was exactly what he’d been expecting, he found at that moment that he needed his mother, and also that he couldn’t speak. He reached outside, around the doorframe, and began ringing the doorbell over and over again.

She was by his side almost instantly and then running back up the stairs. He stood still in the doorway, listening to her footsteps in the upstairs hall, the sound she made when she saw that Lilia’s bedroom was empty, her footsteps coming back down the stairs. She was on the phone a moment later, although it took the dispatcher at the police station a few minutes to understand what she was saying. She called the more recent of her two ex-husbands and screamed obscenities into his answering machine until the machine cut her off. She hung up, shaking, and stared at her son. Her face was white. He met her gaze and looked quickly away. He was briefly interested to notice that he could see his breath inside the house.

“She dropped her bunny,” he said. His voice was stunned. “And there’s still glass in the snow.”

The kitchen window had been broken the night before, and glass was still shining on the snow outside. She stared at the shattered window for a moment.

“Help me,” she whispered. “Put your shoes on. Bring me the broom.” He pulled his boots on over his pajamas and let the quilt fall on the kitchen floor, and they worked together for a while in feverish silence, scooping and sweeping the broken glass out of the snow, collecting it into a shoebox from the hall closet. When they were done the cuffs of his pajamas were cold and soaking wet against his wrists. In the kitchen doorway she turned to him suddenly — he flinched and raised an arm reflexively to protect his face — but she only placed the box of broken glass and snow in his arms. The cardboard was soggy.

“Hide this,” she said, in a tone of voice that he knew not to question, “and bring me a ball.”

“What ball?” He was too dazed to cry.

“Any kind of ball, Simon. Wait. .”

She went to the cupboard and took out three bottles of Scotch, one almost empty. She laid these carefully on top of the snow and broken glass, and said, “Quickly, quickly.”

He took the box to the woodshed and put it under an upside-down moldering armchair. There was an old basketball on the woodshed floor, half deflated. When he brought it to her she was taping cardboard over the window, standing on the kitchen chair that had been Lilia’s only last night, weeping, talking to herself, taping fast. He went upstairs and dressed quietly, with a feeling of tremendous formality; he put on the pants he wore only on special occasions, a sweater that smelled of dust, and his good shoes. He combed his hair without being told to, although he wasn’t tall enough to see his whole head in the mirror. A short time later the police were there; they filled the kitchen with blue uniforms and tracked dirty snow into the house and fanned out to photograph what was there on the lawn. Not the lawn under the window, which had clearly been broken a day or two before; Simon, the mother explained through tears and hysterics, had been throwing a basketball in the house. The basketball was lying half buried in snow. She told them that she’d long since cleaned up the glass, that someone was coming to replace the window. They nodded, uninterested. They were photographing a spot beyond that, farther out toward the driveway and slightly to the right. It’s the perfect photograph: a child’s bare footprints emerge from the house, clearly visible in the snow, and meet after a few steps with the prints of a man’s winter boots. This is the point where the blue knitted bunny lies whitened by frost, and here there’s a scuff in the snow where she was swept off her feet. The bootprints turn here and recede into the forest and eventually coincide, some distance outside the frame of the photograph, with the tire marks down by the road.

The bunny was briefly famous, in a localized way; a couple of regional newspapers showed pictures of it staring up at the sky. Simon was the one who retrieved it that afternoon, when the photographers were done taking pictures. He put it in the bathtub for a while and sat on the bathtub’s edge to watch the pool of bluish water oozing out around it, then put it through the dryer. He sat in front of the dryer on an upturned milk crate, watching it spinning around and around. It came out hot but still wet, so he put it back in the dryer and watched it blurring around again until he got dizzy and had to look away. His mother was sobbing and sobbing in the kitchen, talking about Lilia and Lilia’s father and how she always just knew he was going to do something like this and that was why she had gotten the restraining order in the first place, and there were police officers everywhere. Some wanted to speak to him. He answered questions in a polite monotone, lying mostly, and when they were finished with him he took the bunny upstairs to his room and set it up on a folded towel on the corner of the bed. It still wasn’t completely dry, but he didn’t want to be downstairs anymore.

