The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “Thirteen years?”

  “Yes.”

  It was cold on the terrace and he wanted to go back in. No, not back in, back to his hotel. The cold wasn’t really the problem. Practically speaking, flying economy from Toronto to Edinburgh meant that he’d been awake for two days, which fell into that increasingly vast category of things that were doable when he was eighteen but less so as he slid into middle age. Seeing Ella Kaspersky only made him feel worse. Something of this must have shown in his face, because Ella seemed to soften, just a little, and she lightly touched his arm.

  “I’ve wanted to apologize to you for thirteen years,” she said. “I was angry in Caiette, and I’d been drinking too much, and I let both those things get the better of me. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.”

  “I could’ve said no.”

  “You should’ve said no. But I should never have asked you in the first place.”

  “Well,” he said, “you were right about Alkaitis, at least.” He’d never been particularly interested in the news, but he had read a book about the Ponzi that came out a few years later, looking for news of his sister. In the book, Vincent was a marginal figure, her quotes confined to excerpts from a deposition transcript. It was obvious that the writer hadn’t managed to secure an interview with her, although there was a great deal of speculation about the material opulence of her life with Alkaitis.

  “Yes. I was right.”

  “Did you know he lived with my sister?” He was smoking a cigarette, although he couldn’t quite remember Kaspersky’s having given it to him. Lately time had been stuttering a little.

  “Are you serious?”

  “She was the bartender at the Hotel Caiette,” he said. “A man walks into a bar, one thing leads to another . . .”

  “Extraordinary. I saw pictures of him with a young woman, but I never made the connection back to the hotel.”

  “Do you remember a pretty bartender with long dark hair?”

  She frowned. “Maybe. No. No, if I’m being honest, I don’t remember her at all. What became of her afterward?”

  “We’re not in touch,” Paul said. For Paul, Vincent existed in a kind of suspended animation. On the first night of his run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, back in 2008, he walked out onto the stage and saw her. She was in the front row, at the far end; his eyes fell on her and his heart sped up. He got through the opening somehow, and when he glanced up again, no more than ten minutes later, she was gone, an open seat yawning in the shadows. That night he procrastinated for two hours before he left the theatre, but she wasn’t waiting for him outside the stage door. She wasn’t there the next night, or the next; he expected to see her every night when he exited the theatre, and she was never there, but he imagined the confrontation so many times that it began to seem like something that might actually have happened. Look, all those years you lived in Vancouver, you left the videos boxed up in your childhood bedroom, he’d tell her. Obviously you weren’t going to do anything with them. You didn’t even notice they were gone. And you thought that meant you could take them? she would ask. At least I did something with them, he’d tell her, and after days of imagining this conversation he almost began to long for it. It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent. It had been exactly a decade since the performances at BAM and he was still talking to her, the imagined Vincent who never materialized outside the stage door. Do you mean to tell me, she’d ask, that you’ve built a whole career on my videos? Not a whole career, Vincent, but composing soundtracks for your videos led to collaborations with video artists, live performances at art fairs in Basel and Miami, the residency at BAM, my fellowship, my teaching position, all of the success that I’ve found in this life. Does that justify it? she’d ask. I don’t know, Vincent, I’ve never known what’s reasonable and what isn’t. But for whatever it’s worth, after the BAM performances I never did another public performance with your tapes. Do you think that redeems you? No, I know it doesn’t. I know that I’m a thief.

  “Still with me?” Ella said, and he realized that he may have been staring into space for a while.

  “Sorry, yes. I’m a bit wrecked from travelling all night.”

  “Parties are a bit much under those conditions,” Ella said. “Let’s get out of here, and I’ll buy you a drink somewhere.” Ten minutes later they were at a pub around the corner, an old-time kind of place with a bright red door and a forest’s worth of wood panelling inside.

  “So,” Ella said, when they’d slid into a booth. “Forgive me, but you look terrible.”

  “I’ve been awake for two days.”

  “That’ll do it, I suppose.” But she was giving him a certain kind of look. He had trouble with names and faces but didn’t have trouble recognizing the question she was refraining from asking. It was a look he’d been seeing more and more of lately.

  “How did you end up at that party?” he asked, to distract her. He was acutely aware of the little plastic bag in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “My husband’s a theatre director.”

  “Small world.”

  “The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”

  A waitress took their drink orders, and Paul excused himself to shoot up in the men’s room, not a lot, just enough to bleed a little chaos out of the world. He stood very still in the stall for five deep breaths before he returned to the table. He was calmer now, the sharp edge of the jet lag a little blunted. Everything was fine. No one needs to sleep every night. He could save a lot of time from now on, if he just slept every second night.

  “So,” she said, “you’ve been busy since I saw you last.”

