Last Night in Montreal

22

In a hotel room four or five stories above Boulevard Rene Levesque, in the harbor city of Montreal, Eli was trying to find a phone number. Michaela wasn’t answering her phone, and he wanted to reach Club Electrolite. He had called directory assistance three or four times, and although the operators themselves seemed flawlessly bilingual, some glitch in the system was causing the phone number to be given repeatedly in French, which was not a language he understood; all the languages he knew were dead or on life support. “Please hold for the number,” a sequence of operators had told him brightly, followed by a mechanical click, and then the same robotic cinq, une, quatre, trois, cinq, deux, etc. “Listen,” he was saying to the third or fourth operator, “I need this number in Eng—” but the French robot was already speaking, and he slammed down the receiver in disgust. His collection of obscure aboriginal languages had never seemed more useless. He was reluctant to call the hotel switchboard, because he thought the number he was looking for might belong to a strip club. He stood for a few minutes in the middle of the floor, disconsolate in the winter sunlight, and then moved to the window to look down at the anonymous street. He had arrived from New York City by train the night before. He held no Canadian currency. He didn’t speak the language.

He had arrived without luggage, the postcard and the envelope folded together in his jacket pocket with his toothbrush and his map. After thirteen hours of travel the train pulled into a shadowy underworld of tracks and cement platforms, three hours behind schedule, and stopped with a monumental hissing of brakes. He got out of the train and stood for a few minutes on the dim platform, at a loss. He’d had a prolonged disagreement with an imperfectly preserved Amtrak Café Car sandwich earlier in the day, and he still felt a little ill. Travelers moved past him, speaking French. He thought about just staying down here, on the level of trains and shadows, and then somehow sneaking onto the next train bound for New York City and arriving back in Brooklyn sometime tomorrow and just forgetting the whole thing, but decided he’d never forgive himself.

He took a deep breath and started in the direction of the escalators. Across the concrete twilight of the platform, the stairwells held a greenish, somewhat aquatic light. He stepped onto an escalator and traveled upward under exposed fluorescent lights into the cavernous grey of Station Bonaventure. He stood near the top of the escalator for a few minutes, not quite nauseated anymore, but — and this was almost equally uncomfortable — acutely aware of his lack of luggage. He put his hands in his pockets, in the absence of a luggage handle to hold on to, and this was when he realized that he’d left his cell phone on his desk in New York. He swore under his breath and began walking toward the nearest pay-phone sign.

This station was imposing, although he didn’t find it beautiful. Blue-and-white frescoes high up on the walls depicted heroic scenes involving swords and canoes. The words of an anthem he’d never heard were rendered in two languages, large enough to be read from below, but there was no other English. The insanity of the journey came over him like a chill. He wanted to go home. He was already wishing he hadn’t followed her here. At the pay phone he pulled the envelope from Michaela out of his pocket and dialed the number written on the inside of the flap. It was apparently a cellphone number: there was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings. It rang four or five times before an indifferent-sounding message clicked on: “This is Michaela. Leave a message.”

He cleared his throat before the tone. “Michaela,” he said, speaking too loudly, “this is Eli Jacobs. I’m in Montreal. I’m coming to the club tomorrow. I’ll. . I’ll do what you said, with the white flag and everything, I just. . I. . I hope she’s there. I hope she’s there.” He meant to sound stern but sounded nervous. He hung up fast, flustered, and stood for a moment in the phone booth with his eyes closed. Nothing he had known in Brooklyn seemed applicable here.

He forced himself to leave the station, walking out into the cold evening air. The street outside was all but deserted, urban in a way that reminded him of medium-sized cities everywhere; windswept plazas, hard angles of glass and concrete. Across the street, a low anonymous glass tower reflected lights and the sky. A few cars passed, boxy and random, and it took him a few minutes to recognize them as taxicabs. They weren’t yellow. There was, in fact, nothing identifiable about them at all; this was a random remnant fleet, grey Toyota Tercels and old blue Valiants, boxy red Fords with failing mufflers and squarish minivans with rust around the fenders, all with some variation on a taxi sign bolted to the roof. One or two slowed in front of him; he didn’t get in. He found their randomness unsettling. He thought about calling Geneviève for advice and decided against it.

A couple was approaching through the pools of amber streetlight, passing in and out of shadow and light. The man was telling a complicated story with elaborate hand gestures. The girl let out a high-pitched silvery laugh.

“Excusez-moi,” said Eli awkwardly as they drew near. They paused, receptive and looking at him, smiling. He thought for a second, but his high school French would go no further. “I’m looking for a hotel,” he said, conceding linguistic surrender. “Somewhere near here? Could you recommend anything?”

But he’d failed the password test: the air between them turned suddenly to ice. The girl’s smile hardened into a sneer. The man said something, but the only words Eli understood were anglais and américain. Whatever he said made the girl laugh again, but in a different, harder way, and they left him standing and walked onward. The man was resuming his story as they passed out of hearing range; the girl was laughing her original, silvery laugh. “Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to live in a city with a doomed language?” Geneviève had asked him once, some days or weeks ago in what may have been another lifetime. He stared down at the glittering sidewalk, blinking and at a loss, while the barely recognizable taxicabs kept passing like clockwork in front of him, over and over again like a looped reel with minor variations (Ford, Toyota, Toyota, Chevrolet) and it occurred to him that Thomas was right, that coming here had been a colossal mistake and also that he was somehow too far in already to back away from this place.

When he turned back toward the train station there was in fact a hotel attached to it: Le Hotel Reine Elizabeth towered just behind him. The fact of its existence somehow made him hate the walking couple even more; he could still see them in the distance, arm in arm. The lobby coincided with some uninformed ideas he had about what grand hotels might have looked like in Russia, circa 1960 or so: red carpets, gold-and-crystal chandeliers, businessmen in double-breasted suits, older women with sculpted hair and small handbags waiting stoically on ornate sofas here and there among the pillars. The room was warm with cigar smoke and conversation. He couldn’t understand a single word.

In the morning he spent a long time in the shower. When he got out he dug in his jacket pocket for the folded envelope and dialed Michaela’s number again. It went immediately to voice mail. He hung up without speaking and went down to the front desk to ask for directions. The lobby was much less pleasant in daylight. The concierge tactfully steered him away from Club Electrolite but recommended a number of fine restaurants and a jazz club nearby. A bellboy, apparently concluding that he was yet another American tourist here for the sex, pulled him aside and said he thought Club Electrolite was near the corner of Ste.-Catherine and Rue McGill but remarked that as far as he knew it was primarily a dance club with some go-go dancers, and that if Eli wanted to see some, ahem, danseuses nues perhaps (irritating wink here), he needn’t walk that far; he could, the bellboy said helpfully, simply make his way to Rue Ste.-Catherine, where apparently there were two or three strip clubs on any given block from here to the city limits. In both directions.

“No, I’m looking for a girl,” Eli said.

“Of course,” said the bellboy.

“No, a specific girl. I’m looking for a specific girl.”

“Aren’t we all?” said the bellboy. “Listen, go to Club Electrolite if you want, but you go a couple blocks east on St. Catherine Street around nightfall, you’ll see all the girls money can buy. But don’t go too far east or they all turn into transvestites by the time you get to Rue de la Visitation.”

Eli thanked him and set out for the address on the postcard. It was just past noon, but the sky was heavy and dark. It had begun to snow, and the sidewalk was slippery. He walked slowly, not particularly eager to arrive at his destination, and he’d walked a half block past the club before he realized his mistake and doubled back to find it.

Club Electrolite was a narrow four-story building of the same dirty grey stone as the buildings around it. A narrow alley ran along one side. A neon sign flashed the outline of a naked angel above the door, but all the windows were dark. He stood on the sidewalk, pulled at the door again, and for a moment wanted to fall to his knees: a sign on the door, miraculously bilingual, advised him that the club had switched recently to winter hours and would be open only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights until May.

That was the third Monday afternoon in December. He wandered back down the street to a warm café, at a loss now, and sat alone for some time with the remains of his thoughts.