His mother came to him in the evening, when almost everyone had gone. There was a social worker in the kitchen and someone from the police station rigging something to the telephone, and there was a car down by the road with two police officers in it. She sat on the edge of his bed and stared tearfully at him. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Thank you for helping me with the glass,” she said.

IN A MOTEL ROOM three hundred miles to the south, Lilia’s father was cutting off her hair. In the very beginning her arms had gauze bandages on them, for reasons that were almost immediately unclear; she sat on a chair in the bathroom and watched dark curls falling past her face and landing on the bandages, on the floor, on her legs, while her father moved around her with the scissors.

“Hold still, now,” he said gently, although she hadn’t been moving. She didn’t answer, but she did wrinkle her nose at the smell of bleach. It hurt much more than she had thought it would. She winced and tried to ignore the smell and the tingling while he stood close beside her and kept up a soothing, uninterrupted monologue: “Did I ever tell you, my dove, about the time I was working as a magician in Vegas? This was at a place called La Carnivale, one of the big old casinos, and. .” And she didn’t say anything, but he didn’t expect her to. She never could remember why they’d left in the first place, but she did remember that in the first year of traveling she didn’t say very much. She was unmoored and her memories were eroding in the sunlight, and she was rendered shy by the strangeness of this fast new life. He was driving south.

He would talk to her whether she’d talk to him or not, and it was his voice that gradually put her at ease. He could talk about types of stone, about Goya’s black paintings or the magnificent staircase in Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation, about genetics: the specific signatures of persistent genes, replicating themselves endlessly through the diluting generations. When she grew quiet and despondent, which was often in the beginning, he liked to save her with a fact. Did you know that my favorite composer went deaf at the height of his career? Did I ever tell you about the moons of Jupiter? There’s this one in particular that’s covered in ice. . She didn’t know him well in the very beginning, but she was profoundly soothed by the sound of his voice. On this particular night, twenty hours after he’d lifted her from the snow, he was talking about the arcing bridge in Monet’s garden, the way it changed, over the passage of the painter’s career, from sharpness into an almost abstract vagueness. “Think of that,” he was saying. “An object changing in the manner of a memory.” He rubbed her burning head with a towel. “Et voilà!” he said. “Brace yourself, my dove, this will be startling. .” and he held Lilia up to the motel bathroom mirror.

The effect was shocking. She remembered that moment as the first time she ever looked in a mirror and didn’t recognize herself. A strange child with short disheveled blond hair stared back at her, and she felt suddenly, inexplicably safe. Not only safe but elated; the first time true happiness ever coursed through her chest, like the breaking open of a gate.

“You like it?”

She smiled.

“I’m glad you approve. Now you just need a new name,” he said.

The first false name was Gabriel, chosen because with short hair she looked very much like a boy, and he figured a little ambiguity couldn’t hurt. Still, the name didn’t seem fraudulent; she couldn’t help but feel that Gabriel was just as real as Lilia, and as real as the dense parade of phantoms that followed: after Gabriel she was Anna, and she was Michelle, Laura, Melissa, and Ruth by spring. In retrospect her childhood was all false names and lost memories; the more time passed, the harder it was to say what was real and what wasn’t. There were scars on her arms for which she had no explanation.

7

“What was the book about?” Eli asked sleepily. “What were the delirious things?”

They were lying together under the pomegranate-stained sheets, the blue plate broken somewhere at the foot of the bed, and he’d been apologizing again for throwing her book out the window. Now that it was gone, he was curious about it.

“They were memories.” Her voice was languid. “The way they go all hazy when you stare at them too long.” After some time had passed he pressed for more details, but she’d fallen asleep. Breathing lightly against his arm.

