The Glass Hotel: A novel (24 page)

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 nonaddicted—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 rumors lately of carfentanil in the supply line, which terrified him: one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, approved for the sole 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—

“Vincent?” he said, and perhaps he’d imagined her, in any event she was gone, but for the rest of his life he would tell the story as if she’d really been there, he’d pull it out like a card trick whenever the subject of ghosts came up—“I was sitting on a step in Edinburgh, and I saw my half sister standing there on the other side of the street, and then she was gone, like she just blinked out. I started looking for her, and what I found out weeks later was that she’d actually died that night, maybe even that minute, thousands of miles away…”—and he would always play it as the real thing, as if he wasn’t hallucinating and the woman he saw was really Vincent and Vincent was really a ghost and the ghost was really there on the street with him, whatever that means—what does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be
there,
or
here
? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life—but uncertainty would always pull at him and he could never be sure; later he would wonder if he actually saw her standing there in an apron or if he added the apron to the memory in retrospect when he found out she’d been a cook; and always the question that pulled at him even at that moment, sitting in a doorway in the rain, drifting at the edge of sleep: Did he really see her, standing there on the street? Or was he just drunk and high, lost in a foreign city far from home, delirious with exhaustion and seeing things in the dark?

Begin at the end:

Plummeting down the side of the ship

The horizon flipping once, twice, camera flying from my hand

It felt like plunging into shards of ice.

No, begin twenty minutes earlier:

“Where were you last night?” Geoffrey asks. “I was looking for you after my shift.” It is December 2018, and we’ve been together for years now, on and off, coming together and then agreeing to be apart. There are certain frictions: he wanted to marry me once, but I decided long ago that I will marry no one and will never again be dependent on another human being; he talks about quitting the ocean and living together somewhere, but I have no desire to return to land. Tonight we’re together, although we were fighting earlier, and he lies beside me in my bed. We’ve been watching my suitcase slide back and forth across the room. This is the third night of heavy weather.

“I went for a walk.”

“Where? The engine room?”

“On deck.”

“We’re not allowed on deck,” he says, “you know that. Confined to interior until the weather eases up.”

“Are you going to tell the captain?” I smile, but then I realize that he’s angry.

“It’s dangerous,” he says. “Please don’t do that again.”

“I just wanted to film the ocean.”

“What? Vincent. Please don’t tell me you were hanging off the railing filming things in a storm.”

“Can you not talk so loudly, Geoff? The walls are thin. Look, I know going on deck was questionable, but it was worth it. It was beautiful.” I’d felt immortal, up there on deck. There was such power and magnificence in the storm. Only through the convergence of storm and ocean could a ship like the
Neptune Cumberland
feel small.

He’s sitting up in bed, pulling on his clothes, still talking too loudly. “
Questionable
is not exactly the word I would use for this, Vincent. For Christ’s sake, don’t do that again.”

The one thing in my life I have hated the most, out of a long list of things, is being told what to do. I can tolerate it in a kitchen but not in the bedroom, and I tell him that.

“I’m not telling you what to do for the sake of telling you what to do. I’m telling you to not go out in storms because I don’t want you to die.”

“I’m not going to
die.
You’re being melodramatic.”

“No, I’m being sane, and I wish you’d return the bloody favor,” he says, and he slams his way out of my room.

I lie there for a long time, seething, watching my suitcase slide back and forth with the rocking of the ship. The thing with heavy weather is that it’s impossible to sleep, at least for me, because it’s impossible to lie unmoving in the bed; when the ship rolls, I roll with it, and it makes for a restless twilight kind of night. Finally I rise and get dressed, take my camera, and slip out into the corridor, then walk out onto C deck to meet the storm.

The fresh air is a balm, even the rain is wonderful, after an entire day of stale industrial interiors. Lightning flashes and the ship is illuminated. It’s difficult to walk—I stumble against the railing—but I feel the old quickening that’s always come over me when a beautiful shot is somewhere near. I will film just a few minutes, I decide, then I’ll go back in. I make my way to the back corner of C deck, where the barbecue is clanking against its chains. I switch on the camera as I hear the thunder, and I record the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, lightning flashing over the roiling ocean. In a storm, the waves are like mountains. Cold rain in my face and I know it’s on the lens but this, too, will be beautiful, the blurring and the raindrops. I stand by the railing, but with one hand on the railing I can’t keep the camera steady, so I let go—just for a moment—and in an instant of calm between towering waves, I lean forward so that the shot describes an arc from sky into water, the shot pointing straight down at the ocean.

The light on the wall behind me begins to flicker. When I look over my shoulder, I realize there’s someone here with me, at the other end of the deck.

“Hello!” I call out, but there’s no response.

No, I was mistaken. I’m alone. I must be alone, because I thought I saw a woman, but I’m the only woman on board.

No, she’s there. I can see her, almost. The light is still flickering, the deck intermittently illuminated. The horror is that this other person is somehow intermittent too, less a human figure than a disturbance in the air, a shadow that appears on the railing and then fades, a presence approaching. She is very close now. There’s an impression of a hand on the railing, a silhouette, and then Olivia Collins is standing beside me at the bow, looking down at the water. She looks much younger than she did the last time I saw her, also less substantial. The rain falls through her. I’m still holding my camera over the railing. I can’t breathe. She turns as if to say something and the camera falls from my hand; I reach for it without thinking, leaning too far, the ship lurches

I am over the side

I am weightless

the camera flying away into the rain, the blue square of the viewfinder flipping through the dark—

The cold is annihilating—

I am holding hands with my mother. I am very small. We are in Caiette, picking mushrooms in the woods. A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment. What a pleasure to be here again! “Oh look, my lamb,” she says, stooping to pluck a fluted little orange shape from the dark earth, “this one is a chanterelle.”

