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.
“Who would write something like that?” The only guest to have seen the vandalism, an insomniac shipping executive who’d checked in the day before, was sitting in one of the leather armchairs with a whiskey that the night manager had brought him. It was a little past two-thirty in the morning.
“Not an adult, presumably,” the night manager said. His name was Walter, and this was the first graffiti he’d seen in his three years on the property. The message had been written on the outside of the glass. Walter had taped a few sheets of paper over the message and was presently moving a potted rhododendron to cover the paper, with the assistance of Larry, the night porter. The bartender on duty, Vincent, was polishing wineglasses while she watched the action from behind the bar at the far end of the lobby. Walter had considered recruiting her to help move the planter, because he could use another set of hands and the night houseman was on a dinner break, but she didn’t strike him as a particularly robust person.
“It’s unnerving, isn’t it?” the guest said.
“I don’t disagree. But I think,” Walter said, with more confidence than he felt, “that this could only have been the work of a bored adolescent.” In truth, he was deeply shaken and was taking refuge in efficiency. He stepped back to consider the rhododendron. The leaves almost but not entirely covered the taped paper. He glanced at Larry, who gave him a this-is-the-best-we-can-do shrug and went outside with a garbage bag and a roll of tape to cover the message from the other side.
“It’s the specificity of it,” the guest said. “Disturbing, isn’t it?”
“I’m so sorry you had to see it, Mr. Prevant.”
“No one should have to see a message like that.” A quaver of distress in Leon Prevant’s voice, which he covered with a quick swallow of whiskey. On the other side of the window, Larry had folded the garbage bag into a neat strip and was taping it over the message.
“I agree completely.” Walter glanced at his watch. Three in the morning, three hours remaining on his shift. Larry had resumed his post by the door. Vincent was still polishing glasses. He went to speak to her, and saw when he did that she had tears in her eyes.
“You okay there?” he asked softly.
“It’s just so awful,” she said, without looking up. “I can’t imagine what kind of person would write something like that.”
“I know,” he said. “But I’m standing by my bored-teenager theory.”
“You believe that?”
“I can convince myself of it,” he said.
Walter went to see if Mr. Prevant needed anything—he didn’t—and then returned to his inspection of the glass wall. Only one more guest was expected that night, a VIP, his flight delayed. Walter lingered by the glass wall for a few minutes, looking out at the reflection of the lobby superimposed on the darkness, before he returned to the desk to write the incident report.
“The property’s in the middle of nowhere,” Walter’s general manager had told him, at their first meeting in Toronto three years ago, “but that’s precisely the point.”
This first meeting was in a coffee shop by the lake, the coffee shop actually built on the pier, boats bobbing nearby. Raphael, the general manager, lived on the property of the Hotel Caiette, along with almost everyone else who worked there, but had come to Toronto to attend a hospitality conference and poach talent from other hotels. The Hotel Caiette had been open since the mid-nineties, but had recently been redone in what Raphael called Grand West Coast Style, which seemed to involve exposed cedar beams and enormous panes of glass. Walter was studying the ad campaign photos that Raphael had slid across the table. The hotel was a glass-and-cedar palace at twilight, lights reflected on water, the shadows of the forest closing in.
“What you said earlier,” Walter said, “about it not being accessible by car?” He felt he must have misunderstood something in the initial presentation.
“I mean exactly that. Access to the hotel is by boat. There are no roads in or out. Are you somewhat familiar with the geography of the region?”
“Somewhat,” Walter lied. He’d never been that far west. His impression of British Columbia was akin to a series of postcards: whales leaping out of blue water, green shorelines, boats.
“Here.” Raphael was shuffling through papers. “Take a look at this map.” The property was represented as a white star in an inlet at the north end of Vancouver Island. The inlet nearly broke the island in half. “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. Almost no one.” Raphael leaned back in his chair with a little smile, presumably hoping that Walter might ask what he meant, but Walter waited him out. “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. The point here”—he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure—“is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”
“How do you bring in guests and supplies?” Walter was having some difficulty grasping the appeal of the place. It was undeniably beautiful but geographically inconvenient, and he wasn’t sure why your average executive would want to vacation in a cellular dead zone.
