The Glass Hotel

⁶ THE COUNTERLIFE

No star burns forever. Words scratched into the wall by Alkaitis’s bunk, etched so delicately and in such a spidery fashion that from any distance at all they look like a smudge or a crack in the paint, at exactly the right spot so he sees them when he turns his face to the wall. He’s never had much interest in earth science but of course he knows the sun is a star, everyone knows that, so is the point just that the world will eventually end, in which case, why not just write that? Alkaitis has limited patience for poetry.

“Oh, that was Roberts,” his cellmate tells him. “Guy here before you.” Hazelton is doing ten to fifteen for grand larceny. He talks too much. He is nervous and twitchy but seems to mean well. He’s exactly half Alkaitis’s age and likes to talk about how he still has his whole life ahead of him, when he gets out of here it’s all going to be different, etc. Roberts has come up in conversation before. “Got transferred to the hospital,” Hazelton says. “He had some kind of heart thing.”

“What was he like?”

“Roberts? Old guy, maybe sixty. Sorry. No offense.”

“None taken.” Time moves differently in prison than in Manhattan or in the Connecticut suburbs. In prison, sixty is old.

“Reasonable guy, never had problems with anybody. We called him Professor. He wore glasses. He was always reading books.”

“What kind of books?”

“The kind with Martian chicks and exploding planets on the cover.”

“I see.” Alkaitis tries to picture life as it was lived in this room before him: Roberts reading sci-fi, serious and bespectacled, disappearing into stories about alien planets while Hazelton chattered and cracked his knuckles and paced. “Why was he here?”

“He didn’t want to talk about it. Actually, he didn’t talk about anything. Real quiet guy, just sat there staring into space a lot.”

This summons an unexpected memory of his mother. For three years after Lucas died, Alkaitis used to come home from school sometimes and find his mother sitting perfectly still in the living room, staring at nothing, like she was watching a film only she could see.

“Was he depressed?” Alkaitis asks.

“Bro, it’s prison. Everyone’s depressed.”

Is Alkaitis depressed? Sure, in a manner of speaking, but his life here isn’t as bad as he thought it would be, once the initial shock wears off. He was arrested in December 2008 and six months later he arrived in his new home outside the town of Florence, South Carolina, a medium-security federal correctional institute known officially as FCI Florence Medium 1, not to be confused with FCI Florence Medium 2, which is technically the same security level but considerably harsher. Medium 1 is for the shrinking violets, as Tait memorably put it. Tait is doing a fifty-year bid for child pornography and as such would probably get killed in his first week in any other prison. Medium 1 is for prisoners who are thought to be too vulnerable for the general population: child molesters, dirty cops, the medically compromised, celebrities, fragile bespectacled hackers, and spies. There’s a maximum-security prison in the same complex, also a hospital. The hospital scares Alkaitis, because it’s the place where old men disappear.

He thinks of Roberts sometimes when he steps out into the yard. What’s striking about the yard is its terminal blandness. Green grass crisscrossed with cement pathways, the pathways designed for inmates to walk as efficiently as possible between buildings during periods of movement. There’s a separate recreation yard with a jogging track, its aesthetics equally impoverished. Everyone is dressed in khaki and gray, except the guards, who wear navy blue and black. The buildings are beige with blue accents. Outside the fence, there’s a distant tree line, all of the trees the exact same shade as the grass. There just aren’t enough colors here, that’s his first impression. It’s incomprehensible that this place exists in the same world as, say, Manhattan, so when he’s crossing the yard he sometimes pretends he’s on an alien planet.

Journalists write to him sometimes. “What does it feel like to be sentenced to 170 years?” they ask.

He doesn’t reply to this, because he knows the answer will sound insane: it feels like delirium. One morning when he was twenty-five, Alkaitis woke up with a high fever. He was living alone on 70th Street back then and had nothing in the apartment to treat a fever, so he had to stagger outside to the nearest bodega. He bought aspirin with some difficulty, too hot, the sidewalk unsteady under his feet, made it back to his building and up the stairs to the landing, where he found himself baffled by the mechanics of opening his apartment door. There was a key in his hand, and a lock on the door, and he understood in an abstract way that these two things fit together, but he couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and this was how he knew he was delirious. For how long did he stand there? Five minutes, ten, a half hour. Who knows. Eventually he made it inside.

In the courtroom in Manhattan, thirty-seven years later, the judge says the number—“one hundred seventy years”—and there’s a vertiginous sensation of movement, time rushing away from him toward that impossible destination, the year 2179. He understands that he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison, but it’s the same confusion he felt in that moment of delirium in his twenties: the rest of his life and prison are two pieces that don’t fit together, the lock and the key, an incomprehensible equation.

He never noticed dandelions before he came here, but in the oppressive blankness of the yard, those little bursts of yellow on the grass are almost shocking. Likewise, the birds. They’re the kind of birds that blend into the landscape on the outside, just robins and ravens and finches and such, but here there’s something extraordinary about the way they alight on the grass and then leave again, flitting in and out of bounds. They are emissaries from another world. The prison rulebook prohibits feeding them, but some guys surreptitiously drop crumbs on the grass.

A few guys who’ve passed through maximum security like to proclaim that FCI Florence Medium 1 is a country club, and it isn’t exactly that but it also isn’t nearly as bad as Alkaitis imagined. A fair number of the men here are elderly and have limited patience for drama, and also no one wants to get sent up to maximum. No one talks about shivs or tries to kill him in the yard. The only sinister thing that happens is when a handful of white nationalist types work out together while everyone else ignores them. They know that if they’re too obvious or cause trouble they’ll get moved to maximum, which is what happened during a nationwide roundup of Aryan Brotherhood guys a few years back, so they mostly confine their activities to synchronized push-ups and grandiose prattle about codes of honor and tribal solidarity. Elsewhere, two brothers who collaborated in a high-profile insurance fraud hold court in their favorite corner. The brothers have employees, even in prison, guys who fetch things for them and wash their clothes in exchange for commissary goods. There are always younger guys jogging around and around, clockwise, and older guys walking on the same track. Elderly mafiosos gossip in the sun.

Alkaitis jogs in circles around the yard, lifts weights, does push-ups, and within six months he’s in the best shape of his life. He isn’t one of those men who keep their days as featureless and as similar as possible to make time move faster. He respects that method of survival, but he tries to do something different every day, on principle. He applies for a job even though he doesn’t have to, given his age, and ends up sweeping the cafeteria. He figures out how the system works and pays another inmate $10 a month to deal with his laundry. He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book. It’s possible to rest here, in the order, in the routine, in the up-at-five count-at-five-fifteen breakfast-at-six etc., one day rolling into the next. In the outside world he used to lie awake at night worrying about being sent to prison, but he sleeps fairly well here, between head counts. There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

“There’s something I can’t stop wondering about,” one of the journalists says. Her name is Julie Freeman. She’s writing a book about him, which he finds immensely flattering. “Okay, so for a long time before your arrest, decades, you had considerable resources at your disposal.”

“I did,” Alkaitis says. “I had an enormous amount of money.”

“And you told me a moment ago that you’d been expecting arrest for a very long time. You knew what was coming. So why didn’t you just flee the country before you were arrested?”