IN THE LAST LIGHT of afternoon a few days later Eli took a walk to the river. Thirteen hours by train to the south New York City was etched in the brilliance of autumn, but here winter was well under way. It had snowed twice already in the days since he’d arrived, and the temperature seemed to be dropping by the hour. A white electric cross burned at night high up on the hill above the city; Eli, looking out from the window of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, thought that it was one of the loneliest visions he’d ever seen. He walked for entire afternoons through the frozen streets looking for Lilia, standing in places that he thought might attract her, sitting in coffee shops where he thought she might linger, reading the English-language press for clues on the city he found himself in, trying not to speak English in public except when ordering coffee. The businesses closed early here, but he found two coffee shops about a mile apart that stayed open all night, admitting freezing drafts every time the door opened. He thought of them as beacons in the night ocean and moved between them on alternate nights. Cold air seeped through the windows of every room.

He had read somewhere that there was a cruise ship docked at the port. He wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it, but it seemed like something Lilia might take pictures of, and on the fourth day he thought that walking there and then walking back to the hotel might take up a few hours, and he was desperate to distract himself; Club Electrolite was theoretically opening again that night, and he hadn’t decided what he was going to say when he saw her. He was walking slowly through the old city, moving south toward the harbor, when a movement high above him in an alleyway caught his eye: a girl was standing on the railing of a fire escape. She was balanced perfectly two stories above the cobblestones, one hand steadying her on the ladder above. For a confused moment he took her for a suicide, but at the instant he was about to call out to her, he saw the rope. It had been strung tight from building to building, tied expertly across the vertiginous span between fire escapes. He would have taken it for a makeshift clothesline, except for the girl. He saw the way she had aligned her thin body with the rope, the ballet slippers on her feet and the ferocity of her obvious intent, and he understood what she was going to do. He drifted a few steps into the alleyway and sank close against a brick wall, looking up.

He wanted to call out, perhaps to stop her, but it was too late; it occurred to him that any sudden noise or movement might be fatally distracting. The timing of his arrival on the scene was impeccable. As he stood below, cold sweat on his forehead, she casually removed her hand from the ladder. Eli closed his eyes for a second and then looked back at the street; a man passed on the other side, looking at his reflection in a long blank office-building window, and he thought to call out to him with the best high school French he knew— Help me, aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît, please— but what could another man do at this moment besides distract her into a lethal fall? She was well beyond anyone’s reach. He forced himself to look at her.

She took one careful, expert step out onto the tightrope. He closed his eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable: the loss of balance, unbearable teetering, nightmare wingless descent. Surely no one survived this. A rope with no safety net and cobblestones beneath; he could already see the conspiracy unfolding between the rope and the cobblestones and the siren call of gravity, blood pooling outward from the shattered white epicenter of her skull. His hands were clenched fists in his pockets. He wanted to scream. But no one, Zed had scrawled once in a letter from Africa several years ago, should have to die without a witness. Eli opened his eyes.

She took a second impeccable slow-motion step, and then another. Her face was unreadable and utterly calm. This nightmare, this conspiracy of terrible details: for the first time he began to notice what she looked like, beyond the obvious horror of watching her last moments on earth. It was hard to see her clearly from this angle, in this light, but she was wearing a red dress, and her hair was platinum-white: she shone like a signal in the high shadows above. An apparition, wingless angel, and the poetry of her balance: she moved so slowly. This was a terrible, nerve-shattering meditation she practiced. He couldn’t breathe.

In his mind’s eye he watched her falling and falling and falling in front of him, but she kept moving forward over the rope. One deliberate step after another and she was halfway across already, two-thirds of the way, unceasing, and then she reached out and grasped the fire-escape ladder across the alley from where she’d started, safe and balanced on the opposite railing. She hopped down to the fire-escape landing and then stood there looking down, almost directly above him. Safe.

There were tears on his face. His hand was trembling when he brushed them away, and his heart was beating too fast. He was furious. She climbed down the fire stairs in one continuous movement and dropped down lightly onto the top of a Dumpster. From there it was an easy leap to the cobblestones, where she’d left a shiny silver jacket and a pair of high-heeled boots in a bundle by the wall. She took off the ballet slippers and put them in a jacket pocket. It seemed that the zipper on her left boot was broken, but she had a shoestring that she tied around her ankle to keep it up. She looked up at Eli then and stared calmly at him while she pulled on the jacket. When she’d zipped it up she put her hands in her pockets and stood looking at him.

Strange creature: beautiful, he supposed. She had short hair that stood on end; a struck-by-lightning look, shocked colorless. This close, he saw that her eyes were green. There was a sweet, slightly decrepit smell about her, like hair gel and stale perfume and cigarettes.

“You were looking up my skirt,” she said flatly, in accentless English. She was slightly out of breath.

He stood frozen in her flat green stare; there was a look in her eyes that struck him as unhealthy. He swallowed hard, with enormous effort, and slowly shook his head.

“I wasn’t looking up your skirt. I was just standing here, and I saw you.” He felt dazed and sick, and his voice sounded strange to him.

“Right,” she said. “You were just standing there, looking up my skirt.”

Eli was in no mood to argue. He’d just seen her die, whether she was still breathing or not. He looked up at the tightrope, ingeniously knotted and suddenly innocuous; it could have been a clothesline. For a moment it wasn’t at all clear to him that it wasn’t a clothesline, that he wasn’t dreaming and wouldn’t wake up in a moment in his bed in Brooklyn with Lilia asleep beside him; he took a slow step backward, closed his eyes for a moment, and touched the fingertips of both hands fleetingly to his forehead. His shoulder came up hard against a brick wall.

“Did you cut your hair recently?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Eli said hoarsely. “I just don’t feel like talking to you anymore. I’m not feeling that well. If you’ll excuse me. .”

“No, wait,” she said, “did you cut your hair recently? Was it longer before?”

He stopped backing away and looked at her. There was a thoughtful quality to her stare; she was speaking slowly, like someone trying to recall a forgotten name.

“Yes,” he said. “It was longer before.”

“I’ve seen you,” she said. “I’ve seen you before somewhere.”

“I very much doubt that.”

“No, I’ve seen you before somewhere.” She smiled suddenly. “Oh God, oh God, it’s you,” she said. “Of all people. Did you know Lilia once took a picture of you while you were sleeping?”

He couldn’t speak.

“Although in the picture,” she said, “you did have slightly longer hair. You’re the absolute last person I expected to run into here. Although I did think I might see you tonight.” She was moving past him, still smiling. “The club opens at nine,” she said. “I will see you there, won’t I? Lilia said she’d be there tonight.”

“Michaela,” he said. “Michaela, wait—”

But she blew him a kiss from just outside the alleyway, and when he walked out after her he couldn’t tell which way she’d gone, in all the narrow ancient streets.

23

Christopher left the city quietly, at an hour of the day when Michaela should have been home from school but wasn’t. She was smoking cigarettes behind the school gym as his car pulled out of the driveway and had only just arrived home as he approached the American border. She was tearing his note into furious pieces as he was entering the United States. He’d told Peter that he was leaving town for a few weeks and asked him to look in on Michaela occasionally. He convinced himself that the arrangement wasn’t unreasonable: it was true that Michaela was only fifteen, he thought, but his daughter was never in any trouble that he heard about and didn’t seem to need him anyway.

He was waved across the border and drove quickly into the United States, feeling lighter than he had in years. He was deep into upstate New York by evening. He spent that night in a beige-and-pink Ramada Hotel room that still smelled of new carpeting. He couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning he got up and spent some time looking at a map. The town of Leonard, Arizona was circled in green. He went to bed at four and woke two hours later from a dream of ringing pay phones, strangely rested. He was traveling again an hour later, driving quickly south.

24

Lilia was aware at times of a presence half glimpsed alongside her, evanescent, only indirectly apparent, like the stars you can see only when you look away. A blue car passed them on the highway, the driver staring indifferently at the road ahead, and she was unable to escape the impression that she’d seen him before somewhere. Or as she emerged blinking from a restaurant into the blinding noon sunlight, a man stepped into a hardware store across the street. Did he have the same profile as the driver who had passed them? The sound of a door closing quietly on an upstairs motel balcony, just at the moment she emerged from the room. Footsteps on the same balcony at four A.M. An inescapable feeling, as she pulled the cord on the pale motel curtains, of having just severed someone’s line of sight. A waitress seated Lilia and her father at a restaurant table, and she realized that an uneaten meal had been abandoned at the table beside them, along with a twenty-dollar bill; the waitress returned a few minutes later, puzzled, and began clearing it away, and it wouldn’t have been that remarkable except that she’d seen the same thing on a table in another town two days ago, and she couldn’t help but imagine that the same person had abandoned both meals just at the instant she’d walked into the restaurant.