“On a speedboat. It’s fifteen minutes from the town of Grace Harbour.”
“I see. Aside from the undeniable natural beauty,” Walter said, trying a different tack, “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.” Raphael loved the hotel, Walter could see that. “The truth of the matter is, there’s a certain demographic that will pay a great deal of money to escape temporarily from the modern world.”
Later, walking home through the autumn night, temporary escape from the world was an idea that Walter couldn’t let go. In those days he was renting a cramped one-bedroom on a street that felt somehow between neighborhoods. It was the most depressing apartment he’d ever seen, which for reasons he refused to articulate was why he’d chosen it. Elsewhere in the city, the ballet dancer to whom Walter had been engaged until two months ago was setting up house with a lawyer.
Walter stopped into the usual grocery store on his way home that evening, and the thought of stopping into this store again tomorrow, and then the day after that, and then the day after that, slow strolls down the frozen-food aisle interspersed with shifts at the hotel where he’d been working for the past decade, a day older every time, the city closing in around him, well, it was unbearable, actually. He placed a package of frozen corn in his basket. What if this was the last time he ever performed this action, here in this particular store? It was an appealing thought.
He’d been with the ballet dancer for twelve years. He hadn’t seen the breakup coming. He’d agreed with his friends that he shouldn’t make any sudden moves. But what he wanted in those days was to disappear, and by the time he reached the checkout counter he realized that he’d made his decision. He accepted the position; arrangements were made; on the appointed day a month later he flew to Vancouver and then caught a connecting flight to Nanaimo on a twenty-four-seat prop plane that barely reached the clouds before descending, spent the night in a hotel, and set off the next day for the Hotel Caiette. He could have saved considerable time by flying into one of the tiny airports further north, but he wanted to see more of Vancouver Island.
It was a cold day in November, clouds low overhead. He drove north in a gray rental car through a series of gray towns with a gray sea intermittently visible on his right, a landscape of dark trees and McDonald’s drive-throughs and big-box stores under a leaden sky. He arrived at last in the town of Port Hardy, streets dim in the rain, where he got lost for a while before he found the place to return the rental car. He called the town’s only taxi service and waited a half hour until an old man arrived in a beat-up station wagon that reeked of cigarette smoke.
“You’re headed to the hotel?” the driver asked when Walter requested a ride to Grace Harbour.
“I am,” Walter said, but found that he didn’t particularly feel like making conversation after all of these hours of traveling in solitude. They drove in silence through the forest until they reached the village of Grace Harbour, such as it was: a few houses here and there along the road and shoreline, fishing boats in the harbor, a general store by the docks, a parking lot with a few old cars. He saw a woman through the window of the general store, but there was no one else around.
Walter’s instructions were to call the hotel for a boat. His cell phone didn’t work up here, as promised, but there was a phone booth by the pier. The hotel promised to send someone within the half hour. Walter hung up and stepped out into cool air. It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence. This place was the opposite of Toronto, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted? The opposite of his previous life? Somewhere back in the eastern city, the ballet dancer and the lawyer were at a restaurant, or walking the streets holding hands, or in bed. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Walter waited, listening, and for a while there was only the soft lapping of water against the pier and the occasional cry of a seagull, until in the distance he heard the vibration of an outboard motor. A few minutes later he saw the boat, a white fleck between the dark banks of forest, a toy that grew steadily until it was pulling up alongside the pier, the motor obscenely loud in all that quiet, wake splashing against pylons. The woman at the stern looked to be in her mid-twenties and wore a crisp, vaguely nautical uniform.
