The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  15

  The Hotel

  1

  On a late spring night in the Hotel Caiette, in 2005, the night houseman was sweeping the lobby when a guest spoke to him. “You missed a spot,” she said. Paul forced his face into a semblance of a smile and hated his life.

  “I’m kidding,” the guest said, “I’m sorry, that was a terrible joke. In all seriousness, though, can you come over here for a moment?” The woman was standing by the window, a Scotch in her hand. She was old, or so it seemed to Paul at the time—in retrospect, she was probably only about forty—but there was something striking about her. She conveyed a general impression of having her life together, which was a state to which Paul could only aspire. He carried the broom over awkwardly and stood near her.

  “Can I help you with something?” He was pleased with himself for thinking to say this. It sounded very butlerlike, which was more or less the model he was going for. Every now and again he caught a glimpse of, if not exactly the pleasures of the hospitality industry, at least the pleasure of professional competence. He could see how there might be a certain satisfaction in being good at a job, the way Vincent was good at hers. He’d always been an indifferent employee. At that moment Vincent was at the other end of the lobby, laughing along with a guest who was telling her a story about a fishing trip gone hilariously awry.

  “I wonder if I might speak with you in confidence,” the woman said. Paul glanced over his shoulder at Reception, where Walter was applying his considerable powers of soothing to an American couple who were furious that the room with the Jacuzzi they’d paid for was, in fact, a room with a Jacuzzi, and not a suite with a full-size hot tub. “I’m Ella Kaspersky,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Paul. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Paul, how long have you worked here?”

  “Not long. A few months.”

  “Are you going to stay much longer, do you think?”

  “No.” He hadn’t exactly thought this through before he said it, but the answer rang true. Of course Paul wasn’t going to stay here. He’d come here from Vancouver in order to get away from friends with bad habits, and because Vincent was already here and had told him it was a decent place to work, but he knew it was a mistake by the end of his first week. He hated being back in Caiette. He hated living in the same building as his co-workers, the claustrophobia of it. The waiter who lived in the next room had sex with a sous-chef every night, and Paul, who was extremely single, could hear every noise they made. He didn’t like his boss, Walter, or Walter’s boss, Raphael. He missed his father, who’d died months ago but whom Paul somehow still expected to see every time he walked into the village. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about leaving soon. Maybe very soon.”

  “What do you want to do instead?”

  “I’m a composer.” He’d thought that saying it aloud might make it more real, but saying it aloud only made him feel like a fraud. He was composing music that he showed to no one. He’d fallen into a territory between classical and electronica and had no confidence in his work.

  “Tough line of work to break into, I’d imagine.”

  “Extremely,” he said. “I’m just going to keep working in hotels while I work on my music, but I want to get back to the city.”

  “It’s one thing to rest and recharge in the middle of nowhere,” Ella said, “but something different to live out here, I’d imagine.”

  “Right, yeah, exactly. I hate it.” It occurred to him that he probably shouldn’t be talking this way with a guest—Walter would be furious—but if he was leaving anyway, what difference did it make?

  “I’d like to tell you a story,” Ella said, “which will end with a business proposition, something that would involve you making a bit of money. Are you interested?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep standing here, and we’ll look out the window together, and if that uptight manager of yours asks about it later, I was asking you about fishing and local geography. Deal?”

  “Deal.” The intrigue was wonderful and solidified his desire to leave, because even if she stopped talking at this moment and said nothing further, this was still the most interesting thing that had happened in weeks.

  “There’s a man named Jonathan Alkaitis who lives in New York City,” she said. “We have exactly one thing in common, and that’s that we’re both regulars at this hotel. He’ll be here in two days.”

  “Are you some kind of detective or something?”

  “No, I just give extravagant tips to burnt-out front-desk employees. Anyway. When he arrives, I’d like to convey a message to him.”

  “You’d like me to deliver it?”

  “Yes, but we’re not talking about slipping an envelope under a door. I’d like it to be delivered in an unforgettable way. I want him to be shaken by it.” Her eyes were shining. He realized for the first time that she was actually quite drunk.

  “I knew a girl who once wrote graffiti on the window of a school with an acid marker,” he said. “Something like that?”

  “You’re perfect,” she said.

  When Paul wrote the message, it felt like stars exploding in his chest. It felt like sprinting in a summer rainstorm. On the appointed night he left for his dinner break and crept around to the side of the building, where he’d hidden an oversized hoodie with an acid marker in the pocket, then crept into position near the front terrace, just outside the pool of light cast by the hotel. There was a breeze that night, which made it easier to move undetected, his footsteps disguised by all the small forest sounds, the creaking of branches and rustling of wind. For a long time the night porter stood by the door, too close, and Paul almost despaired of completing the mission, but then Larry glanced at his watch and stepped back, disappeared into the lobby, walking in the direction of the staff room. Coffee break. A cloud passed over the moon and it seemed like a sign, the night conspiring to hide him. He uncapped the marker and stepped out quickly onto the terrace, heart pounding, head down. Why don’t you swallow broken glass. He wrote the message backwards, the way he’d been practising in his room, and then slipped back into the forest, and like choreography the cloud slid away from the moon and the message was illuminated. He crept around the side of the hotel and back toward the staff quarters. It was impossible to move in perfect silence but the night forest was full of noises anyway. In the staff lodge there was some kind of party happening, light and music spilling out of a suite on the second floor, the day staff getting wasted to dull the agony of customer service.

