The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  On a late-summer afternoon in distant childhood, she and her mother had accompanied Paul as far as the Port Hardy airport, where he boarded a propeller plane to Vancouver to catch a connecting flight to Toronto. Vincent would have been ten or so. Paul had been awful all day, laughing at her whenever she said anything, then at the airport he turned away from them with a cursory wave and got into the security line without looking back, and afterward, on the way home with her mother, Vincent was quiet and a little sad.

  “The thing with Paul,” her mother said, while they were waiting for the water taxi on the pier at Grace Harbour, “is he’s always seemed to think that you owe him something.” Vincent remembered looking up at her mother, startled by the idea. “You don’t,” her mother said. “Nothing that happened to him is your fault.”

  In 2008, by the pool, Vincent heard footsteps and looked up. Anya was approaching with a blanket. “I thought you might need this,” Anya said. “It’s cold out here.”

  “Thank you,” Vincent said.

  Anya frowned. “Are you crying?”

  It was difficult to uphold her contract with Jonathan in the two months that followed, difficult to maintain an air of lightness, but he seemed not to notice. In the last months of 2008, he was working all the time. He was always at the office, or in the study with his door closed. She heard his voice on the phone when she walked by in the hallway but could never quite make out the words. When he was with her, he seemed tired and distracted.

  In early December she boarded a series of trains that brought her eventually to the steps of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She’d worried about how to explain a Thursday night absence to Jonathan, but he’d texted to say he was working late and spending the night at the pied-à-terre. She arrived early and lingered outside for a while as a cross-section of affluent Brooklyn assembled on the sidewalk in their uniforms: flat-heeled boots and complicated arrangements of scarves for the women, beards and unflatteringly tight jeans on the men. It was a pleasure to watch them meet one another and pair off, streaming past her in twos and threes and fours, latecomers hurrying around the corner in a fluster of apologies and complaints about the subway. At last Vincent allowed herself to be pulled into the theatre with the last of the crowd, found her seat in the front row, and set about the usual preshow business of blowing her nose, unwrapping a cough drop just in case, turning off her phone, anything to not think about what she was about to see.

  “Do you know the artist?” the woman beside her whispered. She looked to be in her eighties, white hair arranged into spikes. She was elegantly dressed, but she looked ill; she was emaciated and her hands trembled.

  “No.” Vincent felt that this was technically true. She’d known her brother, past tense. The lights were dimming around them.

  “I was here last night too,” the woman said. “I just think he’s brilliant.”

  “Oh,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to seeing him, then.”

  “Do you know the artist?” the woman asked again, after a moment, and Vincent felt a stab of pity.

  “Yes,” Vincent said. Applause rose around them, and when she looked up, her brother was walking out onto the stage. Paul was thinner and noticeably older, and she couldn’t tell if his black suit and thin dark tie were meant to be ironic. He looked like an undertaker. He nodded to the audience, smiled at the applause with what seemed to Vincent to be genuine pleasure, and took his place behind a keyboard, then the stage lights dimmed too, until he was barely illuminated. The screen above his head lit up, a field of white with a black title, “Melissa in the Water,” and then the white resolved into a shoreline. Vincent recognized the beach by the pier at Caiette, grainy and oversaturated, the water and sky too blue, the islands in the inlet an unnatural green. Paul’s music sounded at first like white noise, a radio caught between stations. He played a sequence of notes on a keyboard, the notes emerging a few seconds later as cello music, to which he added a quietly meandering piano, moving between the keyboard and a laptop perched on a stand, pressing buttons and tapping pedals to create loops and distortions, a one-man band. The static had taken on a pulsating quality, a steady beat. Onstage, the screen burst into life as a group of children dashed across the frame. Vincent could see from their faces that they were shouting and laughing, but the film had no sound. She remembered this video. This was the first summer without her mother. She’d been living in Vancouver for ten or eleven months—long hours alone in her aunt’s basement with the television, long commutes by bus to school—but she’d come home to visit Dad for the summer. She’d stood on the beach filming the swimmers, a.k.a. the entire underage population of Caiette circa 1995: a little girl whose name she’d forgotten—Amy? Anna?—who stopped at the water’s edge, giggling but afraid to go in; the twins, Carl and Gary, a little older, splashing around in a corner of the frame; Vincent’s friend Melissa, who would have been fourteen but was small for her age and looked closer to twelve. Melissa’s pale hair and the yellow swimsuit and the graininess and oversaturation of the film lent her an air of radiance. She was doing somersaults in the water, laughing when she surfaced. In three years she would move to Vancouver to go to the University of British Columbia and live with Vincent in that ghastly basement apartment on the Downtown Eastside; she would go dancing with Vincent and Paul on the last night of the twentieth century; at nineteen she would develop a drug problem, drop out of school, return to Caiette to live with her parents while she pulled herself together; a year after that she would be hired as a chauffeur and gardening assistant at the Hotel Caiette; but in the video all of this was in the unimaginable future and she was just a kid twisting around in the water like a fish. The music had a shifting, unstable quality that Vincent found unpleasant, like a soundtrack for one of those nightmares where you try to run but your feet won’t move, and now there were voices in the static, overlapping.