“To be honest,” he says, “it never occurred to me to flee.”

Which is not to say that he doesn’t have regrets. He wishes he’d had more appreciation for the people he was able to associate with, before prison. He never really had friends in his adult life, only investors, but some of them were people whom he genuinely enjoyed. He always very much liked Olivia, whose presence made him feel like his beloved lost brother wasn’t so far away after all, and Faisal, who could talk at fascinating length about subjects like twentieth-century British poetry and the history of jazz. (Faisal is dead now, but no need to think about that.) He’s even nostalgic for some of the investors whom he knew much less well, maybe only met once or twice. Leon Prevant, for instance, the shipping executive whom he’d had drinks with at the Hotel Caiette, the pleasure of getting into a conversation about an industry he knew nothing about, or Terrence Washington, a retired judge at the club in Miami Beach, who seemed to know everything there was to know about the history of New York City.

The people he associates with now are not people he respects, for the most part. There are a few exceptions—the mafiosos who ran terrifying criminal empires, the ex-spy who was a double agent for a decade—but for every godfather and trilingual former spy there are ten guys who are basically thugs. Alkaitis is aware that there’s a hypocritical element to his snobbery, but there’s a difference between a) knowing you’re a criminal just like everyone else here and b) wanting to associate with grown men who can’t read.

“It’s like there’s two different games, moneywise,” Nemirovsky says to the table at breakfast. He’s been here sixteen years for a botched bank robbery. He has a fourth-grade education and is functionally illiterate. “There’s the game everyone knows, where you work your shitty job and get your paycheck and it’s never enough”—nods all around the cafeteria table—“but then there’s this other level, this whole other level of money, where it’s this whole other thing, like this secret game or something and only some people know how to play…”

Nemirovsky isn’t wrong, Alkaitis thinks later, while he’s jogging around the recreation yard. Money is a game he knew how to play. No, money is a country and he had the keys to the kingdom.

He doesn’t tell Julie Freeman this, but now that it’s much too late to flee, Alkaitis finds himself thinking about flight all the time. He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events—a counterlife, if you will—in which he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Why not? He loves the UAE and Dubai in particular, the way it’s possible to live an entire life without going outdoors except to step into smooth cars, floating from beautiful interior to beautiful interior with expert drivers in between. He was last there in 2005, with Vincent. She seemed enchanted by the opulence, although in retrospect it’s begun to occur to him that she may have been acting at least part of the time. She had a significant financial stake in maintaining the appearance of happiness. Anyway. In the counterlife, the hours surrounding the holiday party are very different. When Claire comes to see him in the office on the day of the holiday party, he deflects her. He pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, maintains this air of polite bafflement until she gives up and leaves. He isn’t above a little gaslighting, if that’s what it takes to stay out of prison. In the counterlife, he confesses to nothing. He does not crack. That night he goes with Vincent to the holiday party, and when they leave together, they both return to the pied-à-terre. He kisses her good night as if everything were perfectly normal, revealing nothing of his plans. He stays up when she goes to sleep, drinks some coffee and makes his preparations, stares out at the dark ocean of Central Park and the lights beyond, memorizing a view that he’ll never see again. He waits through the night for the window washers, who rise up the sheer wall of the tower on their suspended platform at dawn.

It’s early in the morning, first light over the park, and they don’t recognize him. Why would they? Over the course of the night he’s given himself a buzz cut, he’s wearing dark glasses and a baseball hat, and—crucially—he’s dressed all in white, just like them, his gym bag slung over his shoulder. He opens the window and speaks with them. “Could I get a ride down to the street?” he asks. They refuse at first, naturally, but he has $5,000 in cash in the pied-à-terre and he gives it all to them, throws in two bottles of an exquisite Grand Cru Classé from his favorite château in Bordeaux and then Vincent’s diamond bracelet and earrings—she’s in the bedroom, still asleep—and persuades them: He just wants a ride down to the street. That’s all. It’ll be over in a few minutes. No one will know. It’s a lot of money and the best wine they’re ever going to drink.

Who are they? It doesn’t matter. A and B. Let’s say they’re young guys who don’t know any better, or they know better but let’s say they have kids to feed. Window washing, that can’t be a particularly well-paying job, unless ascending the glass curtain walls of high-rises is one of those jobs that’s so terrifying no one wants to do it? Anyway, who cares, either way it’s a lot of money, so let’s say they take it. Alkaitis climbs out into the cold, and on the slow descent to the sidewalk, A and B are quiet and respectful, he senses that they’re admiring his forethought in dressing like them—not exactly like them, window washers don’t wear dress shirts, but enough like them that from any distance it’s just three men in white on a suspended platform, an everyday sight in the glass city, and by now the rising sun is reflecting off the tower so no one can look directly at them anyway, because that’s how brilliant his plan is, they descend in the glare and he climbs out and thanks them and hails a taxi to the airport. A few hours later he’s on a flight to Dubai, first-class obviously, in one of those reclining seats that are actually more like a private pod with bed and television. In the counterlife, he reclines the seat flat over the Atlantic and falls into a blissful sleep.

In FCI Florence Medium 1 the lights go on, the alarm for the three a.m. count blaring, and he gets out of bed, neither awake nor asleep, putting on his slippers in an automatic movement, still halfway somewhere else, Hazelton stumbling out of bed across from him. In the counterlife, he is never arrested, let alone sentenced, let alone subject to head counts. (Guards yelling in the corridor—“get up get up get up”—and then one stops in the doorway with his little clicker, and after a few minutes the count is over and it’s possible to go back to bed.) In the counterlife, he transfers all his money into the secret offshore accounts, out of the hands of the American government. By the time his daughter calls the FBI, he’s out of reach. Dubai has no extradition treaty with the United States.

He has enough money to live in Dubai indefinitely, in tranquility, in the cool interiors and the brutal heat. Hotel, or villa? Hotel. He’ll live in a hotel and order room service forever. Villas are a staffing headache. He’s had enough of staff.

“I’d like to ask about your daughter,” Julie Freeman says at their second meeting.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’d prefer not to talk about her. I think Claire deserves her privacy.”

“Fair enough. In that case, I’d like to ask you about your wife.”

“Do you mean Suzanne, or Vincent?”

“I thought I’d start with Vincent. Does she visit you here?”

“No. Actually, I…” He isn’t sure it’s wise to continue, but who else can he ask? His only visitors are journalists. “Would you stop taking notes, please, just for a moment?”

She sets her pen on the table.

“This is embarrassing,” he says, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this off the record, but do you know where she is?”

“I’ve been looking for her myself. I’d love to talk to her, but wherever she is, she’s keeping a low profile.”

Maybe the descent down the tower with the window washers is a little overdramatic. He could just as easily have kissed Vincent good night after the holiday party, told her he had to go get drinks with an investor and that she shouldn’t wait up for him; he could’ve sent her home in a car while he fled the country. No, he would have had to go back to Greenwich for his passport. Well, if he can rewrite history so that he fled the country, surely the passport isn’t an impediment. In the counterlife, maybe he’s the kind of person who keeps his passport on his person 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.

