The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “Is that the same suit you were wearing yesterday?” Saparelli asked. They were sitting together in the business-class cabin, an hour into the flight. Saparelli looked as terrible as Leon felt. Leon wanted to ask if Saparelli had been awake all night too, but it seemed too intrusive.

  “Short trip,” Leon said. “Didn’t think I needed two.”

  “You know what I was thinking about?” Saparelli was staring straight ahead. “The way a bad message casts a shadow on the messenger.”

  “Is that Nietzsche?”

  “No, that’s me. May I please see your notebook?”

  “My notebook?”

  “The one you were using in the car yesterday,” Saparelli said.

  Leon extracted it from the front pocket of his bag and watched as Saparelli flipped to the last page of notes, read it over quickly, then tore off the last two pages and folded them into an inside pocket of his jacket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We actually have similar interests,” Saparelli said. “I was thinking about this last night.”

  “How are your interests served by taking pages from my notebook?” Leon felt that he should be furious about the notebook, but he was so tired that he felt only a dull sense of dread.

  “I know you’re not retired,” Saparelli said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I know you live in campgrounds and work in fulfillment warehouses at Christmas. I know you spent last summer working at an amusement park called Adventureland. Where was that again, Indiana?” He was staring straight ahead.

  Leon was quiet for a moment. “Iowa,” he said softly.

  “And the summer before, I know you and your wife were campground hosts in Northern California. I know you were recently employed doing menial labour at a Marriott in Colorado. I know that that’s your only suit.” He turned to look at Leon. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I read up on the Ponzi scheme when I came across your victim impact statement. Obviously a lot of smart people got blindsided there.”

  “Then what are you saying, exactly? I’m not sure what my employment history has to do with—”

  “I’m saying that you want more consulting contracts, and I want to be able to walk down the hall without everyone thinking Oh, there’s that guy who wrote that awful report that leaked to the press and got people fired. You want that too, by the way. You want to walk down the halls and have people not look at you like you’re some kind of avatar of doom or something.”

  “You’re thinking of not including that last conversation in your report.”

  “Anything outside of the official interviews, well, that’s basically just a question of memory, isn’t it? I recorded the interviews, but nothing outside of that.”

  Leon rubbed his forehead.

  “We may or may not have heard an unsettling anecdote,” Saparelli said softly. “An unsettling anecdote that proves nothing. The facts of the case are unchanged. The fact remains that we’ll never know what happened, because no one else was there.”

  “Geoffrey Bell was there.”

  “Geoffrey Bell disappeared at Rotterdam. Geoffrey Bell is off the grid.”

  “It doesn’t seem suspicious to you that he walked off the ship at the first stop after she . . . ?”

  “I have no way of knowing why he walked off the ship, Leon, and we both know no police force is ever going to interview him about it. Look at it this way,” Saparelli said. “No matter what I write in my report, Vincent Smith will still be dead. There would be no positive outcome whatsoever in including that last conversation. There would only be harm.”

  “But you want an accurate report.” Everything was wrong. The sunlight through the cabin windows was too bright, the air too warm, Saparelli too close. Leon’s eyes hurt from sleep deprivation.

  “Let’s say, theoretically, the report includes every conversation we had on that ship. Will that bring Jonathan Alkaitis’s girlfriend back?”

  Leon looked at him. Upon inspection, he was certain Saparelli hadn’t slept either. The man’s eyes were bloodshot.

  “I just wasn’t sure,” Leon said. “I wasn’t sure if she was the same woman.”

  “How many women named Vincent do you know? Look, I was a detective,” Saparelli said. “I look into everyone and everything, just as a matter of professional habit. Seems like a bit of a conflict of interest, doesn’t it? Your accepting this consulting contract involving the former companion of a man who stole all your money? Does Miranda know?”

  “I’ve never hidden anything,” Leon said. “It’s all publicly available—”

  “Publicly available isn’t the same thing as recusing yourself. You didn’t tell her, did you?”

  “She could have looked. If she just typed my name into Google—”

  “Why would she? You’re her trusted former colleague. When was the last time you Googled someone you trusted?”

  “Gentlemen,” the flight attendant said, “may I offer you something to drink?”

  “Coffee,” Leon said. “With milk and sugar, please.”

  “Same for me, thank you.” Saparelli leaned back in his seat. “If you think about it,” he said, “you’re going to realize that I’m right.”

  Leon had the window seat; he gazed out at the morning Atlantic, vastly upset. There were no ships below, but he saw another plane in the far distance. The coffee arrived. A long time passed before Saparelli spoke again.

  “I’m going to tell Miranda that you were extremely helpful to me and I appreciated having you along, and I’ll recommend that we bring you on board for future consulting gigs.”

  “Thank you,” Leon said. It was that easy.

