The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  Which is not to say that he doesn’t have regrets. He wishes he’d had more appreciation for the people he was able to associate with, before prison. He never really had friends in his adult life, only investors, but some of them were people whom he genuinely enjoyed. He always very much liked Olivia, whose presence made him feel like his beloved lost brother wasn’t so far away after all, and Faisal, who could talk at fascinating length about subjects like twentieth-century British poetry and the history of jazz. (Faisal is dead now, but no need to think about that.) He’s even nostalgic for some of the investors whom he knew much less well, maybe only met once or twice. Leon Prevant, for instance, the shipping executive whom he’d had drinks with at the Hotel Caiette, the pleasure of getting into a conversation about an industry he knew nothing about, or Terrence Washington, a retired judge at the club in Miami Beach, who seemed to know everything there was to know about the history of New York City.

  The people he associates with now are not people he respects, for the most part. There are a few exceptions—the mafiosos who ran terrifying criminal empires, the ex-spy who was a double agent for a decade—but for every godfather and trilingual former spy there are ten guys who are basically thugs. Alkaitis is aware that there’s a hypocritical element to his snobbery, but there’s a difference between (a) knowing you’re a criminal just like everyone else here and (b) wanting to associate with grown men who can’t read.

  “It’s like there’s two different games, moneywise,” Nemirovsky says to the table at breakfast. He’s been here sixteen years for a botched bank robbery. He has a fourth-grade education and is functionally illiterate. “There’s the game everyone knows, where you work your shitty job and get your paycheque and it’s never enough”—nods all around the cafeteria table—“but then there’s this other level, this whole other level of money, where it’s this whole other thing, like this secret game or something and only some people know how to play . . .”

  Nemirovsky isn’t wrong, Alkaitis thinks later, while he’s jogging around the recreation yard. Money is a game he knew how to play. No, money is a country and he had the keys to the kingdom.

  He doesn’t tell Julie Freeman this, but now that it’s much too late to flee, Alkaitis finds himself thinking about flight all the time. He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events—a counterlife, if you will—in which he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Why not? He loves the UAE and Dubai in particular, the way it’s possible to live an entire life without going outdoors except to step into smooth cars, floating from beautiful interior to beautiful interior with expert drivers in between. He was last there in 2005, with Vincent. She seemed enchanted by the opulence, although in retrospect it’s begun to occur to him that she may have been acting at least part of the time. She had a significant financial stake in maintaining the appearance of happiness. Anyway. In the counterlife, the hours surrounding the holiday party are very different. When Claire comes to see him in the office on the day of the holiday party, he deflects her. He pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, maintains this air of polite bafflement until she gives up and leaves. He isn’t above a little gaslighting, if that’s what it takes to stay out of prison. In the counterlife, he confesses to nothing. He does not crack. That night he goes with Vincent to the holiday party, and when they leave together, they both return to the pied-à-terre. He kisses her good night as if everything were perfectly normal, revealing nothing of his plans. He stays up when she goes to sleep, drinks some coffee and makes his preparations, stares out at the dark ocean of Central Park and the lights beyond, memorizing a view that he’ll never see again. He waits through the night for the window washers, who rise up the sheer wall of the tower on their suspended platform at dawn.

  It’s early in the morning, first light over the park, and they don’t recognize him. Why would they? Over the course of the night he’s given himself a buzz cut, he’s wearing dark glasses and a baseball hat, and—crucially—he’s dressed all in white, just like them, his gym bag slung over his shoulder. He opens the window and speaks with them. “Could I get a ride down to the street?” he asks. They refuse at first, naturally, but he has $5,000 in cash in the pied-à-terre and he gives it all to them, throws in two bottles of an exquisite Grand Cru Classé from his favourite château in Bordeaux and then Vincent’s diamond bracelet and earrings—she’s in the bedroom, still asleep—and persuades them: He just wants a ride down to the street. That’s all. It’ll be over in a few minutes. No one will know. It’s a lot of money and the best wine they’re ever going to drink.

  Who are they? It doesn’t matter. A and B. Let’s say they’re young guys who don’t know any better, or they know better but let’s say they have kids to feed. Window washing, that can’t be a particularly well-paying job, unless ascending the glass curtain walls of high-rises is one of those jobs that’s so terrifying no one wants to do it? Anyway, who cares, either way it’s a lot of money, so let’s say they take it. Alkaitis climbs out into the cold, and on the slow descent to the sidewalk, A and B are quiet and respectful, he senses that they’re admiring his forethought in dressing like them—not exactly like them, window washers don’t wear dress shirts, but enough like them that from any distance it’s just three men in white on a suspended platform, an everyday sight in the glass city, and by now the rising sun is reflecting off the tower so no one can look directly at them anyway, because that’s how brilliant his plan is, they descend in the glare and he climbs out and thanks them and hails a taxi to the airport. A few hours later he’s on a flight to Dubai, first-class obviously, in one of those reclining seats that are actually more like a private pod with bed and television. In the counterlife, he reclines the seat flat over the Atlantic and falls into a blissful sleep.