In short, she dwelt for some time in the hinterland between sheer paranoia and reasonable suspicion, but she didn’t mention it to her father. It was only since the town of Leonard that she’d sensed this shadow traveling alongside her, and while it was possible that she was imagining it, it was equally possible that she had conjured her pursuer out of the ether with a phone call. She remembered the cool plastic of the receiver against her face, the crackle of static down the wires, the clicking sounds as the Arizona pay phone forged a fragile link with a telephone somewhere in southern Quebec, and she wondered if her mother’s phone was tapped. It didn’t seem unreasonable; Lilia watched enough television to think it more than plausible that calls to a kidnapped child’s home of origin might be recorded or followed up on and traced at the very least. On an ocean of static, she had sent up a flare.

Lilia spent some time wondering whether her father had noticed the new pursuer. It occurred to her after a while that even if he suspected the same things she did, he might not notice the difference — he had always been aware of shadows, although it had never been clear whether they were real or not. He had always hidden his child in the backseats of moving automobiles. He had always glanced over his shoulder and beaten nervous waltz rhythms on the steering wheel with his hands, driven through the night and taken looped circuitous routes to throw off potential pursuers, thought up names and alibis and procured forged driver’s licenses and birth certificates when necessary, managed the web of interlinked bank accounts that kept their tenuous existence afloat. He had always been followed by shadows and ghosts; whether or not they were real was almost incidental. The waters were always rising behind them, and he was always carrying her to higher ground. The realization made Lilia’s heart swell awkwardly with love and guilt, and she couldn’t bring herself to mention this latest shade. He didn’t mention it either, but then, he also didn’t stop: they no longer stayed anywhere for more than two or three nights. There were motel rooms, diners, endless chain restaurants, pasta cooked in hotel kitchenettes, hours of highway passing under the wheels. They lingered only rarely; an hour in a park, instead of an entire afternoon. An hour in a library, instead of a day. When she emerged from gas station washrooms, he was waiting outside the door. He didn’t let her stay alone in the car in parking lots anymore; Lilia walked beside him into every gas station, every store. He was always beside her. She was seldom alone. She noticed lines on his face that hadn’t been there before. And sometimes she had the impression, walking back through the parking lot to the car with an armload of groceries and magazines, of being watched through one of the other windshields.

25

It was a long time before Eli could bring himself to leave the hotel that night. He spent the evening lying in bed at the hotel with a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside door handle, staring up at the ceiling. At eight o’clock he ordered a room-service dinner. He ate a dinner roll and a forkful of chicken, suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of eating, put the tray outside in the hallway, and ordered a cup of coffee. This he drank standing at the window, looking down at the grey roofscape and the deserted street below. The idea of seeing Lilia again was disconcerting. He had been dwelling increasingly on the way she’d walked out; since she’d left without her suitcase but it had been gone from under the bed, she had to have planted it somewhere the night before — the janitor’s closet by the front door? The basement of the building? A locker at the train station? The premeditation was awful. Horrific to think of her sleeping beside him that last night, already packed for departure and planning on disappearing in the morning. He stood for a long time in the shower, perfectly still in the stream of scalding water; he put on a new shirt that he’d bought on St. Catherine Street earlier and stood for a long time staring motionless at his face in the mirror. “This is what I came here for,” he told his reflection, but his reflection didn’t look convinced. He set out for Club Electrolite at ten o’clock, but when he stepped outside the day’s trampled snow had frozen on the sidewalk into a sheet of uneven dark ice. It was midnight before he came to the door.

The main dance floor of Club Electrolite was vast and shadowy, with a few small round stages for go-go dancers scattered at regular intervals across it. The mirrored walls gave a queasy impression of infinity. Spinning lights illuminated pale clouds of dry ice that hissed from the corners of the room, and a scattering of disco balls threw shards of light back from the ceiling. The darkness was old here; it had always been night. He checked his coat and moved slowly through the crowd, past the bar, onto the dance floor. He didn’t feel like drinking. He made no effort to dance. He stood near a speaker, hands in his pockets, and the music was so loud that he thought he might die. His clothing moved in the gale of sound. He wanted to lie down and let the sound wash over him. He wanted to surrender. He tried to look at every face in the crowd, but Lilia was nowhere.

There was a boy standing near him with a trumpet, playing barely audible counterpoint to the techno beat. He was thin and strung out, wild-eyed in the lights. His hair stood on end. Whoever was in charge of the lighting clearly liked him; a spotlight caught his trumpet in a long gleam of light. Eli stood watching him, hands in his pockets, wondering what to do. There was only one go-go dancer tonight; Michaela was clad in black vinyl, gyrating on a stage near the center of the room. She writhed and shimmered, intoxicated by herself. He realized that she couldn’t see him in the crowd and realized at the same moment that he’d forgotten the white flag. For a moment something was breaking inside him, and he pressed both hands to his forehead and closed his eyes, but all wasn’t lost after all — an idea caught him and he moved toward the blue-lit bar on the far wall. The bartender had left a white towel on the bar; he ordered a drink and then the moment her back was turned he slid the towel quickly from the counter and slipped back into the crowd. He made his way to a place not far from Michaela, trying to look at every face at once in case Lilia might be here, and raised the white towel with both hands over his head. A spotlight, moving over the crowd, caught the towel and transformed it into a rectangle of ultraviolet light. He looked up at it, awkwardly conspicuous, and then back at the dancer. Michaela was watching him, expressionless, still dancing. She raised one thin arm over her head and snapped her fingers in the air.

The music lowered slightly, and the MC’s smooth voice broke over the melody. The room was flooded suddenly in black light, and every white t-shirt in the room and Eli’s improvised flag turned violently luminescent.

“Bon soir, madames et monsieurs. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, et bienvenue à Club Electrolite. We have a special message this evening. . our lovely dancer ce soir, notre Michaela, would like to welcome Eli Jacobs to the club.”

The MC’s smooth voice continued in French. Eli lowered the bar towel and stood stunned and helpless while the swirling of lights resumed and the crowd (mostly drunk, only half aware that there’d been a brief interruption) again began moving to the rising beat. The spotlight trained on him, however, didn’t move. Eli didn’t move either; he stood frozen and illuminated, singled out. Someone tapped his shoulder; he turned, and the bartender snatched her towel from his hand and shouted something at him in French. It was hard to see her clearly through the haze of light as she walked away from him. When he looked back Michaela had vanished from the pedestal stage; it stood abandoned and suddenly unlit. An arm emerged from the crowd and set an empty beer bottle on its surface. The boy with the trumpet resumed his inaudible melody.

Eli stood still, and the music rose around him. Michaela appeared at his side and took his hand. He followed her like a child as she forced her way through the crowd, speaking over her shoulder. The music was too loud and he couldn’t hear what she was saying; still, he followed her through the half-hidden door beside the DJ’s booth. Her hand was damp with sweat. On the other side of the door a bouncer sat reading on the staircase landing, leaning back in a rickety-looking wooden chair under an exposed light-bulb that shivered with every beat; he glanced up disinterestedly from Tropique du Cancer and nodded them down the stairs. The music grew quieter as they descended, until at the foot of the stairs it had become pure vibration, sensed rather than heard, like a complicated heartbeat coming from above. The Club Electrolite basement was a cramped, labyrinthine space, all cheap wooden doors and plywood walls. Wires brushed against him from the ceiling. He trailed after her, she called Lilia’s name, she flung open one of the doors and pulled him into an empty dressing room.

“Well?” Eli said.

Michaela dropped his hand, drew a deep breath, and swore softly. She sat down at a makeup counter, stared at herself in the mirror for a second, and then a sweep of her arm sent the makeup to the floor in a storm of silver tubes and tiny jars that broke open and spilled out bright powders and iridescent goo. Altogether, it was a beautiful mess. He stood leaning against the doorframe watching her while she covered her face with both hands and sat very still for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. She blinked a few times, caught sight of her red-eyed reflection in the mirror and winced, cast around in the mess on the floor for a tissue. When she found one she dabbed at the mascara streaks on her face, gazing steadily into her own eyes in the mirror. “It’s just that I expected her to be here.”

He cleared his throat, but she didn’t look at him.

“Where is she?”

“She was here a half hour ago. We had a fight, but I told her not to leave.”

“Why did you bring me here? Are you a friend of hers?”

