On a late spring night in the Hotel Caiette, in 2005, the night houseman was sweeping the lobby when a guest spoke to him. “You missed a spot,” she said. Paul forced his face into a semblance of a smile and hated his life.
“I’m kidding,” the guest said, “I’m sorry, that was a terrible joke. In all seriousness, though, can you come over here for a moment?” The woman was standing by the window, a scotch in her hand. She was old, or so it seemed to Paul at the time—in retrospect, she was probably only about forty—but there was something striking about her. She conveyed a general impression of having her life together, which was a state to which Paul could only aspire. He carried the broom over awkwardly and stood near her.
“Can I help you with something?” He was pleased with himself for thinking to say this. It sounded very butlerlike, which was more or less the model he was going for. Every now and again he caught a glimpse of, if not exactly the pleasures of the hospitality industry, at least the pleasure of professional competence. He could see how there might be a certain satisfaction in being good at a job, the way Vincent was good at hers. He’d always been an indifferent employee. At that moment Vincent was at the other end of the lobby, laughing along with a guest who was telling her a story about a fishing trip gone hilariously awry.
“I wonder if I might speak with you in confidence,” the woman said. Paul glanced over his shoulder at Reception, where Walter was applying his considerable powers of soothing to an American couple who were furious that the room with the Jacuzzi they’d paid for was, in fact, a room with a Jacuzzi, and not a suite with a full-size hot tub. “I’m Ella Kaspersky,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Paul. Pleased to meet you.”
“Paul, how long have you worked here?”
“Not long. A few months.”
“Are you going to stay much longer, do you think?”
“No.” He hadn’t exactly thought this through before he said it, but the answer rang true. Of course Paul wasn’t going to stay here. He’d come here from Vancouver in order to get away from friends with bad habits, and because Vincent was already here and had told him it was a decent place to work, but he knew it was a mistake by the end of his first week. He hated being back in Caiette. He hated living in the same building as his coworkers, the claustrophobia of it. The waiter who lived in the next room had sex with a sous-chef every night, and Paul, who was extremely single, could hear every noise they made. He didn’t like his boss, Walter, or Walter’s boss, Raphael. He missed his father, who’d died months ago but whom Paul somehow still expected to see every time he walked into the village. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about leaving soon. Maybe very soon.”
“What do you want to do instead?”
“I’m a composer.” He’d thought that saying it aloud might make it more real, but saying it aloud only made him feel like a fraud. 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.
“Tough line of work to break into, I’d imagine.”
“Extremely,” he said. “I’m just going to keep working in hotels while I work on my music, but I want to get back to the city.”
“It’s one thing to rest and recharge in the middle of nowhere,” Ella said, “but something different to live out here, I’d imagine.”
“Right, yeah, exactly. I hate it.” It occurred to him that he probably shouldn’t be talking this way with a guest—Walter would be furious—but if he was leaving anyway, what difference did it make?
“I’d like to tell you a story,” Ella said, “which will end with a business proposition, something that would involve you making a bit of money. Are you interested?”
“Yes.”
“Keep standing here, and we’ll look out the window together, and if that uptight manager of yours asks about it later, I was asking you about fishing and local geography. Deal?”
“Deal.” The intrigue was wonderful and solidified his desire to leave, because even if she stopped talking at this moment and said nothing further, this was still the most interesting thing that had happened in weeks.
“There’s a man named Jonathan Alkaitis who lives in New York City,” she said. “We have exactly one thing in common, and that’s that we’re both regulars at this hotel. He’ll be here in two days.”
“Are you some kind of detective or something?”
“No, I just give extravagant tips to burnt-out front-desk employees. Anyway. When he arrives, I’d like to convey a message to him.”
“You’d like me to deliver it?”
“Yes, but we’re not talking about slipping an envelope under a door. I’d like it to be delivered in an unforgettable way. I want him to be shaken by it.” Her eyes were shining. He realized for the first time that she was actually quite drunk.
“I knew a girl who once wrote graffiti on the window of a school with an acid marker,” he said. “Something like that?”
“You’re perfect,” she said.
