Last Night in Montreal (5 page)

7.

“What was the book about?” Eli asked sleepily. “What were the delirious things?”

They were lying together under the pomegranate-stained sheets, the blue plate broken somewhere at the foot of the bed, and he’d been apologizing again for throwing her book out the window. Now that it was gone, he was curious about it.

“They were memories.” Her voice was languid. “The way they go all hazy when you stare at them too long.” After some time had passed he pressed for more details, but she’d fallen asleep. Breathing lightly against his arm.

It was never very easy to reach her, like loving someone who was rarely in the same room. But it would have been difficult to imagine, in a purely abstract sense, a girl more perfect; he’d had to concede shortly after she’d moved in with him that she was no less interested in his field of study than he was. He lived quietly alongside his work, he couldn’t imagine being separated from it, he wanted to know as much about it as possible, he thought about it now and then through the course of any given hour in the day. But she was caught up in it, she was dancing with it, she was having a fling. She understood the poetry of multiplicity, of estrangement, of irreconcilable concepts of geography: in one of the Mayan languages there are nine different words for the color blue. (He’d been aware of this for years, but she was the one who made him wonder what all those untranslatable shades of blue might look like.) In Wintu, a language of ancient California, there are no words for
right
and
left:
speakers differentiate between riverside and mountainside, from a time when it was taken as a given that you would live your life and bear children and die in the landscape where you and your parents and your great-great-grandparents had been born. A language that would disintegrate at sea, or while traveling beyond either the river or mountains; go beyond the boundaries and there would be no reference points, no words to describe the landscape you moved through—imagine the unfathomable cost of leaving home. Or the Australian Guugu Yimithir, a language of ferociously absolute positioning, in which there was no way to tell someone, for instance, that Lilia is standing to your left; you’d have to say, instead, “Lilia is standing to the west of me.” In that language there are no variables, only north, south, east, west. If that were the only language you had ever known, would it be possible to think in relative terms, in terms of variables, directionlessness, things that are changeable and a little delirious rather than certain, mirages, shades of grey? She read deep into his books and surfaced with questions, and he read to her sometimes aloud from his notes:
“I dream in Chamicuro,”
the last fluent speaker of her language told a reporter from the
New York Times,
in her thatched-hut village in the Peruvian jungle in the final year of the twentieth century,
“but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone. Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It’s lonely being the last one.”

He looked up from his notebook and there were tears in her eyes. If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won’t survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another? A language disappears, on average, every ten days. Last speakers die, words slip into memory, linguists struggle to preserve the remains. What every language comes down to, at the end, is one last speaker. One speaker of a language once shared by thousands or millions, marooned in a sea of Spanish or Mandarin or English. Perhaps loved by many but still profoundly alone; reluctantly fluent in the language of her grandchildren but unable to tell anyone her dreams. How much loss can be carried in a single human frame? Their last words hold entire civilizations.

In the language of the Hopi tribe, there is no differentiation between past, present, and future tense. The divisions do not exist. “What does that do to time?” he asked one night, half drunk on red wine. They had long since closed their books for the evening. He was running his fingertips over her collarbone, tracing that little hollow just below her throat with his thumb. It was already October. She would be gone in a week.

“No,” she said softly, “what does it do to free will?”

He was preoccupied with kissing her neck and didn’t immediately understand what she meant. But he couldn’t fall asleep that night, and when the understanding finally hardened and crystallized, hours later, it was enough to jolt him out of bed. He sat for a long time in the darkened living room, wide awake, listening to her breathing in the adjoining room.

What does it do to free will?
You disappeared. You are disappearing. You will disappear.
If there is a language in which all those sentences are the same, then who are we to say that they’re different?

ON THE EVENING
of Lilia’s disappearance Eli sat at his desk for hours, trying to read at first, then staring at his computer screen, and then just staring at his hands.
I surrender.
She either didn’t hear this thought or heard it and still didn’t come home. He taped a white napkin to the inside of the bedroom window, the only window that faced the street. He would have done anything. It was the closest thing he had to a flag. When the trick-or-treaters had gone he returned to his desk, and the hours slid away from him. Five in the morning: cold grey light. By night’s end the apartment seemed like an illusion.
She was here a moment ago, in the bed, in the shower, her towel on the floor of the bedroom is still damp, none of this can possibly be real.
He fell asleep at dawn with his head on his arms, listening for her footsteps, and slept in this position again the next night. Two days passed before he could bring himself to even look at the bed; the rumpled duvet still held the shape of her body.

