at all times. He kisses Vincent good night and hails a taxi to the airport.
In the counterlife, Claire visits him in Dubai. She is happy to see him. She disapproves of his actions, but they can laugh about it. Their conversations are effortless. In the counterlife, Claire isn’t the one who called the FBI.
* * *
—
Claire has never visited him in prison and will not take his calls.
* * *
—
He wrote Claire a letter his first month in prison, but she responded only with two pages of trial transcript, from the initial hearing where he had to keep saying guilty over and over again. He remembers standing there and repeating the word, nauseous, sweat trickling down his back. On the page it looks strange and fragmented, like bad poetry or a script.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count One of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: Mr. Alkaitis, please speak up so I can hear you.
THE DEFENDANT: I’m sorry, Your Honor. I plead guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Two of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Three of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Four of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Five of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Six of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Seven of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Eight of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Nine of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Ten of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Eleven of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
THE COURT: How do you now plead to Count Twelve of the information, guilty or not guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.
7
SEAFARER
2008–2013
The Neptune Cumberland
Vincent left land on a bright blue day with clouds like popcorn, in August 2013. Her first glimpse of the Neptune Cumberland was at Port Newark. She was escorted to the ship by port security, where she had to wait by the gangway stairs for what seemed like a long time. She was nervous and excited. There were other people around, but they were out of sight, either high overhead in the cabs of cranes or driving trucks laden with containers. She’d known where she was going, she’d studied the coursework and read the books, but the scale of this world was still astonishing to her. The hull of the Neptune Cumberland was a sheer wall of steel. The cranes were the size of Manhattan towers. She knew that the containers could weigh as much as sixty-seven thousand pounds, but the cranes plucked them from the flatbed trucks as if they were nothing, and there was an improbable grace in that illusion of weightlessness. She stood in a landscape of unadulterated industry and enormous machines, a port where humans had no place, feeling smaller and smaller, until her escorts appeared, two men descending the white steel steps from the deck. It took them a long time to reach her. They introduced themselves as they stepped down onto land: Geoffrey Bell and Felix Mendoza, third mate and steward, her colleague and her boss respectively.
“Welcome aboard,” Mendoza said.
“Yes, welcome,” said Bell. They shook her hand, and the port security guy got back in his car and drove off. Mendoza led the way and Bell followed with her suitcase, although she could easily have managed it herself.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Mendoza said. He kept up a running monologue all the way up the stairs. He’d specifically requested an assistant cook with experience in more than one restaurant, he said, because he’d been at sea for too long and frankly could use some new menu ideas. He hoped Vincent didn’t mind starting tonight. (She didn’t.) He was glad she was Canadian because several of his favorite colleagues over the years had been Canadian too. She let him talk, because all she wanted was to absorb this place, the deck high above the port, and she kept thinking, I’m here, I’m actually here,