The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “See, that’s how I can tell you’re from the coast,” his co-worker Navarro said later, when Leon mentioned the emptiness of downtown. “You people think a place has to have a downtown to be a real place.”

  “You don’t think a downtown should have some people in it?”

  “I think a place doesn’t have to have a downtown at all,” Navarro said.

  He’d been there six months when Miranda called. He was in the RV after his shift, doing the crossword puzzle with ice packs on his right knee and left ankle, alone because Marie had gotten a night job stocking shelves at the Walmart across the expressway, and the call was so unexpected that when Miranda said her name he almost couldn’t comprehend it. There was an odd half beat of silence while he recovered.

  “Leon?”

  “Hi, sorry about that. What an unexpected surprise this is,” he said, feeling like an idiot because obviously unexpected and surprise were redundant in this context, but who could blame him?

  “Good to hear your voice,” she said, “after all these years. Do you have a moment?”

  “Of course.” His heart was pounding. For how many years had he longed for this call? Ten. A decade in the wilderness, he found himself thinking. Ten years of travelling far beyond the borders of the corporate world, wishing uselessly to be allowed back in. The ice packs slipped to the floor as he reached for a pen and paper.

  “I’m afraid I’m not calling for the happiest reason,” Miranda said, “but let me just ask you first, before I get into it, would you be at all interested in coming back on a consultant basis? It would be a very short-term thing, just a few days.”

  “I would love to.” He wanted to cry. “Yes. That would be . . . yes.”

  “Okay. Well, good.” She sounded a little surprised by his fervour. “There’s been . . .” She cleared her throat. “I was going to say there’s been an accident, but we actually don’t know if it was an accident or not. There was an incident. A woman disappeared from a Neptune-Avramidis ship. She was a cook.”

  “That’s terrible. Which ship?”

  “It is terrible. The Neptune Cumberland.” The name wasn’t familiar to Leon. “Listen,” she was saying, “I’m convening a committee to look into crew safety on Neptune-Avramidis vessels as a general matter, and Vincent Smith’s death in particular. If you’re interested, I could use your help.”

  “Wait,” he said, “her name was Vincent?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Where was she from?”

  “Canadian citizen, no permanent address. Her next of kin was an aunt in Vancouver. Why?”

  “Nothing. I knew a woman named Vincent, a long time ago. Well, knew of her, I guess. Not that common a name for a woman.”

  “True enough. I think the important point here is, I don’t need to tell you that this is the only investigation into her death that will ever happen. To be candid with you, if I had the budget I’d commission an investigation from an outside law firm.”

  “That sounds expensive.”

  “Extremely. So this is all she’s going to get, just an internal investigation by the company she worked for. Companies have a way of exonerating themselves, don’t you find?”

  “You want an outsider,” he said.

  “You’re someone I trust. How soon can you be in New York?”

  “Soon,” he said. “I just have to wrap up a few things here.” He was calculating the length of the drive from southern Colorado. They spoke for a while about travel arrangements, and when he hung up he sat for a long time at the table, blinking. He checked the call log on the phone to confirm that he hadn’t imagined it. NEPTUNE-AVRA, a 212 area code, 21 minutes. The text on the call display seemed apt; it had been like receiving a phone call from another planet.

  2

  After Alkaitis, there was a different kind of life. Leon and Marie lasted a half year in their house after the collapse of the Ponzi, six months of missed mortgage payments and ruinous stress. Leon had put his entire severance package and all their savings into Alkaitis’s fund, and the returns didn’t make them wealthy but you don’t actually need much to live well in South Florida. They’d bought the RV just before Alkaitis was arrested. In the months that followed, with Leon trying to get more consulting work at Neptune-Avramidis, which was convulsed with layoffs and had put a freeze on consultants, and Marie rendered unemployable by anxiety and depression, the RV in the driveway had at first seemed malevolent, some kind of horrible joke, like their financial mistakes had taken on corporeal form and had parked there next to the house.

  But in the early summer they were eating omelettes for dinner by candlelight, the candles less a romantic gesture than a means of saving money on electricity, and Marie said, “I’ve been emailing with Clarissa lately.”

  “Clarissa?” The name was familiar, but it took him a moment. “Oh, your friend from college, right? The psychic?”

  “Yes, that Clarissa. We had dinner in Toronto all those years ago.”

  “I remember. What’s she up to these days?”

  “She lost her house, so now she’s living in her van.”

  Leon set his fork down and reached for his water glass, to dispel the tightness in his throat. They were two months behind on the mortgage. “Tough luck,” he said.

  “She says she actually likes it.”

  “At least she would’ve seen it coming,” he said, “being a psychic and all.”

  “I asked her about that,” Marie said. “She said she’d had visions of highways, but she’d always just assumed she was going on a road trip.”

