Free The Glass Hotel: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel Page B

different events.
    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. A variation of reality where North Korea hadn’t fired test missiles, where the terrorist bombings in London hadn’t happened, where the Israeli prime minister hadn’t suffered a stroke. Or spin it back further: a version of history where the Korean peninsula was never divided, where the USSR had never invaded Afghanistan and al-Qaeda had never been founded, where Ariel Sharon died in combat as a young man. She could only play this game for so long before she was overcome by a kind of vertigo and had to make herself stop.
    Shield
    One of the first things she bought was an expensive video camera, a Canon HV 10 . 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. That first night of her grandmother’s visit, when Vincent was sitting at the table after dinner—drinking tea, which was a habit she’d picked up from her mother, and staring down the hill at the water because surely any minute now her mother would walk up the steps to the house—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. She recognized it as one of the new kind that took DV tapes, but it still had an unexpected weight. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it.
    “When I was younger,” Caroline said, “say maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, I went through a difficult time.”
    “What kind of difficult time?” It was the first thing Vincent had said in some hours, maybe all day. The words were sticky in her throat.
    “The details aren’t very important. 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.’ It seemed like a dumb idea, to be honest, but I tried it, and I did feel better.”
    “I don’t think—” Vincent said, but couldn’t finish the sentence. I don’t think a camera will bring my mother back.
    “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. I think your brother would laugh at me if I said something like this to him, but maybe you could just try to absorb the idea.”
    Vincent was quiet, considering it.
    “I was going to buy you a thirty-five-millimeter film camera,” Caroline said with a self-conscious little laugh, “but then I thought, it’s 1994, do kids even take still photos anymore? Surely video’s where it’s at?”
    Vincent settled quickly into a form she liked. She recorded segments of exactly five minutes each, like little portraits: five minutes of beach and sky by the pier at Caiette, and then later there were five-minute clips of the quiet street where she lived with her aunt in Vancouver’s endless suburbs, five minutes from the window of the SkyTrain on her way into the city center, five minutes of the fascinating, appalling neighborhood where she lived with Melissa when she was seventeen—not in the film: the way she had to take off running down the street because an addict wanted her camera—and five-minute clips of the dish pit at the Hotel Vancouver that same year, the camera rigged in a