The Glass Hotel

Citation

Mandel, Emily St. John. The Glass Hotel. Harper Perennial, 2020. 9781443455756.

Abstract

“Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. The owner of the hotel is New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the wall of the hotel: ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass?’ Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later, Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.”

Annotations

Part One

I. Vincent in the Ocean. December 2018.

“the storm’s wild darkness” (3)

“Sweep me up. Words scrawled on a window when I was thirteen years old” (3)

“The cold is annihilating, the cold is all there is—” (3)

“Where am I? Neither in nor out of the ocean, I can’t feel the cold anymore or actually anything, I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on, and it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next—” (4)

“the Neptune Cumberland” (4)

Commentator’s Note: Neptune Logistics, Station Eleven, also cf. p. 49

“A man is slumped in a doorway just across from me, and I haven’t seen my brother in a decade but I know that it’s him. Paul looks up and there’s time to notice that he looks terrible, gaunt and undone, he sees me but then the street blinks out—” (4)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 293

2. I Always Come To You. 1994 and 1999.

“He kept trying to focus on probability theory and discrete-time martingales, but his thoughts kept sliding toward a piano composition that he knew he’d never finish, this very straightforward C-major situation except with little flights of destabilizing minor chords” (6)

“I can’t help but notice that you’re as alienated as I am, can we compare notes?” (7)

“Whatever they were doing onstage sounded less like music than like some kind of malfunctioning radio, all weird bursts of static and disconnected notes” (7)

“The girl leaned into the microphone and sang, ‘I always come to you,’ except there was an echo—the guy with the keyboard had pressed a foot pedal—so it was
I always come to you, come to you, come to you” (8)

“but then the girl raised her violin, and this turned out to be the missing element. When she drew her bow, the note was like a bridge between islands of static and Paul could hear how it all fit together” (8)

“The beats were complicated and he wasn’t sure how to dance to them so he just kind of stepped back and forth with a beer in his hand and tried not to think about anything. Wasn’t that the point of clubs? Annihilating your thoughts with alcohol and music?” (9)

Commentator’s Note: Music annihilates, alcohol annihilates, the sea annihilates

“He only listened to Bach when he was desperate for order” (17)

“Sweep me up. Words scrawled in acid paste on one of the school’s north windows, the acid marker trembling a little in Vincent’s gloved hand” (17)

“The boat careered around the peninsula and Paul stared at the massive construction site where the new hotel was going up, at the clouds, at the back of Melissa’s head, at the trees on the shore, anything to avoid looking into the depths of the water, nothing he wanted to think about down there” (19)

“But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary?” (20)

“‘I’m not sure living here is really the best thing for Vincent. Every time she looks at the water…’
He ended the thought there. And Paul thought it went in the good column that he thought of Vincent first when Dad said that, that his first thought wasn’t of the goddamn haunted inlet that he was trying not to look at through the kitchen window, but of the girl listening upstairs at the vent” (21)

“There are doppelgängers everywhere” (28)

“I only hate that Vincent can drop out of high school and move to a terrible neighbourhood and still somehow miraculously be perfectly fine, like the laws of gravity and misfortune don’t apply to her” (29)

“he was trying to dance but there was something bothering him, a sense of movement in his peripheral vision, a feeling of being watched. He looked around wildly, but there was only a sea of anonymous faces and none of them were looking at him” (30)

3. The Hotel. Spring 2005.

“Why don’t you swallow broken glass. Words scrawled in acid paste on the glass eastern wall of the Hotel Caiette, etched trails of white dripping from several letters” (32)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 231

“he was deeply shaken and was taking refuge in efficiency” (33)

“‘It’s wilderness up there,’ Raphael said, “but let me tell you a secret about wilderness.
‘Please do.’
‘Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness’” (35)

“‘At least, not the people who stay in five-star hotels,’ Raphael said.
‘Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent’” (35)

“‘would you say there’s a distinguishing factor that sets this hotel apart from similar properties?’
‘I was hoping you’d ask me that. The answer’s yes. There’s a sense of being outside of time and space.’
‘Outside of…?’
‘A figure of speech, but it’s not far off’” (35)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Vincent in ch. 1

“the hotel was before them, an improbable palace lit up against the darkness of the forest, and for the first time Walter understood what Raphael had meant when he’d talked about an element of surrealism” (38)

“He closed the curtains against the darkness and thought about what Raphael had said, about the hotel’s existing outside of time and space. There’s such happiness in a successful escape” (39)

“it was as if the graffiti had opened a crack in the night, through which all his fears flooded in” (44)

Of Alkaitis: “he made you feel like you were joining a secret club” (46)

“‘you said you’re in shipping, and I realized as you said it that I’ve only the dimmest idea of what that actually means’” (47)

“‘No one does. You go to the store, you buy a banana, you don’t think about the men who piloted the banana through the Panama Canal. Why would you?’” (47)

“‘I think the fact that don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works’” (48)