“You must be Walter.” She disembarked in a single fluid motion and lashed the boat to the dock. “I’m Melissa from the hotel. May I help with your bags?”
“Thank you,” he said. There was something startling about her, an air of apparition. He was almost happy, he realized, as the boat pulled away from the pier. There was a cold wind on his face, and he knew this was a voyage of no more than fifteen minutes, but he had an absurd sense of embarking on an adventure. They were moving so rapidly, darkness falling. He wanted to ask Melissa about the hotel, how long she’d been here, but the motor was prohibitively loud. When he glanced over his shoulder, the wake was a silver trail leading back to the scattered lights of Grace Harbour.
Melissa piloted them around the peninsula and 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. The building would have been beautiful anywhere, but placed here, it was incongruous, and its incongruity played a part in the enchantment. The lobby was exposed like an aquarium behind a wall of glass, all cedar pillars and slate floors. A double row of lights illuminated the path to the pier, where a doorman—Larry—met them with a trolley. Walter shook Larry’s hand and followed his luggage up the path to the hotel’s grand entrance, to the reception desk, where Raphael stood waiting with a concierge smile. After introductions, dinner, and paperwork, Walter eventually found himself in a suite on the top floor of the staff lodge, whose windows and terrace looked out into trees. 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.
By the end of his first year in Caiette, Walter realized that he was happier here than he’d ever been anywhere, but in the hours following the graffiti, the forest outside seemed newly dark, the shadows dense and freighted with menace. Who stepped out of the forest to write the message on the window? The message was written backward on the glass, Walter wrote on the incident report, which suggests it was meant to be viewed from the lobby.
“I appreciate the clarity of the report,” Raphael said when Walter came to his office the following afternoon. Raphael had lived twenty years in English Canada but retained a strong Quebec City accent. “Some of your colleagues, I ask for a report and they hand in a dog’s breakfast of typos and wild speculations.”
“Thank you.” Walter valued this job more than he’d ever valued anything and was always vastly relieved when Raphael praised his performance. “The graffiti’s unsettling, isn’t it?”
“I agree. Just this side of threat.”
“Is there anything on the surveillance footage?”
“Nothing very useful. I can show you if you’d like.” Raphael swiveled the monitor toward Walter and pressed play on a black-and-white video clip. Security footage of the front terrace at night, cast in the spooky luminescence of the camera’s night-vision mode: A figure appears from the shadows at the edge of the terrace, wearing dark pants and an oversized sweatshirt with a hood. His head is down—or is it a woman? Impossible to tell—and there’s something in the gloved hand: the acid marker that defaces the glass. The ghost steps gracefully up onto a bench, scrawls the message, and melts back into the shadows, never looking up, the entire vision transpiring in less than ten seconds.
“It’s like he practiced it,” Walter said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just, he writes it so quickly. And he’s writing backward. Or she. I can’t tell.”
Raphael nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me about last night,” he said, “that might not have appeared in the report?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything at all out of the ordinary in the lobby. Any strange details. Something you maybe thought not relevant.”
Walter hesitated.
“Tell me.”
“Well, I don’t like to rat on my colleagues,” Walter said, “but it seemed to me that the night houseman was behaving strangely.”
The night houseman, Paul, was Vincent’s brother—no, Vincent had said he was her half brother, but Walter was unclear on which parent they had in common—and he’d been at the hotel for three months. He’d been living in Vancouver for five or six years but he’d grown up in Toronto, he told Walter, which should have created a bond but didn’t, in part because he and Paul were from different Torontos. They tried to compare favorite Toronto restaurants and nightclubs, but Walter had never heard of System Soundbar, whereas Paul had never heard of Zelda’s. Paul’s Toronto was younger, more anarchic, a Toronto that danced to the beat of music that Walter neither liked nor understood, a Toronto that wore peculiar fashions and did drugs that Walter had never heard of. (“Well, but you know why the raver kids wear soothers around their necks,” Paul said, “it’s not just bad fashion sense, it’s because K makes you grind your teeth,” and Walter nodded knowledgeably without having the slightest idea of what “K” was.) Paul never smiled. He did his job well enough but had a way of drifting off into little reveries while cleaning the lobby at night, staring at nothing while he mopped the floor or polished tabletops. It was sometimes necessary to say his name two or three times, but any sharpness in tone in the second or third repetition would trigger a reproachful, wounded expression. Walter found him to be an irritating and somewhat depressing presence.
