The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “I loved it too. I read the book when I was sixteen, and after that, going to sea was a fixation of mine.” He was having trouble with his latest origami swan: he frowned at it, smoothed out the paper, and started again. “Would you like to hear something mildly devastating?”

  “Sure.”

  “My father once told me that he’d dreamed of being a pilot. Why, you may ask, might one find this devastating?”

  “Because you told me he was a coal miner.” Vincent was standing on his chair to hang swans from the curtain rod, which was otherwise unused, because Geoffrey’s window was always blocked by the container stacks. “God, you’re right, Geoffrey, that’s ghastly. You dream of flying, but instead . . .”

  “I didn’t want to regret not going to sea.”

  “That makes perfect sense.”

  “Do you like it?” He was holding up another swan, an orange one, a little lopsided.

  “Do I like what, your swan?”

  “No, all of this. Being at sea. Your life.”

  “Yes.” She realized the truth of this as she spoke. “I like all of it. I love all of it. I’ve never been so happy.”

  8

  The Counterlife

  2015

  In the counterlife, Alkaitis moves through a nameless hotel. Outside, the view keeps changing, because he keeps changing his mind about which hotel he’s in. He can’t remember the names of these places, but they come with distinct sets of details and impressions. Let’s say it’s the hotel with the massive white staircase by the reception desk, the suite with the hot tub sunk into the floor by the full-length windows. In that case the view is of a shadowless pale blue sea, meeting the white sky at the blinding horizon.

  “These morons think they’re warrior monks or something,” Churchwell says, inclining his head toward the five younger white guys doing calisthenics in unison at the far end of the recreation yard. “All these dumb ideas about codes of honour.”

  “Well, you’ve got to have a code of some kind, I suppose,” Alkaitis says, a little resentful at being jolted out of the counterlife.

  “I get the need for structure,” Churchwell says. “Sense of belonging, familial feeling, sure, I get it. All I’m saying is, don’t talk to me about your code of honour when you’re doing a fifty-year bid for child pornography.”

  The child pornographer, Tait, had no tattoos when he came to Florence—upon arrival he was a pale, soft person with glasses and unmarked skin—but now he has a little swastika inked on his back. “Some people have families from the beginning,” he says. “Other people have to look a little harder.” This is in the cafeteria. Alkaitis, who expends a great deal of effort trying not to think about his family, lets himself drift. One of the things he likes about the counterlife is that Tait isn’t there. Say it’s the other hotel, not the one on the mainland with the view of the horizon but the one on that island, that man-made island whose name he can’t remember that’s shaped like a palm tree. In that case, the view is of the stagnant trapped water between the palm fronds, as it were, a gaudy row of McMansions shimmering in the heat on the opposite shore. He liked that suite. It was enormous. Vincent spent a lot of time in the hot tub.

  But no, that’s memory, not the counterlife. Vincent isn’t in the counterlife. He feels it’s important to keep the two separate, memory vs. counterlife, but he’s been finding the separation increasingly difficult. It’s a permeable border. In memory, the air conditioning was so aggressive that she had trouble keeping warm, which was why she was always in the hot tub, whereas in the counterlife she’s not there at all.

  In the counterlife he turns away from the view of McMansions and leaves the room, walks out into the wide corridor with its elaborately patterned strip of carpeting, into the elevator made of dark mirrored surfaces, which opens unexpectedly into the lobby of the Hotel Caiette, where Vincent sits with Walter, the night manager, on leather armchairs. This is a memory: they came back here a year before he was arrested. He woke up alone in the bed, he remembers, he woke at five a.m. and went looking for her, found her here in the lobby with Walter.

  The memory stays with him because when she looked up, her mask slipped just a little, and for just a flash he saw something like disappointment on her face. She wasn’t happy to see him. But here memory and the counterlife diverge, because while in real life he got involved in one of those painfully superficial conversations about jet lag, in the counterlife his gaze has shifted to the window, where outside it seems much too bright for five in the morning in British Columbia, a different quality of sunlight altogether, because once again he’s in Dubai, on the palm-tree island, looking out at houses across the narrow bay, and now the lobby is empty.

  Do all of the other men have counterlives too? Alkaitis searches their faces for clues. He’s never been curious about other people before. He doesn’t know how to ask. But he sees them gazing into the distance and wonders where they are.

  “You ever think about alternate universes?” he asks Churchwell, sometime in early 2015. He came across the idea at some point in his free life and dismissed it, because it sounded frankly ridiculous, but now it holds increasing appeal. Churchwell isn’t a friend, exactly, but they often eat at the same table because they’re part of the same loose-knit club of people who are never going to be free again, also part of a different loose-knit club of New Yorkers. These clubs are called cars, which Alkaitis likes. We’re all together in the same car, he finds himself thinking sometimes, with a little flicker of camaraderie, when he’s with Churchwell or one of the other lifers, although of course he’d never voice this aloud and also it’s depressing if you think about it too much. (We’re all together in the same car that’s stalled and will never go anywhere ever again.) Churchwell can be counted on to have heard of multiverse theory or anything else anyone mentions, because all he ever does is read books and write letters. Churchwell was an honest-to-god double agent, CIA/KGB, who’s using his life sentence as an opportunity to get some reading done.