  He stripped off the hoodie and gloves, balled them up and shoved them into the bushes at the base of a stump, stepped out onto the path connecting the staff lodge with the hotel, and came walking out of the woods into the bright pool of hotel light so that if anyone happened to be watching from the hotel, it would look like he’d just gone back to his room for a moment. He glanced at his watch and opted for a slow walk around to the side entrance, nothing to see here, just enjoying some fresh air, high with the twin pleasures of action and secrecy, and the elation lasted until the moment he stepped into the lobby and saw the tableau: the guest standing in the middle of the lobby, stricken; the night manager stepping out from behind the desk; his sister looking up from the glass she’d been polishing behind the bar; all of them were staring at the words on the window, and the look on Vincent’s face was unbearable, a look of naked sadness and horror. The guest turned and Vincent looked away while Walter sailed forward on a wave of efficiency and reassurance—“May we offer you another drink, on the house of course, I’m so sorry that you had to see this,” etc.—while Vincent stared hard at the glass she was polishing and Paul stood just inside the side door, unnoticed. It somehow hadn’t occurred to him that anyone else would see the message. He slipped back out into the cold night air and stood for a while just outside, eyes closed, trying to get ahold of himself, before he made a second, more obvious entrance, closing the door loudly behind him, trying to act casual but his gaze fa
lling immediately on the philodendron that someone—probably Larry—had pushed in front of the window.

  Walter was watching him from behind the desk.

  “Something happen to the window?” Paul asked. To his own ears, his voice sounded wrong, high-pitched and somehow off.

  “I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.” He thinks I did it, Paul thought, and felt inexplicably affronted.

  “Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”

  “Who?”

  “You know.” Paul nodded toward the guest, the man in his fifties who was staring into his drink.

  “That isn’t Alkaitis,” Walter said.

  Oh god. Paul found some excuse to extricate himself and went to the bar, where Vincent had finished polishing glasses and had moved on to wiping imaginary dust from bottles. “Hey,” he said, and when she looked up, he was shocked to see that there were tears in her eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “That message on the glass,” she whispered.

  He wanted to walk away now, just leave all his stuff behind, just call a water taxi from the lobby and walk to the pier and get a ride to Grace Harbour and keep going. “It’s probably just some drunk kid.”

  She was dabbing surreptitiously at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m too upset to talk right now.”

  “Of course,” he said, miles deep in the kind of self-loathing that he’d been warned against in rehab. He sensed a gathering of attention in the lobby; Walter was stepping out from behind the reception desk, and Larry was retrieving a luggage trolley from the discreet closet by the piano. Vincent was drinking a quick shot of espresso. In the glass wall of the hotel, the lobby was reflected with almost mirrorlike fidelity, but now the reflection was pierced by a white light out on the water, an approaching boat. Jonathan Alkaitis was just arriving.

  2

  Three years later, in December 2008, Walter read the news of Alkaitis’s arrest at Reception and the blood left his head. Khalil, the bartender on duty that night, saw him drop out of sight and was at his side within seconds with a glass of cold water. “Walter, here, take a deep breath . . . ,” and Walter tried to breathe, tried to drink the water, tried not to faint, stars swimming in his vision. Walter’s colleagues were kneeling around him, asking what was wrong and making noises about calling the water taxi to get him to a hospital, and then Larry caught sight of the New York Times story on the computer screen and said, “Oh.”

  “I was an investor,” Walter said, trying to explain.

  “With Alkaitis?” Larry asked.

  “He was here this past summer, you remember?” Walter felt like he was going to be sick. “He and Vincent. I had a conversation with him one night, we got to talking about investments, I told him I had some savings . . .”

  “Oh god,” Larry said. “Walter. I’m sorry.”

  “He acted like he was doing me a favour,” Walter said. “Letting me invest in his fund.”

  Larry knelt and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It can’t be gone,” Walter said. “It can’t just be gone. It was my life savings.”

  Here, a gap in memory: how did Walter get back to his apartment? Unclear in retrospect, but some time later he was on his bed, staring at the ceiling, fully clothed but with his shoes off, a glass of water on the bedside table.

  It was somehow almost eight a.m., so Walter went to see Raphael in his office. “I don’t know anything,” Raphael said. He was spinning a pen on the knuckles of his left hand, a quick nervous motion whose mechanics eluded Walter’s grasp. How did the pen not fall? “We have to wait for word from the U.S.”

  “Word of what?” Walter was staring at the pen.

  “Well, word of our fates, at risk of sounding melodramatic. I just got off the phone with head office, and there’s an asset trustee in New York, apparently, some lawyer appointed by a judge to manage Alkaitis’s entire mess, so what happens to the hotel, I guess that’s the trustee’s decision.”

