Last Night in Montreal Read online

  Last Night in Montreal

  Last Night in Montreal

  Emily St. John Mandel

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Unbridled Books

  Denver, Colorado

  Copyright © 2009 Emily St. John Mandel

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  St. John Mandel, Emily, 1979–

  Last Night in Montreal / Emily St. John Mandel.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-932961-68-3

  1. Self-realization in women–Fiction. 2. Amnesia–Fiction.

  3. Montréal (Québec)–Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.4.S727L37 2009

  813'.6—dc22

  2008052962

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book design by SH • CV

  First Printing

  To Kevin

  Last Night in Montreal

  1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2.

  Lilia’s childhood memories took place mostly in parks and public libraries and motel rooms, and in a seemingly endless series of cars. Mirage: she used to see water in the desert. In the heat of the day it pooled on the highway, and the horizon broke into shards of white. There was a map folded on the dashboard, but it was fading steadily under the barrage of light; Lilia was supposed to be the navigator but entire states were dissolving into pinkish sepia, the lines of highways fading to grey. The names of certain cities were indistinct now along the fold, and all the borders were vanishing. Her seat-belt buckle was searing to the touch. The dashboard clock marked slow-motion time. A mile behind her on the desert highway, a detective was following in a battered blue car.

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

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

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

  3.

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

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

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

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