It was never very easy to reach her, like loving someone who was rarely in the same room. But it would have been difficult to imagine, in a purely abstract sense, a girl more perfect; he’d had to concede shortly after she’d moved in with him that she was no less interested in his field of study than he was. He lived quietly alongside his work, he couldn’t imagine being separated from it, he wanted to know as much about it as possible, he thought about it now and then through the course of any given hour in the day. But she was caught up in it, she was dancing with it, she was having a fling. She understood the poetry of multiplicity, of estrangement, of irreconcilable concepts of geography: in one of the Mayan languages there are nine different words for the color blue. (He’d been aware of this for years, but she was the one who made him wonder what all those untranslatable shades of blue might look like.) In Wintu, a language of ancient California, there are no words for right and left: speakers differentiate between riverside and mountainside, from a time when it was taken as a given that you would live your life and bear children and die in the landscape where you and your parents and your great-great-grandparents had been born. A language that would disintegrate at sea, or while traveling beyond either the river or mountains; go beyond the boundaries and there would be no reference points, no words to describe the landscape you moved through — imagine the unfathomable cost of leaving home. Or the Australian Guugu Yimithir, a language of ferociously absolute positioning, in which there was no way to tell someone, for instance, that Lilia is standing to your left; you’d have to say, instead, “Lilia is standing to the west of me.” In that language there are no variables, only north, south, east, west. If that were the only language you had ever known, would it be possible to think in relative terms, in terms of variables, directionlessness, things that are changeable and a little delirious rather than certain, mirages, shades of grey? She read deep into his books and surfaced with questions, and he read to her sometimes aloud from his notes: “I dream in Chamicuro,” the last fluent speaker of her language told a reporter from the New York Times, in her thatched-hut village in the Peruvian jungle in the final year of the twentieth century, “but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone. Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It’s lonely being the last one.”

He looked up from his notebook and there were tears in her eyes. If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won’t survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another? A language disappears, on average, every ten days. Last speakers die, words slip into memory, linguists struggle to preserve the remains. What every language comes down to, at the end, is one last speaker. One speaker of a language once shared by thousands or millions, marooned in a sea of Spanish or Mandarin or English. Perhaps loved by many but still profoundly alone; reluctantly fluent in the language of her grandchildren but unable to tell anyone her dreams. How much loss can be carried in a single human frame? Their last words hold entire civilizations.

In the language of the Hopi tribe, there is no differentiation between past, present, and future tense. The divisions do not exist. “What does that do to time?” he asked one night, half drunk on red wine. They had long since closed their books for the evening. He was running his fingertips over her collarbone, tracing that little hollow just below her throat with his thumb. It was already October. She would be gone in a week.

“No,” she said softly, “what does it do to free will?”

He was preoccupied with kissing her neck and didn’t immediately understand what she meant. But he couldn’t fall asleep that night, and when the understanding finally hardened and crystallized, hours later, it was enough to jolt him out of bed. He sat for a long time in the darkened living room, wide awake, listening to her breathing in the adjoining room.

What does it do to free will? You disappeared. You are disappearing. You will disappear. If there is a language in which all those sentences are the same, then who are we to say that they’re different?

ON THE EVENING of Lilia’s disappearance Eli sat at his desk for hours, trying to read at first, then staring at his computer screen, and then just staring at his hands. I surrender. She either didn’t hear this thought or heard it and still didn’t come home. He taped a white napkin to the inside of the bedroom window, the only window that faced the street. He would have done anything. It was the closest thing he had to a flag. When the trick-or-treaters had gone he returned to his desk, and the hours slid away from him. Five in the morning: cold grey light. By night’s end the apartment seemed like an illusion. She was here a moment ago, in the bed, in the shower, her towel on the floor of the bedroom is still damp, none of this can possibly be real. He fell asleep at dawn with his head on his arms, listening for her footsteps, and slept in this position again the next night. Two days passed before he could bring himself to even look at the bed; the rumpled duvet still held the shape of her body.

The day after she left he bought a map of the continent. He remembered every location she’d told him in her story and he circled the cities she’d passed through in red, looking for a pattern, looking for the next city along the line. If there was a way to find her, he would. He had an idea that if he stared at the map long enough, he might possibly be able to divine where she had gone.