When Paul wrote the message, it felt like stars exploding in his chest. It felt like sprinting in a summer rainstorm. On the appointed night he left for his dinner break and crept around to the side of the building, where he’d hidden an oversized hoodie with an acid marker in the pocket, then crept into position near the front terrace, just outside the pool of light cast by the hotel. There was a breeze that night, which made it easier to move undetected, his footsteps disguised by all the small forest sounds, the creaking of branches and rustling of wind. For a long time the night porter stood by the door, too close, and Paul almost despaired of completing the mission, but then Larry glanced at his watch and stepped back, disappeared into the lobby, walking in the direction of the staff room. Coffee break. A cloud passed over the moon and it seemed like a sign, the night conspiring to hide him. He uncapped the marker and stepped out quickly onto the terrace, heart pounding, head down. Why don’t you swallow broken glass. He wrote the message backward, the way he’d been practicing in his room, and then slipped back into the forest, and like choreography the cloud slid away from the moon and the message was illuminated. He crept around the side of the hotel and back toward the staff quarters. It was impossible to move in perfect silence but the night forest was full of noises anyway. In the staff lodge there was some kind of party happening, light and music spilling out of a suite on the second floor, the day staff getting wasted to dull the agony of customer service.
He stripped off the hoodie and gloves, balled them up and shoved them into the bushes at the base of a stump, stepped out onto the path connecting the staff lodge with the hotel, and came walking out of the woods into the bright pool of hotel light so that if anyone happened to be watching from the hotel, it would look like he’d just gone back to his room for a moment. He glanced at his watch and opted for a slow walk around to the side entrance, nothing to see here, just enjoying some fresh air, high with the twin pleasures of action and secrecy, and the elation lasted until the moment he stepped into the lobby and saw the tableau: the guest standing in the middle of the lobby, stricken; the night manager stepping out from behind the desk; his sister looking up from the glass she’d been polishing behind the bar; 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. The guest turned and Vincent looked away while Walter sailed forward on a wave of efficiency and reassurance—“May we offer you another drink, on the house of course, I’m so sorry that you had to see this,” etc.—while Vincent stared hard at the glass she was polishing and Paul stood just inside the side door, unnoticed. It somehow hadn’t occurred to him that anyone else would see the message. He slipped back out into the cold night air and stood for a while just outside, eyes closed, trying to get ahold of himself, before he made a second, more obvious entrance, closing the door loudly behind him, trying to act casual but his gaze falling immediately on the philodendron that someone—probably Larry—had pushed in front of the window.
Walter was watching him from behind the desk.
“Something happen to the window?” Paul asked. To his own ears, his voice sounded wrong, high-pitched and somehow off.
“I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.” He thinks I did it, Paul thought, and felt inexplicably affronted.
“Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”
“Who?”
“You know.” Paul nodded toward the guest, the man in his fifties who was staring into his drink.
“That isn’t Alkaitis,” Walter said.
Oh god. Paul found some excuse to extricate himself and went to the bar, where Vincent had finished polishing glasses and had moved on to wiping imaginary dust from bottles. “Hey,” he said, and when she looked up, he was shocked to see that there were tears in her eyes. “Are you okay?”
“That message on the glass,” she whispered.
He wanted to walk away now, just leave all his stuff behind, just call a water taxi from the lobby and walk to the pier and get a ride to Grace Harbour and keep going. “It’s probably just some drunk kid.”
She was dabbing surreptitiously at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m too upset to talk right now.”
“Of course,” he said, miles deep in the kind of self-loathing that he’d been warned against in rehab. He sensed a gathering of attention in the lobby; Walter was stepping out from behind the reception desk, and Larry was retrieving a luggage trolley from the discreet closet by the piano. Vincent was drinking a quick shot of espresso. In the glass wall of the hotel, the lobby was reflected with almost mirrorlike fidelity, but now the reflection was pierced by a white light out on the water, an approaching boat. Jonathan Alkaitis was just arriving.
Three years later, in December 2008, Walter read the news of Alkaitis’s arrest at Reception and the blood left his head. Khalil, the bartender on duty that night, saw him drop out of sight and was at his side within seconds with a glass of cold water. “Walter, here, take a deep breath…,” and Walter tried to breathe, tried to drink the water, tried not to faint, stars swimming in his vision. Walter’s colleagues were kneeling around him, asking what was wrong and making noises about calling the water taxi to get him to a hospital, and then Larry caught sight of the New York Times story on the computer screen and said, “Oh.”
