Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

Journalists write to him sometimes. “What does it feel like to be sentenced to 170 years?” they ask.

He doesn’t reply to this, because he knows the answer will sound insane: it feels like delirium. One morning when he was twenty-five, Alkaitis woke up with a high fever. He was living alone on 70th Street back then and had nothing in the apartment to treat a fever, so he had to stagger outside to the nearest bodega. He bought aspirin with some difficulty, too hot, the sidewalk unsteady under his feet, made it back to his building and up the stairs to the landing, where he found himself baffled by the mechanics of opening his apartment door. There was a key in his hand, and a lock on the door, and he understood in an abstract way that these two things fit together, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and this was how he knew he was delirious. For how long did he stand there? Five minutes, ten, a half hour. Who knows. Eventually he made it inside.

In the courtroom in Manhattan, thirty-seven years later, the judge says the number—“one hundred seventy years”—and there’s a vertiginous sensation of movement, time rushing away from him toward that impossible destination, the year 2179. He understands that he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison, but it’s the same confusion he felt in that moment of delirium in his twenties: the rest of his life and prison are two pieces that don’t fit together, the lock and the key, an incomprehensible equation.

He never noticed dandelions before he came here, but in the oppressive blankness of the yard, those little bursts of yellow on the grass are almost shocking. Likewise, the birds. They’re the kind of birds that blend into the landscape on the outside, just robins and ravens and finches and such, but here there’s something extraordinary about the way they alight on the grass and then leave again, flitting in and out of bounds. They are emissaries from another world. The prison rulebook prohibits feeding them, but some guys surreptitiously drop crumbs on the grass.

A few guys who’ve passed through maximum security like to proclaim that FCI Florence Medium 1 is a country club, and it isn’t exactly that but it also isn’t nearly as bad as Alkaitis imagined. A fair number of the men here are elderly and have limited patience for drama, and also no one wants to get sent up to maximum. No one talks about shivs or tries to kill him in the yard. The only sinister thing that happens is when a handful of white nationalist types work out together while everyone else ignores them. They know that if they’re too obvious or cause trouble they’ll get moved to maximum, which is what happened during a nationwide roundup of Aryan Brotherhood guys a few years back, so they mostly confine their activities to synchronized push-ups and grandiose prattle about codes of honor and tribal solidarity. Elsewhere, two brothers who collaborated in a high-profile insurance fraud hold court in their favorite corner. The brothers have employees, even in prison, guys who fetch things for them and wash their clothes in exchange for commissary goods. There are always younger guys jogging around and around, clockwise, and older guys walking on the same track. Elderly mafiosos gossip in the sun.

Alkaitis jogs in circles around the yard, lifts weights, does push-ups, and within six months he’s in the best shape of his life. He isn’t one of those men who keep their days as featureless and as similar as possible to make time move faster. He respects that method of survival, but he tries to do something different every day, on principle. He applies for a job even though he doesn’t have to, given his age, and ends up sweeping the cafeteria. He figures out how the system works and pays another inmate $10 a month to deal with his laundry. He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book. It’s possible to rest here, in the order, in the routine, in the up-at-five count-at-five-fifteen breakfast-at-six etc., one day rolling into the next. In the outside world he used to lie awake at night worrying about being sent to prison, but he sleeps fairly well here, between head counts. There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

“There’s something I can’t stop wondering about,” one of the journalists says. Her name is Julie Freeman. She’s writing a book about him, which he finds immensely flattering. “Okay, so for a long time before your arrest, decades, you had considerable resources at your disposal.”

“I did,” Alkaitis says. “I had an enormous amount of money.”

“And you told me a moment ago that you’d been expecting arrest for a very long time. You knew what was coming. So why didn’t you just flee the country before you were arrested?”

“To be honest,” he says, “it never occurred to me to flee.”

Which is not to say that he doesn’t have regrets. He wishes he’d had more appreciation for the people he was able to associate with, before prison. He never really had friends in his adult life, only investors, but some of them were people whom he genuinely enjoyed. He always very much liked Olivia, whose presence made him feel like his beloved lost brother wasn’t so far away after all, and Faisal, who could talk at fascinating length about subjects like twentieth-century British poetry and the history of jazz. (Faisal is dead now, but no need to think about that.) He’s even nostalgic for some of the investors whom he knew much less well, maybe only met once or twice. Leon Prevant, for instance, the shipping executive whom he’d had drinks with at the Hotel Caiette, the pleasure of getting into a conversation about an industry he knew nothing about, or Terrence Washington, a retired judge at the club in Miami Beach, who seemed to know everything there was to know about the history of New York City.

The people he associates with now are not people he respects, for the most part. There are a few exceptions—the mafiosos who ran terrifying criminal empires, the ex-spy who was a double agent for a decade—but for every godfather and trilingual former spy there are ten guys who are basically thugs. Alkaitis is aware that there’s a hypocritical element to his snobbery, but there’s a difference between a) knowing you’re a criminal just like everyone else here and b) wanting to associate with grown men who can’t read.

“It’s like there’s two different games, moneywise,” Nemirovsky says to the table at breakfast. He’s been here sixteen years for a botched bank robbery. He has a fourth-grade education and is functionally illiterate. “There’s the game everyone knows, where you work your shitty job and get your paycheck and it’s never enough”—nods all around the cafeteria table—“but then there’s this other level, this whole other level of money, where it’s this whole other thing, like this secret game or something and only some people know how to play…”

Nemirovsky isn’t wrong, Alkaitis thinks later, while he’s jogging around the recreation yard. Money is a game he knew how to play. No, money is a country and he had the keys to the kingdom.

He doesn’t tell Julie Freeman this, but now that it’s much too late to flee, Alkaitis finds himself thinking about flight all the time. He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events—a counterlife, if you will—in which he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Why not? He loves the UAE and Dubai in particular, the way it’s possible to live an entire life without going outdoors except to step into smooth cars, floating from beautiful interior to beautiful interior with expert drivers in between. He was last there in 2005, with Vincent. She seemed enchanted by the opulence, although in retrospect it’s begun to occur to him that she may have been acting at least part of the time. She had a significant financial stake in maintaining the appearance of happiness. Anyway. In the counterlife, the hours surrounding the holiday party are very different. When Claire comes to see him in the office on the day of the holiday party, he deflects her. He pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, maintains this air of polite bafflement until she gives up and leaves. He isn’t above a little gaslighting, if that’s what it takes to stay out of prison. In the counterlife, he confesses to nothing. He does not crack. That night he goes with Vincent to the holiday party, and when they leave together, they both return to the pied-à-terre. He kisses her good night as if everything were perfectly normal, revealing nothing of his plans. He stays up when she goes to sleep, drinks some coffee and makes his preparations, stares out at the dark ocean of Central Park and the lights beyond, memorizing a view that he’ll never see again. He waits through the night for the window washers, who rise up the sheer wall of the tower on their suspended platform at dawn.