code of some kind, I suppose,” Alkaitis says, a little resentful at being jolted out of the counterlife.
“I get the need for structure,” Churchwell says. “Sense of belonging, familial feeling, sure, I get it. All I’m saying is, don’t talk to me about your code of honor when you’re doing a fifty-year bid for child pornography.”
* * *
—
The child pornographer, Tait, had no tattoos when he came to Florence—upon arrival he was a pale, soft person with glasses and unmarked skin—but now he has a little swastika inked on his back. “Some people have families from the beginning,” he says. “Other people have to look a little harder.” This is in the cafeteria. Alkaitis, who expends a great deal of effort trying not to think about his family, lets himself drift. One of the things he likes about the counterlife is that Tait isn’t there. Say it’s the other hotel, not the one on the mainland with the view of the horizon but the one on that island, that man-made island whose name he can’t remember that’s shaped like a palm tree. In that case, the view is of the stagnant trapped water between the palm fronds, as it were, a gaudy row of McMansions shimmering in the heat on the opposite shore. He liked that suite. It was enormous. Vincent spent a lot of time in the hot tub.
But no, that’s memory, not the counterlife. Vincent isn’t in the counterlife. He feels it’s important to keep the two separate, memory vs. counterlife, but he’s been finding the separation increasingly difficult. It’s a permeable border. In memory, the air-conditioning was so aggressive that she had trouble keeping warm, which was why she was always in the hot tub, whereas in the counterlife she’s not there at all.
In the counterlife he turns away from the view of McMansions and leaves the room, walks out into the wide corridor with its elaborately patterned strip of carpeting, into the elevator made of dark mirrored surfaces, which opens unexpectedly into the lobby of the Hotel Caiette, where Vincent sits with Walter, the night manager, on leather armchairs. This is a memory: they came back here a year before he was arrested. He woke up alone in the bed, he remembers, he woke at five a.m. and went looking for her, found her here in the lobby with Walter.
The memory stays with him because when she looked up, her mask slipped just a little, and for just a flash he saw something like disappointment on her face. She wasn’t happy to see him. But here memory and the counterlife diverge, because while in real life he got involved in one of those painfully superficial conversations about jet lag, in the counterlife his gaze has shifted to the window, where outside it seems much too bright for five in the morning in British Columbia, a different quality of sunlight altogether, because once again he’s in Dubai, on the palm-tree island, looking out at houses across the narrow bay, and now the lobby is empty.
* * *
—
Do all of the other men have counterlives too? Alkaitis searches their faces for clues. He’s never been curious about other people before. He doesn’t know how to ask. But he sees them gazing into the distance and wonders where they are.
* * *
—
“You ever think about alternate universes?” he asks Churchwell, sometime in early 2015. He came across the idea at some point in his free life and dismissed it, because it sounded frankly ridiculous, but now it holds increasing appeal. Churchwell isn’t a friend, exactly, but they often eat at the same table because they’re part of the same loose-knit club of people who are never going to be free again, also part of a different loose-knit club of New Yorkers. These clubs are called cars, which Alkaitis likes. We’re all together in the same car, he finds himself thinking sometimes, with a little flicker of camaraderie, when he’s with Churchwell or one of the other lifers, although of course he’d never voice this aloud and also it’s depressing if you think about it too much. (We’re all together in the same car that’s stalled and will never go anywhere ever again.) Churchwell can be counted on to have heard of multiverse theory or anything else anyone mentions, because all he ever does is read books and write letters. Churchwell was an honest-to-god double agent, CIA/KGB, who’s using his life sentence as an opportunity to get some