“I was an investor,” Walter said, trying to explain.
“With Alkaitis?” Larry asked.
“He was here this past summer, you remember?” Walter felt like he was going to be sick. “He and Vincent. I had a conversation with him one night, we got to talking about investments, I told him I had some savings…”
“Oh god,” Larry said. “Walter. I’m sorry.”
“He acted like he was doing me a favor,” Walter said. “Letting me invest in his fund.”
Larry knelt and put a hand on his shoulder.
“It can’t be gone,” Walter said. “It can’t just be gone. It was my life savings.”
Here, a gap in memory: how did Walter get back to his apartment? Unclear in retrospect, but some time later he was on his bed, staring at the ceiling, fully clothed but with his shoes off, a glass of water on the bedside table.
It was somehow almost eight a.m., so Walter went to see Raphael in his office. “I don’t know anything,” Raphael said. He was spinning a pen on the knuckles of his left hand, a quick nervous motion whose mechanics eluded Walter’s grasp. How did the pen not fall? “We have to wait for word from the U.S.”
“Word of what?” Walter was staring at the pen.
“Well, word of our fates, at risk of sounding melodramatic. I just got off the phone with head office, and there’s an asset trustee in New York, apparently, some lawyer appointed by a judge to manage Alkaitis’s entire mess, so what happens to the hotel, I guess that’s the trustee’s decision.”
As it happened, the suspense was short-lived. Toward the end of the next week, word trickled down to the hotel that the trustee had decided to sell the property, to recoup the greatest possible gain for the investors in the shortest possible amount of time. There were rumors for a while that the hotel management company might buy the property, but Raphael was skeptical.
“Let me tell you a secret,” Raphael told Walter. “This place hasn’t turned a profit in four years. If there’s a buyer, it likely won’t be a hotelier.”
“Who else would buy it?”
“Exactly,” Raphael said.
When their fate became clear—the property for sale with no immediate buyers on the horizon, the hotel scheduled to close in three weeks—Walter was seized by a strange idea. Everyone was leaving, but did that necessarily mean that Walter had to leave too? On one of his quiet mornings at Reception, just before the shift change, he made his fourth attempt to reach the asset trustee on the phone, and finally got past Alfred Selwyn’s secretary.
“This is Selwyn.”
“Mr. Selwyn, it’s Walter Lee calling. I hope you’ll forgive my persistence,” Walter said, “but I’d hoped to speak to you about something quite pressing, for me at least…”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Lee?”
Walter wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Something out of a legal drama, he supposed, some duplicitous sharklike person with an obnoxiously American accent, but Alfred Selwyn was soft-spoken and courteous, and conveyed an impression of listening carefully while Walter delivered his pitch.
“From what I understand,” Selwyn said, “the property’s quite remote, isn’t it?”
“Not impossibly so,” Walter said. “I can get to Grace Harbour within the hour if I call a water taxi.”
“And Grace Harbour, is that a fair-sized population center? Forgive me, just one second—” A faint commotion as Selwyn cupped the receiver with his hand. “Mr. Alexander,” Walter heard him say, muffled by the hand, “if you’ll please have a seat, I’ll be right with you. Lorraine, may I have some coffee, please, for me and Harvey.” More rustling, and Selwyn’s voice regained its normal volume. “I apologize. What I’m trying to get a handle on, at dire risk of being overly blunt, is whether you’ll lose your mind if you live by yourself in an empty hotel in the wilderness.”
“I understand your concern,” Walter said, “but the truth of the matter is, I love living here.” He heard himself talking about the pleasure of living in a quiet place with immense natural beauty, the friendliness of the locals in the nearby village of Caiette—an exaggeration, most of them hated outsiders—and all he could think was Please, please, please let me stay. There was a beat of silence at the end of the monologue.
“Well,” Selwyn said, “you make a good case for yourself. Could you send me a few references by the end of the week? Including your current supervisor, if possible.”
“Of course,” Walter said. “Thank you for considering this.” When he hung up, he felt lighter than he had in some time, since the night he’d read the news of the arrest. He looked around the lobby and imagined everybody gone.
“You want to do what?” Raphael asked when Walter came to him. There was an open binder on his desk. Walter saw a chart labeled RevPAR 2007–2008, spanning two pages. Revenue Per Available Room. Raphael was transferring to a hotel in Edmonton and was spending his days reading up on his new property.