8

Lilia’s father had purchased a map at an all-night gas station, on his way through the darkness to his ex-wife’s house, a few hours before he’d abducted her. When she was seven Lilia used to trace the ink-line ridges of the Rocky Mountains with her fingertips and admire the patterns made by highways across the continental United States. When she was eight he taught her how to read the map, and by nine she was the navigator. When he showed her how it all worked (north, border, highway, town) she asked where they’d started from, but her father shook his head and said, “It’s not important, kiddo, you’ve got to live in the present.” Map reading was a skill she took enormous pleasure in; every town, to her way of thinking, held an alternative life. She liked to close her eyes and touch a spot on the map, open her eyes and move her finger to the nearest place name, and sketch out the future she might have there as he drove: “We should go to Lafoy, and buy a house, and get a library membership and a cat and a dog, and then start a restaurant—”

“What kind of restaurant?”

“The kind that serves ice cream.”

“But then we’d have to stay in Lafoy,” her father said. “We’d have a house.”

“I don’t want to stop.” This was true, she didn’t, and she’d been writing messages in motel Bibles to this effect for over a year now. Lilia saw motel Bibles as a kind of bulletin board, where messages might be left for other travelers following behind. When she was nine Lilia and her father lived together, a unit, usually in the same motel room or in the same small car, and the messages in motel Bibles were almost her only secret. She scrawled them furtively while her father was in the shower, taking pleasure in the idea that he wouldn’t approve. The shred of privacy afforded by having a secret somehow seemed about as close as she’d ever come to having her own room.

“In that case, kiddo, better come up with a new plan.”

“Let’s drive through Lafoy, and go to the library, and then stay at a motel, and then go to a restaurant and have ice cream, and then leave again.”

“I like that plan much better,” her father said.

Their lives were easiest in the summer, when they didn’t have to make up explanations for why Lilia wasn’t in school and there were other children to play with in the parks. They camped for months at a time when it was warm enough; a week at one campground, a week somewhere else. She liked camping, although it took her a long time to fall asleep in campgrounds. There was sometimes rain on the roof of her tent, and it rendered the night mysterious and full of hidden sounds. In campgrounds she heard footsteps, or sometimes the sounds of trains in the distance; lie still and she could hear the night trains passing, carrying freight between the prairies and the seas. They hiked in national parks and went to outdoor concerts in small towns. Her father loved music of almost any kind; he would seek out concerts and summer music festivals and drive for miles to get to them; at outdoor performances they’d sit together on the grass with bottles of lemonade and when the music started he’d close his eyes and seem very distant.

It was harder in the wintertime. They tried to stay in the Southern states during the school year because Lilia’s father hated cold weather and Lilia liked the desert and palm trees, but the explanations were more difficult. Sometimes when she got tired of lying about being homeschooled she’d stay in the motel room until three o’clock in the afternoon, reading books that her father brought her from a bookstore or working on the mathematics problems that he came up with for her; in the late afternoons they went to the movies, to a mall for ice cream, to a museum if there was one, to a park if it was warm enough. Her father insisted that she learn to swim, and to this end they stayed for nearly five months in a town near Albuquerque while she took a full course of after-school swimming lessons at the local pool. Strange being in the same place for so long; by the time she was good enough to dive from the high diving board and swim laps, she was skittish and uneasy and not sleeping well at night. The day after her first swim meet her father suggested that they go somewhere else, and she was happy to get back in the car and drive away again.

Her father didn’t like stopping for long in any one place, even after the first frantic year when capture seemed most imminent. Her father knew about endless travel, and he wanted to show her everything he knew. He had been born to American diplomats in Colombia, started high school in Bangkok, finished it in Australia, and then moved to the United States. He’d spent the next few years earning multiple degrees from a random sampling of universities, too restless to settle on any one of them; afterward he’d worked for a few months as an adjunct professor of languages until an unfortunate incident involving an undergrad who’d looked much older than seventeen had put an abrupt halt to his academic career. He’d worked as a shipping clerk for a while after that, taught himself to write software at night, served six months in a minimum-security prison for some complicated counterfeiting scheme that he was never inclined to explain in any great detail except to remark that obviously it hadn’t worked out very well, been employed for some time as a bartender in a hotel in Las Vegas, married Lilia’s mother, and was divorced from her by the time Lilia was three. She was, he said, an impossible woman. He wouldn’t tell Lilia what was specifically impossible about her mother, although he did show her a small scar below his left cheekbone from the time Lilia’s mother had thrown a telephone at his head. In the four years between the thrown telephone and the night he’d appeared on the lawn beneath Lilia’s bedroom window, he’d made a minor fortune on the stock market.