She made a brittle sound that could have been a laugh. “I wouldn’t say that friend is exactly the word, really.” Her eyes were glassy and bloodshot in the mirror. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

“That page from the Bible,” he said, “the Twenty-second Psalm with her handwriting on it. Where did that come from?”

“She wrote that when she was seven or eight,” said Michaela, “in a hotel room somewhere in the States. I wish to remain vanishing. I always liked that line.”

“But why did you have it?”

“Because my father had it. He was the detective on the case.”

“I don’t understand. .”

“Well, it’s complicated.” She was staring fixedly at her reflection in the mirror; with shaking hands, she began reapplying eyeliner. “He was the detective on the case, and I read all his notes.”

“Can you just tell me where Lilia is, and I’ll get out of here?”

“She’ll come back to me,” she said, ignoring the question. “I’m the only one who knows her story. I’m her only witness.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen,” she said, “I have to go back onstage.”

“Can you at least tell me why I had to raise up that bloody white dish towel? I felt like an idiot.”

“How else was I supposed to see you in the crowd? The black lights pick up everything white. I didn’t think I’d run into you in the old city this afternoon.” Someone pounded briefly on the door of her dressing room. “I have to go back up,” she said. “Can you meet me somewhere later?”

“Anywhere,” he said.

She arrived at the coffee shop on Boulevard St.-Laurent just after two A.M., shivering her way out of a cab and sinking into a chair across the table from him. She said she was exhausted. She closed her eyes, and he took the opportunity to study her up close. She had a small faint scar on her forehead, imperfectly camouflaged with makeup. She was beautiful in a way that suggested very little time for beauty left ahead of her; there was a hardness and an exhaustion already settling over her face. Eli leaned forward across the table, close enough to smell the cigarette smoke in her hair.

“It’s two in the morning,” he said softly, “I’ve been here for days and I don’t speak the language, I just want to talk to Lilia and make sure she’s all right, I am very tired, and I need you to be straight with me. Can you tell me where she is?”

She opened her eyes. “How long did it take you to get here?”

“Thirteen hours.”

“Jesus. Did you walk?”

“I took the train. Could you tell me where she is?”

“I’ve never been to Brooklyn,” she said after some time had passed. She was quiet for a few seconds, staring out the window. “She told you she was abducted?”

“As a child. Yes.”

“You know what’s amazing? She doesn’t know why she was abducted. Only that she was. It’s incredible, what the mind can block. She wrote to me from New York City a few weeks ago.”

“She wrote you?”

“Maybe a month ago. I told her I wouldn’t tell her anything unless she came here.”

“You forced her to come here. Do you have any idea—”

“No,” Michaela said, “I suggested that she come here. Don’t raise your voice, or I will walk out of here and you will never see her again. She came here all by herself.”

He leaned back in his chair, looking out the window. The city had reached the stage of night when the taxicabs were appearing, ferrying the worn-out glittering nightlife home from the clubs.

“I don’t understand why she had to come here,” he said finally. “Whatever it is she wanted to know, couldn’t you have told her over the phone?”

“I wanted to meet her. I’d known about her half my life. But listen, I brought you here for a reason. I have to ask you something, and I want you to answer me honestly. There’s an argument that I was having with her, very recently.”

“How recently?”

“A few hours ago, just before I saw you on the dance floor. We were talking about a car accident. Did she ever speak to you about a car accident?”

“What?”

“An accident,” she repeated patiently, “involving a car, that would have occurred when she’d just turned sixteen. Maybe two or three days after her sixteenth birthday. Because it’s absolutely imperative that you tell me if she did, if she told you anything about it, if you know anything, anything at all. I have to know.” Michaela clasped her hands on the tabletop, and he saw that her knuckles were red from the cold.

“What could a car accident that happened when she was sixteen possibly have to do with you?”

She just looked at him.

“No,” Eli said. “She didn’t tell me anything about that. I don’t know anything about a car accident.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, I suppose that’s your choice. Listen, I’m tired, and I want to get out of here. Can you tell me where she is?”

“I read my father’s case notes,” Michaela said. “My father was, well, let’s say my father was a little obsessed. The ironic thing is, I know everything about her life except the one thing that I really want to know. I even know the things she doesn’t.”

“I’m not following you. How could you know things about her life that she doesn’t?”

“I know why she has those scars on her arms, for instance. Do you?”

“No,” Eli said. “I never asked.”

“Even if you’d asked,” she said, “Lilia couldn’t have told you.”

“She doesn’t know?”

“She doesn’t remember.”

He was silent, watching her.

“I know Lilia’s story,” she said. “I know why she was abducted, I know what happened to her before her father took her away, I know all the things that she can’t remember herself. I offered them to her in exchange for telling me about the accident, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t tell me about it, even though I could tell she wanted to know what had happened to her, and we argued horribly about it earlier. But she told you her story, didn’t she?”

“Yes. No. All of her story except that.”

“Tell me about the accident,” she said, “and I will tell you where she is.”

“I don’t want to use Lilia’s story as a bargaining chip.”

“But what else do you have?”

Eli looked at her across the table until she stood up and kissed him on the forehead and told him to meet her here again same time tomorrow and then maybe they could talk, and then she was gone in a blast of cold air through the closing glass doors. And it was hard to say later how any moment this ghastly could possibly become a routine, but he knew no one else in the city, and she knew where Lilia was. He waited for her every night after that in the all-night coffee house on the corner of St.-Laurent and Prince Arthur Boulevards, drinking coffee by the window and watching for her shape, for the platform boot emerging from the cab or the narrow figure walking slowly up the hill. She came in exhausted but strangely bright, sometimes feverish, glassy-eyed. She smiled wanly when she saw him, two or three or four A.M., and slid into the opposite chair. She had a curious smell about her at this hour, especially if she’d been in the VIP lounge on the second floor: hairspray, men’s cologne, her perfume. Other, subtler notes that he preferred not to identify too closely. Her hair had softened by this time of night, and her makeup was blurred. There was a loose, dangerous quality to her movements. Her face was flushed. It was sometimes a long time before she spoke.

“Are you all right?”

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

“Can I get you something?”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“What did she write?”

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

“She was being followed?”

“All her life,” Michaela said.

26

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

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

27

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You sound like Lilia.”

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

“She traveled beautifully,” she said finally.

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

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

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

“What was it like, living with her?”

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

“All of it?”

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

“What, then?”

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

“Silence? What else?”

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

She watched him without speaking.

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

“Five.”

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

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

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

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

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

28

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

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

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

29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded.

“Welcome to the city,” she said.

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t stay in hotel rooms.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

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

“Are you sure?”

“It’s too cold to go outside.”

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

“Fine. Don’t come till afternoon.”

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

“Goodnight, Eli,” Michaela said.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s cold,” he said.

“It gets colder.”

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

She shook her head.

“From Chicoutimi,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“North. Very north.”

He nodded. “Even colder than here?”

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

“No.”

She stared blankly at him for a moment.

“You wait outside,” she said.

“Fine. Tell Michaela to hurry up.”

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

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

“Cruise ship?”

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

“Do you want to go see it?”

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

“How late did you work last night?”

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

“What kind of bachelor party?”

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

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

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

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

He nodded and didn’t speak for a while.

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

“Why does it have a figurehead?”

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

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

“But you know where she is.”

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

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

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

“Je ne parle pas français,” she said.

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

“What did you just say to him?”

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

“You don’t speak French?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her loneliness was like a third presence at the café table; they sat together by the hour, and both were aware that the moment he knew where Lilia was he would vanish back to New York and she’d be shipwrecked alone on the ice floe. She held her stories like currency and dispensed small change night by night. Notes on the circular qualities of obsession, like a snake tattoo forever biting its tail: the little girl scheming about dynamite and tightropes in her bedroom, the detective father obsessed with Lilia downstairs, the mother who brought home a cake and then disappeared forever. Michaela always had another story to tell him. Her stories were always in the margins of Lilia’s life. She was always about to tell him where Lilia was. And he was usually only too happy to sit with her indefinitely and avoid the hotel with its painfully empty bed and deadpan bellboys, but he sometimes fell asleep in his café chair with his chin on his chest, arms folded, drifting off into cold dreams about exploding cafés and cake and tightropes. She stayed with him, ordered more tea at intervals, glared with bloodshot eyes at the arrival of morning. He fell asleep to the sound of her voice, and sometimes when he woke up she was still talking.

