“What I want,” she said quietly, on the third night he spent with her, “is to stop traveling and stay in the same place for a while. I’m starting to think I’ve been traveling too much.”
And for Eli—frustrated, aimless, working at a job he didn’t particularly like, failed scholar, unable to decide whether he was a writer or a latent genius or just an academic fraud—the idea of traveling too much was unimaginably exotic, and he pulled her close and fucked her again and imagined staying beside her forever. But that was only the third night she spent with him.
She was easily distracted. She had a photographer’s fascination with quality of light. An upside-down CD reflecting rainbows on the bedroom ceiling, a glass of red wine catching the light of a candle, the Empire State Building piercing white against the sky at night. She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies. She was sublimely abnormal, and very frequently unnerving, but she was his psalm; what a live-in lover offers you, ultimately, is the unprecedented revelation of not being alone. She slipped so easily into the folds of his life. Her few belongings vanished into his apartment.
It always seemed later on that he loved her, at least partially, because she rendered him fraudulent. He talked about traveling, but she had traveled. He talked about photography, but she took photographs. He talked about languages, but she translated them. He felt that if she were a screenwriter she’d write screenplays instead of talking about screenplays and sketching outlines of screenplays and analyzing screenplays the way Thomas did. If she were a dancer, he felt that she’d dance. What he liked best were the times when they went into the café and none of his friends were there, so they could sit together and read the paper in blissful silence. Or the afternoons when he sat at his desk and measured sentences, written and then deleted in equal measure, or did research while she sat in the armchair nearby and studied Russian texts, her lips moving soundlessly over the words. And life settled into a state not far from perfection, until he found the lists.
One: a list of names, ten pages, beginning and ending with Lilia. Most names had arrows that trailed out into the margins, where the names of places were noted in small print: Mississippi, south Kansas, central Florida, Detroit. Two: a list of words in a number of languages, which could’ve meant anything at all. He recognized the Spanish word for butterfly and the German word for night—mariposa, nacht— but the rest were incomprehensible to him. Like the list of names, the paper looked old and the handwriting was evolutionary; the beginning parts of both lists were in awkward childish block letters, which became smaller and more refined as the lines progressed. Three: a list of words and phrases. This third list was longer and of a different genre; no evolutionary transformation was in evidence, and all the languages represented were ailing or dead. He only knew this because he recognized whole phrases from his notebooks. These pages were uncrumpled and new-looking. He went through this last list over and over again but could detect no pattern in the phrases she’d copied. There were words from five continents. Her suitcase also contained six or seven books and a weathered business card for a private investigator in Montreal, but it was the lists that interested him.
“I was just collecting the words,” she explained. “I didn’t meant to plagiarize, I just liked the way they looked. I wanted to save them on the page,” she said. “Like pressed flowers in a book.”
He found this perfectly understandable. He liked patterns too. But the rest of it, my love, these other pages . . .
“I make lists,” she said, stating the obvious. “I always did.” He’d brought the papers to her in a panic—Lilia, what is this, tell me what this means— but she refused to be anything but calm. He was pacing distractedly around the apartment; she sat in the armchair, regarding him quietly. She was interested to know why he’d gone through her suitcase in the first place.
He forced his voice to be steady. “I’m curious about the names.”
She began to tell him a story in bed that night, a long story about deserts and aliases and driving away, motel pay phones and a blue Ford Valiant in the mountains. She spoke in measured tones, her hands moving ceaselessly over his skin. He listened, at first incredulous and then shocked into belief, but he wasn’t too caught up in the words to notice that she was tracing the contours of wings over his shoulder blades.
4.
There is a word in the Dakota language, gender-specific and untranslatable, that expresses the specific loneliness of mothers whose children are absent. Eli told Lilia the word once when they were lying in bed together, and it was hard not to think of her mother when she heard it.
Lilia’s mother said once in an interview that she wished she could forget her daughter. (The interview aired on Unsolved Cases. It’s on record somewhere, although Lilia can’t quite bring herself to watch it again.) It was a cruel thing to say, but touchingly pragmatic. She had a daughter who disappeared: this is the kind of catastrophe that marks a person forever afterward, as indelibly as a missing limb.
On the night her daughter disappeared it was late November, and a heavy snowfall had blanketed the lawn. Just before Lilia left the house for the last time a sound startled her out of sleep, or perhaps she was lying awake already. When the sound came again she climbed out of bed and went to the window, the floorboards cold beneath her feet. She opened the window and the air outside was exquisitely cold, the lawn brilliant with snow and moonlight, and beyond the lawn the forest rose up like a wall. Her breath was pale in the frozen air. Her father was standing in the snow beneath the window; he waved to her and smiled and pressed a finger to his lips. Shh. She turned back into the room, clutching her bunny (it was blue, and its eyes were startled round buttons that gleamed dark in the half light), and she made her way out into the silent hall. A bare floorboard creaked softly as she passed her half-brother’s room. He lay still, but he wasn’t sleeping; he listened to her footsteps recede unsteadily on the stairs. Lilia skipped the ninth stair which sometimes creaked and tiptoed through moonlight on the landing, the banister railing at shoulder height. Down through the shadows of the living room, then the silent kitchen. She unlocked the front door and ran out barefoot into the snow.