In the beginning her father drove and kept driving because it was necessary to flee quickly, but it seemed to Lilia later on that eventually they probably could have stopped. Ceased their endless driving after enough time had passed, perhaps settled in some anonymous town when she was ten or eleven, somewhere far from where they had begun. Changed her name one last time, enrolled her in an elementary school with the help of a forged birth certificate, settled into a quiet, almost ordinary life. (And Lilia could almost see this other life at times, like a scene playing out on the other side of a gauze curtain, dim but glimpsable: the first quiet years of elementary school and forgetting, kissing boys in cars parked at lookout spots, a front porch with flowers planted in the backs of plastic swans, her father recast eventually as the slightly eccentric but kindly grandfather smoking his pipe on the front steps and lending his lawn mower to the neighbors, and the early upheaval so distant that she’s no longer sure it wasn’t a dream. My mother died when I was born, she tells her sympathetic future husband on a quiet night in August, believing it enough herself that it doesn’t even feel like a lie anymore, and a passing jet leaves a sunset-colored trail across the sky.)

But they didn’t stop. He was afraid, he told her much later, that if the two of them paused too long anywhere, especially in the early days, she’d start to dwell on things: the increasing strangeness of her upbringing, the missing parts of her family, events that may or may not have transpired just before he’d taken her away. There were weeks that were mostly spent driving; singing along with her father in a car passing over an infinity of highways, making friends with waitresses in small-town cafés, conjugating Italian verbs in motel rooms from California to Vermont and then Spanish all the way back west again. Her father regretted that he couldn’t send her to school, he said, but to make up for it he wanted to teach her all the languages he knew. In the glove box they carried a battered prayer card for St. Brigid of Ireland, the patron saint of fugitives; Lilia’s father wasn’t religious but said the prayer card couldn’t hurt.

This was a skittish, almost catastrophic life, in which nothing was certain; paradoxically, Lilia was unusually calm. Nothing could startle her. She was profoundly unafraid, although there were near disasters: when she escaped from the motel in Cincinnati, police rapping on the door of the motel room as she squeezed out the bathroom window and dropped down into the wet grass and then climbed through a dark hedge and sprinted, her frantic father waiting in the parking lot of a gas station half a block away, she was calm all the rest of that night. Her father asked if she was scared, and she said she was too old to be afraid of things. She knew something about getting older: she was almost ten and a half. And it was true that her voice was tense when she asked if the police were still close, but it was also true that she was asleep within a couple of hours. Her father that night was scattered and frantic, driving fast but trying not to speed, looking in the mirror for flashing lights and glancing sideways at his daughter and fraught with directionless guilt, trying to drive away quickly and take care of her and let her be all at once. Hours out of Cincinnati he said something and she didn’t answer, and in the passing lights of automobiles he saw that she’d fallen asleep. He tuned the radio to a classical music station, Chopin and then Mendelssohn with the volume low, night lullabies, and he hummed softly to the music and drove all through the night.

9

At the end of November, Eli received a postcard from Montreal. There was no return address. The front depicted a pretty line of grey stone houses with flowerboxes and iron staircases that spiraled from the second floors down to the street, with Montréal in drop-shadowed italics across the bottom. The back held a peculiar message, scrawled in what very clearly wasn’t Lilia’s handwriting: She’s here. Come to Club Electrolite on Rue Ste.-Catherine, and raise a white flag on the dance floor. I’ll see you. Come here soon. Michaela.

If the whole business of life on earth had ever made sense to him, it ceased to at that moment. She unmoored him, her departure made him want to disappear, et cetera — but if the world was askew in the time after he met her, in the time after she left, the postcard spun it entirely from its axis. The day at the gallery passed like a dream. He took the postcard and the continental map to the usual café, where Thomas had been camped out for two weeks trying to pick up a new waitress. Thomas stared at the postcard, whistled softly and shook his head.

“What would you do?” Eli felt fairly unhinged.

“I’d tear up the postcard and go find another girl. Or if you can’t do that, at least forget about this one.”

“What if she needs help?”

