Read Online Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel - Free Book Online

an old woman pulling a little boy by the hand; the boy had a harmonica and played a long, wavering note in a minor key as Eli stepped into the train. He sank down onto a plastic bench and stared up at an overlit advertisement for skin care (“Dr. Z sees every patient personally!”) for all of the long clattering journey under the river, and then up the stairs into the lights and sounds of the Manhattan street. He walked aimlessly down First Avenue against the wind.
    He stopped at a Don’t Walk signal somewhere deep into Chinatown, waiting for the direction of traffic to change. A bottle had been smashed in the gutter. He stood staring at it for a while, the mesmerizing sparkle of broken glass. A van paused a beat too long in the intersection and was attacked by a blaring cacophony of car horns. The sound brought tears to his eyes. He stood on the corner while passersby streamed around him like ghosts and lights changed from green to red to yellow to green again and the stream of traffic before him continued unchecked. He looked down and flecks of glass on the pavement sparkled, like crystal, like ice, tears blurring the pinpoints of light. It was a long time before he could force himself into motion.
    . . .
    “TELL ME ABOUT MONTREAL,” he said to Geneviève. Thomas and Geneviève had been arguing earlier, but the argument was lost in passion and long words. Now they were both a bit flushed, mutually offended, and reading different sections of the same paper without speaking. Geneviève was making occasional notes in a weathered spiral-bound notebook. She had a scribbly, doctor’s-prescription way of writing that produced long lines of cramped hieroglyphics, and he had been watching her write. It was the first thing he’d said in an hour.
    “I thought maybe you’d forgotten how to talk,” she said. “Why Montreal?” But her eyes held a sudden light. She loved talking about Montreal. She’d spent the early part of her life there. Her parents had moved her to Brooklyn when she was nine, but she still considered herself something of an expatriate and took enormous pleasure in pronouncing her name in French.
    “I’m curious. I’m thinking about going there.”
    Thomas was giving him a dangerous look. “Don’t.”
    “Why not?” asked Geneviève, who didn’t know about the postcard.
    “Because it’s fucking cold,” Thomas said, without taking his eyes from Eli’s face. “That’s all anyone needs to know about it. You’d be insane to go there this time of year.”
    “I doubt you’ve even been .” She was always ready to pounce on an opportunity to argue with anyone, but especially with Thomas. “You should go. It’s a city with a probably doomed language. The Quebecois are speaking French with an accent so ancient and frankly bizarre that the actual French can’t understand it. It’s like a fortress in a rising tide of English. It’ll be like research for you.”
    “What do you mean, a fortress?”
    “Imagine a country next to the sea,” she said, “and imagine that the water’s rising. Imagine a fortress that used to stand near the beach, but now it’s half underwater, and the water won’t stop rising no matter how they try to fight it back. Eventually, in the next century or so, it will more than likely rise over the top of the walls and overwhelm them, but for now they’re plugging the cracks and pretending it doesn’t exist and passing laws against rising water. I’m saying that French is the fortress, and English is the sea.”
    “I don’t get it,” said Thomas, without looking up from his paper. “That’s a stupid metaphor.”
    “I think I do,” said Eli quickly, trying to avoid losing them to another fight, but Geneviève had ignored Thomas anyway.
    “You’ve spent your whole academic career thinking about dying languages,” she said. “Thinking about doomed languages, shamelessly romanticizing doomed languages, picking up girls with doomed languages, and imagining what