Emily St. John Mandel - The Glass Hotel

At the end of 1999, Paul was studying finance at the University of Toronto, which should have felt like triumph but everything was wrong. When he was younger hed assumed hed major in musical composition, but hed sold his keyboard during a bad period a couple years back and his mother was unwilling to entertain the idea of an impractical degree, for which after several expensive rounds of rehab he couldnt really blame her, so hed enrolled in finance classes on the theory that this represented a practical and impressively adultlike forward directionLook at me, learning about markets and the movements of money!but the one flaw in this brilliant plan was that he found the topic fatally uninteresting. The century was ending and he had some complaints.

Hed expected that at the very least hed be able to slip into a decent social scene, but the problem with dropping out of the world is that the world moves on without you, and between the time spent on an all-consuming substance and the time spent working soul-crushing retail jobs while he tried not to think about the substance and the time spent in hospitals and rehab facilities, Paul was twenty-three years old and looked older. In the first few weeks of school he went to parties, but hed never been good at striking up conversations with strangers, and everyone just seemed so young to him. He did poorly on the midterms, so by late October he was spending all his time either in the libraryreading, struggling to take an interest in finance, trying to turn it aroundor in his room, while the city grew colder around him. The room was a single, because one of the very few things he and his mother had agreed on was that it would be disastrous if Paul had a roommate and the roommate was into opioids, so he was almost always alone. The room was so small that he was claustrophobic unless he sat directly in front of the window. His interactions with other people were few and superficial. There was a dark cloud of exams on the near horizon, but studying was hopeless. He kept trying to focus on probability theory and discrete-time martingales, but his thoughts kept sliding toward a piano composition that he knew hed never finish, this very straightforward C-major situation except with little flights of destabilizing minor chords.

In early December he walked out of the library at the same time as Tim, who was in two of his classes and also preferred the last row of the lecture hall. You doing anything tonight? Tim asked. It was the first time anyone had asked him anything in a while.

I was kind of hoping to find some live music somewhere. Paul hadnt thought of this before he said it, but it seemed like the right direction for the evening. Tim brightened a little. Their one previous conversation had been about music.

I wanted to check out this group called Baltica, Tim said, but I need to study for finals. You heard of them?

Finals? Yeah, Im about to go down in flames.

No. Baltica. Tim was blinking in a confused way. Paul remembered something hed noticed before, which was that Tim seemed not to understand humor. It was like talking to an anthropologist from another planet. Paul thought that this should have created some kind of opening for friendship, but he couldnt imagine how that conversation would beginI cant help but notice that youre as alienated as I am, can we compare notes?and anyway Tim was already walking away into the dark autumn evening. Paul picked up copies of the alternative weeklies from the newspaper boxes by the cafeteria and walked back to his room, where he put on Beethovens Fifth for company and then scanned the listings till he found Baltica, which was scheduled for a late gig at some venue hed never heard of down at Queen and Spadina. When had he last gone out to hear live music? Paul spiked his hair, unspiked it, changed his mind and spiked it again, tried on three shirts, and left the room before he could make any further changes, disgusted by his indecisiveness. The temperature was dropping, but there was something clarifying about the cold air, and exercise was a therapeutic recommendation that hed been ignoring, so he decided to walk.