The day after she left he bought a map of the continent. He remembered every location she’d told him in her story and he circled the cities she’d passed through in red, looking for a pattern, looking for the next city along the line. If there was a way to find her, he would. He had an idea that if he stared at the map long enough, he might possibly be able to divine where she had gone.

8.

Lilia’s father had purchased a map at an all-night gas station, on his way through the darkness to his ex-wife’s house, a few hours before he’d abducted her. When she was seven Lilia used to trace the ink-line ridges of the Rocky Mountains with her fingertips and admire the patterns made by highways across the continental United States. When she was eight he taught her how to read the map, and by nine she was the navigator. When he showed her how it all worked (north, border, highway, town) she asked where they’d started from, but her father shook his head and said, “It’s not important, kiddo, you’ve got to live in the present.” Map reading was a skill she took enormous pleasure in; every town, to her way of thinking, held an alternative life. She liked to close her eyes and touch a spot on the map, open her eyes and move her finger to the nearest place name, and sketch out the future she might have there as he drove: “We should go to Lafoy, and buy a house, and get a library membership and a cat and a dog, and then start a restaurant—”

“What kind of restaurant?”

“The kind that serves ice cream.”

“But then we’d have to stay in Lafoy,” her father said. “We’d have a house.”

“I don’t want to stop.” This was true, she didn’t, and she’d been writing messages in motel Bibles to this effect for over a year now. Lilia saw motel Bibles as a kind of bulletin board, where messages might be left for other travelers following behind. When she was nine Lilia and her father lived together, a unit, usually in the same motel room or in the same small car, and the messages in motel Bibles were almost her only secret. She scrawled them furtively while her father was in the shower, taking pleasure in the idea that he wouldn’t approve. The shred of privacy afforded by having a secret somehow seemed about as close as she’d ever come to having her own room.

“In that case, kiddo, better come up with a new plan.”

“Let’s drive
through
Lafoy, and go to the library, and then stay at a motel, and then go to a restaurant and have ice cream, and then leave again.”

“I like that plan much better,” her father said.

Their lives were easiest in the summer, when they didn’t have to make up explanations for why Lilia wasn’t in school and there were other children to play with in the parks. They camped for months at a time when it was warm enough; a week at one campground, a week somewhere else. She liked camping, although it took her a long time to fall asleep in campgrounds. There was sometimes rain on the roof of her tent, and it rendered the night mysterious and full of hidden sounds. In campgrounds she heard footsteps, or sometimes the sounds of trains in the distance; lie still and she could hear the night trains passing, carrying freight between the prairies and the seas. They hiked in national parks and went to outdoor concerts in small towns. Her father loved music of almost any kind; he would seek out concerts and summer music festivals and drive for miles to get to them; at outdoor performances they’d sit together on the grass with bottles of lemonade and when the music started he’d close his eyes and seem very distant.

It was harder in the wintertime. They tried to stay in the Southern states during the school year because Lilia’s father hated cold weather and Lilia liked the desert and palm trees, but the explanations were more difficult. Sometimes when she got tired of lying about being homeschooled she’d stay in the motel room until three o’clock in the afternoon, reading books that her father brought her from a bookstore or working on the mathematics problems that he came up with for her; in the late afternoons they went to the movies, to a mall for ice cream, to a museum if there was one, to a park if it was warm enough. Her father insisted that she learn to swim, and to this end they stayed for nearly five months in a town near Albuquerque while she took a full course of after-school swimming lessons at the local pool. Strange being in the same place for so long; by the time she was good enough to dive from the high diving board and swim laps, she was skittish and uneasy and not sleeping well at night. The day after her first swim meet her father suggested that they go somewhere else, and she was happy to get back in the car and drive away again.