She talked about languages sometimes near morning. Specifically, what it was like to speak the wrong one in a place where the use of a particular language is enforced by means of a tip line for citizen informants. Laws were in place in the province of Quebec to ensure the usage of French, agencies were set up to enforce them, and a 1-800 number connected callers to La commission de protection de la langue français to report violations. A violation could be as small as English appearing before French on a sign, she said, or the English appearing in larger letters, or a salesgirl saying hello instead of bonjour on a Sunday afternoon in the ladies’ shoe department. Penalties included fines and the revocation of business licenses.

“Try to imagine,” she said, “what it’s like when you can’t speak the right language in a place like this.” She had been explaining a graffiti tag they’d walked by near Club Electrolite: Montreal en français: 101 ou 401. Bill 101 was one of the laws that specifically restricts the use of the English language. The 401 was the highway out of the city. Speak French or get out.

“I know,” he said gently, “but did I ever tell you about my field of study?”

She went silent, noncommittal, tracing tightropish lines with one finger in the fog of a café windowpane. Outside the streets were achingly cold, and he felt it through the windows; Eli held his coffee mug with both hands to keep warm. It was almost four A.M.

“There are six thousand languages spoken on this earth,” he said. “I told you that much, right?”

She wrote a slow, looping 6,000 in the windowpane fog without looking at him.

“And the thing is, almost all of them will disappear.”

She seemed to like this idea; she smiled, stopped writing on the windowpane and sipped her newest cup of tea, gazed out the window at the huddled pedestrians, didn’t speak again for quite a while. The thought of disappearing languages seemed to make her happy.

“I found a new alleyway the other day,” she said finally. “Well, the same alleyway, but another spot farther down.”

“The one where I met you?”

“No. A different one.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous. Why do you walk on tightropes?”

“It’s as close as I can get to all that. .” And all that, at that moment in that café in that cold northern city, was the time that she could almost see and almost remember, genetic memory planted long before her birth: an imagined life spent traveling through small towns with lions and tents and tightropes and sideshows, a long line of trailers winding down the highway between fields and trees, sunlight glinting on windshields; setting up tents in the field, the parking lot, the smell of popcorn and candy apples.

“You’ve traveled?” she asked.

“A little. Yes. I’ve been to Europe a few times with my brother. Spain, Paris, Eastern Europe, Turkey, one time we traveled around a bit in southern Italy.”

“The time with the boat?”

“I told you about that trip?”

“No, Lilia did.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. The time with the boat. She liked that story. We were fishing for squids.”

“Did you catch any?”

“No.”

“I dated a guy once,” she said, “who’d traveled around Europe a lot, and he said eventually everywhere seemed kind of interchangeable. Is it like that? When you travel, do all the places seem the same?”

How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? We always were a species of nomads. Eli found it easy to imagine an instinct passed down generation to generation, a permanently thrown breaker on a genetic switchboard: flight or fight, and a switch jammed permanently in the flight position, the limitless longing for travel pulled down by hooked genes. It leapfrogs a generation (she said her parents had wanted to be a detective and a real estate agent, even when they were kids), and is thwarted when it reappears. She leaned across the table, asked him if it was true that all places look the same, and the least unkind thing he could do at that moment was nod and lie to her. Yes. It’s true. I have been to half-a-dozen countries, and all the world looks the same to me. He thought it would be unimaginably cruel to tell her that all of the individual places she hadn’t seen were different.

“I don’t believe you,” she answered, settling back in her chair, the moment passed.

30

In the spring when Lilia was fifteen she was traveling north out of Florida. It had been two years since the Unsolved Cases feature, and her life was played out in a shifting, paranoid landscape: abandoned meals on restaurant tables, impressions of figures passing just out of sight, an old blue car with Quebec license plates that she saw three times in different places, a constant feeling of being watched from behind.

There was no sense in talking about it. At some point that year, by unspoken agreement, she had stopped hiding in the back of the car. She was getting too big to comfortably disappear into the backseat of an automobile anyway, and there was a feeling of waiting for something inevitable to occur; her father was moving her faster and faster from place to place. By that frenzied summer they were in a different motel room every night. Sometimes they’d check into one motel, pay for two nights, and then drive to another a few miles away. Sometimes they’d sleep through the day and then drive all through the night, speaking softly or sitting together in silence, listening to night radio, hypnotized by headlights, three A.M. meals in the hallucinogenic glare of open-all-night restaurants on the interstate, going to bed near morning in a cheap motel with parking around back. She dyed her hair at least every month, from blond to dark brown and back again, across entire spectrums of auburns and reds, forever covering the trail. Lilia’s hair felt dry and soft to the touch, and her scalp was always itchy; she spent an hour at a time in the motel shower, soothed by the water, massaging conditioner into her head. She wore dark glasses during the daytime, a baseball cap pulled down low. She met no one’s eyes in public. She wanted gazes to pass over her without stopping. She wanted to be forgotten.

That was the spring she crossed into Arizona for the one hundredth time and had her first glass of red wine to celebrate. It was possibly the worst thing she’d ever tasted, but her father told her that all the best tastes in life are acquired, and she liked the way the liquid in the glass caught the light. That night her father woke her at two in the morning, not for any reason that he could articulate, and they were gone by two-twenty. On the highway she tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t; she sat awake, wired and anxious, into the morning and all through the afternoon, until finally on the other side of the state her father pulled into the parking lot of the Stillspell Motel. She had a dull pounding headache from sleeplessness and the half glass of wine.

“Here,” he said. “I can’t drive anymore. Let’s get some rest.” He was haggard in the sunlight, hollow-eyed. In the motel room he went to bed and slept for three hours while Lilia read newsmagazines at the fake-wood table in the lamplight. He was breathing almost silently. She kept reading the same paragraph over and over again, looking over at him in the dimness to make sure she could still see his chest moving. She had never been so tired, but when she lay on the other bed a few feet away from him, there was a strange feeling of responsibility; for the first time in her life, she felt that she had to stay awake so he could sleep. Three or four cars pulled into the parking lot, and every single time she went to the window, but none of them were the blue car with foreign license plates. After a while she got out her camera and stood by the window taking photographs of the parking lot in the late-afternoon light to calm herself.

“You don’t need to keep watch,” he said.

“I thought you were asleep.”

He was sitting up and pulling his boots on. Smiling the way he used to, before they were traveling to a new town every night.

“I was,” he said. “But you still don’t have to watch over me.”

They walked out together into the warm May afternoon. The Stillspell Motel faced the highway. It was flanked on either side by the Morning Star Diner and Stillspell Auto Repair, and the three buildings (all low-slung, old, and in need of renovations) formed a decrepit open horseshoe facing away from the town. Or if not a horseshoe, perhaps a stage: three buildings at more-or-less right angles and a parking lot between them, the highway blank and grey along the invisible fourth wall. Across the highway was a landscape of chaparral that seemed more or less infinite.

“Where are we?” Lilia asked.

“Town of Stillspell, apparently.”

“I meant which state.”

“Arizona. No. Wait. New Mexico. I’m almost sure we’re in New Mexico.”

“New Mexico,” the waitress in the Morning Star Diner confirmed brightly. She liked Stillspell, she said, although she did think sometimes about leaving. When she’d brought the food she installed herself not far from them, leaning on the side of a banquette, while Lilia slumped over her chocolate milkshake and tried to remember her current name. She hadn’t slept in far too long, and it was getting on into the evening. There weren’t that many people left here, the waitress said; the population had dropped so low that it couldn’t really be considered a town anymore. There was virtually no work here. It was almost a ghost village. But she had a job and a house, and she thought she might stay a while. She’d never really left, except when she was young and had run away with her boyfriend to Phoenix. But Phoenix was so big, and people weren’t friendly to her, and fourteen’s a bit young for that kind of thing, actually, and would they like some more coffee?

“No,” said Lilia’s father. “Thank you. But I’d be curious to know your name.”

“Clara,” said the waitress. “A pleasure.”

“Likewise,” he said, and gave her a fake name that Lilia immediately forgot.

“Are you staying long?”

“Oh, a day or two maybe,” her father said, “just to rest up a little. We’ve been traveling cross-country, Allie and I.”

“Allie,” said the waitress. “What’s that short for?”

“Alessandra,” Lilia said, and flashed an exhausted smile.

“Alessandra,” the waitress repeated. She flicked a strand of hair behind her left ear. Her hair was straight and red and went to her shoulders, and she had china-blue eyes. She liked the name: “Alessandra,” she said again. “Spanish, right?”