“‘The banana arrives on schedule.’ Jonathan sipped his drink. ‘You must develop a kind of sixth sense. Here you are in the world, surrounded by all these objects that arrived by ship. You ever find it distracting, thinking about all those shipping routes, all those points of origin?’
‘You’re only the second person I’ve ever met who guessed that,’ Leon said.
The other was a psychic” (48)

“Was it ever deafening, he asked her, being in a crowded room? Was it like being in a room filled with radios tuned to overlapping frequencies, a clamour of voices broadcasting the mundane or horrifying details of dozens of lives? Clarissa smiled. ‘It’s like this,’ she said, gesturing at the room around them, ‘it’s like being in a crowded restaurant. You can tune in to the conversation at the next table, or you can let that become background noise. Like the way you see shipping’” (48)

“he’d never talked with anyone about the way he could tune in and out of shipping, like turning a dial on a radio” (48-49)

“shift even further and see the Neptune-Avramidis shipping routes … Or further still, into the kind of language he’d never speak aloud, not even to Marie: there are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much” (49)

“‘You can’t even swallow broken glass.’
‘What?’
‘I mean it’s actually physically impossible’” (51)

“On a stormy night in spring, Ella Kaspersky checked in” (54)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 70

“The night was clear and cold, moonless but the blaze of stars was overwhelming. Walter wouldn’t have imagined, in his previous life in downtown Toronto, that he’d fall in love with a place where the stars were so bright that he could see his shadow on a night with no moon. He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have” (55)

“The forest was a mass of undifferentiated shadow” (55)

4. A Fairy Tale. 2005-2008.

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 220

“she preferred the movement of trains to gridlocked traffic” (56)

“In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan” (57)

“the city drew her in, the city was the antidote to the riotous green of her childhood memories. She wanted concrete and clean lines and sharp angles, sky visible only between towers, hard light” (57)

“Her relationship with the pool was adversarial. Vincent swam every night to strengthen her will because she was desperately afraid of drowning” (57)

“Diving into the pool at night … She stayed underwater for as long as possible, testing her endurance” (57)

“It was an infinity pool, which created a disorienting impression that the water disappeared into the lawn or the lawn disappeared into the water. She hated looking at that edge” (58)

“‘Vincent’s an unusual name for a girl’
…
‘My parents named me after a poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay’” (60)

Ghosts

“Vincent’s mother had read a lot of poetry, having formerly been a poet herself. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was nineteen years old, in 1912, she began writing a poem called ‘Renascence’ that Vincent must have read a thousand times in childhood and adolescence. Millay wrote the poem for a competition. The poem didn’t win, but it nonetheless carried an electric charge that transported her from the drudgery of New England poverty to Vassar College, from there into the kind of bohemia that she’d dreamed of all her life” (60-61)

“‘The point is she raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,’ Vincent’s mother had said” (61)

“Vincent wondered even at the time—she would have been about eleven—what that statement might suggest about how happy Vincent’s mother was about the way her own life had gone, this woman who’d imagined writing poetry in the wilderness but somehow found herself sunk in the mundane difficulties of raising a child and running a household in the wilderness instead” (61)

“There’s the idea of wilderness, and then there’s the unglamorous labour of it, the never-ending grind of securing firewood; bringing in groceries over absurd distances; tending the vegetable garden and maintaining the fences that keep the deer from eating all the vegetables; repairing the generator; remembering to get gas for the generator; composting; running out of water in the summertime; never having enough money because job opportunities in the wilderness are limited; managing the seething resentment of your only child, who doesn’t understand your love of the wilderness and asks every week why you can’t just live in a normal place that isn’t wilderness; etc.” (61)

“There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself” (62)

“She didn’t want to be a liar but his expectations were clear. As a former bartender, she was accustomed to performing. The lies were troublingly easy” (64)

“The problems of Vincent’s life were the same from one year to the next: she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans, especially since she’d worked alongside enough bartenders with college degrees to know that a college degree might not change anything at all, etc., etc., and she was spiralling through that familiar territory, sick of her thoughts and sick of herself, when Jonathan walked into the bar” (64)

“In the way he spoke to her, his obvious wealth and his obvious interest, she saw an opening into a vastly easier life, or at least a different life, a chance to live in a foreign country, a life of something other than bartending in a place other than here, and the opportunity was irresistible” (64)

“I’m paying a price for this life, she told herself, but the price is reasonable” (65)

“‘Would you believe I wrote a philosopher’s last words? I came across them in a book somewhere and loved them.’
‘Precocious, but morbid,: he said. ‘I’m afraid to ask.’
‘Sweep me up. It has a certain beauty, don’t you think?’” (65)

Commentator’s Note: Kierkegaard

“Also, it wasn’t morbidity, she found herself thinking on the train into the city the following afternoon. It was almost the opposite. She’d never had a clear vision of what she wanted her life to look like, she had always been directionless, but she did know that she wanted to be swept up, to be plucked from the crowd, and then when it happened” (65)