  “Who doesn’t? In an alternate universe, I got away with it and I’ve got a sweet pad in Moscow,” Churchwell says.

  “I’d live in Dubai. I liked it there.”

  “I’ve thought this through. I’d’ve married an oligarch’s daughter, maybe a supermodel? Two or three kids, golden retriever, summer house in a warm country with no extradition treaty.”

  “I’d live in Dubai.” He catches Churchwell’s glance and realizes that he already said this.

  “Mr. Alkaitis, how are you this afternoon?” The doctor looks too young to be a doctor.

  “I’ve been having some trouble with memory and concentration.” He doesn’t add hallucinations, because he doesn’t want to end up on hard-core antipsychotics, and men who go into the hospital often don’t come back. Anyway hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory. But maybe there’s something to be done, some medication that won’t turn him into a shuffling zombie but that might stop or at least slow the deterioration, if deterioration is what he’s facing. He’s trying to be clear-eyed about it.

  “Okay. I’m just going to ask you a series of simple questions, and that should give us a better idea of where we’re at. Can you tell me what year it is?”

  “Seriously? I’m not that far gone, I hope.”

  “I’m not saying you are. Just the first in a series of standard questions to screen you for potential memory problems. What’s the year?”

  “Two thousand fifteen,” Alkaitis says. Has he been here for six years already? It seems impossible. Maybe he shouldn’t discount the view from the palm-tree-island hotel, actually. The thing with white-sand beaches, blue sea to the horizon under a cloudless sky: that’s a view with two colours, just blue and white, tranquil but you could die of boredom. But the palm-tree-island hotel looked over an inlet to the enormous houses on the other side, and there’s life in that. One of
the mansions was pink, memorable because he and Vincent had laughed at it. It wasn’t a tasteful muted pink, it was pink like Pepto-Bismol.

  “What month is it?”

  “December,” Alkaitis says. “We were in the Emirates for Christmas.”

  The doctor’s face is carefully blank as he makes a note, and Alkaitis realizes his mistake. “I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else. It’s June. June 2015.”

  “Good. Do you know today’s date?”

  “Sure, it’s the seventeenth. July seventeenth.”

  “I’m going to give you a name and address,” the doctor says, “and I’ll ask you to repeat it back to me in a few minutes. Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Jones, twenty-three Cecil Court, London.”

  “Okay. Got it.”

  “What time is it to the nearest hour?”

  Alkaitis glances around but sees no clock in the room.

  “To the nearest hour,” the doctor repeats. “Your best guess.”

  “Well, our appointment was at ten and you kept me waiting, so I’ll go with eleven.”

  “Count backwards from twenty to one.”

  He counts backwards from twenty to one. The details of that weird palm-tree-shaped island are a little hazy. Is it one island, or a collection of islands that taken together form a palm tree? Anyway, that was the hotel where he and Suzanne stayed on his first visit to the UAE, where they held hands over a table in a restaurant that featured a giant aquarium with a shark in it. This was in the last year before her diagnosis, which means that there in that beautiful memory Suzanne is already secretly, invisibly sick, malignant cells proliferating silently on liver and pancreas. God, she was stunning. Much older than Vincent, obviously, but frankly there’s something to be said for having a companion who isn’t young enough to be your daughter, also something to be said for a companion from whom you don’t have to hide. He remembered holding hands with her and discussing the investors. “If you think Lenny Xavier doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said, “I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

  “Say the months of the year in reverse order.” The doctor, intruding.

  “December, November, October, September, August, June, July . . . May, April, March. February. January.” Thinking of the thrill of that moment in the hotel, the delight in having a co-conspirator. “You think we can keep it going?” he asked her. Dessert was just arriving: chocolate cake with ice cream for Alkaitis, a dish of fresh fruit for Suzanne.

  “Tell me the name and address I gave you earlier,” the doctor says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The address?”

  “It was Palm Jumeirah.” Alkaitis smiles, pleased to have remembered the name. “Definitely Palm Jumeirah, in Dubai. I don’t remember if there was a street number.”

  He leaves the doctor’s office with a sense of unease. He knows he messed up that last answer, but is it his fault that his life here is so boring that it sometimes takes him a minute or two to snap out of the counterlife and back to reality, if that’s what this is? “I’m distracted, not demented,” he mutters to himself, loudly enough that the guard escorting him back to the cell block glances at him. It isn’t his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the counterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.

  An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?

  When he’s not in the counterlife, he has dreams in which nothing happens except a mounting sense of dread. In the dream, he knows that someone is approaching, and then one evening he’s reading the paper in the cell after dinner—awake, not dreaming—and he hears a voice say, quite distinctly, “I’m here.”

  He looks up. Hazelton has been pacing for a solid hour, but it wasn’t Hazelton who spoke. Alkaitis is quiet for a long time before he can bring himself to say anything.

  “You believe in ghosts?” Alkaitis asks as casually as possible.