  On the stage below the projection screen, Paul was in motion, making adjustments to dials, following the projection on his laptop, playing the keyboard at intervals. Vincent sensed movement to her right, and when she looked, the woman had fallen asleep, her head on her chest. Vincent rose and slipped out into the lobby, where the lights and the solid reality of marble and benches made her want to weep with relief, and fled outside into the winter air. She walked over the Manhattan Bridge and all the way up to Grand Central Terminal, trying to steady her thoughts. The idea came to her that she could sue him, but with what proof? He’d been in Caiette every summer and every second Christmas of her childhood. There was no way of proving that he hadn’t filmed the videos himself. And any legal action would be difficult or impossible to hide from Jonathan, for whom she was supposed to be a calm harbour, no drama, no friction. On the train back to Greenwich, she caught sight of her reflection in the window and closed her eyes. She’d started paying her own rent at seventeen. How had she become so dependent on another person? Of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.

  A Nightmare

  In the week that followed, Jonathan worked such long hours that she hardly saw him—small mercy—so she only had to feign lightness for brief periods. She read the news to distract herself, but the news was a litany of economic collapse. She thought of going back to Brooklyn and waiting outside the stage door, but the thought of seeing Paul again was repulsive.

  On the following Wednesday, Vincent was awakened by a nightmare for the third time in three nights. She’d been sleeping poorly for longer than that, weeks, but the nightmare was a new and unsettling problem. She was certain that it was the same dream, repeated, but she retained only a vague impression of falling, a sense of catastrophe that persisted in daylight. She stared at the ceiling for a while, Jonathan asleep beside her, before she finally rose and fumbled for her workout clothes—she kept them folded on a chair by the bed—and laced her running shoes in darkness, collected her keys from the hook by the kitchen door. She liked to make a game of leaving the house with
out turning on any lights. There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.

  In the kingdom of money it was important to be thin, but she would have run anyway. She loved the suburbs at this hour, when there was still some mystery here. It was early December but the weather had been well above freezing all week. She walked quickly down the long driveway that led past Gil and Anya’s cottage—no lights in the windows—to the cul-de-sac, where the equally excessive houses of two neighbours glimmered through the trees, and then broke into a light jog when she reached the first real street, the first street that went somewhere. She liked the stillness of the predawn neighbourhood, the secrecy of a street where everyone else was sleeping, their windows unlit. Jonathan wouldn’t have liked her to be out alone in the dark, but these streets had never struck her as dangerous, and she carried mace on her key chain. By the time she returned to the house, it was four o’clock and still dark. She left a note for Jonathan, who wouldn’t wake till five-thirty, then showered and dressed and called a taxi to take her to the five a.m. train.

  The others on the train at that hour were mostly financial-industry maniacs, eyes bright in the shine of their little screens, sending and receiving messages from other continents. Vincent had a row of seats to herself. After a while the night gave way to shadows and a murky dawn, the towns shifting from collections of lights to silhouettes of rooftops. How could Paul do it, she found herself thinking, how could he steal from her like that, but she was too tired to maintain the line of thought and drifted into a twilight state that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t consciousness, towns reappearing and blinking out between intervals of trees. She woke with a start as the train pulled into Grand Central.

  That was the last morning in the kingdom of money. She ate breakfast in a hotel restaurant near Grand Central. There was an hour in a bookstore, time spent in various shops, an interval of newspapers and coffee in an espresso bar in Chelsea. A strange moment: she stepped out of the espresso bar and into a tour group, a pack of tourists following a leader who held a red umbrella up in the air, and just for a moment, she saw her mother in the crowd. Only a flash, but it was unmistakable—the long brown braid down her back, the red cardigan she’d been wearing when she drowned—and then the crowd shifted and her mother was gone. Vincent stood for a long time on the sidewalk, watching the group walk away. Was she hallucinating? She was alert for signs of madness as she walked uptown through the grey city but saw nothing else that seemed obviously unreal. Central Park was monochromatic, dark trees dripping under a colourless sky.

  She was on the steps of the Met when Jonathan called.

  “Christmas party tonight,” he said. “You want to come by the office around seven-thirty, and we’ll walk over together?”

  “Seven-thirty’s perfect,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to it.” She had in fact entirely forgotten about the holiday party. The dress she’d planned to wear was hanging in the bedroom closet in Greenwich, and there was nothing suitable in the pied-à-terre. But the age of money wouldn’t end for a few more hours, so this didn’t constitute an emergency, and she was free to linger for a while with her favourite painting. She had fallen in love with Thomas Eakins’s The Thinker, a massive image of a man in a dark suit, perhaps in his thirties, hands in his pockets, lost in pensive thought. She’d come back to this gallery several times in the past few weeks and stood before this painting, unaccountably moved by it. Her mother would have liked it, she thought.

  When she turned to leave, she saw a man she recognized. He’d been looking at the same painting, standing back a little.

  “Oskar,” she said. “You work with my husband, don’t you?”

  “In the asset management unit.” They shook hands. “Nice to see you again.”

