Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“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.

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.