Her father came forward to meet her; in an easy swooping movement he lifted her up into his arms, and she dropped the bunny as her feet left the ground. My lily, he kept saying, Lilia, my dove . . . He hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half, but he remembered how to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. He kept saying her name as he took her away from there, Lilia’s bandaged arms around his neck and her heart beating fast against his shoulder, teeth chattering in the cold. She closed her eyes against his shoulder. He carried her quickly across the lawn and into the forest, where everything was silent and waiting and dark; the air was a little warmer here, and no snow penetrated the branches on the forest floor. The only snow here was on the driveway, a pale ribbon winding down between the trees. To her brother, watching from the window on the staircase landing, it was as though the forest closed behind them like a gate.
Far from the house, beyond the wall of the forest, a car started down by the road; Lilia’s mother stirred uneasily in her sleep as it receded. Her brother turned away from the window and returned to his bed.
This was her escape. It was recorded in newspapers.
5.
In the morning Eli left her sleeping and went alone to the café where he’d met her. He bought a coffee and a newspaper and took a seat in the corner, trying to sink into the clatter of voices and coffee cups. He spent a few minutes staring at the date on his newspaper before he glanced at the headlines, hoping that reading today’s date in typeface might have a steadying effect. He reread the front page a few times but couldn’t concentrate on it well enough to open the first section. He turned to Arts and Leisure: certain musicals were sweeping Broadway and might stay there forever, certain others were failing and would soon disappear, som
e films were brilliant and others were not, and none of it seemed to matter much. He refolded the paper and looked for a while at the print of Icarus on the opposite wall, trying to decipher her by association, but Icarus persisted in falling through the clueless blue. Eli pulled his notebook out of his bag and then put it back in again. He abandoned his coffee and went back to the apartment.
She wasn’t there, and he wondered about her whereabouts through a torturous day. She came back in the evening and was vague about where she’d been, as always. She’d been at a bookstore, she said, and then a park, and then walking, and then another park, and before all that she’d seen Geneviève on the street. Lilia didn’t like Geneviève very much and suspected this was mutual, but when Geneviève was fired up about something she couldn’t restrain herself from discussing it with the first person she happened to come across, so she’d swept Lilia into the nearest café.
“It was almost malicious,” Lilia said. “I kept on having to order things because we were there for so long. She talked about string theory through two cups of coffee and a scone, and I still don’t really know what string theory is.”
“It involves strings,” he said tiredly. “I think they sort of waver.”
He sat on the couch and pulled her close to him, relieved and peaceful and restless in equal measure, while she asked about the wavering. He didn’t know, he just had an idea that they wavered. Metaphorically wavered? Were they metaphorical strings? He wasn’t sure. Maybe. He didn’t know much about physics. Actually, he didn’t know anything about—she didn’t even like scones, she said, interrupting him. They were just there, and she couldn’t bring herself to drink another cup of coffee. But it was a good afternoon, she said, despite Geneviève; she’d found a Russian edition of Delirious Things. He’d never heard of it. She repeated the title in Russian, taking obvious pleasure in what he could only assume was an impeccable pronunciation, and got up to show it to him. The Cyrillic alphabet spiked inscrutably at him from the cover above an artfully blurry black-and-white photograph that may or may not have depicted a girl in a nightgown walking over hot coals, or perhaps walking on water. It was Great Russian Literature, she said. In the absence of any knowledge of Russian, he was in no position to contest this.
“It’s late,” he said finally. He’d been holding her on the couch while she lapsed into quiet, flipping through the first few pages. He was half asleep, almost dreaming, her warmth against him; he was breathing the scent of her latest shampoo, like cinnamon and violets.
Later he lit a candle in the bedroom and she lay beside him staring up at the ceiling. Sleep was out of the question. He waited, and after a while she began to speak again. A trajectory of cities, of places, of names. He wondered if she was telling the truth. There was no reason to suspect that she wasn’t. Her voice was nearly expressionless. I used to see mirages in the desert. Pools of water on the highway. We were driving in a small grey car . . . She twisted onto her side, facing him, and her hand cupped the bone of his hip. A long stroke down the outside of his thigh. It was shadowless. I think the sand was almost white. We’d been driving for so long, and there was another car behind us . . . She trailed off midsentence, stopped the motion of her hand. He held her close and touched her hair, kissed her softly on the forehead, Lilia, Lilia, it’s all right, shhh . . . but she wasn’t upset, just absent, and he felt that she was slipping away from him. She smiled in the candlelight, but her eyes were unfocused. We must have driven through a thousand towns that year, and then we came into Cincinnati at night . . .