Lilia was tired, and the details of the night grew hazy. Her father and the waitress were talking about music. Lilia was falling asleep at the table; her father and Clara were talking for what seemed like a long time; later on she couldn’t remember how it had been decided that they’d be staying at Clara’s house that night instead of, say, in their paid-for room in the Stillspell Motel, but she found herself walking with Clara and her father down a cracked street in the moonlight, old houses silent on either side. A dog was barking in the distance. Lights were on in some houses; other houses stood silent and unlit. There were a few stores with boards over the windows.

Clara had a house like an optical illusion. A glance around the living room revealed her singular interests: she liked shoes, and the ocean, and things that flew. A dozen sets of stilettos were lined up at attention along one wall in the living room. The walls had pictures of winged things, hummingbirds and pterodactyls and rickety-looking antique airplanes. The house, in the meantime, left no doubt as to her vast and final passion. Every wall, every ceiling, every surface was blue. There were watercolor fishes swimming up the staircase. She told Lilia much later that she was happy never having seen a real ocean; she was afraid it wouldn’t live up to her expectations.

She’d hung blue silk curtains over the living room windows and they rippled, water-like, in the breeze of a fan. There was a fish mobile hanging from the ceiling. The house was old and big — her grandfather had bought it for a song, she said, a few years after the mine had closed, back when everyone was leaving all at once. Lilia pictured an old man standing in the desert singing, open and pleading with eyes as blue as Clara’s. Clara insisted on an immediate tour of the kingdom: later Lilia remembered trailing after them through stranger and stranger rooms, until she asked to take a bath and was left with towels and a bathrobe in the upstairs bathroom.

Lilia lay almost floating in the claw-footed bathtub, the water around her deep and green and still. There were extravagant fish painted freehand on the walls, intensely brilliant creatures of pure color, pure light, with watercolor-green seaweed floating between them in the deep. There was a rubber fish toy on a tiled shelf by the bathtub, smiling next to a rubber yellow duck. She lay still in the water for a long time, listening to the steady dripping of the tap. Her father and Clara were somewhere distant in the house. Their voices and laughter floated up the stairs.

In the morning Lilia woke in an upstairs guest bedroom. There were old-looking toy airplanes suspended from the ceiling above her head. Her father and Clara were up already, drinking coffee; later on her father left Lilia with Clara and a stack of pancakes and walked back to the hotel to get the car and the luggage.

“Someone came by looking for you the other night,” the desk clerk said helpfully.

“What?”

“Here, he left me his card.” The desk clerk dug around in the receipts for a moment and produced a plain white card with neat black type: Christopher Graydon, Private Investigator, an address in Montreal. It took Lilia’s father a moment to recover.

“Did he say anything?”

“Just that he was looking for you. He said he needed to speak with you as soon as possible.”

“Is he still here?”

“He left this morning.”

“He hasn’t been back?”

“No. He went off down the highway.”

“Which way did he go?”

The man stared curiously at him for a moment. “Well, I guess it was east,” he said.

The door to the motel room was swinging open. The room was subtly altered; Lilia’s father stood looking in, and it took a moment to see the disturbance that he sensed: a Bible was open on the bed, with a page ripped out. He didn’t know about Lilia’s habit of leaving messages and so didn’t understand why this was. What he did understand was that someone had been here. He stood for a while on the threshold, the detective’s business card in his pocket, and realized that he’d been saved the night before. It was never possible for him to look at Clara afterward without imagining that she was in some way protective, in some way divine, a patron saint of fugitives in a roadside café. He decided to stop traveling and stay by her side.

31

“Did you find her?” the bellboy asked.

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

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

“No. Not yet.”

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

“Everywhere,” Eli said.

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

He came down to Michaela’s dressing room in the evenings and lay on his back on the carpet, or sat on the chair by the table behind her while she prepared herself for the night, reading the English papers, studying his map. Sometimes he stretched out on the floor and fell asleep while she was performing; he seemed to have fallen into limitless exhaustion. It was always possible for him to fall asleep. He had dreams about ice cubes. He was almost always cold. Once he woke up and she’d turned off the lights in the room. A candle flickered between them on the carpet, melting into a grimy plate. She was lying on the other side of the candle, still dressed in tight vinyl, her hands over her eyes. The room smelled of hairspray and candle smoke.

“What time is it?”

She turned her head to look at him. “Three A.M.,” she said. “You’re awake.”

“Barely.” His neck was stiff. “You’ll burn this place down.”

“It’s on a plate, Eli. Did you ever read about the Gnostics?”

He sat up slowly, looking at her. Her face was barely visible in the dimness.

“Yes,” he said. “How many pills have you taken?”

“Lilia used to talk about them.”

“The pills?”

“The Gnostics. She never talked about them with you?”

“Maybe once,” he lied, obscurely jealous. Michaela smiled.

“They appeared seventeen years after the death of Jesus Christ. She talked about these stories. Prophets walking the streets of Je rusalem, her words, not mine. .”

“They’re not her words,” he said. “They’re from a book I own. I didn’t know she read it.”

“Anyway, I like them. The Gnostics believed that none of this is real,” she said. “None of this seems real to me.”

“It’s the pills,” he said.

“No, it’s everything. This life, these pills, Club Electrolite, this dressing room. How could there be a city like this in the world? How could it possibly be so cold? What I mean is that every light is too bright for me. Every sound is too loud.”

“It’s late,” he said quietly. “You must be exhausted. You should go to sleep.”

Her eyes were shining. “You move like a ghost over the surface of the world,” she said. “Am I right?”

He realized that she was talking about him specifically, and also that she was somewhat more unhinged than usual, and said, “I’m not sure.”

“The thing is,” she said, sitting upright and holding her knees to her chest, “the thing is, I can’t sleep anymore. Days go by sometimes if I don’t send myself to sleep with all these white little pills. And I used to think I could find some kind of peace in this city. I had a job that I liked. .” Eli propped himself up on one elbow to watch her face in the guttering candlelight. Her voice was somnambulant.

She talked on through the night, while Eli listened and eventually fell asleep again on the carpet, and her voice was a current through fitful dreams. When he woke up she was still talking, lying on her back, and the candle was drowning in a pool of wax. There were no windows here, no natural light to give a clue as to the hour of the night, of the morning, but he had a sense of having been asleep for some time. She was mumbling, whispering, and he couldn’t understand her.

“Michaela.” She fell silent and turned her head to look at him. There was a cold draft from somewhere and he couldn’t keep his eyes open. His throat was dry. “What time is it?”

She sat up slowly and fumbled in the darkness for her purse. After a moment she extracted her cell phone, and her face was lit blue for a moment when she looked at the screen.

“It’s six-thirty,” she said. “No, six-thirty-five. I’ve been awake for two days.” She put her cell phone back in her bag and sat there with her legs outstretched on the carpet in front of her, slumped over and looking at her hands, shaking her head, a ghost in the half light. She was barefoot.

“Do you have any sleeping pills?”

She nodded and gestured toward the purse. He thought perhaps she was crying, but it was impossible to tell in the dimness. The candle was a flicker of blue in a pool of melted wax. He could barely make out her face.

“What’s the worst thing you could imagine happening?” she asked suddenly. She was watching his struggle with the child-proof cap.

“I don’t know. I’m too tired for rhetorical questions.”

“It’s not rhetorical, it’s theoretical. There’s a difference.” Her voice cracked, and she coughed once. “My throat’s dry.”

“I’ll get you some water. What’s the worst thing you could imagine?” He succeeded in opening the cap and mea sured three white dots into the palm of his hand. He stood up and moved stiffly to the counter. It took a minute to find the glass he’d seen there earlier. The tap gurgled invisibly in the darkness. He held his hand under the cold water until he began losing feeling in his fingertips and then touched his wet fingertips lightly to his forehead before he returned to her. A trick Zed had taught him; the cold water on his forehead made him feel awake.

“Never falling asleep again. Now tell me yours.”

He knelt beside her on the carpet and touched her wrist. He placed the pills in her hand.

“Take these. I have some water for you.”

“I need the water first. Tell me yours.”

“Here’s the water.”

“Tell me.”

“I hate being alone.” He took a sip of water and passed her the glass. She drank almost all of it and swallowed all three pills at once. “Where’s Lilia tonight?” He spoke very softly.

“Close,” she said. “She’s very close.” She finished the glass of water, set it down empty on the carpet, and then lay down beside it. She turned over on her side toward the candle, away from him. He stayed beside her.