⁷ SEAFARER

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, while Mendoza led the way into the accommodations house and down a narrow industrial corridor that reminded her of the interiors of the ferries that run from Vancouver to Vancouver Island.

“Take a little time to unpack,” Mendoza said, “and I’ll come back for you in a couple hours.” Bell, who hadn’t said anything since offering to take the suitcase, set it inside the threshold of the room with surprising gentleness and smiled as he closed the door.

The room was more or less what Vincent had expected, small and blandly utilitarian, all imitation-wood cabinetry and white walls. There was a narrow bed, a closet, a desk, a sofa, everything either built into a wall or bolted to the floor. She had her own small bathroom. There was a window, but she kept the curtain closed, because she wanted the ocean to be the first thing she saw through it. From outside there was a constant clanging and grinding and creaking, cranes lowering containers into the holds and stacking them high on the lashing bridges. She unpacked her possessions—clothes, a few books, her camera—and found as she did so that she was thinking of Bell. She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.

She zipped up the empty suitcase, stowed it in the closet, and turned to the stack of sheets and blankets and the well-used pillow on the bed. She made the bed and then sat on it for a while, acclimatizing herself to the room. It was impossible not to think in that moment of the master bedroom suite in Jonathan’s house in Greenwich, the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.

It had taken so much to come here, all the training and studying and certifications and hassle, and when Mendoza came to collect her, when she was shown the galley where she’d spend her working life, it seemed improbable that she was actually here, on board, that she’d successfully left land, and it was all she could do to refrain from grinning like an idiot while he kept up a running monologue about his meal plans—French fries with almost every meal as a matter of policy, say four dinners out of five, because the guys liked them and potatoes were cheap so it helped keep the budget under control; rice biryani twice a week for the same reason—and the first shift was such a blur of information and French fries that she didn’t realize the ship had left Newark until later that night, after the cleanup, when she stumbled grimy and exhausted out onto the deck, a constellation of tiny burns stinging on her forearms from the deep-fat fryer, and found that the air had changed, the humidity broken by a cool breeze that carried no scent of land. They were traveling south toward Charleston, the East Coast of the United States marked by a string of lights on the starboard horizon. She walked to the other side of the ship to look out at the Atlantic, its darkness broken only by the far lights of a distant ship and by airplanes beginning their descents into the eastern cities, and her thought at that moment was that she never wanted to live on land again.

“Why did you want to go to sea?” Geoffrey Bell asked her, the first time they talked. She’d been at sea for a week by then, give or take. The ship had just left the Bahamas and had begun the long Atlantic crossing, toward Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Geoffrey had come to the galley at the end of her shift and had asked if she might like to go for a walk with him. He’d taken her to his favorite place on the ship, a corner of the deck on C level that he liked because it was out of sight of the security cameras, “which I realize sounds sinister,” he said, “now that I’m actually saying it aloud, but the trouble with being on a ship is the lack of privacy, don’t you find?”

“I don’t disagree,” Vincent said. “Is that a barbecue?” There was a strange tubular contraption with four legs chained to a railing.

“Oh, it is,” he said, “but I haven’t seen it used in years.” Onboard barbecues were dismal, he explained. Picture twenty men standing around on a steel deck, trying to make conversation in the wind while they eat hot dogs and chicken, a wall of containers rising up behind them. No, he’s not explaining it right. Not twenty men, twenty coworkers, twenty colleagues who’ve been stuck at sea together for months and are fairly sick of one another’s company, and not a single solitary beer for lubrication, because of the no-alcohol rule. Still, he liked this deck, he said.

Vincent liked it too. It was quiet, except for the ever-present hum of the engines. She leaned over the railing to look down at the ocean.

“It’s a pleasure to be out of sight of land,” she said. The horizons were uninterrupted on all sides.

“I notice you didn’t answer my question.”

“Right, you asked why I went to sea.”

“It’s not my best conversational opener,” he said. “Maybe even kind of overly obvious, since here we are, standing on a ship. But one has to start somewhere.”

“It’s a strange story,” Vincent said.

“Thank god. I haven’t heard a decent story in months.”

“Well,” Vincent said. “I was with a man for a while. It ended in a complicated way.”

“I see,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry, if it’s something you’d prefer not to talk about.”

She could see that he perceived the outlines of a story, lurking under the surface like an iceberg, and two possibilities opened before her, two variations: she could tell him that she’d been affiliated with a criminal and risk his contempt, or she could be one of those exhaustingly mysterious people whom no one wants to talk to because they can’t open their mouths without hinting at dark secrets that they can’t quite bring themselves to reveal. “No, it’s fine. Actually, it wasn’t quite…I didn’t leave land because of what he did, specifically,” she said. “I left land because I kept running into the wrong people.”

“That’s the trouble with land,” Geoffrey said. “It’s got too many people on it.”

At first, it seemed there would be a way to withstand the collapse of the kingdom of money, to remain in the city that she loved and find a new life there. The morning after Jonathan’s last holiday party, she’d woken alone and shivering in the pied-à-terre in Manhattan. The duvet had slipped to the floor. She rose, showered, made some coffee, and spent a few minutes looking out at the view of Central Park. She knew by then that Jonathan was going to be arrested, and knew this was the last time she’d admire this view. Jonathan had left a beautiful little duffel bag in the pied-à-terre, creamy white with brown leather accents. Her side of the closet held two gowns, which she thought might have some resale value, and there were also five thousand dollars in cash and some jewelry in the safe. She put the cash and the jewelry in the bag and in her jacket, rolled the dresses carefully into the duffel bag along with a couple changes of clothes.

She brought her coffee to the bathroom, where she reached for the lacquered box where she kept her makeup here, and then stopped. In all of her time with Jonathan, she had never failed to put on makeup. She thought her face looked strange without it, but now, on this particular morning, with her pretend husband either on the verge of arrest or in police custody, there was some appeal in the thought of not looking like herself. Vincent studied her face in the mirror while she drank her coffee. She saw that at some point in the near past she had slipped over a border, into the era of her life where when she was tired she looked not just tired but slightly older. She was almost twenty-eight years old.

She found a pair of nail scissors in a drawer and began methodically cutting off her hair. Her head felt immediately lighter, and a little cold. A half hour later, when she left the building for the last time, the concierge in the lobby did a double take before his smile snapped into place. She got her hair recut at the first salon she passed—“Did your kid cut your hair while you were sleeping?” the stylist asked, concerned—and then stopped into a drugstore, where she bought a pair of minimum-strength reading glasses, although her eyes were fine. Vincent examined herself in a drugstore mirror. In glasses, without makeup, her hair cut short, she thought she looked like a very different person.

Within a week she’d found a place to live in a satellite town a few stops up the Hudson Line from Grand Central, an au pair’s suite that was really just a room above a garage, with a bathroom carved out of one corner and a kitchenette in another. She slept on a mattress on the floor and had a dresser that she’d purchased from Goodwill for $40, a card table that her landlord had given her, and a single chair that she’d found on the street on garbage day. It was enough. Within three weeks of Jonathan’s arrest, she’d found a job bartending in Chelsea. The hours weren’t enough, so she was also a kitchen trainee at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. She preferred the kitchen, because bartending is a performance. The public streams through your workplace and watches your every move. Every time she looked up and saw a new face at the bar, there was a moment of terror when she thought it was going to be an investor.