He woke from a fitful dream of cars and deserts, a twilight kind of sleep. She was breathing beside him in the light of first morning, an arm extended over the tangle of sheets. Her lips were parted slightly, and he could see the movement of her eyes beneath her lids. Eli wondered what she was dreaming of and was shot through with sadness. He got up without waking her and went back to the café; the coffee was strong there, but the newspaper was failing him again, and he was still dazed and only half awake when he left. How could a story throw everything off so suddenly, so clearly? He felt the foundations breaking apart beneath them.
He found Thomas and Geneviève in the Third Cup Café and sat with them for a while trying to lose himself in complicated arguments, and then went to the gallery for an utterly uneventful four-hour shift. When he came home in the late afternoon she was in the bathroom. Judging by the razor blades on the edge of the bathtub, she’d long since finished shaving her legs; now she sat cross-legged in a foot of bathwater, removing her pubic hair with a pair of tweezers. This apparently required her complete attention; she barely glanced up at him when he entered the room. He’d seen her do this before, and it always unnerved him. He stood nearby for a second, watching her without comment, and then sat down on the toilet lid.
“That can’t possibly be making you happy,” he said.
She smiled.
“It makes me wince to look at it. Are you all right?”
“Fine,” she said pleasantly. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
“That . . . that doesn’t . . .” he gestured toward her, but she didn’t look at him.
“What?”
“That, uh, that doesn’t hurt?”
“Oh,” she said. “No, not really.”
“It seems a bit obsessive, don’t you think?”
She didn’t reply.
He rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands in front of him, and stared between his wrists at the white tiled floor.
“I was just at work,” he said, “a little while ago. No one came into the gallery; it was just me standing there for four hours, staring at the walls.”
She was looking at him.
“And I was thinking about your story. And I couldn’t help but . . . I was thinking about your story,” Eli said, “and I would be lying if I said it didn’t frighten me a little.”
She didn’t speak. Her face betrayed nothing. The small movements of her hand continued, silver tweezers distorted by ripples. The water was a lucid green.
“More than a little. The fact that you were abducted would be something unusual in itself, but it’s just . . . it’s just,” he said, “that you always seem to leave. All of your stories are about you leaving.”
It gradually became clear that she wasn’t going to answer him.
“On the way home I bought you a pomegranate.” He leaned forward quickly to kiss her forehead and then sat back down on the toilet lid with her sweat on his lips.
“Thank you,” said Lilia. “That was nice of you.”
He watched her for a while in silence.
“Why do you like them so much?”
“Like what?”
“Pomegranates.”
“Oh.” There was a long pause, during which she became methodically more hairless. He was watching the point where the water touched her skin. Her limbs were slightly tanned, but the rest of her was a few shades paler. White stomach, green water, silver metal in her hand moving under the surface distorted by ripples, the meditative rhythm of her movements. She didn’t seem quite human; a pale clean-shaven creature, half mermaid, half girl. My aquatic love. The water, as always, was far too hot; a bead of sweat left a trail between her breasts. She looked slippery. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve just always liked them.”
“Are you evasive about everything?”
But she wouldn’t be drawn into an argument; she stopped tweezing, reached for the glass of water on the edge of the bathtub, sipped at it, held it to her forehead for a second, returned it to precisely the place where it had been before and took up the tweezers again, all without looking at him.
Eli couldn’t avoid the question anymore. He kept his voice as steady as possible and didn’t lift his gaze from the floor.
“I need to know if you’re going to leave me.”
She stopped then and set the tweezers beside the half-empty glass. She clasped her hands in the water and sat for a moment looking down at them.
“I might,??
? she said.
He stood up slowly and left the room. The apartment seemed foreign to him. He walked back and forth across the floor a few times, swiped his hand across his eyes, stood with his arms crossed in front of a window. He sat at his desk for a few minutes and then stood up again, opened a few books that he immediately closed, and finally settled on opening the window to the fire escape. Someone had left a book on the windowsill. He threw Delirious Things as far as he could into the empty air, realized what he was doing as the book left his hand and tried to catch it, too late; he swore softly and climbed out the window and spent some time looking for it from the fire-escape landing, peering down over the railing, but he couldn’t see it on the street below. He sat out there for a while longer, hoping someone below might pick it up and exclaim loudly enough for him to hear, at which point he could do something useful. People walked alone or in groups on the pavement, drove toward the Williamsburg Bridge or away from it, rode bicycles and carried on conversations; laughter carried up to the level of the fire escape. An airplane passed silently overhead. No one below seemed to pick up a book. Eli only went back inside when the sun began to drop below the level of the rooftops. A cold breeze was drifting off the river.
The apartment was silent. He found her in the bathtub, sitting cross-legged and staring down at her hands, the water grown cool around her. She was shivering, and it seemed she hadn’t moved since he left.