The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel Page 0,109
of Vincent. The street he was on now looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t be sure if that was because he was close to the hotel or if it was just that he was going in circles. He stopped walking and sat in a doorway, because he was tired and in his current state the rain wasn’t a problem, sat on the step and rested his head on his arms. Should he try to find Vincent, contact her somehow, offer to share some of his good fortune? No, he needed the money. All of it. I’ve never been able to completely grasp what my responsibilities are, he told her. Sometimes when he spoke to Vincent now, he was the only one talking, while she just watched and listened to him. The doorway was unexpectedly comfortable. He’d just take a little nap, he decided, he’d just rest for a minute and then find his hotel and sleep properly.
But he wasn’t alone. He sensed someone watching him. When he looked up, there was a woman standing just on the other side of the narrow street. She was wearing some sort of uniform, with a long white apron and a handkerchief tied over her hair. She must be a cook from a local restaurant, he decided, perhaps someone who’d just stepped out on a late-night dinner break, but if she was taking a break, she was spending her time very strangely, just staring at him instead of getting something to eat or smoking a cigarette. She looked familiar, she couldn’t possibly be Vincent but—
“Vincent?” he said, and perhaps he’d imagined her, in any event she was gone, but for the rest of his life he would tell the story as if she’d really been there, he’d pull it out like a card trick whenever the subject of ghosts came up—“I was sitting on a step in Edinburgh, and I saw my half sister standing there on the other side of the street, and then she was gone, like she just blinked out. I started looking for her, and what I found out weeks later was that she’d actually died that night, maybe even that minute, thousands of miles away…”—and he would always play it as the real thing, as if he wasn’t hallucinating and the woman he saw was really Vincent and Vincent was really a ghost and the ghost was really there on the street with him, whatever that means—what does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life—but uncertainty would always pull at him and he could never be sure; later he would wonder if he actually saw her standing there in an apron or if he added the apron to the memory in retrospect when he found out she’d been a cook; and always the question that pulled at him even at that moment, sitting in a doorway in the rain, drifting at the edge of sleep: Did he really see her, standing there on the street? Or was he just drunk and high, lost in a foreign city far from home, delirious with exhaustion and seeing things in the dark?
16
VINCENT IN THE OCEAN
1
Begin at the end:
Plummeting down the side of the ship
The horizon flipping once, twice, camera flying from my hand
It felt like plunging into shards of ice.
2
No, begin twenty minutes earlier:
“Where were you last night?” Geoffrey asks. “I was looking for you after my shift.” It is December 2018, and we’ve been together for years now, on and off, coming together and then agreeing to be apart. There are certain frictions: he wanted to marry me once, but I decided long ago that I will marry no one and will never again be dependent on another human being; he talks about quitting the ocean and living together somewhere, but I have no desire to return to land. Tonight we’re together, although we were fighting earlier, and he lies beside me in my bed. We’ve been watching my suitcase slide back and forth across the room. This is the third night of heavy weather.
“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.”