“she was surprised by how disorienting it was, and then surprised by her surprise” (65-66)

“How have I come to this foreign planet, so far from home? But it wasn’t just the place, it wasn’t even mostly the place, it was mostly the money that made it foreign and strange” (66)

“Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events” (66)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. August in Station Eleven

“None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events” (66)

“She’d read newspapers all her life, because she felt that she was desperately undereducated and wanted to be an informed and knowledgeable person, but in the age of money she would often read a news story and find herself uneasily distracted by its opposite: Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed” (66-67)

Commentator’s Note: Station Eleven, a possible world, an opposite, a counterlife

“One of the first things she bought was an expensive video camera, a Canon HV10. She’d been shooting video since she was thirteen, a few days after her mother disappeared, when her grandmother Caroline arrived from Victoria to help out” (67)

“her grandmother brought a box to the table.
‘I have something for you,’ she said.
Vincent opened it and found a video camera, a Panasonic” (67)

“‘A friend of mine, a photographer, she gave me a camera she no longer needed. She said to me, Just take some pictures, take pictures every day, see if it makes you feel better’” (68)

“‘What I’m suggesting,’ Caroline said softly, ‘is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder’” (68)

“Vincent settled quickly into a form she liked. She recorded segments of exactly five minutes each” (68)

“five minutes of the infinity pool at the Greenwich house, the way it rippled into the lawn, precisely because she hated looking at that vanishing point and was trying to be stronger” (69)

Shadows

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 99

“He’d met Ella Kaspersky back in 1999, at, of all places, the Hotel Caiette” (70)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 54

“Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion” (72)

“‘Are the asset management people a little standoffish?’ Vincent asked” (73)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 159

“‘You’re so poised,’ Jonathan said … That’s my job, Vincent didn’t say in return” (73)

“she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise” (74)

“I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down” (74)

“the curious sameness of expensively maintained people with similar habits” (74)

“Vincent had no formal education in art, but she was moved by portraits, especially portraits whose subjects looked quite ordinary, like people you might see in the subway except in outmoded clothes” (78)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 93

“money is its own country” (78)

“some people just can’t recognize opportunity” (78)

“‘She had real potential. Real potential. But an inability to recognize opportunity? That right there is a fatal flaw’” (79)

“‘Annika? Who gives a fuck. I haven’t seen her since 2000, maybe 2001.’ Lenny poured himself another glass of red. ‘You really want to know? She went back to Canada to play weird electronica with her friends’” (79)

Commentator’s Note: Baltica

“Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it” (81)

“The age of money lasted a little under three years” (82)

“‘There was no television there till I was thirteen.’
…
‘I mean, there was no signal.’
‘So if you switched on the TV, what would happen?’
‘Well, you’d just get static,’ Vincent said.
‘On every channel?’” (83)

“‘My mother drowned when I was thirteen’” (84)

“Everything about Caiette was either impossible to describe or too difficult to talk about, and everything after Caiette was either boring or embarrassing” (84)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Arthur’s childhood in Station Eleven

“Rejection is exhausting. Mirella was standing by the window, looking out at a view of downtown Los Angeles, and she realized that she was getting too tired for this life” (85)

“‘The thing with my mother,’ Vincent said, ‘is I know she drowned, but I don’t know why she drowned. She went canoeing all the time. She was a good swimmer’” (87)

“Is this really it? I thought there’d be more”

“A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity. An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender’s mother disappeared while canoeing and she’s told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who’s aware of this uncertainty—as Paul definitely is—write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what’s driving the bartender to despair isn’t actually the graffiti, it’s the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that’s the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends his hand” (87-88)

“‘Here as in Caiette?’
‘Well, here and then Vancouver.’
‘Great city,’ he said. ‘I keep meaning to spend more time there’” (88)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Echoes of rich people in Station Eleven

“When he beckoned, she would come to him. She would always be well compensated. Why not you?” (88)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. “I always come to you” p. 5, p. 105

“Vincent was admiring a yellow Lamborghini” (88)

“Vincent had been on the East Coast of this continent for two and a half years now, but she was still startled by the violence of the summer thunderstorms, the way the sky turned green” (89)

“in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone” (89)

“Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing” (89)

“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life” (90)

5. Olivia.

“a yellow Lamborghini shone in the haze of the afternoon. The car had such presence that it was almost alive, all but vibrating with possibility, like something from the future” (91)

“In 1958, Lucas was working on a series of nudes: women and men, mostly women, all sitting on a sofa the colour of the Lamborghini that would park outside his door a half century later” (92)

“‘You paint me, I paint you,’ she said. ‘I’m working on a new portrait series’” (93)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 78

“one of them looked away and Olivia saw that she was gazing across the street at the yellow Lamborghini, brilliant in the dull pre-storm light.
‘I see it too,’ Olivia murmured” (94)