Her father didn’t like stopping for long in any one place, even after the first frantic year when capture seemed most imminent. Her father knew about endless travel, and he wanted to show her everything he knew. He had been born to American diplomats in Colombia, started high school in Bangkok, finished it in Australia, and then moved to the United States. He’d spent the next few years earning multiple degrees from a random sampling of universities, too restless to settle on any one of them; afterward he’d worked for a few months as an adjunct professor of languages until an unfortunate incident involving an undergrad who’d looked much older than seventeen had put an abrupt halt to his academic career. He’d worked as a shipping clerk for a while after that, taught himself to write software at night, served six months in a minimum-security prison for some complicated counterfeiting scheme that he was never inclined to explain in any great detail except to remark that obviously it hadn’t worked out very well, been employed for some time as a bartender in a hotel in Las Vegas, married Lilia’s mother, and was divorced from her by the time Lilia was three. She was, he said, an impossible woman. He wouldn’t tell Lilia what was specifically impossible about her mother, although he did show her a small scar below his left cheekbone from the time Lilia’s mother had thrown a telephone at his head. In the four years between the thrown telephone and the night he’d appeared on the lawn beneath Lilia’s bedroom window, he’d made a minor fortune on the stock market.

In the beginning her father drove and kept driving because it was necessary to flee quickly, but it seemed to Lilia later on that eventually they probably could have stopped. Ceased their endless driving after enough time had passed, perhaps settled in some anonymous town when she was ten or eleven, somewhere far from where they had begun. Changed her name one last time, enrolled her in an elementary school with the help of a forged birth certificate, settled into a quiet, almost ordinary life. (And Lilia could almost see this other life at times, like a scene playing out on the other side of a gauze curtain, dim but glimpsable: the first quiet years of elementary school and forgetting, kissing boys in cars parked at lookout spots, a front porch with flowers planted in the backs of plastic swans, her father recast eventually as the slightly eccentric but kindly grandfather smoking his pipe on the front steps and lending his lawn mower to the neighbors, and the early upheaval so distant that she’s no longer sure it wasn’t a dream.
My mother died when I was born,
she tells her sympathetic future husband on a quiet night in August, believing it enough herself that it doesn’t even feel like a lie anymore, and a passing jet leaves a sunset-colored trail across the sky.)

But they didn’t stop. He was afraid, he told her much later, that if the two of them paused too long anywhere, especially in the early days, she’d start to dwell on things: the increasing strangeness of her upbringing, the missing parts of her family, events that may or may not have transpired just before he’d taken her away. There were weeks that were mostly spent driving; singing along with her father in a car passing over an infinity of highways, making friends with waitresses in small-town cafés, conjugating Italian verbs in motel rooms from California to Vermont and then Spanish all the way back west again. Her father regretted that he couldn’t send her to school, he said, but to make up for it he wanted to teach her all the languages he knew. In the glove box they carried a battered prayer card for St. Brigid of Ireland, the patron saint of fugitives; Lilia’s father wasn’t religious but said the prayer card couldn’t hurt.

This was a skittish, almost catastrophic life, in which nothing was certain; paradoxically, Lilia was unusually calm. Nothing could startle her. She was profoundly unafraid, although there were near disasters: when she escaped from the motel in Cincinnati, police rapping on the door of the motel room as she squeezed out the bathroom window and dropped down into the wet grass and then climbed through a dark hedge and sprinted, her frantic father waiting in the parking lot of a gas station half a block away, she was calm all the rest of that night. Her father asked if she was scared, and she said she was too old to be afraid of things. She knew something about getting older: she was almost ten and a half. And it was true that her voice was tense when she asked if the police were still close, but it was also true that she was asleep within a couple of hours. Her father that night was scattered and frantic, driving fast but trying not to speed, looking in the mirror for flashing lights and glancing sideways at his daughter and fraught with directionless guilt, trying to drive away quickly and take care of her and let her be all at once. Hours out of Cincinnati he said something and she didn’t answer, and in the passing lights of automobiles he saw that she’d fallen asleep. He tuned the radio to a classical music station, Chopin and then Mendelssohn with the volume low, night lullabies, and he hummed softly to the music and drove all through the night.