  “A van,” Leon said. “That seems like it’d be a difficult life.”

  “Did you know there are jobs you can do, if you’re mobile?”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  “Taking tickets in fairgrounds. Working in warehouses around the holiday rush. Some agricultural stuff. Clarissa said she got a job she liked in a campground for a while, cleaning up and dealing with campers.”

  “Interesting.” He had to say something.

  “Leon,” she said, “what if we just left in the RV?”

  His initial thought was that the idea was ridiculous, but he waited a gentle moment or two before he asked, “And went where, love?”

  “Wherever we want. We could go anywhere.”

  “Let’s think about it,” he’d said.

  The idea had seemed crazy for only a few hours, maybe less. He lay awake that night, sweating through the sheets—it was hard to sleep without air conditioning, but they were keeping a careful budget and Marie had calculated that if they ran the A/C that week they’d be unable to pay the minimums on their credit card bills—and he realized the plan’s brilliance: they could just leave. The house that kept him up at night could become someone else’s problem.

  “I’ve been thinking about your idea,” he said to Marie over breakfast. “Let’s do it.”

  “I’m sorry, do what?” She was always tired and sluggish in the mornings.

  “Let’s just get in the RV and drive away,” he said, and her smile was a balm. Once the decision was made, he felt a peculiar urgency. In retrospect, there was no real rush, but they were gone four days later.

  When he walked through the rooms one last time, Leon could tell the house was already done with them, a sense of vacancy pervading the air. Most of the furniture was still there, most of their belongings, a calendar pinned to the wall in the kitchen, coffee cups in the cupboards, books on shelves, but the rooms already conveyed an impression of abandonment. Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph. Leon pulled out of the driveway, made a couple of turns, and then they were on the expressway leaving forever.

  “Leon,” Marie said with an air of letting him in on a delightful secret, “did you notice that I left
the front door unlocked?”

  He felt real joy when she said this. Why not? There was no plausible scenario where they could sell their house. The whole state was glutted with houses that were newer and nicer, entire unsold developments in the outer suburbs. They owed more on the mortgage than the house was worth. There was such pleasure in imagining their unlocked home succumbing to anarchy. He knew they would never come back here and there was such beauty in the thought. He didn’t have to mow the lawn anymore or trim the hedge. The mould in the upstairs bathroom was no longer his concern. There would be no more neighbours. (And here, the first misgivings at the plan, which was objectively not a great plan but seemed like the best of all their terrible options. He glanced at Marie in the passenger seat and thought: It’s just us now. The house was our enemy but it tied us to the world. Now we are adrift.)

  Marie seemed a little distant in the first few days, as they drove up out of Florida and into the South, but he knew that was just the way she dealt with stress—she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself—and by the end of the week she’d begun to come back to him. They mostly cooked in the tiny RV kitchenette, getting used to it, but on the one-week anniversary of their departure they pulled into a diner. Sitting down to a meal that neither he nor Marie had cooked seemed wildly extravagant. They toasted their one-week anniversary with ginger ale, because Leon was driving and one of Marie’s medications clashed with alcohol.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked her, over roast chicken with gravy.

  “The office,” she said. “Back when I worked at that insurance place.”

  “I still think about my working life too,” he said. “Seems like a different lifetime now, to be honest.”

  Being in shipping had made him feel like he was plugged into an electrical current that lit up the world. It was the opposite of spending his days in an RV, driving nowhere in particular.

  They spent most of that first summer in a campground in California, near the town of Oceano, central coast. South of the beach access road, people rode ATVs over the dunes, and the ATV engines sounded like bugs from a distance, a high buzzing whine. Ambulances drove down the beach to collect ATV drivers three or four times a day. But north of the road, the beach was quiet. Leon loved walking north. There wasn’t much between Oceano and Pismo Beach, the next town up the coast. This lonely stretch of California, forgotten shoreline, sand streaked with black. The land here was dark with tar. In the evenings there were flocks of sandpipers, running over the sand so quickly that they gave the illusion of hovering an inch off the ground, their legs blurred like the animals in a Road Runner cartoon, comical but there was also something moving about the way they all somehow knew to switch direction at once.

  Leon and Marie ate dinner on the beach almost every night. Marie seemed happiest when she was gazing at the ocean, and Leon liked it here too. He tried to keep her out on the beach as long as possible, where the horizon was infinite and the birds ran like cartoons. He didn’t want her to feel that their lives were small. Freighters passed on the far horizon and he liked to imagine their routes. He liked the endlessness of the Pacific from this vantage point, nothing but ships and water between Leon and Japan. Could they somehow get there? Of course not, but he liked the thought. He’d been there a few times on business, in his previous life.