“‘Okay, I’ve got an idea for a ghost story,’ Renata said. This was a game they played sometimes, when Renata was posing and starting to get bored, because they’d both loved ghost stories since childhood. ‘A guy gets hit by a car and dies, and then after that the intersection’s haunted, but the ghost isn’t the gets hit by the car, the ghost is the car’” (94)

“It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative” (95)

“She’d been experimenting with surrealist backgrounds: the subject painted with eighteenth-century fealty to realism—or as close as she could get to eighteenth-century fealty to realism; she was aware at all times of the limits of her technical skills—but backgrounds dissolving into a fever dream of red, of purple, of blue, interiors breaking apart into formlessness, landscapes where the light was all wrong” (95)

“Was the bleeding chair even a good idea? Were any of her artistic ideas ever actually any good? Her self-doubt had been one of the few constants in her life over the past half century” (96)

“Lucas shrugged and took off his denim jacket and undershirt. He was skinny and unpleasantly pale, a strictly indoor creature” (96)

“He was ridiculous in some ways, but beneath all that he was a serious person, she understood that, he was a serious person who worked very hard. She painted rapidly, not at all in her usual style, swift short strokes. She’d hoped that if she skimmed the surface of the portrait she might be able to see him better” (96)

“This was the thing about her life in those years: some nights it was beautiful but some nights there was such pain, throbbing just under the surface of the evening for no discernible reason” (97)

“another fallen sparrow in a chaotic and rapidly receding decade, except that forty years later—forty years of no money” (99)

“forty years in the desert—there was a retrospective exhibition of downtown artists from the fifties, Olivia among them, and in its wake there was a sudden—and vanishingly brief—resurgence of interest in her work, during which her painting Lucas with Shadows sold at auction for two hundred thousand dollars” (99)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 69

“Money was mysterious to Olivia” (100)

“Surely it meant something that the man with whom Monica had invested her savings was Lucas’s brother” (100)

“Idea for a ghost story: a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes that she’s become invisible” (100)

“‘My brother was a decade older than me,’ he said. ‘I loved him, but when you’re a kid, a decade is like the space between galaxies’” (102)

“‘Do you know, I’ve no idea what became of his painting of me?’” (102)

“‘I bought your painting of Lucas,’ he said” (103)

“‘I think [Vincent]’d be good at anything she set out to do’” (104)

“Painting was something that had grabbed hold of her for a while, decades, but now it had let go and she had no further interest in it, or it had no further interest in her” (104)

“‘I enjoyed talking with her, and I thought, Why not?” (105)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 88

“‘It’s interesting,’ he said, ‘she’s got a very particular kind of gift.’
‘What’s that?’
‘She sees what a given situation requires, and she adapts herself accordingly.’
‘So she’s an actress?’ The conversation was beginning to make Olivia a little uneasy. It seemed to her that Jonathan was describing a woman who’d dissolved into his life and become what he wanted. A disappearing act, essentially.
‘Not acting, exactly. More like a kind of pragmatism, driven by willpower. She decided to be a certain kind of person, and she achieved it’” (105)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 61

“‘Interesting,’ Olivia said, to be polite, although she couldn’t actually think of anything less interesting than a chameleon. Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person” (105)

Part Two

6. The Counterlife. 2009.

“No star burns forever. Words scratched into the wall by Alkaitis’s bunk” (109)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Sea of Tranquility

“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” (109)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Vincent’s upbringing in poetry

“‘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’” (110)

“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” (110)

“‘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’” (110)

“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” (111)

“the rest of his life and prison are two pieces that don’t fit together, the lock and the key, an incomprehensible equation” (112)

“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” (113)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Escape, earlier

“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” (113)

“‘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 paycheque 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…” (114)

“Money is a game he knew how to play. No, money is a country and he had the keys to the kingdom” (115)

“He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events—a counterlife” (114)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Vincent p. 67, August in Station Eleven

7. Seafarer. 2008-2013.

“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” (121)

Commentator’s Note: Now has an ambition, a direction, a destination. Compare the Traveling Symphony in Station Eleven, which always has a destination.

“there was an improbable grace in that illusion of weightlessness” (121)

“She stood in a landscape of unadulterated industry and enormous machines, a port where humans had no place, feeling smaller and smaller” (121)

“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” (122)

“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” (122)

Commentator’s Note: This is a strong image for me!