“The hotel needs a caretaker,” Walter said. “Selwyn was in agreement that it’s in no one’s best interests to let it fall into ruin.”
“Look, it would be my pleasure to give you a glowing reference, Walter, but I can’t believe you want to stay out here by yourself. Do you have an end date in mind?”
“Oh, of course I wouldn’t stay here forever,” Walter said, in order to be reassuring, but that wouldn’t be the worst thing, he thought on the walk back to the staff lodge. Caiette was the first place he’d ever truly loved. There was nowhere else he wanted to go. Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.
A decade later, in Edinburgh, Paul accepted a glass of wine from the bartender and turned to slide back into the crowd, and there she was before him.
“You,” he said, because he couldn’t remember her name.
“Hello, Paul.” She was exactly as he remembered—a small, well-put-together person with a very precise haircut, dressed this evening in an elegant suit, wearing a necklace that seemed to involve a mosquito trapped in a walnut-sized piece of amber—but who was she? He was jet-lagged and slightly drunk, also so bad at remembering faces and names at the best of times that lately he’d started to wonder if it was maybe some kind of thing, either borderline sociopathy—Am I so self-absorbed that I can’t see other people?—or some mild variant of facial blindness, that neurological situation wherein you won’t recognize your wife if she gets a haircut, not that he had a wife. He ran through all of this while the mystery woman waited patiently, whiskey in hand.
“Not to rush you,” she said finally, “but I was about to head up to the terrace for a cigarette. Perhaps you’d like to join me while you think about it?”
She had an American accent, but that brought him no closer to placing her. The party had drawn a cross-section of the Edinburgh Festival, and a fair percentage of the guests had American accents. He mumbled something ineloquent and followed her through the crowd, but her identity didn’t come to him until they’d been alone on the terrace for a moment and she’d lit her cigarette.
“Ella,” Paul said. “Ella Kaspersky. I’m so sorry. I’m a little jet-lagged…”
She shrugged. “You see a person out of context…” She left the thought unfinished. “And it’s been a long time.”
“Thirteen years?”
“Yes.”
It was cold on the terrace and he wanted to go back in. No, not back in, back to his hotel. The cold wasn’t really the problem. Practically speaking, flying economy from Toronto to Edinburgh meant that he’d been awake for two days, which fell into that increasingly vast category of things that were doable when he was eighteen but less so as he slid into middle age. Seeing Ella Kaspersky only made him feel worse. Something of this must have shown in his face, because Ella seemed to soften, just a little, and she lightly touched his arm.
“I’ve wanted to apologize to you for thirteen years,” she said. “I was angry in Caiette, and I’d been drinking too much, and I let both those things get the better of me. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.”
“I could’ve said no.”
“You should’ve said no. But I should never have asked you in the first place.”
“Well,” he said, “you were right about Alkaitis, at least.” He’d never been particularly interested in the news, but he had read a book about the Ponzi that came out a few years later, looking for news of his sister. In the book, Vincent was a marginal figure, her quotes confined to excerpts from a deposition transcript. It was obvious that the writer hadn’t managed to secure an interview with her, although there was a great deal of speculation about the material opulence of her life with Alkaitis.
“Yes. I was right.”
“Did you know he lived with my sister?” He was smoking a cigarette, although he couldn’t quite remember Kaspersky’s having given it to him. Lately time had been stuttering a little.
“Are you serious?”
“She was the bartender at the Hotel Caiette,” he said. “A man walks into a bar, one thing leads to another…”
“Extraordinary. I saw pictures of him with a young woman, but I never made the connection back to the hotel.”
“Do you remember a pretty bartender with long dark hair?”
She frowned. “Maybe. No. No, if I’m being honest, I don’t remember her at all. What became of her afterward?”
