A brief flight over a border in wintertime. The grey wing of a plane outside the window. The world glimpsed in barely remembered flashes of snow and air and the corners of buildings (memories of a dream he’d had once: snow, wartime, the vague impression of heroism, hiding in a ditch in the cold). The streets of Manhattan through the windows of a taxicab. (“At least it’s alive here,” he said to his brother, before he closed his eyes again. It was the first thing he’d said in four hours, and did nothing to reassure Zed.) Their mother reduced to a kind of concerned impression, insubstantial and far off, like a sketch of a mother drawn on transparent architect’s vellum. A door opening into the blue room where he’d slept as a child, assurances that he could rest here as long as he needed to and that everything was going to be all right, pajamas, the sound of worried voices out in the hallway afterward. He closed his eyes and went to sleep immediately.
In the first few days he didn’t move very much. He lay still on the bed watching light move across the ceiling. Later on the days assumed a particular rhythm: cadences of winter light in the clear afternoons, the white-and-black expanse of Central Park out the window of his mother’s apartment, white snow and silvery trees and dark paths winding between them—he could lose himself in this vision for hours on end. There were entire afternoons when life distilled into precisely this: a blue room on the Upper West Side and snow outside the window, his mother’s favorite Bach or Vivaldi playing quietly somewhere in another room and his mother humming tunelessly along with it, and people passing small and dark in the icy world below.
“The question,” Zed remarked, “is what you’re going to do now.”
Zed wasn’t staying much longer. He was going back to Africa for a few weeks, and after that he was making plans to go to Europe; he wanted, he said, to sit where the oracle had sat at Delphi. He wanted Eli to come with him. They had halfhearted arguments on whether there was still an oracle there; Eli thought there might be. Zed tended toward the school of thought that all of us are oracles but was inclined to believe that this particular one no longer walked the earth.
“I want to travel.”
“I meant after Greece. After our trip. Are you going back to Brooklyn?”
“To Brooklyn? No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because nothing I did there meant anything,” Eli said. “Because I was ice-skating in that life as much as she was, I do have friends there, but I think I’d rather be . . .” He hesitated, looking at a solitary man walking into the park, his coat dark against the snowy path, and he pressed his fingertips against the glass. “I haven’t been outside in a while,” he said. “I’d like to immerse myself in all that.”
“In all what?”
“I’d like to immerse myself in the world. That was her problem,” Eli said. “She couldn’t immerse herself. It isn’t enough to observe the world and take pictures of it.” He was quiet for a second and then said, “It isn’t enough to just go ice-skating. Lilia’s metaphor, not mine—she was talking about how she lived. About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.”
“Some people only know how to skate.”
“How did you find me in Montreal?”
“There was an unmailed letter to me in your jacket pocket.”
“Do you still have it?”
It was in Zed’s pocket; he passed it over to Eli without a word. It was longer than Eli remembered, four or five pages wadded tightly together, and seemed foreign now; the writing was wild and allowed for no margins, words crashing up against the edges of the page:
I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafés in the mornings and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same.
“I don’t even recognize the handwriting,” Eli said.
“Any idea where she went?”
“No idea. She could be anywhere by now. I actually thought I heard her voice on the train platform in Montreal, but I think I was hallucinating.” He was looking at the letter. “This is like a dispatch from a foreign country,” he said. He refolded it carefully and gave it back to Zed. “I mean, technically it is a dispatch from a foreign country, it’s just, I don’t recognize . . .”
“The handwriting? The sentiment?”
“Both, actually. Neither.”
“You don’t still wish you could be with her?”
“I think I’d rather be alone,” he said.
44.
On her last morning in Montreal Lilia woke early and lay still for a while under the blankets. She slept fully clothed in those days and wore two pairs of socks to bed, but winter seeped through the windows of her rented room. She rose and showered quickly, shivering, and put on her waitressing uniform. At the Bistro de Porto down the street she fell into the trance of work, cleaning and serving, and in the late afternoon she went back to her room and changed out of the uniform. Out on the street again she wandered for some hours. but it was too cold to take photographs; she didn’t want to take her hands out of her pockets. She walked past Club Electrolite in the early evening, half hoping to catch a glimpse of Michaela again, but there was no one out front. She spent some time in her favorite bookstore, reading a history of New York City in French, and then started home in the gathering night. The cold in Montreal was like nothing she’d experienced; she was wearing three sweaters under her jacket, but none of them were thick enough, and her clenched hands felt like ice in her gloves. She stopped for a while in an all-night coffee shop in Centre-Sud to read the paper, trying to avoid the loneliness of her rented room, and she was just stepping out into the darkness again when her cell phone rang. Only Michaela and her employer knew the number.
“I want you to meet me somewhere,” Michaela said.
“Why?”
“Meet me on the westbound platform at Métro Place-des-Arts. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“You’ve said that before. I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care,” Michaela said. “Meet me there anyway.”
Two hours later Lilia was in a taxi to the airport, staring blankly at the passing night. She flew from Montreal to Rome at three in the morning, Rome chosen because it was the flight leaving soonest when she arrived at the airport that night and she knew how to speak the language. She withdrew the contents of her bank account from an airport ATM and paid for the ticket in cash. She looked out the airplane window into darkness through all of the long transatlantic night, weeping intermittently, and in the early-morning light she disembarked from a taxi in the Piazzo di Popolo. Later she stood on a bridge over the Tiber River and let the three lists fall from her hands: a list of names, ten pages, beginning and ending with Lilia; a list of places, nine pages, beginning and ending with the province of Quebec; a shorter list of words, of phrases, all Eli’s. She had to leave quickly then because a policeman was approaching meaningfully from the Trastevere side of the bridge, apparently having observed her dropping pieces of paper into the Tiber, so she didn’t get to watch the pieces of her old life float away the way she had wanted to.
