Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“I went for a walk.”

“Where? The engine room?”

“On deck.”

“We’re not allowed on deck,” he says, “you know that. Confined to interior until the weather eases up.”

“Are you going to tell the captain?” I smile, but then I realize that he’s angry.

“It’s dangerous,” he says. “Please don’t do that again.”

“I just wanted to film the ocean.”

“What? Vincent. Please don’t tell me you were hanging off the railing filming things in a storm.”

“Can you not talk so loudly, Geoff? The walls are thin. Look, I know going on deck was questionable, but it was worth it. It was beautiful.” I’d felt immortal, up there on deck. There was such power and magnificence in the storm. Only through the convergence of storm and ocean could a ship like the Neptune Cumberland feel small.

He’s sitting up in bed, pulling on his clothes, still talking too loudly. “ Questionable is not exactly the word I would use for this, Vincent. For Christ’s sake, don’t do that again.”

The one thing in my life I have hated the most, out of a long list of things, is being told what to do. I can tolerate it in a kitchen but not in the bedroom, and I tell him that.

“I’m not telling you what to do for the sake of telling you what to do. I’m telling you to not go out in storms because I don’t want you to die.”

“I’m not going to die. You’re being melodramatic.”

“No, I’m being sane, and I wish you’d return the bloody favor,” he says, and he slams his way out of my room.

I lie there for a long time, seething, watching my suitcase slide back and forth with the rocking of the ship. The thing with heavy weather is that it’s impossible to sleep, at least for me, because it’s impossible to lie unmoving in the bed; when the ship rolls, I roll with it, and it makes for a restless twilight kind of night. Finally I rise and get dressed, take my camera, and slip out into the corridor, then walk out onto C deck to meet the storm.

The fresh air is a balm, even the rain is wonderful, after an entire day of stale industrial interiors. Lightning flashes and the ship is illuminated. It’s difficult to walk—I stumble against the railing—but I feel the old quickening that’s always come over me when a beautiful shot is somewhere near. I will film just a few minutes, I decide, then I’ll go back in. I make my way to the back corner of C deck, where the barbecue is clanking against its chains. I switch on the camera as I hear the thunder, and I record the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, lightning flashing over the roiling ocean. In a storm, the waves are like mountains. Cold rain in my face and I know it’s on the lens but this, too, will be beautiful, the blurring and the raindrops. I stand by the railing, but with one hand on the railing I can’t keep the camera steady, so I let go—just for a moment—and in an instant of calm between towering waves, I lean forward so that the shot describes an arc from sky into water, the shot pointing straight down at the ocean.

The light on the wall behind me begins to flicker. When I look over my shoulder, I realize there’s someone here with me, at the other end of the deck.

“Hello!” I call out, but there’s no response.

No, I was mistaken. I’m alone. I must be alone, because I thought I saw a woman, but I’m the only woman on board.

No, she’s there. I can see her, almost. The light is still flickering, the deck intermittently illuminated. The horror is that this other person is somehow intermittent too, less a human figure than a disturbance in the air, a shadow that appears on the railing and then fades, a presence approaching. She is very close now. There’s an impression of a hand on the railing, a silhouette, and then Olivia Collins is standing beside me at the bow, looking down at the water. She looks much younger than she did the last time I saw her, also less substantial. The rain falls through her. I’m still holding my camera over the railing. I can’t breathe. She turns as if to say something and the camera falls from my hand; I reach for it without thinking, leaning too far, the ship lurches

I am over the side

I am weightless

the camera flying away into the rain, the blue square of the viewfinder flipping through the dark—

The cold is annihilating—

I am holding hands with my mother. I am very small. We are in Caiette, picking mushrooms in the woods. A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment. What a pleasure to be here again! “Oh look, my lamb,” she says, stooping to pluck a fluted little orange shape from the dark earth, “this one is a chanterelle.”

It’s like the moment just before sleep, when you’re not quite unconscious—you’re awake enough to realize that you’re falling asleep—but your thoughts and your memories begin unspooling into narrative and you realize that you’ve already started to dream: one last moment of waking, choking on seawater, surfacing for an instant in a valley between waves, out of air, out of time, the ship an indistinct mass of shadow and lights, and then Olivia pulls me aside to apologize. She was thinking of me, she says, as she often thinks of me, and thinking of the ocean, that trip in Jonathan’s yacht, so she sought me out and found me there on the ship, filming the storm. She didn’t think I’d see her. She’s pulled me aside to tell me this, but pulled me aside from where? We’re in some in-between space, or so it seems to me, between the ocean and something I don’t want to think about—

Sweep me up: words scrawled on the window of the school when I was thirteen years old, the letters pale on the glass—

A memory I wish I could stay in for longer: Kissing Geoffrey on C deck, beside a wall of shipping containers at the rear of the ship. His hand on the side of my face.

“I love you,” he whispered, and I whispered it back. I’d said it before, but it seemed to me I’d never known what the words meant until that moment—

But now Geoffrey Bell and Felix Mendoza are standing on deck by the gangway stairs in a light rain, the orange cranes of the Port of Rotterdam overhead. Geoffrey is unshaven and has dark circles under his eyes. This isn’t a memory.

“You know it makes you look guilty,” Felix says.

“I swear to god I don’t know what happened to her.” Geoffrey’s voice cracks; he swallows hard and closes his eyes for a second, while Felix stares at him, “But I’m afraid if I stay I’ll get blamed for murder.” Felix nods, they shake hands, then Geoffrey turns away and descends the stairs, shoulders squared in the rain. He looks so alone and so bereft, and I wish I could go to him and touch his shoulder and tell him I’m all right, I’m safe now and nothing can hurt me, but there’s some confusion, some distance, he’s receded—

I’m in a hotel that I recognize. I think this is Dubai, but this place isn’t like the other places and memories I’ve been visiting. There’s an unreality about it. I’m standing by a fountain in the lobby.

I hear footsteps, and when I look up I see Jonathan. We’re in some nonplace, some dream-place, a place whose details keep shifting. No one else is here. I feel more solid here than elsewhere; Jonathan can see me, I can tell by his surprised expression, and it’s possible to speak.

“Hello, Jonathan.”

“Vincent? I didn’t recognize you. What are you doing here?”

“Just visiting.”

“Visiting from where?”