  In FCI Florence Medium 1 the lights go on, the alarm for the three a.m. count blaring, and he gets out of bed, neither awake nor asleep, putting on his slippers in an automatic movement, still halfway somewhere else, Hazelton stumbling out of bed across from him. In the counterlife, he is never arrested, let alone sentenced, let alone subject to head counts. (Guards yelling in the corridor—“get up get up get up”—and then one stops in the doorway with his little clicker, and after a few minutes the count is over and it’s possible to go back to bed.) In the counterlife, he transfers all his money into the secret offshore accounts, out of the hands of the American government. By the time his daughter calls the FBI, he’s out of reach. Dubai has no extradition treaty with the United States.

  He has enough money to live in Dubai indefinitely, in tranquility, in the cool interiors and the brutal heat. Hotel, or villa? Hotel. He’ll live in a hotel and order room service forever. Villas are a staffing headache. He’s had enough of staff.

  “I’d like to ask about your daughter,” Julie Freeman says at their second meeting.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’d prefer not to talk about her. I think Claire deserves her privacy.”

  “Fair enough. In that case, I’d like to ask you about your wife.”

  “Do you mean Suzanne, or Vincent?”

  “I thought I’d start with Vincent. Does she visit you here?”

  “No. Actually, I . . .” He isn’t sure it’s wise to continue, but who else can he ask? His only visitors are journalists. “Would you stop taking notes, please, just for a moment?”

  She sets her pen on the table.

  “This is embarrassing,” he says, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this off the record, but do you know where she is?”

  “I’ve been looking for her myself. I’d love to talk to her, but wherever she is, she’s keeping a low profile.”

  Maybe the descent down the tower with the window washers is a little overdramatic. He could just as easily have kissed Vincent good night after the holiday party, told her he had to go get drinks with an investor and that she shouldn’t wait up for him; he could’ve sent her home in a car while he fled the country. No, he would have had to go back to Greenwich for
his passport. Well, if he can rewrite history so that he fled the country, surely the passport isn’t an impediment. In the counterlife, maybe he’s the kind of person who keeps his passport on his person at all times. He kisses Vincent good night and hails a taxi to the airport.

  In the counterlife, Claire visits him in Dubai. She is happy to see him. She disapproves of his actions, but they can laugh about it. Their conversations are effortless. In the counterlife, Claire isn’t the one who called the FBI.

  Claire has never visited him in prison and will not take his calls.

  He wrote Claire a letter his first month in prison, but she responded only with two pages of trial transcript, from the initial hearing where he had to keep saying guilty over and over again. He remembers standing there and repeating the word, nauseous, sweat trickling down his back. On the page it looks strange and fragmented, like bad poetry or a script.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count One of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: Mr. Alkaitis, please speak up so I can hear you.

  THE DEFENDANT: I’m sorry, Your Honour. I plead guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Two of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Three of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Four of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Five of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Six of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Seven of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Eight of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Nine of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Ten of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Eleven of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Twelve of the information, guilty or not guilty?

  THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

  7

  Seafarer

  2008–2013

  The Neptune Cumberland

  Vincent left land on a bright blue day with clouds like popcorn, in August 2013. Her first glimpse of the Neptune Cumberland was at Port Newark. She was escorted to the ship by port security, where she had to wait by the gangway stairs for what seemed like a long time. She was nervous and excited. There were other people around, but they were out of sight, either high overhead in the cabs of cranes or driving trucks laden with containers. She’d known where she was going, she’d studied the coursework and read the books, but the scale of this world was still astonishing to her. The hull of the Neptune Cumberland was a sheer wall of steel. The cranes were the size of Manhattan towers. She knew that the containers could weigh as much as sixty-seven thousand pounds, but the cranes plucked them from the flatbed trucks as if they were nothing, and there was an improbable grace in that illusion of weightlessness. She stood in a landscape of unadulterated industry and enormous machines, a port where humans had no place, feeling smaller and smaller, until her escorts appeared, two men descending the white steel steps from the deck. It took them a long time to reach her. They introduced themselves as they stepped down onto land: Geoffrey Bell and Felix Mendoza, third mate and steward, her colleague and her boss respectively.

  “Welcome aboard,” Mendoza said.