It’s like the moment just before sleep, when you’re not quite unconscious—you’re awake enough to realize that you’re falling asleep—but your thoughts and your memories begin unspooling into narrative and you realize that you’ve already started to dream: one last moment of waking, choking on seawater, surfacing for an instant in a valley between waves, out of air, out of time, the ship an indistinct mass of shadow and lights, and then Olivia pulls me aside to apologize. She was thinking of me, she says, as she often thinks of me, and thinking of the ocean, that trip in Jonathan’s yacht, so she sought me out and found me there on the ship, filming the storm. She didn’t think I’d see her. She’s pulled me aside to tell me this, but pulled me aside from where? We’re in some in-between space, or so it seems to me, between the ocean and something I don’t want to think about—

Sweep me up:
words scrawled on the window of the school when I was thirteen years old, the letters pale on the glass—

A memory I wish I could stay in for longer: Kissing Geoffrey on C deck, beside a wall of shipping containers at the rear of the ship. His hand on the side of my face.

“I love you,” he whispered, and I whispered it back. I’d said it before, but it seemed to me I’d never known what the words meant until that moment—

But now Geoffrey Bell and Felix Mendoza are standing on deck by the gangway stairs in a light rain, the orange cranes of the Port of Rotterdam overhead. Geoffrey is unshaven and has dark circles under his eyes. This isn’t a memory.

“You know it makes you look guilty,” Felix says.

“I swear to god I don’t know what happened to her.” Geoffrey’s voice cracks; he swallows hard and closes his eyes for a second, while Felix stares at him, “But I’m afraid if I stay I’ll get blamed for murder.” Felix nods, they shake hands, then Geoffrey turns away and descends the stairs, shoulders squared in the rain. He looks so alone and so bereft, and I wish I could go to him and touch his shoulder and tell him I’m all right, I’m safe now and nothing can hurt me, but there’s some confusion, some distance, he’s receded—

I’m in a hotel that I recognize. I think this is Dubai, but this place isn’t like the other places and memories I’ve been visiting. There’s an unreality about it. I’m standing by a fountain in the lobby.

I hear footsteps, and when I look up I see Jonathan. We’re in some nonplace, some dream-place, a place whose details keep shifting. No one else is here. I feel more solid here than elsewhere; Jonathan can see me, I can tell by his surprised expression, and it’s possible to speak.

“Hello, Jonathan.”

“Vincent? I didn’t recognize you. What are you doing here?”

“Just visiting.”

“Visiting from where?”

I’m visiting from the ocean,
I almost say, but I’m distracted just then because I think I just saw Faisal walk by the window with a woman who looks vaguely familiar—is that Yvette Bertolli?—and in any event the ocean isn’t exactly where I am, or if I’m there I am also somewhere else—

Some time has passed. I’ve been drifting through memories. I visit a street in some distant city where my brother sits in a doorway, because I heard him talking to me, but when he looks up and sees me he has nothing to say; I move for a while through Vancouver, walking the neighborhood where I lived when I was seventeen, although
walking
isn’t quite the word for the way I travel now; I search for Mirella and find her sitting alone and pensive in some beautiful interior, a loft of some kind, staring at her phone, she looks up and frowns but doesn’t seem to see me there—

In memory I’m back at Le Veau d’Or, in the interior of gold and red, listening to my least favorite of Jonathan’s investors talk about a singer. No, not a singer, a Ponzi scheme. “Couldn’t recognize an opportunity,” Lenny Xavier said, talking about the singer. “Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

I watched Jonathan’s look of alarm, the way he leaned forward as he spoke, his obvious desperation to stop Lenny from talking—“Let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk”—and Lenny’s smirk as he raised his glass: “All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” He knew, but of course I knew too, if not the details of the scheme than the fact that there
was
a scheme, because I’d been pretending to be Jonathan’s wife for months by then, it was just that I’d chosen not to understand—

I look for Paul again and find him in the desert, outside a low white building that seems to shine in the twilight. He just stepped out of the door, and he’s lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. He looks up and sees me, drops the cigarette and then retrieves it.

“You,” he says. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re really there?”

“I don’t know how to answer either of those questions,” I tell him.

“I was just talking about you,” he says, “in my session just now. I was just telling my counselor all the things I’ve never told anyone.” I can’t see his face clearly in the fading light, but he sounds like he’s been crying. “Vincent, before you go again, can I just tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it.”

“I was a thief too,” I tell him, “we both got corrupted,” and I can tell he doesn’t understand but I don’t want to stay here and explain it to him, there’s somewhere else I’d rather be, so I move away from the desert and away from Paul, all the way to Caiette.

I’m on the beach, not far from the pier where the mail boat comes in, and my mother is here. She’s sitting some distance away, on a driftwood log, hands folded on her lap, with an air of waiting calmly for an appointment. Her hair is still braided, she’s still thirty-six years old, still in the red cardigan she was wearing the day she disappeared. It was an accident, of course it was, she would never have left me on purpose. She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name.