On the night of the graffiti, Paul returned from his dinner break at three-thirty a.m. He came in through the side door, and Walter looked up in time to see the way Paul’s gaze fell immediately to the awkwardly placed philodendron and then to Leon Prevant, the shipping executive, who by then was on his second whiskey and reading a two-day-old copy of the Vancouver Sun.
“Something happen to the window?” Paul asked as he passed the desk. To Walter’s ear, there was something faux-casual about his tone.
“I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”
“Who?”
“You know.” Paul nodded toward Leon Prevant.
“That isn’t Alkaitis.” Walter was watching Paul closely. He was flushed and looked even more miserable than usual.
“I thought it was.”
“Alkaitis’s flight was delayed. You didn’t see anyone lurking around outside, did you?”
“Lurking around?”
“Anything suspicious. This just happened in the last hour.”
“Oh. No.” Paul wasn’t looking at him anymore—another irritating trait; why did he always look away when Walter was talking?—and was staring at Leon, who was staring at the window. “I’m going to go see if Vincent needs the kegs changed,” he said.
“What was unusual?” Raphael asked.
“Inquiring about guests like that. How would he even know who was checking in that night?”
“It’s not the worst thing for a houseman to take a look at the guest list, familiarize himself with the lay of the land. Just playing devil’s advocate.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll give you that. But then, the way he looked straight to that point on the glass when he walked in, straight at the potted plant. I just don’t think the philodendron was that obvious,” Walter said.
“It is obviously out of place, to my eye.”
“But is it the first thing you look at? Especially at night? You walk into the lobby from the side door, at night, you look past the double row of pillars, past the armchairs and the side tables, halfway down the glass wall…”
“He does clean the lobby,” Raphael said. “He’d know better than anyone where the potted plants go.”
“I’m not accusing him of anything, to be clear. It’s just something I noticed.”
“I understand. I’ll speak with him. Was there anything else?”
“Nothing. The rest of the shift was completely normal.”
The rest of the shift:
By four a.m., Leon Prevant was beginning to yawn. Paul was somewhere back in the heart of the house, mopping floors in the staff corridors. Walter had finished his report and gone through his checklist. He was gazing out into the lobby, trying not to think too much about the graffiti. (What does Why don’t you swallow broken glass signify, if not I hope you die?) Larry was standing by the door with his eyes half-open. Walter wanted to wander over and talk to him, but he knew Larry used the quiet hours to meditate, and that when his eyes were half-open, that meant he was counting breaths. Walter considered going to talk to Vincent, but it wouldn’t look right for the night manager to linger by the bar while a guest was present, so he settled for a leisurely inspection of the lobby. He straightened a framed photograph by the fireplace, ran a fingertip over the bookshelves to check for dust, adjusted the leaves of the philodendron so that they better covered the paper taped to the glass. He stepped out for a moment into the cool night air, listening for a boat that he knew was not yet en route.
At four-thirty Leon Prevant rose and drifted toward the elevator, yawning. Twenty minutes later, Jonathan Alkaitis arrived. Walter heard the boat long before it came into view, as always, the motor violently loud in the stillness of night, and then the lights on the stern swung over the water as the boat rounded the peninsula. Larry set off for the pier with a luggage trolley. Vincent put away the newspaper she’d been reading, adjusted her hair, reapplied lipstick, and took two quick shots of espresso. Walter put on his warmest professional smile as Jonathan Alkaitis walked in behind his luggage.