“What would change if you knew about the accident? What difference would it make?”

“I just want to know,” she said. “I want to know what happened to my family. My father disappeared earlier this year, did I tell you that? He sold the house and left, and I don’t know where he is anymore. You never expect both of your parents to just vanish like that. It’s a missing piece.”

“But what happens when you have the final missing piece? Are you happy then? Can you stop taking pills? Do you stop entertaining bachelor parties in the VIP lounge on weekends? Does the knowledge solve anything?”

“Then I can sleep,” she said. She closed her eyes. “Please don’t raise your voice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will you stay with me a minute?”

“Of course.”

He stayed beside her until her breathing slowed, then he stood and groped in the dimness for the clothing rack. Under it, behind it, the sheep quilt was crumpled on the child-sized mattress. He pulled the quilt out and spread it over her, blew out the candle, and felt his way out of the room in absolute darkness.

32

In a small town in New Mexico, more of a truck stop really, a detective wearing a battered fedora sat in a car in a parking lot. He was watching a particular couple emerge from the Morning Star Diner: a man he’d been following for some years, and a waitress. The man was forty-seven years old that year, according to Christopher’s records; he had a benevolent, somewhat weathered look, and brown hair that fell just below his ears. The woman was younger, with straight red hair and an old-fashioned blue-and-white waitressing uniform. She was holding a square white box. The detective remembered that it was Lilia’s sixteenth birthday tomorrow and decided that Clara must be holding her birthday cake.

They paused for a moment outside the diner, the man pulled the waitress close against him, and they kissed briefly in the warm end-of-day light. The detective slowly lowered his forehead to rest on the steering wheel and stayed that way for some time with his eyes closed. He had been following them for five years now, but he was no longer sure why. The helpless observer: everyone knows that Icarus fell into the sea. But only one book he’d ever read on the subject remarked on the possible existence of witnesses: wandering with his flock on a hillside not far from the ocean, a shepherd looked up in time to watch the disastrous, improbable flight — the at-first-awkward beating of wings as the child and the father moved like the spirit of God over the face of the water, the small shape that grew exultantly smaller as it flew closer and closer to the sun, until Icarus was so far away that the shepherd could no longer see him, only knew where he was from the way the father kept looking anxiously up into the sky, and then the scream from an almost unfathomable distance above, an unseen sense of faltering far overhead and then the fall, the coming apart of wax and feathers, that fast awful descent into the sea; the father moving down through the air to catch his child, too late. The cloud of feathers drifting up as Icarus broke the surface of the water, and the father circling desperately in the beaten air overhead. The shepherd, watching all of this from a slight distance, leaning on his staff while his sheep scattered like clouds. Awestruck, stunned, perhaps already composing the story he’d tell his wife that evening in his head, but at ease in the often uncomfortable awareness of being an extraneous figure in a world-historical event. His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas; someone has to remember them.

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

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

33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s why I stay here,” Clara said.

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

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

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

“Where should we go, my lily?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Clara Williams?”

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

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

“Not here,” she said.

34

Michaela’s father returned from the United States in a wheelchair. He spent hours staring out the window in the living room, blinking and sometimes shaking his head. Private nurses came and went. His car had gone sideways off a highway in the mountains, he said. When pressed he was able to give the date of the accident, but he was vague on the question of how exactly it had occurred. He said he might have fallen asleep at the wheel. Over the next two years he began walking on crutches, and then with a cane, stiffly, dragging one leg, not at all like the way he had walked before. He was given light assignments by the private investigative agency, mostly photographing cheating spouses from cars, and he drew a small pension from his years on the police force.

There was no more talk of Lilia’s case. He told Peter the trail had gone cold; Peter reported that Lilia’s mother had screamed at him and threatened to sue. But in the few years that followed Christopher used to disappear for a few days at a time, traveling back into the States whenever he could. Just a long weekend sometimes, driving from Friday to Monday and arriving at work on Tuesday exhausted and worn. He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia’s safety. He would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United States and realize with absolute, inexplicable certainty that she was in West Virginia, the way he tried to ignore his terrifying clairvoyance and forget where she was and couldn’t, the way he knew where she was but had to keep driving south to check, the horror of always being right: he saw her face in the crowd on Sunset Boulevard, he stepped into a hardware store in St. Louis at the moment she stepped out of the deli across the street, he stood on a corner in a run-down neighborhood in Chicago and watched her emerge from an apartment building down the block. After each sighting he returned north more depleted, more frightened, less intact.

The last time Michaela saw him was in the evening, when he’d just returned from the United States. She’d lost her job earlier in the day. In the six years since she’d left high school she’d fallen into a pleasant double life: she worked at a clothing store five days a week and walked on ferociously dangerous tightropes strung across alleyways in the old city on weekends. But her manager had fired her in the early afternoon for speaking the wrong language on the sales floor, walked her to the door, shaken her hand when they got to the street. “Good luck,” he’d said brightly, as if she were a needy stranger to whom he’d given a quarter, as though he hadn’t just put her out of a job. “I hope things go well for you.”

“I hope you die,” Michaela said sweetly. She turned away from his aghast expression and soundlessly moving lips and wandered down the street in the cool September light, hands in her pockets and shaking inside, and the store receded instantly into the distant past; it seemed inconceivable that she’d gone to work there just that morning. It seemed inconceivable that she’d been living a life so ordinary for so long now, so long, living in her father’s house in the almost-suburb of Westmount and folding clothes for a living. People were talking and laughing and the leaves on the trees hadn’t fallen yet. The air was bright. A little girl was playing a violin at the corner of St. Catherine and McGill; she was no older than ten, and her face was a vision of impeccable serenity. Michaela stood watching her face for a while, but she couldn’t hear the music above the din of her thoughts. A band of tourists passed, speaking English, and only then did she notice that everyone else walking past her was speaking French. It struck her that she’d rarely been so lonely, or so incompatible with the world, or so strange. She spent some time in the park and arrived home after nightfall, slightly drunk.

The newspapers had been collected from the front step. The front-step newspapers were a private marker; she let them pile up in the weeks when her father was traveling, and when they disappeared it meant he was home and she knew what to expect when she opened the front door. When she came in this evening, her father was eating dinner in the dining room. He looked up and smiled briefly as she walked into the room; she sank into a chair across the table from him and sat watching him eat for a moment.

“Where did you go this time?”

He swallowed, and took a sip of water before he answered. “Chicago,” he said.

“Chicago.”

“Yes.” He swallowed another spoonful of soup and took a bite of bread. “I was following a lead.”

“You were following Lilia.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, during which he finished his bread, sipped at his water again, and set the glass back down on the table with perhaps slightly more force than was strictly necessary.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, yes. I was interviewing a girl who knew her there.”

“What was her name?”

“Erica.”

“What was she like?”

He hesitated a moment. “She was sad,” he said. “How was your day?”

“I lost my job.”

“At the clothing store? I’m sorry,” he said. “You were laid off? Business was slow?”

“Fired, actually. I said hello to a little kid on the sales floor. His mother complained to the manager.”

“Why would she complain to the manager? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” said Michaela. “I said hello in English.”

“Oh,” he said.

“She felt quite strongly about the issue, apparently.”

“Zealots,” said Christopher. He shook his head. “You just have to ignore them. What did your manager say?” It occurred to him that this was the most substantial conversation he could remember having with his daughter since she was nine or ten, or possibly ever, and he tried not to look pleased.

“He was regretful. Said she’d told him she was going to call the language commission, said he liked me but we’d been through this before and he couldn’t afford to be fined by the language police again, hoped I understood, but I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Understand. I don’t understand this place. I liked working there.”

“Well. I don’t think it’s right either. But maybe there’s a chance of getting your job back in a week or two, once he calms down a little. How did you leave off with him?”

“I told him to drop dead,” said Michaela.

He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. There was a certain look about her eyes that reminded him of her mother. He dipped a piece of bread in his soup and ate without looking at her.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve got some news of my own. I’m selling the house. An appraiser’s coming by tomorrow.”

“What? Why?”

“I need the money,” Christopher said, “to be honest with you.”

“You have a job.”

“I do,” he said. “Photographing people from cars, mostly. But I want to do some traveling, so I’m going to have to leave the job for a while.”

“Don’t you have savings?” she asked.

“I did,” he said.