  As it happened, the suspense was short-lived. Toward the end of the next week, word trickled down to the hotel that the trustee had decided to sell the property, to recoup the greatest possible gain for the investors in the shortest possible amount of time. There were rumours for a while that the hotel management company might buy the property, but Raphael was skeptical.

  “Let me tell you a secret,” Raphael told Walter. “This place hasn’t turned a profit in four years. If there’s a buyer, it likely won’t be a hotelier.”

  “Who else would buy it?”

  “Exactly,” Raphael said.

  When their fate became clear—the property for sale with no immediate buyers on the horizon, the hotel scheduled to close in three weeks—Walter was seized by a strange idea. Everyone was leaving, but did that necessarily mean that Walter had to leave too? On one of his quiet mornings at Reception, just before the shift change, he made his fourth attempt to reach the asset trustee on the phone, and finally got past Alfred Selwyn’s secretary.

  “This is Selwyn.”

  “Mr. Selwyn, it’s Walter Lee calling. I hope you’ll forgive my persistence,” Walter said, “but I’d hoped to speak to you about something quite pressing, for me at least . . .”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Lee?”

  Walter wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Something out of a legal drama, he supposed, some duplicitous sharklike person with an obnoxiously American accent, but Alfred Selwyn was soft-spoken and courteous, and conveyed an impression of listening carefully while Walter delivered his pitch.

  “From what I understand,” Selwyn said, “the property’s quite remote, isn’t it?”

  “Not impossibly so,” Walter said. “I can get to Grace Harbour within the hour if I call a water taxi.”

  “And Grace Harbour, is that a fair-sized population centre? Forgive me, just one second—” A faint commotion as Selwyn cupped the receiver with his hand. “Mr. Alexander,” Walter heard him say, muffled by the hand, “if you’ll please have a seat, I’ll be right with you. Lorraine, may I have some coffee, please, for me and Harvey.” More rustling, and Selwyn’s voice regained its normal volume. “I apologize. What I’m trying to get a handle on, at dire risk of being overly blunt, is whether you’ll lose your mind if you live by yourself in an empty hotel in the wilderness.”

  “I understand your concern,” Walter said, “but the truth of the matter is, I love living here.” He heard himself talking about the pleasure of living in a quiet place with immense natural beauty, the friendliness of the locals in the nearby village of Caiette—an exaggeration, most of them hated outsiders—and all he could think was Please, please, please let me stay. There was a beat of silence at the end of the monologue.

  “Well,” Selwyn said, “you make a good case for yourself. Could you send me a few references by the end of the week? Including your current supervisor, if possible.”

  “Of course,” Walter said. “Thank you for considering this.” When he hung up, he felt lighter than he had in some time, since the night he’d read the news of the arrest. He looked around the lobby and imagined everybody gone.

  “You want to do what?” Raphael asked when Walter came to him. There was an open binder on his desk. Walter saw a chart labelled RevPAR 2007–2008, spanning two pages. Revenue Per Available Room. Raphael was transferring to a hotel in Edmonton and was spending his days reading up on his new property.

  “The hotel needs a caretaker,” Walter said. “Selwyn was in agreement that it’s in no one’s best interests to let it fall into ruin.”

  “Look, it would be my pleasure to give you a glowing reference, Walter, but I can’t believe you want to stay out here by yourself. Do you have an end date in mind?”

  “Oh, of course I wouldn’t stay here forever,” Walter said, in order to be reassuring, but that wouldn’t be the worst thing, he thought on the walk back to the staff lodge. Caiette was the first place he’d ever truly loved. There was nowhere else he wanted to go. Give me quiet, he thought,
give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.

  3

  A decade later, in Edinburgh, Paul accepted a glass of wine from the bartender and turned to slide back into the crowd, and there she was before him.

  “You,” he said, because he couldn’t remember her name.

  “Hello, Paul.” She was exactly as he remembered—a small, well-put-together person with a very precise haircut, dressed this evening in an elegant suit, wearing a necklace that seemed to involve a mosquito trapped in a walnut-sized piece of amber—but who was she? He was jet-lagged and slightly drunk, also so bad at remembering faces and names at the best of times that lately he’d started to wonder if it was maybe some kind of thing, either borderline sociopathy—Am I so self-absorbed that I can’t see other people?—or some mild variant of facial blindness, that neurological situation wherein you won’t recognize your wife if she gets a haircut, not that he had a wife. He ran through all of this while the mystery woman waited patiently, whisky in hand.

  “Not to rush you,” she said finally, “but I was about to head up to the terrace for a cigarette. Perhaps you’d like to join me while you think about it?”

  She had an American accent, but that brought him no closer to placing her. The party had drawn a cross-section of the Edinburgh Festival, and a fair percentage of the guests had American accents. He mumbled something ineloquent and followed her through the crowd, but her identity didn’t come to him until they’d been alone on the terrace for a moment and she’d lit her cigarette.

  “Ella,” Paul said. “Ella Kaspersky. I’m so sorry. I’m a little jet-lagged . . .”

  She shrugged. “You see a person out of context . . .” She left the thought unfinished. “And it’s been a long time.”