Lilia walked quickly down the boulevard that ran alongside the river, hands in her pockets in the morning light, and the city foremost in her mind at that moment wasn’t Montreal or New York or even Chicago, but San Diego. A place far back toward the genesis of everything, a version of herself so distant that the memory itself was third-person: Lilia, young and unstable and
awakened frequently by nightmares about a car accident in the mountains, prone to weeping in moments of frenzy or disarray. Lilia, sixteen years old and unaware of her own story, still in shock from an accident a month or two before, fervent and always running out of time, arriving in San Diego alone after dark. Her father and Clara had said good-bye in New Mexico and given her money, made her promise to call and write and come back to visit before too much time had passed. San Diego was the first city she’d ever traveled to by herself, they were terrified and knew they couldn’t stop her, and she was shocked by the exhilaration of solo travel. She pressed her forehead against the bus window and watched the landscape passing by, anguished and exultant and perfectly free. In those days she was tightly wound and always ready to cry, and life seemed fraught with an almost unbearable intensity; in the bus on the way to San Diego she saw a dead cat by the side of the highway, recent roadkill, and she burst into hysterical tears.
In the San Diego bus terminal she stood in front of a long line of pay phones, mesmerized by the way they caught the light, trying to remember a certain phone number and failing. She had a guidebook that was supposed to contain every youth hostel in the state of California, and the closest San Diego entry was miles from the bus terminal but she walked there anyway; she moved slowly through the delirious streets in the early evening, pavement still radiating heat from the afternoon sunlight, dance music pounding from slow-moving cars with tinted windows. Her suitcase made her a stranger, so she dropped it into a garbage can as she passed and after that she went on feeling light and infinitely anonymous, much less wary, much less sharp, hands in her pockets and sometimes whistling brief picked-up snatches of tunes that came and went. She passed a gospel church and sat for awhile on the steps in the vertiginous twilight, the church and her soul both swelling with music, and then onward again past a bodega where two small boys lingered in the doorway; they watched her and one said something in Spanish as she passed. She spoke to him in his own language and he smiled, abruptly shy, and she kept on walking in the fading day. In those days she kept the lists in her pocket (languages, names), and it was excellent, the way the folded wads of paper fitted perfectly in her right hand.
On her first day in Rome she went to an Internet café, and after some time she emerged with a phone number for a house in Quebec. In the motel room she sat for a long time holding the scrap of paper in her hands and then placed a wildly expensive long-distance call. A man answered on the second ring.
“Simon,” she said.
“Who is this?” he asked, in French.
“C’est moi.”
“Lilia?”
“I just wanted to thank you,” Lilia said.
Simon was quiet for a moment before he spoke. “Don’t thank me,” he said finally. “It was all I could do.”
An hour later she hung up the phone and went out into the city. She made her way back to the Tiber River and walked back to the same bridge, the lists far downstream and the policeman long departed, and stayed there for a long time looking down at the water. Ten years later she stood in the same place with her Italian husband on the day of their seventh anniversary of marriage, and he laughed when she imitated the policeman.
“It was scary,” she insisted. “I thought I’d be arrested for littering and deported on the spot.”
“I know,” he said, still laughing. “You tell me that every year, my love, but when in your life were you ever scared?”
Once on a highway in the American mountains, once on a subway platform in Montreal. Seldom, in other words, but she was left with strange memories. It wasn’t a question of unhappiness, but her thoughts drifted back at odd moments: when she was walking alone on certain boulevards in the rain; “There’s a Central Australian language,” Eli once told her, “that has a word, nyimpe, I’m mispronouncing it, that means ‘the smell of rain.’” (Difficult now to remember his face; his hair was dark, but were his eyes brown or blue?) Or sometimes when she woke up in winter and the covers had fallen off the bed, the mere sensation of cold was enough to bring the streets of Montreal back to her; wandering with Michaela through the ice-locked landscape, arguing, shivering, talking in circles about memory and accidents. Michaela wasn’t someone Lilia ever trusted, but there was a certain kinship; she shared Lilia’s suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax.
Or when she stood in a metro station at the end of the day, waiting for the train that brought her from a translation job at the Vatican to the apartment she shared with her husband a few miles away, Lilia was sometimes shocked by a memory so forceful that it rendered her breathless. She could close her eyes and watch Michaela coming down the stairs at Métro Place-des-Arts; Michaela had been crying a short time earlier but now she came to Lilia smiling, a red cigarette box crushed in one hand. The moment Lilia saw her she stood up from the bench and started to repeat herself, Tell me what happened, but Michaela was smiling as she came toward her and she kissed Lilia lightly on the lips before Lilia could finish the sentence. Her lips were cold from the air aboveground.
“Listen,” Michaela said. She put her hands on Lilia’s shoulders then and whispered a story in her ear. It was an old story about broken windows and snow, over in a few sentences, and when she was done Lilia sank down onto the bench, staring up at her, shocked into silence. In a few minutes Eli would run past her screaming Michaela’s name, in a few minutes the night would implode into noise and catastrophe, but for now Michaela stood near her, watching her, and Lilia had never seen her so still or so calm. Michaela’s voice was gentle when she spoke.
“Do you remember now?”
Lilia nodded. Yes. I remember everything.
“I’ve made my decision,” Michaela said. Lilia was struck by a look she’d never seen before; there were tears in Michaela’s eyes, but her face was radiant. “I’m leaving tonight.”
Lilia swallowed and found her voice. “You sound happy.”
“I am.”
“Where are you going?”
“Far away,” Michaela said. She smiled then, already leaving, and walked away down the platform to meet her train.
Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal
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