The Glass Hotel: A novel (19 page)
Read The Glass Hotel: A novel Online
Authors: Emily St. John Mandel
“Are you going to eat any more?” He wanted his wife to eat something, to keep her strength up, and also very much wanted her to stop staring at Kaspersky.
“No, let’s get the check.”
He got the check and attended to the details while his wife studied Kaspersky, who’d waved off the busboy’s apologies and had returned to reading some kind of document, an inch of paper held together with a binder clip. He didn’t like the way Suzanne was looking at her.
“Let’s just leave,” he said softly, when the check was taken care of, but Kaspersky was seated at the restaurant’s narrowest point, and they had to walk quite close to her table to get to the door. As they neared the table, Suzanne’s face was set in a terrifying smile. Kaspersky finally looked up when they were almost upon her. She had an excellent poker face, except that her eyes narrowed slightly when she recognized him.
“Good evening, Ella,” Alkaitis said. The SEC had closed the investigation earlier that week. There was no need to be ungenerous in victory.
She leaned back in her chair, considering him, and sipped her wine. She didn’t speak for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to say anything, and was just gathering himself to leave when she said, “You’re beneath my contempt.”
Alkaitis was paralyzed. He couldn’t imagine what to say.
“Oh, Ella,” Suzanne said. A small shard from the broken wineglass had been overlooked at the base of the bread basket. Suzanne plucked it between two fingers and dropped it delicately into Kaspersky’s water glass. They all watched it drift to the bottom.
Suzanne leaned in close and spoke quietly. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?”
There was a moment where no one spoke.
“I’m sure you must hear this all the time,” Ella Kaspersky said, “but you two are perfect for each other.”
Alkaitis took his wife’s arm and steered her rapidly out of the restaurant, out to the cold street, where the car was waiting. He bundled her in and sat beside her. “Home, please,” he said to the driver. He glanced over and saw that Suzanne was weeping silently, her hands over her face. He pulled her close and held her tightly, her tears falling on his coat, and they stayed like that, not speaking, all the way back to Connecticut.
In a different life, in the library at FCI Medium 1, the visiting professor takes an uncharacteristic break from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I want to talk about allegory today,” he says. “Any of you know the story of the swan in the frozen pond?”
“Yeah, I think I know that story,” Jeffries says. He was a police officer until he tried to arrange a hit on his wife. “The one about the swan who doesn’t fly away in time, right?”
Alkaitis finds himself thinking about the swan story later on, standing in line for his potatoes and mystery meat. The story was a favorite of his mother’s, repeated every so often throughout childhood and adolescence. There’s a flock of swans on a lake in the deepening autumn. As the nights grow colder, they all fly away. Except one, for reasons Alkaitis can’t remember: a lone swan who doesn’t perceive the approaching danger or loves the lake too much to leave even though it’s clearly time to go or is afflicted by hubris—the swan’s motivations were hazy and, Alkaitis suspects, changeable, depending on what message his mother was trying to impart at any given moment—and then winter sets in and the swan is frozen in ice, because it didn’t get out of the water in time.
“I thought I’d be able to get out,” he tells Freeman when she comes to see him again. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to let everyone down. They were just so greedy, these people, the returns they expected…”
“You feel the investors pushed you to commit fraud,” she says blandly.
“Well, I didn’t say that, exactly. I take full responsibility for my crimes.”
“But you seem to think the investors were partly to blame.”
“They expected a certain level of returns. I felt compelled to deliver. It was a nightmare, actually.”
“For you, you mean?”
“Yes, of course. Imagine the stress,” he says, “the constant pressure, always knowing that eventually it would all come crashing down but trying to keep it going anyway. I actually wish I’d been caught sooner. I wish they’d caught me back in 1999, that first SEC investigation.”
“And you maintain that no one else knew about the scheme.” Freeman’s voice was carefully neutral. “The account statements, the deception, the wire transfers, that was all you.”
“It was all me,” he says. “I never told a living soul.”
On a different day, Yvette Bertolli circles the recreation yard, walking a little behind and to the right of an elderly mafioso whose name used to inspire terror on the Lower East Side but who now shuffles awkwardly in a slow-motion attempt at jogging. Elsewhere, Olivia and Faisal are speaking with a man Alkaitis doesn’t recognize, a man who is also not a prisoner, presumably also not alive, a middle-aged man in a beautiful gray wool suit.