She saw Mirella again, just once, a year and a half later. In the spring of 2010, Vincent was tending bar in Chelsea when Mirella came in with a group of people, six or seven of them. Mirella’s hair was teased into a magnificent Afro. Her lipstick was fire-engine red. She was dressed in one of those outfits that look casual at first glance but are in fact comprised entirely of coded signals—the sweatshirt that cost $700, the jeans whose rips were carefully executed by artisans in Detroit, the scuffed boots that retailed for a thousand dollars, etc. She looked spectacular.

“Regulars,” Ned said, following the direction of Vincent’s gaze. He was her best friend at work, a mild sort of person who was pursuing an MFA in poetry that he didn’t want to talk about. They were both working the bar that night, although the place wasn’t crowded enough to justify both of them.

“Really? I’ve never seen them here.” The hostess was leading Mirella’s group to a booth in the back corner.

“Only because you never work Thursdays.”

A man in a shiny blue blazer had his arm draped over Mirella’s shoulders. Vincent’s desire to be seen by her was matched only by her desire to hide. She had tried to call Mirella three times: once the day after Jonathan was arrested, then twice when she learned that Faisal had died. All three calls went to voicemail.

“You okay?” Ned asked.

“Not at all,” Vincent said. “You mind if I take five?”

“No, go ahead.”

Vincent slipped out through the kitchen door and walked down the block a little. Cherry blossoms had appeared almost overnight on the trees across the street, and the flowers looked like an explosion, like fireworks suspended in the dark. The cigarette couldn’t last forever, and when she came back in, Mirella and one of her friends had left the group at the table and moved to the bar. Whatever Mirella had to say, whatever accusations and condemnations she’d been rehearsing these past two years, she could say them now, and Vincent could tell her that words couldn’t express how sorry she was, and that if she’d known—if she’d even suspected—then of course she would have said something, she would have told Mirella immediately, she would have called the FBI herself. I didn’t know, Vincent wanted to tell her, I didn’t know anything, but I am so sorry. Then they could go their separate ways with nominally lighter burdens, or something like that.

“Hello,” Mirella said, smiling politely at Vincent, “do you have any bar snacks?”

“Oh, that’s the best idea ever,” her friend said. She was about Vincent and Mirella’s age, at some indeterminate point in her thirties, with aggressively bleached hair cut in a squared-off bob like a 1920s flapper.

“Bar snacks,” Vincent repeated. “Um, yes, mixed nuts or pretzels?”

“Mixed nuts!” the flapper said. “God yes, that’s exactly what I need. This martini’s super-sweet.”

“Actually,” Mirella said, holding Vincent’s gaze, “could we possibly have both?”

“Of course. Mixed nuts and pretzels, coming right up.” This was a dream, wasn’t it?

“I haven’t had mixed nuts in like a million years,” the flapper said to Mirella.

“I’d say you’ve been missing out,” Mirella said.

Vincent felt strangely outside of herself. She observed her hands as she poured mixed nuts and pretzels into little steel bowls. I dreamed you came into my bar and didn’t know me. She set the bowls gently on the bar before her former best friend, who said thanks without looking at Vincent and returned to her conversation. “The thing with New York,” Mirella’s friend was saying as Vincent turned away, “is everybody leaves. I really thought I’d be the exception.”

“Everyone thinks they’re the exception.”

“You’re probably right. It’s just, my friends started taking off ten years ago, going to Atlanta or Minneapolis or wherever, and I guess I thought I’d be the one to stay and make a go of it.”

“But it’s a better job in Milwaukee, isn’t it?”

“I could afford a huge apartment there,” the flapper said. “Probably actually a whole house. I don’t know, it just seems like such a cliché, living in New York City for your twenties and then leaving.”

“Yeah, but people do that for a reason,” Mirella said. “Don’t you ever get the impression that it’s easier to live pretty much everywhere else?” Look at me, Vincent thought, notice me, say my name, but Mirella ignored Vincent as completely as if she were a stranger.

“Hey, excuse me,” Mirella said.

Vincent took off her glasses before she turned to face her.

“Mirella,” she said.

“Could I get another martini?” As though she hadn’t heard her name.

“Of course. What’s that you were drinking, Mirella, a Sunday Morning?”

“No, just a plain old Cosmo.”

“I thought you didn’t like Cosmos,” Vincent said.

“Oh, I’ll take another Midnight in Saigon, please,” the flapper said.

“Coming right up,” Vincent said. Was it possible that she was actually unrecognizable to someone who’d once been her dearest friend? A more likely possibility was that this was Mirella’s revenge, pretending not to know Vincent, or perhaps she was playing the same game Vincent was, living in disguise, except that Mirella’s disguise was more comprehensive and included pointedly not recognizing anyone from her previous life, or alternatively, possibly Vincent was losing her mind and maybe none of her memories were real.

“One Cosmopolitan, one Midnight in Saigon.” Vincent set the drinks on the bar.

“Thanks so much,” Mirella said, and Vincent heard the glasses clink as she turned away. She emptied the tip jar on the counter.

“Little early to count out, isn’t it?” Ned was looking at her curiously. There was no one at the bar now except Mirella and her friend, deep in conversation.

“Ned, I’m sorry about this, but you’re going to have to close up on your own tonight.” Vincent divided the tip money into two piles and pocketed one of them.

“What’s going on? Are you sick?”

“No, I’m walking off the job. I apologize.”

“Vincent, you can’t just—”

“I can, though,” Vincent said, and left him there. She was much more ruthless after Alkaitis than before. She exited via the kitchen door. Mirella didn’t look at her as she left. She wouldn’t have imagined that Mirella could be so cold, but what were they if not actors? You didn’t come from money, Mirella had said to Vincent once, in a different, unimaginable life. If they were plausible in the age of money because they could disguise their origins, why should it be surprising that Mirella was capable of pretending they’d never met? Pretending was their area of mutual expertise.

That night she walked down to lower Manhattan, to the Russian Café, a place she’d frequented during her years with Alkaitis, although if anyone recognized her from that time, they never let on. Her favorite manager was working that night, a woman in her thirties named Ilieva who spoke with a slight Russian accent and had once let slip that she’d acquired her green card in exchange for testimony in a criminal case.

“You have no coat?” Ilieva asked when she came to Vincent’s table. “You’ll freeze to death.”

“I just quit my job,” Vincent said. “I forgot my coat in the break room.”

“You just walked off the job?”

“I did.”

“Glass of red on the house?”

“Thank you,” Vincent said, although the wine here was terrible. The point of this place wasn’t the wine, the point was the atmosphere. Here in the warmth and dim lighting, with scents of coffee and cheesecake in the air, Nina Simone on the sound system, the gripped feeling in her chest was beginning to subside. This place was the one constant between the kingdom of money and her current life.

“So,” Ilieva said when she came back with the wine, “what next? Another bartending job?”

“No, I have my second job, in the other place,” Vincent said. “I’m going to try to get more hours.”

