Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“Who doesn’t? In an alternate universe, I got away with it and I’ve got a sweet pad in Moscow,” Churchwell says.

“I’d live in Dubai. I liked it there.”

“I’ve thought this through. I’d’ve married an oligarch’s daughter, maybe a supermodel? Two or three kids, golden retriever, summer house in a warm country with no extradition treaty.”

“I’d live in Dubai.” He catches Churchwell’s glance and realizes that he already said this.

“Mr. Alkaitis, how are you this afternoon?” The doctor looks too young to be a doctor.

“I’ve been having some trouble with memory and concentration.” He doesn’t add hallucinations, because he doesn’t want to end up on hard-core antipsychotics, and men who go into the hospital often don’t come back. Anyway hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory. But maybe there’s something to be done, some medication that won’t turn him into a shuffling zombie but that might stop or at least slow the deterioration, if deterioration is what he’s facing. He’s trying to be clear-eyed about it.

“Okay. I’m just going to ask you a series of simple questions, and that should give us a better idea of where we’re at. Can you tell me what year it is?”

“Seriously? I’m not that far gone, I hope.”

“I’m not saying you are. Just the first in a series of standard questions to screen you for potential memory problems. What’s the year?”

“Two thousand fifteen,” Alkaitis says. Has he been here for six years already? It seems impossible. Maybe he shouldn’t discount the view from the palm-tree-island hotel, actually. The thing with white-sand beaches, blue sea to the horizon under a cloudless sky: that’s a view with two colors, just blue and white, tranquil but you could die of boredom. But the palm-tree-island hotel looked over an inlet to the enormous houses on the other side, and there’s life in that. One of the mansions was pink, memorable because he and Vincent had laughed at it. It wasn’t a tasteful muted pink, it was pink like Pepto-Bismol.

“What month is it?”

“December,” Alkaitis says. “We were in the Emirates for Christmas.”

The doctor’s face is carefully blank as he makes a note, and Alkaitis realizes his mistake. “I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else. It’s June. June 2015.”

“Good. Do you know today’s date?”

“Sure, it’s the seventeenth. July seventeenth.”

“I’m going to give you a name and address,” the doctor says, “and I’ll ask you to repeat it back to me in a few minutes. Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Jones, twenty-three Cecil Court, London.”

“Okay. Got it.”

“What time is it to the nearest hour?”

Alkaitis glances around but sees no clock in the room.

“To the nearest hour,” the doctor repeats. “Your best guess.”

“Well, our appointment was at ten and you kept me waiting, so I’ll go with eleven.”

“Count backward from twenty to one.”

He counts backward from twenty to one. The details of that weird palm-tree-shaped island are a little hazy. Is it one island, or a collection of islands that taken together form a palm tree? Anyway, that was the hotel where he and Suzanne stayed on his first visit to the UAE, where they held hands over a table in a restaurant that featured a giant aquarium with a shark in it. This was in the last year before her diagnosis, which means that there in that beautiful memory Suzanne is already secretly, invisibly sick, malignant cells proliferating silently on liver and pancreas. God, she was stunning. Much older than Vincent, obviously, but frankly there’s something to be said for having a companion who isn’t young enough to be your daughter, also something to be said for a companion from whom you don’t have to hide. He remembered holding hands with her and discussing the investors. “If you think Lenny Xavier doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said, “I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

“Say the months of the year in reverse order.” The doctor, intruding.

“December, November, October, September, August, June, July…May, April, March. February. January.” Thinking of the thrill of that moment in the hotel, the delight in having a co-conspirator. “You think we can keep it going?” he asked her. Dessert was just arriving: chocolate cake with ice cream for Alkaitis, a dish of fresh fruit for Suzanne.

“Tell me the name and address I gave you earlier,” the doctor says.

“I’m sorry?”

“The address?”

“It was Palm Jumeirah.” Alkaitis smiles, pleased to have remembered the name. “Definitely Palm Jumeirah, in Dubai. I don’t remember if there was a street number.”

He leaves the doctor’s office with a sense of unease. He knows he messed up that last answer, but is it his fault that his life here is so boring that it sometimes takes him a minute or two to snap out of the counterlife and back to reality, if that’s what this is? “I’m distracted, not demented,” he mutters to himself, loudly enough that the guard escorting him back to the cell block glances at him. It isn’t his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the counterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.

An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?

When he’s not in the counterlife, he has dreams in which nothing happens except a mounting sense of dread. In the dream, he knows that someone is approaching, and then one evening he’s reading the paper in the cell after dinner—awake, not dreaming—and he hears a voice say, quite distinctly, “I’m here.”

He looks up. Hazelton has been pacing for a solid hour, but it wasn’t Hazelton who spoke. Alkaitis is quiet for a long time before he can bring himself to say anything.

“You believe in ghosts?” Alkaitis asks as casually as possible.

Hazelton grins, apparently delighted by the question. Hazelton is an understimulated person who longs for conversation. “I don’t know, bro, I always wanted to believe in ghosts, I think it’d be cool if they were floating around, but I’m not so sure they’re real.”

“You ever met anyone who saw one?” What he doesn’t tell Hazelton is that Faisal is standing in a corner of the cell. Alkaitis has been trying to convince himself that he’s hallucinating. Faisal cannot possibly be in this room, because a) it’s a prison cell and b) Faisal is dead. Nonetheless, Faisal looks alarmingly real. He’s wearing his favorite gold velvet slippers. He’s standing under the cell window, craning his neck to look at the moon.

“I knew a guy who swore he’d seen one. But the ghost he’d seen, it was a guy he killed by accident in a robbery.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Nah. Well, kind of. I mean, I don’t think it was an actual ghost, I think it was just his guilty conscience.”

Faisal flickers slightly, like a faulty hologram, then blinks out.

In the last September Vincent and Alkaitis spent together, they “went sailing,” as he called it, which seemed an odd way to describe a few days of lounging around on an enormous boat with no sails. He invited his friend Olivia, who Vincent gathered had known Jonathan’s brother, and at night the three of them had dinner and then drank together in the breeze on deck. Vincent, who always tried to stay sharp, could make a single cocktail last for hours, but she liked making drinks for other people.