“There was a window, but she kept the curtain closed, because she wanted the ocean to be the first thing she saw through it” (122-23)

“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” (123)

“her thought at that moment was that she never wanted to live on land again” (124)

“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” (125)

“She preferred the kitchen, because bartending is a performance. The public streams through your workplace and watches your every move” (127)

“Was it possible that she was actually unrecognizable to someone who’d once been her dearest friend?” (130)

“perhaps she was playing the same game Vincent was, living in disguise, except that Mirella’s disguise was more comprehensive” (130)

“She wouldn’t have imagined that Mirella could be so cold, but what were they if not actors?” (131)

“‘I think I’d like to go to sea.’ Vincent’s mother went to sea in her early twenties” (132)

“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’” (135)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. birds p. 112

“‘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” (136)

“‘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…’” (136)

8. The Counterlife. 2015.

“‘All these dumb ideas about codes of honour’” (138)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 168

“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” (139)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. border p. 4

“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” (140)

“‘You ever think about alternate universes?’ he asks Churchwell, sometime in early 2015” (140)

“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” (141)

“An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?” (144)

Commentator’s Note: Commissary at sea, commissary in prison

“‘You believe in ghosts?’ Alkaitis asks as casually as possible” (144)

9. A Fairy Tale. 2008.

“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” (148)

“In Distant Northern Land, the emerging composer Paul James Smith presents a series of mysterious home videos, each with a running time of exactly five minutes, all filmed by the composer during his childhood in rural western Canada, presented here as part of an arresting composition that blurs the lines between musical genres and interrogates our preconceived notions of home movies, of wilderness, of—
Vincent closed her eyes. She’d never been very careful with her videos” (148)

“‘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’” (149)

“Paul’s music sounded at first like white noise, a radio caught between stations” (151)

Commentator’s Note: Stole films from Vincent, stole musical style from Annika. Saw opportunities, and took them.

“all of this was in the unimaginable future” (152)

“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” (152)

“she had dipped into dependency because dependency was easier” (153)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Dependency p. 294

“There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen” (153)

“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” (155)

Commentator’s Note: Portrait

“she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan” (156)

Commentator’s Note: Arrangement

“she’d slipped further than she’d thought, no longer quite as cohesive as she had been, her systems failing” (157)

“no one in the room seemed quite able to look at her, so she took temporary refuge in a series of small tasks … It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line” (159)

“‘the asset management unit it’s all…’” (159)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 73

“These were the last few weeks of 2008, the age of faltering stock prices and collapsing banks” (159)

“‘Vincent,’ he said, ‘do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?’” (159)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 234

Part Three

10. The Office Chorus. December 2008.

Commentator’s Note: Fascinating shifting “chorus” perspective in this chapter.

“We had crossed a line … came around to our desks … told us” (163)

Commentator’s Note: Chorus “we”

“The Arrangement was something we did, not something we talked about” (163)

Commentator’s Note: Arrangement

“‘Look,’ Alkaitis said finally, ‘we all know what we do here.’
Later, some of us would pretend that we didn’t hear this” (164)

“that statement represented the final crossing, or perhaps more accurately, the moment when it was no longer possible to ignore the topog raphy and pretend that the border hadn’t already been crossed. Of course we all knew what we did there” (164-65)

Ron, Oskar, Enrico, Harvey, Joelle (165)

Commentator’s Note: The chorus

“On Seventeen we were running a criminal enterprise in lieu of investing our clients’ money, and this fundamental disorder was reflected in our office space” (166)

Commentator’s Note: Order

“Simone liked to stave off terminal boredom by playing games with herself: when she had to fetch coffee, she sometimes pretended that she was involved in some kind of arcane coffee ceremony with mysteriously high stakes, a ritual in which the precision of her movements somehow mattered immensely” (166-67)

“the line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he’d first been asked to backdate a transaction” (168)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 190

“‘It’s possible to both know and not know something,’ he said later, under crossexamination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honourable and not being honourable, knowing you’re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad” (168)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Honour p. 168

“you don’t have to be an entirely terrible person, we told ourselves later, to turn a blind eye to certain things—even actively participate in certain other things—when it’s not just you, because who among us is fully alone in the world? There are always other people in the picture” (168)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Binary p. 20

“Alkaitis, who in most matters had an impressive capacity for self-delusion, understood finally that it was too late to avoid arrest” (173)

“At that moment, Oskar was standing by the window of Alkaitis’s piedà-terre in a high tower on Columbus Circle, drinking wine with Vincent” (181)

Commentator’s Note: Meet at the gallery, p. 155

“There is only this moment, he told himself. Don’t think of anything else, prison for example, just walk up the street with this beautiful woman. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t yours” (181)

“When Oskar stepped out into the living room, he was momentarily blinded. Oskar and Vincent had left all the lights on in their hurry to get to the bedroom, and the apartment was too bright, a nightmare of track lighting and reflective surfaces. He stood with his hands over his eyes for a moment, adjusting, and when he finally looked at the room, the first thing he saw was the painting. He hadn’t really noticed it before, but it was large, maybe five feet by six feet, a portrait of a young man, mounted with its own lighting fixture on the wall by the kitchen. The man sat on a red chair, wearing only jeans and combat boots. He looked too pale and too thin. There was something unsettling about the portrait, but it took Oskar a moment to register the faint streaks of bruises on his left arm, the shadows running along his veins. Oskar drew near, to see if he could decipher the signature in the lower right corner of the painting, and found that he could: Olivia Collins. He recognized the name” (188-89)

Commentator’s Note: Portrait, Shadows

“It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet” (189)