“What if she doesn’t? This isn’t a ransom note, it’s just a weird message on the back of an ugly postcard. What if this is some kind of sick joke she’s pulling, some ploy to get you back?”

“I have to go to her.”

“No, you have to move on. What kind of a person disappears like that? Look, things happen. Life continues. So you had a girlfriend who disappeared.”

“Easy for you to—”

“Do you think no one’s ever left me? You can’t chase after them,” Thomas said. “When they leave like that, they’re screwed up, and when they’re screwed up, you can’t save them. You can’t save them. You just have to let them go.” He made an airplane-like letting-go motion with one hand, jetting off to the left. Eli followed it with his eyes and then looked at the postcard again. “You just have to put your life back together and move on and pretend you never knew them, you just have to let them do whatever it is that they can’t do with you around. It’s the way it is.”

“Thomas, this isn’t her handwriting. Leave aside the fact that she left me, I have a postcard that someone’s written about her from a foreign city.”

“She left you, and you want to go find her?”

“I just want to make sure she’s okay. I know she left me, it’s just, I don’t think she has anyone else.”

“She might be with someone else, have you considered that? Some other guy could just. . Eli, I’m sorry, wait. .”

Eli stood up and pulled his coat from the back of his chair, the map in his other hand. Thomas made a grasping motion at his arm, which he evaded. Out through the warmth of the café with the map crumpled in his fist, Thomas calling after him, and outside night was falling and it was far too cold. He had a frantic desire to get out of Williamsburg, out of Brooklyn altogether, and found himself walking quickly toward the L-train stairs. There was a girl playing a guitar on the subway platform, sitting on a folding stool. She was singing soft songs about love and pay phones, almost to herself, until the sound of the oncoming train canceled everything. In the crowd that spilled out through the train doors there was an old woman pulling a little boy by the hand; the boy had a harmonica and played a long, wavering note in a minor key as Eli stepped into the train. He sank down onto a plastic bench and stared up at an overlit advertisement for skin care (“Dr. Z sees every patient personally!”) for all of the long clattering journey under the river, and then up the stairs into the lights and sounds of the Manhattan street. He walked aimlessly down First Avenue against the wind.

He stopped at a Don’t Walk signal somewhere deep into Chinatown, waiting for the direction of traffic to change. A bottle had been smashed in the gutter. He stood staring at it for a while, the mesmerizing sparkle of broken glass. A van paused a beat too long in the intersection and was attacked by a blaring cacophony of car horns. The sound brought tears to his eyes. He stood on the corner while passersby streamed around him like ghosts and lights changed from green to red to yellow to green again and the stream of traffic before him continued unchecked. He looked down and flecks of glass on the pavement sparkled, like crystal, like ice, tears blurring the pinpoints of light. It was a long time before he could force himself into motion.

. .

“TELL ME ABOUT MONTREAL,” he said to Geneviève. Thomas and Geneviève had been arguing earlier, but the argument was lost in passion and long words. Now they were both a bit flushed, mutually offended, and reading different sections of the same paper without speaking. Geneviève was making occasional notes in a weathered spiral-bound notebook. She had a scribbly, doctor’s-prescription way of writing that produced long lines of cramped hieroglyphics, and he had been watching her write. It was the first thing he’d said in an hour.

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten how to talk,” she said. “Why Montreal?” But her eyes held a sudden light. She loved talking about Montreal. She’d spent the early part of her life there. Her parents had moved her to Brooklyn when she was nine, but she still considered herself something of an expatriate and took enormous pleasure in pronouncing her name in French.

“I’m curious. I’m thinking about going there.”

Thomas was giving him a dangerous look. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” asked Geneviève, who didn’t know about the postcard.

“Because it’s fucking cold,” Thomas said, without taking his eyes from Eli’s face. “That’s all anyone needs to know about it. You’d be insane to go there this time of year.”

“I doubt you’ve even been.” She was always ready to pounce on an opportunity to argue with anyone, but especially with Thomas. “You should go. It’s a city with a probably doomed language. The Quebecois are speaking French with an accent so ancient and frankly bizarre that the actual French can’t understand it. It’s like a fortress in a rising tide of English. It’ll be like research for you.”

