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

right. He turned the page over to read the rest of the psalm. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. When he held it up to the window, Lilia’s childhood handwriting was a backward shadow on the other side of the page. His mother wanted to know if he’d heard from Zed lately; at last word he was headed for Ethiopia, although she couldn’t remember what he was doing there. It wasn’t that she entirely disapproved of Eli’s brother, although she wished he’d go to college; she was glad that he was seeing the world (incidentally, had Eli considered travel? Maybe a month or two abroad would do him good, perhaps focus him a little), but she worried about Zed. She did. She worried that Zed was getting too radical, too mystical (or was spiritual the right word? She was never sure what the difference was), just the way he wandered around biblical countries talking about God like that. Did he seem at all unhinged? Had he been heard from lately?
    Eli turned the page over again. The first part of the psalm was partly lost under her handwriting, but he could still make it out: . . . I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.
    “No,” he said, “I haven’t heard from Zed for a while, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He doesn’t just talk about God, he talks about Buddhism and Taoism at least as much. What he suffers from—” He listened to his mother’s interruption for a second and then interrupted her. “No, he’s not an extremist, you’ve got it all wrong. I was going to say what Zed suffers from is a pathological sense of democ racy. He’s too democratic to even choose one individual religion to be extreme and radical about. He’s probably an atheist.”
    This last sentiment triggered a longish pause, in which he imagined her switching the telephone from one ear to the other and mentally rewriting her will.
    “Eli,” she said, “sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong.”
    “I just don’t think we’re in any position to judge his life.”
    The pause lengthened and grew black around the edges. No, she told him, she was serious. She wanted to know what was wrong, with no diversions this time.
    “My girlfriend disappeared.” Eli listened for a moment and then interrupted her. “Yes, Lilia, the one I was living with, you think I’d have more than one? She didn’t just leave me. I mean she disappeared.”
    His mother offered her opinion that girls don’t just disappear, unless they’ve gone and gotten themselves—
    “This one does.”
    Then she did go and get herself—
    “No,” he said, “she wasn’t preg nant. For God’s sake.”
    Her son, she felt, deserved better than that. And what did he mean by disappeared, exactly?
    “She just got on a train and—”
    “So she left. ”
    “Yes, but it wasn’t—”
    “Then how do you know it was a train?”
    “Because she said she was sick of traveling on buses,” he said.
    She was worried about him. How long had he been working on his thesis, out there in the boroughs? (She had a way of saying the word boroughs that conjured up images of far-off places of questionable repute: Uzbekistan, North Korea, Côte d’Ivoire.) How long was his thesis? It must be the length of War and Peace by this point. Was it even done yet? Wasn’t it due a year ago, at least? Heaven knew she wasn’t one to judge, of course, or to criticize, but he had to at least consider her point of view in this matter. It seemed a bit odd to her that he’d want to spend time chasing after noncommittal girls who leave on trains when here it had been years and he’d missed at least one thesis deadline already. What exactly was it that was so impossible to write about? He’d always been so good at writing, he’d always been so passionate about those dead languages of his, and she understood about writer’s block, well, she thought she did, but