In later years Walter was interviewed three or four times about Jonathan Alkaitis, but the journalists always left disappointed. As a hotel manager, he told them, he lived and died by his discretion, but in truth there wasn’t much to tell. Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.
The best suite had been set aside for him, as always. He was absurdly jet-lagged, he told Walter, and also quite hungry. Could an early breakfast be arranged? (Of course. For Alkaitis, anything could be arranged.) It was still dark outside, but day broke in the kitchen long before sunrise. The morning shift would be arriving by now.
“I’ll just take a seat at the bar,” Alkaitis said, and within minutes was deep in conversation with Vincent, who was, it seemed to Walter, at her brightest and most engaging, although he couldn’t quite make out what they were talking about.
Leon Prevant left the lobby at four-thirty a.m., climbed the stairs to his room, and crept into the bed, where his wife was sleeping. Marie didn’t wake up. He’d purposefully drunk one whiskey too many with the thought that this might make it possible to fall asleep, but it was as if the graffiti had opened a crack in the night, through which all his fears flooded in. If pressed he might have admitted to Marie that he was worried about money, but worried wasn’t strong enough. Leon was afraid.
A colleague had told him this place was extraordinary, so he’d booked an extremely expensive room as an anniversary surprise for his wife. His colleague was right, he’d decided immediately. There were fishing and kayaking expeditions, guided hikes into wilderness, live music in the lobby, spectacular food, a wooded path that opened into a forest glade with an outdoor bar and lanterns hung from trees, a heated pool overlooking the tranquil waters of the sound.
“It’s heavenly,” Marie said on their first night.
“I’m inclined to agree.”
He’d sprung for a room with a hot tub on the terrace, and that first night they were out there for at least an hour, sipping champagne with a cool breeze in their faces, the sun setting over the water in a postcard kind of way. He kissed her and tried to convince himself to relax. But relaxation was difficult, because a week after he’d booked this extravagant room and told his wife about it, he’d begun to hear rumors of a pending merger.
Leon had survived two mergers and a reorganization, but when he heard the first whispers of this latest restructuring, he was struck by a certainty so strong that it felt like true knowledge: he was going to lose his job. He was fifty-eight years old. He was senior enough to be expensive, and close enough to retirement to be let go without weighing too heavily on anyone’s conscience. There was no part of his job that couldn’t be performed by younger executives who made less money than he did. Since hearing of the merger he’d lived whole hours without thinking about it, but the nights were harder than the days. He and Marie had just bought a house in South Florida, which they planned to rent out until he retired, with the idea of eventually fleeing New York winters and New York taxes. This seemed to him to be a new beginning, but they’d spent more money on the house than they’d meant to, he had never been very good at saving, and he was aware that he had much less in his retirement accounts than he should. It was six-thirty in the morning before he fell into a fitful sleep.
When Walter returned to the lobby the following evening, Leon Prevant was eating dinner at the bar with Jonathan Alkaitis. They’d met a little earlier, in what seemed at the time like a coincidental manner and seemed later like a trap. Leon had been at the bar, eating a salmon burger, alone because Marie was lying down upstairs with a headache. Alkaitis, who was drinking a pint of Guinness two stools down, struck up a conversation with the bartender and then expanded the conversation to include Leon. They were talking about Caiette, which, as it happened, Jonathan Alkaitis knew something about. “I actually own this property,” he said to Leon, almost apologetically. “It’s hard to get to, but that’s what I like about it.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Leon said. He was always looking for conversations, and it was a pleasure to think about something—anything!—other than financial insolvency and unemployment for a moment. “Do you own other hotels?”
“Just the one. I mostly work in finance.” Alkaitis had a couple of businesses in New York, he said, both of which involved investing other people’s money in the stock market for them. He wasn’t really taking on new clients these days, but he did on occasion make an exception.