“It’s a kitchen job, isn’t it? What, you want to be a chef, open your own restaurant?”

“No,” Vincent said. “I think I’d like to go to sea.”

Vincent’s mother went to sea in her early twenties. Vincent had always pressed her for stories from when she was young, because while the contours of Vincent’s father’s life were fairly straightforward—an undramatic childhood in the Seattle suburbs, a brief stint studying philosophy before he dropped out and found work as a tree planter—Vincent’s mother’s past held a certain mystery. Vincent’s mother had survived a miserable childhood in a small town in the Prairies—there were aunts, an uncle, and even a set of grandparents whom Vincent had been given to understand she would never meet—and gone east when she was seventeen, to Nova Scotia, where she worked as a waitress and wrote poetry, then at nineteen she got a job as a steward on a Canadian Coast Guard vessel that maintained navigational aids in the shipping lanes. She loved it and hated it in equal measure. She saw the northern lights and sailed past icebergs, but also she was always cold and thought she might actually die of claustrophobia, so she quit after two rotations and drove across the country with a new boyfriend. She was a restless person. Within a year the boyfriend was going to medical school in Vancouver and Vincent’s mother was living precariously in Caiette, writing poetry that was sometimes accepted for publication in obscure literary journals, commuting back and forth on the mail boat and hitchhiking into Port Hardy for a job cleaning houses, until she fell in love with a married man down the road—Vincent’s father—and got pregnant with Vincent. She was still only twenty-three years old.

Vincent’s mother would not talk about her family. “They’re not nice people,” she’d say. “They’re not worth talking about, sweetie, so please don’t ask.” But of the stories she was willing to tell, what Vincent most wanted to hear about was the time on the coast guard vessel, and she pressed her mother for those stories so many times that they began to seem like Vincent’s own memories: she’d never been to that coast but held mental images of the northern lights shifting over a winter sky, the silent towers of icebergs in a dark gray sea. And then after her mother was gone, Vincent started trying to place her mother in the picture—her mother gazing at the iceberg, her mother’s face tilted toward the aurora borealis—but who was her mother at twenty, at twenty-one? It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In memory her mother was stranded forever at thirty-six, the age she’d been when she came into thirteen-year-old Vincent’s bedroom, kissed her on the top of the head—Vincent barely looked up from her book—and said, “I’m just taking the canoe out for a bit, sweetie, I’ll see you later”—before she descended the stairs for the last time.

The day after she saw Mirella, Vincent took the train back into the city and then boarded a southbound subway and rode it to its terminal point, to stand for a while on a white-sand beach at the edge of the city, filming the waves. A cold gray day, but the cold was bracing. A containership was passing on the far horizon. She was thinking of her mother, and then, watching the ship, she found herself thinking of one of her last nights at the Hotel Caiette, a day or two after she first met Jonathan. He’d been eating dinner at the bar that night, and she’d been talking to him, when another guest arrived, a man staying in the hotel with his wife. She couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered a detail of the conversation: “I’m in shipping,” he’d said to Jonathan when the subject of work came up, and this was memorable because he was someone who clearly loved his job, she could see that immediately, the way he lit up when the topic was introduced. Years later, standing by the ocean on a cold spring day, she lowered her camera to watch the passing ship. How difficult would it be to get a job at sea?

“Thailand,” Geoffrey Bell repeated, aboard the Neptune Cumberland in the fall of 2013. “Why are you going to Thailand when your leave comes up?”

“Because I’ve never been,” Vincent said.

“Seems like a solid reason. It’s just that most people use their shore leave to go home.”

“Where would that be, though? I don’t mean this in any kind of tragic sense,” Vincent said, “but I don’t feel that I really have a home on land at this point.”

“Don’t tell me you think of the Neptune Cumberland as home,” Geoffrey said. “You’ve been at sea for, what, two months?”

“Three.”

Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from Newark down to Baltimore and Charleston, from Charleston over to Freeport in the Bahamas, from Freeport to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, up to Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Bremerhaven in Germany, then back across the Atlantic to Newark again. Most of the men on board—she was the only woman—worked for six months straight and then took three months off, and she’d decided to do the same.

Geoffrey smiled but didn’t look up. He was folding a tiny origami swan. She’d told him his cabin was bleak and he’d agreed with her, so they were making little swans and hanging them from his curtain rod. “I had such romantic visions of going to sea,” he said, “as a boy, I mean. You know, see the world, that kind of thing. Turns out most of the world looks very much like a series of interchangeable container ports.”

“And yet you’re still here.”

“I’m still here. One gets sucked in. Did you read that book I gave you for your birthday?” He held up a swan, turning it between his fingers, and passed it to Vincent.

“I’m almost halfway done. I love it.” Vincent pierced the swan with her needle—the commissary sold sewing kits—and drew the fishing line through.

“I thought you would. If you’re halfway through, then you’ve got to the part where they go fishing for birds, haven’t you?”

“Yes. I loved that image.” The book he’d given her was a collection of narratives written by the captain and crew of the Columbia Rediviva, an American trading ship that circled the globe in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and it contained an image that would never leave her: On the last day of 1790, two hundred miles off the coast of Argentina, the air filled with albatrosses. The crew gathered on deck and cast fishing hooks baited with salt pork into the ocean, to pull in the birds diving out of the sky.

“I loved it too. I read the book when I was sixteen, and after that, going to sea was a fixation of mine.” He was having trouble with his latest origami swan: he frowned at it, smoothed out the paper, and started again. “Would you like to hear something mildly devastating?”

“Sure.”

“My father once told me that he’d dreamed of being a pilot. Why, you may ask, might one find this devastating?”

“Because you told me he was a coal miner.” Vincent was standing on his chair to hang swans from the curtain rod, which was otherwise unused, because Geoffrey’s window was always blocked by the container stacks. “God, you’re right, Geoffrey, that’s ghastly. You dream of flying, but instead…”

“I didn’t want to regret not going to sea.”

“That makes perfect sense.”

“Do you like it?” He was holding up another swan, an orange one, a little lopsided.

“Do I like what, your swan?”

“No, all of this. Being at sea. Your life.”

“Yes.” She realized the truth of this as she spoke. “I like all of it. I love all of it. I’ve never been so happy.”

⁸ THE COUNTERLIFE

In the counterlife, Alkaitis moves through a nameless hotel. Outside, the view keeps changing, because he keeps changing his mind about which hotel he’s in. He can’t remember the names of these places, but they come with distinct sets of details and impressions. Let’s say it’s the hotel with the massive white staircase by the reception desk, the suite with the hot tub sunk into the floor by the full-length windows. In that case the view is of a shadowless pale blue sea, meeting the white sky at the blinding horizon.

“These morons think they’re warrior monks or something,” Churchwell says, inclining his head toward the five younger white guys doing calisthenics in unison at the far end of the recreation yard. “All these dumb ideas about codes of honor.”

“Well, you’ve got to have a 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 reading done.

“Who doesn’t? In an alternate universe, I got away with it and I’ve got a sweet pad in Moscow,” Churchwell says.

“I’d live in Dubai. I liked it there.”