“We’re not in touch,” Paul said. 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. She was in the front row, at the far end; his eyes fell on her and his heart sped up. He got through the opening somehow, and when he glanced up again, no more than ten minutes later, she was gone, an open seat yawning in the shadows. That night he procrastinated for two hours before he left the theater, but she wasn’t waiting for him outside the stage door. She wasn’t there the next night, or the next; he expected to see her every night when he exited the theater, and she was never there, but he imagined the confrontation so many times that it began to seem like something that might actually have happened. Look, all those years you lived in Vancouver, you left the videos boxed up in your childhood bedroom, he’d tell her. Obviously you weren’t going to do anything with them. You didn’t even notice they were gone. And you thought that meant you could take them? she would ask. At least I did something with them, he’d tell her, and after days of imagining this conversation he almost began to long for it. It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent. It had been exactly a decade since the performances at BAM and he was still talking to her, the imagined Vincent who never materialized outside the stage door. Do you mean to tell me, she’d ask, that you’ve built a whole career on my videos? Not a whole career, Vincent, but composing soundtracks for your videos led to collaborations with video artists, live performances at art fairs in Basel and Miami, the residency at BAM, my fellowship, my teaching position, all of the success that I’ve found in this life. Does that justify it? she’d ask. I don’t know, Vincent, I’ve never known what’s reasonable and what isn’t. But for whatever it’s worth, after the BAM performances I never did another public performance with your tapes. Do you think that redeems you? No, I know it doesn’t. I know that I’m a thief.
“Still with me?” Ella said, and he realized that he may have been staring into space for a while.
“Sorry, yes. I’m a bit wrecked from traveling all night.”
“Parties are a bit much under those conditions,” Ella said. “Let’s get out of here, and I’ll buy you a drink somewhere.” Ten minutes later they were at a pub around the corner, an old-time kind of place with a bright red door and a forest’s worth of wood paneling inside.
“So,” Ella said, when they’d slid into a booth. “Forgive me, but you look terrible.”
“I’ve been awake for two days.”
“That’ll do it, I suppose.” But she was giving him a certain kind of look. He had trouble with names and faces but didn’t have trouble recognizing the question she was refraining from asking. It was a look he’d been seeing more and more of lately.
“How did you end up at that party?” he asked, to distract her. He was acutely aware of the little plastic bag in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“My husband’s a theater director.”
“Small world.”
“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”
A waitress took their drink orders, and Paul excused himself to shoot up in the men’s room, not a lot, just enough to bleed a little chaos out of the world. He stood very still in the stall for five deep breaths before he returned to the table. He was calmer now, the sharp edge of the jet lag a little blunted. Everything was fine. No one needs to sleep every night. He could save a lot of time from now on, if he just slept every second night.
“So,” she said, “you’ve been busy since I saw you last.”
“Very. It’s been extraordinary.” He hadn’t expected success and still found it disorienting. “I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music,” he said. I couldn’t possibly have seen this coming, he told Vincent, in his head, I just took the opportunities that arose, I was hustling just like everyone else…The opportunities that arose, like you had no choice in the matter? I couldn’t have anticipated this life, he told her, and actually, why didn’t he ever try to contact her after they’d both left the hotel? Because of his guilt over upsetting her with the graffiti and stealing her videos, obviously, but maybe he should try to find her now? Maybe enough time had passed? The condition of having landed in an unimaginable life was something he thought she might know something about.
“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.” For two separate works of video art, Paul had composed twenty-four hours’ worth of music, arranged as a collection of thirty-minute pieces that could be programmed to play in whichever order the buyer preferred: a night owl might prefer something fast and sharp at three in the morning, for instance, segueing into calm around a five a.m. bedtime, while the early risers might prefer to walk into their living room and hear something bracing as the sun rose.
“Some of those video art projects need a soundtrack to be even halfway interesting, if we’re being honest here,” Paul said. The beer in front of him was a terrible idea. If he drank it, he would lay his head on the table and fall asleep.
“I was curious about your musical influences,” she said.
“Baltica,” he said. “Everything I do sounds like an electronica group called Baltica that used to exist in Toronto in the late nineties.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize you’d been part of a group.”
“I try to compose stuff that sounds different,” he said, “I mean I’ll really try in a concentrated way, and then I get to the end, I play it back, and it somehow always sounds like…” He stopped talking, and looked over his shoulder to cover his unease. “Do you think they have coffee here?” He was deeply shaken. He’d never told anyone about Baltica, and here he’d just blurted it out to her without hesitation.
“I’d imagine so.” She waved, and a waitress appeared at the table.
“A coffee, please.”
“Our coffee’s terrible,” the waitress said. “Fair warning.”