The thing about Alkaitis, a woman from Philadelphia wrote some years later, in a victim impact statement that she read aloud at Alkaitis’s sentencing hearing, is he made you feel like you were joining a secret club. There was truth in this, Leon had to admit, when he read the transcript, but the other part of the equation was the man himself. What Alkaitis had was presence. He had a voice made for late-night radio, warm and reassuring. He radiated calm. He was a man utterly without bluster, confident but not arrogant, quick to smile at jokes. A steady, low-key, intelligent person, much more interested in listening than in talking about himself. He had that trick—and it was a trick, Leon realized later—of appearing utterly indifferent to what anyone thought of him, and in so doing provoking the opposite anxiety in other people: What does Alkaitis think of me? Later, in the years that he spent replaying this particular evening, Leon remembered a certain desire to impress him.
“This is slightly embarrassing,” Alkaitis said that night, when they’d left the bar and retired to a quieter corner of the lobby to discuss investments, “but 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.”
Leon smiled. “You’re not alone in that. It’s a largely invisible industry, but nearly everything you’ve ever bought traveled over the water.”
“My made-in-China headphones, and whatnot.”
“Sure, yes, there’s an obvious one, but I really mean almost everything. Everything on and around us. Your socks. Our shoes. My aftershave. This glass in my hand. I could keep going, but I’ll spare you.”
“I’m embarrassed to admit that I never thought about it,” Jonathan said.
“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?” Easy now, he told himself. He was aware of a weakness for rhapsodizing on his industry at excessive length. “I have colleagues who resent the general public’s ignorance of the industry, but I think the fact that you don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works.”
“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, a college friend of Marie’s who’d come into Toronto from Santa Fe, back when Leon was still based in Toronto, and the three of them had had dinner downtown at Saint Tropez, Marie’s favorite restaurant in their Toronto years. The psychic—Clarissa, he remembered now—was friendly and warm. He liked her immediately. He had an impression that psychics must very often be exploited by their friends and passing acquaintances, an impression not dispelled by Marie’s reminiscences about all the times she’d asked Clarissa for free advice, so over the course of the evening Leon went elaborately out of his way to avoid asking her anything, until finally, over dessert, curiosity overtook him: 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 clamor 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,” she said, and this remained in memory as one of the most delightful conversations Leon had ever had, because he’d never talked with anyone about the way he could tune in and out of shipping, like turning a dial on a radio. When he glanced across the table at Marie, for example: he could see the woman he loved, or he could shift frequencies and see the dress made in the U.K., the shoes made in China, the Italian leather handbag, or shift even further and see the Neptune-Avramidis shipping routes lit up on the map: the dress via Westbound Trans-Atlantic Route 3, the shoes via either the Trans-Pacific Eastbound 7 or the Shanghai–Los Angeles Eastbound Express, etc. 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.
When Walter walked within earshot of Leon Prevant and Jonathan Alkaitis, some time later, the conversation had shifted from Leon’s work to Alkaitis’s, from shipping to investment strategies. Walter understood none of it. Finance wasn’t his world. He didn’t speak the language. Someone on the day shift had covered the graffiti on the glass with reflective tape, an odd silvery streak of mirror on the darkened window. Two American actors were eating dinner at the bar.
“He left his first wife for her,” Larry said, nodding at them.
“Oh?” said Walter, who could not possibly have cared less. Twenty years of working in high-end hotels had cured him of any interest in celebrity. “I wanted to ask you,” he said, “just between the two of us, does the new guy seem a little off to you?”
Larry glanced theatrically over his shoulder and around the lobby, but Paul was elsewhere, mopping the corridor behind Reception in the heart of the house.
“Maybe a little depressed, is all,” Larry said. “Not the most sparkling personality I’ve ever come across.”
“Did he ask you about arriving guests last night?”
“How’d you know? Yeah, asked me when Jonathan Alkaitis was arriving.”
“And you told him…?”