“I’ve thought this through. I’d’ve married an oligarch’s daughter, maybe a supermodel? Two or three kids, golden retriever, summer house in a warm country with no extradition treaty.”

“I’d live in Dubai.” He catches Churchwell’s glance and realizes that he already said this.

“Mr. Alkaitis, how are you this afternoon?” The doctor looks too young to be a doctor.

“I’ve been having some trouble with memory and concentration.” He doesn’t add hallucinations, because he doesn’t want to end up on hard-core antipsychotics, and men who go into the hospital often don’t come back. Anyway hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory. But maybe there’s something to be done, some medication that won’t turn him into a shuffling zombie but that might stop or at least slow the deterioration, if deterioration is what he’s facing. He’s trying to be clear-eyed about it.

“Okay. I’m just going to ask you a series of simple questions, and that should give us a better idea of where we’re at. Can you tell me what year it is?”

“Seriously? I’m not that far gone, I hope.”

“I’m not saying you are. Just the first in a series of standard questions to screen you for potential memory problems. What’s the year?”

“Two thousand fifteen,” Alkaitis says. Has he been here for six years already? It seems impossible. Maybe he shouldn’t discount the view from the palm-tree-island hotel, actually. The thing with white-sand beaches, blue sea to the horizon under a cloudless sky: that’s a view with two colors, just blue and white, tranquil but you could die of boredom. But the palm-tree-island hotel looked over an inlet to the enormous houses on the other side, and there’s life in that. One of the mansions was pink, memorable because he and Vincent had laughed at it. It wasn’t a tasteful muted pink, it was pink like Pepto-Bismol.

“What month is it?”

“December,” Alkaitis says. “We were in the Emirates for Christmas.”

The doctor’s face is carefully blank as he makes a note, and Alkaitis realizes his mistake. “I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else. It’s June. June 2015.”

“Good. Do you know today’s date?”

“Sure, it’s the seventeenth. July seventeenth.”

“I’m going to give you a name and address,” the doctor says, “and I’ll ask you to repeat it back to me in a few minutes. Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Jones, twenty-three Cecil Court, London.”

“Okay. Got it.”

“What time is it to the nearest hour?”

Alkaitis glances around but sees no clock in the room.

“To the nearest hour,” the doctor repeats. “Your best guess.”

“Well, our appointment was at ten and you kept me waiting, so I’ll go with eleven.”

“Count backward from twenty to one.”

He counts backward from twenty to one. The details of that weird palm-tree-shaped island are a little hazy. Is it one island, or a collection of islands that taken together form a palm tree? Anyway, that was the hotel where he and Suzanne stayed on his first visit to the UAE, where they held hands over a table in a restaurant that featured a giant aquarium with a shark in it. This was in the last year before her diagnosis, which means that there in that beautiful memory Suzanne is already secretly, invisibly sick, malignant cells proliferating silently on liver and pancreas. God, she was stunning. Much older than Vincent, obviously, but frankly there’s something to be said for having a companion who isn’t young enough to be your daughter, also something to be said for a companion from whom you don’t have to hide. He remembered holding hands with her and discussing the investors. “If you think Lenny Xavier doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said, “I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

“Say the months of the year in reverse order.” The doctor, intruding.

“December, November, October, September, August, June, July…May, April, March. February. January.” Thinking of the thrill of that moment in the hotel, the delight in having a co-conspirator. “You think we can keep it going?” he asked her. Dessert was just arriving: chocolate cake with ice cream for Alkaitis, a dish of fresh fruit for Suzanne.

“Tell me the name and address I gave you earlier,” the doctor says.

“I’m sorry?”

“The address?”

“It was Palm Jumeirah.” Alkaitis smiles, pleased to have remembered the name. “Definitely Palm 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

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 I try not to cross that river if I can help it,” Jonathan said.

“Snob,” Olivia said.

“Guilty as charged. Although, I was just thinking about Brooklyn the other day. I was looking at a real estate listing, this loft a friend of mine was thinking about buying, and I’m looking at all this luxury, some four-thousand-square-foot place in this gorgeous neighborhood by the Manhattan Bridge, and I’m thinking, Whatever this place is now, it has nothing to do with the Brooklyn I used to know. Seemed like a different city.”

“And then there’s BAM,” Olivia said. “My sister Monica was telling me about this show she’d seen, and I realized, when was the last time I’ve been? Two thousand four? Two thousand five?”

“We should all go together,” said Vincent, without much intention, but a month later, back on land, at home with a head cold on a hazy October afternoon, she found herself wondering if she should propose some sort of unexpected evening activity to Jonathan for the weekend, perhaps surprise him with theater tickets or something, and her thoughts drifted back to the conversation. She looked up the Brooklyn Academy of Music online, and found her brother.

It seemed that Paul, against all odds, had attained some success as a composer and performer. In early December he had a three-night series of performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The program was called Distant Northern Land: Soundtracks for Experimental Film. She hadn’t seen him in three years, since the last shift they’d worked together at the Hotel Caiette. In the image on the BAM website, he looked possessed: he was on a stage surrounded by equipment that she didn’t understand, keyboards and inscrutable boxes with dials and knobs, hands blurred with motion, and above him, projected on a screen, was a picture that she thought she recognized as the shoreline of Caiette, a rocky beach with dark evergreens under a cloudy sky.

Vincent closed her eyes. She’d never been very careful with her videos. She’d made them and recorded over them, or made them and then left them in boxes in her childhood room. How often had Paul visited their father without her, in the years after she left Caiette? Often enough, she supposed. There was nothing stopping him from plundering her belongings. She found herself sitting outside by the pool, staring at the water, although she didn’t specifically remember leaving the house.

On a late-summer afternoon in distant childhood, she and her mother had accompanied Paul as far as the Port Hardy airport, where he boarded a propeller plane to Vancouver to catch a connecting flight to Toronto. Vincent would have been ten or so. Paul had been awful all day, laughing at her whenever she said anything, then at the airport he turned away from them with a cursory wave and got into the security line without looking back, and afterward, on the way home with her mother, Vincent was quiet and a little sad.

“The thing with Paul,” her mother said, while they were waiting for the water taxi on the pier at Grace Harbour, “is he’s always seemed to think that you owe him something.” Vincent remembered looking up at her mother, startled by the idea. “You don’t,” her mother said. “Nothing that happened to him is your fault.”

In 2008, by the pool, Vincent heard footsteps and looked up. Anya was approaching with a blanket. “I thought you might need this,” Anya said. “It’s cold out here.”

“Thank you,” Vincent said.

Anya frowned. “Are you crying?”

It was difficult to uphold her contract with Jonathan in the two months that followed, difficult to maintain an air of lightness, but he seemed not to notice. In the last months of 2008, he was working all the time. He was always at the office, or in the study with his door closed. She heard his voice on the phone when she walked by in the hallway but could never quite make out the words. When he was with her, he seemed tired and distracted.

