“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 danc
ers 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.