“Over a decade had passed since Harvey walked into his office and asked him to backdate a trade” (190)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 168

“‘You’re an intelligent guy, Oskar. You’ve seen some things by now’” (190)

“In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI. But in real life, he called no one” (192)

“‘You already knew this,’ he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. ‘There are no surprises here. You know what you are’” (192)

11. Winter.

“The scale of the Arrangement took Oskar’s breath away when he thought of it. He’d always secretly loved the intrigue of Seventeen, the feeling of being in an inner circle, of operating outside of the edges of society, perhaps even outside of the edges of reality itself—was there any difference, actually, in the grand universal scheme of things, between a trade that had actually occurred and a trade that appeared to have occurred on Oskar’s impeccably formatted account statements?” (194)

“[Leon’s] boss had been told to put a freeze on consulting contracts, ‘until the landscape looks a little brighter,’ but when would that be? He had been laid off two years ago in the wake of a merger, and now, in late 2008, ships were moving across oceans at half capacity or less and could be chartered for a third of last year’s cost. The landscape—the seascape—was clouded and dim” (200)

“‘Obviously, we’re not alone. I had an interesting conversation this morning with a friend over at CMA. They’ve got ships at anchor off the coast of Malaysia.’
‘Just sitting there?’ Miranda had been Leon’s junior colleague in Toronto and then in the New York office, in the years before he’d been restructured into consultant status. Now she had Leon’s former title, office, and telephone extension, though not his former salary” (200)

Commentator’s Note: Station Eleven

“‘We’d be creating this weird kind of ghost fleet’” (201)

“‘There’s the question of the new Panamax vessels,’ Miranda said. There was a collective sigh. The company had commissioned two new ships back in the lost paradise of 2005, when the demand had seemed endless and they were struggling to keep up, and the ships-under contract, paid for, two and a half years into the building process, and now extravagantly unnecessarywould be delivered from the South Korean shipyards in six months” (202)

“writing something in her legal pad. No, not writing, sketching: the pad was angled away from him, but he watched the movements of her wrist with some interest as he approached” (203)

“she flipped a page over as she set the pad on the marble coffee table, so that he couldn’t see whatever she’d been working on. He’d seen her perform this motion a hundred times, at least, and as always, he made a point of not asking” (203)

“‘you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?’
‘There’s something almost tedious about disaster,’ Miranda said” (203)

Commentator’s Note: Economic vs. Pandemic

“‘I know what you mean,’ Leon said. ‘It’s the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry.’
‘Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I’m not naming names, and he said, “I just can’t believe what’s happening to our industry, can you?” And I’m trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let’s break this down. What is it you can’t believe, exactly? That people don’t want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don’t want to ship goods that nobody’s buying?’” (203-204)

“Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea” (206)

“Alkaitis had explained the investment strategy, Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid” (206)

“Leon could see it for himself, a steadiness in that column of numbers that appealed to his deepest longing for order in the universe” (207)

Commentator’s Note: Order

“The people passing out flyers had thousand-yard stares and were worn down in a manner suggestive of a difficult life” (207)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 247

“He could live without retirement savings. No one in this country actually starves to death. It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another. He had his health. They could sell the house” (207)

“‘There’s no pleasure in having been right,’ [Kaspersky] said now, elegant and impeccable in a CNN studio. She was telling her story—approached by Alkaitis in a hotel lobby; did her research and concluded that the returns were impossible; contacted the SEC, who bungled the investigation to such an egregious degree that there was talk now of congressional inquiries; tried for years to get the story out and was written off as a crank—and even though Oskar knew all of this to be correct and knew Kaspersky was in the right, he still wanted to throw his shoe at the screen. Why are the righteous so often irritating?
‘She couldn’t be happier,’ Joelle said. ‘She loves that she was right’” (208)

“Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close” (213-14)

Commentator’s Note: High functioning sleepwalkers

“‘Twenty years from now, you’ll literally be telling the story at cocktail parties’” (215)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 268

“He seemed to be trying to convey the impression that the Ponzi was something that happened, the way weather happens, as opposed to a premeditated crime coldly perpetuated and covered up with the assistance of a dedicated staff” (218)

“‘What I believe, Your Honour, is that it comes down to a question of fear. Every life contains a measure of terrifying moments. My client had lost his wife. He was desolate. All he had left was his work, his job’” (218)

“The state was rising from the prosecution table, the state was buttoning its suit jacket, the state was beginning, with barely disguised contempt, to rip holes in the timeline that the defence had laid out” (220)

“The sentence, when it came, was like something from a fairy tale: there once was a man locked away in a castle for one hundred and seventy years” (220)

“When she’d boarded the downtown train that morning she’d had the thought that she was witnessing history, but would history remember Jonathan Alkaitis? Just another empty suit in a time of collapse and dissipation, architect of an embarrassingly unsophisticated scheme that had run for a while and then imploded” (221)

12. The Counterlife.

“he said, and I quote, ‘It’s possible to both know and not know something’” (223)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 168