In early December she boarded a series of trains that brought her eventually to the steps of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She’d worried about how to explain a Thursday night absence to Jonathan, but he’d texted to say he was working late and spending the night in the pied-à-terre. She arrived early and lingered outside for a while as a cross-section of affluent Brooklyn assembled on the sidewalk in their uniforms: flat-heeled boots and complicated arrangements of scarves for the women, beards and unflatteringly tight jeans on the men. It was a pleasure to watch them meet one another and pair off, streaming past her in twos and threes and fours, latecomers hurrying around the corner in a fluster of apologies and complaints about the subway. At last Vincent allowed herself to be pulled into the theater with the last of the crowd, found her seat in the front row, and set about the usual preshow business of blowing her nose, unwrapping a cough drop just in case, turning off her phone, anything to not think about what she was about to see.

“Do you know the artist?” the woman beside her whispered. She looked to be in her eighties, white hair arranged into spikes. She was elegantly dressed, but she looked ill; she was emaciated and her hands trembled.

“No.” Vincent felt that this was technically true. She’d known her brother, past tense. The lights were dimming around them.

“I was here last night too,” the woman said. “I just think he’s brilliant.”

“Oh,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to seeing him, then.”

“Do you know the artist?” the woman asked again, after a moment, and Vincent felt a stab of pity.

“Yes,” Vincent said. Applause rose around them, and when she looked up, her brother was walking out onto the stage. Paul was thinner and noticeably older, and she couldn’t tell if his black suit and thin dark tie were meant to be ironic. He looked like an undertaker. He nodded to the audience, smiled at the applause with what seemed to Vincent to be genuine pleasure, and took his place behind a keyboard, then the stage lights dimmed too, until he was barely illuminated. The screen above his head lit up, a field of white with a black title, “Melissa in the Water,” and then the white resolved into a shoreline. Vincent recognized the beach by the pier at Caiette, grainy and oversaturated, the water and sky too blue, the islands in the inlet an unnatural green. Paul’s music sounded at first like white noise, a radio caught between stations. He played a sequence of notes on a keyboard, the notes emerging a few seconds later as cello music, to which he added a quietly meandering piano, moving between the keyboard and a laptop perched on a stand, pressing buttons and tapping pedals to create loops and distortions, a one-man band. The static had taken on a pulsating quality, a steady beat. Onstage, the screen burst into life as a group of children dashed across the frame. Vincent could see from their faces that they were shouting and laughing, but the film had no sound. She remembered this video. This was the first summer without her mother. She’d been living in Vancouver for ten or eleven months—long hours alone in her aunt’s basement with the television, long commutes by bus to school—but she’d come home to visit Dad for the summer. She’d stood on the beach filming the swimmers, a.k.a. the entire underage population of Caiette circa 1995: a little girl whose name she’d forgotten—Amy? Anna?—who stopped at the water’s edge, giggling but afraid to go in; the twins, Carl and Gary, a little older, splashing around in a corner of the frame; Vincent’s friend Melissa, who would have been fourteen but was small for her age and looked closer to twelve. Melissa’s pale hair and the yellow swimsuit and the graininess and oversaturation of the film lent her an air of radiance. She was doing somersaults in the water, laughing when she surfaced. In three years she would move to Vancouver to go to the University of British Columbia and live with Vincent in that ghastly basement apartment on the Downtown Eastside; she would go dancing with Vincent and Paul on the last night of the twentieth century; at nineteen she would develop a drug problem, drop out of school, return to Caiette to live with her parents while she pulled herself together; a year after that she would be hired as a chauffeur and gardening assistant at the Hotel Caiette; but in the video all of this was in the unimaginable future and she was just a kid twisting around in the water like a fish. The music had a shifting, unstable quality that Vincent found unpleasant, like a soundtrack for one of those nightmares where you try to run but your feet won’t move, and now there were voices in the static, overlapping.

On the stage below the projection screen, Paul was in motion, making adjustments to dials, following the projection on his laptop, playing the keyboard at intervals. Vincent sensed movement to her right, and when she looked, the woman had fallen asleep, her head on her chest. Vincent rose and slipped out into the lobby, where the lights and the solid reality of marble and benches made her want to weep with relief, and fled outside into the winter air. She walked over the Manhattan Bridge and all the way up to Grand Central Terminal, trying to steady her thoughts. The idea came to her that she could sue him, but with what proof? He’d been in Caiette every summer and every second Christmas of her childhood. There was no way of proving that he hadn’t filmed the videos himself. And any legal action would be difficult or impossible to hide from Jonathan, for whom she was supposed to be a calm harbor, no drama, no friction. On the train back to Greenwich, she caught sight of her reflection in the window and closed her eyes. She’d started paying her own rent at seventeen. How had she become so dependent on another person? Of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.

In the week that followed, Jonathan worked such long hours that she hardly saw him—small mercy—so she only had to feign lightness for brief periods. She read the news to distract herself, but the news was a litany of economic collapse. She thought of going back to Brooklyn and waiting outside the stage door, but the thought of seeing Paul again was repulsive.

On the following Wednesday, Vincent was awakened by a nightmare for the third time in three nights. She’d been sleeping poorly for longer than that, weeks, but the nightmare was a new and unsettling problem. She was certain that it was the same dream, repeated, but she retained only a vague impression of falling, a sense of catastrophe that persisted in daylight. She stared at the ceiling for a while, Jonathan asleep beside her, before she finally rose and fumbled for her workout clothes—she kept them folded on a chair by the bed—and laced her running shoes in darkness, collected her keys from the hook by the kitchen door. She liked to make a game of leaving the house without turning on any lights. There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.

In the kingdom of money it was important to be thin, but she would have run anyway. She loved the suburbs at this hour, when there was still some mystery here. It was early December but the weather had been well above freezing all week. She walked quickly down the long driveway that led past Gil and Anya’s cottage—no lights in the windows—to the cul-de-sac, where the equally excessive houses of two neighbors glimmered through the trees, and then broke into a light jog when she reached the first real street, the first street that went somewhere. She liked the stillness of the predawn neighborhood, the secrecy of a street where everyone else was sleeping, their windows unlit. Jonathan wouldn’t have liked her to be out alone in the dark, but these streets had never struck her as dangerous, and she carried mace on her key chain. By the time she returned to the house, it was four o’clock and still dark. She left a note for Jonathan, who wouldn’t wake till five-thirty, then showered and dressed and called a taxi to take her to the five a.m. train.

The others on the train at that hour were mostly financial-industry maniacs, eyes bright in the shine of their little screens, sending and receiving messages from other continents. Vincent had a row of seats to herself. After a while the night gave way to shadows and a murky dawn, the towns shifting from collections of lights to silhouettes of rooftops. How could Paul do it, she found herself thinking, how could he steal from her like that, but she was too tired to maintain the line of thought and drifted into a twilight state that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t consciousness, towns reappearing and blinking out between intervals of trees. She woke with a start as the train pulled into Grand Central.

That was the last morning in the kingdom of money. She ate breakfast in a hotel restaurant near Grand Central. There was an hour in a bookstore, time spent in various shops, an interval of newspapers and coffee in an espresso bar in Chelsea. A strange moment: she stepped out of the espresso bar and into a tour group, a pack of tourists following a leader who held a red umbrella up in the air, and just for a moment, she saw her mother in the crowd. Only a flash, but it was unmistakable—the long brown braid down her back, the red cardigan she’d been wearing when she drowned—and then the crowd shifted and her mother was gone. Vincent stood for a long time on the sidewalk, watching the group walk away. Was she hallucinating? She was alert for signs of madness as she walked uptown through the gray city but saw nothing else that seemed obviously unreal. Central Park was monochromatic, dark trees dripping under a colorless sky.

