Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“My husband’s a theater director.”

“Small world.”

“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”

A waitress took their drink orders, and Paul excused himself to shoot up in the men’s room, not a lot, just enough to bleed a little chaos out of the world. He stood very still in the stall for five deep breaths before he returned to the table. He was calmer now, the sharp edge of the jet lag a little blunted. Everything was fine. No one needs to sleep every night. He could save a lot of time from now on, if he just slept every second night.

“So,” she said, “you’ve been busy since I saw you last.”

“Very. It’s been extraordinary.” He hadn’t expected success and still found it disorienting. “I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music,” he said. I couldn’t possibly have seen this coming, he told Vincent, in his head, I just took the opportunities that arose, I was hustling just like everyone else… The opportunities that arose, like you had no choice in the matter? I couldn’t have anticipated this life, he told her, and actually, why didn’t he ever try to contact her after they’d both left the hotel? Because of his guilt over upsetting her with the graffiti and stealing her videos, obviously, but maybe he should try to find her now? Maybe enough time had passed? The condition of having landed in an unimaginable life was something he thought she might know something about.

“It was such an interesting angle you came up with,” Ella was saying. He’d been half following along while she told him that she liked his work. “One sees so much video art, but that collaboration you did, the programmable soundtrack console, that was a wonderful innovation.” For two separate works of video art, Paul had composed twenty-four hours’ worth of music, arranged as a collection of thirty-minute pieces that could be programmed to play in whichever order the buyer preferred: a night owl might prefer something fast and sharp at three in the morning, for instance, segueing into calm around a five a.m. bedtime, while the early risers might prefer to walk into their living room and hear something bracing as the sun rose.

“Some of those video art projects need a soundtrack to be even halfway interesting, if we’re being honest here,” Paul said. The beer in front of him was a terrible idea. If he drank it, he would lay his head on the table and fall asleep.

“I was curious about your musical influences,” she said.

“Baltica,” he said. “Everything I do sounds like an electronica group called Baltica that used to exist in Toronto in the late nineties.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you’d been part of a group.”

“I try to compose stuff that sounds different,” he said, “I mean I’ll really try in a concentrated way, and then I get to the end, I play it back, and it somehow always sounds like…” He stopped talking, and looked over his shoulder to cover his unease. “Do you think they have coffee here?” He was deeply shaken. He’d never told anyone about Baltica, and here he’d just blurted it out to her without hesitation.

“I’d imagine so.” She waved, and a waitress appeared at the table.

“A coffee, please.”

“Our coffee’s terrible,” the waitress said. “Fair warning.”

“I think I might want it anyway.”

“If I could possibly dissuade you,” she said. “I mean, if you insist. But I promise that you’ll send it back.”

“Do you have black tea?”

“You’re in Scotland.”

“Something extra-strong,” Paul said. “The strongest tea you’ve got. A lot of it. The more caffeine, the better.”

“I’ll bring you a pot, then,” the waitress said, “and you can let it brew for as long as you’d like.” Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity. Damn it, I know how tea works, he wanted to say, but it was too late, the waitress had departed and he was alone with Ella, who was giving him that look again.

“Do you still play music with that group? Baltica, was it?” She’d misunderstood, but he couldn’t possibly explain.

“We’ve all gone our separate ways,” he said. “I only see them on Facebook now. Annika’s always on tour with like five different bands. Theo’s a family guy. Is the hotel still there?” he heard himself ask, desperate to change the subject.

“It closed after Alkaitis was arrested,” she said.

Eight time zones to the west, Walter was standing by the window of his room in the old staff quarters of the former Hotel Caiette. There was still no cellular service here, but some years ago he’d splurged on a cordless phone, in order to wander around his apartment while he talked with the outside world.

“I can’t believe it’s been almost ten years,” his sister said. “Good lord. You’re still not lonely?”

“I’m not sure lonely is exactly the word. No, I wouldn’t say lonely.”

The last guest checked out of the Hotel Caiette in early 2009, two months after Jonathan Alkaitis was arrested, and the rest of the staff left shortly thereafter. Is a hotel still a hotel without guests? Walter was there on the pier when Raphael departed. “Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again. Raphael climbed aboard the boat with his overnight bag—his belongings had gone on ahead to Edmonton—and the chauffeur, Melissa, started the motor. She was being paid through the end of the day but hadn’t bothered with her uniform. She was leaving the boat in Grace Harbour and returning home by water taxi. “I’ll stop by next week,” she said to Walter. “Just to check in on you.”

“Thanks,” he said, moved and a little surprised by this. She cast off from the pier and the boat pulled out into the water, arced around the peninsula and out of sight. It was a muted day, the sea reflecting a pale gray sky, the forest dark and dripping from the morning’s rain. Walter stood on the pier until he could no longer hear the boat and then turned back to face the empty hotel. He walked up the path and unlocked the glass doors of the lobby, locked them behind him. Raphael had ceremoniously switched off the lights as he left, but now Walter switched them back on. The dark wood of the bar gleamed softly. His footsteps echoed. The furniture had all been sold off except for the grand piano, which was too costly to move. Walter played a few notes, unnaturally loud in the silence. It was true silence, he realized, not at all like being in the forest, which even at its quietest was alive with small sounds. He walked past Reception, past the bar, to the staircase.

The largest suite, the Coast Royal, was where Jonathan Alkaitis had always stayed. Walter had thought to move in here—it had a splendor that the staff quarters lacked, and surely the hotel caretaker should live in the actual hotel—but the thought of sleeping in the bed where Alkaitis had slept was repulsive, and Walter liked his apartment. He wandered through all of the guest rooms, left the doors open behind him.

What was strange was that he didn’t feel alone in all this space, all of these empty corridors and rooms. It was as though the hotel were haunted, but in the most benign sense: the rooms still held an air of presence, a sense of occupation, as if at any moment the boat might pull in with new guests and Raphael might walk out of his office complaining about the latest staffing problem, Khalil and Larry arriving for the night shift. He walked out onto the terrace. It provided a view of the empty pier, shadowy in the early winter twilight. He stood there for a while before he realized that he was waiting, by habit but completely without logic now, for a boat to come in.