  “Very. It’s been extraordinary.” He hadn’t expected success and still found it disorienting. “I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music,” he said. I couldn’t possibly have seen this coming, he told Vincent, in his head, I just took the opportunities that arose, I was hustling just like everyone else . . . The opportunities that arose, like you had no choice in the matter? I couldn’t have anticipated this life, he told her, and actually, why didn’t he ever try to contact her after they’d both left the hotel? Because of his guilt over upsetting her with the graffiti and stealing her videos, obviously, but maybe he should try to find her now? Maybe enough time had passed? The condition of having landed in an unimaginable life was something he thought she might know something about.

  “It was such an interesting angle you came up with,” Ella was saying. He’d been half following along while she told him that she liked his work. “One sees so much video art, but that collaboration you did, the programmable soundtrack console, that was a wonderful innovation.” For two separate works of video art, Paul had composed twenty-four hours’ worth of music, arranged as a collection of thirty-minute pieces that could be programmed to play in whichever order the buyer preferred: a night owl might prefer something fast and sharp at three in the morning, for instance, segueing into calm around a five a.m. bedtime, while the early risers might prefer to walk into their living room and hear something bracing as the sun rose.

  “Some of those video art projects need a soundtrack to be even halfway interesting, if we’re being honest here,” Paul said. The beer in front of him was a terrible idea. If he drank it, he would lay his head on the table and fall asleep.

  “I was curious about your musical influences,” she said.

  “Baltica,” he said. “Everything I do sounds like an electronica group called Baltica that used to exist in Toronto in the late nineties.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you’d been part of a group.”

  “I try to compose stuff that sounds different,” he said, “I mean I’ll really try in a concentrated way, and then I get to the end, I play it back, and it somehow always sounds like . . .” He stopped talking, and looked over his shoulder to cover his unease. “Do you th
ink they have coffee here?” He was deeply shaken. He’d never told anyone about Baltica, and here he’d just blurted it out to her without hesitation.

  “I’d imagine so.” She waved, and a waitress appeared at the table.

  “A coffee, please.”

  “Our coffee’s terrible,” the waitress said. “Fair warning.”

  “I think I might want it anyway.”

  “If I could possibly dissuade you,” she said. “I mean, if you insist. But I promise that you’ll send it back.”

  “Do you have black tea?”

  “You’re in Scotland.”

  “Something extra-strong,” Paul said. “The strongest tea you’ve got. A lot of it. The more caffeine, the better.”

  “I’ll bring you a pot, then,” the waitress said, “and you can let it brew for as long as you’d like.” Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity. Damn it, I know how tea works, he wanted to say, but it was too late, the waitress had departed and he was alone with Ella, who was giving him that look again.

  “Do you still play music with that group? Baltica, was it?” She’d misunderstood, but he couldn’t possibly explain.

  “We’ve all gone our separate ways,” he said. “I only see them on Facebook now. Annika’s always on tour with like five different bands. Theo’s a family guy. Is the hotel still there?” he heard himself ask, desperate to change the subject.

  “It closed after Alkaitis was arrested,” she said.

  4

  Eight time zones to the west, Walter was standing by the window of his room in the old staff quarters of the former Hotel Caiette. There was still no cellular service here, but some years ago he’d splurged on a cordless phone, in order to wander around his apartment while he talked with the outside world.

  “I can’t believe it’s been almost ten years,” his sister said. “Good lord. You’re still not lonely?”

  “I’m not sure lonely is exactly the word. No, I wouldn’t say lonely.”

  The last guest checked out of the Hotel Caiette in early 2009, two months after Jonathan Alkaitis was arrested, and the rest of the staff left shortly thereafter. Is a hotel still a hotel without guests? Walter was there on the pier when Raphael departed. “Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again. Raphael climbed aboard the boat with his overnight bag—his belongings had gone on ahead to Edmonton—and the chauffeur, Melissa, started the motor. She was being paid through the end of the day but hadn’t bothered with her uniform. She was leaving the boat in Grace Harbour and returning home by water taxi. “I’ll stop by next week,” she said to Walter. “Just to check in on you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, moved and a little surprised by this. She cast off from the pier and the boat pulled out into the water, arced around the peninsula and out of sight. It was a muted day, the sea reflecting a pale grey sky, the forest dark and dripping from the morning’s rain. Walter stood on the pier until he could no longer hear the boat and then turned back to face the empty hotel. He walked up the path and unlocked the glass doors of the lobby, locked them behind him. Raphael had ceremoniously switched off the lights as he left, but now Walter switched them back on. The dark wood of the bar gleamed softly. His footsteps echoed. The furniture had all been sold off except for the grand piano, which was too costly to move. Walter played a few notes, unnaturally loud in the silence. It was true silence, he realized, not at all like being in the forest, which even at its quietest was alive with small sounds. He walked past Reception, past the bar, to the staircase.

  The largest suite, the Coast Royal, was where Jonathan Alkaitis had always stayed. Walter had thought to move in here—it had a splendour that the staff quarters lacked, and surely the hotel caretaker should live in the actual hotel—but the thought of sleeping in the bed where Alkaitis had slept was repulsive, and Walter liked his apartment. He wandered through all of the guest rooms, left the doors open behind him.