“What do you mean, a fortress?”

“Imagine a country next to the sea,” she said, “and imagine that the water’s rising. Imagine a fortress that used to stand near the beach, but now it’s half underwater, and the water won’t stop rising no matter how they try to fight it back. Eventually, in the next century or so, it will more than likely rise over the top of the walls and overwhelm them, but for now they’re plugging the cracks and pretending it doesn’t exist and passing laws against rising water. I’m saying that French is the fortress, and English is the sea.”

“I don’t get it,” said Thomas, without looking up from his paper. “That’s a stupid metaphor.”

“I think I do,” said Eli quickly, trying to avoid losing them to another fight, but Geneviève had ignored Thomas anyway.

“You’ve spent your whole academic career thinking about dying languages,” she said. “Thinking about doomed languages, shamelessly romanticizing doomed languages, picking up girls with doomed languages, and imagining what life played out in a doomed language might be like. Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to live in a city with a doomed language?”

“I would,” he said. “I really would. Although I’m not sure that career is exactly the word for my academic situation. How cold is it?”

“Arctic,” she said, “but it’s worth it. There’s no place like it on earth. I try to go back there every year. It’s a great city.” She was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said, “provided you speak French.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Thomas asked. He was still flushed and still wouldn’t look up at her. “Eli, you can’t chase them. We talked about this.”

“Chase who? What are you talking about? What it means is certain laws are in place to protect the French language,” she said. “Like I said, it’s a fortress. Whether or not the scope of them is justified is somewhat controversial, but anyway, the English are more conservative, whereas the French. .”

This sparked an instant argument on the subject of cultural stereotypes; they barely noticed when Eli walked out. There was a bad moment out on the street, where the fact of her absence slammed into his chest and he had to sit on a park bench for a while until the exhaustion lifted enough for him to stand up and get home. He spent the afternoon staring at the bedroom ceiling.

An envelope arrived the following morning. It was postmarked Montreal, and Queen Elizabeth II half smiled against the sky-blue background of a stamp. The envelope contained a page torn from a Bible, with a child’s awkward ballpoint-pen letters scrawled bluely over the surface of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home. — Lilia. The page was thin and slightly yellowed, and it trembled in his hands. There was nothing else in the envelope, but a phone number was scrawled on the inside of the flap with the message Call me when you get to Montreal, and he recognized the handwriting and the return address, Michaela, c/o Club Electrolite, a street number on Rue Ste.-Catherine. He was still staring at the envelope when the phone rang.

“Hello, Eli,” his mother said.

He sank into the desk chair, closed his eyes, and lowered his forehead into the palm of his left hand. He clutched the phone white-knuckled with his right.

“Hi.”

“You sound strange,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

He told her that he was slightly tired. This seemed to be her cue. Did he know that it had been two months since he’d called her last? She was serious. Two months! She was only up in the Upper West Side, you know, not in Siberia, he could visit sometimes, or at least call, but any way. She just wanted to know how he was. How was the thesis coming? How was life in Brooklyn? She’d been out earlier, running a few errands, and on the way out of Zabar’s she almost got hit by a taxi. On a crosswalk, on the walk signal! Manhattan taxi drivers are homicidal. She was thinking of writing to the mayor. But anyway, her friend Sylvia’s daughter was having a baby, did he remember Sylvia’s daughter? Red hair? Blue eyes? Yes, everyone was excited. She was the one who was right between Zed and Eli, agewise. And that bloody tap in the bathroom had begun dripping again, but she wasn’t complaining. Because life’s too short to complain about small things, especially if you’re going to practically lose your life to a taxi on the way out of Zabar’s, c’est la vie, et cetera.

She faded in and out, like a shifting and unreliable radio signal. The monologue eventually subsided, and a silence settled over the line. He didn’t speak.