  4

  After Germany, Leon began to see the shadow country again, for the first time in a while. For the past few years he hadn’t noticed it; after the initial shock of the first few months on the road it had faded into the background of his thoughts. But a few days after he returned from Germany, at a truck stop in Georgia, Leon happened to be looking out the window when a girl climbed down from an eighteen-wheeler nearby. She was dressed casually, jeans and a T-shirt, but he realized what she was at the same moment he realized that she was very young. She disappeared between trucks.

  At a gas station that night, he saw another girl climb down from another truck, a hitchhiker this time, wearing a backpack. How old? Seventeen. Sixteen. A young-looking twenty. He couldn’t say. Dark circles under her eyes in the harsh blue light. She saw him watching her and fixed him with a blankly appraising look. You stare at the road and the road stares back. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

  You spend your whole life moving between countries, or so it seemed to Leon. Since the collapse of the Ponzi, he’d often found himself thinking about an essay he’d read once by a man with a terminal illness, a man who wrote with gratitude of the EMTs who’d arrived when he woke one morning and found himself too sick to function, kind men who’d ferried him gently into the country of the sick. The idea had stayed with Leon, and after Germany, in the long quiet hours behind the wheel of the RV, he’d begun formulating a philosophy of layered and overlapping countries. If a medical misfortune sends you into the country of the sick—which has its own rituals, customs, traditions, and rules—then an Alkaitis sends you into an unstable territory, the country of the cheated. Things that were impossible after Alkaitis: retirement, a home without wheels, trusting other people besides Marie. Things that were impossible after visiting Germany with Michael Saparelli: any certainty of his own morality, maintaining his previous belief that he was essentially incorruptible, calling Miranda to ask about other consulting opportunities.

  A week after he returned from Germany there was an email from Saparelli, with a link to a password
-protected video. The email read, “We examined Ms. Smith’s laptop and reviewed hours of video. Several videos like this one, some shot in very bad weather. Thought you should see it; supports our conclusion that her death was most likely accidental. Remember weather was bad the night she disappeared.”

  It was a short clip, five minutes or so, shot from a rear deck, at night. Vincent had recorded several minutes of ocean, the wake of the ship illuminated in moonlight, and then the camera angle changed: she stepped forward and peered over the railing, which on this particular deck wasn’t especially high. She leaned over alarmingly, so that the shot was straight down at the ocean below.

  Leon played it twice more, then closed his laptop. He understood that Saparelli was doing him a kindness, sending him evidence to assuage Leon’s conscience and support the narrative of the report. Leon and Marie were in Washington State that night, in a private campground that was almost deserted in the off-season. Night was falling outside, the branches of fir and cedar silhouetted black against the fading sky. The video proved nothing except a certain recklessness, but the video also made it easy to fill in a narrative: rough seas, high winds, a distracted woman on a slippery deck, a low railing. Perhaps Bell had walked off the ship because he’d killed his girlfriend, but on the other hand, perhaps he’d walked off the ship because the woman he loved had disappeared.

  “This is such a beautiful place,” Marie said one night, a year after Leon returned from Germany. There had been no more consulting contracts. They’d just spent the pre-Christmas season at a warehouse in Arizona, ten-hour days of walking quickly over concrete floors with a handheld scanner, bending and lifting, and had retreated to a campground outside Santa Fe to recuperate. Difficult work, and it got harder every year, but they’d made enough money to get the engine repaired and add to their emergency fund, and now they were resting in the high desert. Across the road was a tiny graveyard of wood and concrete crosses, a white picket fence sagging around the perimeter.

  “We could do a lot worse,” Leon said. They were sitting at a picnic bench by the RV, looking at a view of distant mountains turning violet in the sunset, and he felt at that moment that all was well with the world.

  “We move through this world so lightly,” said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favourite songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of humanity, all these individual lives passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t blame his chill on the encroaching night. In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.

  They sat watching the sunset fading out behind the mountains, they stayed out well after dark until the sky blazed with stars, but they had to go in eventually and so they rose stiffly and returned to the warmth of the RV, performed the various tasks of getting ready for bed, kissed one another good night. Marie turned out the light and was asleep within minutes. Leon lay awake in the dark.

  14

  The Office Chorus

  December 2029

  “Most memorable job?” Simone hears herself say at a cocktail party in Atlanta, where she lives with her husband and three children and works for a company that sells clothes on the internet. “Oh, that one’s easy.” She’s in a circle of colleagues, holding court. “Any of you remember Jonathan Alkaitis? That Ponzi scheme, way back in 2008?”

  “No,” her assistant says. Her name is Keisha. She was three years old when Alkaitis went to prison.

  “That Jonathan Alkaitis?” An older colleague. “He stole my grandpa’s retirement savings.”

