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 m
ake 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.