“But where will we live?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ll be traveling. And you, well, I thought maybe you might want to find your own place one of these days. Have a little independence, maybe live closer to downtown?”

“But I just lost my job.”

He had nothing to say to this.

“By traveling,” she said, “you mean following Lilia?”

“Yes. It’s an open case.”

“There isn’t a retainer? You said once there’s always a retainer when you’re following someone.”

“It ran out a while ago. The contract expired.”

“There’s something that I don’t quite understand,” she said.

He glanced up briefly, and then down at his soup. She was making him uneasy. He reached out with his left hand and his fingertips passed nervously over the smooth handle of his walking cane, leaning against the table by his side.

“What’s that?” He lifted the glass of water a few inches, changed his mind, lowered it to the table again, and adjusted his napkin on his lap.

“Why you’re still following her.”

“She’s an abducted child,” he said. “That’s what I do.”

“An abducted child? Do you know how old she is?”

He swallowed a spoonful of soup and chased it with a sip of water. He set the glass down on the table and then, with a thumb and two fingers, moved it carefully an inch to the left.

“Of course I know how old she is,” he said quietly. He didn’t take his eyes from the glass. “I know almost everything about her.”

“She’s two months older than I am. Do you know how old I am?”

A spoonful of soup was halfway to his mouth; he lowered it back into the bowl and touched a corner of napkin to his lips.

“You’re my daughter,” he said.

“It seems very strange to me,” Michaela continued, very quietly now, “that you would chase a twenty-two-year-old woman to Chicago. She was abducted quite some time ago, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t,” he whispered. He wanted to explain it to her: the cufflink he’d found on the floor that morning, that tie on the floor of the closet, the way Elaine had sometimes looked at him when he got into bed at night, with such contempt, as if he couldn’t find a lost sock, let alone a missing child, but it came to him suddenly that it was years too late.

“You’ve been chasing her since we were both eleven years old,” said Michaela relentlessly. She felt giddy and dangerous, slightly drunk, and she couldn’t stop talking although she knew she should. “And now she isn’t a child anymore. Not that that negates the crime, but then, if you were trying to solve the crime, you’d be chasing her father, wouldn’t you?”

He didn’t speak. A muscle in his jaw worked uselessly, and his face was slowly turning red.

“You’d be chasing Lilia’s father,” she said, “except that you’re obsessed with Lilia. And I wish you’d just admit it.”

“Admit what?” His voice was a croak.

“That you want to fuck her,” Michaela said.

It would have been difficult to predict what happened next. He had, after all, never even hit her. But then the glass in his hand was abruptly airborne, almost of its own volition; he couldn’t remember deciding to throw it. He watched the trajectory unfold in slow motion, the girl in the gradually-becoming-clearer line of flight, the intersection of her forehead with the edge of the glass, her backward fall, the sound she made. His cane was in his hand, although he couldn’t remember having reached for it; he made his way around the table and saw her lying still and white in the overturned chair. There was blood on her forehead. He was aware in that instant of nothing but color and light: the deep-blue evening behind his ghostly reflection in the dining room windows, and fragments of light from the chandelier caught in the broken angles of glass, spilled water. He had shocked himself. He reeled backward, touched the wall with his hand and slid down it. He was clutching his cane with both hands, white-knuckled. The room was moving like a boat on rough water.

When he opened his eyes she was staggering to her feet, bleeding from the forehead, backing up and clutching the table. She swore softly and spat at his feet. She left the room like a sleepwalker, leaning to the right. The door slammed. He heard her fall once on the gravel outside, her receding stumbling footsteps, and then silence. The room had stopped spinning in her absence, but everything was too bright. He sat still for a long time, looking at the way light caught in the angles of broken glass and spilled water and along the glinting handle of her soup spoon, on the varnish of her chair lying on its back, in a smear of blood on the hardwood where she’d fallen.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or to his ex-wife; he talked to Michaela’s mother sometimes, the old Elaine, the circus Elaine who hadn’t disappeared yet, before they were detective and real estate agent and before Michaela was even born, playing on the midway before the show opened, riding together in the house trailer from town to town and looking out the windows at the prairie passing by, holding hands in the shadows behind the tent. It hadn’t really been so bad in retrospect, traveling around like that, and he found himself speaking to her sometimes in moments of disarray. He stood up unsteadily and returned very slowly to his side of the table, leaning heavily on the cane as he sank into the chair and lifted his spoon. He found himself looking at the spoon for several long minutes, almost unsure what to do with it, but he eventually resumed eating his soup.

35

Erica was outside Lilia’s apartment in the morning. The last morning, the day Lilia left Chicago; she stepped out with her suitcase and Erica was there on the sidewalk, blue-haired and shivering in an old velvet smoking jacket the color of peaches. She was leaning against the side of the building, staring at her feet, or perhaps her eyes were closed — her hair fell over her face — and Lilia had the impression that she’d been standing there for some time. The lines of her shoulders spoke of exhaustion and night.

Lilia said her name, and she looked up quickly with swollen eyes.

“It’s so early, Erica, what are you—”

“I don’t want you to leave.”

Lilia set down her suitcase. Erica took a cautious step toward her, stumbled forward and was suddenly in Lilia’s arms. She was wearing perfume; she smelled like roses and cigarettes.

“Erica,” Lilia whispered into her blue hair, “Erica, I’m so sorry, I really am. .”

“What’s in New York City?” Erica’s voice was muffled against Lilia’s shoulder. “Why won’t you stay with me? You don’t know anyone there.”

“I’m so sorry, but I have to go.” Erica’s shoulders were shaking now. Lilia held her awkwardly. “You knew I wasn’t staying here long when you met me.” Her own words sounded unforgivable when she heard them, but she closed her eyes and pressed on nonetheless. “You know I always leave again.”

Erica pushed away from her then. She was still crying, but she wouldn’t meet Lilia’s eyes anymore. Blue hair falling over her face. She turned and almost seemed to drift as she walked away down the cracked sidewalk, hands deep in her pockets. An empty, narrow-shouldered figure, hair like tropical water and shadows gathering underfoot, slouching and broken on the predawn street. At the corner she turned left and she was gone then, but it was several minutes before Lilia could pick up the suitcase and turn away from the scene of the crime, and she kept looking back. Half expecting that Erica would come running up behind her, half hoping she would.

Lilia stood at the corner with her suitcase waiting for the light to change, and all she could think of was dancing with Erica last night, when she told Erica she was leaving and at first Erica was acting so hopeful and so adorably brave; she gave Lilia her silver chain necklace to wear—“to remember me by,” she actually said— and it was a while before it warmed to Lilia’s skin. “So you’re finally going,” Erica said, “just like you said you would.” Just like I said I would. I’m sorry. Yes. Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving. The ticket’s in my pocket. We are almost out of time. Lilia didn’t say, And you’re the first one who ever mattered enough to me to warn in advance that I’m leaving. “Well, good for you,” Erica said. The beginning of the only argument Lilia ever had with her. “I think it’s courageous.”

Erica’s voice trembled a little. She went upstairs to the dance floor and danced ferociously. She was beautiful. Lilia followed her up there and watched her for a while, leaning against a wall, not sure what to do with herself, and then she moved to join Erica in the throng. Thinking as she danced that she could just get a refund on the ticket, that this one time perhaps she could stay, and knowing even in the midst of these thoughts that it was hopeless: if she didn’t leave now she’d only leave later, and Erica danced with her eyes closed, sweat and tears shining on her face. Lilia danced in front of her for a few minutes, but Erica refused to look at her. Later they sat together in the mezzanine of the bar and argued about courage and bus schedules. The second-to-last time Lilia ever saw her.

The last time Lilia saw her she drifted away around the corner, the way newspapers drift when they’re caught in slow wind. Every detail of the moment was clear to Lilia later, when she closed her eyes in a departing bus and tortured herself with the scene: Erica disappearing around the corner in the watery predawn light. The striking, final lines of the apartment buildings of this particular neighborhood, the kind of low ugly buildings that look to stand a fair chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust with their freight of cockroaches intact. The sidewalk shining a little, cement fraught with crushed glass, the neon lights of the restaurant across the street. A police siren in the distance. A decrepit woman passing by on the opposite sidewalk, shuffling unevenly and pushing a cart heaped with cans and old clothing. The quiet stoicism of a man across the street, leaning on the wall of the restaurant. One hand in his pocket, the other on his cane. Watching her, perhaps, from under his fedora.