Jumeirah, in Dubai. I don’t remember if there was a street number.”
* * *
—
He leaves the doctor’s office with a sense of unease. He knows he messed up that last answer, but is it his fault that his life here is so boring that it sometimes takes him a minute or two to snap out of the counterlife and back to reality, if that’s what this is? “I’m distracted, not demented,” he mutters to himself, loudly enough that the guard escorting him back to the cell block glances at him. It isn’t his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the counterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.
* * *
—
An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?
* * *
—
When he’s not in the counterlife, he has dreams in which nothing happens except a mounting sense of dread. In the dream, he knows that someone is approaching, and then one evening he’s reading the paper in the cell after dinner—awake, not dreaming—and he hears a voice say, quite distinctly, “I’m here.”
He looks up. Hazelton has been pacing for a solid hour, but it wasn’t Hazelton who spoke. Alkaitis is quiet for a long time before he can bring himself to say anything.
“You believe in ghosts?” Alkaitis asks as casually as possible.
Hazelton grins, apparently delighted by the question. Hazelton is an understimulated person who longs for conversation. “I don’t know, bro, I always wanted to believe in ghosts, I think it’d be cool if they were floating around, but I’m not so sure they’re real.”
“You ever met anyone who saw one?” What he doesn’t tell Hazelton is that Faisal is standing in a corner of the cell. Alkaitis has been trying to convince himself that he’s hallucinating. Faisal cannot possibly be in this room, because a) it’s a prison cell and b) Faisal is dead. Nonetheless, Faisal looks alarmingly real. He’s wearing his favorite gold velvet slippers. He’s standing under the cell window, craning his neck to look at the moon.
“I knew a guy who swore he’d seen one. But the ghost he’d seen, it was a guy he killed by accident in a robbery.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Nah. Well, kind of. I mean, I don’t think it was an actual ghost, I think it was just his guilty conscience.”
Faisal flickers slightly, like a faulty hologram, then blinks out.
9
A FAIRY TALE
2008
The Boat
In the last September Vincent and Alkaitis spent together, they “went sailing,” as he called it, which seemed an odd way to describe a few days of lounging around on an enormous boat with no sails. He invited his friend Olivia, who Vincent gathered had known Jonathan’s brother, and at night the three of them had dinner and then drank together in the breeze on deck. Vincent, who always tried to stay sharp, could make a single cocktail last for hours, but she liked making drinks for other people.
“We were just talking about you,” Olivia said when Vincent returned to the deck with a fresh round that she’d mixed inside.
“I hope you made up some interesting rumors, at least,” Vincent said.
“We didn’t have to,” Jonathan said. “You’re an interesting person.” He accepted his drink from Vincent with a little nod and passed the other glass to Olivia.
“You remind me so much of myself at your age,” Olivia said with an obvious air of bestowing a compliment.
“Oh,” Vincent said. “I’m flattered.” She glanced at Jonathan, who was suppressing a smile. Olivia sipped her drink and gazed out at the ocean.
“This is delicious,” Olivia said. “Thank you.”
“I’m so glad you like it.” Vincent was charmed by Olivia, as she knew Jonathan was, but something about Olivia made Vincent a little sad. Olivia’s dress was too formal, her lipstick was too bright, her hair was freshly trimmed, she was slightly too attentive in the way she looked at Jonathan, and the combined effect was overeager. You’re showing your hand, Vincent wanted to tell her, you can’t let anyone see how hard you’re trying, but of course there was no way to give advice to a woman two or three times her age.
“Do you ever go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music?” Olivia asked after a while. “My sister was just telling me the other day about a show she’d seen there, and it occurred to me, I haven’t gone in years.”
“You know