“‘I was curious about whether that idea has any relevance for you, that notion that a person can know and not know something at the same time.’
‘It’s an interesting idea, Julie. I’ll think about it’” (224)

“There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people, and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives” (224)

“He goes back to his cell and lies down with an arm over his eyes. Hazelton is somewhere else, thank god. He’s desperate to be alone, but the problem is that now he can no longer be sure of whether he’s alone in any given room. Certain borders are dissolving” (225)

“‘Why do you want to write about all this?’
‘I’ve always had an interest in mass delusion,’ she says. ‘My senior thesis was about a cult in Texas.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘Well, look at it this way. I believe we’re in agreement that it should have been obvious to any sophisticated investor that you were running a fraudulent scheme’” (225)

“‘Oh, Ella,’ Suzanne said. A small shard from the broken wineglass had been overlooked at the base of the bread basket. Suzanne plucked it between two fingers and dropped it delicately into Kaspersky’s water glass. They all watched it drift to the bottom. Suzanne leaned in close and spoke quietly. ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass?’” (231)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 32

“Vincent impressed him, at the end, despite not being Suzanne” (234)

“‘Vincent,’ he said, ‘do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?’
‘Yes,’ Vincent said” (234)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 159

“Claire, from the sofa, still crying: ‘How do you know what a Ponzi scheme is, Vincent? Did he tell you? Did you you know about this? I swear to god, if you knew about this, if he told you…’
‘Of course he didn’t tell me,’ Vincent said. ‘I know what a Ponzi scheme is because I’m not a fucking idiot.’
He thought, That’s my girl.” (235)

“He isn’t well. He’s in the counterlife more often than he’s in the prison now, and he knows that reality is sliding away from him” (236)

13. Shadow Country. December 2018.

“‘I’m afraid I’m not calling for the happiest reason,’ Miranda said I was going to say there’s been an accident, but we actually don’t know if it was an accident or not. There was an incident. A woman disappeared from a Neptune-Avramidis ship. She was a cook” (240-241)

“He checked the call log on the phone to confirm that he hadn’t imagined it. NEPTUNE-AVRA, a 212 area code, 21 minutes. The text on the call display seemed apt; it had been like receiving a phone call from another planet” (242)

“Marie said, ‘I’ve been emailing with Clarissa lately.’
‘Clarissa?’ The name was familiar, but it took him a moment.
‘Oh, your friend from college, right? The psychic?’” (242)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 48

“‘Let’s just get in the RV and drive away’” (244)

“When he walked through the rooms one last time, Leon could tell the house was already done with them, a sense of vacancy pervading the air” (244)

“Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph” (244)

“It’s just us now. The house was our enemy but it tied us to the world. Now we are adrift”

“they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window” (247)

“He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error; they hitchhiked on roads with their worldly belongings in backpacks, they collected cans on the streets of cities, they stood on the Strip in Las Vegas wearing T-shirts that said GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, they were the girls in the room” (247)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 207, and Undersea, Station Eleven

“In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light” (247-48)

“[Vincent had] settled into a pattern of going to sea for nine months at a time, followed by three months off, and had no permanent address, which wasn’t at all unusual among seafarers who maintained that work schedule” (250)

“The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she’d disappeared in international waters, so it wasn’t actually Mauritania’s problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries” (252)

“If he’d been Alkaitis’s spouse, Leon found himself thinking, he’d probably have wanted to go to sea too. He’d have wanted to leave the planet” (254)

“Leon had spent a great deal of time in these places, and now, walking with Saparelli and their security escort toward the Neptune Cumberland, he had a strange sense of haunting a previous version of his life* (254)

“‘I want to be able to walk down the hall without everyone thinking Oh, there’s that guy who wrote that awful report that leaked to the press and got people fired. You want that too, by the way. You want to walk down the halls and have people not look at you like you’re some kind of avatar of doom or something” (262)

“After Germany, Leon began to see the shadow country again, for the first time in a while. For the past few years he hadn’t noticed it; after the initial shock of the first few months on the road it had faded into the background of his thoughts” (264)

“You stare at the road and the road stares back” (264)

“the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift” (265)

“It was a short clip, five minutes or so, shot from a rear deck at night. Vincent had recorded several minutes of ocean, the wake of the ship illuminated in moonlight, and then the camera angle changed: she stepped forward and peered over the railing, which on this particular deck wasn’t especially high. She leaned over alarmingly, so that the shot was straight down at the ocean below” (266)

“‘We move through this world so lightly,’ said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favourite songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of humanity, all these individual lives passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t blame his chill on the encroaching night” (267)

“a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth” (267)

“[Simone’s] in a circle of colleagues, holding court. ‘Any of you remember Jonathan Alkaitis? That Ponzi scheme, way back in 2008?’” (268)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 215

14. The Office Chorus. December 2029.

“She was never Alkaitis’s secretary, she realizes now, when she looks up the word. A secretary is a keeper of secrets” (270)