  Hazelton grins, apparently delighted by the question. Hazelton is an understimulated person who longs for conversation. “I don’t know, bro, I always wanted to believe in ghosts, I think it’d be cool if they were floating around, but I’m not so sure they’re real.”

  “You ever met anyone who saw one?” What he doesn’t tell Hazelton is that Faisal is standing in a corner of the cell. Alkaitis has been trying to convince himself that he’s hallucinating. Faisal cannot possibly be in this room, because (a) it’s a prison cell and (b) Faisal is dead. Nonetheless, Faisal looks alarmingly real. He’s wearing his favourite gold velvet slippers. He’s standing under the cell window, craning his neck to look at the moon.

  “I knew a guy who swore he’d seen one. But the ghost he’d seen, it was a guy he killed by accident in a robbery.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “Nah. Well, kind of. I mean, I don’t think it was an actual ghost, I think it was just his guilty conscience.”

  Faisal flickers slightly, like a faulty hologram, then blinks out.

  9

  A Fairy Tale

  2008

  The Boat

  In the last September Vincent and Alkaitis spent together, they “went sailing,” as he called it, which seemed an odd way to describe a few days of lounging around on an enormous boat with no sails. He invited his friend Olivia, who Vincent gathered had known Jonathan’s brother, and at night the three of them had dinner and then drank together in the breeze on deck. Vincent, who always tried to stay sharp, could make a single cocktail last for hours, but she liked making drinks for other people.

  “We were just talking about you,” Olivia said when Vincent returned to the deck with a fresh round that she’d mixed inside.

  “I hope you made up some interesting rumours, at least,” Vincent said.

  “We didn’t have to,” Jonathan said. “You’re an interesting person.” He accepted his drink from Vincent with a little nod and passed the other glass to Olivia.

  “You remind me so much of myself at your age,” Olivia said with an obvious air of bestowing a compliment.

  “Oh,” Vincent said. “I’m flattered.” She glanced at Jonathan, who was suppressing a smile. Olivia sipped her drink and gazed out at the ocean.

  “This is delicious,” Olivia said. “Thank you.”

  “I’m so glad you like it.” Vincent was charmed by Olivia, as she knew Jonathan was, but something about Olivia made Vincent a little sad. Olivia’s dress was too formal, her lipstick was too bright, her hair was freshly trimmed, she was slightly too attentive in the way she looked at Jonathan, and the combined effect was overeager. You’re showing your hand, Vincent wanted to tell her, you can’t let anyone see how hard you’re trying, but of course there was no way to give advice to a woman two or three times her age.

  “Do you ever go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music?” Olivia asked after a while. “My sister was just telling me the other day about a show she’d seen there, and it occurred to me, I haven’t gone in years.”

  “You know I try not to cross that river if I can help it,” Jonathan said.

  “Snob,” Olivia said.

  “Guilty as charged. Although, I was just thinking about Brooklyn the other day. I was looking at a real estate listing, this loft a friend of mine was thinking about buying, and I’m looking at all this luxury, some four-thousand-square-foot place in this gorgeous neighbourhood by the Manhattan Bridge, and I’m thinking, Whatever this place is now, it has nothing to do with the Brooklyn I used to know. Seemed like a different city.”

  “And then there’s BAM,” Olivia said. “My sister Monica was telling me about this show she’d seen, and I realized, when was the last time I’ve been? Two thousand four? Two thousand five?”

  “We should all go together,” said Vincent, without much intention, but a month later, back on land, at home with a head cold on a hazy October afternoon, she found herself wondering if s
he should propose some sort of unexpected evening activity to Jonathan for the weekend, perhaps surprise him with theatre tickets or something, and her thoughts drifted back to the conversation. She looked up the Brooklyn Academy of Music online, and found her brother.

  Melissa in the Water

  It seemed that Paul, against all odds, had attained some success as a composer and performer. In early December he had a three-night series of performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The program was called Distant Northern Land: Soundtracks for Experimental Film. She hadn’t seen him in three years, since the last shift they’d worked together at the Hotel Caiette. In the image on the BAM website, he looked possessed: he was on a stage surrounded by equipment that she didn’t understand, keyboards and inscrutable boxes with dials and knobs, hands blurred with motion, and above him, projected on a screen, was a picture that she thought she recognized as the shoreline of Caiette, a rocky beach with dark evergreens under a cloudy sky.

  In Distant Northern Land, the emerging composer Paul James Smith presents a series of mysterious home videos, each with a running time of exactly five minutes, all filmed by the composer during his childhood in rural western Canada, presented here as part of an arresting composition that blurs the lines between musical genres and interrogates our preconceived notions of home movies, of wilderness, of—

  Vincent closed her eyes. She’d never been very careful with her videos. She’d made them and recorded over them, or made them and then left them in boxes in her childhood room. How often had Paul visited their father without her, in the years after she left Caiette? Often enough, she supposed. There was nothing stopping him from plundering her belongings. She found herself sitting outside by the pool, staring at the water, although she didn’t specifically remember leaving the house.