  “Oh my god, that’s terrible,” Keisha says. “What did he do?”

  “My grandpa? Spent the last decade of his life in my mother’s guest bedroom. You never met a more embittered man. Simone, you had some connection with Alkaitis?”

  “I was his last secretary before he went to prison.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “Oh my god,” Keisha says, looking at her boss in the way administrative assistants do when it’s just dawned on them that the boss was once an administrative assistant.

  “I’d just moved to New York,” Simone said, “so I was approximately twelve years old, and the city had a kind of sparkle to it. I got a job pretty quickly, at this financial place in Midtown, receptionist duties with some light secretarial work. Three weeks in, I’m just about ready to die of boredom, and then one day I walk into a meeting with a tray of coffee—”

  “You had to get coffee?” Keisha has to get coffee twice a day.

  “That wasn’t even the most boring thing I had to do,” Simone says, choosing to ignore Keisha’s tone. “Anyway, Alkaitis is having a meeting with his staff, and he calls for coffee, so I bring it in on a tray. When I walk into the room, there’s just this very fraught atmosphere. Like everyone was scared. I don’t know that I can really explain it, it was like . . . help me out here, Keisha, you’re the poetry major.”

  “An atmosphere of dread?”

  “Thank you, yes, exactly. An atmosphere of dread, like someone had just said something awful or something. I’m just leaving with the tray, and as I’m closing the door, I hear Alkaitis say, ‘Look, we all know what we do here.’”

  “Wow. This was just before he was arrested?”

  “Literally the day before. Then he comes to me an hour later and asks me to go buy paper shredders.” She’s honed the story over the years, made it sharper and more entertaining, and now, as always, she has to carefully suppress the vision of Claire in the back of the black SUV that carried her home the next night. What became of Claire? She doesn’t want to know.

  “Which were you, though?” Keisha asks, toward the end of the story. “His secretary, or his receptionist?”

  “Bit of both,” Simone says. “More the latter. Does it matter?”

  “Well, probably only from a word-derivation sense,” Keisha says with the hesitance of people who know no one else is nearly as interested in the topic as they are, and the conversation moves on, Simone forgets to ask what she means, but she looks it up later in the quiet of her bedroom, her husband sleeping beside her. She was never Alkaitis’s secretary, she realizes now, when she looks up the word. A secretary is a keeper of secrets.

  By then, when Simone is in her mid-forties, the rest of us have served our sentences—four years, eight years, ten years—and have been released from prison, although Oskar was released and then sent back in for a different crime. We’re released in different years and from different facilities. We emerge into an altered world in various states of disarray, clutching our belongings in our hands. Harvey is the first, because in light of his invaluable assistance to the prosecution he was sentenced to time served—four years of shuttling between the orderly hell of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan and the opulent offices of the court-appointed asset trustee uptown, four years of acting as a tour guide to the Ponzi by day and lying alone in his cell at night and on weekends—and after the sentencing he obtains permission from his probation officer to leave the state and move to New Jersey, where his sister owns an ice-cream shop. He serves ice cream near the beach and lives in her basement.

  Ron avoids conviction but not divorce. He lives with his parents in Rochester, in upstate New York, and has a job taking tickets at a movie theatre.

  Oskar and Joelle are dropped off at bus depots, in different years and in different states: Joelle travels from Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she sits for a long time in the Greyhound waiting room, watching mothers with their children, until finally her sister arrives, late as always, chattering about traff
ic and weather and the spare room where Joelle’s welcome to stay until she gets back on her feet, whatever that means; Oskar stands for a while in front of an information board at the Indianapolis bus station and eventually boards a bus bound for Lexington, the destination chosen because the bus is leaving soon and he can afford the ticket. He drifts off to sleep and wakes in the mountains under cloudy skies, pine trees rising into mist on steep hillsides, and the sheer beauty of the world brings tears to his eyes. This is a landscape that he holds on to when he’s arrested on drug charges a year later, handcuffed on the sidewalk at two a.m. and shoved into the squad car, where he closes his eyes on the way to the station and takes himself back to this moment on the bus on the way to Kentucky, a vision of steep slopes, pine trees, mist.

  Enrico has two small daughters and a wife who thinks his name is José. It isn’t an especially happy marriage, but they have a nice house by the beach. The rest of us are united by our obsession with Enrico. In our imaginations he has become a heroic figure, leading a life of verve and mystery beyond the southern border. But in his actual life he watches his daughters and his wife chasing one another on the beach in the twilight, and thinks about how they will fare if—not if, when, surely when—he is finally apprehended and taken away. He can’t escape the dread. Once he was proud of himself for evading his fate, but more and more lately he feels it moving toward him, his fate approaching from a long way off. He is always waiting for a slow car with dark windows, a tap on the shoulder, a knock on the door.