There were four Ponzi-related suicides that Alkaitis is aware of, four men who lost more than they could bear. Faisal was one of them; is this man another? There was an Australian businessman, if Alkaitis remembers correctly, also a Belgian. Are more ghosts even now approaching FCI Florence Medium 1? He stares at Olivia and is overcome by rage. What right does she have to haunt him? What right do
any
of them have to haunt him? It isn’t his fault that Faisal chose to do what he did. If he’s to be honest with himself, he supposes Yvette Bertolli’s heart attack was probably Ponzi related, but she should have seen the scheme for what it was and she could’ve gotten out whenever she wanted, just like everyone else, and whatever happened to Olivia can’t possibly be blamed on him, he’s been in prison for years now and she’s only been dead for a month. When Alkaitis thinks about how much money he provided, all the checks he sent out over the years, he feels a hollow rage.
“I’m not saying what I did was right but by any rational analysis I did some good in the world,” he writes to Julie Freeman. “By which I mean I made a lot of money over a period of decades for a lot of people, a lot of charities, many sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, etc., and I know that might seem self-justifying but the numbers are the numbers and if you look at investments vs. returns, most of those people/entities took out far more than they put in and made far more money than if they’d just invested in the stock market and therefore I would suggest that it is inaccurate to refer to them as ‘victims.’ ”
“Well,” he said to Suzanne, in the hospice, “at least now you won’t have to go to prison when the scheme collapses.”
“Think of the savings in legal fees,” she said. They were like that in the last few months, all competitive bluster and stupid bravado, until she stopped talking, after which he stopped talking too and just sat silently by the bed, hour upon hour, holding her hand.
When it did finally collapse, when he was finally trapped, the wrong woman was there with him. Although Vincent impressed him, at the end, despite not being Suzanne. The tableau: His office in Midtown, the last time he was ever in that room. He was sitting behind his desk, Claire crying on the sofa, Harvey staring into space, while Vincent fidgeted around with a coat and shopping bag and then sat and stared at him until he finally had to tell her: “Vincent,” he said, “do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”
“Yes,” Vincent said.
Claire, from the sofa, still crying: “How do you know what a Ponzi scheme is, Vincent? Did he tell you? Did you know about this? I swear to god, if you knew about this, if he told you…”
“Of course he didn’t tell me,” Vincent said. “I know what a Ponzi scheme is because I’m not a fucking idiot.”
He thought,
That’s my girl.
In the counterlife, he walks through a hotel corridor—wide and silent with modernist sconces, the corridor of the hotel on Palm Jumeirah—and takes the stairs this time, walking slowly through the cool air. There’s a potted palm on every landing. The lobby is empty except for Vincent. She’s standing by a fountain, looking into the water. She looks up when he approaches; she’s been waiting for him. It’s different this time, he’s certain that this cannot possibly be a memory, because it takes him a moment to recognize her. She’s much older, and she’s wearing strange clothing, a gray T-shirt and gray uniform trousers and a chef’s apron. There’s a handkerchief tied over her hair, but he can tell that her hair’s very short, not at all like it was when they were together, and she’s not wearing makeup. She’s become a completely different person since he saw her last.
“Hello, Jonathan.” Her voice seems to come from a long way off, like she’s speaking by telephone from a submarine.
“Vincent? I didn’t recognize you.”
She gazes at him and says nothing.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Just visiting.”
“Visiting from where?”
But she’s looking past him, distracted now, and when he turns he sees Yvette and Faisal, strolling by one of the lobby windows. Yvette’s laughing at something Faisal just said.
“They’re not supposed to be here,” he says, truly alarmed, “I’ve never seen them here before,” but when he looks back, Vincent’s gone.
Later, lying awake in his uncomfortable bed in the noncounterlife, the nonlife, he’s struck by the unfairness of it. If he has to see ghosts, why not his real wife, his first companion instead of his second—his co-conspirator, his beloved Suzanne—or why can’t he see Lucas? He isn’t well. He’s in the counterlife more often than he’s in the prison now, and he knows that reality is sliding away from him. He’s afraid of forgetting his own name, and if he forgets himself, of course by then he’ll have forgotten his brother too. This thought is vastly upsetting, so he marks a tiny L on his left hand with Churchwell’s pen. Every time he sees the L, he decides, he’ll make a conscious effort to think of Lucas, and in this way thinking of Lucas will become a habit. He heard somewhere that habits are the last to go.