She began speaking again all at once, fast and nervous. She just worried about him, she said, out there in the boroughs like that. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed. Eli transferred the phone into his left hand and held the torn page in his right. He turned the page over to read the rest of the psalm. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. When he held it up to the window, Lilia’s childhood handwriting was a backward shadow on the other side of the page. His mother wanted to know if he’d heard from Zed lately; at last word he was headed for Ethiopia, although she couldn’t remember what he was doing there. It wasn’t that she entirely disapproved of Eli’s brother, although she wished he’d go to college; she was glad that he was seeing the world (incidentally, had Eli considered travel? Maybe a month or two abroad would do him good, perhaps focus him a little), but she worried about Zed. She did. She worried that Zed was getting too radical, too mystical (or was spiritual the right word? She was never sure what the difference was), just the way he wandered around biblical countries talking about God like that. Did he seem at all unhinged? Had he been heard from lately?

Eli turned the page over again. The first part of the psalm was partly lost under her handwriting, but he could still make it out: . . I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t heard from Zed for a while, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He doesn’t just talk about God, he talks about Buddhism and Taoism at least as much. What he suffers from—” He listened to his mother’s interruption for a second and then interrupted her. “No, he’s not an extremist, you’ve got it all wrong. I was going to say what Zed suffers from is a pathological sense of democ racy. He’s too democratic to even choose one individual religion to be extreme and radical about. He’s probably an atheist.”

This last sentiment triggered a longish pause, in which he imagined her switching the telephone from one ear to the other and mentally rewriting her will.

“Eli,” she said, “sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just don’t think we’re in any position to judge his life.”

The pause lengthened and grew black around the edges. No, she told him, she was serious. She wanted to know what was wrong, with no diversions this time.

“My girlfriend disappeared.” Eli listened for a moment and then interrupted her. “Yes, Lilia, the one I was living with, you think I’d have more than one? She didn’t just leave me. I mean she disappeared.”

His mother offered her opinion that girls don’t just disappear, unless they’ve gone and gotten themselves—

“This one does.”

Then she did go and get herself—

“No,” he said, “she wasn’t pregnant. For God’s sake.”

Her son, she felt, deserved better than that. And what did he mean by disappeared, exactly?

“She just got on a train and—”

“So she left.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t—”

“Then how do you know it was a train?”

“Because she said she was sick of traveling on buses,” he said.

She was worried about him. How long had he been working on his thesis, out there in the boroughs? (She had a way of saying the word boroughs that conjured up images of far-off places of questionable repute: Uzbekistan, North Korea, Côte d’Ivoire.) How long was his thesis? It must be the length of War and Peace by this point. Was it even done yet? Wasn’t it due a year ago, at least? Heaven knew she wasn’t one to judge, of course, or to criticize, but he had to at least consider her point of view in this matter. It seemed a bit odd to her that he’d want to spend time chasing after noncommittal girls who leave on trains when here it had been years and he’d missed at least one thesis deadline already. What exactly was it that was so impossible to write about? He’d always been so good at writing, he’d always been so passionate about those dead languages of his, and she understood about writer’s block, well, she thought she did, but how hard could it be? Well, she worried about him, that was all. He just seemed a bit lost to her when she called sometimes. Lacking focus, perhaps. She just didn’t want him to end up like Zed, wandering rootlessly through dangerous places far away. She still didn’t understand why he didn’t just finish his thesis and take his master’s degree. She wondered sometimes if he knew what he wanted. She was afraid sometimes that perhaps he didn’t.

He was reading the eleventh verse of the psalm: Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

His mother was explaining about responsibility and adulthood. She had ideas about staying engaged with the world, as expressed in one’s willingness to make something of one’s life, particularly after having enjoyed the benefits of a lengthy and maternally funded university education. Which, naturally, was not an inexpensive proposition. Not that she minded, of course she didn’t, not at all, and she certainly wasn’t saying this to make him feel guilty; she just didn’t want him to end up like his brother, she was just a bit concerned, and she wondered if he was fully aware of the—

“I know what I want,” he said quietly. And suddenly, miraculously, the haze lifted. The decision was made. He let the phone drop a little, holding it loosely and barely listening to her, and with his other hand he picked up the map. Montreal was less than two inches to the north.

She wanted to know what he meant by that, but he’d already hung up the phone. He reached for his wallet from the side table, folded the Bible page into it, grabbed his coat from the closet, and put his toothbrush and the map in opposite coat pockets. The telephone began ringing again within minutes, but he was already out the door.