  “I don’t mean this as a pickup line,” Vincent said, “but do you come here often?”

  “Not as often as I’d like. I took a couple art history classes in college,” he added, as if he had to justify his presence here. They parted ways after a brief volley of small talk—“I hope you’re coming to the party tonight?”—and it might have been unmemorable except that that was the first time she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan. She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love, or failing that, at least to sleep with someone she was actually attracted to and to whom she owed nothing. She hailed a taxi and travelled to Saks, where she spent some time under dazzling lights and emerged an hour later with a blue velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. There were still so many hours left in the day. Don’t think of Paul, probably in a studio somewhere composing new music to accompany her plundered work. She hailed another taxi and went downtown to the financial district, to linger for a while in a café that she’d always especially liked. She stayed in the Russian Café for two hours, drinking cappuccinos and reading the International Herald Tribune.

  By five o’clock she was restless, so she gathered her things and stepped out into the rain. She would find another café, she decided. She’d go up to Midtown and stake out a position near Jonathan’s office, so as to arrive perfectly on time. But halfway down the stairs to Bowling Green station, she was overcome by the certainty that if she went into the subway, she would die. She knew it as clearly as she knew her own name. Vincent turned around and half stumbled, half ran back up the stairs, pushing through a sea of commuters coming the other way, desperate to reach a bench before she fainted. She’d never fainted before but surely this was what it felt like, this terrible lightheadedness, the awareness of being just at the edge of an abyss. I should ask my mother, she thought, and the equally irrational thought that followed was My mother’s waiting for me in the subway.

  Vincent made it to the nearest bench, gasping, and a few minutes passed before she had the presence of mind to unfurl her umbrella. She sat there for what seemed like a long time, holding the umbrella low enough to hide her face from passersby, trying to catch her breath, trying to stop crying. If she’d started having panic attacks—she’d never had one before, but surely that moment just now on the steps would qualify—then she’d slipped further than she’d thought, no longer quite as cohesive as she had been, her systems failing. She sat very still until her breathing slowed, listening to the rain on the umbrella and watching the feet of passing pedestrians.

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and she saw Jonathan’s receptionist’s number on the call display. “Oh, I’m great, thank you,” she said in response to a question, “and how are you?”

  “So listen,” the receptionist said, instead of answering, “Mr. Alkaitis was wondering if you could come up to the office a little early. He tells me it’s urgent.”

  “Of course.” Jonathan’s idea of urgent was needing Vincent’s advice on which tie to wear for the holiday party. “Please tell him I’m on my way.”

  A car is the worst possible way to travel during rush hour in Manhattan, but attempting the descent into Bowling Green station again was a risk that Vincent couldn’t afford, so she hailed a taxi that crept uptown in dense traffic, dark streets passing in slow motion, until a mile from the office she got out and walked. It’s just that you’re very tired, she told herself. There is nothing seriously wrong with you. Anyone could have a panic attack after three nights of not sleeping. Anyone would be a little shaky after what Paul did. In the mirrored elevator of the Gradia Building she quickly pulled back her wet hair and tried to avoid looking too closely at the dark circles under her eyes. The doors opened to the corporate splendour of the eighteenth floor.

  “Ms. Alkaitis, good afternoon. You can go on in,” Jonathan’s receptionist said. Her name was Simone. In several months’ time, she would be a key witness for the prosecution.

  When Vincent entered the office she found Jonathan at his desk, hands clasped before him, and she was struck immediately by his stillness. He looked like a statue of himself, cast in wax. They weren’t alone. His
daughter, Claire, was slumped on the sofa with her head in her hands, and at the other end of the sofa sat a man in his late fifties or early sixties, soft around the middle, with an expensive suit and silvering hair.

  “Hello,” Vincent said. The man’s name escaped her.

  “Mrs. Alkaitis.” His voice was flat. “I’m Harvey Alexander. I work with your husband.”

  “Oh yes, of course, we’ve met.” Vincent shook his hand. What was wrong with everyone? Harvey wore the expression of a man at a funeral. Jonathan’s hands were still clasped, and Vincent saw now that his knuckles were white. Vincent and Claire didn’t like one another, per se, but they’d always managed a veneer of politeness, and Claire had never before failed to look up or say hello when Vincent entered a room.

  “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?” Vincent asked. Keeping her tone as light as possible, because she understood lightness to be part of her job.

  “Please close the door,” Jonathan said. Vincent did as he asked, but he said nothing further, and no one in the room seemed quite able to look at her, so she took temporary refuge in a series of small tasks. She placed the Saks bag by the coat stand, took off her coat and hung it, removed her gloves and draped them over the Saks bag, and finally, having run out of things to do, sat in one of the visitors’ chairs, crossed her legs, and waited. They all sat there in silence. It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.

  “Someone has to tell her,” Claire said, and Vincent was shocked to realize that Claire was crying.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Vincent,” Jonathan said, but words seemed to fail him, and he briefly pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes. Was he crying too? Vincent tightened her grip on the armrests of the chair.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Vincent, listen, my business, not the whole thing, not the brokerage company, where Claire works, but the asset management unit, it’s all . . .” He seemed unable to continue.