“We’re released in different years and from different facilities. We emerge into an altered world in various states of disarray, clutching our belongings in our hands” (270)

15. The Hotel.

“He was composing music that he showed to no one. He’d fallen into a territory between classical and electronica and had no confidence in his work” (274)

“When Paul wrote the message, it felt like stars exploding in his chest. It felt like sprinting in a summer rainstorm” (275)

“all of them were staring at the words on the window, and the look on Vincent’s face was unbearable, a look of naked sadness and horror” (276)

“For Paul, Vincent existed in a kind of suspended animation. On the first night of his run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, back in 2008, he walked out onto the stage and saw her” (284)

“ten minutes later, she was gone, an open seat yawning in the shadows” (284)

“Does that justify it? she’d ask. I don’t know, Vincent, I’ve never known what’s reasonable and what isn’t” (285)

“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me” (285)

“‘I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music’” (286)

“‘It was such an interesting angle you came up with,’ Ella was saying. He’d been half following along while she told him that she liked his work. “‘One sees so much video art, but that collaboration you did, the programmable soundtrack console, that was a wonderful innovation’” (286)

“‘I was curious about your musical influences,’ she said.
‘Baltica,’ he said. ‘Everything I do sounds like an electronica called Baltica that used to exist in Toronto in the late group nineties.’
‘Oh, I didn’t realize you’d been part of a group’” (287)

Commentator’s Note: Doesn’t correct her, pretends he was, just like he forced himself into Baltica’s circle in the nineties

“‘Do you still play music with that group? Baltica, was it?’ She’d misunderstood, but he couldn’t possibly explain.
‘We’ve all gone our separate ways,’ he said” (288)

“‘Good lord. You’re still not lonely?’
‘I’m not sure lonely is exactly the word. No, I wouldn’t say lonely’” (288)

“Is a hotel still a hotel without guests?” (288)

“What was strange was that he didn’t feel alone in all this space, all of these empty corridors and rooms. It was as though the hotel were haunted, but in the most benign sense: the rooms still held an air of presence, a sense of occupation, as if at any moment the boat might pull in with new guests” (289-90)

“I was sitting on a step in Edinburgh, and I saw my half sister standing there on the other side of the street, and then she was gone, like she just blinked out. I started looking for her, and what I found out weeks later was that she’d actually died that night, maybe even that minute, thousands of miles away…” (293)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 4

“he would always play it as the real thing, as if he wasn’t hallucinating and the woman he saw was really Vincent and Vincent was really a ghost and the ghost was really there on the street with him, whatever that means—what does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life” (293)

16. Vincent in the Ocean.

Commentator’s Note: No year. She’s outside of time.

“I decided long ago that I will marry no one and will never again be dependent on another human being” (294)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Dependency p. 153

“‘I know going on deck was questionable, but it was worth it. It was beautiful.’ I’d felt immortal, up there on deck. There was such power and magnificence in the storm” (295)

“I switch on the camera as I hear the thunder, and I record the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, lightning flashing over the roiling ocean. In a storm, the waves are like mountains. Cold rain in my face and I know it’s on the lens but this, too, will be beautiful, the blurring and the raindrops” (296)

“I stand by the railing, but with one hand on the railing I can’t keep the camera steady, so I let go—just for a moment—and in an instant of calm between towering waves, I lean forward so that the shot describes an arc from sky into water, the shot pointing straight down at the ocean” (296)

“It’s like the moment just before sleep, when you’re not quite unconscious—you’re awake enough to realize that you’re falling asleep—but your thoughts and your memories begin unspooling into narrative and you realize that you’ve already started to dream” (297-98)

“We’re in some in-between space, or so it seems to me, between the ocean and something I don’t want to think about” (298)

“I’m in a hotel that I recognize. I think this is Dubai, but this place isn’t like the other places and memories I’ve been visiting. There’s an unreality about it. I’m standing by a fountain in the lobby. I hear footsteps, and when I look up I see Jonathan. We’re in some nonplace, some dream-place, a place whose details keep shifting. No one else is here. I feel more solid here than elsewhere” (299)

Commentator’s Note: Alkaitis’s counterlife, Vincent’s ghostlife

“‘Hello, Jonathan.’
‘Vincent? I didn’t recognize you. What are you doing here?’
‘Just visiting.’
‘Visiting from where?’
I’m visiting from the ocean” (299)

“in any event the ocean isn’t exactly where I am, or if I’m there I am also somewhere else” (299)

“I look for Paul again and find him in the desert” (300)

Commentator’s Note: The desert is a sea

“‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry for all of it.’
‘I was a thief too,’ I tell him, ‘we both got corrupted,’ and I can tell he doesn’t understand but I don’t want to stay here and explain it to him, there’s somewhere else I’d rather be, so I move away from the desert and away from Paul, all the way to Caiette” (301)

“my mother is here … She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name” (301)