“Well, you know my eyesight’s not great, and I’d only just come on shift. So I told him I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought the guy drinking whiskey in the lobby was Alkaitis. Didn’t realize my mistake till later. Why?” Larry was a reasonably discreet man, but on the other hand, the staff lived together in the same building in the woods and gossip was a kind of black-market currency.
“No reason.”
“Come on.”
“I’ll tell you later.” Walter still didn’t understand the motive, as he walked back toward Reception, but there was no doubt in his mind that Paul had committed the act. He glanced around the lobby, but no one seemed to require his attention at that moment, so he slipped through the staff door behind the reception desk. Paul was cleaning the dark window at the end of the hall.
“Paul.”
The night houseman stopped what he was doing, and in his expression, Walter knew that he’d been correct in his suspicions. Paul had a hunted look.
“Where’d you get the acid marker?” Walter asked. “Is that something you can just buy at a hardware store, or did you have to make it yourself?”
“What are you talking about?” But Paul was a terrible liar. His voice had gone up half an octave.
“Why did you want Jonathan Alkaitis to see that disgusting message?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“This place means something to me,” Walter said. “Seeing it defaced like that…” It was the like that that bothered him the most, the utter vileness of the message on the glass, but he didn’t know how to explain this to Paul without opening a door into his personal life, and the thought of revealing anything remotely personal to this shiftless little creep was untenable. He couldn’t finish the sentence. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to give you an opportunity,” he said. “Pack up your things and leave on the first boat, and we don’t have to get the police involved.”
“I’m sorry.” Paul’s voice was a whisper. “I just—”
“You just thought you’d deface a hotel window, for the sake of delivering the most vicious, the most deranged—” Walter was sweating. “Why did you even do it?” But Paul had the furtive look of a boy searching for a plausible story, and Walter couldn’t stand to listen to another lie that night. “Look, just go,” he said. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t want to look at you anymore. Put the cleaning supplies away, go back to your room, pack your bags, and tell Melissa that you want a ride to Grace Harbour as quickly as possible. If you’re still here at nine a.m., I’ll go to Raphael.”
“You don’t understand,” Paul said. “I’ve got all this debt—”
“If you needed the job that badly,” Walter said, “you probably shouldn’t have defaced the window.”
“You can’t even swallow broken glass.”
“What?”
“I mean it’s actually physically impossible.”
“Seriously? That’s your defense?”
Paul flushed and looked away.
“Did you ever think of your sister in all of this?” Walter asked. “She got you the job interview here, didn’t she?”
“Vincent had nothing to do with this.”
“Are you going to leave? I’m in a generous mood and I don’t want to embarrass your sister, so I’m giving you a clean exit here, but if you’d prefer a criminal record, then by all means…”
“No, I’ll go.” Paul looked down at the cleaning supplies in his hands, as if unsure how they’d landed there. “I’m sorry.”
“You should go pack before I change my mind.”
“Thank you,” Paul said.
But the horror of it. Why don’t you swallow broken glass. Why don’t you die. Why don’t you cast everyone who loves you into perdition. He was thinking about his friend Rob again, forever sixteen, thinking about Rob’s mother’s face at the funeral. Walter sleepwalked through the rest of his shift and stayed up late to meet with Raphael in the morning. As he passed through the lobby at eight a.m., up past his bedtime and desperate for sleep, he caught sight of Paul down at the end of the pier, loading his duffel bags into the boat.
“Good morning,” Raphael said when Walter looked into his office. He was bright-eyed and freshly shaved. He and Walter lived in the same building, but in opposite time zones.
“I just saw Paul getting on the boat with his worldly belongings,” Walter said.
Raphael sighed. “I don’t know what happened. He came in here this morning with an incoherent story about how much he misses Vancouver, when the kid practically begged me for a change of scenery three months back.”
“He gave no reason?”
“None. We’ll start interviewing again. Anything else?” Raphael asked, and Walter, his defenses weakened by exhaustion, understood for the first time that Raphael didn’t like him very much. The realization landed with a sad little thud.