  What was strange was that he didn’t feel alone in all this space, all of these empty corridors and rooms. It was as though the hotel were haunted, but in the most benign sense: the rooms still held an air of presence, a sense of occupation, as if at any moment the boat might pull in with new guests and Raphael might walk out of his office complaining about the latest staffing problem, Khalil and Larry arriving for the night shift. He walked out onto the terrace. It provided a view of the empty pier, shadowy in the early winter twilight. He stood there for a while before he realized that he was waiting, by habit but completely without logic now, for a boat to come in.

  “I can’t quite believe it myself,” he said to his sister, on the phone in 2018, “but I woke up this morning and realized, in February I’ll have been here as the caretaker for ten years.” Difficult to believe, but there it was: ten years of living alone in the staff quarters and playing tour guide to the infrequent potential buyers who arrived by water taxi, a decade of weekly trips to Port Hardy for supplies, cleaning the hotel, mowing the grass, meeting with repairmen when necessary, reading in the afternoons, teaching himself to play piano on the abandoned Steinway in the lobby, walking to the village of Caiette for coffee with Melissa; ten years of wandering by himself in the forest, watching the first pale flowers push through dark earth in the springtime, swimming by the pier in the hottest days of summer and reading on a balcony under blankets in the clear autumn light, sitting alone in the lobby with the lights out for the thrill of winter storms.

  “But it seems like you still like it,” she said.

  “I do. Very much.”

  “Solitary, but not lonely?”

  “That’s a fair way of putting it. I wouldn’t have expected this,” he said, “after working in hotels all my adult life, but it turns out I’m happiest when I’m away from other people.”

  When he hung up, he left the staff quarters and followed the short path through the forest to the overgrown grass behind the hotel. He let himself in through the back door, making a mental note to sweep and mop the lobby today. Without furniture, the lobby was like a shadowy ballroom, a vast empty space with a panorama of wilderness beyond the glass: inland waters, green shorelines, a pier with no boats.

  5

  At the pub in Edinburgh, Paul’s tea wasn’t working very well. “I was always ambitious,” he heard himself say, “but I never thought anything would come of it.” Ella nodded, watching him. For how long had he been talking about himself? Did he just fall asleep for a second? He wasn’t sure. It was difficult to stay awake. “All the videos are either beautiful or interesting, but not beautiful or interesting enough, without music added to them.” Did he say this already?

  “You seem tired,” Ella said. “Shall we call it a night?”

  He glanced at his watch and was startled to find that it was almost one in the morning. She was settling up with the waitress.

  “Well, good night, then,” she said, “and good luck, Paul.”

  “Do I seem like I need it?” he asked, honestly curious, but she only smiled and wished him good night again. He hated her in that moment, as he rose and left her alone in the bar—the unbearable smugness of the non-addicted—but of course she wasn’t wrong, he knew he needed luck, he’d OD’d a month ago and woken up in the ER. (“Welcome back, Lazarus,” the doctor had said.) He’d been perfectly functional for nearly a decade on heroin, not just functional but miraculously productive, just a matter of knowing his limits and not being stupid about it, but the problem now was that sometimes the heroin wasn’t heroin anymore, sometimes now it was fentanyl, seeping into the market by mail and by ship, fifty times more potent than heroin and cheaper to produce. He’d been hearing rumours lately of carfentanil in the supply line, which terrified him: one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, approved for the so
le purpose of tranquilizing elephants. The other night he’d read about a new rehab facility in Utah, and he’d spent some time on the website, looking at pictures of low white buildings under a desert sky. In a distant, logical way, he knew that going back to rehab wouldn’t be the worst idea. Just do it, get it over with. Outside on the street, the rain had that diffuse quality that Paul associated with both the U.K. and British Columbia, a gentleness about it, coming from all directions at once.

  He was almost certain that his hotel was back in the direction of the Royal Mile, which he was almost certain was a left turn at the end of this next street. He was thinking about the Hotel Caiette again, which led to thoughts of Vincent. The street he was on now looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t be sure if that was because he was close to the hotel or if it was just that he was going in circles. He stopped walking and sat in a doorway, because he was tired and in his current state the rain wasn’t a problem, sat on the step and rested his head on his arms. Should he try to find Vincent, contact her somehow, offer to share some of his good fortune? No, he needed the money. All of it. I’ve never been able to completely grasp what my responsibilities are, he told her. Sometimes when he spoke to Vincent now, he was the only one talking, while she just watched and listened to him. The doorway was unexpectedly comfortable. He’d just take a little nap, he decided, he’d just rest for a minute and then find his hotel and sleep properly.

  But he wasn’t alone. He sensed someone watching him. When he looked up, there was a woman standing just on the other side of the narrow street. She was wearing some sort of uniform, with a long white apron and a handkerchief tied over her hair. She must be a cook from a local restaurant, he decided, perhaps someone who’d just stepped out on a late-night dinner break, but if she was taking a break, she was spending her time very strangely, just staring at him instead of getting something to eat or smoking a cigarette. She looked familiar, she couldn’t possibly be Vincent but—