Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“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.

“How’s retirement treating you?” Miranda asked. They were sitting in her office, which had previously been Leon’s boss’s office. It was larger than he remembered. Several days had gone by since she’d called him in Colorado, during which he’d left his job at the Marriott—an urgent family matter, he’d told his boss, in hopes of being rehired later—and driven the RV to Connecticut, where they were parked in the driveway of one of Marie’s college friends.

“Can’t complain,” Leon said. Miranda seemed not to know that he’d been an Alkaitis investor, although the information wasn’t hidden. There was a victim impact statement online somewhere, which he didn’t specifically regret but probably wouldn’t have written if he’d realized it was going to be available to anyone who typed his name into Google.

“No complaints at all?”

He smiled. “Did I seem ever-so-slightly overeager on the phone?”

“I didn’t sense any reluctance to give up your life of leisure and take on a consulting gig, let’s put it that way.”

“Well,” Leon said. “There’s such a thing as too much retirement, if we’re being honest here.”

“There’s a reason why I’m not planning to retire.” Miranda was flipping through a file folder. I didn’t plan to retire either, Leon didn’t say, because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t be desperate or bitter, that if anyone asked he’d spent this last decade living in an RV because he and Marie had had enough of the hassles of home ownership and had always wanted to explore the country. Miranda passed him the file, which was labeled VINCENT SMITH. Had Miranda really been his assistant once, or was that a false memory? He vaguely remembered the era when he’d spent his life on the road and Miranda had made his travel arrangements, but it was difficult to reconcile that quiet young woman with the executive across the table, impeccable in a steel-gray suit, drinking a cup of tea that someone else had made for her.