The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel Page 0,100

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 theater.

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 traffic 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.

15

THE HOTEL

1

On a late spring night in the Hotel Caiette, in 2005, the night houseman was sweeping the lobby when a guest spoke to him. “You missed a spot,” she said. Paul forced his face into a semblance of a smile and hated his life.

“I’m kidding,” the guest said, “I’m sorry, that was a terrible joke. In all seriousness, though, can you come over here for a moment?” The woman was standing by the window, a scotch in her hand. She was old, or so it seemed to Paul at the time—in retrospect, she was probably only about forty—but there was something striking about her. She conveyed a general impression of having her life together, which was a state to which Paul could only aspire. He carried the broom over awkwardly and stood near her.

“Can I help you with something?” He was pleased with himself for thinking to say this. It sounded very butlerlike, which was