The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel Page 0,111

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.”

5

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—

6

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

7

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—

8

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—

9

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?”

I’m visiting from the ocean, I almost say, but I’m distracted just then because I think I just saw Faisal walk by the window with a woman who looks vaguely familiar—is that Yvette Bertolli?—and in any event the ocean isn’t exactly where I am, or if I’m there I am also somewhere else—

10

Some time has passed. I’ve been drifting through memories. I visit a street in some distant city where my brother sits in a doorway, because I heard him talking to me, but when he looks up and sees me he has nothing to say; I move for a while through Vancouver, walking the neighborhood where I lived when I was seventeen, although walking isn’t quite the word for the way I travel now; I search for Mirella and find her sitting alone and pensive in some beautiful interior, a loft of some kind, staring at her phone, she looks up and frowns but doesn’t seem to see me there—

11

In memory I’m back at Le Veau d’Or, in the interior of gold and red, listening to my least favorite of Jonathan’s investors talk about a singer. No, not a singer, a Ponzi scheme. “Couldn’t recognize an opportunity,” Lenny Xavier said, talking about the singer. “Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

I watched Jonathan’s look of alarm, the way he leaned forward as he spoke, his obvious desperation to stop Lenny from talking—“Let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk”—and Lenny’s smirk as he raised his glass: “All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” He knew, but of course I knew too, if not the details of the scheme than the fact that there was a scheme, because I’d been pretending to be Jonathan’s wife for months by then, it was just that I’d chosen not to understand—

12

I look for Paul again and find him in the desert, outside a low white building that seems to shine in the twilight. He just stepped out of the door, and he’s lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. He looks up and sees me, drops the cigarette and then retrieves it.

“You,” he says. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re really there?”

“I don’t know how to answer either of those questions,” I tell him.

“I was just talking about you,” he says, “in my session just now. I was just telling my counselor all the things I’ve never told anyone.” I can’t see his face clearly in the fading light, but he sounds like he’s been crying. “Vincent, before you go again, can I just tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it.”

“I was a thief too,” I tell him, “we both got corrupted,” and I can tell he doesn’t understand but I don’t want to stay here and explain it to him, there’s somewhere else I’d rather be, so I move away from the desert and away from Paul, all the way to Caiette.

I’m on the beach, not far from the pier where the mail boat comes in, and my mother is here. She’s sitting some distance away, on a driftwood log, hands folded on her lap, with an air of waiting calmly for an appointment. Her hair is still braided, she’s still thirty-six years old, still in the red cardigan she was wearing the day she disappeared. It was an accident, of course it was, she would never have left me on purpose. She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name.