“I think I might want it anyway.”
“If I could possibly dissuade you,” she said. “I mean, if you insist. But I promise that you’ll send it back.”
“Do you have black tea?”
“You’re in Scotland.”
“Something extra-strong,” Paul said. “The strongest tea you’ve got. A lot of it. The more caffeine, the better.”
“I’ll bring you a pot, then,” the waitress said, “and you can let it brew for as long as you’d like.” Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of just having been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell whether the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity. Damn it, I know how tea works, he wanted to say, but it was too late, the waitress had departed and he was alone with Ella, who was giving him that look again.
“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. “I only see them on Facebook now. Annika’s always on tour with like five different bands. Theo’s a family guy. Is the hotel still there?” he heard himself ask, desperate to change the subject.
“It closed after Alkaitis was arrested,” she said.
Eight time zones to the west, Walter was standing by the window of his room in the old staff quarters of the former Hotel Caiette. There was still no cellular service here, but some years ago he’d splurged on a cordless phone, in order to wander around his apartment while he talked with the outside world.
“I can’t believe it’s been almost ten years,” his sister said. “Good lord. You’re still not lonely?”
“I’m not sure lonely is exactly the word. No, I wouldn’t say lonely.”
The last guest checked out of the Hotel Caiette in early 2009, two months after Jonathan Alkaitis was arrested, and the rest of the staff left shortly thereafter. Is a hotel still a hotel without guests? Walter was there on the pier when Raphael departed. “Keep in touch,” he said to Walter, and the men shook hands with the mutual understanding that they’d never speak again. Raphael climbed aboard the boat with his overnight bag—his belongings had gone on ahead to Edmonton—and the chauffeur, Melissa, started the motor. She was being paid through the end of the day but hadn’t bothered with her uniform. She was leaving the boat in Grace Harbour and returning home by water taxi. “I’ll stop by next week,” she said to Walter. “Just to check in on you.”
“Thanks,” he said, moved and a little surprised by this. She cast off from the pier and the boat pulled out into the water, arced around the peninsula and out of sight. It was a muted day, the sea reflecting a pale gray sky, the forest dark and dripping from the morning’s rain. Walter stood on the pier until he could no longer hear the boat and then turned back to face the empty hotel. He walked up the path and unlocked the glass doors of the lobby, locked them behind him. Raphael had ceremoniously switched off the lights as he left, but now Walter switched them back on. The dark wood of the bar gleamed softly. His footsteps echoed. The furniture had all been sold off except for the grand piano, which was too costly to move. Walter played a few notes, unnaturally loud in the silence. It was true silence, he realized, not at all like being in the forest, which even at its quietest was alive with small sounds. He walked past Reception, past the bar, to the staircase.
The largest suite, the Coast Royal, was where Jonathan Alkaitis had always stayed. Walter had thought to move in here—it had a splendor that the staff quarters lacked, and surely the hotel caretaker should live in the actual hotel—but the thought of sleeping in the bed where Alkaitis had slept was repulsive, and Walter liked his apartment. He wandered through all of the guest rooms, left the doors open behind him.
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 and Raphael might walk out of his office complaining about the latest staffing problem, Khalil and Larry arriving for the night shift. He walked out onto the terrace. It provided a view of the empty pier, shadowy in the early winter twilight. He stood there for a while before he realized that he was waiting, by habit but completely without logic now, for a boat to come in.
“I can’t quite believe it myself,” he said to his sister, on the phone in 2018, “but I woke up this morning and realized, in February I’ll have been here as the caretaker for ten years.” Difficult to believe, but there it was: ten years of living alone in the staff quarters and playing tour guide to the infrequent potential buyers who arrived by water taxi, a decade of weekly trips to Port Hardy for supplies, cleaning the hotel, mowing the grass, meeting with repairmen when necessary, reading in the afternoons, teaching himself to play piano on the abandoned Steinway in the lobby, walking to the village of Caiette for coffee with Melissa; ten years of wandering by himself in the forest, watching the first pale flowers push through dark earth in the springtime, swimming by the pier in the hottest days of summer and reading on a balcony under blankets in the clear autumn light, sitting alone in the lobby with the lights out for the thrill of winter storms.
“But it seems like you still like it,” she said.
“I do. Very much.”