She was on the steps of the Met when Jonathan called.

“Christmas party tonight,” he said. “You want to come by the office around seven-thirty, and we’ll walk over together?”

“Seven-thirty’s perfect,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to it.” She had in fact entirely forgotten about the holiday party. The dress she’d planned to wear was hanging in the bedroom closet in Greenwich, and there was nothing suitable in the pied-à-terre. But the age of money wouldn’t end for a few more hours, so this didn’t constitute an emergency, and she was free to linger for a while with her favorite painting. She had fallen in love with Thomas Eakins’s The Thinker, a massive image of a man in a dark suit, perhaps in his thirties, hands in his pockets, lost in pensive thought. She’d come back to this gallery several times in the past few weeks and stood before this painting, unaccountably moved by it. Her mother would have liked it, she thought.

When she turned to leave, she saw a man she recognized. He’d been looking at the same painting, standing back a little.

“Oskar,” she said. “You work with my husband, don’t you?”

“In the asset management unit.” They shook hands. “Nice to see you again.”

“I don’t mean this as a pickup line,” Vincent said, “but do you come here often?”

“Not as often as I’d like. I took a couple art history classes in college,” he added, as if he had to justify his presence here. They parted ways after a brief volley of small talk—“I hope you’re coming to the party tonight?”—and it might have been unmemorable except that that was the first time she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan. She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love, or failing that, at least to sleep with someone she was actually attracted to and to whom she owed nothing. She hailed a taxi and traveled to Saks, where she spent some time under dazzling lights and emerged an hour later with a blue velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. There were still so many hours left in the day. Don’t think of Paul, probably in a studio somewhere composing new music to accompany her plundered work. She hailed another taxi and went downtown to the financial district, to linger for a while in a café that she’d always especially liked. She stayed in the Russian Café for two hours, drinking cappuccinos and reading the International Herald Tribune.

By five o’clock she was restless, so she gathered her things and stepped out into the rain. She would find another café, she decided. She’d go up to Midtown and stake out a position near Jonathan’s office, so as to arrive perfectly on time. But halfway down the stairs to Bowling Green station, she was overcome by the certainty that if she went into the subway, she would die. She knew it as clearly as she knew her own name. Vincent turned around and half stumbled, half ran back up the stairs, pushing through a sea of commuters coming the other way, desperate to reach a bench before she fainted. She’d never fainted before but surely this was what it felt like, this terrible lightheadedness, the awareness of being just at the edge of an abyss. I should ask my mother, she thought, and the equally irrational thought that followed was My mother’s waiting for me in the subway.

Vincent made it to the nearest bench, gasping, and a few minutes passed before she had the presence of mind to unfurl her umbrella. She sat there for what seemed like a long time, holding the umbrella low enough to hide her face from passersby, trying to catch her breath, trying to stop crying. If she’d started having panic attacks—she’d never had one before, but surely that moment just now on the steps would qualify—then she’d slipped further than she’d thought, no longer quite as cohesive as she had been, her systems failing. She sat very still until her breathing slowed, listening to the rain on the umbrella and watching the feet of passing pedestrians.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and she saw Jonathan’s receptionist’s number on the call display. “Oh, I’m great, thank you,” she said in response to a question, “and how are you?”

“So listen,” the receptionist said, instead of answering, “Mr. Alkaitis was wondering if you could come up to the office a little early. He tells me it’s urgent.”

“Of course.” Jonathan’s idea of urgent was needing Vincent’s advice on which tie to wear for the holiday party. “Please tell him I’m on my way.”

A car is the worst possible way to travel during rush hour in Manhattan, but attempting the descent into Bowling Green station again was a risk that Vincent couldn’t afford, so she hailed a taxi that crept uptown in dense traffic, dark streets passing in slow motion, until a mile from the office she got out and walked. It’s just that you’re very tired, she told herself. There is nothing seriously wrong with you. Anyone could have a panic attack after three nights of not sleeping. Anyone would be a little shaky after what Paul did. In the mirrored elevator of the Gradia Building she quickly pulled back her wet hair and tried to avoid looking too closely at the dark circles under her eyes. The doors opened to the corporate splendor of the eighteenth floor.

“Ms. Alkaitis, good afternoon. You can go on in,” Jonathan’s receptionist said. Her name was Simone. In several months’ time, she would be a key witness for the prosecution.

When Vincent entered the office she found Jonathan at his desk, hands clasped before him, and she was struck immediately by his stillness. He looked like a statue of himself, cast in wax. They weren’t alone. His daughter, Claire, was slumped on the sofa with her head in her hands, and at the other end of the sofa sat a man in his late fifties or early sixties, soft around the middle, with an expensive suit and silvering hair.

“Hello,” Vincent said. The man’s name escaped her.

“Mrs. Alkaitis.” His voice was flat. “I’m Harvey Alexander. I work with your husband.”

“Oh yes, of course, we’ve met.” Vincent shook his hand. What was wrong with everyone? Harvey wore the expression of a man at a funeral. Jonathan’s hands were still clasped, and Vincent saw now that his knuckles were white. Vincent and Claire didn’t like one another, per se, but they’d always managed a veneer of politeness, and Claire had never before failed to look up or say hello when Vincent entered a room.

“Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?” Vincent asked. Keeping her tone as light as possible, because she understood lightness to be part of her job.

“Please close the door,” Jonathan said. Vincent did as he asked, but he said nothing further, and no one in the room seemed quite able to look at her, so she took temporary refuge in a series of small tasks. She placed the Saks bag by the coat stand, took off her coat and hung it, removed her gloves and draped them over the Saks bag, and finally, having run out of things to do, sat in one of the visitors’ chairs, crossed her legs, and waited. They all sat there in silence. It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.

“Someone has to tell her,” Claire said, and Vincent was shocked to realize that Claire was crying.

“Tell me what?”

“Vincent,” Jonathan said, but words seemed to fail him, and he briefly pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes. Was he crying too? Vincent tightened her grip on the armrests of the chair.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Vincent, listen, my business, not the whole thing, not the brokerage company, where Claire works, but the asset management unit, it’s all…” He seemed unable to continue.

“Are you bankrupt?” Vincent had been following the news carefully. These were the last few weeks of 2008, the age of faltering stock prices and collapsing banks.

“Oh, it’s so much worse than that!” Claire’s voice held an edge of hysteria. “Really so much fucking worse.”

“I think we should all bear in mind,” Harvey said, “that there’s a pretty good chance anything we say in this room today will eventually be repeated in a courtroom.” He spoke very calmly, staring at a painting of Jonathan’s yacht on the opposite wall. He seemed curiously detached from the scene.

“Just tell her,” Claire said.

“Careful, now,” Harvey said in that same tone of disinterest.

After a pained interval of silence, Jonathan settled on a question. “Vincent,” he said, “do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”