“No,” he said, “thank you. I’ll leave you to it.” On the walk back to the staff lodge, he found himself wishing that he’d been less angry when he’d spoken with Paul. All these hours later, he was beginning to wonder if he’d missed the point: when Paul said he had debts, did he mean that he needed the job at the hotel, or was he saying that someone had paid him to write the message on the glass? Because none of it actually made sense. It seemed obvious that Paul’s message was directed at Alkaitis, but what could Alkaitis possibly mean to him?
Leon Prevant and his wife departed that morning, followed two days later by Jonathan Alkaitis. When Walter came in for his shift on the night of Alkaitis’s departure, Khalil was working the bar, although it wasn’t his usual night: Vincent, he said, had taken a sudden vacation. A day later she called Raphael from Vancouver and told him she’d decided not to come back to the hotel, so someone from Housekeeping boxed up her belongings and put them in storage at the back of the laundry room.
The panel of glass was replaced at enormous expense, and the graffiti receded into memory. Spring passed into summer and then the beautiful chaos of the high season, the lobby crowded every night and a temperamental jazz quartet causing drama in the staff lodge when they weren’t delighting the guests, the quartet alternating with a pianist whose marijuana habit was tolerated because he could seemingly play any song ever written, the hotel fully booked and the staff almost doubled, Melissa piloting the boat back and forth to Grace Harbour all day and late into the evening.
Summer faded into autumn, then the quiet and the dark of the winter months, the rainstorms more frequent, the hotel half-empty, the staff quarters growing quiet with the departure of the seasonal workers. Walter slept through the days and arrived at his shift in the early evenings—the pleasure of long nights in the silent lobby, Larry by the door, Khalil at the bar, storms descending and rising throughout the night—and sometimes joined his colleagues for a meal that was dinner for the night shift and breakfast for the day people, shared a few drinks sometimes with the kitchen staff, listened to jazz alone in his apartment, went for walks in and out of Caiette, ordered books in the mail that he read when he woke in the late afternoons.
On a stormy night in spring, Ella Kaspersky checked in. She was a regular at the hotel, a businesswoman from Chicago who liked to come here to escape “all the noise,” as she put it, a guest who was mostly notable because Jonathan Alkaitis had made it clear that he didn’t want to see her. Walter had no idea why Alkaitis was avoiding Kaspersky and frankly didn’t want to know, but when she arrived he did his customary check to make sure Alkaitis hadn’t made a last-minute booking. Alkaitis hadn’t visited the hotel in some time, he realized, longer than his usual interval between visits. When the lobby was quiet at two a.m., he ran a Google search on Alkaitis and found images from a recent charity fund-raiser, Alkaitis beaming in a tuxedo with a younger woman on his arm. She looked very familiar.
Walter enlarged the photo. The woman was Vincent. A glossier version, with an expensive haircut and professional-grade makeup, but it was unmistakably her. She was wearing a metallic gown that must have cost about what she’d made in a month as a bartender here. The caption read Jonathan Alkaitis with his wife, Vincent.
Walter looked up from the screen, into the silent lobby. Nothing in his life had changed in the year since Vincent’s departure, but this was by his own design and his own desire. Khalil, now the full-time night bartender, was chatting with a couple who’d just arrived. Larry stood by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes half-closed. Walter abandoned his post and walked out into the April night. He hoped Vincent was happy in that foreign country, in whatever strange new life she’d found for herself. He tried to imagine what it might be like to step into Jonathan Alkaitis’s life—the money, the houses, the private jet—but it was all incomprehensible to him. 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.
But when he turned back to the hotel he was blindsided by the memory of the words written on the window a year ago, Why don’t you swallow broken glass, the whole unsettling mystery of it. The forest was a mass of undifferentiated shadow. He folded his arms against the chill and returned to the warmth and light of the lobby.