“Solitary, but not lonely?”
“That’s a fair way of putting it. I wouldn’t have expected this,” he said, “after working in hotels all my adult life, but it turns out I’m happiest when I’m away from other people.”
When he hung up, he left the staff quarters and followed the short path through the forest to the overgrown grass behind the hotel. He let himself in through the back door, making a mental note to sweep and mop the lobby today. Without furniture, the lobby was like a shadowy ballroom, a vast empty space with a panorama of wilderness beyond the glass: inland waters, green shorelines, a pier with no boats.
At the pub in Edinburgh, Paul’s tea wasn’t working very well. “I was always ambitious,” he heard himself say, “but I never thought anything would come of it.” Ella nodded, watching him. For how long had he been talking about himself? Did he just fall asleep for a second? He wasn’t sure. It was difficult to stay awake. “All the videos are either beautiful or interesting, but not beautiful or interesting enough, without music added to them.” Did he say this already?
“You seem tired,” Ella said. “Shall we call it a night?”
He glanced at his watch and was startled to find that it was almost one in the morning. She was settling up with the waitress.
“Well, good night, then,” she said, “and good luck, Paul.”
“Do I seem like I need it?” he asked, honestly curious, but she only smiled and wished him good night again. He hated her in that moment, as he rose and left her alone in the bar—the unbearable smugness of the nonaddicted—but of course she wasn’t wrong, he knew he needed luck, he’d OD’d a month ago and woken up in the ER. (“Welcome back, Lazarus,” the doctor had said.) He’d been perfectly functional for nearly a decade on heroin, not just functional but miraculously productive, just a matter of knowing his limits and not being stupid about it, but the problem now was that sometimes the heroin wasn’t heroin anymore, sometimes now it was fentanyl, seeping into the market by mail and by ship, fifty times more potent than heroin and cheaper to produce. He’d been hearing rumors lately of carfentanil in the supply line, which terrified him: one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, approved for the sole purpose of tranquilizing elephants. The other night he’d read about a new rehab facility in Utah, and he’d spent some time on the website, looking at pictures of low white buildings under a desert sky. In a distant, logical way, he knew that going back to rehab wouldn’t be the worst idea. Just do it, get it over with. Outside on the street, the rain had that diffuse quality that Paul associated with both the U.K. and British Columbia, a gentleness about it, coming from all directions at once.
He was almost certain that his hotel was back in the direction of the Royal Mile, which he was almost certain was a left turn at the end of this next street. He was thinking about the Hotel Caiette again, which led to thoughts of Vincent. The street he was on now looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t be sure if that was because he was close to the hotel or if it was just that he was going in circles. He stopped walking and sat in a doorway, because he was tired and in his current state the rain wasn’t a problem, sat on the step and rested his head on his arms. Should he try to find Vincent, contact her somehow, offer to share some of his good fortune? No, he needed the money. All of it. I’ve never been able to completely grasp what my responsibilities are, he told her. Sometimes when he spoke to Vincent now, he was the only one talking, while she just watched and listened to him. The doorway was unexpectedly comfortable. He’d just take a little nap, he decided, he’d just rest for a minute and then find his hotel and sleep properly.
But he wasn’t alone. He sensed someone watching him. When he looked up, there was a woman standing just on the other side of the narrow street. She was wearing some sort of uniform, with a long white apron and a handkerchief tied over her hair. She must be a cook from a local restaurant, he decided, perhaps someone who’d just stepped out on a late-night dinner break, but if she was taking a break, she was spending her time very strangely, just staring at him instead of getting something to eat or smoking a cigarette. She looked familiar, she couldn’t possibly be Vincent but—
“Vincent?” he said, and perhaps he’d imagined her, in any event she was gone, but for the rest of his life he would tell the story as if she’d really been there, he’d pull it out like a card trick whenever the subject of ghosts came up—“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…”—and 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—but uncertainty would always pull at him and he could never be sure; later he would wonder if he actually saw her standing there in an apron or if he added the apron to the memory in retrospect when he found out she’d been a cook; and always the question that pulled at him even at that moment, sitting in a doorway in the rain, drifting at the edge of sleep: Did he really see her, standing there on the street? Or was he just drunk and high, lost in a foreign city far from home, delirious with exhaustion and seeing things in the dark?