  “What are you thinking of?” Marie asked once, on a clear evening on the beach. They’d been in Oceano for two months by then.

  “Japan.”

  “I should’ve gone there with you,” she said. “Just once.”

  “They were boring trips, objectively. Just meetings. I never saw much of the place.” He’d seen a little. He’d loved it there. He’d once taken two extra days to visit Kyoto while the cherry trees were blooming.

  “Still, just to go there and see it.” An unspoken understanding: neither of them would leave this continent again.

  A containership was passing in the far distance, a dark rectangle in the dusk.

  “It’s not quite what I imagined for our retirement,” Leon said, “but it could be worse, couldn’t it?”

  “Much worse. It was much worse, before we left the house.”

  He hoped someone had done him the favour of burning that house to the ground. The scale of the catastrophe was objectively enormous—We owned a home, and then we lost it—but there was such relief in no longer having to think about the house, the vertiginous mortgage payments and constant upkeep. There were moments of true joy, actually, in this transient life. He loved sitting here on the beach with Marie. For all they’d lost, he often felt lucky to be here with her, in this life.

  But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error; they hitchhiked on roads with their worldly belongings in backpacks, they collected cans on the streets of cities, they stood on the Strip in Las Vegas wearing T-shirts that said GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, they were the girls in the room. He’d seen the shadow country, its outskirts and signs, he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it.

  In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light. He lay beside Marie and remembered that in this life there was no space for any kind of error or misfortune. What would happen to her if something happened to him? Marie hadn’t been well in some time. His fear was a weight on his chest in the dark.

  3

  “How’s retirement treating you?” Miranda asked. They were sitting in her office, which had previously been Leon’s boss’s office. It was larger than he remembered. Several days had gone by since she’d called him in Colorado, during which he’d left his job at the Marriott—an urgent family matter, he’d told his boss, in hopes of being rehired later—and driven the RV to Connecticut, where they were parked in the driveway of one of Marie’s college friends.

  “Can’t complain,” Leon said. Miranda seemed not to know that he’d been an Alkaitis investor, although the information wasn’t hidden. There was a victim impact statement online somewhere, which he didn’t specifically regret but probably wouldn’t have written if he’d realized it was going to be available to anyone who typed his name into Google.

  “No complaints at all?”

  He smiled. “Did I seem ever-so-slightly overeager on the phone?”

  “I didn’t sense any reluctance to give up your life of leisure and take on a consulting gig, let’s put it that way.”

  “Well,” Leon said. “There’s such a thing as too much retirement, if we’re being honest here.”

  “There’s a reason why I’m not planning to retire.” Miranda was flipping through a file folder. I didn’t plan to retire either, Leon didn’t say, because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t be desperate or bitter, that if anyone asked, he’d spent this last decade living in an RV because he and Marie had had enough of the hassles of home ownership and had always wanted to explore the country. Miranda passed him the file, which was labelled VINCENT SMITH. Had Miranda really been his assistant once, or was that a false memory? He vaguely remembered the era when he’d spent his life on the road and Miranda had made his travel arrangements, but it was difficult to reconcile that quiet young woman with the executive across the table, impeccable in a steel-grey suit, drinking a cup of tea that someone else had made for her.

  “Take your time with the materials,” she said. “Obviously strictly confidential, but you can take that file home to read tonight. I know you’ve been gone a long time, so let me know if any que
stions come up. I imagine some of our procedures have changed since you left.”

  Gone a long time? Yes, he thought, that’s one way of putting it. It was disorienting, coming back here after all this time. He’d spent the past hour walking unnervingly familiar corridors and shaking hands with people who had no idea how lucky they were.

  He cleared his throat. “You mentioned on the phone that someone from the security office will be conducting the interviews,” he said. “What’s my role in all of this?”

  “Yes, Michael Saparelli will conduct the interviews,” Miranda said. “He’s the one who talked to the captain on the phone last week and wrote up these preliminary notes for us. To be absolutely clear, I have nothing but respect for him. He’s former NYPD. It’s not that I don’t think he’ll do a good job, I just think with such a sensitive matter, these interviews should have more than one witness.”

  “You’re worried about a cover-up?”

  “It’s more that I’d like to remove any temptation for a cover-up.” Miranda sipped her tea. “It’s not that I suspect Saparelli of being a dishonest person, nothing like that. But companies are like nation-states. They all have their own cultures.” Leon suppressed a flicker of annoyance—Is my former administrative assistant lecturing me about corporate culture?—but on the other hand, she wasn’t wrong. “I’ve dedicated my professional life to this place,” Miranda was saying, “but if forced to point out a cultural flaw, I’d say I’ve noticed a certain reluctance to accept blame around here. In fairness, that’s probably true of most of the corporate world, but a little frustrating regardless.”