“A habit, like brushing your teeth,” Churchwell says.
“Yes, exactly.”
“See, but here’s the difference. Every time you brush your teeth, your teeth aren’t progressively degraded.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”
“Well,” Alkaitis says, “I suppose I’ll have to take my chances.” He’s troubled by this new information—is it new information? There’s a ring of the familiar about it—because these days he mostly only returns to one memory of Lucas, the same memory retrieved again and again, and it’s terrible to think that he’s chipping away at it every time, that it might even now be mutating in as-yet-imperceptible ways. When he isn’t in the counterlife he likes to dwell in a green field in his hometown, in the twilight following a family picnic. This was Lucas’s last summer. Jonathan was fourteen. Lucas arrived in the midafternoon, four trains later than planned. Jonathan remembers waiting at the station for one train, then another, then a third and a fourth, Lucas finally stepping out into the sunlight, much thinner than Jonathan remembered, a wraith in dark glasses. “Sorry about that,” he said, “I guess I just somehow lost track of time this morning.”
“We were almost starting to worry!” their mother said with that nervous little laugh that Jonathan had only recently begun to notice. She’d spent the last hour crying in the car while their father paced and smoked cigarettes. “We thought you maybe weren’t coming.” The family picnic was her idea, of course.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Lucas said, and their father’s jaw tightened. As always, Jonathan couldn’t tell if Lucas was being sincere or not. It wasn’t fair that Jonathan had to be so much younger. He’d never been able to keep up.
“How’s the painting going?” he asked when they were in the backseat of the car together, and decades later in FCI Florence Medium 1 he can still feel the pleasure of that moment, of having thought to ask such an adult question.
“It’s going great, buddy, thanks for asking. Really great.”
“You’re still enjoying the city?” Mom always said
the city
in the way a preacher might say
Gomorrah.
“I love it.” Lucas’s tone was a little off, though, even fourteen-year-old Jonathan could perceive that. Their parents exchanged glances.
“If you ever wanted to come home for a bit,” their father said. “Take a little break from it all, even just a week or two, get a little fresh air…”
“Fresh air’s overrated.”
Later, considering the memory from afar, from FCI Florence Medium 1, Alkaitis doesn’t remember much about the picnic. What he remembers is afterward: a sense of calm at the end of the long strange day, a temporary peace, sitting there in the shade with his whole family together, and then an hour or so when the sun is setting and their parents are starting to talk about driving Lucas back to the train station (“unless you’d like to stay here tonight, honey, you know there’s always room…”), one last beautiful hour of throwing a Frisbee with his brother in the deepening twilight, running and diving over grass, the pale disk spinning through the dark.
SHADOW COUNTRY
December 2018
In December 2018, Leon Prevant had a job in a Marriott on the southern edge of Colorado, not far from the New Mexico border. It wasn’t a big town but there were somehow two Marriotts, reflecting one another across the wide street and the parking lot. The Marriotts were just on the edge of downtown, but the downtown itself proved to be something of a mirage. On Leon’s first day he walked there on his lunch break, past a massive mural and then up a street where he found the best café he’d seen in a while, a large shadowy place attached to a coffee roasting business. He took a coffee to go and wandered up the street. There was a huge army surplus store that seemed to have spilled into three adjoining buildings, but most of the other storefronts were empty. No cars passed by. He was standing on a corner, with long views down two streets, and in all of that, he saw just one other person, a man in a neon-orange T-shirt sitting on a bench about a block away, staring at nothing. The tables outside the café were empty. Leon walked quickly back to the Marriott, clocked back in, and resumed the work of the day, receiving a new shipment of toiletries in the supply room and then skimming drowned bugs and leaves from the surface of the pool.
“See, that’s how I can tell you’re from the coast,” his coworker 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 traveling 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 fervor. “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.
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 omelets 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 mold in the upstairs bathroom was no longer his concern. There would be no more neighbors. (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 favor 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.