The Glass Hotel

In 2013, after long study and certification, Vincent begins her life as a crewperson on a large container ship called the Neptune Cumberland, sailing out of Port Newark. She takes to third mate Geoffrey Bell instantly, and enjoys the feeling of independence she gets from receiving her own small sleeping galley. When Geoffrey asks her about her former life, she is circumspect.

In a flashback of the events immediately following Alkaitis’s arrest in 2008, Vincent gathers a few thousand dollars in cash and jewelry, cuts her hair, changing her look entirely, and leaves alone without saying goodbye. She gets a small place upstate and resumes her life in bartending and food service. A year and a half later, she serves Mirella at a bar in Chelsea; Mirella pretends to not know her former friend. Her husband Faisal committed suicide shortly after losing his life savings in Alkaitis’s scheme. Vincent leaves her shift early that night, quitting her job, and decides she’d like to go to sea. Vincent’s mother also went to sea in her twenties, working for the Canadian Coast Guard. She, too, was estranged from her family. Vincent remembers the day her mother died of drowning off the coast of Vancouver Island.

Vincent and Geoffrey’s relationship deepens on the ship. He takes living on a boat for granted, but Vincent relishes the freedom of being away from land and the people she knew there.

In 2015, Alkaitis must increasingly remind himself to separate the facts of his memory from the fantasies of his imaginary “counterlife.” His memory shifts from experiences in Dubai and Vancouver, and these memories present different versions of Vincent, including one in which she drops her nonjudgmental poise and expresses disappointment with him. He talks to fellow prison inmate Churchwell, a captured foreign spy who reads science fiction and talks openly about his own imaginary prison “counterlife.”

A prison therapist tests the limits of Alkaitis’s memory and grip on reality. Alkaitis is still sharp enough to give the current time and date, but he fails to recall an incidental fact from his short-term memory. In contrast to his bright and colorful daydreams, his dreams at night are bleak and uneventful. One day, while in his room with his cellmate Hazleton, Alkaitis hallucinates that the dead Faisal is there in the cell with them. When Alkaitis asks Hazleton if he’s ever heard of anyone seeing ghosts, Hazleton replies that the only such vision he’d heard about was the figment of a murderer’s bad conscience.

In 2008, sometime before Alkaitis’s arrest, he, Vincent, and Olivia pass time on a yacht. Vincent’s impression of Olivia is that she is somewhat out-of-fashion and overeager. The subject of the Brooklyn Academy of Music comes up. Sometime later, Vincent looks up the venue, and is surprised to see that her brother Paul is headlining there. According to the material, his compositions center around five-minute snippets of film that were obviously taken from Vincent’s collection of home movies. She replays her memory of Paul and his resentments of her and her mother. The memory makes her sad.

Increasingly estranged from Alkaitis in their last months together, Vincent travels alone to see her brother’s performance. She sits anonymously in the crowd and sees an older and thinner Paul take the stage. Her videos play as a background to Paul’s discordant modern music, bringing to the forefront a flood of claustrophobic memories. She leaves the performance early, nursing resentment over Paul’s theft of her work and over her dependence on Alkaitis.

Through December 2008, during a global financial panic, Alkaitis all but disappears into his work. One morning, to stave off feelings of dread, Vincent goes jogging in the early morning hours and then leaves for Manhattan before her partner wakes. She receives a call reminding her of Alkaitis’s company Christmas party that evening. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vincent runs into Oskar, one of Alkaitis’s employees, whom she finds attractive. Fighting off a rising feeling of panic, during which Vincent imagines she sees her dead mother on the street, Vincent receives another urgent call asking her to come to the office early, before the party.

In the office, she finds Alkaitis, Claire, and high-level business associate Harvey in a grave mood. They inform her of the business’s nature as a Ponzi scheme (that is, a scheme in which a constant flow of new investors funds returns for founders and early investors without any legitimate basis in an investment product). The business, and everyone knowledgeably involved with it, is doomed to criminal prosecution.