  “Yes, welcome,” said Bell. They shook her hand, and the port security guy got back in his car and drove off. Mendoza led the way and Bell followed with her suitcase, although she could easily have managed it herself.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Mendoza said. He kept up a running monologue all the way up the stairs. He’d specifically requested an assistant cook with experience in more than one restaurant, he said, because he’d been at sea for too long and frankly could use some new menu ideas. He hoped Vincent didn’t mind starting tonight. (She didn’t.) He was glad she was Canadian because several of his favourite colleagues over the years had been Canadian too. She let him talk, because all she wanted was to absorb this place, the deck high above the port, and she kept thinking, I’m here, I’m actually here, while Mendoza led the way into the accommodations house and down a narrow industrial corridor that reminded her of the interiors of the ferries that run from Vancouver to Vancouver Island.

  “Take a little time to unpack,” Mendoza said, “and I’ll come back for you in a couple hours.” Bell, who hadn’t said anything since offering to take the suitcase, set it inside the threshold of the room with surprising gentleness and smiled as he closed the door.

  The room was more or less what Vincent had expected, small and blandly utilitarian, all imitation-wood cabinetry and white walls. There was a narrow bed, a closet, a desk, a sofa, everything either built into a wall or bolted to the floor. She had her own small bathroom. There was a window, but she kept the curtain closed, because she wanted the ocean to be the first thing she saw through it. From outside there was a constant clanging and grinding and creaking, cranes lowering containers into the holds and stacking them high on the lashing bridges. She unpacked her possessions—clothes, a few books, her camera—and found as she did so that she was thinking of Bell. She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.

  She zipped up the empty suitcase, stowed it in the closet, and turned to the stack of sheets and blankets and the well-used pillow on the bed. She made the bed and then sat on it for a while, acclimatizing herself to the room. It was impossible not to think in that moment of the master bedroom suite in Jonathan’s house in Greenwich, the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.

  It had taken so much to come here, all the training and studying and certifications and hassle, and when Mendoza came to collect her, when she was shown the galley where she’d spend her working life, it seemed improbable that she was actually here, on board, that she’d successfully left land, and it was all she could do to refrain from grinning like an idiot while he kept up a running monologue about his meal plans—French fries with almost every meal as a matter of policy, say four dinners out of five, because the guys liked them and potatoes were cheap so it helped keep the budget under control; rice biryani twice a week for the same reason—and the first shift was such a blur of information and French fries that she didn’t realize the ship had left Newark until later that night, after the cleanup, when she stumbled grimy and exhausted out onto the deck, a constellation of tiny burns stinging on her forearms from the deep-fat fryer, and found that the air had changed, the humidity broken by a cool breeze that carried no scent of land. They were travelling south toward Charleston, the East Coast of the United States marked by a string of lights on the starboard horizon. She walked to the other side of the ship to look out at the Atlantic, its darkness broken only by the far lights of a distant ship and by airplanes beginning their descents into the eastern cities, and her thought at that moment was that she never wanted to live on land again.

  “Why did you want to go to sea?” Geoffrey Bell asked her, the first time they talked. She’d been at sea for a week by then, give or take. The ship had just left the Ba
hamas and had begun the long Atlantic crossing, toward Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Geoffrey had come to the galley at the end of her shift and had asked if she might like to go for a walk with him. He’d taken her to his favourite place on the ship, a corner of the deck on C level that he liked because it was out of sight of the security cameras, “which I realize sounds sinister,” he said, “now that I’m actually saying it aloud, but the trouble with being on a ship is the lack of privacy, don’t you find?”

  “I don’t disagree,” Vincent said. “Is that a barbecue?” There was a strange tubular contraption with four legs chained to a railing.

  “Oh, it is,” he said, “but I haven’t seen it used in years.” Onboard barbecues were dismal, he explained. Picture twenty men standing around on a steel deck, trying to make conversation in the wind while they eat hot dogs and chicken, a wall of containers rising up behind them. No, he’s not explaining it right. Not twenty men, twenty co-workers, twenty colleagues who’ve been stuck at sea together for months and are fairly sick of one another’s company, and not a single solitary beer for lubrication, because of the no-alcohol rule. Still, he liked this deck, he said.

  Vincent liked it too. It was quiet, except for the ever-present hum of the engines. She leaned over the railing to look down at the ocean.

  “It’s a pleasure to be out of sight of land,” she said. The horizons were uninterrupted on all sides.

  “I notice you didn’t answer my question.”

  “Right, you asked why I went to sea.”

  “It’s not my best conversational opener,” he said. “Maybe even kind of overly obvious, since here we are, standing on a ship. But one has to start somewhere.”

  “It’s a strange story,” Vincent said.

  “Thank god. I haven’t heard a decent story in months.”

  “Well,” Vincent said. “I was with a man for a while. It ended in a complicated way.”

  “I see,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry, if it’s something you’d prefer not to talk about.”